Monday, March 25, 2024

Holy Week 2024

Castle Church at Weimar

 

Durch Lieben und Leiden.

These have long been my favorite words in Himmelskönig sei willkommen, BWV 182, Bach's cantata for Palm Sunday as seen through the lens of the Annunciation. 

There was no "concerted" music in churches during Lent in early 18th century Germany, but the churches did celebrated the Annunciation on March 25, nine months before Christmas, a festival existing outside of Lent, so there could be music. Occasionally Annunciation coincided with Palm Sunday, including in 1714 when this cantata was first performed in Weimar. The juxtaposition of the two -- a day that anticipates Christmas, another day that anticipates Good Friday, birth and death -- is a history of salvation story. It's also profoundly human.

Himmelskönig sei willkommen, the first words of the cantata's opening chorus are translated "King of Heaven, you are welcome." The text goes on to say "you have captured our hearts" -- as one might say of an adorable infant, or the Son of God come down to earth. Three arias about the Incarnation and believers' response follow; they're all lovely -- but whatever. Then there's a contemplative, imitative, and oh-so-lyrical setting of a stanza of a Lenten chorale familiar to Bach's congregations: "Jesus, your Passion is for me pure joy....My soul walks on roses when I think of this." Roses. In the grey days of March. 

And then a little gigue for the choir, a dancing invitation to follow the Savior durch Lieben und Leiden, "though love and suffering."

So lasset uns gehen in Salem der Freuden,

So let us go in the Salem of joy,

Begleitet den König in Lieben und Leiden.

accompany the king in love and in sorrows.

(Lieben is pronounced with what would be a long-e sound in English, as in need; Leiden with a long i, as in slide.)

Credit goes to the (unknown)  poet for the l-sounds in lassetSalem and begleitet which prepare the ear for the satisfying alliteration of Lieben and Leiden. 

But more credit, I think, belongs to Bach for the light-hearted elegance of the music. Yes, there's a little dissonance, a little darkness around those love and suffering words, as the various musical lines collide into one another, but at the cadence Lieben und Leiden are tossed off lightly, no great burden since Jesus bears them with us, for us. 

I'll take that into Holy Week 2024 -- the Salem of joy. 

There's so much to worry about, so much bad news, so much to stress about. Does it seem wrong to carry it lightly? 

Look to Jesus, who carried the world's sorrows with love -- and joy.


Listen to yesterday's performance at Grace Lutheran Church's Bach Cantata Vespers here.

Monday, February 12, 2024

Life. Toilet tanks. All of it.

Last Thursday I noticed that the toilet was running all the time. You could see the water moving in the toilet bowl day and night. I stopped at the hardware store and bought a new flapper -- the easiest of all possible things to change, but this didn't help. It got worse. Over the next few days I half-heartedly Googled how to fix a running toilet, clicked on a couple of links and stopped reading at "replace the filler valve."  Mostly I stayed far enough way from the bathroom (except when necessary) to not hear the water run, the water bill inching upward. 

And all the time I whined. Not out loud, but in my head to myself alone. Someone has to fix the toilet. Why does that someone have to be me? It's too piddling a job to pay a plumber to make a house call. Why me? 

Twenty years ago I'd have sailed right in and done the job, because, well, who else was going to do it? My sainted husband could fix a sentence, but did not have fix-it skills for concrete objects. Back in the day, more than once, I set out to fix something or install something and would get partway through and then have to call my brother-in-law for help. The instructions made sense to me, but there would be a screw I couldn't loosen or something inside the wall that didn't look the picture in the handy home repair book. I probably should not have even tried to set a new toilet in the wax ring on the bathroom floor all by myself. 

But I set my face toward that job this afternoon, because my own whining was getting on my nerves. I emptied the toilet tank of water, unscrewed the plastic nuts underneath that held the filler valve in place, and took the old one to the hardware store to get another one just like it. I came home and installed the new one in a matter of minutes, noting that the directions said to "hand-tighten only" those plastic nuts under the toilet tank. So I'll be able to unscrew them myself again next time. The toilet is now flushing properly, is refilling when it is supposed to, and remains silent the rest of the time.

Way too much time was spent complaining, procrastinating, whining, avoiding. 

Let me rephrase that: I spent way too much time ... etc. Self-inflicted irritation.

I had been thinking over the weekend about "Lucinda Matlock," from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems in which characters from a small rural town in southern Illinois speak from beyond the grave about their lives. The poems make a nice readers' theater piece; I was in such a production at a time in my life when all the youngest women's voices were assigned to me. Lucinda is quite old and this poem was spoken beautifully by an actress who seemed old to me, maybe almost 40. Vocally she imbued it all with memory, recollections of both hardship and joy.

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed —
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love Life.

I'm pretty sure that if Lucinda were living my life she would have sucked it up and fixed the toilet days ago and then moved on to the next chore or the next neighborly act of service. She'd be rigging new parts for her loom instead of waiting for the fancy ready-made ones to come in the mail (as I am today). Surely the sick she nursed included those eight children she lost. I imagine her steely and resourceful at the bedside, though bent, perhaps, under the crushing grief at their graves. Were they infants, perhaps? A daughter lost in childbirth? A son who was suddenly, gravely injured in the field, or one who died of cancer far too young?

She knew healing: the medicinal weeds she gathered, the singing that restores the soul. But what did she shout to the wooded hills? Maybe that's what she did with what she didn't understand, shouting questions beyond words, getting them out and not expecting an answer in return. 

"It takes life to love Life." I remind myself of these words when that lowercase life is not going well, when I am weary and angry or overwhelmed. That big mystery of Life is not full up, not fully lived without remembered happiness and the sweet sorrow that is sometimes our lot in the present. 

Also, in the middle of all of life's grandiosity, sometimes you have to get over yourself and do what's yours to do. Fix the toilet. 


An hour or two after fixing the toilet, I went on to extract the hair clog from the bathtub drain. 

I am Woman, watch me plumb.




Monday, February 05, 2024

A little faith

The cantata for last Sunday's Bach Cantata Vespers was BWV 81, Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen? (Jesus sleeps, what can I hope for?). It's based on the gospel lesson for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany from Matthew 8 (from the lectionary of Bach's day). The disciples are in a boat on the Sea of Galilee with  Jesus asleep in the stern. A storm is brewing, they are frightened -- how can Jesus sleep through this? But then he wakes up to tell the storm to schweigt, hush, be still.  

Arias and recitatives dramatize a journey from despair and fear to eventual peace and reassurance. From Jesus' absent to Jesus present. There's a gorgeous lament at the beginning of the cantata and then a fast and furious storm in the orchestra, with the tenor hanging on by a thread. Then the bass stands up to sing the words of Jesus, heard over the storm. Peace is restored and the choir (possibly the congregation, too, in Bach's day) sings the second stanza of the chorale, "Jesus, Priceless Treasure," with "Jesus will protect me" as the final line, the melody firmly descending the five notes of a C minor scale, from dominant to tonic.

"Why are you afraid, you of little faith?" (Matthew 8:26) were Jesus' words to the disciples, and the homilist, speaking before the cantata performance, turned the words "a little faith" a bit sideways and explored whether "a little faith" was enough. In Matthew's gospel, it is. It is enough to clothe the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:28-29), enough to save Peter as he sank down under the waves after impetuously stepping out of the boat to walk on water in another storm on the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 14:22-33). Even a little faith -- a diminutive one, which honestly, might be the best we can come up with -- will see you through the storms of life, the preacher said. An effective idea which gave structure to the sermon. I listened all the way through, which I must admit, is rare with sermons. 

But still, it begs the question: What is faith, this unseen thing that, whether large or small, is supposed to be there for us in the darker moments of life? Conviction that will carry us forward? Even when the swirls and anger of the storm are worse than frightening -- when they are meaningless, heartless?

The sermon like the cantata text came to rest on the words "Jesus will protect me." It works out that way in the Bible story. Jesus and his band of disciples arrive safely on the other side, surviving the storm to live another day. But there's trouble ahead for Jesus, and neither he nor his Father works a miracle to save him from trial and execution. Trouble ahead also for the disciples further down the road.

None of us are protected from the wounds of life. Not from petty hurts that conspire with our own worries and fears to distort our outlook. Not from blows so gutting that it's hard to imagine a life beyond them. And not from our own aging, deterioration and death. 

A strong faith is not an insurance policy against danger or suffering or struggle. I thought that way as a child -- that I could conquer all things with God by my side. Now, not so much. Great faith, small faith -- meh. 

"Life is suffering," said the Buddha (though in truth the concept of dukkha is more subtle than that). Awful things happen, whether you have faith or not, and faith won't erase the wounds. After Jesus' resurrection the disciple Thomas declared he would acknowledge the risen Christ only if he could touch the wounds in his hands and feet, put his hand on the place where the spear had slashed Jesus' side. 

It's the wounds that matter, scarred, healed over, but still vibrating with the wounds of the world. It's in the hurt, questioning places that even a "little" faith gasps, breathes, lives. Why? Because Jesus meets me here, wounded, suffering, compassionate. And it's where I meet others, in that boat that's never quite still in BWV 81.