Christmas 2010

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

For fifteen years, D and I have hosted a Christmas Carol party. In the beginning, when we lived in the City, we actually bundled up and went around our neighborhood, singing on doorsteps, but as we got older, the charm of trudging around in heavy coats and clunky boots lost out to the allure of a fireplace and mulled wine. Since moving to the hill, we’ve expanded the guest list to include non-singers, who tend to huddle ‘round the kitchen, eating all the best food while the singers make merry around the piano.

The party means a lot to D and me. Now that we no longer have a church home, and our former choir colleagues are scattered about the area, we don’t have an opportunity to sing together very often. For friends who were used to having a built-in chance to be together every week, losing the opportunity to worship and make wonderful music together each Sunday morning was a devastating blow, but only one casualty in the petty, ongoing religious turmoil of our generation. Luckily, the Carol party gives us a chance to reunite our voices, even if it is only once a year.

Near the end of my decade-plus tenure as a professional chorister at the Cathedral, I felt most powerfully how the gift of music can transform. It was the midnight service on Christmas Eve, and the choirmaster had chosen an especially moving setting of the ancient O Magnum Mysterium, written originally as a responsorial chant for the matins service for Christmas Day. The text, with its focus on the mystery of the Son of God being born among farm animals, has always been a favorite of mine, since it moves beyond the human-centric, and widens God’s mercy to include the rest of His creation—horses, sheep, cows, barn mice, mourning doves…

Because of the setting’s quiet dignity, we sang the piece during the most sacred part of the service, communion. And as we sang, I watched as the young priest who was preparing the bread and wine became entranced by the words and music, the candle-lit beauty of the sanctuary, the lateness of the night. Listening to us singing Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Christum, he forgot where he was, and what his duties to the mass were, and simply stood, mouth agape, and listened. On the high altar, in a crowded downtown cathedral, on Christmas Eve, in full view of the congregation, this young man was transported—there is no other word for it.  And I, standing and singing alongside a group of my very best friends, had a hand in taking that priest out of his world, for just a moment, and placing him in the stable, with Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and the animals. It was a feeling I’ll never forget, and a high point in my life as a musician and a Christian.

Not long after that—a year, maybe—the choir received calls at home over the summer, letting us know that we’d been sacked, the choir disbanded. Although I had been a chorister, and church member, for 13 years, I was a relative new-comer. Many of the choristers had been singing together at the cathedral for twenty years or more. It was not a surprise when the choirmaster and organist, who’d held his position for thirty years, was let go as well. The factional, and fractious, nature of organized religion in America moves in mysterious ways. And most of them are ways I will not tread.

So, instead, D and I gather our friends and loved ones around us every Christmastide, and sing together ancient and miraculous poems. Standing around our piano, elbow to elbow with our cathedral family may not have the grandeur of processing down a long, candle-lit nave in wool cassocks from England, sliding into carved wood choir stalls at midnight, wreathed in incense smoke, but it is no less sacred, nor any less welcoming to a God who chose to become incarnate in a stable, among farm animals.

A song, regardless of where it is sung, is—after all—a prayer twice prayed.

(The setting that caught our junior priest all unawares during communion on that Christmas Eve was by Morten Lauridsen, a contemporary American composer based in California. You can hear his setting of O Magnum Mysterium here.)



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