Art and Music: Updated

My digital camera has gone to Germany to see the Oberammergau Passion Play, in company with my teenaged daughter and her overwhelmingly generous grandmother. My husband, a fluent German speaker, has provided this daughter with lifelong language coaching, to the end that she can now say things like “fig” and “silver altarware” and “It’s all the same to me,” which might actually come in useful while she’s over there. In addition to her grandmother, the daughter’s traveling companions include my high-school biology teacher — she was a brilliant teacher who made me love biology, but after a few years of my friends and me, not to mention a long sucession of fetal pigs in formaldehyde, she gave that up and went into the travel business instead. I told the daughter to tell her that she (the daughter) had enjoyed the whole mystery-of-pickled-life thing herself;  fortunately she can say that in English.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have gone to Charlotte. It’s not Rome, and it’s not Germany, but it will do. The Eucharistic Congress opened last night with a concert of sacred music performed by the diocesan choir:  motets by Amner and Croce, a very haunting and lovely Filipino  Ave Maria (Aba Ginoong Maria), John Rutter’s setting of Psalm 23 with its gorgeous oboe accompaniment, the Gounod Sanctus, and the Hallelujah Chorus from the Messiah. Above right you see an artist’s rendering of this concert, with organist and a selection of choristers — they were really loud at certain junctures — and smiling crowds in the background. I’m not sure who the kneeling people are supposed to be. The artist kept asking me in a stage whisper what “that little house” to the right of the choir was:  it was a pulpit. She thought perhaps it was a tabernacle, because it had a sort of gothic-arch detail on the front of it which might have been a door.  As far as I can tell, that didn’t make it into the picture, and I’m not sure who the people in the sort of curtained box seats to the upper left of the mysterious kneeling people are, either, but otherwise, it’s a fair representation of what went on, and since my camera is in Germany seeing other sights, I’m afraid it’s all the illustration you’re going to get.

They also performed this piece,which I especially love,  from the Brahms German Requiem —

— and an arrangement of “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” by Joseph and Pamela Martin, composed in response to the devastating events of 9/11, the ninth anniversary of which we mark today. I couldn’t find a video of a choir performing the piece, but somehow this simple piano rendition — the person had found the music in a box and was trying it out — moved me at least as much as the choral performance did last night.

Rushing out the door now for the morning’s Eucharistic Procession.

Update: A lovely day. Fair weather for the procession. We were sharing the streets with a big blues-and-barbecue festival, and according to my older son, who was carrying the banner for the adoration society he belongs to, some guy in a booth was saying ugly things as the procession passed, but I didn’t press for details. Younger son marched with this year’s First Communicants and is now mourning the fact that he can’t ever do it again.

If I can pull my thoughts together, I’d like to post more about the weekend. Right now, though, the image which stays in my mind is that of something the children and I saw on our drive home. We had dropped my husband in Belmont, where he’d left his car, and had struck out towards home on the back highways we like to drive when there’s no hurry. As you travel north and west through this part of North Carolina, the land starts to roll, intimating the approach of the foothills;  we were riding the gentle swells of the road in the clear blue-gray twilight of a perfect early-September day, when the crape myrtles are still blooming and the leaves still hang green on all the trees.

About halfway between Belmont and home, our way takes us over the railroad tracks in a little town. As we swung through this town tonight, I noticed that the far end of the main street, where we never go because we’re on our way someplace else, had been blocked off. Every fire truck from every municipality for miles around, so it seemed, was parked in the street, and the hook-and-ladders had their ladders extended to their full height. From every ladder hung an American flag.

What’s that? we said to each other. A street festival? But that didn’t seem right. There was something off about the scene somehow. The road crossed the tracks and ran parallel to them for a long way, and as we came up opposite the gathering of fire engines, we saw the people standing beneath those flags, and we didn’t have to hear them to know that this was a quiet thing, not a celebration.

They were just standing there, it looked like. Seventy or a hundred people, in the street, under flags hung from firetruck ladders. Just standing. We caught a glimpse of them, and then they were behind us, and we were gone.

It struck me that they looked like people gathered to pray. And then I remembered what day it was. I’d known, in the morning, when we set out, but somehow on the way home, it didn’t seem possible that we were still in the same day, that it was still September 11, and these people were remembering what, for a few hours in the presence of the Eucharistic Lord, we had managed to forget.

And you know, what can you say? I came to guiltily. And at the same time, I thought, Thank God. I vividly remember  thinking, in 2001, that we were looking at the end of the world. My husband, children, and I were living in England;  I thought we might never come home again. I thought that quite possibly everything I knew and loved was ready to go up in flames.

If you had said to me, nine years ago today, that in nine years I would be driving through a peaceful American countryside with my children, at the end of a day of ordinary happiness, I would have said, Well, that’s a nice thought. What I would have believed, privately, is what I believed five years ago, in the hours before my father died:  I knew that he was dying, I sat beside him in the small hours of the night watching the life drain away from him, and I knew, as one knows that it’s hot or cold outside, that without him none of us would ever be happy again.

And yet it turns out that we are. The sun rises, and the world, though sadly changed, still has its goodness after all. And the thing about remembering is that you know what you’re able — by some miracle of time — not to carry as an intolerable burden at the forefront of your mind every minute. And I don’t know what to say about that, except that my children are waiting to be read to, and for the fact that we are here, that the house is quiet and safe, that the hills outside are swathed in no more than the usual, natural darkness, I want to fall down in gratitude.

(Cross-posted)