This reflection was written for the 2018 half-day retreat at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Christiansburg, Va. The Ann-Frances Chapter of the Daughters of the King holds this quiet day every Advent and Lent. The second meditation for the retreat, “The Stars Singing,” can be read here.
I have a friend who is an operatic soprano. A few years ago, one Christmas Eve in Memphis, Tennessee, 12 hours’ drive from where I was born and from where my parents and sister and niece and nephew gathered to celebrate Christmas without me, I stood in the side chapel of a darkened, candlelit church, listening to her sing “O Holy Night,” and I wept. That’s what her voice can do.
This is also what her voice can do. Step back a few centuries, to George Frederic Handel and his Messiah, which he wrote in a matter of days to raise money for a child’s orphanage. When my friend sings “Rejoice greatly” from his Messiah, the notes rejoice. Her voice sparkles and leaps. I listen to her sing that and laugh out loud because of how she can fly through those lines with what sounds like no effort at all, leaping from height to height like birds flying from branch to branch of a tree and then soaring into the sky with nothing to hold them back.
I am not an operatic soprano. My good range is about eight notes, mostly tenor. Yet she is the same soprano who, when I say, “I cannot sing,” tells me, “yes, you can. You just need to practice.”
And I roll my eyes, because she’s put on her teacher’s voice, that stern, don’t-forget-I’m-giving-you-a-grade-at-the-end-of-the-semester-and-I-will-know-if-you’ve-been-practicing-or-not. Kind of like a cross between your first piano teacher and Santa Claus, I guess. And she laughs at me, gently.
But what she’s telling me is not that I need to practice my vocal warmups and work on my Italian diction and memorize four arias by final exams, but that I need to open my mouth, and open my ears, breathe in, and sing. I know where the notes are, I know what the words are, and whether it’s beautiful or not doesn’t really matter.
She and I work together with university music students; she teaches them Italian arias and French art song, and I coach them from the piano when they come in to rehearse with me. I am not, truly, a singer, no matter what my friend tells me, but I can sing a little bit, vicariously, through their voices, and I know enough about what they need to do with their voices to tell them things like, “your vowels need to be rounder,” or “you need to move your air steadily, like a stream,” or “sing quietly the way you would hold a newborn infant – gently, carefully, but also with strength.”
There are so many metaphors in music, just as there are in scripture. I remember a voice professor once saying, “a song about a flower is never just about a flower.”
But song is, at its essence, about breathing; the lyrics, the text, the metaphors are carried by breath. It’s a very physical concern – we work on breath support, and phrasing, and learning how to inhale in time with the music, how to breathe with each other, or with the pianist or the conductor.
The Latin for “breath” is one of the roots of the word “spirit.” And breathing – that silent, constant inhale and exhale we are always accomplishing without thinking, that stream of air that carries text and story and conversation and beauty, that keeps us living – is also a spiritual concern.
As I was thinking about what I would meditate on today, a quiet day about music, I spent time trying to follow the connections I sense among music, breath, spirit, Advent, waiting, listening, quiet, prayer. Advent is a season of journey, a season of knowing and unknowing, rather like Lent, so I hope you’ll forgive me if this meditation is a little bit that way too – a journey of knowing and unknowing, a seeking of connections.
I love these threshold seasons. There is a reason why the experience of Advent is not so far distant from the experience of Lent. They both hold in themselves that quiet dark and light, hopelessness and promise. They are both wilderness walks of self-restraint and reflection. They are both journeys that are at once individual and communal.
And, in a sense, they each hold within them the entire liturgical year, the entire cycle of mystery. What is the meaning of Advent without Christmas? What is the meaning of Christmas without Easter? What is the meaning of Easter without Good Friday? The candlelit wait, the quiet miracle in the manger, the journey of the Magi, the journey through the wilderness, the darkness of the cross, the joyful morning light and the open tomb – all of these depend on each other.
While we move and breathe and wait, patiently, through this holy season of Advent, at the doorway to the liturgical seasons to come, the holy spirit is already with us, even though the day of Pentecost, when we’re anointed by tongues of fire, seems very far away in time and space.
In Advent, we anticipate the rest of the trinity, in Christmas and Epiphany and in Pentecost – in Advent, we await not only birth, but Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or Creator, Incarnate and Holy Spirit – death, resurrection and eternity. This is a time when past, present and future coexist.
To sing, I must practice singing. How do I do that?
For me, it’s a bit like the question, how do I practice prayer? For Episcopalians, praying is pretty structured, intentional – some might even say institutional or formal. We have collects, and Eucharistic prayers, and Prayers of the People, prayers for government and ordinations and confirmations, the Daily Offices – we have a list of the seven principal kinds of prayer – adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, intercession and petition – see pages 856 and 857 of the Book of Common Prayer. It’s no wonder we either freeze or overthink it when someone volunteers us to give the blessing over a holiday meal.
Even in the silence and space of my own heart, when I grieve, or fear, or hope, the words I try to put around that get tangled up, and all I hear is my own voice.
The poet Mary Oliver writes:
I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
(You can listen to her read the poem above, “I Happened to be Standing,” here, and her unedited interview with Krista Tippett for On Being on SoundCloud here.)
And she also writes:
Prayer
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
For Mary Oliver, praying is more about listening, and being, than it is about speaking.
Poets talk about voice – the voice of the poem, the voice a writer develops in his or her work over years – a lyrical voice, a strident voice, a meticulous voice.
Pianists, as well as singers and poets, use the word voice. We will talk about voicing a chord. A melody is usually a string of single notes – “O come, O come, Emmanuel” – but most piano music, at least after the first few years you take lessons, involves more than strings of single notes. For instance, the haunting, open harmonies you heard earlier, when I played an arrangement of that Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” – a melody, with chords underneath it. Playing the chords so that the melody stands out from the other notes added to it we refer to as “voicing.” Much of the time the melody is right on top of the chords, easy to see, easy to play, or to “voice.”
With some composers, it is not so easy. When I was a student and I was studying Brahms, I found that he would bury the melody inside his chords. The most important line wasn’t always floating along the top. And it made it much more difficult to voice, to play his music so that the melody could be heard in the midst of these thick, complicated chords.
While I played and played, trying so hard to make my second or third finger sound out those notes, probably making terrible faces and turning my hands inside-out and upside-down trying to voice the melody, my professor stopped me and said, You don’t need to try so hard. Don’t try to play the melody. Instead, listen for it. Not to it. Listen for the melody, buried in those chords, and then, you’ll hear it. That voice will emerge, shine, in the midst of everything going on around it.
In this quiet time, today, and throughout these weeks of Advent, we have a chance to listen for the voice of this season, to form our own prayers without words, to pray by listening, to find the music in the quiet, the single line of melody in a complicated mess of notes, the profound truth in this threshold season of Advent. By being quiet, we can hear what is deep within this time of the year – the stories and the truths to come, the birth and wilderness and death and resurrection, the infinite Spirit of a Creator, a universal good, that is part of the fabric of this anticipation, this season that brings all the mysteries together.
More Mary Oliver:
“The Summer Day”
A transcript of her edited interview with Krista Tippett
Her page at the Poetry Foundation
“What Mary Oliver’s Critics Don’t Understand,” in the New Yorker, 2017