Category Archives: seasons

birthrights and summer nights

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We’re getting the old house in as good shape as we can in anticipation of a barbecue this weekend. Our book group is meeting at our house at three, and a crowd of other friends are coming at five thirty on Saturday. Our god daughter, Emma, will be here with her mom—they are honorary members of the book group.

Normally, we would have barbecued on Independence Day, but Emma couldn’t come on the fourth this year. She’s working lots of hours as a lifeguard this summer and saving as much as she can in her college fund. In August she matriculates at Oberlin College. We’re very proud of her. She graduated with high honors from Iowa City High School in May. She’s not going to Oberlin for music, and we don’t know what she will decide to do with her life, What we do know is that she will do the deciding, just as she chose Oberlin because of its diverse faculty and student body and because she felt after visiting a good many schools that Oberlin offered the kind of challenge she is inclined to take on now.

For the past several days I’ve been trying to think of something to say about why I love my country, but that immediately puts me at odds with many people I know and love who believe that the country I love, the creation of a liberal establishment, needs to be dismantled in the name of freedom and creativity. I am now to understand that greed is not only good but socially redemptive as well; to accept the destruction of the fundamental institutions of a great nation, everything from public universities to highways and bridges in the name of privatization or that will-o-the-wisp, reform; and to adjust to a public sphere in which swaggering thugs strut about brandishing assault rifles.

So I’ll wave no flags this year. Instead, I’ll think about what it was like to be as young as Emma, when the things I most loved to do came easily. I’ll remember swimming in the lake, canoeing out to a floating pier at Lake Junaluska as Pat Boone’s voice crooned “April Love” out over the water. I worked there in the summer of 1956 as a singer. We created a stir by protesting the segregated swimming pool. I’ll think about rides up the mountain in my roommate’s convertible, and rides back down after dark with the girl I fancied then. I’ll think about how open the world seemed. I didn’t think of that openness as an unearned privilege, but of course it was. I had a ticket to the American meritocracy—that was my birthright.

But tonight after ice cream at Ted Drewes on old Route 66, I’m not inclined to be analytical or judgmental. I’m enjoying a fine summer in the last days of my seventy-fifth year. My garden is grown up as never before. My cup runneth over, because you see I’m still privileged. The world remains open to my concerns and desires. Pat Boone is still singing out over the lake somewhere; and somewhere fine young people who are kin to me, their bodies lithe, their faces devoid of guile, paddle out to a floating pier, tie up their small boats, and share the evening. They’ll swim, some of them will kiss or exchange other endearments; they’ll talk and their talk will be fine summer talk, talk for the time being, talk of the wondrous open world they share. And that’s a good thing.

It’s the best thing I have to celebrate this Independence Day season, except perhaps for the crowds lined up at and around Ted Drewes, some waiting to buy at the windows where young people who will go to college with Ted Drewes’ assistance serve us concretes and banana splits—just ahead of me a beautiful little girl has helped her father collect two huge banana splits to be shared with their family of four as they speak Spanish together. And some across the street sitting on the wall in front of a bank, leaning against it, eating ice cream, some like us who simply lean against the iron rail of Ted Drewes’ parking lot and watch our neighbors as we consume two identical butterscotch mini-concretes. All around us the blessing of openness, of a parking lot one can get in and out of, of camaraderie at the service window (I have met foreign diplomats, Salvation Army executives, priests, scholars, and baseball players there, among others), of the gift of one more blessed summer evening.

—the gift of one more blessed summer evening.

. . . late in Advent

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It’s always tempting to offer some borrowed eloquence; but that’s cheating, and now that I’ve lived officially three quarters of a century I’d like at least to cheat a little less than in former years. No intimation of winter yet—the season hangs indifferent, damp as the leaves in my back yard that I’ve not yet raked, neither cold enough for winter nor fruitful enough for fall. The sap wrung out of the time, I journey a sodden way towards solstice, towards the longest night.

Some years the sky has opened to thousand Seraphim striding the air, their great pennons shedding dark love. Today at dusk a fat squirrel pawed through the leaves, found an acorn and scampered up the fence to the garage roof and thence to the hanging branches of the huge old oak in my neighbor’s yard three houses down. Better bury some acorns in the ground, I thought, lay down some supplies against the time when the light goes; though yesterday at the clinic smart young doctors shined lights in my eyes and pronounced them healthy.

Lord, the thing I know best is that I don’t know much of anything. I can’t imagine not being, can’t think not thinking. But the death wind blows around me, not urgently, not swiftly, but firmly nonetheless. What angels will stride in its wake this year? I read of murdered children in the news and wonder how anyone . . . so many innocent, but would fewer have been less . . . I can’t finish the sentence. I resolve to rake my leaves before year’s end (mine by possession, not by ownership), to clean my gutters, and to sit on my back porch at dusk to watch the time go afterwards.

These will be my last things for the time being—though of course I have good memories, hierophanies some of them and those I don’t like to use too much, don’t want to wear them thin. But if you come by again, I’ll be as ready as I can be, having recalled that once you astonished me in the old red brick church, so that I ran out into the night with tears streaming down my face. After that you dropped in occasionally, like that time in the Intimate Bookshop when I picked up “A Song for Simeon.” But mostly you’ve stayed hidden in the world, the “still unspeaking and unspoken word” I wait upon.

—Come, Emmanuel.

Tidings of comfort and joy . . .

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“O Magnum Mysterium” is one of the responsories in the Gregorian liturgy of Christmas and as such is much older than “In Dulci Jubilo,” which dates from the early fourteenth century. “O Magnum Mysterium” has about it a formality and high seriousness that one writer refers to the irony of the Incarnation, “the fact that the field animals—mere beasts of burden trying to sleep in the same manger—would witness the birth of the holy Christ child.” “In Dulci Jubilo,” in which we are asked to sing and be merry around the manger, is less formal but also bears the signs of liturgical trope. Both texts depend upon the “in praesepio,” theme from Luke’s gospel.

Unsres Herzens Wonne leit in praesepio.

. . . ut animalia viderent Dominum natum jacentem in praesepio.

. . . et venerunt festinantes et invenerunt Mariam et Ioseph et infantem positum in praesepio.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

It’s a lovely story, taken all together, the holy birth surrounded by signs and portents, the plain circumstances suffused with swarms of angels and the the swagger of magician kings. And it’s part of a larger story that one could wish were true even in the face of certain conviction to the contrary, As professor Tolkien has put it:

There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.1

The text of the story surely came first, but I love this image of Giotto’s that foregrounds the animalia,2 with its wonderful donkey and the angels hiding in the attic. “O Magnum Mysterium” foregrounds the mystery, but “In Dulci Jubilo” seems to address the Christ child, himself, much as Dante addressed Beatrice on the margin of the earthly paradise, Alpha es et O, “Blessed are you who come.”

1See “On Fairy Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, Erdmans, 1966 [1947].
2The original is in the Scrovegny Chapel.

Unsres Herzens Wonne

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We’re sending this letter to family members and as many friends as we can find this season. If you’re a Facebook friend or someone who reads this blog occasionally, we wish you the same happiness we wish others. We are persuaded that one can never have too many friends.

I posted Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium” at Christmas a couple of years ago, but that performance has disappeared from You Tube. Here’s a link to another performance I like a lot, this one by the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

And while I’m posting music, here’s Chanticleer performing what has become a signature piece for them, the “Ave Maria” of Franz Biebl. My favorite Chanticleer album is still their 1992 Christmas album, Our Heart’s Joy, which was remastered and re-released in 2004 (I have the earlier CD). Here’s a performance of the carol that gave that album it’s title, though this is a performance by a later instantiation of Chanticleer, from their 2003 Portrait CD.

We used to call verse that mixed vernacular and Latin text Macaronics. It’s interesting, to me at least, that translations and paraphrases of this carol, perhaps the Macaronic original, like the fairly well-known though not very good 1837 paraphrase by Robert Pearsall, retain the Latin untranslated (except “Good Christian Men, Rejoice”). Of course one loses the effect of the Macaronic if the whole is translated; though I expect the real reason for the practice is that any educated person, before our own benighted time, could rede the Latin text, perhaps even understand that in German Latin, dulci is “dultsi.”

—Happy Christmas to all. In dulci jubilo!