Music
"Loveliness leaves a deeper impression
and one that costs you a little more."
Br Todd Koesel made Solem Profession in 2010.
Music, what can you say about it? There are so many different kinds of this thing that the well trained ear would probably never exhaust the branches of it. Punk, Rock and Roll, classical, baroque. William Johnston once wrote a book called the Silent Music and it seems that most of it is either that or has a big part of that as an element. So we monks do music. Gregorian chant is quite a lot different than it was 50 years ago when everything was in Latin and some of the fathers look back on that time with nostalgia, a little bit of sadness, and longing for that purity of tone. Not that it is dumbed down now; it has just changed and has another beauty to it.
Just now coming out of the scullery after supper one of the brothers pulled me aside to ask if I had driven the Subaru lately, one of our newer vehicles. There have been a couple of monks who having driven it lately reporting that it makes a “ping” noise at different intervals. Ping. So of course even though I haven’t had my hands on the wheel we had to contemplate together just what kind of ping this thing is sounding out. Is it metal on metal, a grinding noise that would only be heard in a car that is run by computer, like the baseball card in the spoke of your bike tire as a kid? We run into these different noises in our life and it seems like we have to return to memory for an analog that might fit what we are trying to describe. Maybe that is what is happening with music in general. We have a need to express all of it, the joy and the way it hurts, the sadness and the bright tone of a space that we’ve walked into and something about the music of our lives matches up with the music of our past experience, they form a whole. And the whole can really only be expressed by returning to the songs and psalms that the human race has been calling out since the beginning. It is a whole person experience. When we sing, play the guitar, blow on a horn or pluck a cello string maybe pluck is not the term I am looking for such a sublime action we are engaging all of us, body, soul, spirit, mind, and we are connecting to that which has been exercised by humans all the way down. After the last supper when Jesus and the disciples are on the way to the Mt. of olives and the garden of Gethsemane, one of the evangelists reports that they sang songs along the way.
Don’t have the foggiest idea what to put down today. 4 am is our earliest office and that can be extended as far as you like to the darker side of 4 am, to each man’s discretion. Usually showing up ten minutes before is plenty for me to settle into the firm stall and remember to thank God for all the gifts he will be pouring out on us today. That sounds pretty pious and it is. Usually it is more like trying to get the little kid inside of me to sit still and just be there and to try and remember that God is at the wheel so he can just sit comfortably in the backseat and enjoy the ride. Maybe that’s synonymous with thanking him for his gifts. In addition to that particular music which is playing in my head, there is the external. Fr. Howard shuffling in with his sandpaper on tile gait, a brother dropping his stall chair so that if you weren’t awake yet, most surely you are now, the subtle hum of the light bulbs and a trickling holy water fount that is running with living water. At 5 til, the lights begin to flick on and the traditional nose blowers get their business out of the way. It is all music. I think of Therese, sitting in meditation every day with the sister behind her clicking her teeth. She thought to turn and ask her to hush, but a deeper thought came to her rescue: let that clicking noise be your concert, a tune given especially for you by Jesus.
We just had our bi-weekly choir practice tonight. It happens like this: the day before a note goes up on the bulletin board in large print reminding everyone that at 6:40 tomorrow night there will be singing practice. It takes a day for one to warm up to such an idea and then at the beginning of practice itself there is the warm up which consists of stretching, bending at the waist swinging your hips from side to side and extending your arms to the sky a little bit of a neck rub self imposed and then some scale type exercises. It always astounds me to look across the choir and to see numerous men past their eightieth birthday limbering up for the festivities and sitting patiently on a Tuesday night through this practice of what----psalms and hymns that they have been singing for 50+ years. So we start out with vocal calisthenics, some yawning, nu-wah-nu-wah-nu followed by 8-7-8, 87678, 8765678, you get the picture. Tonight was a smattering of Ascension and Pentecost hymns led by our choir director Ron Hylton. Ron is a snappy dressing High Church Anglican who with tassels on his shoes doesn’t seem to fit at one level but at another he is our guy. His sense of humor gets us rolling after a long day and we are off and running into melisma tic chants and some very lovely tunes. I don’t think that choir practice was the lynchpin in anybody’s vocation here, the thing that sealed the deal, but it is an essential part of our life and we do sound better for it. That’s the funny thing about monks, music is our life, but most of us aren’t musicians. So we roll in with our variant attitudes to practice and sing.
A friend of mine, Ila Mae Phillips showed up here for an afternoon chat recently and I sat by the pond with her and longtime friend of both of us Jim Foglio. Ila Mae, is inching toward her 88th birthday and “I don’t take a pill, just a little bit of an eye drop in the one eye that has gone blind” When I asked her the nutritional secret to living long and well, her reply “eat what you want, when you want it, and as much as you want.” So we sit by the pond on the first gorgeous day of spring telling stories. Ila was once part of a 4 piece group of comedians called the grinning grannies and they did skit all around Arizona when she and her husband “retired” down there, more like took their instruments and played them for whoever would listen down there. When she was with the grannies, she perfected a howl called the Witch’s laugh, reputed to be a nasty sound. One Halloween a few years ago she and her daughter were shopping at the Clackamas Town Center and she thought the place could use a little excitement, it being Halloween and all, so she went up to the second level and got into the witch’s laugh for a bit. People were ducking into stores for cover and the police were called in because “they must have thought somebody was hurt real bad.” Asking if she fessed up, I got a big grin out of her. “Course not, just having a little fun, so I went to see if I could help the good men find what they were looking for” Ila Mae is the wife of Russ, now deceased, but a musician of special gift. He could “pick up one of 20 different instruments and if you were to begin humming a tune for him, he could carry it out and by the second verse would be throwing in variations.” The back of their station wagon was always stuffed with instruments and they all got used. What is the effect of a life lived in music?
This morning I came in for vigils and Fr. Howard was busy sawing logs on the other side of the choir. Usually he is sitting on the side of the chapel in one of the comfortable chairs set up for the seniors so I can’t make heads or tails as to how he is snoring on that hard wooden stool when he never does on the padded ones.
This afternoon I took a walk down the drive and it being the last week in May the place is like a jungle around here, lush and green and many birds out singing. I tried my best to listen to the sounds around me and noticed at least 8 different birdsongs going at once. It is something like this when we get together in the choir. We all arrive from our various duties around the house for the divine office 5 times a day, some from the bindery, some from the kitchen, a gardener, a laundryman, a couple of fruitcake bakers, and some admin folks who keep the ship under direction and we sing. We are in step with one another, but the voices and the toning of them are as variant as or even more so than the birds. A man to my left has the softest nasiliest gentlest voice you have ever heard and the man to my right is on perfect pitch having studied performance voice in college. From across the way floats a Brooklyn voice and a gentle tenor comes right behind me. Coming to the monastery for the first time as a retreatant my impression was the beautiful sound coming from the choir and since then I have spent 7 years being immersed in it. A good comparison might be the life of marriage: you fall in love get engaged and then married because it looks just so lovely. After a few go rounds and living it awhile, loveliness leaves a deeper impression and one that costs you a little more. But it wouldn’t be loveliness otherwise???
Sometimes it is just plain hard. To get up early in the morning and go into the chapel to chant the same psalms with the same guys feels a burden and today was one of those days. I have the desire to write something profound about this experience but it is just your run of the mill human reality that everyone rubs up against. As I was thinking about this ebb and flow that we get into a quote from Diary of a Country Priest came to mind. The priest at one point writes: “Keep silent. What a strange expression. Silence keeps us.” It is the same dynamic with music. The bell is going to ring here 5 times daily calling us to gather again and to sing praise, and that praise will be sung whether one is happy, sad, pissed off, or just plain numb. When you come in on a day like today feeling out of sorts and wanting to be anywhere but here, the music keeps you. It is enough.
Recently I was talking to one of the brothers about the community which has now reached a median age of 80. He said that when he entered in New Mexico, the average age was 27 so the demographics have changed a bit. But there is some sort of witness to be received when one lives with men of a deeper and longer line of generations. We have many who served in WWII and a couple who were in Korea and it just means more when these guys make a petition for peace than it does coming from a young guy like myself. Along with the age of wisdom comes the different bodily weaknesses that slow one in service and around here we have hearing loss. This morning after mass I was sitting in chapel for a few minutes and overheard a conversation taking place in the sacristy 100 feet distant. Our hermit Fr. Mark was leaving the decibels cranked up although the other man could hear just fine. When you first come to the monastery all idealistic and wanting to have some sort of experience of silence you learn that the ideal comes up against the real very quickly. You think that everyone is going to be practicing this deep silence when really they are practicing a deep love which is often times noisy, and quite frankly, more to the point.
Thomas Merton to Jacques Maritain: “Realize yourself to be entirely in His love and His care and worry about nothing. In these days you should be carried by Him toward your destination, and do what you do more as play than as work, which does not mean that it is not serious: for the most serious thing in the life of a Christian is play. The seriousness of Christian play is the only genuine seriousness.” Our chapel is newly built in 2007 and the ceiling and walls are as much window as they are wood so every time we come together for the office (the Work of God as it is called in Benedictine circles) the elements are a part of our praise. It is early June now and this morning before Lauds, I was looking out into the greenness before us and at the top of one of the trees was a violently jiggling branch. I followed this jiggle for a few moments for branch to branch and discovered that it was one of our overfed Western gray squirrels getting his morning exercise underway. He was playing. We need this type of energy from time to time to kickstart us back to the reality of what we are about. When you first arrive at the monastery to live here, there is a class to help you sort through “the Books” of which there are five of them filled with various things, you’ve got martyr feast days, multiple martyr feast days, multiple martyr feast days in Eastertide…there is a hymn and chant for each occasion. Initially it is enough for confusion but after a few months, the books become like an extension of yourself and you know them like the knuckles that I watch as I type this page…a development which could in all circumstances facilitate a more squirrel like approach to singing. The work of God is mysterious: is He working on us? Are we working for Him? And may it please Him that those two things are indeed working together. It is always serious business and from God’s perspective I imagine it looking something like a torrent of love whereas we show up with the seriousness of a toothache sometimes and others times we come with our inner tube to seriously hop in the river.
These days we have an informal symphony going in the back yard every morning because the house is under construction. Any construction site has its noises and you don’t have to have a well trained ear to gather them. But if you were to put them all together, they do make a kind of song, the thwap of a regular old hammer on nail, the duug duug of a pneumatic nail gun, the high pitched buzz of a skilsaw tearing through a fir 2 by 4, and the beep of a tractor in reverse. But the first trumpet is the human voice, these 15 or 20 guys whose lives outside of here intersect with our daily living and stories start flying. Tales of fishing trips and goats on the hill at mount Angel, and “Hey Frank, you got that stuff yet, I’ve been waiting up here for it for ten minutes” and “Dude, hold your britches” and the like. I was thinking about all of this activity the other day and it has become part of the landscape. One of our monastic practices, if you choose to partake and I usually do, is a short snooze after lunch and I wonder once they leave if I’ll be able to knock off without all that ruckus going on outside?
Looking across the choir tonight I catch a glance at Fr. Dismas, our prior. Dis has been in the monastery since joining at age 16 and now is inching toward his 86th birthday. About a year ago the doctors found he had an aggressive form of colon cancer that was spreading into the rest of his body and they have been plugging him with radiation and chemotherapy ever since. And he has taken it gently and generously. So he is limited now in what he can do with us, but as steady as ever makes it to 3 offices a day and performs his duties of authority when Abbot Peter is away. I don’t really know what I want to say about Fr. D as we call him other than he is an exemplar of our musical here. Shortly after joining the monastery they made him a cantor in choir, a complete surprise to him. When the brothers made a foundation in New Mexico in 1948, Dis was the first one to read in refectory at lunchtime and the Abbot liked his voice so much that he got the job for a stretch of some months whereas normally the duty would be changed week to week. Now, his tune is often just his black dress shoes sliding behind his walker and genuine smile should you be heading in the opposite direction.
At the south side of our chapel, there is a tapestry of Our Lady of Guadalupe that if I had to guess is 4 feet wide by 8 or nine feet tall. It was “sewn” is that what you do with a tapestry? By John Nava who did all of the tapestry work in the new cathedral in Los Angeles. At a community meeting shortly after the chapel was dedicated we had a community discussion about pros and cons of the new space. Br. Alberic, who would complain if hung with a new rope, had one thing to say: “That tapestry is fantastic. I rest my case.” So every night at the end of compline, we leave the choir stalls to gather around the altar and sing the Salve to Our Lady and beseech her with a final prayer. If you take a look at a picture of the image from Juan Diego’s tilma, you will see that Our Lady’s hands, folded in prayer have a space between them. That space is filled up with a whole lot of anguish and joy and love and fear and hope and sorrow. That space holds the hearts of these men.
Sometimes choir is a matter of who’s on first. Just like any family we are coming and going with random regularity and the guy whose job it is to intone the psalms may be in Portland picking up books or the cantor may be in a business luncheon, or the abbot prior and sub prior are all gone for whatever reason and the people start looking around and smiling and nodding heads to the next man in line. Then sometime you just plain forget that you have this or that duty and it takes a second and a nudge from your neighbor to get you moving and it just might happen that once the nudge comes you have got some bindery problem on your noggin and you sing the psalm from yesterday or this morning or tomorrow and then the whole process begins anew.
Today is Pentecost Sunday with its imagery of tongues of fire and the newfound courage of the followers of Jesus. In refectory on a solemnity we have a few things that change the scene from a normal ferial day: at each table there is a lighted candle, and instead of the 20 minute lunchtime reading, we get music. As we are lining up for the blessing of the meal, the abbot moves over and gently pulls a flaming candle back from Br. Clarence who is leaning toward it on the table and a chorus of smiles respond. After the blessing, Br. Damien turns to me and says “We just missed seeing Br. Clarence go up in flames” as matter of fact as can be. Then we all proceeded to dish up with Tuna loaf and rice before settling down for a little Henry Purcell and his 17th Century Baroque. Having music in refectory always reminds me of the Shawshank Redemption when Andy Dufrene gets his first shipment of library materials and locks the guard in the can before broadcasting some Italian opera singer over the loudspeaker to the entire prison yard. He then gets punished with solitary confinement. When he gets back from a month in “the Hole” the guys want to know if it was worth it. “Best time I ever did…..had that music in me the whole time”
+ Br Todd