LONDON -- On a rainy Sunday night early in the Advent season, Rev. David Monteith, the associate vicar at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, bids good evening and blessings to the last of some 700 people who have attended the Advent carol service in the dark old church on London's west end.
A warming, seasonal light seems to flow from the open doors of the church, which rests in a setting that is in no way pastoral. St. Martin may well have been in the field at some point, but the church that carries his name certainly isn't.
Homeless people, many of them Scottish visitors who are not shy about asking passersby for change to buy a drink, bundle up on the steps of the church, getting ready to spend a long, wet night out of doors. The bustle of the city surrounds the place, with its noisy buses, honking taxicabs and rushing, pre-Christmas crowds headed for the splendors of nearby Covent Gardens.