Inside These Wrappings, a Brighter Life

Adamos Maximus Photography

Spiritual Sunday

Yesterday we had a white Christmas in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I am visiting my parents.  The world was brown when we went to bed and white when we awoke.  The symbolism of Christmas snow lies in the promise of wiping everything clean and starting anew.  Grace appears to enter our fallen world.

That’s also the theme of a wonderful Christmas poem by Mark Doty.  In this case, Handel’s Messiah does the cleansing. I am a member of our small church choir (one of three men), and love the way Doty describes the group in the poem exceeding his expectations. At first the poet doesn’t think the singers can do justice to either The Messiah or to the gorgeous sunset over the church. After all, they are just locals whose histories everyone knows, people with voices that aren’t particularly stellar.  In the course of the concert, however, the music becomes more than the singers and merges with the glory outside. “Aren’t we enlarged/by the scale of what we’re able/to desire?” the poet asks as he weaves Handel’s lyrics into his poem.  By the end of both poem and performance, are doubts are momentarily suspended.  We realize that there is still time to change:

Messiah (Christmas Portions)

By Mark Doty

A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
(colors of tarnish on copper)

against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
the Choral Society

prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
Not steep, really,

but from here,
the first pew, they’re a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
that neighbor who

fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
from the post office

—tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
from the T-shirt shop:

today they’re all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
of distance and formality.

Silence in the hall,
anticipatory, as if we’re all
about to open a gift we’re not sure
we’ll like;

how could they
compete with sunset’s burnished
oratorio? Thoughts which vanish,
when the violins begin.

Who’d have thought
they’d be so good? Every valley,
proclaims the solo tenor,
(a sleek blonde

I’ve seen somewhere before
—the liquor store?) shall be exalted,
and in his handsome mouth the word
is lifted and opened

into more syllables
than we could count, central ah
dilated in a baroque melisma,
liquefied; the pour

of voice seems
to make the unplaned landscape
the text predicts the Lord
will heighten and tame.

This music
demonstrates what it claims:
glory shall be revealed. If art’s
acceptable evidence,

mustn’t what lies
behind the world be at least
as beautiful as the human voice?
The tenors lack confidence,

and the soloists,
half of them anyway, don’t
have the strength to found
the mighty kingdoms

these passages propose
—but the chorus, all together,
equals my burning clouds,
and seems itself to burn,

commingled powers
deeded to a larger, centering claim.
These aren’t anyone we know;
choiring dissolves

familiarity in an up-
pouring rush which will not
rest, will not, for a moment,
be still.

Aren’t we enlarged
by the scale of what we’re able
to desire? Everything,
the choir insists,

might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
quickened, now,

by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
Still time to change.

The way that the music transfigures the singers and everyone in the church gets at the essence of Christmas, a time when we open ourselves to divinity entering the world.  The poem reminds me of a similar transformation, no less miraculous, described in my favorite short story, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.”  The narrator looks down from his Harlem apartment at three men and a woman conducting a small street revival meeting near the entrance to a barbecue joint.”  Others are watching as well including the cook, some hard bitten women who live nearby, and some  passersby.  After the man concludes his testimony, one of the women starts to beat a tambourine and group starts singing.  Suddenly all present are transfigured:

It was strange, suddenly, to watch, though I had been seeing these meetings all my life. So, of course, had everybody else down there. Yet, they paused and watched and listened and I stood still at the window. “‘Tis the old ship of Zion,” they sang, and the sister with the tambourine kept a steady, jangling beat, “it has rescued many a thousand!” Not a soul under the sound of their voices was hearing this song for the first time, not one of them had been rescued. Nor had they seen much in the way of rescue work being done around them. Neither did they especially believe in the holiness of the three sisters and the brother, they knew too much about them, knew where they lived, and how. The woman with the tambourine, whose voice dominated the air, whose face was bright with joy, was divided by very little from the woman who stood watching her, a cigarette between her heavy, chapped lips, her hair a cuckoo’s nest, her face scarred and swollen from many beatings, and her black eyes glittering like coal. Perhaps they both knew this, which was why, when, as rarely, they addressed each other, they addressed each other as Sister. As the singing filled the air the watching, listening faces underwent a change, the eyes focusing on something within; the music seemed to soothe a poison out of them; and time seemed, nearly, to fall away from the sullen, belligerent, battered faces, as though they were fleeing back to their first condition, while dreaming of their last.

Inside these wrappings burns another, brighter life. Believe in miracles.

Photo: Adamos Maximus Photography: www.adamosmaximusphotography.com