Music and Mystery

Like lots of folks, I rely on music to help me cross into the holiday season and to navigate its terrain. During Advent and Christmas we anticipate and celebrate the incarnation, the Word who became flesh, but sometimes it takes more than words alone to evoke and enter into the mysteries of the story of the God who came to be with us.

Over the past few years, I’ve gone in search of Christmas music that takes my ears beyond the customary holiday fare. Although there are some contemporary songs in my stack of holiday CDs, my collection leans pretty heavily toward music that reaches backward in time. This is music that draws the listener deep into the layers of stories and legends surrounding the birth of Christ, music that echoes with the ancient human longing for light and celebration in a dark time. These are songs of signs and wonders, with words and melodies that beckon us to enter into the audacious, mysterious, hopeful, and wild tales they have to tell.

Here’s some of what I’ll be listening to as this holy season begins.

Wolcum Yule: Celtic and British Songs and Carols
Legends of St. Nicholas
On Yoolis Night
Anonymous 4

The women of Anonymous 4 are masters of reaching into the treasures of centuries past to offer sustenance in the present. These three CDs are now available in a boxed set titled Noël: Carols & Chants for Christmas; the set also includes the CD A Star in the East, a collection of medieval chant from Hungary. (As a single CD, A Star in the East is now available under the somewhat more mundane title Christmas Music From Medieval Hungary).

La Bela Naissença: Christmas Carols from Provence
Patrick Vaillant, et al.

Ooohhh, I really love this one; it’s one of the newest in my collection and is among my all-time favorites. I first heard excerpts from it on Harmonia, the splendid radio show that features early music and offers archived shows on its web site. “La Fugida en Egipte” (The Flight into Egypt), with its wry alleluia, is worth the price of the CD, and Patrick Vaillant’s liner notes are a big slab of icing (chocolate) on this Christmas cake. He writes,

the Nativity is not just a series of images. A whole imaginary world is stirring behind them, and it is this that carries the entire story and all its little meanders, giving a bit of legend here and a measure of familiarity there to the whole mystery. The music is there to reveal, to unfold the tale, to give these images their dimension in sound….Christmas carols are witnesses.

The Bells of Dublin
The Chieftains

A great CD with a big dose of Irish flair. Here the Chieftains mix it up with such folks as Elvis Costello, Nanci Griffith, and Marianne Faithfull, plus Jackson Browne with his song “The Rebel Jesus,” which should be part of the Christmas carol canon.

Christmas
Bruce Cockburn

One of the first CDs I purchased when I started searching for nontraditional fare. It’s actually very traditional, in the sense that it draws on lots of old carols, including the haunting “Iesus Ahatonnia” (The Huron Carol, written by a Jesuit missionary in the early 1600s; Cockburn says it’s the first Canadian Christmas carol) and “Down In Yon Forest” (of which Cockburn writes, “If there were a contest for the title of the spookiest Christmas carol, this ought to win hands down”). Though filled with traditional fare, the Canadian Cockburn puts a spin on it that makes it feel like a different animal entirely.

Christmas Through the Ages
Various artists; the composers include Arcangelo Corelli (how could he not have written Christmas music, with a name like that?), Benjamin Britten, and John Rutter

Aside from the tasty Christmas fare this contains, I couldn’t resist having a CD with a cover that features a fantastic depiction of the wise men wearing what look like particolored stockings, from a 6th century mosaic in the basilica of San Apollinaire Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. (Here’s a link to a photo of the spiffy magi.)

The Black Madonna: Pilgrim Songs from the Monastery of Montserrat
Ensemble Unicorn

This isn’t specifically a Christmas CD, but this wondrous collection of medieval pilgrim songs from Spain begins with a song about the Annunciation to Mary and ends with a Catalan round that makes mention of the magi. Sandwiched in between is a festive array of songs that tell some of the stories and miracles of the mother of Christ. The CD includes a couple of selections from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, an enormous collection of 13th-century songs in praise of the Virgin Mary. Written in Galician-Portugese during the reign of King Alfonso X, known as “El Sabio” (“The Wise”), a number of the songs are attributed to El Sabio himself. The interaction of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions often exerted an intriguing influence on the culture of medieval Spain. The songs included in The Black Madonna bear witness to this; they convey the sense that something very ancient and complex is at work in them.

Mistletoe and Wine
Mediaeval Baebes

Baebes indeed. This CD gathers up songs from a couple of their previous holiday CDs and includes “There Is No Rose Of Swych Vertu” and “The Coventry Carol.”

To Drive the Cold Winter Away
Loreena McKennitt

Containing a couple of original songs from this distinctive Canadian singer-composer, this CD primarily features traditional Christmas music from England, Ireland, and Scotland.

A Winter’s Solstice III
Windham Hill Artists

For sentimental reasons. This is one of the oldest in my collection of cool Christmas CDs. I still particularly delight in Pierce Pettis’ take on “In the Bleak Midwinter” and Barbara Higbie’s “Lullay, Lully.”

The Night of Heaven & Earth
Gary Doles

I’ve been saving the best for last. This CD makes me think of a passage from the Book of Isaiah, where God says these words through the prophet: “I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places” (Isaiah 45.3, NRSV). Gary (also known as Garrison) Doles is an award-winning singer-songwriter who has entered into the dark and secret places of the Advent and Christmas seasons and has found the riches there. With this treasure trove of utterly original songs, Gary invites us to come and find the delights and the challenges of the God who put on flesh and came to be with us. He also happens to be my sweetheart, and my enthusiasm about this CD isn’t merely a girlfriend’s bias; it’s this kind of amazing stuff that made me fall in love with him in the first place. Check out The Night of Heaven and Earth at CD Baby.

All this talk of Christmas music, I may not be able to wait until Advent to start listening, after all…

May your ears find many delights to draw you into the mysteries of the coming season.

In the Cards

In the “Random Bits from the Studio” Department…

These are a few wee collages I pieced together on playing cards, inspired by a friend who took a class where the instructor had them do this kind of exercise. Being much smaller, more spontaneous, and much speedier than my customary creative fare, these are a good diversion from my usual way of working; they don’t ask for a lot of planning and pondering and attention. I did these a couple of years ago. I’m thinking that in the wake of my most recently finished artwork, the mondo Welcome Table piece, it might be good to scale things way back and pull out the deck of cards and box of scraps again.

Here’s what else I’m thinking: in 2008, lots of small collages instead of one huge one…

Collage was my path into becoming an artist. I continue to find that in the practice of working with the pieces of paper, I’m also, at some other level, working with the pieces of my life. Play with the bits long enough, follow the unlikely juxtapositions, something new always emerges.

And everything can be used. Everything. I figured out long ago that God is the consummate recycler: in God’s economy, nothing gets wasted.

The wild preacher-painter Howard Finster put it this way, on a hand-lettered sign in the art-drenched Paradise Gardens Park he created in Georgia:

I TOOK THE PIECES YOU THREW AWAY
AND PUT THEM TOGETHER BY NIGHT AND DAY
WASHED BY RAIN AND DRIED BY SUN
A MILLION PIECES ALL IN ONE.

A Girl Named IKEA

I’m perpetually intrigued by synchronicity, that phenomenon that Carl Jung described as “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” Translated into English, synchronicity is the thing that happens when mysterious connections pop up with no immediately obvious cause. Occasionally I experience synchronicity in big ways, like when I preached my first sermon about twenty years ago. I was with a group of folks from the Wesley Foundation (the United Methodist campus ministry) at Florida State University, and we were sharing in a Sunday evening worship service at a church in Pinellas Park. At the end of the service, as I was visiting with some of the church’s members, I realized that I had just preached my first sermon from the pulpit of a congregation that had been founded by the man who was the senior pastor of the church I grew up in, and who had been a significant influence in my life and my call to ministry, and who had just recently died of a brain tumor. Forgetfulness is occasionally a blessed thing; I’d heard him talk about Pinellas Park UMC plenty of times, but if I’d been aware I was preaching in the pulpit that O. Dean Martin had once occupied, I’m not sure I could have gotten through it.

When that kind of big synchronicity happens, I experience it as an occasion of encouragement and confirmation, sort of a cosmic “attagirl.” That night in the church in Pinellas Park, I was really early in my journey toward ordained ministry, and I still carried lots of questions about how that journey might unfold. Sitting alone in the sanctuary for a few moments after everyone had left, I had a sense that I was moving in a direction that, while I didn’t know quite where it was heading, was a good one for me, and also that God has a pretty keen sense of humor. (The humor thing has been confirmed plenty of times, and I find that God’s sense of humor seems to grow more twisted the farther I go along).

Those big occasions of sacred timing can be fairly strange, but it’s actually the small occurrences of synchronicity that really mystify me, those coincidences that seem utterly random and minor and without any obvious point. Like seeing a guy in the line at the post office one morning, and then spotting him an hour later in the grocery store. I’d never seen him before and haven’t seen him since. Or like coming across the phrase cui bono while reading a novel recently. It’s a Latin phrase that means “Who benefits?” With all the mysteries I read, one would think I would’ve encountered it before. Ten minutes later it popped up in a movie I was watching on TV.

The big synchronicities make a measure of sense to me because they offer some assurance that there’s meaning in the midst of our sometimes chaotic lives. They remind me that if we work at staying awake and discerning God’s longing for our lives, and if we seek to move in the direction of that longing, we’ll (hopefully) experience cool occasions of confirmation. But the small synchronicities—I don’t really understand those, though they happen a lot. When they occur, they make me wish I could go somewhere like the Existential Detective Agency that Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman run in the movie I Heart Huckabees, where you can hire them to investigate these kinds of small coincidences to see if there’s any underlying meaning.

Even though the small synchronicities don’t seem to have much inherent meaning or obvious point, I think of them as reminders that God is at work, even in the minor stuff, and that everything is somehow connected—mysteriously, mystifyingly connected; that we are “inexplicably inextricable,” as one writer has put it (in “Cold Calling” at her SouthQuest blog). My sweetheart Gary says it’s God winking.

Here’s my favorite recent wink.

I’m a huge fan of the comic “Get Fuzzy,” which, for the unfortunately uninitiated, features a perpetually cranky, vengeful, conniving cat named Bucky Katt, who always has a scheme up his furry sleeve; an endearingly hapless dog known as Satchel Pooch; and their long-suffering human, Rob Wilco (who, yes, has a brother named Roger). A few days ago I was telling Gary about a recent “Get Fuzzy” strip (because it seems important to keep him up to date on what’s going on in their world) in which Bucky was plotting to do product placement in Broadway musicals. The strip I was recounting culminated in Bucky singing, “IKEA! I just met a girl named IKEA!” (You can see it here, though it won’t be quite the same without my off-key rendition of the West Side Story tune.) I told Gary about visiting the IKEA store with my sister in Toronto and that I wouldn’t mind having one here in Orlando. You know, for the day when I’m not living in a wee studio apartment, and Gary and I actually have a home together that needs furnishing.

So, the next day, an IKEA catalog shows up in Gary’s mail. And then yesterday I heard on the radio that IKEA is coming to Orlando.

Wink.

Maybe it means that it won’t be too long before Gary and I have a place that will give us a reason to make a trip to IKEA…