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pain in my head I'm having recurring pain in my head at the upper left corner of the back of my neck. I wonder if I should worry. During the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'm often inclined to run around screaming at the top of my lungs 'til my voice quits things like, "Parate viam Domini! Rectas facite semitas eius!" It occurs to me that this is not my job, and that it might get me put away for awhile. (It WAS John the Baptist's job, and eventually, he got put away, too, though I don't think he was screaming it in that language, and the Latin would almost surely be lost on the people around here.) I am regularly amazed at the amount of beauty in the world. Occasionally, walking home late at night and looking up at the sky and the outlines of buildings, I wonder at the immensity of it all. In those moments, my existential crises are squelched for a time. I am also regularly struck by the power of the human voice raised in song. There's this thing we do, a service that occurs at 10 p.m. on Sundays during the academic year, called Compline. It's the last of the canonical monastic hours, and I believe we're one of two churches in the country that do it regularly (the other is in Seattle, and I'm told they do it a little differently). In these two churches, however, it's become quite a trend; it's amazing the number of people who attend. There's no priest, no preaching, just the choir, hidden on a balcony, singing into the darkness of the church, which is illuminated by probably about a hundred or so candles. In the half-hour that we sing these Gregorian chants and pieces of five-hundred-year-old polyphony, the experience of the unseen listeners below varies, but I'm told for many it is a deeply emotionally moving and spiritual (though not necessarily religious) thing. There is a quiet transcendence and peace that comes with sitting in the darkness of that place, staring at those candles, either amidst the music or in the silence that comes before, after and between. And then, when it's over, we who have been singing leave, perhaps recognisable to those people who congregate outside afterwards, but largely anonymous, despite the affect we may have just had on those congregated, be they friends or strangers. It has become one of my favourite things to do. A sort of energy seems to be channeled down through the centuries through the singing of these ancient melodies in their archaic language; it renders the passage of time irrelevant, almost nonexistent. It intensifies my awe at all creation and the reverberation in my consciousness of that prayer: "Hasten, O God, the coming of thy kingdom..." r
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