The yearly "Broadway Blessing" is taking place this coming Monday night at the Cathedral, and I have been there for three nights in a row, rehearsing with the rest of the Broadway Blessings choir. We are singing several pieces, among them Stephen Schwartz's "For Good" from the musical Wicked, in which I have a short solo. There will be many wonderful artists from the theater community taking part; this will tell you more about the event.
If you have been reading my blog for a while you already know that the Cathedral has become my home since I moved back to the city. But you might not know how I came to it in the first place.
In 1982, I was living in Chicago and trudging through a particularly difficult period in my life. Following my automobile accident, I had withdrawn from the Manhattan Transfer, as it took a few years to fully recover physically. It then took even longer for my career to recover from that time away. The Transfer, with Cheryl Bentyne in my place, was up and running again long before I was, and that was not easy to watch.
I was browsing in a library one day, looking for a literary escape, when a book literally fell out of the shelf and onto my foot. It was Madeleine L'Engle's memoir, A Circle of Quiet. I said "Ouch" (very quietly, of course), picked the book up, glanced through it, and decided to check it out. I spent the next two days reading it. Then I went back to borrow every other L'Engle book I could find in the system. Her breadth was amazing. Fantasy. Children's books. Poetry. Memoir. Novels. Christian apologetics. Stunning!
Not long after that, I read that she was coming to Chicago to teach a writing workshop at Mundelein College, and I registered for the workshop. It changed my life, she changed my life, in the very slow way that drops of water falling on a rock carve it over the course of time.
Time was her writing specialty - her most famous books, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind at the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (which, with Many Waters and An Acceptable Time form the Time Quintet) deal with time travel and the present now. Her memoirs follow time in a lifespan. Her apologetics reach from human chronological time to speak to and of that which is eternal. She was the first person to define to me the difference between chronos and kairos. She introduced me to the hymn known as "St. Patrick's Breastplate", and asked me to sing it for her a few different times over the years. She told me I could write. She also told me that I did not have to choose between writing and singing, that it was not either/or, but rather both/and. The way I would combine them would become clear, she said... in time.
Madeleine was an Anglican, and she was librarian then at the Cathedral. A member, too, I think, and she spoke of it with great fondness. I remember saying I would like to sing there one day. She smiled and said, "It's a very rarified atmosphere." I said, "Still...", and we both laughed.
It is now 24 years later. I am a member of the congregation at the Cathedral, and I do sing there, every week, as part of a choir, and over the course of this past summer I soloed a few times. I continue to be a working singer. And I write. I sometimes do truly understand that though life looks like a series of choices that present as either/or, there is usually a both/and possibility, if I have the vision and the courage to see it. I certainly know chronological time - oh my aching knees! - but I also know that to pay attention, and to truly notice something, is to stop time, or rather slip through chronos into kairos like walking through a waterfall. I have learned by experience that there is a difference between happiness and joy, that beauty isn't pretty, and that funerals are where Alleluias must be said. I would have learned all this eventually, I am certain. But Madeleine said things about all this that I have remembered, you see, and I know them now to be true.
Madeleine L'Engle died yesterday, in Connecticut. She has moved through the waterfall. I am sad beyond telling, and yet, alleluia. Christ is risen.
This Monday night, in the Cathedral, we sing the words "I do believe I have been changed for the better, and, because I knew you, I have been changed for good".
Madeleine, I sing for you.
