A week ago a new nephew entered our family. His name is Charlie and he came one week early. Nevertheless, it was a long wait. After my sister-in-law had been in labor for nearly ten hours, the action pretty much stopped. My brother texted me: “We’re kind of bored.” I chuckled, and hoped he didn’t think I was condescending when I texted back, “Sleep now while you can.” Waiting is hard.
About ten years ago John and I were trying to sell a house and buy one in The Woodlands and I was always up and down with the good news-bad news of having a house on the market. My dear husband tried to lighten my mood by quoting a line from The Simpsons one night: “Now we play the waiting game!” and answering himself with Homer’s line, “Awww, I wanna play Hungry, Hungry Hippos.” So on a whim one night in a hotel we bought the game and probably caused no little annoyance to our neighbors as we drank glasses of wine and played that crazy noisy game. Perhaps not the best way to handle waiting, but waiting is hard.
Elisabeth is waiting to hear if she earned a part in a musical she just auditioned for. She’s been walking around the house looking a little sad and not knowing what to do. Waiting is hard. And too bad--we got rid of that awful hippos game as soon as our kids were old enough to play it.
Eleven and a half years ago I was waiting for our first child. It was summer and my body was growing more than I ever knew it could. My mom and I made curtains and bedding for the nursery. John and I picked out the perfect stroller, carseat and every other important piece of equipment.
But one of my favorite parts of that waiting time was singing Christmas music in July.
The Chancel Choir at First Presbyterian Church was working towards recording a Christmas album, so beginning in the late spring and working diligently in June and July, we fine-tuned pieces that were new to us and carols we were quite familiar with. At first it seemed a little odd to be singing songs that we associate with another season of the year, but soon it didn’t matter. I was entering into the music and the music was entering me.
The First Noel started quiet and slow, but as a choir, we were the storytellers of the entire scene, starting in the lonely fields, seeing and hearing the bright angels, and then swelling into the final verse, extolling Christians around the world: “Then let us all in one accord, sing praises to our heavenly Lord, Who hath made heaven and earth of naught and with his blood mankind hath bought.”
I sang with my mother, also an alto, and across the chancel my husband sang tenor and my father, bass. There is something amazing that happens to a singer when working on a piece with a choir. It is one thing to listen to a song over and over. It is quite another thing to work on it, to enter into it, to know it inside and out and to do this together with other singers.
It was this way with O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen. (You can also listen to it here.) The song is in Latin, words sung as part of the Christmas Matins, sung for generations on Christmas morning. As I concentrated hard on learning the notes I failed to put all the words together for a few weeks. I had some idea that I was singing about the Virgin Mary and something about Mystery--there was no mistaking the word “Mysterium.”
Finally I read the text all the way through, curious as to what story we had been singing.
O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
jacentem in praesepio.
Beata virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt
portare Dominum Christum, Alleluia!
O great mystery
and wondrous sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord
lying in their manger.
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy
to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
Now the music had even more power, more depth, as I began to see how the words and the music fit together. There were many pauses in rehearsal during which my mom and I would look at each other with amazement, enjoying the beauty together.
My favorite part is halfway through the piece. Virgo. Beata virgo. I sing, I lean in to the dissonance on the word “Virgin.”
The composer, Morten Lauridsen, strove to convey the agony of what this new mother would encounter years later as she watched her son die. Such harmonious sounds, pierced by the dissonant G-sharp. “And a sword will pierce your own soul,” said Simeon to Mary when Jesus was eight days old.
I hear a second meaning for the dissonance and tension on the word “Virgo.” I hear the very dissonance, the obvious impossibility of God born to a woman. Jesus, God the Son, placed in a manger, lying in hay, animals seeing him laid “in their manger.”
But “nothing is impossible with God,” the angel Gabriel had told Mary nine months earlier.
I trembled as I sang this anthem in those days of waiting. I tremble as I remember how it felt to have our own child growing inside me and realizing that in the same way God was born into the world.
Did Mary’s back ache? Did she get to sit down as much as she needed to? As we sang in choir robes I knew that not even large robes could cover my growing belly. How was it for her, growing larger by the week?
Our child, pressing against my ribs, would be born in a hospital, with much attention and cleanliness. Mary’s child was wrapped in strips of cloth and placed in a feed-trough, watched by animals.
Phyllis Tickle, in her book, What the Land Already Knows: Winter’s Sacred Days, writes of her own pregnancies and her preparations for Christmas and of finding kinship with Mary therein.
“Standing [in front of a plastic Madonna in a shop window] I would make a brief prayer to the memory of the real one, who like me, was a highway to the world. Ours was the tearing of the flesh and the pushing, forever pushing out, of the thing from the body into some other life. Hers had been the rapture of the Magnificat, and mine the fullness of pleasure, but it was, I at last understood, our only difference.”
This third week of Advent, as we move ever closer to Christmas morning, I thank those whose gifts have nourished me for the journey--Dr. Lauridsen for composing this meditation, Dr. Yarrington for teaching it to me and allowing me to share in it, Mary for being a mother and for trusting God. . .
And I thank God, the creator of music, the giver of these good gifts, the giver of his Son.
Let us praise the Lord, whom the Angels are praising, whom the Cherubim and Seraphim proclaim: Holy, holy, holy!
The Short Breviary
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