30 December, 2018
I have heard the University of King’s College Cathedral Choir sing many times before, yet each time is a different experience because the sound, the exquisite beauty they loose into the universe, is interacting with what I bring to the listening.
Planets, solar systems, and galaxies have at different times been images that appear to me as each choral part swirls notes into orbit and the unique orbits hold each other in graceful, elliptical splendour, thanks to the composition’s gravity of precise arrangement. Today, though, it was water and it was a current of ribbons.
…am here at All Saints, laying witness with my senses to the glorious bloom of sound filling this space. Absolutely spectacular. All parts soaring, rising on unseen ribbons of air to ripple outward, to fill, to conform to every bend and crag, crack and nook, of this space…Augh, the overlap of sound, like a wave not waiting for the retreat of the one before and bringing its fullness to bear on the edges of what is already, releasing an energy of new notes in that union of waters and power…
As I listened, I couldn’t help but also think about the captivating fog I witnessed on the harbour yesterday morning, too… It absolutely had being-ness, this fog…It pulsed, it danced, it stretched from land to land over the water and yet kept changing. At one moment, the dawn’s first brilliant notes stretched out upon it, glowing not only in itself, but also illuminating the fog from within as it settled upon the waters.
…light from light…begotten not made…
All of this…together with it being the end of the year…it has me thinking about what is to come…and how utterly impossible it is to predict, especially with the fractious politics and overall volatility of our world.
Sitting in my chair at the cathedral, my prayer was this—May we all allow God to fill our being like the choir-sound fills this space…Allowing for such a fullness of God that God conforms to each bend and crag, crack and nook… And if we can do that, allow ourselves to be illuminated from within by God, as we reach from person to person across harbours, borders, divisions of all kinds, maybe, just maybe, things will be different…at least for a gasp of wonder, a moment, a flicker of memory, the sudden warmth of what it is like to hope.
