Light in Darkness, Let Us Sing!

Joel Cohen, Musical Director Emeritus of the marvelous early music ensemble, Boston Camarata, writes of their Renaissance Christmas program:

"In fact, the most astonishing juxtapositions of seriousness and wit, of spirituality and jest, run through this Renaissance Christmas reportoire. All the animals of the barnyard seem to make their appearance at some point of other: cocks, cuckoos, owls and wolves participate in our musical celebration......And in the Magnificant of  Galliculus ("Little Rooster"!) the different modes of experiencing Christmas are made to run together: solemn Gregorian chants, learned Flemish-style polyphony, and a riotous collection of Christmas carols, animal noises, sound effects and nonsense syllables manage happily to co-exist: Finnegan's Wake in a Renaissance Chapel.

At Christmas contradictions are overcome; we learn to reconcile the different aspects of our own being. Our humblest and noblest parts move together toward the Truth that lies beyond us, yet which, at moments, does come near."

I've always felt that Christmas is a greater mystery than even theologians give it credit. There is some kind of Dark Night of the Soul beauty about it, a numinous to it, as if in deep December we encounter the thinnest of the thin places. And that's a quality shared among the December holidays. Just as we herald and summon the slow return of longer days, we marvel, too, that in richest darkness, the colored lights twinkle brightest.

Slaughter of the Holy Innocents

Massacre of the Innocents by Alexey Pismenny

A poem of grief for

Charlotte

Daniel

Olivia

Josephine

Ana

Dylan

Madeleine

Catherine

Chase

Jesse

James

Grace

Emilie

Jack

Noah

Caroline

Jessica

Avielle

Benjamin

Allison

 

King Herod was a bad man. And Herod had his henchmen.

Henchmen do the bad deeds powerful men don’t want to actually do themselves.

Herod sent them to kill all the children in Bethlehem, where Jesus had been born.

Herod was afraid of Jesus, even though he was just a child.

A child can be powerful, even threatening, to some grown-ups.

So Herod had them all killed.

His henchmen didn’t use guns. There were no guns then.

But they may have used knives, slicing the children in pieces or stabbing them.

Their parents must have had to watch.

I imagine some of them killed themselves afterwards.

But probably most didn’t, especially if they had older children.

They had to keep on living.

There is a day in December, right between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

It’s a day called Holy Innocents Day and some church people remember it.

But most people ignore the day. We don't even know the children's names.

We don't even know how many were killed.

Probably fifteen, maybe twenty, like in Newtown.

Bethlehem was a small town. Still, twenty is a lot of children to kill.

Herod had his henchmen. Here, in this world, we have guns.

And you are the Holy Innocents slaughtered by them.

A Sestina for Santa Lucia

St. Lucy by Domenico de Pace Beccafummi

On December 13th, St. Lucy's Day, in many Scandinavian countries and in Lutheran communities in the United States, young girls wearing crowns of candles and bearing plates of saffron buns--to represent St. Lucy's tortured eyes--come before their families to sing "Santa Lucia." Originally a Neapolitan sailor's song, the words to the Scandinavian versions plea for the return of light and for the release from winter's darkness. 

St. Lucy was a fourth-century martyr, condemned to die by fire. As she was dying, her throat was speared to keep her from speaking further. But the spearing was unsuccessful and her words continued.

A sestina is a thirty-line French poetic form of six sestets, ending in a three-line envoi. It's got six repeated words that end each line, following a strict order. It is a hypnotic form, suitable to the strange and mysterious martyr, St. Lucy.

A Sestina for Santa Lucia

Sing of Santa Lucia, envoy of light,

bearing into the solstice her halo

of flame, white-robed and dark-eyed.

Sing of Santa Lucia, martyred by fire,

speared through the throat to silence her speaking.

Listen! What does love call us to hear?

What is in the music we hear?

We sing, but somehow it’s the martyr’s words that plea for light.

We hear promise in the prayer she is speaking.

Lilting, though plaintive, in lands darkness swallows

she moves among us, a corona of fire,

and sings with a luminous glow in her eyes.

Santa Lucia, with visionary eyes,

called forth from her pyre words few could hear.

The flames leapt at her, the flames of the fire,

upon which she stood martyred and blinded by light.

We imagine her words, more prayer than echo,

and wonder at the meaning of the words she is speaking.

But what are the words she is speaking?

O timeless legend with fire-blinded eyes,

a Nordic spirit with flaming tallows

atop her head singing that we might hear,

she summons from darkness the return of light,

she who was martyred in the brightness of fire.

The one who died from it summons the fire.

But it is not of death she is speaking,

nor is she frightened by the brightness of light.

Though dying, what was left for her eyes

To see, what beyond the fire’s roar could she hear?

Now she is the visionary, fire-hallowed.

In the dark morning, the young girls follow

one after another and stand by the parlor fire

singing “Santa Lucia” for the family to hear--

not the same words Santa Lucia was speaking,

but we see the same plaintive look in their eyes:

Let not the darkness be more final than the light.

In darkness Santa Lucia’s luminous echo is speaking--

the refining fire lent vision to her dying eyes--

and in deep December we hear the saint’s sweet plea for light.

Advent - a grim story (it can't all be sweetness and light)

Alice Strange, Three Queens, Oban, Scotland

Advent

                       

Sam Schultz told Asa about the protesters--two of them, but each holding a hand-lettered sign: God Hates Fags. Jesus Cursed Queers. 

Really? thought Asa. But complete sentences. At least that.

Then he went out to talk to them.

“Look, you can’t bring hate signs onto this property. This is a church. We just had the Sunday School Christmas pageant. The kids don’t need to see this kind of crap.”

The bulky, barrel-chested protester said, “You got a fucking flamer as your minister here and you’re worried about a couple of signs? Your minister is a faggot. Did you know that?”

Asa stared at them.

“Yes, I know that. I’m the minister. And you need to get off this property right now.”

By this time some of the men—Sam Schultz, Mike Kiley and Asa’s partner, David—had come outside to see what was going on. Mike was still wearing his wife’s dress (the Three Kings had been Three Queens this year), hanging loosely on his lanky frame. He hadn’t yet had the chance to change.

“Mike, get back in here,” his wife called from church steps. He looked down at his hairy legs, up at the protesters and went back inside.

“What the fuck was that?” the other protester said as Mike walked away. “A tranny fag?”.

“Leave now,” Asa said forcefully, “Or I’ll call the state troopers.”

“Already did,” David said, holding up his cell phone.

The troopers took their time arriving. One of the men started yelling “God hates fags” over and over. By this time there was chaos in the Fellowship Hall. The little kids kept asking what was going on. Why were the police coming? What did the signs say? In between packing away Christmas pageant costumes and gathering up casserole dishes from the potluck supper, the mothers tried to come up with reasonable explanations that, at the same time, obscured what was going on.

But when nearly-deaf old Mrs. Fischer found out about the men picketing, she said in a voice that carried throughout the Hall, “’God hates fags’? What a despicable thing to say!”

One little boy demanded to know what ‘a fag’ was. He was only five. He’d know by fourth grade, at least, probably third.  

“Tell him it’s a cigarette,” the boy’s father whispered to his wife,  “That’s what they call them in Britain.”

“What? They call gay people ‘cigarettes’ in Britain? I never heard that.”

“No. Cigarettes. They call cigarettes ‘fags’ in Britain.”

“Mommy,” he asked again, “what’s ‘a fag’?”

“It’s a cigarette, Daddy says.”

“If they’re cigarettes, then what’s so bad about God hating them?”

                                    ***                              ***                              ***

Going Out Dancing

My mother, in her dying days (by which I mean just a handful of them since she was not one to sit in waiting rooms for long) told me in a peeved voice that she "wanted to go out dancing." And I believed her. I think "out" meant more than one thing. Come on, what do you think she meant?

After all, she had danced all her life. She had been a red-headed, hot-blooded ballroom dancer, many years later a round dancer (I don't know know what that is, but I know it didn't have anything to do with those super-celibate 19th-century Shaker dancers so often to be found, until they all died out, in our New England/Mid-Atlantic area). Among her other engaging activities, Mom had always danced.

And she was pissed as hell that she couldn't during those last days since she was a) on oxygen and b) dying.

Who knows if she's dancing now? Who knows what "the great perhaps" holds in store for any of us? Maybe nothing. Maybe dancing. The truth is, if invitations are forthcoming, we haven't been issued ours just yet. So there's no use packing our suitcases right now. We must sit tight in our plastic bus station chairs for the time being.

As for me, I want to go out dancing. Whatever that might mean. After all, aren't our bodies meant to be used and used well? Even without our trying, they already do a splendid job. For example: peristalsis. Need I say more? And let's not forget sex, childbirth, dreaming. Let's not forget writing and the other arts, playing sports, singing. Let's not forget the ne plus ultra of human effort: composing. (But let's not let it go to those musicians' heads!)

So let this be my last time, for the time being, of saying requiescat in pace.

Right now--and the odds are slim--but what I want is to go out dancing.

From the novel....Milly and Johanna's Mother, Leah, in 1962

Thanksgiving, 1962     

Driving back from Charles’ parents’ house in Summit we had the most ridiculous fight. Not that it was a fight in the sense that we were arguing. We had the girls with us, of course. Milly was in the front between us, her head on my lap. She slept most of the way. Johanna was in the back seat, reading Nancy Drew, every now and then spelling out a word and asking me what it meant:

“What’s an r-o-a-d-s-t-e-r, Mommy?’ ‘What’s a hex sign?’”

Charles is no talker, anyway, so that’s another way it wasn’t really an argument. But you can have a fight without fighting words, of course. What happened was that I brought up the idea again of me giving piano lessons. Not even teaching school again. Just piano lessons. I ought to have known better. Charles was already in a bad mood because his brother had been at his parents’ house, as well as his older sister and her husband—not that they count as a threat to him. It’s his brother, Henry, who riles him. Henry is five years his junior and makes more money than he does. His wife, Suzanne, is younger than I am and they have two sons instead of two daughters.

Suzanne could double as Dinah Shore singing “See the USA in a Chevrolet.” She’s sprightly, for God’s sake. Tall, blonde, busty. She wears those artillery bras. And the sons are the same way—tall and blond. Hitler would be proud of their erect carriage and sparkling blue eyes. I don’t think a holiday goes by that Charles doesn’t not-so-subtly rue his choice of a Sicilian fisherman’s daughter from Gloucester as his wife, even if she did somehow make it out of Gloucester, as well as into and out of music school.

Before we got married, before the babies, I thought he liked it that I taught school. But once Henry married Suzanne and he rose at Alcoa like lava at the top of a volcano, Charles has been impatient with his life. Or the deficiencies he notices: We don’t have a vacation home. Having had daughters, he can’t coach a Little League team. He doesn’t have a wife with a chiseled clavicles and manicured fingernails.

I think it’s superficial of him to want all that. But I still can’t help feeling apologetic. Inadequate. I feel I’ve failed, somehow. I’m short. I’m dark. (In fact, our daughters have my complexion and brown eyes.) I listen to “Cavaleria Rusticana” and Verdi instead of Bing Crosby and Patti Page. I read instead of playing tennis. I grow vegetables instead of day lilies. I make pasta with cauliflower and sardines (actually, I don’t make that anymore; I’ve learned from the women at the church how to make Swedish meatballs and angels-on-horseback). I’m almost there, but not-quite in an unsettling, though defining, not-quite way.

So when I brought up giving piano lessons, Charles just said quietly, “And turn our living room into a store front?”

I knew what he meant. I even know who he was referring to: Angela Orlando Brancaleone. Her husband had been a drunk as well as a fishermen, as if the two weren’t incompatible. And she was scolded by the Our Lady of Good Voyage priest for giving piano lessons in her parlor after Vito Brancaleone’s ship went down off the Georges Banks.

‘What’s she supposed to do?’ my mother had asked, time and again, ‘Say novenas to the Blessed Virgin Mother to send poor Angela another drunken fisherman that she could marry and bury some more? Though it’s true she didn’t have to bother much about the burying part. The sea took care of that.’

I think my mother sent me to Signora Brancaleone for lessons just to spite the parish priest. And if was spitefulness toward him, it was such a gift for me.

Signora used to talk about music as if it were tactile, as if every musical phrase had a concrete correlative in the real world.

‘Listen,’ she would say, as I practiced one of Schumman’s “Scenes from Childhood.” ‘What do you hear in ‘Traumerei’? Does it make you think of dreaming?’

After every lesson she’d send me home with laden with treats, loaning me her recordings of operas and symphonies.

“Next lesson I want you to sing for me the Funeral March in the Beethoven 3,” she’d say. Or, “Listen to this and next lesson, you tell me what it was that Smetana was writing about when he wrote, “The Moldau.” (I didn’t even know then that the Moldau was a river.)

She gave me easy assignments, too: Everybody knew the Offenbach can-can music and “Pomp and Circumstance” and “The Waltz of the Flowers.”
“Yes, but what do they have in common?” she’d asked. I, of course, had no idea.

Jane Avril, Can-can

“It’s all music for showing off!” she’d declared, as if anyone with ears would have heard that. “The putains dancing and showing off their backsides, the scholars parading in to special music because they’d passed some tests—as if any fisherman in Gloucester ever got a diploma for making it back past Dog Bar breakwater. No, it’s just prayers and tears when they don’t come back--. Oh, but then there is “The Waltz of the Flowers.” They have a right to show off. Flowers are better than can-can dancers or scholars and even fishermen. All they do is live to give beauty. And when they die, we’re sad, maybe for a day. But we know they’ll come back next spring. And the next spring after that. The flowers don’t ever really leave us.”

That’s the kind of thing she would say and it made sense to me. Maybe she was a little crazy—she was a widow who had five kids to support. That would have made me crazy, too. But she told such great stories. She made music this invitation into another world, a world beyond the cramped streets and smelly wharves where drunken men, back in port and flush with cash, wanted girls like me. Or any girl, actually.

So Signora Brancaleone was a kind of anchor, grounding me. She was also as much a beacon, letting me know there was safe passage: I could leave Gloucester. I would be all right.

Peace Like a River

The Heart of the Rose, Margaret MacIntosh

Two years ago my daughters and I lost a woman we loved as a mother and grandmother, though she was neither to us. Not closer than kin, but closer than a friend, her loss was sudden and unimaginable. I found out about it through the subject line in an email—not a good way to learn such news. It was left to me to tell my daughters what had happened.
I don’t even remember how I did it.

*** *** ***

Only a week ago, my brother-in-law died. It wasn’t unexpected. But death is never expected, either. There’s no way to prepare. Not really. Not for the weird ways you feel when faced with loss.And for my immediate family, our loss was as nothing compared to Alan’s children’s loss and his wife’s, my sister’s.

But sometimes love abounds. And it has within my family this past week.The stories are private, not to be shared here. But the gratitude can be. I know I speak for all of us when I say that the support, generosity and tenderness offered was as close to heaven as can be found in the hellishness of grief.

Nobody knows what to say in the face of death. But the wordlessness of human affection can be salvific.We hold on to one another. And that’s how we hold on.

Then in small, incremental ways, time takes over. We fill a coffee mug. Then we re-fill it. It’s time to eat. It’s time to eat again. It’s time to sleep—oh, the bane and blessing of sleep.Hour-by-hour, day-by-day, routines resume. In my sister’s case, new patterns must be--and most reluctantly--forged. Perhaps the only comfort is in knowing that somebody who loves you would bear the pain for you if only they could.

*** *** ***

Linnea flower on teapot

Amidst these days one of my daughters said she was going to get a tattoo.
I trust her when it comes to tattoos, though I’ve never been inclined to get one myself, having my own commitment issues.But she’s got a couple of them, one of a flower in middle of her back, the flower for which she was named. The other is on her wrist; it's a Latin quote, a favorite quote of both of ours.

What will the new tattoo be? I asked

It will say ‘peace abounds,’ she said, and took the car keys.

*** *** ***

She returned, her arm Saran-wrapped, a bottle of Dial Gold Antibacterial soap in hand. She knows the drill, having done this before.

Want to talk me through the most painful part? she asked.

Always, I thought.

Just so you know, it’s not that bad, she said.

And off came the plastic wrap.She gave a short in-take of breath. It wasn’t that bad, apparently. Because there are far worse things and we both know that. We examined the font, the placement, the precision.

Glenn really knows what he’s doing, she said. Glenn is the tattoo artist.

What’s ‘peace abounds’ from? I asked.

And that’s when she told me. That when I’d told her about our dear friend who died two years ago, she was away at college and had had no really close friends, no one to talk to about this strange, non-familial, yet so awful loss. She said she went back and sat in her room alone, thinking, worrying, crying. Then she remembered this song she knew, this song from the soundtrack of “Elizabethtown.”

It was an old spiritual, sung by Washington Phillips, a bluesman from the 1920’s who recorded only sixteen songs, self-accompanied on what sounds something like a zither, though maybe it’s not. It’s not clear what he used when he sang “What Are They Doing in Heaven in Today?”
But here are the words he sang:

What are they doing in heaven today
Where sin and sorrow are all done away?
Peace abounds, like a river, they say.
What are they doing there now?

Then we agreed we know next to nothing about heaven. But she added, I like to believe that peace abounds. And I want to trust enough to have that written on my body, too.

From Going Out, the memoir

Breaking Silence

La Sainte Chappelle in Paris, from Monks and Mermaids, a Benedictine blog

I’m up there in the pulpit in the middle of the sermon when the first car alarm goes off. The woman whose car it is doesn’t like to wear her hearing aids so she doesn’t notice it. I pretend not to. For some reason, one of the tenors in the choir thinks it’s his car and he makes his way out of the choir stall, treading over the other choristers’ feet, then across the uncarpeted side aisle, out of the sanctuary and into the parking lot.

Now another car alarm begins to go off. A second choir member decides it must be his car.

I keep preaching.

Then both alarms stop. Both men come back into the sanctuary, down the side aisle and noisily back into the choir loft. Mission accomplished. And I’ve only got a few more pages to go.

But then the car alarm goes off again. It’s the same car alarm that had gone off the first time and the tenor now recognizes that it hadn’t been his alarm that had gone off before. Somehow he’s figured out that it’s the car belonging to the woman who doesn’t like to wear her hearing aids.

So the tenor decides it’s a good idea to go tell her about it. But just as he is stepping down from the choir loft again, the second car alarm starts up again. And this time a third car alarm goes off. It’s like a parking lot full of wailing toddlers—it only takes one to set them all off.

 

 

Princton Bulldogs

 I see the tenor walking toward the woman who doesn’t like her hearing aids. Then a man in a red tie gets up from about halfway back in the pews. He thinks one of those alarms is his. He makes his way out of the sanctuary to the door into the church foyer. Then I see a woman sitting toward the front. She’s been holding her baby, but now she hands the baby off to her husband and sprints after the man going to the back of the sanctuary. Suddenly it all seems like a football play, the two of them setting up an offensive formation. I expect the husband to lob the baby into the choir loft. Whatever happens, I hope it’s a completed pass.

Meanwhile, the tenor has made it over to the pew where the woman who doesn’t like her hearing aids is sitting. She is looking up at me with a rapt smile. So she jumps in surprise when the tenor stands at her shoulder and tries to tell her about the car alarm. It’s easy to see she’s confused. I find out later she hadn’t even realized she had a security alarm in her car. So naturally she would have had no idea how to turn it off even if she had heard it.

She gets up slowly, a little stiffly and she and the tenor join the others going into the parking lot. After a bit we hear the car alarms turn off, one by one. Then the man in the red tie, the tenor, the young mother and the woman who hates her hearing aids, each of them holding their car keys, come back to their pews. I keep right on preaching, now just a half-a-page away from the ‘Amen.’

“Rabbi, what can we learn from the sound of a car alarm?”

“That what you need to hear is not always what you are listening for.”

***                              ***                              ***

A Poem by Jane Kenyon

Because it is Election Day. And because in my family we are still waiting, midwives to sorrow. Jane Kenyon herself, died too young, but left behind shreds of beauty and we find this here:

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the bar, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to it sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to the air in the lung,
let evening come.

Let it come as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Barn at Dusk, Kathy Los-Rathburn