Shape and Substance

meditations on faith and church

Tag: Advent

December 17, 2024

Shape and Substance No.8

Shape and Substance, No.8

17 December 2024

O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
iacentem in praesepio!
Beata Virgo, cujus viscera
meruerunt portare
Dominum Iesum Christum.
Alleluia!

O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed Virgin whose womb
is worthy to bear
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!

The American composer Martin Lauridsen set this ancient Latin text, the fourth responsory for Matins on Christmas Day, to unforgettable music, first performed in Los Angeles on 18 December 1994, thirty years ago tomorrow. It has since become a staple of Christmas repertory for choirs and chorales all over the world. I’ve sung it a dozen times. Pat is playing the Robert Shaw recording of it while I write these words and she bakes my birthday cake (pineapple upside-down cake, if you must know). When I heard the opening strains, I got up from my desk and padded into the kitchen, sat down at the island to listen, while tears rose in my eyes. It is one of the two or three most beautiful, transporting pieces of music I have ever sung.

As the last notes disappear into the ether, I find myself wondering why this piece moves me so. The answer, I think, is this: it is a musical rendering of mystery, characterized by what one reviewer, Susanne Stähr, called “volksliedhafte Schlichtheit, ätherisch entrückte Klänge, eigenwillige Expressivität (“folksong-like simplicity, ethereal otherworldly sounds, personal expressivity”).[1] Stähr is right; Lauridsen’s music soars into the ether on the wings of rising open fourths and falls back to earth in open fifths. Dissonant seconds sustain tensions that resolve finally into thirds, never cloying but somehow soothing. The music moves, but the movement seems more like stillness than motion. And through it all, one has the sense of sitting in the nave of some grand cathedral while the air fills with unknowable, inexplicable mystery.

The text Lauridsen uses is the sung response to Lesson IV in the liturgy for Matins of Christmas Day. I am not Roman Catholic, but what I understand of the Roman liturgy of Christmas Eve/Christmas Day is that Matins immediately precedes the Midnight Mass, which then gives way to Lauds, the liturgy of praise on Christmas morning. Before the praise comes the dark and the silence. Matins on Christmas is a liturgy for and in darkness and wordlessness. In this fourth responsory, there is not a single human or divine figure to be found, other than Mary (and she only as a womb, rather than a whole person). No shepherds, no wise men, no innkeeper, no Joseph, no Herodian guards prowling about—no people to confuse the moment with commentary and obscure the scene with sensationalism. There are only the animals, and they alone are admitted to the “admirable Sacrament.”

Don’t misunderstand; this is not some PETA-ized Christmas column, no misanthropic rant. Rather, what I’m pointing to is the silence, the absence of talk, the sheer awestruck wonder that transcends words and can somehow best be appreciated by those beings for whom words are both inaccessible and unnecessary, who live every breath and heartbeat in the presence of Mystery. I confess to no small envy of them.

We’ll be in worship on Christmas Eve. We’ll sing the appointed songs and read the appointed texts (and hear the inevitable sermon ostensibly derived therefrom), confess our sin in scripted unison and mumble “the peace of Christ” in the general direction of our fellow congregants to the accompaniment of a holy fist-bump. By the time all is said and done, I trust that most of the gathered worthies in the sanctuary will have some sense that they have celebrated the advent of the One into human life.

I doubt that I will, however. I suspect that the hour spent robed and seated in the choir loft singing and listening to the words of Christmas will leave me pretty much as it increasingly does: with the sense that I’ve sat through a ritual that has outlived its usefulness for me (I recognize this is an idiosyncratic sense not necessarily shared by others). I am weary of words said in worship, having spent my life writing and saying them. Words are like clothing: they conceal more than they reveal, provide places to hide as much as occasions to communicate. Words are little invitations to dishonesty. It’s not that I don’t believe them (although some of them I don’t); it’s that, used too often or too glibly, they cease to deliver what they promise, are flattened like champagne left open on the table overnight.

It won’t be until later, perhaps in the middle of the night, perhaps just before dawn on Christmas Day, that I will experience the Incarnation in the way I have come to know it best: in the wordlessness of the Great World that curls itself beneath my windows and waits just outside my door, in the chill of the pre-dawn frost, in the twinkle of stars alight in the windswept darkness of the night sky—in short, in a cosmos brimful-to-overflowing with the presence of the One who speaks not a word and yet who gathers all words and all things unto Itself. I will stand in the dark on my back porch and draw my bathrobe closer against the cold and open myself to the Sacrament once again.

And then it will be Christmas.

Here is a poem:

Matins, Christmas Morning[2]

O magnum mysterium …

                        -Fourth Responsory for Matins on Christmas Day

Mystery needs no consecration.

It sighs in the wind,

crackles in the hoarfrost,

burrows earthworm tunnels in the loam,

eddies in the water where trout hold, unheard, unseen—

…et admirabile sacramentum…

I wake before the house,

stand on the back porch in the wintry air

of the not-yet-dawn of day.

Cold flash-freezes sleep within my brain.

The dog is attending to his urges,

aware, I imagine, that the brittle grass he sniffs

and the wisps exhalant from his nose

are pregnant with Mystery.

It waits to be born.

Or no—

it is already here, has always been here,

before we began these daily offices

of field and forage.

He knows.

He knows because he is Mystery.

He clothes Mystery in the soft swaddling of his fur.

…ut animalia viderunt…

Borrowed Question:

Why is this night different from all others?

Answer 1: It is the same as every other.

Answer 2: There has never been another like it.

Answer 3: It is the womb of a new creation.

Dawn breaks, a birthing mother.

Fluid light soaks the horizon.

Mystery is being born. Again.

Each morning is birth,

each evening is death,

…dominum natum iacentem in praesepio…

Sanguine and pure,

Mystery pulses in the veins of creation,

coursing with the nourishment of life—

or spills, pouring out onto the land,

a death that does not die

but seeps between the living rocks

into the light-starved caverns of creation,

an aquifer recharged by wonder,

life come at last

to the womb’s dark heart.

It gestates there, in night-bound silence, waiting…

O beata virgo, cuius viscera meruerunt portare dominum Iesum Christum…

The dog has finished his oblations.

I cinch my robe against the cold

and reach behind me for the doorknob.

Inside is warmth, and food, and she, asleep.

Why is this day different from all other days?

It is no different.

There will never be another like it.

Mystery is born this day. Again.

Alleluia.

Merry Christmas.

[1] Susanne Stähr, “Morten Lauridsen O magnum mysterium”. klassik-heute.com 15 February 2007.

[2] Paul K. Hooker, The Longing: Poems. Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024, p. 49.

Leave a comment
December 3, 2024

Shape and Substance, No.6

3 December 2024

Annunciation, 1898. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937). Philadelphia Museum of Art

Annunciation

The feast of the Annunciation falls in April, nine months before Christmas. That’s logical; it takes thirty-six weeks to gestate a human being. Yet every year I want to hark back to that moment at the beginning of Advent when we stand on the verge of seeing what the Annunciation began. I want the Annunciation to be the word that is Advent’s annual starting gun.

In truth, I don’t think time means much in the biblical universe. Or, to put it a bit more precisely, I don’t think time has any meaning in the reality of the One, in which all times—like all things—are one. In the reality of the One, there is only one moment, the eternal moment, in which all moments are gathered and in which there is no separation between one moment and another. So I feel some justification in rehearsing the myth of the Annunciation here at the beginning of Advent. If it’s all the same to the Holy, it’s all the same to me.

That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Here is a poem:

Annunciation

Luke 1:26-38

Suppose it was not an angel,

But dust motes floating in a shaft of light,

an idle breeze billowing the curtains

whispering the wild and wordless wonder

of the ages.

Suppose it was not a message

from gods no one has ever claimed to see,

and from whom only madmen claim to hear

promises like these that strain the limits

of belief,

but merely a poor girl’s fantasy

who had no sense of natural causation

and no better explanation near to hand

than godly violation of the sanctum

of her womb.

Tell me, could you blame her

for telling such a tale and, tale once told,

believing with a girl’s ferocious power

relying on the growing evidence

of her belly?

And if she believed it,

kept it within her heart, then why not we?

Why not the world—can it not make good use

of a god who yields up life in service

to the Holy?

Here I am, she said,

a statement less of certainty than hope.

And wondering if we could say as much,

we follow at a distance on the road

to Bethlehem.[1]

Occasionally, people ask me to tell them what I intended a poem of mine to mean. My standard answer is that I want it to mean whatever it means to whoever is reading it whenever it is read. I can’t determine meaning; that is the province of the reader.

But I can tell you what was on my mind when I began writing it. I was sitting in my study in the late afternoon, and sunlight was streaming through the half-closed louvers on the windows, creating an alternating grid of light and shadow on the floor. In the illumined spaces, where the light poured in as though from some sort of celestial ewer, I could see dust-motes floating in the air, moving aimlessly in every direction.

I don’t remember if I had been reading Luke’s story of Gabriel’s visitation to Mary, but something about the dust and the alternating pattern of light and dark and the silence of the room and the stillness of the world made me think of that young girl and her angel.

I never think of angels as embodied. Which is why I love this painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, the African American artist who painted it in 1898. Tanner doesn’t show the traditional angelic figure, robed in white and standing in the midst of a heavenly aura. Tanner in fact doesn’t yield to our anthropomorphic arrogance at all but gives us instead an angel who is a shaft of brilliant, white-hot light, almost too bright to look at, and surely too unsettling to get comfortable with. Which is why, I think, Tanner depicts Mary as a shy teenage girl, seated on her bed, a little hunched as if to make herself smaller, looking sideways and upward with apprehension on her still-childlike face. This is not a mature woman who is ready to declare the eschatological revelation that will turn the world upside down. This is a frightened daughter of timid parents who know what it is like to live with the boot of the oppressor on your neck and his hands in your pockets. This is a child who knows more about threat than promise, more about fear than hope. And yet…

… there is something defiant in her glance, too, and in those quiet hands clasped in her lap. Not the eyes of the terrified, the rabbit suddenly aware of the wolf, the deer illumined by fast-approaching headlights, but the eyes of the wary and worldly, who know how to look out for themselves. Not hands raised in self-protection or flung forward in fright, but hands stilled and patient, as if to say, let us see what is in store, what the future already unfolded in the ken of the One who sends the light will show to rest of us who wait in the mottled time-bound darkness. She is saying, let us play this out, ravel this skein to the end, well beyond a manger and even all the way to a cross.

I suppose something like that is what I was hoping to convey with my Mary. Pregnant by some cause—does it really matter whether human or divine?—she is gathering her grit and mustering her moxie to take on this charge to bear the One into the many. I think she knows it will not be easy to carry this child, that there will be plenty who want to take him from her. Some of them sit on queasy thrones and would take her child because they need to feed their visions of grandeur with the blood of innocents. Others—and herein are most of us—dream up visions and versions of our own desiring and would take Mary’s child as the sigil of our own self-aggrandizement. I pulled up behind a car in traffic today, which bore a sticker on the rear window: “Just a girl who loves Jesus.” No, you don’t, I thought. The “Jesus” you think you love is a figment of your imagination, created to suit the predilections of your own life and lifestyle. The same, I then thought, is true of mine. And yours.

There is quite likely only one “girl who loves Jesus,” and that is the teenager reticent and yet somehow resilient, who sits and faces the Light that falls from the One, terrifying as it must be (Rilke once said, “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich – Every angel is terrifying”), and still musters courage and voice to say, “Here am I; let it be with me as you would have it.” Loves him enough to accept the angelic assignment: pregnancy and delivery, motherhood and martyrdom and myth, heaven’s light and tomb’s dark. Here am I, she says, incredibly. So be it. 

I don’t have that kind of courage. The best I can do is to follow her at a distance, as she makes her way toward Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, and into the world beyond, and finally into the mystic wonder of the heart. It is, I suspect, a holy and harrowing journey.

[1] Paul Hooker, The Longing: Poems. Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024, pp. 95-96.

Leave a comment
November 22, 2016

Remembering Zion

22 November 2017
Psalm 137
Shelton Chapel Faculty Series on Memory

Psalm 137 is not, on its face, the word of God. Certainly is it true that Scripture as a whole is the Word, and God be praised for it. But let there be no mistake: this psalm not the voice of God; it is the voice of people in crisis, addressed to anyone who will listen, maybe even to God. Psalm 137 is a dangerous wildfire of a poem that threatens to get out of control and burn up everything in its path. It is therefore a word we need to hear.
The poet cries out from the battered soul of the exilic community in Babylon in the mid-sixth century BCE. He asks whether it is possible to sing Yahweh’s song while a prisoner on Marduk’s turf. It’s a question we will struggle with. And while it’s not the only psalm that connects lament with the hope of revenge, this psalm is the only one to paint that connection in the colors of such cold, naked, murderous anger.
This psalm embarrasses us. The vicious, violent “beatitude” in the last two verses is abhorrent, even to us moderns, inured as we are to broadcast bloodshed. To read those verses is to turn one’s head away in disgust. Better to ignore them, pretend they aren’t there.
When I was young, there was a famous reggae group, Boney M, that had a hit record drawn from this psalm. In lilting Jamaican rhythm, the song bounced through the first verse of the psalm:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yeah, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

I remember the first time I heard it; I knew how the psalm ended, and I wondered how that upbeat, innocent reggae rhythm was going to handle smashing babies against rocks. It didn’t. After the first two verses of Psalm 137, the song bailed out and switched to David’s pious prayer in Psalm 51: “Let the words of my mouth/ and the meditations of our heart/ be acceptable in thy sight/ here tonight.” Cowards.
Well, I don’t want to be a coward. I may be a fool, but I am willing—if you are—to walk open-eyed into the universe of these dark and terrifying words. I want to explore what it means to remember Zion. And I want to suggest that, if you sit beside the waters of Babylon, literally or metaphorically, remembering Zion comes at a cost. To remember Zion is to dwell in places of darkness lit by fires of rage.

I
Darkness and Memory

          Psalm 137 is the cry of refugees and exiles, people who have watched the swords and spears, the bombs and bullets of invaders level and burn the very structures of their lives. People who have looked upon the dismembered corpses of families and friends. People who have fled in the night, been frog-marched along paths of despair to places of hopelessness and helplessness. People who have looked back over their shoulders to watch the western sun setting on the smoldering rubble of their dreams. These are the words of a people in darkness.
To hear this psalm is thus to dwell in dark places: in the place of African slaves standing in chains on the docks of Newport, Rhode Island or Charleston, South Carolina. The place of the Cherokee trekking the long Trail of Tears from Alabama to Oklahoma. The place of Jews stuffed into cattle cars rattling along the Polish via dolorosa to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. The place of Syrian refugees begging at the borders of countries that do not want them or sinking in deflating rafts into the blue Aegean Sea. To dwell in these places is to know that you will never again see the forests of West Africa or the greenwoods of the Great Smoky Mountains or the streets of Warsaw or the onion domes of Aleppo. It is to be overwhelmed in darkness. And that is where this psalm begins.

II

Memory and Silence

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat, all of us, weeping
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows in that place we hung up our lyres.
For there they required of us,
our captors, “Sing a song!”
our tormentors, “Be joyful!”
“Sing for us one of those songs of Zion!”
But how could we sing the LORD’S song in a strange land?

        We begin with weeping. We weep for burned-out homes and broken down walls, for sacred places desecrated and despoiled. For the altars thrown down, for the Holy of Holies violated, for the Ark of the Covenant overturned and empty. For the royal palace ransacked, the Throne of David abdicated. For the great gates torn from their gateposts lying shattered and burned in the street. We weep for those who have died on the journey, starved or thirsty, drowned or abandoned, too weak or too sick or too young to walk another perilous mile. We weep because we have made it to the destination, knowing all the while that this place is no place we want to be. Memory begins in weeping.
Soon enough, though, weeping gives way to silence. The lyres and psalteries, drums and pipes, violins and qanuns—all hang soundlessly on the trees here, no tune playing on their strings and skins and reeds. This place is no place for music. Psalm 137 is positioned in the Psalter immediately after the Psalms of Ascents, the joyful songs of celebration Judaean people sang on their way up to the Temple: “I lift my eyes to the hills…my help comes from the LORD.” “I was glad when they said to me, ‘let us go to the house of the LORD.’” “Those who trust in the LORD are like Mt. Zion/ which cannot be moved, but abides forever.” Only it doesn’t. Psalm 137 gives the lie to all that. The Babylonians manage to move Zion by burning it to the ground, and those who trusted in the LORD are cattle-prodded across the desert at the point of a spear. Suddenly all the songs of Zion sound empty, hollow, discordant. Such a strange and bitter end to the joy of ascending the holy hill! Now there is no hill, no Temple, no Zion. No hope. No wonder the lyres are hanging from the trees.
So it is that singing the LORD’S song becomes the antic of the circus monkey, the bark of the trained seal. Drained of its meaning, memory is hollow, and the command to sing yet another song of Zion is nothing less than a cynical mummery by those in positions of power and privilege.
Every year, February brings with it the observation of Black History Month. The mostly white choir in which I sing breaks out its repertoire of spirituals. Every year, the congregation responds to our recitations with “amens” and thanks. I’m glad they appreciate the beauty and grace in those powerful songs. They are good songs worth good singing. And yet, every year I must confront again the fact that I am no slave, nor child of a slave, but a descendent of captors and tormentors. These are not my songs. And I can’t escape the feeling that, by singing them, I am perpetrating that mummery all over again.
So it is that memory becomes at last obscenity. Sweet songs of trust and faith taste of wormwood in the exiled mouth. Those who trusted in the LORD are come a-cropper. We find ourselves in a land where the LORD is not God, where the creed of the faith—“hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one”—is a lie. To remember Zion in this land is to curse a faith turned false, turned to dust, turned to dung.
Must we forget the LORD’S song in this strange land? Maybe. Maybe not.

III
Memory and Forgetting

If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand cringe!
may my tongue stick to my palate
if I do not lift Jerusalem above my highest joy!

        These words are an oath, and like most oaths they envision two possibilities. One is the possibility of forgetting Zion. I suppose one might argue that this path is the easier, or at least the more pragmatic: better to leave the past in the past, pronounce it dead and gone, and get over it, to undergo the anesthesia of amnesia. To forget is to walk the way of darkness and silence, but at least after a while it will be a familiar darkness, a comfortable silence. To forget is to ensure that the hand that once plucked the lyre-strings never touches them again. Indeed, it recoils and cringes from the prospect, if for no other reason than to strum the chords of home is to freshen the memory, reopen a wound too lightly healed. To forget is to ensure that the tongue that once sang the songs of Zion now sticks stubbornly in the palate, so that neither song nor speech emerges, but only the inarticulate grunts and groans of pain and loss. To forget Zion is to sing no more forever. And maybe that’s just as well.
But maybe not. The other possibility implicit in the oath is to remember Zion, no matter the cost, regardless of the pain, even if the memory is ashes in the mouth and obscenity on the tongue. It is to take down the lyre and with a trembling right hand pluck the very chords that evoke all that has been stolen or burned or killed. It is to say the words that seem accursed with tongues that even yet utter the curses. It is to sing a song in a place where that song does not belong, precisely because it does not belong. It is an act of protest, and maybe, of hope.
In the fall of 1971, Rod Stewart had his first big hit song, “Maggie May”:

Wake up Maggie, I think I’ve got something to say to you
It’s late September and I really should be back at school
I know I keep you amused, but I feel I’m being used
Oh Maggie, I couldn’t have tried any more.
You led me away from home just to save you from being alone
You stole my heart and that’s what really hurts.

I was 18 that autumn, and that song was the soundtrack of my college freshman year. I had just reached the age of military maturity in the eyes of the United States Selective Service, and Vietnam loomed like a storm cloud over my life and the lives of my friends. There was something about Rod Stewart’s gravelly, irascible voice singing about lost opportunity and innocence and maybe virginity that gathered up all our anger, our hopelessness, all our fear of dying in some dark, murky swamp in a forgotten corner of an alien land. By the rivers of Babylon. Stewart threw all that despair back in the face of an imaginary older woman who—in some way known best to poets—became for us the symbol of a country at whose hands we all felt we were “being used.” Still, to sing “Maggie May”—at the top of our lungs—was not to give up, but to cling to the hope, however forlorn, that beyond the loss was a tomorrow, that we might one day resume our lives and “get on back to school.” Every time I hear that song even now, a taste of that forlorn hope comes flooding back. My wife caught me singing in the shower this morning, “Oh, Maggie, I wish I’d never seen your face.” I’m sure she wondered what the hell had gotten into me.

IV
Memory and Rage

And Hell is exactly what has gotten into me, and what gets into anyone in exile who has the temerity to remember Zion, to choose no matter the cost not to forget. To remember Zion is to be enraged at all that is not Zion. To be enraged is to burn with the very fires of Hell:

“Remember, LORD, the people of Edom,
against the day of Jerusalem’s fall;
when they cried, “Burn it! Burn it! Down to its foundations!”
Daughter Babylon, Devastator!
Happy the ones who repay you
for what you did to us.
Happy the one who seizes your children
and smashes them against the rock!

        In the summer of 1965, the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in racial unrest and riots. It all began on the night of 11 August, when a white California Highway Patrolman beat up Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old black man, during a routine traffic stop. A fight between police and bystanders erupted, and soon all of Watts was in flames—figuratively and literally. Bands of angry black men, fed up with years of abuse at the hands of what they deemed a racist police force—sound familiar?—exploded into rage and began setting fire to cars and buildings all across Watts. “Burn, baby, burn!” chanted the crowds as they stood silhouetted against the blazes, like so many witches around a Shakespearean cauldron. The chant somehow caught up and spit out all the repressed fury born of generations of despair. It took four days for the fires to die down and the crowds to dissipate, and in those days the nation got its first look at black rage. The riots left thirty-four people dead and did $40 million damage.
Was such violence and destruction justified? I suppose it depends on your point of view. White people in my hometown of Birmingham, AL were horrified at the prospect of such violence washing up on their own doorsteps, and thus was born a generation of political rhetoric about “law and order.” But from the perspective of many African-Americans, the riots were the first sign of a growing new self-awareness, and with it a refusal to accept exile, to continue tolerating dilapidated housing, police brutality, and economic privation as normal. It was a cry of rage from beside the waters of Babylon. And you can still hear it, that cry…in Ferguson, or Baltimore, or Charlotte.
Let me be clear. I am not advocating violence of any sort, whether smashing the heads of Babylonian children, or burning cars and buildings, or beating up protestors at political rallies. Violence may end conflict, but it rarely resolves it.
Still, in our haste to disavow bloodshed, let us not try to sanitize this psalm and thereby ignore or explain away the fury and ugliness of these last verses. That’s what’s wrong with Boney M’s song. It ignores a fundamental truth about remembering Zion, a truth that pulses beneath whatever veneer of gentility and good behavior we wear when we sit beside the Babylonian waters. Memory is connected to rage whenever what we remember is a life we can no longer have or cannot attain. To remember Zion is to know the urge, somewhere down inside us, to cut down any barrier that keeps us from Zion, no matter what it costs.

V

We are today two weeks downstream from the presidential election, and five days before Advent. In strikingly similar ways, both those events gather up hopes and dreams and translate them into lives, be that life a political candidate or a messiah. Politically and religiously, we cannot live without those hopes and dreams, those yearned-for promises of a new kingdom and a new way. The problem is that all too often—dare one say, always?—those dreams are dashed and those promises at best postponed. So it is that we find ourselves beside the Babylonian waters, trying again to understand what has happened and where we go from here. We find ourselves in darkness and in rage. We are not strangers to this place.
Let us not shrink from it. Let us not surrender to bland acceptance of a “new normal” that is neither normal nor new. Let us not douse the fires of memory that may yet light the way to hope. Let us not forget Zion. For you see, Advent kindles its own blaze. Advent holds a grim warning from the lips of the Baptizer in the wilderness to all who trust the status quo: that even now the axe is laid to the root…and every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Burn, baby, burn. Before the Kingdom is born and the baby laid in the manger, we must endure labor and delivery in the darkness. Before we remember Bethlehem, let us remember Zion.

Leave a comment