[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

That Yonge Child

It's the spiritual memories, I find, that stay with me most vividly, 
and this is one such:

It is November, the end of the school day, and I am walking through 
the corridor to my locker. I am 12 and in Grade 7, still very shy and 
scared in the big school that the junior high students share with the 
formidable and just-barely-tolerant senior high students.

As I walk past the music room I hear a girl's voice, very true and 
clear, and it stops me in my tracks. The song she is singing is 
unlike anything I've ever heard before. It isn't pretty; it's got a 
discordant, edgy quality, and its movement isn't rhythmically 
regular. It pauses and leaps. It's quiet, but it feels like a small 
wild animal, one with a soft coat and needle teeth. And I find it 
utterly entrancing -- piercing, mysterious.

The song ends, and I head down the corridor, disconsolate. I want to 
find that song again, and I have no idea how to do so.

For the next few weeks, scraps of the song keep pursuing me, nuzzling 
up to my consciousness at odd moments, and I grieve the fact that I'd 
found it only to lose it again. I try to describe it to my musical 
mother, but she doesn't recognize it from my description. It doesn't 
occur to me to ask the music teacher at school; I am too intimidated. 
The music room is holy ground of which I am not worthy.

My parents go off to a concert in December, held by our high school's 
senior girls' choir, the Harmonettes. A week or so later, it's 
Christmas Eve, and we're putting up the Christmas tree, something 
that happens only after dark on December 24th, because before then 
(my parents are staunch on this) it's Advent. My mother has just 
bought a new recording, the piece she'd heard at the choir 
performance, and she puts it on as we decorate the tree.

I am immediately entranced by the music, lovely stuff, performed by 
boys' choir and harp. And then, there it is, the song I'd heard back 
in the school corridor, piercing my soul.

That yonge child, when it gan weep,
With song she lulled him asleep,
That was so sweet a melody
It passed all minstrelsy.

It would be years before I finally got the composer's point: that 
sweet isn't necessarily pretty, and that real beauty exists in the 
angles and the accidentals as well as in C major. But what matters to 
me in that long-ago Christmas Eve is that I've found my song again. 
And it's on a recording that we own, in our house. I can listen to it 
whenever I want. I have a name for it.

Later, in high school, I was in the girls' choir myself, performing 
Britten's "A Ceremony of Carols." It is not an easy piece, but I 
loved it. I found other parts of it even more piercingly beautiful 
and fell in love with them too. I treasured that music in my heart 
and head. I kept it locked away until after dark on December 24th. 
Bringing it out and into my full consciousness was the act making 
Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I would take it out with me into the 
snow-spangled dark where mystery lurked and there was always the 
Milky Way, even behind the overcast. It walked with me across the 
yard into the church next door for Midnight Mass.

Years passed. I always listened to "A Ceremony of Carols" when the 
tree went up -- a bit earlier than after dark on Christmas Eve, once 
I had children, but still late by seasonal standards. I fought off 
"the holiday season" in order to keep Christmas itself piercing and 
mysterious. Even when I was very far from faith, the music bored its 
way through to my spirit, not every single year, but enough.

Was it that, I wonder, that kept some sort of trickle-through passage 
open between me and God? Maybe so. It certainly helped. There were 
other memories of the spirit, too, that never quite vanished off the 
horizon during those years. I'd had faith and spirituality gently 
mocked, frozen out, discouraged, and I had tagged along obediently 
with those who saw faith as -- well, silly and old-fashioned and 
credulous.  But yearly, however briefly, I scented mystery again in 
that music, and knew that there was God.

Last night, it came time to start making Christmas. The shopping's 
done; I have the tree, and the kids -- home from their new lives -- 
will help me put it up tonight. But last night I put the music on and 
listened to it, eyes closed.

And yes, it still works. Thanks be to God.