Social distancing, day one

Saturdays are days when I often do nothing, or get nothing done. I'm more likely to engage in purposeful behavior on a Sunday afternoon. Today, Saturday, March 14, day one of social distancing in my neck of the world, is no different. So far:

1. Started a shopping list so that in one more trip to the grocery store, where I need to pick up a prescription, I can also get all the things I need so that I can stop going to the grocery store.

2. Took the Enneagram test, because I thought it would maybe provide insight and help me think about things in all the thinking time ahead. Also, didn't have anything more pressing to do. My highest score was a tie for Type 1 and Type 5; my second-highest score was a tie between 6, 3, 4, 2 and 8. The PDF file I received via email with my results is 37 pages long. Apparently I contain many worlds.

3. Met my neighbor across the street via text messaging. She was responding to a note I left on her porch before Christmas with a package that had been delivered to my house by mistake. Said she'd been meaning to do that for a long time. Seems like we may get to know each other better. Curious that today was a day to make a new acquaintance.

4. Limited my news intake to 15-20 minutes of headlines on my phone before getting out of bed. Very effective for reducing anxiety.

5. Made gluten-free pancakes with Eliza. Okay to eat / but they ain't wheat.

6. Noticed the many corners and floors and cluttered spaces in my house that, were I to use my time at home profitably, ought to be thoroughly cleaned.

7. Thought about starting my taxes. Thought it about for maybe 10 seconds. Baby steps.

8. Thought about doing some yoga. Visualizing that now. I think late-afternoon light is best for yoga, don't you?

9. Read yesterday's and today's devotion from "Lent Is Not Rocket Science." Contemplated whether there might be life in other parts of the universe, and what this might mean. Five or ten minutes of cosmic thinking lightens my heart.

10. Read through the lessons for tomorrow's livestream worship service. Will need to reckon with Paul in Romans saying that suffering builds endurance, which builds character, which builds hope. Hope does not disappoint us. All true, but still hard in practice.

Alleluia

Looked in the mirror to brush my hair this morning and remembered what I had been dreaming maybe an hour or so earlier. A friend had driven me to Madison Street, the downtown of the next suburb over, to get a haircut. I'd sat in the chair in the window of a salon while a short, stocky blonde man fussed and waved his hands around my head telling me what should be done. He went off somewhere and my friend grabbed some scissors and did the cutting. Later in the dream I looked in a mirror and wow, it was one bad haircut. Nothing left on the sides, strange knotty sticking-up places on top. I had wanted to go back and pay the salon guy for my haircut, but my friend said, no, why pay him, he didn't do anything, let's just go. And then we were in a neighboring, empty storefront, and someone threw a body through the half-open front door and gosh, sigh, we were going to have to figure out a way to get rid of it.

We couldn't identify the body. And, dear readers, lest any of you are concerned, I can't identify the friend who cut my hair dream either. It was a composite of -- well, many of you.

Madcap adventures that some psychologists would ask me to pay deep attention to, and most would suggest I just disregard. Yes, as we like to say at The Perverse Lutheran, what does this mean?

I try to post at least once in my blog every February, to mark The Perverse Lutheran's beginning in February of 2006. I wish I had something more coherent than a dream this Monday morning, but here are three things from the weekend I was still pondering at 5am this morning:

The dissonance of yesterday afternoon's Bach cantata. But how does one write about that? Words can't do what music can. That's why it's music. Even the text of the cantata itself pales next to what Bach did with it.

Transfiguration Sunday and the "burying" of the alleluia until Easter. In yesterday morning's children's sermon, the pastor asked, what does alleluia mean? "Rise up," said one child, which is not exactly right, but is still intriguing." Alleluia means praise God," said the preacher, when there were no more answers from the kids. This is, of course, true, but not enough. I say, alleluia means what it means: vowels and consonants sung in many keys, many melodies, through joy and sorrow. Praise, triumph, victory, heavenly longing, communal singing. Majesty. Easter. Not a word, but an orientation.

Thing three: some highlights from the creative writing showcase at Friday afternoon's tenth anniversary celebration of Opportunity Knocks, the program for disabled teens and young adults that is such an important part of my daughter's life. At the microphone: Sonya with a song lyric, Claire with a poem, and Eliza, my daughter, with a bit of romance. And finally the always radiant Jessica, declaiming her biography from her wheelchair. I typed her final sentence into notes on my phone: "I will never give up no matter how hard life gets."

Bad haircuts, crazy dreams, chromaticism, chaos -- I keep trying. And on Monday morning I say, Alleluia.

Requiem aeternam

My Aunt Shirley died earlier this evening. Not unexpected -- she was at home in hospice care, with the promise of no more trips to the hospital for congestive heart failure. She was, I believe, ninety-one years old, almost four years older than her sister, Marilyn, my mother, who will turn 88 in a few weeks.

My cousin Sue called my sister to tell her of Shirley's death, and told her that they'd had a "nice party" this evening. Shirley's sister-in-law and niece had come from Massachusetts to Michigan to stay for a few days. They'd had a family dinner, visited for a while — "visited,"  which is Midwestern for pleasant conversation — and shortly after that, Shirley put her head down and was gone.

Gone! Gone to a heavenly banquet, a heavenly party, a reunion with those who've gone before: her husband, her brother, her son John, who died of cancer two years ago and who she must have missed so much. And maybe Kris, my son, is sitting nearby.  If John is at the heavenly table (and he surely is!) it's a jolly party, with laughter and bemusement and love and silliness. There are tall tales being told by brother Dave, true mostly, with laughter from Ed, the husband and country pastor, who, if they have farm food at heavenly banquets, has brought home more corn on the cob than even ranks and ranks of angels could possibly eat.

Just last night I had thought about writing a blog piece for Shirley this week, remembering her presence in my life, remembering things we shared, good times we had as kids and young mothers and older adults under her roof -- at the old parsonage and at the new house she designed for herself. She wasn't the person who taught me to knit, but she taught me to knit better, and set me up with my first successful project when I was 8 or 9. She laughed and called me a "stomach knitter" because of the way I steadied the right-hand needle against my body. At the time I suspected she thought this was not a good thing, but I've always remembered it, and it's actually the key to whatever relative speed I have as a lifelong knitter.

A small detail. I'm sure Shirley would not even remember.

Shirley did many things beautifully. She had beautiful handwriting, so beautiful it was intimidating. I remember her cutting gladiolas from her garden and arranging them -- for the altar in church, I think. She sent handmade presents to my daughter, Eliza, for her birthdays -- bags and zippered cases that I've appropriated and used for knitting projects. She quilted and collected pitchers (as do I) and arranged colored glass bottles on the windows of her sun porch for the light to shine through in the morning. The house she laid out for herself had spaces for the big pieces of country furniture she owned -- her grandmother's table, the pie safe, the desk from the old church with its towering hutch. And she kept the family stories along with the family furniture.

Shirley was my mother's older sister. So yes, that means she was there to try to fix things, to be the boss, the one in charge, whether that was helpful or not, because that's what oldest sisters do. This could be hard for my mother, and the frustration that ensued could be hard for Shirley. (I speak as the oldest of three sisters, born myself to be in charge!) We both worked on letting go.

There will be lots to remember in the days ahead. Lots to smile about. And so many things that people will remember from Shirley's years as a first grade teacher, as a mother and grandmother, and a quilter and friend, that I, who visited Michigan only once or twice a year, don't even know about. Things to think of and wonder about, knowing some family stories have now passed, along with Shirley.

I'm having my own party as I write this, a glass of decent red wine and the best of the Christmas chocolate. I'll get out my knitting, maybe text my sisters, put my feet up on the ottoman. I'll have a nice visit with all the things and the presence that I remember about Shirley.

Rest eternal grant her, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon her. 

The Slaughter of the Innocents

It's December 29. In the "Twelve Days of Christmas," it's the fifth day of the season, with "gold rings" given by true love in the song. This year the fifth day is also the First Sunday of Christmas, where the gospel reading this year, Lectionary Year A, is Matthew 2:13–23. This would be Joseph and Mary's flight to Egypt and Herod's orders to kill all the children under age two in Bethlehem, agitated as he was by the threat of a new king. The Slaughter of the Innocents.

The story seems out of sequence. We won't hear about the wise men following the star to Herod's court in Jerusalem and ultimately to the baby in Bethlehem until Epiphany on January 6. But at a distance, time folds back on itself. We hear in one story the echoes of others, from times before and after. And history has no shortage on stories of slaughter, of times of "wailing and loud lamentation" (v. 18).

Today, December 29, is also the 129th anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee. I learned this from a Facebook friend who posted this link, and I then read more at Wikipedia. In an attempt to disarm a band of Lakota Sioux, the U.S. 7th Cavalry ended up murdering at least 150 men, women and children -- perhaps as many as 300. One Lakota man could not be made to give up his gun -- he was deaf and did not understand what the soldiers were saying. The rifle went off, others fired, and the people were slaughtered. Women were shot down as they fled through the snow with infants wrapped in their shawls.

Gold plays a part in this story: the Black Hills of South Dakota had been Sioux land, protected by treaty with the U. S. government — until the Black Hills Gold Rush began in 1874. And gold was only a small part of what white settlers took from native people.

It would be nice, or convenient, or comforting, if we could say such things no longer happen. But that's not true. In many and various ways, innocent people are rendered powerless and suffer the loss of dignity, freedom, life.

When you read about Wounded Knee you learn about the Ghost Dance, a religious movement within the Lakota culture that foretold a time of peace. It would "reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples."

Familiar echoes?

Whites felt mystified and threatened by the Ghost Dance, like Herod felt threatened by the prophecies about a rival king. Power and privilege distort vision. God was made human not as a great king, but as a tiny baby, as an ordinary man, as one who suffered and died at the hands of power and privilege. A gift of true love.

This little babe

The second week of Advent. Up early, with silly songs from last night's Christmas concert rehearsal looping through my head.

It's my daughter's birthday today. We had the big party for her last weekend. (There is always a big party.) Today is a quieter day--a usual Wednesday, but with a little birthday shimmer and dinner at a restaurant when the day is done. The early-morning house, the rush of air from the furnace, quiet churn from the dishwasher running in the kitchen — I'm listening, waiting, with slow, morning mind.

Ghosts of days past, of birth days, birth stories, track the house, the dining room, the windows of the kitchen, the living room. My daughter's birth day included a diagnosis of Down syndrome when she was less than 12 hours old.

This little babe so few days old
Is come to rifle Satan's fold.
All hell doth at his presence quake
Though he himself for cold do shake.
For in this weak, unarméd guise
The gates of hell he will surprise. 

That's not the song from last night--it's another concert, also coming up, a text from Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols, and one that goes by  lickety-split. It takes typing to make me see the text. In performance, I'm conducting this, so I'm more focused on controlling the tempo than anything else.

With tears he fights and wins the field
His naked breast stands for a shield.
His battering shot are babyish cries.
His arrow looks of weeping eyes.
His marshall ensigns cold and need
And feeble flesh his warrior's steed.

Warfare, weapons, armies in the field  charging into battle — I should go look for 16th century engravings of these things. Lots of lines, confusion, violence — not my favorite imagery for a life of faith. But that crying, shivering babe at the lead? That seems — well, a lot like life. I've held naked, wet, puling babies in my tired arms, including one small whimpering daughter with Down syndrome 29 years ago today. And I've hugged, held, stroked adults weakened and disabled, confused by cancer, dementia, ALS.

We fight these things -- but even more, we live into them. Cold and need and feeble flesh are weaponized. The music grows ever more confusing, with one voice chasing the next in canons just a beat apart, until they come together to sound the alarm.

His camp is pitchéd in a stall.
His bulwark but a broken wall.
The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes,
Of shepherds he his muster makes.
And thus as sure his foe to wound
The angel trumps alarum sound. 

And then a big unison:

My soul with Christ join thou in fight
Stick to the tents that he hath pight.
Within his crib is surest ward
This little babe will be thy guard.

The big finish:

If thou will foil thy foes with joy
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

Foiled with joy. The struggle, as they say, is real. But so is the joy.

Listen here. Watch the children's faces at the end: Joy!

NOT the program notes

"Holy hellfire, Batman!"

That's what tops the little list I made for myself of points to include in writing program notes on J. S. Bach's cantata, "O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort" (BWV 20). If the sound of Donnerwort is not enough to make your eyes pop open, be advised that it means "thunder word." The complete English title on the front of the Stuttgart Bach-Ausgaben score is "Eternity, thou thunderous word."

It's a chorale cantata, the first in the cycle of chorale cantatas Bach composed in his second year (1724) as Kantor in Leipzig. It's based on a 16-stanza hymn from the previous century by a poet and dramatist named Johann Rist. It's not a very good hymn. The sixteen stanzas were reduced to twelve when it was published in a later hymnbook, and that didn't improve it much. Verse after verse after verse (sigh) describe the torments of an eternity in hell. Only toward the end does the hymn writer warn you to take heed and shape up now so that you don't offend a righteous God and end up damned forever.

One senses that 18th century German Lutherans appreciated a good scare.

And where better to experience it than in church? There was no opera company in Leipzig in Bach's time, no regular theatre, only traveling troupes passing through during trade fairs.

Bach lets loose with the drama in this cantata. A full-on French overture (ba-da-DUM, da-da-DAH) accompanies the chorus singing the first stanza of the chorale. There's weeping and wailing in the bass section with an ascending arpeggio of minor seconds on the word Traurigkeit (sadness, troubles). Chromaticism everywhere. And some crazily expressive and deeply creepy arias and duets.

And oh! jolly good music for the bass soloist, including a wake-up call sounded first by a trumpet (a sliding trumpet in Bach's day) immediately after the sermon that was preached in the middle of the cantata (and was surely at least an hour long).

I'm lucky I never had to sit through this one as a child. I'd have been deeply shaken, perhaps scarred for life. I remember lying awake at night, at the age of seven or eight, contemplating eternity and scaring myself half to death. And I wasn't even thinking about an eternity in hell -- I was thinking about heaven. My father came upstairs to check that my sisters and I were asleep, and I confessed to him that I was not looking forward to going to heaven and endlessly singing hymns in an eternal church service. (When your father is a church organist, this is not an easy thing to share.) My good father said that Jesus loved me, that God loved me and whatever heaven was, it would be something I liked. I could go to sleep.

He was a good explainer, Herb Gotsch. And a good theologian, too.

We're singing BWV 20 in the Bach Cantata Vespers at Grace Church in River Forest on November 24, Christ the King Sunday, a day when there's a lot of power and awesomeness to contemplate, as well as a cross and whiffs of the trumpet sounding for the final judgment. These end of the church year Sundays are troubling, amplified by the chaotic times we live in and all the apocalyptic movie images we may carry in our minds.

(My late husband, movie aficionado Lon Grahnke,  made me watch at least one Mad Max movie with Mel Gibson. We saw "Apocalypse Now" once in a midnight showing, sitting in the front row before a very big screen with Dolby Surround-Sound echoing off the walls.)

My official notes for the cantata service bulletin await a final edit from me, in which I may have to tone down the drama I've written into them. I've listened to several conductors' performances of the cantata, and they're astonishing for different reasons, but the one by John Eliot Gardiner raises hairs on the back of my neck.

(I'd link to a performance on YouTube. But I keep getting error messages when I try to go there. Will the Last Judgment kick off with YouTube going down?)

The original audience for BWV 20 heard the cantata on a June morning on the First Sunday After Trinity in 1724. I can't help wondering if it was, for them, perhaps the equivalent of a good summer horror movie, with the final impression being less about piety and more about dramatic catharsis. I don't know. I can't know--I'm almost three centuries away from their experience, and an additional 75 years away from the German landscape in which Johann Rist lived after the The Thirty Years War. Even Lutheranism has changed a bit in those centuries, and we have plenty of newer images of a hellish German landscape. Heck, plenty of hell in places here in America, too.

I had not meant to get so dark in this post.

Music, art, literature mediate the fear and terror of knowing that there are forces far bigger than us at work in the world.  That time is an endless mystery not measured by clocks. That we must account for our lives win some way, at some point, if only to ourselves.

No wonder that we need a God who loves us. And people who remind us of that even in our darkest moments.

The Harrowing of Hell, depicted in the Petites Heures de Jean de Berry, 14th-century illuminated manuscript commissioned by John, Duke of Berry.

BWV 194, Reformation Sunday

It seems that of all the days on the liturgical calendar when a perverse Lutheran blogger should post, Reformation Sunday would be at the top of the list. 

Or perversely, perhaps not, but here I am, laptop on my knees, blog open in the browser, blank space on the screen.

I sat outside to eat my lunch in the warm and colorful October sun this afternoon, and then stayed in my chair, at the patio table littered with golden maples leaves, to finish the novel I've been reading "Leaving the Atocha Station," by Ben Lerner. My red wool sweater was just warm enough on this bright afternoon, and the number of pages left in the book just enough to fill up the minutes until it was time to return to church for a pre-service rehearsal for Bach Cantata Vespers. Now, in the evening, in the living room, my bare feet are craving the afternoon sunshine and warmth. Next Sunday, on All Saints, it will be dark already at 5 o'clock in the afternoon

This afternoon's cantata, at Grace Lutheran in River Forest, was not "Ein Feste Burg" or "Gott der Herr ist Sonn und Schield," cantatas composed for Reformation Day. Instead we sang the festive "Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest," first performed for the dedication of a church renovation and a new organ in a small town near Leipzig in early November of 1723. If you'd like to know more about the cantata, you're welcome to read the bulletin notes (written by me last weekend).

It's quite the cantata -- lots of inventive dance-like music for happy people celebrating something. It was an eye-popping afternoon in the soprano section. The organ in this small town was tuned quite low, and the soprano part in the chorus, already pretty high no matter how you tune the organ, had some high C's, which did not have to be quite so high back in 1723.

When I was studying the cantata last week, I imagined a little domestic drama around it. The music comes from a secular work performed at the Court of Köthen, where Bach was music director before taking up the church musician job in Leipzig. Someone (couldn't track down who) has suggested that Anna Magdalena sang the solos in the 1723 church performance outside Leipzig, just as she may have sung the soprano solos in a performance of the early work in Köthen. This makes sense -- maybe Bach wrote this music with her voice in mind. It's not easy, and there's a lot of it. The duet with the bass goes on and on. Give the woman a chance to sing it again!

Anna Magdalena was a salaried court singer when she married JSB in 1721 at the age of 20. He was a widower, 16 years older than she was. Her first child, a daughter, Christiana, had been born in the spring of 1723 (and died in 1726). Women were not allowed to sing publicly in churches in Leipzig, so the move to Leipzig put an end to Anna Magdalena's singing outside her home, though perhaps that was inevitable after marriage and children; she became the household manager and a mother to stepchildren as well as 13 babies of her own. Only six of them survived to adulthood.

Here, on this day, in this place, in this music, in between pregnancies, she had a chance to shine. She sang an aria and a duet with the bass. Before the duet there's a dialogue recitative, in which the bass asks lots of questions about faith and the soprano has all the reassuring theological answers. If you were making a movie about the first performance of BWV 194 (a prequel to my romcom about BWV 197) this duet could be a way to show the relationship between the Great Composer and his young wife -- he setting her up to look good, she inspiring the music. He wanting to please the young wife, she with the capacity to please and cheer. In other scenes perhaps we'd see her chafing under the demands of running a household full of children and students, or working through the minefield of establishing her authority as mistress, while having to lean on the domestic experience of the sister of Bach's first wife, who remained part of the household. Does the movie end happily, with her far away from the kitchen, working as a copyist and singing to herself alongside Bach and his students in his workroom? And what about that famous Notebook?

Who knows? But I would insist that the scene where she sings the music of Höchsterwünschtes Freudenfest be lit with golden filters and shot in the fall, with church windows open to an autumn forest, deep, brilliant and elegiac.