Laurel Massé

Still Christmas, so...

Ten years ago, or perhaps eleven, I was part of a "Lessons and Carols" evening service with John Kirk and Trish Miller at Christ Church Ballston Spa, in upstate NY. The evening was recorded, which I had forgotten. But this morning I remembered, and so here is my favorite carol for you. Right now, it's still Christmas, and it will be until the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. If we are heartily sick of Christmas by Christmas Day, it may be because we skip Advent and put the tree up too soon. Which is certainly what our culture screams at us to do. In my fairly solitary life, I can stick my fingers in my ears and walk past the stores with Christmas displays blaring pop carols at me. My heart aches for those of you who have to remain fully engaged with the hustle bustle even if you don't want to. And I admire you for making Christmas anyway. This is for you most of all.

03 Wexford Carol Christ Church Ballston Spa NY

One more thing: my new website is almost complete, and this blog - the whole thing! - will be moving there shortly. By "there" I mean at www.laurelmasse.com. The herding dog in me will be well pleased to have all my work in one enclosure.

 

 

 

Just before Christmas

It has been a long time since I last wrote here. I have been thinking, and contemplating, and busily writing things on paper. That, coupled with the temporary inconvenience of not having internet access, kept me relatively quiet. ME! Can you imagine?

And now it's the day before before Christmas. I am at home waiting for the UPS driver and a package, and for the U.S. Post Office delivery person who does not always put my mail in the correct mailbox, while Mrs. Peel sleeps blissfully and elegantly on the radiator.

All day yesterday, rain tapped at the windows. It was like Christmas in Los Angeles, as I remember it: yuletide rains, warm temperatures, aqua and coral decorations on trees sprayed with fake snow. My friend Howard took me to see a huge poinsettia tree and I suddenly understood why I had never been able to keep my Christmas poinsettia alive: mine was just bunch of twigs stuffed into a beribboned pot. Christmas in L.A. was an experience not of Christmas Past or Christmas Present, but of Christmas Other because it looked so different from what I had grown up with. Christmas under palm trees! How odd it seemed!

And yet, how much more like the first Christmas than our nordic pines and our Dickensian feasts, and Clement Clarke Moore's poem, which does not even mention Jesus (though Moore was a religious scholar, and so how odd that seems, too).

We have not evolved a whole lot since Mary bore that baby. We still wage war and are victims of war, we still oppress and are oppressed. We still have major vision problems - can't see the poor until they are troublesome, for instance, can't see the person behind the skin. And heavens, we are easily distracted by ducks and mileys and penguin santas.

But underneath that, at the same time, we love. The heart is made for love. We are called to love every year, every day, every moment. The media may spin the season, commerce may manipulate our guilt and our desire to please, fellow Christians may tell us we're doing Christmas all wrong, atheists may accuse us of stupidity for doing it at all, and all of that noise distracts us from the not-always-easy but actually quite short to-do list we were given by Jesus: love God, love your neighbor.

Yes, we're flawed. Yes, we mess up. Yes, we don't always do it right. But we return to it, to the task at hand, and there are moments, moments, and shining, and sudden onsets of joy. This Love has no expiry date. And that is good news.

May your days be merry and bright.

 

 

 

 

Wing in a sling

 

I fell and broke my right arm on the 16th, and the degree of difficulty of everything has been temporarily increased. Typing is difficult. Driving is difficult. Can't walk through a door carrying anything, because I can't turn doorknobs - doorknobs I never really noticed until they became barriers. I managed a blog post a few days ago, but it will be a little while before the next one moves from heart through head and hands to hyperlink.

Being quiet is good. With Mrs. Peel on my lap, it's very good indeed. I love to read, she loves to purr, and we both stare, and think. Something's bound to come of it. In the meantime, if you would please pray for a speedy restoration to health (and some breaking up of a bureaucratic logjam), I would be very grateful. And fewer doorknobs.

And remember, it's still Christmas. The 12 days don't end on the 25th. They start there, and we're in them. Rejoice!

Circling, circling

No matter how many wings we have, if and when one breaks, we circle.  My own broken wing, my arm in a sling, has reminded me that Advent is neither a journey from here to there, nor a path from this day back to then. It's a spiral, toward the center. Now is then, there is also here. And here is everywhere.

All we, in the darkness, circle what light we can find. That's where we tell stories, and listen to stories, big ones, because each of us needs a bigger story than the story of self.

A lion roars creation into being, a rat looks on a god, a hobbit saves the world, the boy who lived defeats that which could not live. All of these draw from deep myth, and so do many elements of the story of the birth of Christ. As people feel they must remind me, every year. As if myth means untruth.

Any writer, mystic, or mathematician will tell you that what is true sometimes does not fit into what is known to be factual. We must not forget that music was being made long before there was music theory to dictate how one could or could not make it. Languages were spoken long before there were systems of grammar, and I am pretty confident that theos preceded theology. We start so big, and then, in the process of categorizing things, we get small.

I remember being taught, in primary school, that we humans were different and special because we used tools. But as it turns out, so do ravens. Or because we made songs. So do whales. Or have dreams. Ha! Ever had a sleeping, twitching cat on your lap? Or because we just knew stuff. Homo sapiens. Please. We don't even know how to be polite half the time, much less be fully human.

But all is not lost, because we still tell stories. Perhaps someday, if we ever learn to be still and listen, we will hear all the stories around us. Day to day pours forth speech, says the Psalmist, and night to night declares knowledge. Trees might talk to us about community, rocks might teach us to take the long view. Cats have things to say about attention; ravens, about rollicking. Then, maybe, when something impossible and unfactual is nevertheless true, we won't need angels scaring us half to death by shrieking "FEAR NOT!" just to get our attention.

 

Still Jo's girl

So many years ago that this is almost a story that could start with "once upon a time", my family lived in a very big house, a legacy of the days of grand families and grand architects. The realtor called it a mansion. My family still calls it The Big House.

The first floor was indeed very grand. There was a parlor for company, and a library with built-in shelves. A dining room that overlooked a formal rose garden. A ballroom. The second floor had the good bedrooms, big as New York City studio apartments, with much nicer baths than I have ever had since.

My spirit's home, though, was up one more flight, in the small third floor servants' quarters. There, in a little monk's cell of a room with one window, I had a desk, a chair, a box of onion skin paper, my Sheaffer fountain pen, and a box of ink cartridges. And my companion, Jo March. I wanted to be just like Jo March, and to that end I scribbled page after page of - what? stories, probably, and perhaps some poems. I don't remember, and as my family moved a lot, nothing remains of all that ink except the memory of the texture of the paper, and the sound the pen nib made as I wrote line after line after blotted line. Oh, I wanted to be a writer.

Singing turned out to be easier, and my dear Lord is aware that I rather enjoy the spotlight. But this "words thing" never went away. I care about lyrics, I read aloud to people whenever I can, I do inspirational speaking, Shakespeare's King Lear leaves me sobbing on the floor, for Jo's spell has never worn off. And particularly at this time of year, the connection I feel to this fictitious character and to the extraordinary woman who created - or released - her is especially strong. It has long been my Christmas season practice to read Little Women again. Every year, somehow, it seems a better book.

My pretty little red leather-bound copy is currently in storage with the rest of my things, so I went to the local library. Their copy is for in-library use only - can you imagine? I'd have to wear shoes! But I found another treasure that I could take home: Marmee and Louisa by Eve LaPlante (2012). As far as I know LaPlante is the first author to explore the relationship between Lou and her mother, Abigail. Ever since her death in 1888, conventional wisdom has held that Louisa was her daddy's girl through and through, educated by him, inheritor of his gifts, beneficiary of his attention. That never set quite right with me. If the Alcott family was the model for the March family, why was the father absent for most of the book? Well, as it turns out, Bronson Alcott was also much absent in real life, and he never made a living. His mind on higher things, he seems to have been content to let his wife and daughters do all the work for the lowlier purposes of rent and food. Unlike his wife, Alcott did not particularly believe in the equality of women, and he came late to the abolitionist's cause. It was Abigail (Marmee) who encouraged her daughters to live full, good lives and to work to utilize their gifts, Marmee who wrote volumes of journals. And it was Marmee who worked until her health was ruined, as did Louisa, whose writing supported the family until she died at 56 (her royalties did so thereafter). The relationship between mother and daughter was deep, and necessary for both women. LaPlante's is a beautiful and calmly fierce book, well-researched and well-written, sad in many ways, but ultimately inspiring. Abigail was left out of history; Eve has fixed that.

You can buy the book through LaPlante's website, to which I have inserted a link above. Amazon has it, of course, but if you possibly can, please get it from an independent bookseller.

 

 

 

Hello, Santa?

I know it's awfully early to be asking, but please, may I have this?

Thank you.

From datamancer.net

One fair day

Epiphany.

The manifestation of a god, that's what the Greek word means. It also means the sudden realization of a great truth. It seems to me that the two would pretty much go together.

In the Western church, that manifestation is celebrated with the story of three wise men (or magi, or kings. Important folks!) from a different country and tribe, making a long and perilous journey to see the manifestation of the Divine.

Now, we don't often hop up on the nearest camel to follow a star, but that longing for the divine is deep-seated. My favorite description of an epiphany lies in Kenneth Grahame's classic book, The Wind in the Willows, in the chapter called "The Piper at the gates of Dawn".

Rat and Mole have been all night on the river in their boat, searching for a lost baby otter. Rat hears snatches of a music so entrancing that he is compelled to follow the sound to its source. Just before dawn, they land their boat, and walk into a wood to ...

...a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees - crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.

'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him.'

Then suddenly Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror - indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy - but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend, and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Perhaps he would never had dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the immanent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked into the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the sterm, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease ont eh sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in utter peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'

'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never. And yet - and yet - O, Mole,  I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden rim showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

Rat and Mole are then caressed by a breeze that carries a gift of forgetfulness. It is not easy to see a god and carry on in every-day life. So they forget what happened, and gather up the sleeping otter. But they are left with the sense that Something happened.

That's us, too. Even after a great revelation, sometimes all we know is that Something happened. Perhaps everyone has this experience. I know from reading that saints do, and I know from life that artists do. It's in the vision we pursue, it's in the song we seek. We don't all call it by the same name, but that there is Something we have no doubt, and to tell about it is our calling.

 

 

On the twelfth day of Christmas...

  Tomorrrow is the Feast of the Epiphany, the time to celebrate the arrival at the stable in Bethlehem of three travellers bearing three strange gifts. Today is the last day of Christmas, and tonight is Twelfth Night. It's been getting noisy in the apartment, what with all the pipers and dancing gals and calling birds and such. But my true love's gift on the twelfth day is the biggest noise yet: twelve drummers drumming.

The drum is the second-oldest instrument. The voice came first, factory-installed. Then, mimicking the beat of the blood, we started hitting things together. Hands. Rocks. Sticks.  Then wood and animal hides were melded... and everything we call a drum started there. So this last-day-of-Christmas gift is ancient, and loud. Twelve drummers is a lot of drummers. A superabundance. Is there a word for a big group of drummers, something like flock or herd or school? I have no idea. So I am going to call it "an exuberance of drummers".

In the end, that's what I think this Twelve Days of Christmas song is all about. Exuberance. Extravagance. Gifts piled on top of gifts. Full measures, pressed down and running over. Calling, leaping, dancing. How many geese does one need? Have six! How many drummers? Take twelve. It's just so much!

At Christmas I feel God whirling and swooping around us like a lover in a Chagall painting. All Christmas long I hear angels in unexpected places. Surely Christmas is (to borrow a phrase from Celtic thought) a "thin place", when and where the so-called division between the worlds, between mortal and the Divine is transparent and permeable. God comes right through. All we have to do is pay attention. And rejoice.

Maybe every place is a thin place, waiting.

 

 

 

 

 

On the eleventh day of Christmas...

The pipes. The soul-shaking, sacred clamour of the sweet shrieking pipes. A voice of the gods.

I had the great good fortune of working with piper Nancy Tunnicliffe when I recorded Feather and Bone, and continue to bless the day the other pipers referred to me never called me back. She is the best I have ever heard, and I'll gladly tell you why. It's simple: tuning - her pitch is dead-on accurate; time - her tempi never waver; tone - in this raw raucous instrument, the Great Highland Bagpipes, she finds both the sweetness and the bray.

There are bagpipes all over the world, pretty much wherever there were goats, the original design featuring an empty goat and some reeds. Featured in the photo above are Asturian pipes, from northern Spain. Some pipes are sweeter-sounding than others, and more  "house-broken" (i.e. not so bloody loud). In fact, when we see Great Highland Bagpipes on a movie screen, we're often hearing the smaller Irish Uilleann pipes, which offer film score composers more flexibility.

I have always been mad for the pipes - predictable, really, in one who has Scottish, Irish and French blood, and also loves the banjo, which is like unto bagpipes but lo! with strings instead of pipes, (and a gourd added to the goat).  Even so, eleven pipers piping would be quite the noise in this studio apartment. One will do.

So here is a clip of Nancy Tunnicliffe (with her name spelled wrong in the credits, and don't I know how that feels!), playing a medley to set your toes tapping.

 

 

On the ninth day of Christmas...

As I mentioned the other day, I grew up hearing that on the ninth day, my true love gave me "nine ladies waiting". This was the lyric that Fred Waring' Pennsylvanians sang, and as my grandfather was the lead baritone for that wonderful vocal ensemble, it never occurred to me to wonder if it was the right lyric. But that "waiting" bothered me. What were the ladies waiting for? Why did they have to wait? Having just experienced the yearly agonizing wait for Christmas, and then the four endless days between Christmas and my birthday, and still no pony in sight, which meant another year of waiting until maybe, just maybe, if I was good enough, if my grades were high, if I was polite, if if if, there might be a pony... after all that, I felt a kinship and solidarity with the Waiting Nine.

The men in the song, the lords of the very next verse, were allowed to be leaping: into the dance, into the future, to the top of the porch, to the top of the wall, and right on over the ding-dang walls. In my growing-up years, boys were allowed to be athletic, girls were not. But more important, boys were allowed to show that they were smart. That would have been OK, but most of the time... they weren't. No offense, gents, God knows I love you (and you know it, too), but back then, on any given day in primary, middle or high school, my girl friends and I could have made mince of you. Because teachers tended to call on you more often, we were usually denied that triumph. When you were rude, you were full of high spirits. When we were rude, we were uppity. Dire fates were predicted for smart, sassy girls, and indeed, one of those fates came early and fast: if you were smarter than a boy you liked, and showed it, especially in front of other people, he would never like you back. So you put a bridle on your mind, a bit in your mouth, and, holding a tight rein, learned to trot so slow and hide so well that for many women it is the work of a lifetime to come back out of that self-imposed hobbling.

I would like to think that times have changed, but as I see the early hyper-sexualization of little girls, I  think things are the same. And worse. Even without having children of my own, I find I am sometimes awake long into the night worrying about the girls. The various ways in which our culture is failing our children (boys, too) break my heart.

Back to the song. When I learned that there were alternate lyrics for the ninth verse, that the nine ladies were not waiting, but dancing - dancing! - I was thrilled. Perhaps Waring preferred the "waiting" because he was a little bit of a sexist, perhaps becasue it is a more singable lyric, and that can be enough for the singing of a song. But not for the living of a life. Dancing our lives is what we could have been doing all along, and what we must ensure our girls have the right and the power to do.