I sing alto in a modest, sixteen-voice choir at our church. We prepare an anthem and help lead worship three Sundays a month. But every autumn we also rehearse a major work for a community concert in December. This year it's Sunrise Mass by composer Ola Gjeilo.
We will be joined at the concert by other vocalists – a high school ensemble, another church choir, and various itinerant vocalists whom directors have summoned to fill out the parts.
We could use the help.
Although our choir has six (!) altos, we need more sopranos, tenors, and basses. Sopranos provide the soaring high notes, tenors the lovely harmonies, and basses the strong foundation for choral music. My husband, Ed, and another man are the only two basses in our choir.
And, truth be told, most of our voices are aging. I've lost the top of my range, my sight-reading has slowed, and I can't sustain long notes like I used to.
Rehearsals have been a hard slog.
While Sunrise Mass promises to be sublime, Gjeilo (pronounced Yay-lo) asks a lot of his musicians. The opening movement, "The Spheres," has eight vocal parts, layering the voices in long, sustained notes with little support from the orchestra. That's right choral sports fans – the first thing the audience will hear is our voices, almost a cappella.
In the second movement, "Sunrise," the string section plays its own sweet part while we vocalists struggle to find our entrances and maintain our own rhythm.
The third movement, "The City," goes on for twenty-two pages, a full eleven minutes of accidentals and strange time changes while the string players saw their way through hundreds of fast-moving sixteenth-notes, bars and bars and bars of arpeggios. The orchestral score looks like someone dipped a paintbrush in black ink and flung it at the page.
And, did I mention that the text is in Latin?
But here's some good news: Our church choir participated in a community concert featuring this same piece eight years ago and the woman I sit next to in the alto row learned it then. You can see me leaning toward her during rehearsals to hear our part.
Also, I had some random good luck – I was given a vocal score used by an alto the last time around. Her penciled notations remain on the pages of the score. She reminds me "In 3" when there is a time change over a page turn. "Stagger breath" lets me know someone else will hold the note while I breathe. "Same note" informs me that though they look different, A-flat and G-sharp are the same sound. She provides pronunciation aids for the unfamiliar Latin words.
She helps keep me from stumbling as I move through the piece.
Whoever you are, I thank you.
This unknown alto is one of a whole host of kindly people whose instructions have shown others the way. Like canoe voyagers who notched blazes on trees to mark the portage from river to lake. Or hikers who piled cairns to show later travelers which trail to take down from the rocky outcrop on top of the mountain.
Or, those blessed folks who make YouTube videos telling you how to change the headlamp in your Subaru (harder than it looks) or how to tape and paint a drywall seam. Most of these YouTube gurus are not professionals – they're not in it to promote a product, they just get a kick out of showing you how it's done.
God bless them.
As we rehearse Gjeilo's mass, I am helped, too, by the conductor who marks the rhythm with his hands, by the rehearsal accompanist who pounds out our parts, and by the music itself, which, when we listen closely enough, will tell us how to sing it.
I am surrounded by helpers.
On the first day of November, the Christian church celebrated All Saints' Day, a day on which we remember not only famous saints like St. Peter and St. Paul and Mother Theresa, but also ordinary folk who have gone before us in faith.
It might seem odd to describe ordinary people as "saints," but that's exactly what the apostle Paul does in his Letter to the Ephesians. "To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus," he writes. We usually think of saints as spiritual superstars, but the way Paul uses the word, saints are regular people who, by their faithfulness, help others on their way.
In his memoir, The Sacred Journey, novelist Frederick Buechner says that on All Saints' Day, we should remember friends and family members and mentors, "all the foolish ones and wise ones, the shy ones and overbearing ones, the broken ones and whole ones, the despots and tosspots and crackpots of our lives…, by whom we were helped to whatever little we may have, or ever hope to have, of some kind of seedy sainthood of our own."
On the night before the election, I was lying awake in my bed, legs tense and shoulders scrunched, full of dread about the future. Unable to quiet my mind any other way, I began to pray, over and over again, "Lord, have mercy on us." Then I began naming saints I have known and asked them to stand close by and help us through this.
I named my mom, Mary Inwood Smith, my friend Barbara Lewis-Lakin, my mentor Juanita Ferguson, and one of my bishops, Judith Craig. As I breathed, and named a name with each breath, it seemed as if I could sense their presence around the room, just beyond a filmy veil, watching, sending their love. As I breathed and prayed, I felt a jolt of something like electricity flow through my body. Though it was still a long time before I fell asleep, my shoulders relaxed into the pillow, and my legs unclenched under the sheets.
Who are your saints? Who would you name?
This is my prayer in these dark days of November: May you be given help when you need it. May you be blessed by the presence of faithful ones, living and dead, who stand beside you and show you the way. May you know that you are not alone.
Scripture: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witness, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith." – Hebrews 12:1-2
Playlist: "For All the Saints," William W. How, 1864, to the tune of SINE NOMINE by Ralph Vaughn Williams, 1906.