"Empire of Light" Blesses the New Year

My friend Suzanne and I went to Empire of Light on the recommendation of NPR and the reputation of writer/director Sam Mendes. Very glad we did. Also very surprised that a poem by Philip Larkin seems to have had a part in shaping the movie.

Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a white middle-aged middle manager of the Empire Cinema in Margate, England, 1981, who trains Stephen, a new employee played by Micheal Ward. They find common interest in the design of the old theatre and in caring for an injured bird. There are problems: a daily dose of lithium is all that keeps demons of her mental illness at bay, while he feels more vulnerable every week during a surge of racist nationalism in the U.K.

We want these people to make each other happy, and so do their co-workers (except her abusive boss, played by Colin Firth). The projectionist Norman, played by Toby Jones, teaches Stephen how a thin stream of light passing through still pictures at 24 frames per second registers to the human eye as life, and the darkness between frames doesn't show.

So movies are themselves a metaphor for the hope that both of these people need.

A key moment in their relationship occurs at midnight on New Year's Eve. Another key moment is an admission that "last year is dead," conveyed by the "fullgrown thickness" of trees in spring. We hear that message from Hilary's reading aloud of Philip Larkin's poem "The Trees." Larkin's trees are also telling us, "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

From a movie that has its share of darkness, it's a sweet message.

New Poems at Year's End

For an hour or two every weekday morning, yellow legal pad in my lap, I sit in the poetry workshop I've made in my basement. Since Halloween, I've posted five new poems at First Verse, along with images by my friend Susan Rouse. (One of those is included here.)

• Ghost Story
• Cliff Hanger
• Relay
• Live Stream
• On Track

Although they're all taken from real-life incidents, I had to flash my poetic license a lot.

Like a Sondheim Virgin

I'm no Sondheim virgin. My first experience was the LP of A Little Night Music 50 years ago (thanks to Paul Ford who became Sondheim's go-to pianist ). You might call me a "Sondheimite," but I prefer another term I read recently, "Steveadore."

Still, I do sometimes wonder, if I were to encounter Sondheim's songs for the first time now (as I "discovered" Joni Mitchell some years ago), would their qualities be apparent without my knowing the stories and thematic connections, without the actors who "sell" them? Must you have "been there" to "get" a Sondheim song?

Eleri Ward's album A Perfect Little Death gave me a perfect little opportunity to find out. Ward recorded 13 Sondheim songs in her closet during the COVID lockdown with an acoustic guitar and her laptop. She labels it "indie-folk Sondheim." Hearing just a few seconds of Ward and her guitar, you might mistake her for early Joni Mitchell.

Ward sings the melodies straight. Her accompaniment might be called "stripped down," but what I hear is Ward building up each song the way Sondheim himself did, with a "vamp," a repeated musical pattern. Ward's vamps are just enough to provide a steady beat and an outline of harmony, leaving space for Sondheim's unexpected turns into different keys.

All that said, I'm now going to imagine that I'm hearing these songs for the first time.

First Listens

With the first lines of the first song, I'm disoriented:

And are you beautiful and pale
with yellow hair, like her?
I'd want you beautiful and pale,
the way I've dreamed you were,
Johanna.

The initial word "And" drops us into someone's interior monologue. The woman (or man?) who sings of this Johanna has evidently not seen her recently (if ever), and we haven't a clue who the "her" is that Johanna might be "like," except for the hint that they might be family, expected to resemble each other. The same voice, overdubbed, sings "I feel you, Johanna" and, later, "City on fire." It's all very weird, but intriguing. The voices and images express a strong yearning for both Johanna and "her," a regret for time lost, and resignation to thinking "less and less" of Johanna as "we learn to say 'good-bye.'" Some conflict -- a city on fire? -- is preventing a reunion. You don't have to know the details to know those feelings.

Three songs evoke the domestic life of women (presumably). While these women sing of buttons, bread, the coffee cup, tending the flowers, they all seem to be preoccupied by someone absent. Yet each song has a different character.

• "Every Day a Little Death" perks along like a children's song, before the lines "I would murder him right there, / but first I die." We get the sense that someone who seems in control is letting her mask slip -- just a little.
• "Losing My Mind" starts as a cheerful love note about how "I think about you" all day long, addressed to someone who may be away at work. But then he doesn't come home during her "sleepless nights," and, in a recap of earlier stanzas, frustration replaces cheerfulness. She raises her voice. "Does no one know?" she asks. "You said you loved me," she sings, mournfully, "or were you just being kind?" When she sings "Am I losing my mind?" at the end, almost in a whisper, I think she means it.
• "In Buddy's Eyes" the singer tells us that "life is slow, but it seems exciting 'cause Buddy's there." When she sings of Buddy, her voice warms up: "I'm so lucky, I feel like crying." When she concludes, "the best I ever thought of me / is every minute there to see / in Buddy's eyes," she sounds ecstatic. She has doubts about herself, but she's grateful to the man who doesn't doubt her, climbing to a note high above the range of the rest of the song, but soft, when she sings of his "eyes."

"Pretty Women" is another look at women going about their daily activities, a reverie about how "something in them cheers the air." It's a lovely melody. But something's wrong. I thought Ward was singing in the character of a man, and a line later confirms it: "How [pretty women] make a man sing!" But as the images pile up about women observed from a cool distance -- at their mirrors, in their gardens, silhouetted -- and we hear how women "stay within you, breathing lightly," we get a stalker vibe incongruous with the lovely melody.

Ward's lilting "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" sounds like a Victorian murder ballad. The vocabulary is Dickensian: "He shaved the faces of gentlemen / who never thereafter were heard of again." Rhymes are playful: "Inconspicuous, Sweeney was, / quick and quiet and clean 'e was." Except for the complications of an eerie overdubbed vocal obligato and elaborate middle section about how the title character "heard music that nobody heard," it's a song you might learn around a campfire. I love how Ward's voice dips low to ominous effect for the refrain, "the demon barber of Fleet Street."

Intimacy is worth all the inconveniences of living with someone. That's the message you get from "Being Alive." She sings first how she has to put up with "Someone to hold me too close, someone to know me too well... someone to sit in my chair..." But soon she's singing the same phrases as a prayer: "Somebody hold me too close, Somebody know me too well." She drives the point home with the biggest vocal climax of the album.

The final song "Sunday" is strangely compelling. There's no "you" or "me" in it, only a description of "a perfect park" where people are "strolling through the trees... forever." The park is described in terms of colors and abstract shapes: "blue-purple-yellow-red water" and "the verticals of trees," for two examples. Several overdubbed voices sing harmony, creating a sense that a community is sharing this experience "on an ordinary Sunday." I'm intrigued enough to wish I had someone to connect the dots.

The Sequel Eleri Ward's second Sondheim album is available for download. Her producer's addition of strings has not diluted the strength of her straightforward vocals. It's called Keep a Tender Distance. Every Steveadore knows that phrase from "Marry Me A Little" cut from Company and later restored. I'm waiting for the CD.

[For a curated list of articles about Sondheim, his work and his colleagues, see My Sondheim Page]

Christmas Card with Mom

 

That's Mom with my sister, with me, with her Visiting Angel Laura, and my brother.

With her blood sugar under control, now, she's much cheerier. She's engaged in a conversation, and you can tell she means something when she speaks. Though the words don't make sense, often, they sometimes do. We draw her out on how she wants us to respond, with "How do you feel about that?"

[See my page Dementia Diary for a curated list of blogposts that relate to our 10+ years dealing with the disease.]

"God as Trinity: An Approach through Prayer" by Sarah Coakley

The image of the Trinity, from the 15th century, appears with a hymn from the same period in a blog by "A Clerk of Oxford". Here are verses two and three of many more:

2. O three persons in one unity
Being but one god and no mo, [more]
One in substance, essence and might,
O deus sine termino.

3. O, which hast made both day and night,
Heaven and earth round like an O
By thy wisdom and endless might,
O deus sine termino.

The Clerk notes that 21st century Christians write tortured arguments about the Trinity while their medieval counterparts wrote beautiful and playful hymns. The "O," she writes, is a standard vocalisation in hymns, but also a common expression of "one," and also an image of the earth and heavens "round like an O."

Looking for images of the Trinity, I ran across an article about conflicts over the doctrine at another blog Anxious Bench (06/2016). One group of Baptists accuses other Baptists of making up a new (false) god by pushing the Trinity; their opponents accuse the others of imposing their own views and limits on the Bible.

My assignment this week, however, has been to read an essay by Sarah Coakley printed in the Reading and Reflection Guide, Volume B used by participants in Education for Ministry (pp. 253-264).

Coakley's "approach" to the Trinity "through prayer" comes with assurances that she understands why Christians would dismiss "seemingly alien formulas" of the Council of Chalcedon in the 5th century. The focus of scholarship and devotion on the person of Jesus has been much more appealing to believers in the past 200 years, and the many references to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the New Testament are "unsystematic." Even charismatic Christians think of having the Spirit as an expression for having an experience of "God with us." That the Trinity is an obstacle to interfaith dialogues is another point against pushing the doctrine.

Even as Coakley introduces the idea that Christians in silent prayer to God feel they are being prayed in, she first lists caveats. The "phenomenon of prayer is varied" and its descriptions are "inexact," and there's "circularity" in using "certain cherished doctrines" to interpret prayer that has already been influenced by those same doctrines; and other faiths have "contemplative" traditions in which the sense of a Trinity has not arisen.

To all this, Coakley answers that Paul struggled to express his sense of the spirit within that leads us to Christ and God the Father. "No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor 12.3). Christ is not just "an external model," she writes, but indwelling: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2.20).

When we experience abandonment by the Spirit, Coakley writes, it's neither the historical Jesus nor the eternal Father who leaves us. The "dark night of the soul" that St. John Chrysostom (ca.400 CE) wrote about is, she says, "the death-throes of the domineering ego" as the Spirit breaks down our the barriers of our individualism. (The analogy comes to mind of the symptoms that resulted from a recent vaccine: I felt the fight between my body's defenses and the force that was teaching my body to resist the virus.)

Coakley up to this point in the essay is taking bits from Paul and presuming to tell us what our experience will be like when we really pray. I'm on the edge of resenting the essay.

Coakley is on more solid ground when she goes back to the councils that established the Trinity, and even further back, to show that the Trinity was something that Christians experienced and were passionate about. The councils were not "periodic bureaucratic reviews of a continuing theoretical problem." She shows first that Christians of the first three centuries prayed longer, and more often, than we think of today; "spiritual life" was not for specialists. Second, she shows how the liturgy of the eucharist embeds the doctrine of Trinity, even in the simple exchange "May the Spirit of the Lord be with you...And with thy Spirit: it is the Spirit in the priest who invokes the presence of Christ, not the priest's incantation.

While Coakley stresses Christian experience of the Trinity through prayer, she tells us that the councils' trinitarian formulas were "primarily" defenses against alternatives that were "misleading."

Regarding other faiths, Coakley admits that the Trinity is a barrier. "Yet," she writes, "the darkness, the sheer defencelessness of wordless prayer usually lead ... to a greater openness to other traditions."

Just at the end of her essay, Coakley raises the tradition of the Spirit as feminine and motherly, who was called "Our Mother" by Julian of Norwich. Gregory of Nyssa saw a balance of masculine and feminine between Son and Spirit.

[Our clergy's sermons on the Trinity have been helpful to me. See Belief in Things Unseen and Episcopal Wisdom on Death, Trinity, and Church Architecture]

The Rector Retires; The Clerk Reflects

The applicant whom the Rector Search Committee rejected became the chief priest of the corner at Church Street and Polk. That was 11 years ago; now Fr. Roger Allen is retiring from St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, and it's time to reflect.

Origin Story

In 2009, parishioners expressed to a survey their preferences for a priest under 45 years old with children and at least 10 years' experience leading a large congregation. At 57, happily married without children, an ex-lawyer who'd led a small parish only six years, Fr. Roger Allen did not meet specs.

Yet we on the Search Committee heard good things from priests who'd worked with him, and we heard from a gentleman whose parish was destroyed by Katrina a month after Roger's first Sunday there: "Fr. Roger was a tower of strength to us when everything had fallen apart." When Fr. Roger's name was one of three that our committee passed to the Vestry, the Sr. Warden told me that two candidates were perfectly suitable; they elected the one who was extraordinary.

Clerk of the Vestry Looks Back

Soon after Fr. Roger began his tenure at St. James, I became Clerk of the Vestry, so I've not only seen the ups and downs of his service, but I've typed them.

Regarding the business of the church, Fr. Roger exerted control. He consolidated bank accounts and sorted through an array of special funds. He took a hard look at groups and programs that had operated for years without oversight. Some who chafed at his oversight had also criticized the previous rector (unjustly) for not being strong enough: go figure.

Every year, to reach a balanced budget, the Vestry considered cutting programs and personnel. Every year, Fr. Roger maintained that a church cannot thrive if it cuts what's vital to the parish. Have faith, he would say. Every year, parishioners came through with their pledges, expenses were lower than expected, other resources were found, and the budget balanced.

Fr. Roger's choices of personnel made a difference. He gave the parish what it wanted in Associate Rector Fr. Daron Vroon, a young priest with children. (See an appreciation of Fr. Daron.) Peter Waggoner brought children, teens, and college students into the choir program, and established a "St. James School of Music" where musicians could give lessons -- an outreach program that paid dividends to the church in dollars and in participation. Matt Bowers reinvigorated the flagging Youth Ministry; when he moved out of state during COVID, Riley Dugan continued to grow the program. Fr. Roger hired staff from outside of the parish to serve as disinterested professionals: Jenny Mancini, Assistant to Clergy; Charlene Smith, Financial Manager; Amy Goetze, the Director of Communications (someone to manage our web site -- at last!); and Building Superintendent Erik Linso, who saves the church thousands of dollars with DIY proactive repairs.

Fr. Roger's pastoral ministry happened mostly out of my sight, but I got a sense of it early in his tenure. I was still known for chairing the Search Committee when an elderly gentleman accosted me after a service. "Do you know what that rector you got us did last week?" I braced myself. "He stayed all night with me and my wife when she went into the Emergency Room." I know Fr. Roger recently took similar care with a bereaved father. As Clerk taking names of visitors after services, I saw the personal connections Fr. Roger had made to the people who waited in line for a word with him. People routinely clasped both of his hands; they hugged him; they whispered in his ear, and received whispered words back, or a promise, "I'll call you." He has often visited my mother in memory care, but I wouldn't know it if her caregivers hadn't told me.

Until COVID, Fr. Roger saw to it that worship took place at St. James nearly every day. Sundays there were three services for three worship styles (Rite One no music, Rite Two with music, Rite One high church with chanting), plus Evensong spoken, sometimes sung. Weekdays there was morning prayer, and Wednesday evening healing services. Some of my most memorable worship experiences were for feast days I'd never known about in my 30 previous years in the Church. Fr. Daron or Fr. Roger would preach and serve communion for groups of six-to-twelve parishioners on Ascension Day, the Annunciation, and, in the church cemetery, All Soul's Day.

Metrics of all sorts were headed in the right direction, bucking trends in the Diocese, until COVID hit in March 2020, and our church building was practically barricaded by decree of the Bishop. Still, Fr. Roger and his team found ways to do church, adapting to changing protocols. Easter live-streamed from Fr. Daron's living room was memorable -- with mother Julie Vroon keeping her youngest boys respectfully silent, mostly. I stood in for the choir a few times once that was allowed, singing to the camera accompanied by interim organist Paul Kelley. There were eucharists in the parking lot, with priests in masks moving from car to car even in cold wind and rain. No wonder that Fr. Roger, expressing thanks when church at last opened up again, was overcome with emotion and couldn't speak.

COVID was responsible in one way or another for declines in attendance, discontinuation of the small services, and the departure of the choir director. Fr. Roger's appointment of Bryan Black to lead music at St. James may turn out to be one of most enduring and consequential gifts in his legacy. As a baritone in the choir, that's how it feels.

So now Fr. Roger can rest. When Roger introduced me to his wife Elisabeth back during the search process, he said he'd married her because "she's fun!" I'm sure she's thrilled. In the words of that catchy hymn tune (with an even catchier title Ora Labora), a glad sound comes with the setting sun, / "Servants, well done."

Reflections on Sermons I've reflected on sermons by Fr. Roger through the years. I'd make notes on my bulletin, and write on my blog if my teaching schedule gave me the time. Here are my reflections, most recent listed first:

Fr. Roger Allen

• What Puts the "Dead" in the Dead Sea(09/2022) is a parable that Fr. Roger found in a quirk of mideastern geography.
• What's New in that New Commandment from Jesus (05/2022), a question that Fr. Roger Allen answered the day after a horrific shooting in Buffalo.
• For My Eyes Have Seen Thy Salvation (02/2022), my response to that text, and Fr. Roger's questons.
• Sermon in Nine Words (01/2022) by Jesus, with commentary by Fr. Roger Allen
  
• A Silent "Silent Night" and other Tales from Omicron Christmas (12/2021)
• Death, Trinity, and Church Architecture (06/2021) is an olio of highlights and insights by Fr. Roger and Fr. Daron.
• Fear Not (04/2020) is a message by Fr. Roger livestreamed from a barricaded church, added to my own reflection on Isaiah and the pandemic, "Deep Gloom Enshrouds the Nations."
• Christmas Present: Carols and Lessons (12/2019) reflects on Fr. Roger's sermons for three services I attended in 20 hours.
• Episcopal Church at Work (01/2018) So much planning went into making the service; the sermon brought it all together.
• Easter Vigil after a Painful Holy Week (04/2018) Dogs. Diagnoses. Darkness.
• Give me that Organized Religion (08/2017) Fr. Roger Allen on what you miss when you miss church
  
• Ascension Day: It's Up to Us (05/2017) helped convince me that this least loved season of the church year is the one to pay most attention to.
• A New Parable: The Farmer's Third Wish (09/2016)
• Theology with Martini and Ice Cream (08/2016) is a memorable message from Fr. Roger Allen
• Beyond Being Right(02/2015) relays messages about duality from sermons by Fr. Daron and Fr. Roger.
• Jesus Ascended: Then What? responds to a team effort by Fr. Roger and Fr. Daron to focus our attention on the season of "Ordinary Time." (06/2014)
• Father Roger and Water (01/2012)

"Thinking Inside the Box" by Adrienne Raphel

When crossword puzzles first became a fad in America in the 1920s, moral panic ensued. Editorialists in England cried that America was "enslaved" to crosswords; but soon, the English were addicted. We learn this from Adrienne Raphel's Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who can't live without them (p.78).  The book was a gift to me from dear friend Kitty Drew and her late husband Terry Strecker.

Raphel pushes back on those who regard puzzle-solving as a shameful waste of time and effort. She almost convinces.

In favor of crosswords, Raphel offers these facts:

• People at the tops of their fields regularly work(ed) crosswords: Nabokov, Eliot, Auden, Sondheim, Pelosi, President Clinton, Bret Favre, and Yo-Yo Ma (xiv).
• A puzzle saved civilization when it was planted in the London Times as bait to draw puzzle-solvers to Bletchley Park, where they broke the Nazis' enigma code (91).
• Studies show that doing crosswords delays the onset of dementia (ch. 13). (I wish to forget that dementia, when it does hit, hits puzzlers harder.)

Then there's the beneficence of Will Shortz, puzzle editor of the New York Times, "puzzle master" of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and "everyone's uncle":

He carries himself with the formal politeness of a foreign affairs diplomat and the wholesomeness of a Midwestern tennis coach. He has a sheepish grin, boyish cheeks, and a trimmed mustache that defies trendiness; his eyes flicker on each blink between anxious to please and slyly ready to deceive. (65)

Raphel meets with Shortz and his assistants at the puzzle-master's home, a "Juilliard of puzzling" for his interns, where they sift through hundreds of submissions from hopeful puzzle-writers nation-wide. Raphel herself writes a puzzle, giving us insight to the tricks, tools, and demands of the craft. Like most of the others she saw at Shortz's home, hers comes back with the notation TDEME. The letters stand for "Theme Didn't Excite Me Enough" (69), but I notice that the pronunciation of the letters could be "tedium."

Is joy a good enough reason to spend a lot of your life doing crosswords? What makes crosswords enjoyable has changed over the decades. During the Shortz tenure at the Times, the puzzles have tilted away from puzzles that rewarded arcane knowledge towards word-play. Unlike his predecessor Eugene T. Maleska, Shortz allows phrases, brand names (ZZZQUIL was one answer), and pop cultural references. Shortz and his team look for "the kind of pattern that puts an involuntary smile on the editors' faces" (70).

In other chapters, Raphel takes us to a crossword-solving competition, she reviews some faux pas that prompted Shortz and his staff to remove their white-male blinders, and she surveys puzzles in fiction.

Still, what good is a puzzle when you've done it? I've a pile of puzzle books going back 15 years. With my notations beside the hardest-won and cleverest answers -- mostly, HA! and AH-HA! -- the books are trophies, stacked and annually dusted with reverence. But I've never reopened one.

Despite Raphel's book, there's an accusing angel inside me charging that I've wasted time solving puzzles that could have gone into studying great literature or creating literature of my own.

The devil's advocate argues that working a crossword, reading a poem, and writing a poem are equally creative. Sure, someone else shaped the piece, leaving us the clues. Still, our imaginations and memories are also struggling to find the perfect word, the interconnection, the shape, the meaning. Coming to puzzles from the other side, we mirror what their creators do.

When I'm writing a poem, closing in on the draft that I will eventually decide is the final one, I feel like I'm uncovering something that I should have seen all along. Like the solution to a crossword, the right words were there -- somewhere in the back of my mind -- the whole time. So, whether I'm creating something myself or re-creating what someone else composed, the sensation is the same.

There's a quasi-religious side to crosswords, too:

• Stephen Sondheim, famous composer-lyricist and the man whose British-styled "cryptic crosswords" introduced the genre to American audiences*, said that's the thing about crosswords: you know there IS a solution.  Sondheim never believed in the Creator of the universe; but he liked believing in the creator of any puzzle.   
  
• Shortz wrote in his introduction to Cartoon Puzzles: "I haven't just solved something, I've discovered something that's pretty. And I don't know how the people who put this together did it." His sense of awe and gratitude is where religion begins.

So, to pass the time with a puzzle is not a waste of time. Neither is reading about it in Raphel's playful book.

*Cryptic clues are two-in-one: first, there's the answer, and then a play on words that gives the answer in another way. "Successor to The Sound of Music" gives you HEIR (a successor) which has the "sound" of music, i.e., air. "Entertain and wind again" gives you REGALE, which consists of the word "gale," i.e., a strong wind, and "re-" again.

I've crossed crosswords and theology before:

• Theology of Crossword Puzzles: A Shortz Sermon is an acrostic on the name of NPR's "puzzle master" for which each line relates a truth about crosswords to a spiritual principle (03/2010)
• Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design (01/2007) relates puzzles to humor and awe
• My poem "Cliff Hanger" was inspired by Raphel's simile for diagramless crosswords: solvers had to figure out where the black squares were, as well as the correct answers, relying on the letters provided like climbers clutching grips to scale a rock wall (105). Across the top of every draft of that poem, I wrote GOD-CLIFF-CROSSWORDS-POETRY