Good Friday on the front porch

Well, it happend. Gerry read my previous post and e-mailed me to say he'd like to sing. A few phone calls and we had a quorum, and tonight, seven of us -- a tenor, an alto, two trebles and two basses -- sang the songs suggested for the 14 Stations of the Cross on our front porch. It was one of those lovely Midwestern spring evenings that makes the long winter almost worth it.

We started at about 7:45 and it took us about an hour to go through them. The singing was strong, and as I hoped several passersby stopped to listen to the strangely beautiful sounds coming from the porch. The connection of a few of the songs to the station to which they were assigned eluded us, but most of them fit very nicely. A couple of times someone spoke about the station or a song, but mostly we just sang them. I noticed we sang at a some what slower tempo most of the time, which gave it just the right mood

The only complaint from one singer was that there weren't enough fuguing tunes. When I announced that the song for station 11 -- Jesus is nailed to the cross-- was number 300, the alto said, "What's that, Calvary? Hot diggity!"

Easter Anthem at the end was wonderfully trimphant.

After the prepared program, we sang a little more, and then broke for ginger-lemon sandwich cookies and an hour of conversation. It felt right to do something on Good Friday, and this was the right thing to do. We closed with "Living Hope" #500:

When from the dead He raised His Son
And called Him to the sky,
He gave our souls a living hope
That they should never die.

* * * *

Gerry and I have decided to go to Chicago in two weeks for the 21st Annual Sacred Harp Midwest Convention and are going on an outfit he found called Megabus -- $8 one way, $15 the way back. (Some fares are even cheaper: e.g., $1 from Chicago to St. Louis depending on the schedule.) It's hub is Chicago, and it connects to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis, and Indianapolis. We'll get on the bus in Minneapolis at 11:50 pm on Friday and will arrive in Chicago at 7 am Saturday. On Sunday, we leave Chicago about the same time and arrive home by 8 or so. I don't know how they do it, but we're gonna try it out and are looking forward to an adventure.

Following the Stations of the Cross with the Sacred Harp

Here is a wonderful and ambitious post of a Sacred Harp singing Friend who has chosen a Sacred Harp song for each of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. (He turns out to be Mennonite, actually.) My thanks to him. (I also notice that he, too, directed readers to Garry Wills' column cited in my previous post.)

The Stations were not part of my Lutheran upbringing or of my current life as a Friend, so I'm not qualified to know the deeper meanings of each stage or how well the songs he picked matches the traditional mood or lesson of each stage.

But to me the songs each have a quirky kind of appropriateness that I love. Like singing "David's Lamentation" ("Oh my son, oh my son . . .") for the stage "Jesus meets his mother." And "A Cross for Me" for where Simon of Cyrene is made to carry Jesus's cross ("Must Jesus bear the cross alone, And all the world go free? No, there's a cross for ev'ryone, And there's a cross for me").

One of the bad things about Sacred Harp is that it's really hard when you want to sing these songs and you're alone; I want to call up some friends to get together and sing them together on Friday night. Maybe I will.

In any event, I look forward to singing Easter Anthem on Sunday.

Christ among the Partisians

With his characteristic clarity, Garry Wills's piece in Sunday's New York Times "Christ among the Partisians" sheds a lot of light and wisdom that Friends (including this one) could do well to take to heart.

(It's funny: At meeting yesterday, both ministers spoke very near the end of the hour and cited as their texts National Public Radio and the New York Times respectively. My first inclination was to roll my closed eyes, but I resisted the urge and found their calls for commitment to peace in Iraq and justice for immigrants to be genuine and authentic and spoke to my condition of complacency. I wonder whether I'll be able to resist speaking to Wills' NYT piece myself next week?)

Bus poetry. Unknowing, I understand.

One of the several delights of becoming a regular bus rider again is the improved quality and interest of the in-bus advertising. In the old days, most of them were garish, dreary ads for bankruptcy lawyers, blood plasma donation centers, earn-thousands-at-home-in-your-spare-time scams, etc.

Now, almost all of the ads are public service announcements, e.g., information about new bus lines, rules for using a cell phone or music players on the bus, phone numbers to report lost-and-found items, etc.

And they've also begun to post bus poetry, which I've seen in other cities, and love.

Here's the one I read and learned this morning. It's by Octovio Paz.

Brotherhood

Homage to Claudius Ptolemy

I am a man: little do I last

and the night is enormous.
But I look up: the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written, and at this very moment
someone spells me out.

Let us now praise important but un-famous men

Caleb Foote has died.