Lux et Tenebrae

The girls spent this Christmas with us in Geneva.  Before they arrived, we had talked about all the fun things we might do – a day trip to Lyon, a water-park outing – but instead we stayed at home and cooked and ate and played board games.  Lydia and I let them stay in our bedroom, since it’s bigger than the guest bedroom and there are three of them,  so it wasn’t long before an undergrowth of beauty products and sweatpants and bras took root across the floor.  Because they don’t live with me (I was about to add “full-time,” but the qualifier is kind of unnecessary and also represents a certain sense of denial), I think I find myself feeling their presence, and a subtle hum of joy from their presence, more than I otherwise would. 

We played a lot of Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, a semi-cooperative game in which some players (“Investigators”) are trying to identify a murder weapon and a clue out of a collection of weapons and clues on cards in front of each player.  (The "Hong Kong" bit is irrelevant, but for thematic consistency everything is written in both English and what I assume is Cantonese).  Some of the weapons/clues are obvious ones (“axe”), while others are more bizarre (“e-bike”?) and/or gruesome (“surgery”).  One of the players (the “Forensic Scientist”) silently tries to direct players to the right weapon/clue by providing more information about the crime, using different cards covering the appearance of the scene, the location, the motive, etc..  One player is the “Assassin,” and only she and the Forensic Scientist know who she is, and which weapon and clue are the right ones (with 6 or more players, there’s also an “Accomplice”).  The wrinkle is that none of the Investigators knows which player the Assassin is (there’s a ritual at the beginning of every round involving closing and opening eyes and raising of thumbs), and the Assassin tries to blend in with the rest of the Investigators and throw them off the scent.   Much deduction, arguing, intrigue, play-acting, etc. ensue.  On Christmas Eve, while I cooked roast pork and red cabbage, Lydia and the kids played one game in the kitchen which exploded in riotous shrieks and laughter when Sarah, who had been feigning anger that her sisters were ignoring her clues, was revealed as the Assassin.  We also played some Fury of Dracula, another game where one player is Dracula and the other players pursue him all over Europe (good for one’s eastern European geography), and Dead of Winter, another outstanding and tense co-operative game, because it wouldn't be Christmas without a zombie apocalypse.    

On the 26^th, I drove the girls to the airport for their flight back to Boston.  We exchanged misty-eyed hugs at security.  I was sad to see them leave, but brimming with joy and gratitude for the time we had spent together.

Later that evening I learned that, on Christmas Day, a woman I work with killed herself and her two young children, ages 4 and 1 ½.  The three of them were found on the sidewalk in front of a parking garage tower near Northeastern University in Boston.  Her SUV, doors open, child seats inside, was found on the top floor.  The news reports called this a “murder/suicide,” which I suppose is technically correct, but those terms didn’t make it any easier to process what had happened.

I found myself asking questions about the mundane details of the day itself, an exercise that becomes more horrific and heartbreaking the deeper you go.  Was there something playing on the car radio as she drove over?  Did she say anything to the kids on the way, perhaps a story to put their minds at ease, knowing what the real purpose of her trip was?  Did they talk about the toys that Santa had brought that morning?  As she circled up the parking garage ramp, the parked cars on each floor becoming sparser as she climbed, did she have second thoughts?  When she exited her car on the garage roof, did the cold brace of air on her face trigger a moment, however fleeting, of consideration?  Did she say anything to her children, a brief word of comfort or love, while leading them to the roof’s edge? 

Morbid curiosity like this is at worst fuel for sensational media coverage and gossip, and at best an irrational rescue fantasy.  As if by mentally inserting myself into the horrible moments leading up to their deaths, perhaps I may say or do something to change the outcome.

There is no “sense” to be made here.  None of the “motive” cards in Deception: Hong Kong ("Power," "Money," "Jealousy") remotely capture whatever might lead a human being to such an act.  Talking about brain chemistry and mental health awareness only gets you so far.  As I try to process this, I find myself retreating to broad, somewhat clumsy theological terms.  There are seeds of both immense light and utter darkness within every single one of us.  And darkness, from within or without, can overwhelm the strongest of us.  I do believe, based on faith and experience and probably my own good fortune, that light does prevail in the end, and I pray that this is an idea I will be able to hang onto whenever I may find myself surrounded by darkness in the future.  One never knows.

Last Sunday at church, the opening prayer talked about the new year, and about how being in church offers hope, comfort, strength, and vision as we make resolutions about who we will be and how we will live.  Near the end, our minister Laurence talked about “not taking refuge in a cozy personal faith,” something that I think I (along with a lot of so-called Christians) are susceptible to.  It’s convenient for me to chalk up the horrors of Christmas Day in Boston to the metaphysical struggle between good and evil, light and darkness.  That way, I can put my mind at relative ease, and we can all get back to work.  It’s another thing entirely to testify to that light: to try to, however humbly, be a source of light for other human beings.

James 2:14-18 is worth thinking about, when it comes to making January resolutions:

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead." 

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.   

Belated Christmas

If you suddenly found yourself as VP of Marketing for Christianity, one of the "signature tactics" in your annual marketing plan would have to be the Nine Lessons and Carols service.  Originating in the Church of England in the late 19th century, it has since gained a foothold in other Protestant congregations, including mine in Geneva and many others around Europe and the US,  In roughly one hour, you pretty much get the Christian faith in a tight, energetic nutshell: nine Bible readings that span Genesis (the fall) to Isaiah (the prophecy) to Luke and Matthew (the Christmas stories you're familiar with), interspersed with nine or more carols.

The readings are the same every year, but the music playlist varies: this year we were treated with an anglicized version of the absolutely kick-ass Swedish carol "Jul Jul."  All leading up to a first-class climax in terms of depth, significance, and emotional power: "O Come All Ye Faithful," followed by John 1:1-14,* followed by "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing."  John 1:1-14 is a tour de force, covering, in John's characteristic mystical tone, all the key ideas you want people to walk out with: light shining in the darkness, word becoming flesh and dwelling among us, grace and truth.  I imagine that "O Come All Ye Faithful" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" have popped up once or twice on your Spotify holiday playlist this year, but I would suggest that until you've heard them, and sung them, in full voice in a packed congregation, you haven't truly experienced them.

I realize that I do a lot of hand-wringing around here, about faith and what it means and how I try to get my head around it, and maybe this entire website is no more than an exercise in such hand-wringing.  In any case, the Nine Lessons and Carols are a good reminder and example of how essential the practice of faith is.  By its very nature, faith is not something you can simply talk yourself into.  Later on in the New Testament, James will make this point even more emphatically, claiming that “faith without works is dead.”  Just like thinking about running a marathon has very little in common with actually running a marathon, thinking and reading and writing about faith is different than practicing one's faith, whatever form that might take.




* Which your humble author had the honor of reading this year, and which, directly following "O Come All Ye Faithful," he was worried he would be too choked-up to get through.