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.

Random firing of neurons

Twice this week I've gotten almost eight hours of sleep. The sleep app on my phone, which sends me off to slumber at night with the sound of ocean waves and wakes me, gradually, in the morning, also scores my sleep quality. I didn't know that scores approaching 100% were even possible until this morning, when the app scored my sleep from last night in the upper 90s.

I'm sure that's a good thing. I'm sure it's a goal I should place above my night-owl need to keep going -- past 11, past 11:30, past midnight. But we'll see. I like my late-night hours, and on the days when I'm up before 7, I like the early-morning hours as well. (Two o'clock in the afternoon? Enh.)

This week's two nights of almost eight hours of sleep (really, two mornings of sleeping late) were accompanied by two curious and at times, nearly coherent dreams. The kind of dreams in which real people that you know appear out of the blue and surprise you by being there or even by being other than you know them to be.

I woke up from one of those about an hour ago and I'll be puzzling over it off and on for several hours more, trying to recreate the feeling of the dream in my mind, trying to figure out how the dream came to be, and even playing with the idea that it means something.

There are heroes in the Bible, in The Odyssey, in legend and mythology and even history who changed their minds, made new plans, ventured out into new places, because of dreams in which an angel or God or a god showed them the way. I'm modern, or post-modern, and tend to believe that dreams are only the random firing of neurons, random energy traveling here and there along established neuronal networks, often the same ones that were recently busy while awake. And yet my brain or my consciousness or whoever I am needs to construct a story around them.

What's the story? This week it's something about venturing forth on long gravel roads, something about trusting kindness, and something about looms (seriously, fiber, weaving). As I sit outside this morning in the warm September sunshine, these things cohere.

I'm watching the female cardinal fly into the grape vines on the fence, where she pecks at the grape skins to get at the pulp. She's plumping up for cold days to come.

I feed on dreams.

No words

"No words." "I have no words."

This is now a thing people say when reacting to tragedy or when offering words of comfort in times of suffering or loss.

"No words," they say, with a sad shake of the head, or with a gesture of the hand to the heart.

It sounds solemn and sad and dignified. It has the virtue of avoiding foolish woods or statements that turn out to be more about the speaker than the bereaved, and people who have listened to the condolences of long lines of friends and acquaintances at funerals and memorial services know that there are words that would have been better avoided. To say "no words" deeply, with emotion, as your hand moves to some place near your throat can be genuinely kind as it is unimposing.

But it bothers me, because if we can't find words to share and shape our feelings, can't find words to communicate and specify feelings in this moment--well, what hope is there for us miserable human beings? Complex language is what sets us apart from other mammals, what makes it possible to collaborate and compromise and work things out. Presence, embraces, sympathetic faces are all important, but they cannot do what words do. Words are out there at the edges where we challenge ourselves to understand, where we reach for words to be returned to us, in affirmation, agreement, antithesis.

And yet—tonight I have no words.

Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of the death of my son Kris. And what I feel I am not feeling in words, I cannot describe in words. There is a space in my chest where, when I inhale and raise the floodgates, everything Kris flows in--what it was like to be around him, his grin, his love, his four-year-old charm, his flashes of anger, his pride, his enthusiasm, his conversation, his maturity. His fierceness in the fight against ALS. His desire to stay and be present for those he loved even as death came closer and closer, a fight that was hard, but worth it (his words).

I can feel those things like he's still here, and those feelings are so strong, so particular to Kris and his Kris-ness, that trying to put words to them is all but useless. Somewhere, perhaps, in the epigrammatic world of poetry (in Emily Dickenson perhaps?) there may be words that fit and surprise the moment, that talk about the ache of grief and hint at the unwillingness to let it go--but I do not know what these words are. I do know that the mental labor of finding them and typing them is a process far apart from feeling the feelings.

So where I find myself tonight, grieving the death of my oldest child, is in a place where I have no words. Where it's hard to write. Where words never quite get it right. (This is happening in 21st century America where the meaning of words is endlessly and unethically manipulated, un-attaching them from stable, felt, rational truth.)

In words I would love to tell you about my son--Eliza and Kurt's brother, Michelle's husband, Dan's and Mark's and Tim's and Jeff's and John's friend. And I hope to find all  those words and more someday. But now, this last week of July in 2019, I have no words, only that place in my heart where Kris, child of my body, still smiles at me.

Robin, at work

Sunday afternoon as I sat working on my computer at the patio table, I heard a ruckus behind me, a small explosion in the dead leaves I had minutes earlier swept neatly against the chain-link fence with my new broom. What made this sudden noise? I watched as it happened again. Leaves scattered, and a robin hopped backwards, yanking something from the ground. Had she surprised a worm? Was she after a necessary piece of twig or bark for her nest? Just seven inches tall, she had dislodged an amount of yard detritus equal to herself in volume.

But she was not satisfied. She hadn’t found what she wanted. She hopped to her left, to the next interval between hostas and weeds and tried it again. She dug her head into the pile and pulled back hard, throwing leaves and dust and odd bits of this and that into the air, then ducked back in to inspect the ground and get what was there for her. She flew off when a squirrel chased across the patio cement, but was back at it, again and again, a few minutes later.

So much energy and purpose under those plain brown wings, that small brown head, and the red breast. She was light on her feet, light in every way, feathers puffed dry and weightless over hollow bird bones. Of course she could fly, but what a disrupter she was on the ground, connected to a purpose, a task, the thing that robins are wired to do in the spring.

I went back to my work, pulling quotes and ideas together into sentences, yanking on them, testing their truth, clearing away the clutter, searching for how to say it. Flew off (to Twitter!) for a few minutes, then back at it, doing the work God put in front of me.

Photo: "robin in garden, 15 April 2011" by mwms1916 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

#IAmALS

As I write this, on June 1, a month of #ALSAwareness has come to an end. This year the new organization I Am ALS was all over the place on social media: “I am …. You in? #IAmALS.” Statements of I’m hopeful. I’m pushing for change. We can do this. We’ll find a cure. Cheering on new drugs, new infusions, new trials. Cheering on those who find their way into these things, find their way into taking part. Cheering on those who just got a trach. Cheering all who fight hard and pubicly.

And also remembering to cheer for simpler things, for getting on with life. To cheer when folks with ALS travel or just get out in the back yard or tweet or post. To cheer for caregivers and spouses and children and parents. Remembering those who grieve, because #IAmALS includes everyone — even those who live with loss because of ALS. Because — it’s a horrible disease and it moves so quickly. A few intense years of living and loving and recognizing all the good in life, the way you can perhaps only when you are all too aware that it ends and will end quickly.

Standing as someone who has stood at the memorial service, committed ashes to the ground, what does it look like to fight on? How do you hold the soft edge of hope?

So many things rise up to harden the heart. Religion and religious explanations for tragedy. (“God has a purpose.” Or whatever). Cynicism — we all die. Tough luck. Bad genes. The way of the cross. Soldier on. Something better is waiting in the future, or at least something else.

But losing a son at the age of 30 to ALS hurts like hell. Losing a child, a loved one to anything hurts like hell.

What would it feel like, to have a cure for ALS emerge in the next few years? Some drug that would manage the disease, slow it, turn it into something to be lived with for a long time, if not cured completely. What would it feel like to know that if only Kris had gotten ALS ten years later, it would not have ended in his death? Sometimes I wonder about this—about how I will feel. I hope to find out.

Kris talked, wrote, hoped about finding a cure so that others after him would not have to endure and resign themselves to death from ALS. I know he embraced that sincerely. It has been the thing that has most impressed me, most weighed on me about ALS warriors raising money for research, taking to social media, walking, biking, everything they throw themselves into to raise awareness and raise funds. They know they’re doing this for a cure in the future, a future too far off in years to help them. Though perhaps that is changing.

On some days, certain cloudy days in June, perhaps, or when I am too much on my own or worn out by work and boredom, it’s very hard to keep a soft edge on hope, a soft growing edge, or to look positively into the future. After handling all the crappy tragedy of the last 20 years — Lon, Kris, neurologic disease — it’s hard to escape the sense of dread, anxiety, worry. What’s the next damn thing around the corner?

I think myself a fool for not knowing life would be this hard. (Am I?) I am far more vulnerable than I wish to be, less strong than I think I should be. I cherish my pain because it’s what’s left of love.

“I want to know what love is,” goes the song. Well, there it is—it hurts. But this, I think, is also what keeps hope alive.