My Stars

 

I never thought that stars were mere pinpricks of light on a black canvas hung just beyond my reach…at least I’ve convinced myself that I never thought that. I honestly believe that I have always known that stars, like the void around and beyond them, are way beyond any reach, brighter than any consciousness.

Constellations have never made sense to me, except for the Big Dipper (and the Little One, too). Growing up on American’s vast prairie lands, I learned early on how to find the North Star in an instant. And Orion: I could easily point out Orion presiding over winter’s bitter cold. But somehow I knew that those connected dots in the night sky were the product of shepherds’ imaginations fixated on that sky, imposing an order that simply wasn’t there.

The stars—individually and collectively—are brighter and bigger than all of us, out of the reach of any of us. They have their reasons.

The way I understood the stars when I was a child…was that unique to me? I don’t know, because I never asked. Perhaps once my father had said to me, Dean, the stars are giant suns millions and millions of miles away from us, and even though my brain could not really understand him, I understood it where it mattered. Same with the Milky Way…a long-shot view through to the edge of the galaxy that bears its name. It is astonishing, but the star-filled wheels of distant galaxies far outnumber and outshine it.

Maybe I believe that I always got the shine and enormity and distance of the stars right because I have always felt that almost everything is more than I am. I am a tall man, but in my head I’ve never measured up to most other people. Almost everyone else is far more important and successful and popular and all the rest than I am. Generous folks have tried to convince me otherwise…oh, you are bigger and brighter than you think…but I have always been quite sure they are wrong.

In my late teens and early twenties, I loved to sit on the front stoop of my parents’ rural Iowa home on warm summer nights and contemplate the stars and their possible intersection with the Bible and theology I was learning in school. As I sat in those stars’ silent, soulful presence, I felt more deity than I felt in reading all the words of all the books.

But then again, the words in those books helped me feel stars and be awed by them and yet not be tempted, as were the ancients, to worship them and their fellow travelers out there, beyond the firmament.

I rarely see the stars these days, blinded as I am by the lights of our human technology and impudence. I have a favorite high desert retreat where stars are as visible to me as they once were, but now it is hard for me to go there. So, I imagine the stars of my childhood and youth, and I wonder if anyone will ever grasp them for what they truly are, or how humankind fits into their eternal schemes.

I have never thought that I outshine stars.

My Heart and “the Pity of War”

 

Wednesday afternoon, in anticipation of getting a new pacemaker ten days from now, I had an echocardiogram. It was both exciting and scary to watch my beating heart on the monitor— seeing it keep on beating, albeit irregularly, without any awareness or conscious effort on my part, as it’s been beating for over 80 years.

I was home less than an hour when MyChart posted the report of the cardiologist who read the results (with a bit of AI help, do you suppose?). An essay consisting of words that I do not understand and coolly impersonal numbers and values purportedly describing my beating heart is now available for my own cardiologist to read and understand and interpret.

Which is my heart—a muscular organ that second-by-second keeps me alive, or an organized series of letters and digits on a computer screen? Which is my heart to those doctors? Which is it to me?

Last night Maxine and I heard Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, Chorus, etc., conducted by Klaus Makela. I’ve known and loved this powerful work of poetry and music since college days, and last night it cast its magnificent, heart-rending, and soul-searing spell on me once again.

I wonder how my heart would have looked to an echocardiogram after the chorus’s final, hushed, a cappella plea, “May they rest in peace.” Broken, I think.

We Sang Mozart

 

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon. We’d been practicing Mozart for two and half months—together and on our own—but on that Sunday afternoon, we sang Mozart. We sang his Solemn Vespers and Coronation Mass.

I was one of fifteen basses in a hundred voice choir, and there were four soloists and a small orchestra of instrumentalists and one determined conductor. Months of hard work came together inside a glorious quasi-Gothic church sanctuary, and it was as if the building itself—bright shining stained glass and all—was singing Mozart.

I did not sing Mozart the way the best of Mozart’s singers sing him. I did just okay, though better for me than I’d expected a couple of days before. I think that I found some notes that others missed, and that others got rhythms that I messed up, a holy harmonization of just right and almost right, with a wayward just plain wrong as well along the way. We came together as one—even when we had to be dragged back together when too many of us tried to outpace our conductor’s tempo, his face first almost panicked, then relieved.

We all sang Mozart despite our lacks, amateur singers that most of us are.

We sang Mozart on that Sunday, and for a while, embraced in that space’s rose-tinted late afternoon light, something of the holy—of the wholly other—shined through our faces from deep in our souls. (Did anyone see it?) Genius touched us, and we returned his touch: his music’s assurances and shocks, chords and progressions we could not imagine until we heard them, surprises of syncopation and dissonance that transformed sounds sung in time into music that sounded eternal, celebrating living life and loving love the way the creator celebrates, banishing all things ugly, hateful, and deathly.

We sang Mozart on a Sunday afternoon, and for a time we were where no one else will ever take us.

Soli Deo Gloria.