incidents and accidents

Post.

I used a full sheet of stamps to send out Christmas cards this year. Peeling the last 37-cent Madonna-and-Child off the backing paper, I felt purpose trickle away from me. On the plus side, I sent out a darn lot of Christmas cards. That makes me happy. On the other hand, I sent a lot of cards to people I love and who are far away, whom I am far away from. What does that make me? What is the opposite of happy when you're not really sad? I think the opposite is far away.

I have another full sheet left. How am I going to find that many things to mail in the month of January? Why is the Madonna-and-Child image only valid in December? In 2006 it will be a sticky reminder, of both miracles and distance.

*

She says she'll never go on another cruise. They have these groups of entertainers who get on the ships, and do their act, singing, comedy, whatever, and then they get off at some port and switch ships. They don't have addresses, she says. They don't have homes. Just ships. And really, they don't even have those.

*

Dove vai? she reads. It is a rare portion of her presentation, in which I understand every single word. I write them down.

Lontano, she reads. My pen scratches the shape of syllables into the porous white pad. Why does lontano sound so much more like what it means than far does? The melancholia of distance and loneliness, a bitter, unwanted nostalgia for some reminiscent childhood that was never the way you truly lived. Palm trees, prickly to look at in a picture that brings it all back, prickly to touch when you get up close and try to bring them into focus. All in that final "o," the sound like a lid left off something steel, an echo open to the infinite and the original sound just a blur.

Lontano, ma dove? she reads. I write it down so I will look like I've understood all the other words too. In fact a full academic paper in Italian is beyond my linguistic abilities. I am caught, though, by the sounds and shapes of words I do grasp. Lontano could be a verb in the first person singular, though the translation makes no sense : I far. Translation is another lens. Don't bring it into focus. It loses something.

*

I am forgetting my French. Not the big things but the details, one slippery cross-hatch at a time. It seems tiny when it happens. The city is fading. The language is fog. In the interview I call something "déceptif." It's not déceptif, that's not even a word, it is trompeur. The irony hits me with the memory, and I sink.

I don't remember the name of this one. They all have different names, over there.

That too is a name.

*

The light overhead burns a kind of yellow that shouldn't be called yellow, it is that close to white. And yet yellow. It turns the tiled floor the color of diluted apple juice. The color of rush hour, of things happening in a haze.

- Elle a ouvert les yeux. - Eh, là - Madame, Madame, restez avec nous. - Regardez par ici. - Vous vous appelez comment? - Qu'est-ce qui vous arrive, qui vous mène à un tel geste? - Vous savez où vous êtes? - Madame? Madame. Restez avec nous …

The sound speeds by, yellow and white. And then black, voices fading with Doppler distortion in the wake of color. The yellow is what catches you. The black is where you go, what you hold to.

*

All you have to do is hold still.

Perfect. Now hold still.

*

I stayed awake for days, fueled by adrenaline and the necessity of appearing energetic. And then I couldn't sleep. The adrenaline wore off, and the fatigue wore off after it, and I paced my hotel room wishing for simple sleepiness, instead of weary unbidden remorse. Even wine didn't help slow my mind, and sleep, when it came, brought oddly shaped visitors who spoke slow languages of night but looked at me with yellow eyes. Empty. Judging. And far too bright, like fear and sharpnesses. This is what the dream taught me :

That the names themselves deceive. That fog lifts and burns. That sounds in one language echo distances in another. That every point on a circle is as far as it's possible to get from one other point on the circle. And a city inscribed in the flesh can fade.

Black is the color of desire.

All you have to do is ride it out, and the pain stops mattering. Just lean back. Swallow. Give up. And wait. It stops hurting. The black is beautiful. It's what you want when you stop wanting, and bigger than all the rest, until it's all there is.

I am forgetting that, too.

O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel,
Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio gentium,
et Salvator earum :
Veni, ad salvandum nos,
Domine, Deus noster.

For six days we have called out using metaphor and descriptive titles ; today we call Your name. We specify You throughout the antiphon : in the proper name on the first line, and in the titles that follow, King and Savior, and in the final stirring appeal. For six days You have filled a series of abstract roles (Wisdom, East, Key) : today You are present among us. For six days You have held a series of divine functions (Root of Jesse, Mighty Lord, King). Today You are a child.

*

These bleak days might have been midwinter in Your time. For us they are just the beginning. December is punctuated by celebrations and twinkling lights that swing above our busy streets, and festive colors and silly hats and tiny bells chiming in doorways and unabashed public singing. People too shy to hum in the shower lend lusty voices to the loop of Crosby carols in the supermarket ; following gleefully, and tunelessly, along with "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" or "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." December gives us freedom to sing in public without shame, and time to think unconditionally about other people. Personal purchases from Amazon can wait until January, because Mom needs a gift. Every year we hear more and more about the rampant consumerism of the Christmas season, and it's not untrue - but when else do I get to splurge on something that I know will light up my father's face? When else can I buy a random present, to be sure I have one just in case someone shows up unexpectedly ? We forget too easily the value of letting ourselves be generous. Not on a case-by-case basis, not just to the people we know, but with every breath and gesture.

But December is shortlived. For me, this year, January will bring the end of one semester and the start of a new one ; a new crop of students, a frenzy of preparation and completion and correction and self-presentation and that gasping sense on Friday at 5 pm that the weekend is already over. The knowledge of no real time off before June. The anxiety of senior theses and conferences and events to organize and emails to answer and paperwork to get through and finals to write and grades to submit. And this is the good part.

"The bleak midwinter," as Christina Rossetti called it in the poem that Gustave Holst turned into my second-favorite Christmas carol, starts, these days, once December has ended. I don't know if it's global warming or the frenetic pace of modern life, but year by year winter comes later. I didn't put up lights, or an Advent calendar, or decorate a tree, or even get out my Christmas music, this year : I didn't have time. I tend to feel more "Advent-y," more in need of a Savior soon to arrive (and, less liturgically speaking, a break), around the first week of February. But then it is time for Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday and the opening sequences of Lent and the long days of a different kind of breathless silence - a time of renunciation and turning away from the self. And if I don't completely resent the commercial aspect of Christmas, I do lament the loss of Christmastide - the Sundays after Christmas and Epiphany, the liturgical season that lasts, in the Church's calendar, until 2 February. It seems a shame to have our season of good will and giving end, like the sound of a needle scratching off a vinyl record, at 12:01 am on 26 December.

And there is a reason You come now, instead of during the harsher months of the literal "midwinter" : You sustain us, like a chord held beyond the final fermata in a symphony of silence. In the churches we sing "Adeste fideles" all the way through to February, and "Il est né le Divin Enfant," and "Angels We Have Heard On High," as reminders of Your presence despite the way Christmas disappears from the visible world, the way we make it disappear. The trash barrels full of torn and crinkled wrapping paper, hauled away in the early morning. The holly-berry- or candy-cane-patterned seasonal tablecloths and serviettes and festive decorations and holiday lights marked down to 50% off, then 75%, then shunted off to discount stores. The external marks of the season are dismantled one by one, the chill of insurance bills and tax-time start to loom, and we button ourselves up against the season, in a daily, dreary routine that makes us forget the warm glow of December's lights shining in expectation. It is hard to remember, in the sleet and bustle of a midwinter morning commute, that You remain among us, fragile and sleepy in a makeshift bed, the tiniest and most helpless of creatures - an infant in a crèche. It is hard to hear "O Come All Ye Faithful" when finals are due, a month after Christmas. Sometimes - when the snow kicks up with a biting nor'easter wind, or a car drives through a puddle and splashes my shins with frozen slush, or the T is so crowded I can't find a seat and end up spilling my coffee and my papers, or I am frustrated with the fast pace and competition, the me-me-me-ness of my world and I don't have a moment to sit down in the quiet and pray - it is hard to feel faithful at all.

But You lie there, in the center of the Nativity Scene, to remind me. For four weeks of Advent, we have lit candles and chanted metaphors and waited : and tonight we leave the "O" antiphons behind for another liturgical year, and sing instead a new series, the "Hodie" responsories. The music changes, each Responsory of Matins in a new mode - jumping from fifth to eighth to third to seventh, plagal and authentic side by side, angelic intervals following human aspirations - calling in the entire range of modal expression to participate in this celebration. The second, "sad" mode, the mode of the "O" antiphons, is not found among these joyful exclamations. We are no longer waiting : Jerusalem is no longer desolate : our need for consolation has been fulfilled, our hopes of something to come (ad venire, Advent) realized. Hodie nobis cælorum Rex de Virgine nasci dignatus est - today it is given to us that the King of the heavens is born of a Virgin. Hodie nobis de cælo pax vera descendit - today the true peace of heaven descends unto us. The Responsories for Matins on this Christmas Eve move from "Hodie" to "Hodie," then to "O magnum mysterium" ; then "Beata Dei Genitrix Maria," "Sancta et immaculata virginitas," and "Beata viscera," all in praise of the Virgin Mary ; and finally, the last Responsory before the Midnight Mass : "Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis," the glorious phrase from the Prologue to the Gospel of Saint John that makes us genuflect in adoration, every Sunday. The Midnight Mass begins with the marvelous Introït "Dominus dixit ad me : Filius meus es tu" (the Lord God said to me, you are my Son). The Dawn Mass of Christmas Day has the Introït "Lux fulgebit hodie super nos" (a Light shines bright above us today), and Introït for the Mass of Christmas Day begins, "Puer natus est nobis, et filius datus est nobis" (A child is born unto us, and a Son is given unto us).

And then, after all three Masses with their elaborately wrought Gregorian propers, and their poetic expressions of delight and glory, comes a simple Hodie Christus natus es, hodie Salvator apparuit - today Christ is born, today the Savior appears. The antiphon occurs before the Magnificat at Vespers, and acclaims the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah. Hodie in terra canunt Angeli, lætantur Archangeli (Today the Angels sing unto the earth, and the Archangels rejoice), it continues, and : Hodie exsultant justi (Today the just exult). The antiphon closes with the phrase of the Angels, Archangels, and just alike : Gloria in excelsis Deo, alleluia. The words offer glory to God in the highest, but they do so in a quiet manner, fitting after such a feast of Masses and liturgical splendor. And the antiphon ends on a lower note than where it began - an odd thing for an "alleluia," which usually raises worship to the heavens. In this case, the musical expression retains all its glorious fulness, but reminds us that the presence we have longed for and expected all these weeks (months, years) is a baby, a child, wrapped in the humble circumstances of his earthly parents and probably sleeping. Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, Rejoice ; but do so with gentleness and courtesy for the weary mother and the hush all around the child's crib. For six days we have pleaded noisily with the Lord for a savior, raising a clamor of prayer He cannot ignore. Now You are here, and we marvel in your smallness and your newborn purity.

Angels and Archangels must have gathered there ;
Cherubim and Seraphim throngèd the air.
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved with a kiss.

*

Advent, I have said, is a time of paradoxes. We have to weep in the pain of our need - but we have to sing. We have to request divine intercession as we wait, fidgeting, for deliverance - and we have to hope and keep believing the Lord has not forgotten us. We have to ask for concrete proof of our hoped-for redemption - and we have to have faith that deliverance and redemption will come.

The other day, I turned on the television while waiting for my sister and caught about 20 minutes of The Agony and the Ecstasy. In the scene I saw, Michelangelo climbs a scaffolding to the section of the Sixtine Chapel he is currently completing, and when he reaches the last stair he finds Pope Julius already there, lifting a tentative finger to the drying fresco. In the paint, God extends a fingertip toward the fingertip of His creation, the still-formless, soulless Adam. The two fingers do not quite meet, and the eyes of the Almighty seem to gleam as they focus on the man waiting for His touch. Julius asks Michelangelo about the image - Is that really how you see Him? and the two men begin a discussion of God, His character, His nature, His place in the Renaissance world. Julius had imagined the Lord as wrathful ; Michelangelo has painted Him as benevolent, because, the artist explains, "the act of creation is an act of love."

What you have painted there, my son, is not a portrait of God, Julius tells Michelangelo ; It is a proof of faith.

Michelangelo turns and glances at the pope, slightly surprised. I hadn't thought that faith needed proof, he says.

Julius smiles. Not if you're a saint - or an artist. There is a pause. I am merely a pope.

I am not a pope, and not a saint. I am merely a convert and a traveler, a displaced Californian trying to live with God in the world. I am a French teacher and a sometime musician and a writer of blog entries, and it sometimes shames me to admit that I need proof. Isn't the music enough? Well, sometimes. Isn't prayer sufficient? Sometimes. Doesn't going to Mass provide all the certainty I need? Sometimes. But still I struggle to respond to unbelief, or non-belief, or anti-belief, or blatant ignorance or criticism. And still I wonder how to reconcile the pieces of my life, wonder whether God truly can weave them all together, family and profession and prayer. Still I worry about the world and the ways we have damaged it and how little likely the possibility of recuperation seems. And so I add my voice to "Veni, veni Emmanuel and let the urgency carry me through the minor keys, in solemn expectation, and sometimes in despondency, and in hope. And when I hear Rossetti's carol my mind jumps to the last verse, which is in some ways the answer to popes and poverty and modern frustration alike :

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb.
If I were a wise man, I would do my part ;
Yet what I can I give Him, give my heart.

This is what I struggle to remember beyond the detritus of presents and family feasts, and shops and discounts and last-minute flurries to whatever store might still be open. That giving our hearts is the only way to "keep Christmas with you, all through the year," as the Muppets sang so poignantly once upon a time. And through the bleak months of winter, and the stress of spring semester and the hurry of academia and the worry about parish politics and the jostle and rush of commuting and the delicacy of family and colleagues ... giving my heart is the proof that faith does not require but in which it delights. That's how we know we still believe, even when the light fades above the Bethlehem and we are in the desert again. Tonight, and tomorrow and on 26 December, the feast of the first martyr, St Stephen, and on New Year's Eve and in the new year - through January and February and April and all through the summer, whatever it brings. For unto us today a child is born. And with Him, great and joyous song, and peace in light - and these things stay.

O Emmanuel,
Who art our King, and bearer of our law,
the hope of the people
and their Savior :
Come, and save us,
oh Lord our God.

O Rex gentium

O Rex gentium,
et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis,
qui facis utraque unum :
Veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

*

Last Sunday , I sang Gregorian in church for the first time in nearly sixteen months. It happened quite simply : after the Mass, one Sunday in November, I approached the director of the Gregorian schola, complimented him on the morning's chant, and asked jokingly if he ever needed a counter-tenor. Actually, he answered, looking me up and down, I'd like to do some polyphony for the Christmas season, and we always need voices. Can you blend, an octave below? I promised to drop out on the low notes, and he promised to pitch things a tiny bit higher, and thus was born my career as a cantor (cantrix?) at Holy Trinity.

I should mention that, in a divinely inspired decision, Archbishop O'Malley of Boston has granted an indefinite extension to Holy Trinity. The news came literally hours before the official closing date of 15 December, and was met with the same mixture of stoicism and delight as the preceeding postponement. On the one hand, the parish rejoiced at the news that we wouldn't have to move right before Christmas. -On the other hand, the closure decision was not completely rescinded, just put off another little while. -But any postponement means the charitable programs housed in the church can stay alive a while longer. -But a decision based on charitable programs does not truly address the parish. -But this way everyone is happy for a little while, and the Church won't throw anyone out in the street. -But the Church has never been concerned with everyone being "happy," rather with bringing everyone to faith, and focusing on annex programs is not the same as recognizing the importance of tradition and the liturgy. -But "annex" programs that help the less fortunate are a central part of our tradition, and this way we don't have to get rid of those and that's good isn't it? -But for how long?

Et cetera. In the meantime, Mass continues at the high Baroque altar with its painted-wood angels and gilded candlesticks, the only truly important act - the mystery of consecration, the miracle of redemption - repeated daily in the choir of this sacred space, for as long as the Archdiocese allows it.

And so, last Sunday morning, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, I stood in the choir loft and chanted with the men. We sang polyphony as well as the Gregorian Mass propers and Kyriale - an English translation of the Advent Responsory, "I looked from afar," for the processional ; the Advent Kyrie XVII ; Credo III ; the antiphon "O Adonaï" at the Offertory ; Bach's "Wachet Auf" as a recessional. And, during the Communion, the plainchant "Rorate Cæli," all four verses, with the repeated refrain :

Rorate, Cæli, desuper, et nubes pluant justum !
Drop down, ye Heavens, from above, and let the clouds pour forth righteousness !

I first knew "Rorate Cæli" as a Palestrina motet, and was somewhat surprised to learn its Gregorian origins. In Lyon, during Advent, we frequently used "Rorate Cæli" as a processional, with the choir singing the verses and the faithful repeating the refrain between them. I'd sung Palestrina's setting with the Collegium Musicum, years before moving to France, and grown attached to its intricately overlaid descants, its latticework of echoes between the harmonies as one voice takes up the text another voice has just finished singing. I couldn't imagine hearing the same words sung in unison. How could the melody hold meaning without the depth of chords to support it? Then I heard the first verse of the Gregorian "Rorate," not in the expertly modulated voices of trained college vocalists, but in the rich and sometimes grating tones of a hodgepodge group of amateur church chorists, singing not for musical perfection but for prayerful reflection, and I began to understand. "Ne irascaris Domine" my Lyon choir's men sang, their voices like inchworms out of synch, one honeyed, one rough-edged, one warbling. They weren't together, they weren't quite at the same pitch, their voices had different timbres ... it was only an ensemble in the loosely literal sense of the term, because they stood near one another. Something in me cringed to hear them, but something in me opened. This was not song for performance : this was song for prayer, as prayer. As it should be sung, by the faithful, begging God for mercy, and intervention, and recognition of their need. Their voices rose, for the second line of the verse, a cry, and I closed my eyes and heard the sound in a desert, crossing the barren landscape in this time of waiting, a time before. Sion deserta facta est, Jerusalem desolata est. The anguish in those words, and the notes that sculpt them across the Gregorian stave, the rising and falling, the resignation written in to the neumes themselves, struck deep into my heart in a way the artful, crystalline Palestrina never had, never could.

Be not angry, Lord, neither remember iniquity forever :
Thy holy cities are a wilderness,
Sion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation,
our holy and our beautiful house
where our fathers praised Thee.

*

As we rehearsed the "Rorate" in Boston, a week ago, the Schola director asked who would like to sing a verse. Without thinking I raised my hand. He smiled, and assigned me the third verse ("Vide, Domine"). I sang it in the same octave as the other verses, my voice straining slightly to reach the low Re, the final note. I didn't want to break the flow of sound - the other verses would be in this octave, sung by men - and wasn't sure my voice would carry, if I sang it up where it felt more natural. But after the rehearsal one of the men asked why I had held the verse down. I explained I thought it would sound weird otherwise, and he shook his head. "Take it up," he said. "Let your voice be your voice." Just before Mass on Sunday, we rehearsed again, and I got a case of stage-fright (altar-fright?). My voice quavered in the lines of the verse, and the progression Fa-Sol-La on "ut auferat" went flat, the podatus on "au-" too heavily accented, the syllables tripping clumsily over the line as I tried to catch up and recover. I finished the verse and look despondently at my director. One week in the Schola, and I am already screwing up the chant, I thought. Great. Now he'll ask someone else to take the verse, or the men will complain after Mass and he'll tell me it's not such a great idea to have a woman sing along after all ... Better to nip this in the bud.

Maybe someone else should take that verse, I said. My voice isn't warmed up in the upper register, and I kind of blew it just then.

The director looked surprised. He shook his head. You don't want to do it? he asked.

Well, of course I wanted to, but I suddenly wasn't sure my voice would be up to it. It had been a long time since I'd sung chant anywhere besides alone in my home, with any kind of confidence.

Then one of the men spoke up. I could sing it with you, he offered.

What, in my octave?

He nodded and gave a quick little grin. I'm a treble, he said.

And other men spoke up, offering suggestions. "Stop singing during the refrain, so you can change registers more easily" ; "sing the refrain up an octave" ; "try a throat drop !" The treble and I ran through the verse, and my voice gained strength from his. And I entered the choir loft and said a little prayer, asking God to let our song be at its best, not for us but for Him, and for the faithful. At Communion, we sang the "Rorate Cæli," without a single hitch. My voice opened to the verse and soared. The entire Schola sang the final verse - "Consolamini, Consolamini" (Comfort ye, my people) - and then the last refrain. Then we stepped back, and I knelt as the melody faded into the high arch above the choir.

I'd been anticipating rejection, perhaps even rebuke. The generosity of these singers humbled me, and reminded me why we were singing. The Mass is not a concert of perfect soloists. It is a worshipful celebration - and more importantly, a sacrifice, with sinners united in hope and prayer, and sometimes in song. Of course the song should be as perfect as possible : as St Augustine wrote, "Qui bene cantat, bis orat !" (He who sings well prays twice). But sometimes, I realized, he - or she - who sings poorly prays even harder, three times, or four. This is why we sing : this is why we pray. Not because we are already perfect, but in hope that we may become closer to perfection. We offer our voices and our hearts, in a desolate city whose churches threaten to close, in a full heart yearning for consolation in the barren winter. This is why we sing. This is why we pray.

O King of the people,
their one desire,
the cornerstone,
who make two into one :
Come, and save man,
whom you shaped from mud.

O Oriens

O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae,
et sol justitiae :
Veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris,
et umbra mortis.

*

Where is the East?

I stand in the living room, compass in one hand, learning how to read it. The swinging needle with the arrow points mostly toward the red N, but if I sneeze, or turn to the left, or do a little jag with my hand, the needle bounces and hovers over the pale line next to the N instead. I try to hold perfectly still, to become empty of whatever makes me change the magnetic absolutism of the earth. I am astonished at how easy it is for my clumsy body to change a polar direction, how I can interfere. The needle jumps to N and shudders, then stays. The chimney is North. Which means the dining room and the long end of the street, with its unfamiliar houses and other families’ cars, is West ; and my bedroom, and the dark hall, and the corner to Argyle Road and the expertly manicured lawn with its forbidden rose bush, is East. From where I stand the front door is South. But if I move to my bedroom, am I standing in the East? What about if I stand at the neighbor’s rose bush? How far do I have to go to reach the East, THE East, the absolute value of the adjective? How do you navigate to the East Pole? And why is Japan, clearly west from the spot on the living-room carpet before the chimney, called "the Far East"? Why isn’t geography definite? I hold my muscles in solemnly motionless alignment as I ponder directions – hallways, fences, freeways, borders. At seven years old, compass in my palm, I am mapping the world, one square foot of interior dÈcor at a time.

As years go on, sometimes I will forget the orientation of this home, have to close my eyes and picture the suburban street at dawn. Where does the light come from, brick-blue over the rooftops? Argyle Road. The French have an expression : perdre le nord. It means, idiomatically, to feel lost and kind of purposeless, at loose ends. But literally, to lose the north, as on a compass. I gave up on the north years ago, but for my entire life I've been trying to figure out where East is.

*

In 1992 I move to Boston. October astonishes me with its reds and golds ; November brings my first snowstorm, with flakes that spin down like a sodium halo around the streetlights ; December dazzles my eyes with strings of blue and white lights in patterns of assymetrical starbursts across the Square. A group of carolers in tuxedos and long black velvet dresses stands at the mouth of the Coop, singing four-part harmony. Every image burns itself into my consciousness like a realization of some childhood idea : "What Christmas should be." I go back to California for the holidays, and everything feels askew. I have lost the East. But in January when I go back to Cambridge, the magic is dissipated in a winter of hard colds and wet and icy storms, and a ten-foot pile of filthy snow at Porter Square. The winter is a long process of testing limits. How much snow can the city take? How many consecutive colds can a graduate student catch? How many weeks in a row can I live through a blizzard? How many nights can I go without sleeping? Each limit reached is pushed again, stretched and tested, and when the storms finally stop I barely dare to raise my head. Is it true? The sun? Here? It feels like a fable, after such a long bleak time of waiting.

In March I do an unexpected thing. I take the T up to Revere and walk along the beach. To my right, the water of the Atlantic is black, glittery with marine winter turbulence. To my left, a series of unfamiliar streets, grey and slate-blue with weather. I've never seen snow on the beach before. I pick up a flat pebble and carry it in my pocket. This is as far as I can go.

*

My sister and I start a tradition. On 24 December, we "spend the night" together, sharing a pillow and a fit of giggles as we decide which radio station, K-EARTH or K-BIG, has the best all-night Christmas carol selection. One year we wake up early and tiptoe up the stairs, holding scraps of paper with handwritten lyrics. We push open the door to our parents’ bedroom and wake them up with singing. Our hair falls in rag-curls pulled tight the night before, and we wear long floral nightgowns with lace trim : the closest two girls from Southern California can come to an image of Victorian carolers. We sing "Good King Wenceslas" and "Silent Night" and "Deck the Halls" and "The First Nowell" and "We Three Kings of Orient Are," and we finish with "Keep Christmas With You All Through the Year," from Christmas Eve on Sesame Street. The carol about the journeying Magi leaves me puzzled. I know, even as a basically agnostic child, that Bethlehem, where Jesus is born, is in Israel, which is in the East. But – "We three kings of Orient are !" my sister and I intone, and launch into verse after verse. Where is the Orient if you’re already in Bethlehem? And – a bigger question – if light comes from the East, and the Magi come from the East (an East-er East than where Jesus comes from), then why do they need to come to Bethlehem to follow that star? The song itself declares the star is "Westward leading." Who goes West for light?

*

Years later, I move to France. Each year I live there brings a Christmas of a different character, including the one I spend alone. Strangely, perhaps, that year puts Christmas into truer perspective for me. Instead of looking for something outside my experience, trying to re-orient myself, I live one Advent minute at a time, hymn by hymn and verse by verse. When dawn breaks over the nave that midnight, I understand for the first time that east is about faith as much as it cartography. I don't know right away what I have found, but it is light of some kind.

*

The point is, the light dawning in Bethlehem is a greater light than anything coming out of the geographical East. "O Oriens," the antiphon for 21 December begins : O East ! But also, O Dawn. This is the East Pole, the fulcrum around which cardinal directions shall turn from now on. The East in liturgy is re-placed to the center, and replaces all prior concepts of dawn and light, both visual and scientific. Fittingly, this antiphon falls on the day of the winter solstice, the day of the year the most deprived of light. Perhaps that natural lightlessness prompts the repetition of words about light in the text : Oriens, first of all, and then "lucis" and "sol," then "illumina" ; and, on the other hand, to end the verse (in an echo of the antiphon for 20 December), "tenebris" and "umbra." Like the Prologue to the Gospel of Saint John, both light and shadow are given tremendous metaphorical importance – but in the case of the "O" antiphon, their importance is much more than a poetic way of speaking. They echo quite literally human experience of the natural world, inscribed into poetry and scanned into neumes for the chant. The summit of the piece comes on the last syllable of "justitiae," in the usual double-torculus that plays over Fa, Sol, and the accidented Si, at the end of the first (descriptive) phrase and before the bar.

The "Veni" phrase in "O Oriens" breaks radically from pattern, though. In the other "O" antiphons, the imperative plea begins with a podatus that steps from Do to Fa, an major fourth that echoes the opening neume’s interval and provides a certain consistency of shape to the phrasing. In each other "O" antiphon, this recurring interval provides our cue for understanding the function of the musicological phrase. Just like in a ballad, or a country-western song, or a Christmas carol, when you hear the same melody repeated later in the piece you understand that phrase as either continuing or furnishing another example of the first instance – in these antiphons, the repeated fourth tells the listener that the vocative, descriptive phrase has finished, and that the plea has begun. The interval is paced and measured, not the simple stepping-stone of a whole step, nor the bell-chime of a third, but the real plateau-leap of a fourth. But in "O Oriens," "Veni" begins on the same high La that "justitiae" ended on, and in strikingly different notation. Instead of a (rising) podatus, the first syllables occur on two separate puncti, voiced high like a cry, and the phrase descends until the end of "illumina," where we find the stability of the fourth again at "sedentes." The plea thus takes on even more urgency, and the difficulty in singing it lies in not letting that descent rush headlong down the stave.

When we reach "sedentes," we hear the echo of the opening interval, but the phrase does not have the same function (either musically or grammatically) as in the other antiphons. "Veni et educ vinctum de domo carceris" (20 December), "Veni ad liberandum nos" (19 December), "Veni ad docendum nos" (17 December) – these are all positive requests. "Sedentes in tenebris," on the other hand, touches a chord both pitiable and sinister. In this antiphon, repetition alters the meaning : the same aural signs are used, but their sense is vastly different. As we get closer to the last of the antiphonal days before Christmas, our need grows greater and more urgent. We look everywhere for East. We climb as high as we can, to see further, and rush toward some place we recognize, thinking perhaps it has come in our absence. And still we have to wait, in the darkness.

Star of wonder, Star of might !
Star of royal beauty bright !
Westward leading,
Still proceeding,
Guide us with thy perfect light !

*

It took me more than two decades after that childhood Christmas-caroling morning to find the East. It turned out to be an un-navigable commodity – I couldn’t go somewhere and understand my direction. The experience was both literal and figurative : I had to go east from where I was, in order to find the east that was calling me. And tonight, on this darkest day of the year, incongruous as that may seem in the current heat wave of Southern California, I am hearing another echo – not a Christmas carol, this time, but a line of ancient poetry I learned once I’d reached the East. Et lux in tenebris lucet ; et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt. Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. Meaning, the darkness did not overcome or extinguish this new light. And because of the light from the East, there is much still to understand.

O Dawn,
splendor of eternal light,
and sun of justice,
Come, and shine on those seated in darkness,
and in the shadow of death.

O Clavis David

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel,
qui aperies, et nemo claudit,
claudis, et nemo aperit :
Veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

*

This past week, I was reminded of something unpleasant I did, back in college. It didn’t hurt anybody, left no permanent marks, was all in all just a stupid and highly juvenile thing to do. I wrote something ugly about God. And I would have forgotten about it, except that a friend reminds me every so often, and the words now make me blush.

I suppose that if I’d grown up religious, it would have been a sort of liberation, to say what I said. But I did not grow up religious. I grew up amid a strange mixture of garden-variety puritan and atheist philosophies about life and how to live it, and the name of God was rarely spoken in my childhood home, except when my grandparents would argue with my father about politics and the racetrack. I have vivid pinpricks of memory around those late-night discussions, usually heated by martinis whose olives I always wanted to play with, and punctuated by a phrase that has stayed in my memory as "damnhell racehorses." In retrospect, I think the "damnhell" part of that referred to the crooked politician du jour, and the "racehorses" were separate beasts, but I didn’t know that then.

And anyway, I didn’t grow up religious. I grew up agnostic at best, spiteful and selfish at worst, but with a naive streak. So for me to speak in vulgar terms about the divine was not a liberation – it was gratuitous, and cheap, an easy first line of a forgettable story for a writing seminar that fed my ego.

Then, well, things changed. I sang Bach, and felt the presence of God move through me in the complex counterpoint of the B-minor Mass. And then I went to France and felt the presence of God even more strongly, and then converted, and then fell apart, and then got put back together again, and felt the presence and the might of God within me as I realized what it might feel like to be whole. And then I came back.

Every so often I find myself speaking with someone I knew from my old life, and I have to reset my conversation register, much the way I set my watch when I change time zones. Did this person know me when I was an angry feminist? Oh. Did this person know me as a hateful atheist? Oh. Did this person know me as a starry-eyed poet who wanted to rewrite the Mary Magdalen story? Oh. Did this person know me as a dull-spirited depressive who looked at high windows with longing? Oh. Start there. It hasn’t happened for a while, but every now and then I have to tell the story of my life for the past few years, and explain that, yes, I’ve converted to traditional Roman Catholicism and no, it wasn’t in reaction to previous experiences and yes, I really do believe priests should be celibate and abortion is taking a life and confession is not only a sacrament but also a great and necessary gift and Jesus was born of a virgin and that bread is His body and that wine is His blood ; and also that, yes, sometimes these things are hard to believe, and that is why we have a word for things that seem impossible but which we believe nonetheless : faith. ("Blessed are they who believe without seeing !" wrote St Cyrille of Alexandria.) And it occurs to me sometimes that if you knew me back in high school or college or graduate school my conversion probably seems pretty bizarre and extreme, if not unbelievable. And that if you knew me in the first year or so after my baptism, you might well think the same thing.

I would love to write a paragraph about my spiritual journey that could omit the clause "and then I fell apart," because that’s the part of the story that makes all the rest of it seem unreliable. It makes even me blink and pause for a second. Isn’t that timeline out of synch? I converted and then fell apart? How does that make sense? Wasn’t God’s grace – the grace I write about in such glowing terms - strong enough to keep me from falling apart? In my own former non-religious existence, I would have seized on this detail as a logical fallacy, used it to justify not giving God a chance in the first place.

On the plane tonight, the first movie was Elf, which I watched, between bouts of sleeping, without sound. (I can’t tell you how surreal this already weird movie becomes, when you don’t have voices. Look ! It’s a really tall elf, walking around the city in an elf hat ! Look ! the really tall elf is in a suit ! Look ! the really tall elf is kissing that girl !) The second movie was A Beautiful Mind, which I watched, also between bouts of sleeping, and also without sound. I read the book – about physicist and game theorist John Nash’s studies and career, and his struggle with schizophrenia – a few years ago, and I remember being struck less by his delusions and idiosyncratic behavior than by the fact that one day he got better. He spends three decades in hospitals and on medications, sometimes catatonic and sometimes violent, sabotaging his family, his career, his reputation, even jeopardizing his citizenship during a paranoid episode in Paris. In the book, his colleague and friend, the one who submits his name in nomination for the Nobel Prize, says "and then John just woke up."

That’s how I think about my own history, especially my history with God. (I mean, without the mathematical genius component.) One day, I just woke up. It didn’t happen right away, and it wasn’t easy. But it’s what makes me look back on my former mentality and various declarations and long-term resistance to faith, and the works of faith, with something like shame, and something like pity.

What God had opened in me, no one could close ; what He had closed in me, no one could open. And while it is humiliating to recall the things I did and said before that day, I am grateful for the memory – as I am grateful to my friend for the reminder – because I don’t believe God wants me to erase or rewrite my past. He wants me to redeem it, and the only way to do that is to offer it intact. What use would a conversion be to anybody, if the previous state of existence were simply erased in its wake? If God wanted total oubli, He would not have sent His son to redeem the world. Maybe He would have wiped the world out, and started over. Or not started over. The fact that we exist, with the collective memory of sin and the collective hope of salvation, means the past is important, even the things we’d rather not remember.

What kind of God would call someone to Him and then let her fall apart? I don’t think it would have occurred to me, in my angry state, that sometimes God lets us do stupid things – even protects us as we do them. I don’t think it would have occurred to me that sometimes God wants us broken, that we come to Him more open to healing, more humble and more whole, when we have wrenched ourselves away from His grasp. And that if any bit of resistance lingers within us as we near Him, it is perhaps better in His sight that we break, in order to be more completely healed afterward. I’m not sure I understand these things now. They simply make sense, in a way I can only explain through metaphor and poetry. Grace is a mystery, and though I try to sound its deep waters, the only thing I am certain of is that I have only shadows of the answers. The real key to this mystery is out of my hands. Perhaps the greatest liberation comes, after all, from the memory of captivity, captivity within my own limitations and the jagged chasm of my own faultlines ; from the ability to look back and realize darkness hovered over me then, a thing you can only understand from the perspective of imminent light.

O Key of David, and scepter of the house of Israel,
Who open, and no one closes;
And close, and no one opens :
Come, and lead the captive out of prison,
Seated in darkness, in the shadow of death.

O Radix Jesse

O Radix Jesse,
qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos,
jam noli tardare.

I've heard the phrase a hundred times, a thousand times : Root of Jesse. It appears in carols and hymns, antiphons and popular culture. This year I find myself re-examining the phrase and wondering what it means. Why "Root"? The "O" antiphons make up a seven-day cry to the Redeemer. Each day, the verse begins with an apostrophic description, and ends with an imperative : Come. Assuming the vocative phrases refer poetically to Jesus - or, more accurately, to the triune person of God specifically in His salvific function - and that the reference to Jesse invokes a history of sacred lineage, wouldn't Jesus be rather a "shoot" than a "root"? And who is Jesse, anyway?

*

Jesse appears in the Book of Samuel, Chapter 16, as "the Bethlehemite" whom God indicates to Samuel as a source of consolation following the revocation of kingship from Saul. "It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king," the Lord says to Samuel : "for he is turned back from following me, and hath not performed my commandments." (15:11) The message grieves Samuel. He weeps to hear of Saul's turning his back on the Lord's commandments. But even more than he loves Saul, Samuel loves the Lord. He bears the message to Saul that his reign is over. Saul receives the message first with cunning, then with regret, and eventually turns to bitterness, and the two men part ways with pain in both sides.

Samuel suffers this separation with a hurt heart. Not only his personal hope in his friend, but also his divine mission and purpose - to unify Israël under one just and godly monarch - seem thwarted. God soon comes to Samuel with consolation. He commands Samuel to go to Bethlehem, to find Jesse ; for, he explains, "I have provided me a king among his sons." Samuel goes, and sanctifies Jesse and his sons in preparation for a sacrifice. The sons pass one by one in front of Samuel, and with each son he wonders if this is the Lord's chosen one. But each time the Lord tells him no. After seven sons pass before his sight, Samuel wonders if a true king of Israel is to be found in Bethlehem.

Jesse, like any good dynastic father, presents his sons in order of importance. First Eliab, then Abinadab, then Shammah, elder to younger, then four others, through all seven sons. "But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature." (16:7) Despite status and wealth and position in the birth order, none of these sons is the Lord's chosen one. And so Samuel asks if these are all Jesse's children. "Well," Jesse answers. "There is the shepherd." David comes in, and the Lord tells Samuel he is the one, and Samuel anoints him.

Jesse is not himself a king. He is a simple man with many sons (and a couple daughters), and he probably trembles along with the elders of the city when Samuel comes among them, wondering if the holy judge with the powerful voice (his name means "heard of God") comes with peaceable intentions or warrior orders from the Lord. He wishes to do honor to the Lord's power and might, by presenting his best offerings - and his "best" sons. It does not occur to him to call for the youngest, the benjamin, the one who runs all day in the sun and spends all his time with pack animals. It does not cross his mind that what society sees as lowly, the Lord sees as precious. And God has to remind Samuel, as well : "the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart." Samuel anoints David, and David assumes the kingship of Israël - and the humble, poetic boy even heals the rage in Saul's soul, with his harp, with gentle words and music.

*

A root lies hidden beneath the earth. From it spring the leaves and flowers we recognize as plants and to which we assign botanical classifications. Flowers are beautiful things, especially after a long winter - they emerge from the frozen earth, and stretch toward the sky, and live a while beneath the sun, then die. But beneath the soil, the root lives on. It nourishes the plant, gives it form, and waits. When the flower fades and falls, the root remains. Dormant. Humble.

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum, the antiphon begins (O Root of Jesse, who stand as a sign for the people). One of the frustrating qualities of Advent is that the "signum populorum" is hidden. People have to trust in something we can't see. The sign is buried, taking form beneath the earth, and in the meantime the visible things we rely on for life and color and small daily joys are blocked, wilted or lifeless or frozen, obscured by darkness that descends earlier each afternoon, or shrouded by whiteness that envelopes the earth. In a world grown accustomed to ostentation and display, the jazz and flash of running lights and a constant bass beat pouring from the cracks of tinted car windows, winter is a frustrating season, with its muffled sounds and distinction-numbing briskness. Signs are hidden. And waiting is annoying. I can't stand it when an Internet page takes 5 seconds to load. How am I supposed to make it through 3 (though, really, 4) months of winter? It is a season of paradoxes and forced patience, expectation mingled with skepticism and doubt. And so we sing, impatient, exigent.

The "O" antiphons represent a cry to the Lord from an eager, waiting, weary world. They also represent the whole process of moving through the liturgical year, especially through the long days of Advent. Musicologically, they exist absolutely outside ordinary time. The sequence of them contains its own sort of musical grammar, its own play on liturgical and melodic messages. Each antiphon is in the Fa clef, instead of the more common Do clef of the Kyriale and most Mass propers. And each is written in the second Gregorian mode - an interstitial, plagal space between authentic modalities - with its suspensions and stark intervals between which shadows hang. Guido d'Arezzo called the second mode "sad." And indeed, the antiphons are hauntingly nuanced, with poignant minor-key tendencies (inasmuch as Gregorian chant can be in a minor key). They are built in the paradoxical architecture of alternating minor thirds and half-steps, with a surprising step up in the first neume, and fairly simple elaboration after that. They emphasize the state of waiting, the longing for something to come, and the awkwardly melancholic hope of generations that that something will come if only we figure out just how to call for it.

In "O Radix Jesse," the antiphon for 19 December, the music explicitly reflects the paradox of being in a state of suspension. The chant reaches its summit, in a supreme élan on two intersecting torculi, at the same moment that the text speaks of kings constrained to silence (continebunt os suum). Yet the voice's liberation on these rising neumes is not complete : the phonetics of the words in the verse reflect the conflict of expectation and holding back. The cantor/s must sing "reges os suum" seamlessly, letting the melodic line pull the words forward while still enunciating each consonant, but without letting the sibilant "s"s get in the way of the forward flow. The syllabification, as well, reflects our present constraint : instead of an even division between two neumes, the double vowel of "su-um" is given an asymmetrical shape, with "su-" falling on one inflected punctum, and "-um" rising and falling and rising again and falling again through the stepping-stone torculus progression. A similar asymmetry occurs later in the antiphon, on the words "noli" and "tardare" (no longer tarry). The voice strains to place each syllable with the correct neume, which fall like syncopation, jarring us from a supposed ease of singing. The plea, repeated year after year on exactly the same day with the same liturgical function, becomes all the more vivid.

*

Which brings me back to the Root. If a flower is ephemeral, the root is eternal. It waits behind when other plantlife succumbs to seasonal frost. The story of the Root of Jesse is larger and vaster than the story of Samuel, or the story of David, or the story of Saul, or the story of Jesse himself - the Root was there before Jesse, and remains once Jesse is just an assemblage of consonants in an ancient narrative, a minor character whose penitence and generosity foreshadows a greater story of consolation and redemption coming from Bethlehem.

O Root of Jesse,
who stand as a sign for the people,
about whom the mouths of kings stand silent,
whom the nations will worship :
Come, set us free,
tarry no longer.

O Adonaï

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti, et ei in sina legem dedisti: veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.*

The mood in the church was somber, last Sunday after Mass, despite the joyful words of the liturgy and the colorful clerical vestments. The priest, in his pink embroidered chasuble, had climbed three creaking stairs to preach from the wooden pulpit, and his words centered on the Introït for the Third Sunday of Advent, otherwise known as Gaudete Sunday.

Rejoice in the Lord, Saint Paul reminds us in this letter. He insists : Rejoice in the Lord always. And insists some more : And again, I say, Rejoice !

You may remember that Holy Trinity was scheduled to close last June, as part of Boston's Archdiocesan Reconfiguration Process (whose initials nicely spell out, BARP). I've written obliquely about the closure here and here, and then even more obliquely about the suspension of closure here. Originally, as I understand it - I was still in France when this recommendation was issued from the offices of Archdiocese, so my grasp of the chronology of events is somewhat shaky - Holy Trinity was recommended for closure in 2004, along with 65 other churches (one-sixth of the parishes in the archdiocese). The original date given for Holy Trinity's closure was 30 June 2005. That date was extended when the Parish Council pointed out that the Archdiocese had not answered specific questions about the reconfiuration process (specifically as pertains to the financial assets of the parishes being suppressed), and - more concretely still - about the charitable programs housed at Holy Trinity which would be evicted if the church was forced to close. Five days before the last High Mass at the old German Baroque altar, news began to circulate. The Archbishop had issued a stay. The new date given for closure : 15 December 2005.

Reactions ranged from guarded optimism (That gives us six months) to elation (They're listening to us !) to immediate despondency (That's right in the middle of Advent !) to outright skepticism (This decision is all about money). Parishioners at Holy Trinity were promised a seamless merger with another community, but few people trusted either the seamlessness or the reasoning about joining two parish communities. Holy Trinity houses two groups already : Catholics of ethnic German descent, and the traditional Latin Mass community. The Germans asked if they would be allowed a Mass with the readings in German, if Holy Trinity was merged with another church (the nearby St James, in Chinatown). The Latin Mass community wondered when the Latin Mass would be celebrated. St James has its own Mass schedule, which conflicts to some degree with Holy Trinity's. Already, because the German Mass is celebrated at 10h on Sundays, and usually takes High Mass priority for the week, the Latin (Tridentine) Mass is at noon. If Holy Trinity merged with St James, would the Latin Mass be pushed into the late afternoon? Or squeezed into some early morning slot? Would we ever have a Latin High Mass again?

And what would happen to the building of the church itself? Cynical speculation said the tower would be rebuilt and sectioned off into condos. The church, built in 1844 by the immigrant German Catholic community, stands on prime South End property, in the middle of a neighborhood increasingly caught up in the sweep of urban renewal (a nicer, more anodyne term for gentrification). What would become of the history embedded and prayed and sung into these stone walls? The fact that the Von Trapp family singers once sang on these marble steps, the high altar gleaming and ornate behind them? Who would be responsible for dismantling the stained-glass windows with the saints' names lovingly soldered in German gothic script?

*

For six months after arriving in Boston I didn't dare attach myself to Holy Trinity. I explained that I only went to Mass there "because it is the only church that offers an indult Latin Mass." My parish, the place my soul calls home, lay across the sea and up a gentle river, in the valley between the Massif Central and the wide mouth of the Rhône. When asked, on some questionnaire or other, to list my parish, I wrote : Lyon, St-Georges. And yet every Sunday, about 10 a.m., I would suit up in my winter coat, grumbling at the time it took to get to South Boston, cranky because the hour of the Mass (noon) meant I couldn't eat in the morning, weary in the face of the atmosphere of discouragement I sensed in the parish, the too-readiness to criticize, the spirit of complaint. And some Sundays, I got lazy. I went to St Paul's in Cambridge instead, or St Gabriel's in Brighton. I tried to love the new Mass, really I did. I sang along with its rhythmic hymns and laughed at the jokes told during the sermons. I shook hands with utter strangers when the priest said "Give to one another a sign of peace." But always something was missing. At St Paul's, one priest called the Holy Sacrament a symbol. At St Gabriel's, the music director chose "God Bless America" as an Offertory hymn. And I knelt in my pew, head in my hands, and wondered who we were being asked to worship. And I never got used to the altar facing the other way, or a binary "Kyrie," or the truncated, modern-language Consecration. Something was missing - I don't know what label to put on it - respect? Solemnity? Dignity? Theology?

It dawned on me after the Mass last Sunday that - if all went according to the BARP - that was the last Sunday at Holy Trinity. 15 December fell midweek and I knew I wouldn't have time to come back. I touched the wood of the doorway as I left the church after Mass. Tibi ago gratias, I whispered to the building which had become my reluctant second second home.

On my way out I saw the flyer. Just a yellow photocopy, with a grainy black-and-white photo, but it grabbed me. The Holy Trinity Christian Arts Series, it read, presents the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum. Well, I'll be.

I sang with the Collegium Musicum, for a while, back in a lifetime long before this one. In a way I haven't fully explored yet, that choral experience led me to God and specifically to the Mass - to the Mass in Latin. It was also painful, in some intensely personal ways - I met a boy who became my husband, and a girl who took her own life (and part of my own), and I came face-to-face with many of my own insecurities about soul, and language, and music, and the place of singing in my life's path. I hesitated about going to hear the group sing, last Sunday, then decided to go walk around Downtown Crossing for a while and get some lunch before I made up my mind.

I walked around Downtown Crossing for several hours, without eating and without making up my mind. But something pulled me. And two hours later I found myself back in the nave, filled now nearly to capacity the way a church should be on Sunday, and I stood for the opening carol, a stirring four-part setting of "O Come O Come Emmanuel."

Rejoice !
Rejoice !
Emmanuel shall ransom captive Israël.

The choir sang just as I remembered - a purity of sound, a crispness of diction, a wholeness as each voice found its line and wove it into each other voice. The pauses between notes rang as full as the lines and waves of sound ; the interstices and suspensions and accidentals hung sharply for a moment in the air, then smoothed into a final cadence, fading from candleflame into the wisp of resinous smoke left behind a candle. They sang Schütz, and Praetorius, and Handel, along with traditional Christmas carols. The concert lasted 90 minutes, and then there was a reception in the church basement, with homemade cake and big silver urns of coffee. I went into the basement and ran into the Collegium's current assistant conductor. He was a freshman my last year in the group. We stared for a second and then he said, with great politeness, You look familiar, and I smiled tensely and said, I think we sang quartets together in the Faculty Club, a century ago, and that made him laugh, a little, and we chatted about the choir and about the campus and the church and where we'd been in the meantime. The line for cake advanced slowly around us.

So what are you doing here ? he asked, after a moment.

I didn't pause for even a moment before answering.

This is my church, I said, a compact sentence, as automatic as a voice rising through the intervals of an antiphon.

O Adonaï ... the vocative "O" begins on Do, soars to Fa, and moves to Mi before releasing to the following syllable and following neume. The "O" creates an arch, and we rise to meet it, create it, to participate in what it builds, in the flickering silence of the nave. It goes from Do to Fa so we go there : Causal. It rises and falls, lilts and lulls without ever a loss. Rejoice in the Lord always, the music tells us, in the echo of candles and the hovering silence as voices hush into prayer. Iterum dico : Gaudete. This is our church.

*O Adonai and Leader of the house of Israel, who didst appear to Moses in a flame of red fire, and gavest him the law in Sinai: Come, deliver us with an outstretched arm.

O Sapientia

The first of the Great O Antiphons, sung on 17 December in the Roman Church, addresses Wisdom.

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviter disponensque omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.*

I was thinking about the beginning of the O Antiphons this afternoon, wishing I knew of a church nearby where they would be sung, over the next 7 days. Then I realized I was wishing in fact to be back in Lyon, at Saint Georges, and attending the 7 a.m. Low Mass because there at least I knew Abbé Dor would enlist the help of Matthieu to sing them before leaving the altar, and the sound would fade into the stone like a cold color full of shadows and the promise of eventual light, light you don't know how to look for. And then I remembered that Abbé Dor no longer celebrates the Mass at Saint Georges because he was transferred in the summer of 2003, and that Matthieu hasn't served a Mass there since the November before that because he left Lyon to go finish his M.D. in Paris, and is now in the Diocesan Seminary in Toulon, studying to be a parish priest. It occurred to me then that I didn't know what to wish for, really, because what I actually wanted was not to find a church here in Boston but to step back in my own memory and live one particular year over again, one particular end-of-Advent season and the way the echoes held me in the nave. And it came to me as I was walking from my office to the gym, zigzagging with cautious steps over the ice bricks of the Square, like finding stepping stones in an improbable river, that sometimes in order to go forward, you have to go back.

*

I changed into running clothes and armed myself with water bottle and Creative mp3 player, and ran up the stairs to the treadmill area. I'd put on the playlist called "Courant," an inside joke with just myself, and selected random play. The first song started as I stepped onto the black ramp : Switchfoot.

Welcome to the planet
Welcome to existence
Everyone's here
Everyone's here

A good running song. Good tempo, motivational words, pleasant harmonies, excellent use of mandolin-sounding guitar with the surprising contrast of the scratchy bass and percussion. Cool bridge. I watched out the second-story window as I worked into my own rhythm, pace after pace and breath after breath, watched the yellow Colonial house across the street and the people walking by on the slick sidewalk just before it, and the grey-lit rainy sky behind. And I did what I usually do as I run, which is to close my eyes for a second and imagine the Saône on my side, and the statue of the Virgin on the bright hill, and the red-roofed houses in the historical district, and the narrow streets and corridors and evenly spaced purposefully landscaped trees along the quai.

Everybody's watching you now
Everybody waits for you now
What happens next?
What happens next?

*

I ran along the quai as if I could engrave the city into my stride. I ran every day, sometimes twice within 24 hours. My memory was linked to the movement of my knees and the way I had to pace my breath, and the river unspooling like crystal thread in blue and green and grey and sometimes black. I ran until I had four periods a month, and then kept running until I had none. I ran so much a bump rose up in a gland at the hinge of my right thigh. (It hasn't gone away.) I ran until shin splints radiated down into my third toe on each side. I ran a map. I ran a daily race. I ran to breathe. I ran to prove that I could run. I ran because it was joyful to run. I ran instead of drinking. I ran instead of reading. I ran to forget the scars I'd engraved into my skin. I ran instead of cutting. I ran instead of everything. I ran because I knew I was leaving. I ran instead of leaving. I ran because I wanted to carve the urban shape into the shape of my own limbs. I ran to get out of my apartment. To get out of my old body, that thing I had called fat for so many years I didn't remember it might have another name. I ran to get out of my churning mind and the choices I didn't have the words to try to make. I ran to stop thinking that I might someday only remember Lyon as the place I broke. I outran myself for a while - and then I caught up. I left, and when I got to Boston my back froze up and a vertebra slanted to one side and my muscles screamed and my legs, instead of pumping in furious, desperate exaltation up and down along the quai, took each step with great caution, as though walking on ice, as though a wrong move, a slip or a tweak to the left, could break me in two.

Where can you run to escape from yourself?
Where you gonna go?
Where you gonna go?

I ran slowly on the treadmill, watching the cheerful yellow house and the brick slicks of Winthrop Street, watching the rain stop and the passing man with his shivering dog lower the hood of his slicker. I ran and thought about hillsides and bridges and rivers and how we climb them and build them and ford them and what we leave behind us as we go. And I remembered being at this window, running, in 1992, mourning Davis and the life I'd led there and the boyfriend and mentor and best friend and apartment and familiar landscape I had left behind, and how, that winter, when winter happened over and over again, every Wednesday, until the whiteness of it made me want to scream, I had nobody to call because I'd tried so hard to run away from all of them, from all of that, and had to put myself back on my feet and get up in the freezing morning nearly blind from weeping and do my Latin homework and go to class anyway, anyway, anyway. All my insecurity was tied into this thing I thought I wanted - this monolith, the Ph.D. but more than just the pedigree, the whole experience to me was sacred - and I heard my professor's voice saying "99% of Harvard grad students think they are an admissions mistake, and only 1% actually are. Make sure you know your percentage." And I ran.

I ran and watched a woman take a hesitant step that threatened to become a glissade. She grabbed the yellow house's wooden fence and steadied herself, then walked carefully away shaking her hand as if it stung. That happens sometimes, in the ice - you slip, and find something that will keep you from falling, but the thing you grab onto can hurt just as much as a fall would. Or more.

I found myself remembering a visiting professor (R.I.P.) who cast a chilly, Snape-like stare around the seminar table and said "The feminization of the profession is really ... striking." There were 17 women and 2 men at that table - and only 2 of the students were truly welcome. The same man handed me back a paper on Wilde, a couple months later. And on the front page, in bright red ink, he had scrawled "YOU ARE NOT HARVARD MATERIAL." I sat through the next two hours of his class, chanting song lyrics and multiplication tables in my head, getting stuck on six times nine just like the girl in the rhyme my great-grandmother used to recite at family gatherings ("She answered : Maryann"), and instead of taking notes on his lecture on Mallarmé's poem about John the Baptist, I underlined the assessment of my paper in green, then blue, then black, and worked it into the mental mathematics I was putting myself through, to keep from crying in class. Four times eight, thirty-two. Four times thirteen, fifty-two like a deck of cards. Four times seventeen, sixty-eight like the student uprising. Four times nineteen, I don't know. Because I AM NOT HARVARD MATERIAL. I don't know how many grad students can't do four times nineteen off the top of their heads (without thinking about twenty, and then subtracting), but I bet it's about one percent. The admissions mistakes. It didn't occur to me that this bitter, brutal man might say such a thing because he was a visiting professor, left out of department politics and decisions and with no hope of making his position permanent : he wasn't Harvard material either. I never finished his class. I took an incomplete, and just never did the final paper because I couldn't manage to write for such a judge. A few years ago a friend told me that professor had died of cancer, and I wanted so badly to mourn him. But it was like that song from A Chorus Line : I dug right down to the bottom of my soul, and cried. Because I felt nothing. And to this day I can't stand Mallarmé. Which is a shame, because he wrote some fine poetry.

*

Maybe redemption has stories to tell
Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell

When I told the professor I work the most closely with now that I was on the job market this year, she immediately offered to write me a letter of recommendation. And as she said it she made a little face, which I interpreted as her being busy and not wanting to take the time to write a new letter of recommendation.

Only if you have the time, I said, trying to be gracious. I don't want to bother you.

She had started writing something on a notepad, her left wrist curved around so she could shape the letters. She stopped and turned her head toward me. "Bother" me?

Well, you know ... I hedged. And quickly shut up, because she was shaking her head and my voice was quavering.

Did I say it would "bother" me to write a letter for you? It would be a pleasure. I have some great things to say.

I felt her staring at me. I stared at my shoes. Then at the wall. Then at her pen. I am used to sitting on the sidelines trying to pass unnoticed, doing everything I can and realizing too late it is not enough, that I haven't outrun the part of me that just doesn't get it and doesn't belong there, wishing for invisibility since my efforts don't measure up. And then I realized how long it has been since I thought the sentence "I am such a fuckup." And how so many things I've spent years afraid of no longer scare me. How confidence comes with practice, and how kindness gives you confidence enough to be generous with even the people who would intimidate you elsewhere. And that I am proud of my work, that I love it. That there is good work to be proud of - and still a lot of work to be done.

I made a face because I will be sad to see you go, my professor continued. And healed twelve years of doubt and resentment, leaving only a pale scar in the shape of a red H.

*

The tension is here
Between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be

I ran this afternoon, until my stomach cramped and my legs became unsteady on the black rubber cylinder. When I left the gym the rain had stopped, the evening had started to open in the way only December evenings in Cambridge can do at 2 p.m., like crisp pale flowers, and I walked to get coffee and then to a meeting and then to see a student and I meditated these things in my heart : how leaving a place you hold sacred can teach you about both the place and the nature of sacredness. And how much you learn when you feel you don't measure up, and how much more you learn when you realize you are right where you belong for right now, and don't have to run away from or instead of anything but sheerly for the joy of the music like a river in your soul. I crossed and recrossed the Square this afternoon, and didn't fall once.

To my great surprise, I am realizing I might not have been an admissions mistake after all. That realization reaches from one age of my limited comprehension to another, and brings both might and sweetness. Tonight, in the hardwood darkness of this home, I sing in thanksgiving for Wisdom, which comes in season, in the fulness of time : unexpected poetry to line the streets with shining stones.

*O Wisdom, issued from the mouth of the most High, and reaching from one age to another, and disposing all things with both might and sweetness : Come, and lead us on the path of prudence.

The gift that just keeps giving.

Long ago in Ms Roberts' 4th period AP French class, I imagined myself being a French teacher, you know, when I grew up. I saw a world of little Princes and little Nicolases and a whole set of alternate lyrics to Christmas carols. I could already taste the bûche de Noël, and crêpes in February, and mottled-glass wide-bottomed bottles of Orangina sans ice and tiny, lightning-bolt-strong coffees in thin gold-lipped china. I may even have painted escargot into the picture - or at least the taste of their sauce, white wine and garlic, so I could forget the spongy snail texture.

And in my rêverie about the Francophone world I would inhabit as an adult, I wore a saucy béret and a stripey shirt and rode a three-speed bicycle with a baguette across its dipping old-fashioned handlebars, zooming insouciantly past perpetual green-awning terrasses of sidewalk cafés, dodging colorfully gleaming bin-displays of fresh fruit on narrow cobbled streets, underneath the pointy shadow of the Tour Eiffel - all as I inspired generations of American youth to take joy in unlocking the mysteries of language.

I don't think I ever pictured myself standing in front of a university class, engaged in a spontaneous translation of popular song. Or, if I did, I certainly never imagined myself actually getting jiggy, elbows and knees in rhythm, fingers snapping, as my students chanted the following chorus :

Cette MERDE, c'est des BANANES !
BAY-AH-ENNE-AH-ENNE-EUH-ESSE !
Merde ! des bananes !
BAY-AH-ENNE-AH-ENNE-EUH-ESSE !

Reality is different from how I imagined my future, when I was 14, and sometimes the whole business of the "mysteries of language" boils down to whatever makes you happy as you speak, that's all I'm saying.

Trop de fois j'ai pris ce chemin-là,
Et cette'fois il n'aura pas lieu comme ça !
Parce que je ne suis point une rappelle-fille,
rappelle-fille, rappelle-fille.

8 December

Immaculate Conception, you
enlume grey earth with snow of whitest blue.
You hold us close within your purest heart,
that's never known the stinging tempter's art.
You light the sky
with palest cold,
the lighted veil
shot through with sparks,
indigo dark-lit gold.

Immaculate Conception, I
brush snow-dust from your hem as you glide by.
I can't catch what you carry, can't untrace
your footsteps through the bluer snow drawing nigh ;
can only echo prayers across the sea,
and candles in the thickened window panes,
pale light steady behind the paler glass,
white-blue glow like sparks in darkened water.
The paper-sheltered flames of other years
have burned into an echo of your song,
old lanterns cinders now, in folds and tears,
but your voice hearkens through them, glass-clear, strong :
You call. I am your most flawed daughter
but I reach to touch your honeyed face,
and follow heavy in the bluest shadow of your grace.

A couple quick follow-ups.

*The irony of scoring as Neo, the "ONE," is that I fell asleep halfway through the first Matrix movie and never could bear to go sit through the second and third episodes of the trilogy. So I feel like a fraud in my fake cassock and sunglasses.

*So far no interviews, but I have been asked to coach a friend before his. Super ! At least my extensive un-knowledge will benefit someone. Because, you know, it's all about doing a little good in the world.

*And speaking of doing a little good in the world ... Thank you for helping me help Filip do his little great good. The exhibition raised close to 1000 USD for the Prof. Dr. Assen Zlatarov Orphanage in Haskovo, Bulgaria. I ended up buying one photo for each comment here, plus two to keep in my office. Thank you for helping. It will be an honor to keep these images nearby as I work - as a reminder of the world beyond my office, beyond my (flimsy?) hopes for academia, beyond everything I've seen and held important.

*A long-overdue P.S. : I actually did find the girl. And she was fine, but had a headache. I hope she's over it by now.

*Who wants a Christmas card? Email me your address.

*Yes, I have pictures and stories from Thanksgiving weekend, and I will post them once I am well and truly certain nobody is interested anymore. OK? (Thanks for your patience ...)

I required a tie-breaker !

You scored as Neo, the "One". Neo is the computer hacker-turned-Messiah of the Matrix. He leads a small group of human rebels against the technology that controls them. Neo doubts his ability to lead but doesn't want to disappoint his friends. His goal is for a world where all men know the Truth and are free from the bonds of the Matrix. Batman, the Dark Knight 71% Lara Croft 71% Neo, the "One" 71% Captain Jack Sparrow 67% The Amazing Spider-Man 67% William Wallace 63% The Terminator 58% Indiana Jones 58% Maximus 50% James Bond, Agent 007 42% El Zorro 38% Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

Hunh. Equal parts Neo, Lara Croft, and Batman ??

I am beginning to think Quizilla might not have *all* the answers.

Eyes of Grief

A Spanish teacher in my department directed me to this project, designed and operated by one of his students.

"Eyes of Grief" is a visual literacy project to raise money for an orphanage in Bulgaria. The email reads :

Sixty black-and-white photographs of orphans living in Haskovo, Bulgaria are available for purchase as part of an effort to raise money for the Prof. Dr. Assen Zlatarov Orphanage. You can make a contribution by filling out the order form at the exhibit, or just by stopping by at the closing reception on December 2nd at 2 p.m.

All proceeds to benefit the Prof. Dr. Assen Zlatarov Orphanage, Haskovo, Bulgaria.

I don't know what I find so arresting about these images, or which photo stirs me the most. The project moves me, and I want to help.

Here's where you come in. Go have a look at the photos and leave me a comment with the gallery page and photo number you like best. For every five comments up to 25, I will buy one photo from the exhibition tomorrow. Don't do it for me - I don't need the comments, I was perfectly sated by the comment orgy a couple weeks ago. Do it for the boy with the scar on his upper lip and the sticky-out ears. Or the girl in the top hat, the one with green eyes that are just a little bit afraid of giving in to her smile. Or the ones who aren't pictured, and for the pictures that won't be taken, of moments without the slightest hint of silliness or exuberance.

I have no idea if this plug will work at all - marketing is not my thing, and I feel tawdry even asking you to participate - and I'll go purchase at least a few photos no matter what. But this way, I know at least I'm publicizing the project. I hope you'll go look.

And see.

Eyes of Grief

Read this very carefully.

The authorities, elected representatives, and population of the Commune of Oued-Korelch (near Algiers), very moved by the death of Pope Jean-Paul II, offer their most sorrowful condolences to the deceased's wife and children.