Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Friday, December 24, 2004
NOT-SO-SILENT NIGHT
During the week before Christmas, I read Stephen Mitchell's The Gospel According to Jesus, given to me by a Jewish friend who likes to talk with me about things religious. Mitchell, who is, I believe, a Buddhist, is interested in what the religions have in common. He has translated varied texts - from the Baghavad Gita to Rilke, the Tao te Ching to the Psalms and the Book of Job - and his Gospel According to Jesus is an attempt to present a Jesus who can speak to Buddhists, Muslims and Jews as well as Christians. Putting aside for the moment my feelings about Mitchell's rather audacious and, I think, very subjective approach to dealing with religious texts, I read the book as generously as I could.
Relying almost entirely on the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Luke, and Mark), some of the Gnostic Gospels, and on a selective group of Biblical critics and commentators, he tried to decide which of Jesus' purported saying and actions are authentic, and from these wrote a single, combined text that includes a narrative of the events that ring true to him, and the parables, comments and actions that he feels Jesus really said and did. Mitchell explains his reasoning and his selections in some detail, and whether you agree or not, it makes for interesting reading.
He begins by discarding the infancy narratives, the deification of Mary and her identification as "Jesus's first disciple" (in fact he tries to prove that Jesus was misunderstood by his family, and rejected them to a large extent); and the resurrection. He removes everything from the Gospels that he either doesn't see as authentic or which was, in his opinion, an early-church attempt to discredit the Jews and later became fuel for anti-Semitism - the entire trial before Pilate goes away, for example, as well as Jesus's criticism of the Pharisees.
What's left is Jesus the teacher and healer. In that regard, I think Mitchell succeeded admirably - certainly Muslims, Hindus and Jews can find much here that will resonate with them - and he in fact quotes luminaries from each tradition speaking about the universality of Jesus' message. Mitchell acknowledges that Christians may have a hard time with what he's done, and he's right - even though I'm extremely liberal when it comes to biblical criticism, and very, very far from a literalist, especially on such matters as the virgin birth and the meddling with the story done by the early church for various political and institutional purposes, he went farther than I think he needed to, and probably further than what is justified by history or current scriptural scholarship.
What is striking is that even in this severely deconstructed version, the teachings and the basic message are absolutely shining, and just as immediate today as they must have been when Jesus was alive. That was useful for me to see; as if for once one could view the historical person set against a plain white backdrop, without the overlay of centuries of institutionalization, liturgy, and political wrangling - not to mention bad art and treacly hymnody. Rather than diluting Christmas for me this year, it gave me some new food for thought as I navigated the narratives, the creche scenes, the carols and hymns that in many ways I still associate with my childhood.
As a counterpoint to Mitchell's book, I read this essay from The Guardian, sent to me by a friend, about how the world has never been ready for the real person Jesus was during his lifetime, or the revolutionary message he taught, but has preferred to reduce him to a sweet baby or a victim dying in agony, ignoring what came inbetween. This piece by Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser, a British priest and lecturer at Oxford, is well worth reading.
My rector, a liberation theologian who is courageous - perhaps even foolhardy - preached last week about Joseph as the first feminist, because despite living in a time of strict religious law, he did not follow the verses in the Jewish scripture that called for the stoning of a pregnant unmarried woman, and instead showed Mary compassion, caring for her and her unborn child. (Mitchell makes many convincing arguments, based on the Gospel texts and semitic cultural tradition, that Jesus was always considered illegitimate and a bastard by the surrounding society.) Afterwards, the rector said, a conservative member of the congregation came up to him and said, "Only you would make Joseph into a political figure," while others approached him with tears in their eyes, thanking him for a sermon they viewed as radical, eye-opening, and liberating. Would that more of our churches had the courage to leave aside the simplistic manger images, and preach this sort of sermon during the Christmas season.
Moved as I was by Stonehenge when I finally saw it, fifteen or so years ago, rising above the Salisbury Plain, I’m not a solstice person. Here in the hills of Vermont there are a number of people who observe a self-styled blend of New Age beliefs and pagan practices, including quite a few women my age or older who favor Birkenstocks and long flowing skirts printed with moons and stars, and wear their graying hair down their backs; some of them know how to dowse, or to make aromatherapy essences from flowers; some of them weave or spin; they like to talk about crystals, and labyrinths, and angels in their gardens, and it seems to me that they don’t have much to do with men. I’ve been invited a few times to attend some of their gatherings for one or the other of the solstices, but I politely decline; I guess I’m too much of a Christian to feel comfortable there (while acknowledging the pagan aspects of the holiday I am celebrating!)
But that doesn’t mean I’m not affected by the solstice, or that I don’t notice it. It would be impossible not to, living this far north, where light for living things feels in short supply even in the summer. And still, Vermont is not really northern; it’s barely halfway to the pole. The other night I handed my Icelandic neighbor a couple of radishes from a plate of crudités before dinner. He looked skeptically at the red orbs in his hand, and then bit into one. “Hmm,” he said, looking surprised. “This is not bad!” He explained that in Iceland the growing season is so short that radishes are one of the few things that people grow, and kids are always given seeds and a little plot of ground. “But they always taste awful,” he said. “Woody and musty, or just tasteless. Not like this at all.” According to him, no Icelander even tries to grow a tomato outdoors, or a green bean. I should be grateful.
On these shortest days, I think of the longest ones, when the evening light glances warm and golden against the delphinium and roses. Today, the house is frigid, and by three p.m. it was starting to get dark. Now, at five, there is less skylight than at nine on a midsummer night, and it is a deep blue shading to azure, split by black tree branches, and grounded by coldly reflective snow.
The last year I was in college, my roommate and I had an apartment in the student ghetto. There were two bedrooms, and a kitchen, small bath, and living room between the two. When we moved in, in the fall, we tossed a coin. I got the light-filled southwestern bedroom, and A. got the smaller, darker bedroom on the north side. We planned to switch at midyear. Every evening, we’d emerge from studying in our bedrooms, make dinner, and sit at the little wooden table in the kitchen to eat, watching the sun set over the lake in the distance. Thunderstorms swept across the valley from the west, and sometimes lake-effect snows obscured all vision. But the sun kept up its determined journey.
We got in a habit of marking its setting place each evening on the window glass. In late December, we marked the sun at its furthest point south, and I mentioned that it was time to switch rooms. I hated the thought of moving into that cave, but didn’t say so – fair was fair. But to my astonishment, A. said she had come to like her dark room; she’d come home from several hours at the piano in one of the equally tiny basement practice rooms in the music building, close her bedroom door and study or read with the blinds down all day. It felt safe, she said. I knew she was unhappy about her life, a failed love affair, confused about what to do after graduating. I urged her to take the bigger, lighter room, but she insisted. So we kept things as they were, meeting in the kitchen every night to cook a simple supper and eat together and talk about music, books, friends, professors, love; and watching as the sun now made its slow progression toward the north. We kept marking the days on the window glass, each little dot representing one day closer to leaving this existence we both loved, for another unknown one.
A. lives in Georgia now, and I’ve just set up a household even further north than that relatively northern apartment. Our lives diverged; we traveled miles from those dreams and heart-to-heart talks, and despite a friendship that was once extremely close, we’ve lost touch. But writing this I've realized that back in that apartment, the sun has faithfully traveled up and down the window thirty-one times.
It's been a busy and very Christmasy day. I was up early and at church for choir rehearsal at 9:00 am; sang the 10:00 service; went back home, picked up two pans of scalloped potatoes I made last night and drove with J. to the annual choir lunch at one member's beautiful colonial house in a neighboring town; then back to church for rehearsal for the Lessons&Carols service, which we sang at 5:00. The concert went really well, and it was a joy to sing some lovely music - among them a difficult setting of Hodie, Christus Natus Est by Poulenc, and the totally melodic Shepherd's Farewell by Hector Berlioz - and to be with "my choir" again. I'll sing again with them on Christmas Eve.
This feels just about right. I've sung with this group for the past ten or eleven years, and it is a huge commitment - in addition to two rehearsals a week (Thursday night and Sunday morning) and preparing two pieces to perform each Sunday, we also perform four other events each year - a special fall Evensong, a Requiem Mass for All Saint's Day, this Lessons&Carols service late in Advent, a Bach cantata or the like for Lent - this year the choir will be doing the St. John Passion - and a light, short Mass in the spring - such as a Missa Brevis by Mozart or Schubert. Sometimes we also go on a trip, singing elsewhere - we sang at the National Cathedral in Washington one year; last year we combined with other choirs for Gene Robinson's consecration. I dearly love it, and I love the other singers and the very caring community we create among ourselves. Our director is an enormously gifted and entertaining teacher as well as musician, and I feel like I've learned more about litugical and choral music in the past eight years with him than in all my previous years of singing. But in the past couple of years, the obligation and commitment have felt like they were getting to be too much.
Fortunately, the choir really is like a family, to which one is always welcome to return for one week or a season. I walked into rehearsal on Thursday night after being away nearly the entire autumn, and was greeted with open arms; it was up to me to do whatever I needed to do to learn the music quickly and get up to speed so I could sing this weekend. Past members and friends often come and sing with the choir, especially for special events; the basic core group stays pretty stable but a number of new members have joined in the past few years. I was glad to see that my robe and music cubby hadn't been assigned to anyone else yet.
What I hadn't realized until this week was that I had needed to stay away this fall in order to settle into my new life and make a successful transition. The choir has meant a great deal to me over the years, and music itself means even more in my life. I couldn't really face giving any of that up when I felt uncertain and unsettled about what was in the future, and it was difficult to answer people's questions and concerns about what we were doing; I was a fixture in many people's lives too. At the time I didn't quite understand the depths of the pain and emotion I was feeling; I just knew that it felt better to stay away. But now I seem to be through that, and it felt really joyful to see everyone, to sing, to enjoy that wonderful annual get-together at my friend's house, and especially to share this part of Christmas which means a lot to all of us - doing our very best to make beautiful music together and share it with the many people who come to listen, to think, to reflect, and hopefully be moved in some way.
But I also realize that now I feel free to leave, or - even better - to come and go. At this point in my life, I don't need to (and can't, frankly) sing in a formal group. I can also take on a different role in this particular group than I have for years, and it's OK; I felt just as surrounded by their love as I always have, and was very happy to be able to understand and express to many people how happy I was to be with them again. And to sing! To sing.
