Mundanities II | Cloudy with a Chance of Beer

Someday, not every song shall dwindle unto silence.

Fog has rolled in. A thin, halfhearted rain is trickling down; a cloying summer humidity is asserting itself amidst the winter. It is Lent. But—it is Sunday. And as the storm system flows out of the town, beer is flowing in the tavern. Laughter, garrulity, the sounds of mastication vaguely amplified by the narrow acoustics of cramped quarters: the soundscape is rich with incarnation. It was the first gathering of its kind since the public health apparatus’ power play in the third decade of the twenty-first century. The group had once gathered much more frequently. And many of the older participants still were nowhere to be seen. There were several young families. The children looked all about them, marveling at what was around them.

The kitchen is all spooled up and ready to spring into action, like the pregnant calm of an electric sewing machine waiting for its foot pedal to be actuated. There are grilled sandwiches coming out, all manner of bratwurst, varieties of pork—not a salad in sight. I watch the ethnic delicacies pass me by. They would surely make me dreadfully ill. There is always soy about, lurking, a fly in every ointment save those which I myself make. While I touched not the bread and finer things, I yet could partake of the liquid bread. There was quite a variety. Their names have long since departed my memory, however; this was sufficiently proximate to The End that my memory was yet terribly feeble. I could still barely hear anything out of my right ear.

I had driven a fair distance to get out to this county. I never had an appetite in those days, so I’d eaten no breakfast or lunch. After an hour or so, I think I had downed a couple beers. The alcohol was smoothing out the chronic stress and immiseration of pain and suffering, and my eyes were growing brighter.

Let us call her Catherine. Catherine was standing on my left, which she chose so that I would not be deaf to her. She was happier in those days: her hair, slightly vivider in color, brighter in texture, and with a healthier gravity. Not one nervous tic was in sight, and I knew more than a few of them by that point. To my right, Catherine’s mother; we may call her Ashley. She was glowing—her face, and more importantly, her eyes, aflame with an inexhaustible smile. Others of the family were further down the line to my right. Yet other friends were out in front of us, at a table.

The several young families were predominately occupied with managing their children’s consumption of dinner in as least messy a fashion as possible. The whole affair was rather distended as mealtime durations go, for—as mentioned before—the children were looking all about them, marveling at what was around them. And what was around them?

About fourscore men and women, sourced from at least four different theological traditions, had gathered. The Lutherans were running the show: hence the beer, bratwursts, etc. There were these thin, brightly colored plastic binders floating all over the restaurant, with a pile of them against a back wall, piled up and up, almost up to your nose (and a man’s nose at that—not a child’s). On one end of the dining room, an electronic piano had been pressed into duty. Next to it, a solitary microphone awaited a worthy voice to command it (or, at the least, an MC).

For this was a hymn sing. The binders had been painstakingly assembled, representing the hymnaries of half a dozen denominations. And the children were marveling at the sound of scores of voices boisterously singing all manner of Revivalist, Baptist, Victorian, German, and Genevan hymns. And everything, in parts—always, glorious, parts.

Catherine has a quiet, gentle soprano voice. Its quiet stems not from lack of confidence, but rather indeed, an exceeding competence. She uses her voice for many things and thus must be fiscally prudent with it. Ashley, whom I could not particularly hear, is an alto. Between others in that family and our other friends, every vocal part was accounted for. But Catherine was the only soprano, as I recall.

And so for just over three hours, we sing and sing and sing. Catherine often would get bored of the soprano lines, and she would invent descants for herself. At those times, I often would sail down to the melody line from tenor, or I would glide up into the soprano octave for the same. Or I would ad lib a counterpoint descant to Catherine’s, each of us flitting about in the rafters of our vocal ranges. Other times, Catherine would delicately snatch up the tenor line, but first translating it an octave higher; and I might reciprocate by jumping up onto the alto line, at which time Ashley would contentedly drop down onto the recently abandoned tenor line. When part of my voice would weary from the soprano or alto, I would sink to the bass line and play around down there—especially during some of the Revivalist hymns, whose bass and tenor lines are so hilariously vacant of complexity that one really and truly may pay the score almost no mind, for an entire verse may consist of two notes.

But I have gotten ahead of myself. About an hour in, it was between hymns. Catherine was refreshing herself with her beer; I, mine. And then, as the next hymn began—an old, English splendor—she unconsciously smiled, and cocked her head to the side a little bit, and bladed her body vaguely towards mine, and cracked her neck back and forth a little bit, and said something like, “Paul, I just realized. I don’t even have anything this week. Nothing at all. Paul—” she pauses, putting down the beer, lazily lifting her arms halfway, running her hands through her hair, and sweeping it back over her shoulders, giving it a final rebuke with a backwards flick of her head, and she straightens her shoulders and back, and her body language becomes simultaneously more relaxed and yet more purposed, more disciplined, her knees unlocked with the tiniest jolt, or spring, in them—“Paul, I can really sing, tonight.”

I have been around many, many sopranos in my life. I have heard none like Catherine was on that evening. The glassy, pure tone was set free from all her moderating impulses; and as with all mastery, it was effortless as her whole body conspired to produce this voluminous, mellifluous worship.

An elderly woman near us looks over, jabbing her husband in the elbow, “Wow, look at all them; they’s sure can sing, huh? You catch where they from?” Catherine nudges my left arm, mouthing back to me part of the interrogative woman’s comments with the dancing flickers of a smirk upon her face. I’d never seen her so happy, nor have I since.

---

A bit later than three hours after we began, the call goes up for what hymn we want next. Somebody calls out a number excitedly. Hearing no contest, the MC goes with it. I get there before Catherine. “Ooh, Catherine, look.” We had just sung it together a few weeks prior under very different circumstances indeed: at a funeral. And—awe of awes, delight of delights—the version in our little binders was the real version: all eleven verses of For All The Saints.

And so we were off singing. The first few verses, unison. So we plow through. At the fourth or fifth verse, it explodes into parts. As each verse ends, fifth, sixth, seventh, the piano dwindles yet more with each verse. Finally, at the end of the eighth verse, the pianist flatly stops playing, unambiguously contending that eight verses was more than enough fun, and everyone falls somewhat into disarrayed silence. My hearing of course is suspect, but for a measure or two of the ninth verse, I heard naught but two sounds: first, my voice, and then, no more than a beat or two later, Catherine carrying on with me. And after four or five measures, with many others now rejoined behind us, the pianist accepted defeat, and continued on. And Catherine and I were laughing and laughing. And the tenth verse comes, and the pianist did not even try to put a stop to it all then.

And finally the eleventh verse in all its glory-charged majesty, and at its conclusion, people were cheering, screaming, hollering, clapping, whistling. I do not much like the limelight, and of course all eyes had been on us for what I pulled with the ninth verse. But: even the pianist was delighted, doubled over laughing, all smiles. Everyone in the room was happier for my imposing my own peculiar, idiosyncratic will upon the room—that is, for refusing the pianist’s will. It’s funny how life is, sometimes.

We are so terribly quick to forget the Great Cloud of Witnesses. We forget the Saints. We forget, largely, all but ourselves. Life was meant, in a very real sense, for a certain sort of wild abandon. That night, as wintry clouds seeped out clutching fog and drizzling rain, a yet Greater Cloud settled over that place. And as the beer flowed, a right, and I dare say, righteous, wild abandon, found its way into the hearts of a people all too prone to never truly live in the flesh. For yes, we are not to be slaves to the flesh, subject to its whims and fancies: but we were, yet, Created in the flesh. The angels cannot taste and see that the Lord is Good: we can. We are to feast and fast, to work and rest, to build and bask, to keep and kiss, to speak and sing.

When we deny such realities—such obligations—that is when the Church begins to falter, to stumble, to crumble. Such discontinuity was, perhaps, at the root of the severance between me and that family. For there are no smiles towards me now; no joy, no beer, no conviviality. There is nothing.

But Someday, in that Cloud—everything shall be made anew. Everything is going to be all right. For in that Cloud, everything already is new. For Time is but a cage whose bars are all too wide to trap the Holy Ghost, and that Dove of Peace goes as He pleases, redeeming the times and pains of mortal men and transforming them into precious jewels, into gemstones for the saints’ crowns.

And so it is that these days, the forecast tends to be cloudy. And, at best, maybe we get some beers along the way: a laugh here or there, a mild chortle, before the prowling lion growls yet again. But Someday—on that Day, when we have all been swept up in that Cloud just as Christ Himself is coming with the clouds—rather than of imported German beers, we shall partake of the Wine of Heaven.