St. John the Unfinished.

FROM the choir stalls, the central aisle of the nave of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine stretches out in an endless line, through the throngs of dignitaries and worshippers and past the bays commemorating, among other things, Education, Medicine, and Anglican History. At the nave's west end stands the great Christmas tree, its tip pointing toward the lesser rose window. From there my eyes come to rest on the great rose window, on Christ in His Majesty. The organ pipes swell with the Invitatory, and voices fill the air with song as the procession of bishop, priests, lay ministers, and choir makes its way through the haze of sweet smoke that fills the vast space of the nave as the thurible swings and the incense burns.

Tonight is not just another Midnight Mass in one of the world's largest, most striking cathedrals, but the beginning of a week of farewell on the retirement of the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral. And Dean Morton is not just another distinguished clergyman: in the quarter-century that he has served St. John's he has come to personify the institution and what it stands for. To some, he is one of the city's great clerical champions of liberal causes. To others, he represents everything that has gone wrong with the Episcopal Church.

James Morton was appointed dean of St. John's in 1972, by his old friend and mentor Bishop Paul Moore Jr., a leader of the liberal wing of the Episcopal Church (Paul Moore is the same bishop who in 1977 ordained the Episcopal Church's first announced homosexual priest).

When the new dean arrived at St. John's, he found a relatively conservative place, at least architecturally speaking. Construction at the site on Morningside Heights had begun in 1892 in the Romanesque style, the crossing and east end going up first. When work on the nave was started in 1911, it was decided to switch to the Gothic style. The vault at the east end had to be entirely redone to preserve aesthetic coherence. Some building went on sporadically through World War I and the Depression, with the nave finally dedicated in 1941. From that point until James Morton's deanship, the cathedral stood with its transepts and west front towers yet to be built and the crossing unfinished. Building has resumed, but completion of the cathedral remains only slightly less difficult to imagine than the coming of the End of Days. The place is still familiarly known as St. John the Unfinished.

The procession reaches the high altar, flanked on either side by towering gold menorahs, whose presence in this sanctum sanctorum recalls the great Temple at Jerusalem. Gargoyles peer down on the scene from the tops of eight massive columns surrounding the altar like a crown. At the center is the great cross, whose Christ Triumphant completes the Romanesque aesthetic of the sanctuary, in stirring contrast with the cathedral's Gothic nave and west end and its towering Christ Crucified.

The Sunday after Christmas I return and stand in the Chapel of St. Martin of Tours, facing the statue of Joan of Arc. The stone beneath her feet was brought from the Rouen cell that was her prison. Today was James Morton's final sermon as dean, in which he recalled his long history with the cathedral.

The dualism of flesh and Logos dominated his words, which is fitting. God, Christians believe, made the Word flesh through Christ, and through community works, said Dean Morton, the priest must make flesh what he preaches. We see this in the cathedral's commitment to public service, in its soup kitchen, homeless shelter, and housing-refurbishment project, as well as in its more original ventures. In 1979, Dean Morton pioneered the Cathedral Stoneworks Project, an impressive program in which inner-city youths were trained in traditional stone-cutting and carving; they continued the work on the cathedral that had been stalled, and acquired a craft that would serve them throughout their lives.

As with any Platonist scheme, however, taking the Word -- the ideals of tradition -- and turning it into solid reality in the present-day world is difficult. The world is currently very far from the Word, and the influence of current trends may undermine both Word and tradition. That, some would say, is what has happened at St. John's.

The "Hair Mass" of 1972, commemorating the third anniversary of the Broadway musical and featuring rock 'n' roll and women in hot pants, comes to mind. So do the dean's attempts to complete the cathedral. When he held contests to solicit designs from contemporary architects, most of the designs that came in were abominations. One calls for an Eiffel Tower - like structure to straddle the cathedral; another would turn the vault and crossing into a greenhouse. The latter is favored by Dean Morton, who has been an environmentalist since the Sixties, when he was perhaps too greatly impressed by photographs of the earth from space.

If the predominant philosophy of St. John's is the intersection of Word and flesh, its sensibility under Dean Morton has been universalist. In his sermon the dean spoke of how the Word has been realized in many "fleshes" -- the classic universalist proposition that all the world's religions and cultures express essentially the same philosophy. This idea was presented most stirringly in Pico's "Oration on the Dignity of Man," but Pico's imagination stretched no further from Christendom than the Greek, Jewish, and Persian traditions, and his vision was part of the glorious humanist revival that lay at the center of the Italian Renaissance. In today's environment, when we face cultural impoverishment and chaos at home and evil, sadistic regimes and cultures abroad, such universalism seems like empty diversity-speak.

As I sit, facing St. Joan, I think of how she stood to defend France from the English incursions, and hope that the cathedral's next steward will be committed to protecting its tradition and the Word from the world's foolishness.

Two days later, December 31, marks the end of Dean Morton's tenure, and I attend the Fourteenth Annual New Year's Eve Concert for Peace. The cathedral has a festive, concert-hall air; it is barely illuminated, save for the spotlight which falls on the Brooklyn Philharmonic as it plays the Gloria from Schubert's Mass in G Major.

It is hard not to be impressed with this institution. I have been in cathedrals with a purer aesthetic and a stronger religious sensibility, but never was there such a marvelously eclectic place, where Gothic and Romanesque merge so sublimely and where high art and music, community service and religion, come so intimately together. While the Dean's ideology is far too "progressive," his cathedral stands firmly in the tradition of its medieval progenitors -- at the center of its community and its culture.

So, in the wake of the "Hallelujah Chorus" and Philippe Petit's high-wire walk across the nave, as the cathedral begins to come alive with the light of thousands of candles, lit to the strains of "This Little Light of Mine," the question that dominates my mind is: Will St. John's lead that community in a moral, Christian direction, or will it be led by the currents of the times?