by Nils Peterson
There’s that list of religions from which we’re offered a choice. If none of them quite fit, at the bottom there’s None. Well that’s not for me either so I’ve taken to calling myself a Non-None. My religious feeling is not defined by any of the above, but it certainly is not defined by None. Some thoughts.
While knotting my shoes, which gets harder as I get older, I realized that if I were Catholic I would prefer to go to a church, well, cathedral really, in which the mass was sung in Latin. I’ve sung many of the great mass settings which are in Latin, and I know enough Latin to understand what I’m singing and conductors always insist on singers having a sense of what the sounds coming out of their mouths mean, but while tying my shoes I realized that I didn’t care about understanding. What I wanted was the incantatory sound, the glorious AH of Ave, the dark EH of Requiem, the round OH of Gloria. It was the sound that penetrated me, of what has sometimes been called “the holy vowels,” – think of the OM sound that some feel is the heartbeat of the universe. How rich it is to say, richer even in a chant. Some would say, and I for the moment agree, it is an all-encompassing sound. So maybe understanding the words of the mass gets in the way of the mass. I don’t insist on this, but wonder.
Remember the ending of Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur?”
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
How great that ah! is. It is an Ah of Awe, and we feel the awe deep down, and the exhalation of our saying is prayer. (I admit that it’s good to understand the words of Hopkins that bring us to that great sound then releases us from it.)
I think we have lost the feeling of awe and so the universe we live in has grown smaller except for the astrophysicists who seem to understand the universe as a vast cathedral. Once here on earth we found the language of awe. That language was the cathedral. It spoke our feeling of awe and also recreated it in us. (Yes, there are smaller spaces that offer their version of that experience and if we use eyes and ears, nature too enjoys building cathedrals. Maybe there’s nothing that’s not.)
Today I vote for awe
One day an ancestor picked up a stone,
found it comforting, useful. What to do,
but start noticing the world as something
other than food and fear. World asked us, then,
to keep track – “Draw on walls of caves,” it said,
offering us charcoal and ocherous pigments.
As bison and reindeer leapt out of our hands
they called out “Look inside too.”
Awe became God, then, with her many stories
to tell the children – or was She/He there all along
waiting for someone to talk with.
A Riff on Alleluia,
Four open vowels beginning with the openest, ah,
— the one the doctor tells you to say so he can look all the way down your throat,
then next leh as in lent,
— a little bit more forward in the mouth,
then even more forward, lu,
— mouth pursed as if to whistle,
then a retreat for the yah
— like the turn that makes a dance a dance.
Tongue has been dancing, the elegant dance of ahs and ells,
three steps forward and a yah turning back, showing off, enjoying
the supple life. Cheeks are the corps de ballet, back, outward, forward and back.
Say it a few times and pay attention to what’s going on in your mouth, the pleasures of the movement of your mouth.
Alleluia the easiest and loveliest word to sing. It invites
your tongue to dance and you to music.
Hallelujah is Forceful, Political, Marching Orders,
but Alleluia is lyrical, introverted, joyful.