Lord, suffer me to sing
these wounds by which I am made
and marred
—Christian Wiman, “Lord Is Not a Word”
I do not know if song came before prayer, or prayer before song, but I do know that together they are magnified and soar as they cannot do alone. Hebrew and Greek have no separate word for music, nor does the language of the Inupiat; the boundary between singing and speech wavers like a mirage.3 I come to song to help me pray, and I come to prayer to help me sing. Sitting in a rehearsal room in a hard metal folding chair every Monday in Seattle after Dad and Kathy’s funeral, I start to sing. I start to pray. I do not know yet that music will lead me to a river.
The chorale director stands in front of plate glass windows overlooking Lake Union and the headlights of I-5, slicing through the dark night. Rehearsal is a torrent of voices, each part channeling and eddying, rising to a frenzied pitch. The words are not hard. There are only three: “Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. The music carries the words. The words carry the music.
My score of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor is well used. I wonder if the singers who wore the pages to this petal softness held it with as much hope as I do, opened it with such expectation laced with trepidation and desire. It is a holy book, this score, this pathway to prayer. I sit and I sing and I feel lucky to be here, doing the only new thing I’ve been able to take on since I came back from Alaska after the funeral and selling my childhood home; it’s the thing I needed to do, though I could not have said that myself.
It had happened in a slow, quiet way, my getting to that hard metal folding chair. In the midst of grief’s restlessness and languor, I’d opened a flyer that came in the mail from the Seattle Symphony, advertising a performance of the Mozart Requiem conducted by Itzhak Perlman five months hence. I pulled up the Symphony Chorale page online and looked at audition schedules. They were two weeks away. I signed up.
The word requiem comes from the Latin, meaning “to rest,” and the Requiem Mass is a service for the dead in the Christian tradition. It is a structure of prayers that has varied over the ages, depending on the history of the church and the intention of the composer, and it has been set to music many times, perhaps most famously by Mozart.
A gentle introduction and the Kyrie begin the Requiem Mass: “Lord have mercy upon us.” From there it moves into the terror of the Dies Irae, or Day of Wrath. This part of the Requiem departs from the standard Mass sequence and was first added in the fourteenth century because of its vivid imagery, a nod to the inability of our daily prayers to fully express our grief. The Domine Jesu asks God to bless those we have lost. The Sanctus and Benedictus praise God, and the Agnus Dei begs God’s mercy. The Lux Aeterna pleads for everlasting light to shine on the dead.
Singing the Requiem for Dad and Kathy could be the ritual I thought I was missing. If I could get into the Symphony Chorale. The thing was, I had a hard time concentrating on much. My mind floated listlessly, as though in a mountain fog. How could I start something new when I could barely put one foot in front of the other?
Perhaps it had not been slow and quiet after all. Perhaps it happened fiercely, a propulsion of pain. Who’s to say how these things happen? But the flyer I received, and the audition that followed, lined up as though orchestrated from another place, by a bigger hand, in the careful way that even when you do not feel him, God moves gently in your life.
The conductor rehearses the men through a section. I sit and listen. The folding chairs around me are full of people, most of whom I don’t know, some of whom might consider the words they are singing, some of whose only interest in the words is their proper pronunciation, the intonation of vowels. Some are Christian, some Jewish, some atheist, and, I imagine, others are of different beliefs yet. Some are here for the music, and some are here for prayer. I am here for both. I need the music to pierce me, the prayer to bleed me. I am here because I don’t know what to say, how to ask, how to address this God I’ve known for so long when parts of me are dead. I know only that I need to pray. And I need the music to do it for me. I need the music to pull me into the time called kairos, unbound by clocks and calendars, to give me courage to stay with the pain and help me pray this ancient prayer.
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison.