Messiah

Tonight we heard Messiah by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and a small choir formed from the Memphis Symphony Chorus. They outdid themselves. It was wonderfully, powerfully done. I'll be dreaming the music, I suppose.

The man next to me had brought the score with him and said for me to poke him if he accidentally started singing. It is hard for me too, in a way, to sit there and not sing. I saw a woman on our row mouthing the words.

Seeing the people around me was almost as delightful as hearing the music. Something about the way the pews were shaped and placed made it easier than usual to see people. And because they kept the lights up.

So I saw this man with his well worn score, the woman mouthing the words. People all around were gently swaying in time to the music, as I found myself frequently doing. I noticed a woman two rows ahead of us who could barely contain her joy when it was time for the Hallelujah Chorus, and when everyone broke into applause, she not only clapped but also raised her hands upward, the way people sometimes do in worship.

I sat there and wondered how many people there believed what was being sung, or how they believed it. I thought about this again after Worthy Is the Lamb, when the applause rang on and on and on, longer than usual for a symphony performance. And certainly longer than you would expect for a piece so frequently performed, so familiar.  My own hands began to hurt from it, but there was no way I would stop as long as it was socially acceptable to keep clapping! The joy in the air was palpable.

Messiah is long and covers much territory, and my mind went to so many places this evening as I listened to the music--to the stories and ideas the passages point to, and to times in my own life when I've sung the music, or when I've "beheld the Lamb" in a particular way. I thought about the ways I've gone astray like sheep, and about my high school music teacher introducing us to various pieces and talking about how Handel used the music to "show" sheep straying here and there and valleys being exalted and rough places being made plain.

Tonight I wondered where all the minds in the room were going, what all was represented by the people present, what their stories were, why they loved this music so much. And there was no doubt at all that they did, given that prolonged applause. I thought of Kurt Vonnegut's story about the child who had seen the sun, living on a planet where no one had seen the sun and didn't believe it was real. They teased the child who talked about it, and the story doesn't have a happy end, though the sun proves to be real, after all.

I just wondered tonight, what does Messiah mean to all these people in this room? For how long will it continue to be cherished and performed in a culture that seems to be growing more and more secular? Will the music alone be enough to keep it alive? And if so, how often might it actually cause someone to wonder, to ponder, to search?

It's amazing where all a mind can go during two and a half hours of music!

But it kept coming back to the words and the music, and tonight was a beautiful gift in this life of watching and waiting for the eventual Hallelujah Chorus. Hallelujah!