December 12, 2010
Sunday
Today is the Third Sunday in Advent, known in the Roman liturgy as Gaudete Sunday. I wrote on Thursday about the little brouha that erupted on Facebook over a new pastor’s question about the order of the candle lighting. I lighted the pink candle on the Advent wreath I keep at home. My Lutheran congregation uses all white candles on a large wreath mounted on a floor stand. The third candle is at the top, and most years it seems that the shortest acolyte we have is on the rotation for this task.
This is also the day I traditionally had my Holiday Open House Extravaganza. I haven’t had it since 2006, and very likely never will again, at least not in the form it always took. But I think of it every year, the way one thinks of a departed friend on some anniversary.
Today I attended the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, a concert offered by the choir Ron sings with at his Catholic Cathedral parish. I was accompanied by one of Ron’s oldest friends, who was in town for a few days. He was going to go to the Hershey Community Chorus concert (Ron’s parents sang with that group for many years, as did Ron), but Ron talked him out of it, claiming that while the group worked hard and put on a fine event, it was mostly Jingle Bells and show tunes. (I remember one year when a gigantic Arm of Santa Claus descended from the flyloft and placed a Baby Jesus figure in a manger, reminding us of the True Meaning even though the most religious song they sang was “Deck the Halls.”)
The Cathedral parish calls its concert series “Under the Dome.” The space is really quite beautiful, freshly redecorated for the building’s centennial a few years ago. When we arrived the musicians in the small orchestra were already seated, inside the chancel rail. The tabernacle on the high altar was standing open and the sanctuary lamp had been extinguished, indicating that the Blessed Sacrament had been removed, and the space was now temporarily an auditorium and not a sanctuary. Nevertheless, people arriving for the concert genuflected before they entered the pew, and during the concert, the lectors who read the lessons stopped in the crossing and bowed.
The habits of reverence in a church that some of us have developed over a lifetime can be hard to break. Our friend and I did use the temporarily secular nature of the space (and the fact that the concert had not yet begun) to justify checking the football scores via Blackberry (him) and accepting a text message from a friend about those scores (me), and then responding to it briefly.
The choir filed in then, and when the high clear voice of their best soprano filled the space with the opening of  “Once in Royal David’s City,” the idea that we were sitting in an auditorium completely fell away. For the next ninety minutes I was held rapt by the simple story told in song and scripture, and I forgot to feel sorry for myself because I was not at home eating the cardamom rolls I bake for St. Lucy’s Day and singing “Here Are Poinsettias” with people I was in seventh grade with fifty years ago.
I didn’t even bother to find out until we were almost through dinner (having chosen seats away from the TV area at the sports bar we chose because it’s convenient and we like the food) that the New Orleans Saints had won and our home town favorite, Marques Colston, had another good game.
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