Lessons and Carols Redux

This year I raised the stakes on the Service of Lessons and Carols and volunteered to sing with the church choir.  I’m still not sure what motivated me to do this.  I like music (I play the drums and sometimes sing in a cover band) and I like singing in church, but it’s not like I have 17^th century choral music in heavy rotation on my car stereo.  Also, and probably more importantly, my formal musical training is nonexistent: I downloaded a free piano app for the iPad so I could hunt-and-peck my way through my parts at home, but I had to turn to google to remember what the notes on the bass clef were.  Nonetheless, I found myself at the church fair in mid-November telling Peter our choir director that I’d really like to join them for the Christmas concert. 

This year, it would actually be two concerts: our choir would join up with the choir from the Swiss German church, and we would perform on Saturday at their place and on Sunday at ours.  We would do a mixed repertoire of around a dozen songs, some in German, some in English, one or two (like the old standby “Veni Veni Emmanuel”) in Latin.  Peter would share directing duties with their choir director, Stanislava, a Bulgarian with frosted hair who unlike Peter is an actual pro musician.  This led to some tense moments in the days leading up to the concerts, like when Stanislava told Peter he was wasting precious rehearsal time working on nuances, and Peter angrily stomped off and threw his sheet music binder at the organ.  Or when Peter, during a rehearsal of “The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came,” allowed the tempo to slow down almost to a complete halt and Stanislava sat in the front pew holding her face in her hands in anguish.  This didn’t seem to faze the other choir members much, though, as they happily offered me glasses of white wine during the mid-rehearsal pause.

There were roughly 30 of us singing.  I would put the median age of the tenors and basses around 75: this likely explained Stanislava’s asking me to sit near the middle of the tenors, my lung capacity partly compensating for my lack of chops.  From time to time I would observe a few of the basses nodding off during rehearsals.  The altos and sopranos skewed younger.

I became friendly with Moises, another tenor from the Swiss German choir, who had grown up in Bolivia but had come to Geneva 50 years ago as part of a scholarship established by some Bolivian who had made his millions in mining.  His wife was a sorprano, and from time to time they would interact in a very sweet way: “Chouchou, t’as un stylo?” (“Sweetheart, do you have a pen?”) he would ask her, or she would turn around and offer him a sip of tea from her little thermos.

The rehearsals passed quickly, and we almost certainly needed more time before the first concert on Saturday night.  We were joined by a string quartet + flute, which definitely raised our overall game musically.  Two young organists tag-teamed: Oscar, a teenage musical prodigy from our church with an androgynous vibe and a watch chain dangling from his waistcoat, and Arthur, who had a mop of dirty blond hair and round Harry Potter glasses and who became my secret ally when I suggested to Peter that we try not to let the tempo drag so much on one of his songs.   

The concerts themselves went well enough: no horrific flubs, and I even managed to execute a solo, as Gaspard in “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” alongside Peter and a different Arthur, a bass with a white beard, a smooth singing voice, and essential tremor.  As usual, there were several truly moving moments: on Saturday when Arthur the organist slowly opened the swell box shutters as he played the prelude, which introduces the melody from “Joy to the World” with slightly different chords; during several of the really kick-ass German carols*, especially “Fröhlich soll mein Herze springen” and “Kommet, ihr Hirten;” on the fifth verse of “We Three Kings,” when we come roaring in with “glorious now behold him arise;” and of course during the murderer’s row of a climax of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” the John 1:1-14 reading, and “Joy to the World.” 

Yet the service itself felt different somehow.  Obviously, the visual perspective is completely flipped, as the choir is facing the audience.  And afterwards, I noticed an uneasiness that I found hard to pin down.  I compared my post-concert experience to what usually happens after my band plays a show: you have drinks with some of the people who came to see you, you get compliments, you pack up the gear and do some post-mortem critiques with the other guys in the band, pictures and videos get posted on social media, you get “likes.”  Considering this, I realized that at least part of me had gone into this looking for some kind of recognition, to have one of the people from my congregation come up to me and say, “I didn’t realize you could sing,” or something.  Now maybe this didn’t happen because we actually sucked.  But I think more likely it’s because it’s not at all the point: performing music in this context is not about impressing your friends; it’s about glorifying God and celebrating His arrival on earth.  And perhaps this is part of the “lesson:” stop thinking about yourself for a second and instead glorify God, the Creator, the Force, or whatever you want to call it.  And maybe consider for a minute what things would be like if everybody did that a little more often.

Afterward, I encountered the most intense case of earworm I have ever experienced.  I literally could not stop hearing these songs in my head, loudly and insistently, for days.  Like relay runners, one song would hand off dominance over my neurons to the next.  I’m sure there are easy explanations for this.  I did of course sing those songs several times over the course of four days.  Since my sight reading is not so fantastic, I tried to memorize my parts as much as I could.  And especially on some songs where there’s a strong impulse to follow the melody (e.g., “Joy to the World”), I would really have to bear down and concentrate on the tenor part.  Or it could simply be because these songs are just that good.

* Since I know like five words of German, I’m basically singing these songs phonetically, and I wonder if that actually makes them more emotionally evocative. Like with the words stripped of significance, you’re left with only the music and the feeling itself.  A more direct path to the mystical, if you will.   

The Courage for Truth

I've been meaning to write something about Thomas Merton, but capturing his prolific awesomeness in a blog post would be akin to drawing the map of the universe on an Etch A Sketch while riding a unicycle.  Maybe one day I'll work up the courage to try something.

Meanwhile, as today is the 50th anniversary of his untimely death, I'll just pull-quote a few great lines from The Courage for Truth, a collection of his letters to other writers.  These were written mainly in the 1950's and 1960's, but, as always, the truth of his words comes through clear as a bell.

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“How beautiful and simple God’s plan for humankind is!  That’s it.  Friends, who love, who suffer, who search, who see God’s joy, who live in the glory of God; and all around them, the world which does not understand that it too is Proverb, which does not find the Lord’s joy, which seems to seek to self-destruct, which despairs of rising above material things.  That wants to destroy itself in the fire, despairing that it can soar above material things.”  (p. 33)

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“Our mania for organization will be judged and all will be burned except love and friendship.  The small groups united by genuine love will remain everywhere and the rest will go, even in monasticism.”  (p. 46)

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“There is a lot of disordered animal vigor in the US, a huge abundance of it still, rambling and incoherent, discontented, baffled by its own absurdity, and still basically seeking something.  I think the search has almost been given up. ..” (p. 125)

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“We simply cannot look to the established powers and structures at the moment for any kind of constructive and living activity.  It is all dead, ossified, corrupt, stinking, full of lies and hypocrisy, and even when a few people seriously mean well they are so deep in the corruption and inertia that are everywhere that they can accomplish nothing that does not stink of dishonesty and death.  All of it is rooted in the cynical greed for power and money which invades everything and corrupts everything.”  (p. 144)

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“…the joy of being able to communicate with friends, in a world where there is so much noise and very little contact.  We cannot realize the extent of our trouble and our risk, and yet we do not know what to do – except to go on being human.  This in itself is already an achievement.  And we hope that since God became man, there is nothing greater for us than simply to be men ourselves, and persons in His image, and accept the risks and torments of a confused age.  And though the age is confused, it is no sin for us to be nevertheless happy and to have hopes, provided they are not the vain and empty hopes of a world that is merely affluent…” (p. 176)

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“I fear nothing so much as conventionalism and inertia, which for me is fatal.  Yet there is that all-important stillness, and listening to God, which seems to be inertia, and yet is the highest action.  One must always be awake to tell the difference between action and inaction, wen appearances are so often deceiving…” (p. 187)

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“The religion of our time, to be authentic, needs to be the kind that escapes practically all religious definition.  Because there has been endless definition, endless verbalizing, and words have become gods.  There are so many words that one cannot get to God as long as He is thought to be on the other side of the words, the words multiply like flies and there is a great buzzing religion, very profitable, very holy, very spurious… My whole being must be a yes and an amen and an exclamation that is not heard…That is where the silence of the woods comes in.  Not that there is something new to be thought and discovered in the woods, but only that the trees are all sufficient exclamations of silence, and one works there, cutting wood, clearing ground, cutting grass, cooking soup, drinking fruit juice, sweating, washing, making fire, smelling smoke, sweeping, etc.  This is religion.  The further one gets away from this, the more one sinks into the mud of words and gestures.  The flies gather.”  (p. 225)

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“What is vitally important is that you should be a Christian and as faithful to the truth as you can get.  This may mean anything but resembling some of the pious faithful.  But I don’t have to tell you, because you know, that there is only one thing that is of any importance in your life.  Call it fidelity to conscience, or to the inner voice, or to the Holy Spirit: but it involves a lot of struggle and no supineness and you probably won’t get much encouragement from anybody.”  (p. 269)

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“(P)recisely the greatest and most absurd difficulty of our time is keeping disentangled from the idols, because you cannot touch anything that isn’t defiled with it: anything you buy, anything you sell, anything you give even…Anyone who sells out to even a small inoffensive, bargain-cheap idol has alienated himself and put himself into the statue and has to act like it, which is he has to be dead…I frankly don’t have an answer.  As a priest I ought, of course, to be able to give Christ’s answer.  But unfortunately…it is no longer a matter of answers.  It is time perhaps of great spiritual silence.” (p. 277)