The Old High Way of Love, Blog #1: Jubilate Deo

As a seven-year-old in my church’s boys’ choir I had no idea what the Latin text of “Jubilate Deo” was all about but, boy, did I like to sing that one. I mean, I really liked to sing it. I’d sing it for you now but I’m in a library and it’s a nice one, so I don’t want to get kicked out. Besides, it really belongs in a church if it’s going to be sung, and this was where, of course, under the able direction of Sister Helen Louise, we sang it. It was, I believe, a version of the arrangement attributed to Mozart, and if you knew anything about Mozart you could tell. The soprano part soared from the trumpet-blast of the opening line through the flute-like irridescence of “In laetitia! In laetitia! . . . In lae-tee-ee-ti-a!”—stretching across about fifteen measures or so and sounding like it had been written for a million angels to sing, tremolando-ing away in some crazy neo-Platonic circle around the sun. Warbling it from Sunday to Sunday during High Mass—in my snowy choirboy surplice and laundered black cassock, with my hair brilliantined and my best shoes buffed to a sheen—I felt exactly like one of those angels. I even thought I might be learning to fly a little. We sang it during the Introit, which was especially fortunate in that, High Mass being what it was with its ninety minutes or so of studied pomp and painstaking circumstance, I wasn’t too exhausted yet to channel my inner cherub.

I loved being in the choir, and I was very punctual and quite good at following directions, so Sister was disappointed in a crabby sort of way when in third grade, the day after Father Flaherty, who was the pastor, came into class during religion period and announced with great solemnity the beginning of altar boy sign-ups, I told her I was trading in my choir togs for the resplendent red-and-white vestments of an acolyte. Sister responded that with my voice it was a disservice to God and perhaps myself to leave off singing for serving. I half-believed her, which of course induced to guilt, against which I doubled down, refusing to wither under her ferociously wimpled gaze.

These many decades later, remembering that moment in the undeniable wisdom of my years, I must say I feel a little ambivalent about the soundness—so to speak—of my decision. On the one hand I’m proud of myself for sticking to my guns at such a young age. On the other, I’m not sure Sister Helen Louise wasn’t right, at least regarding myself and what talent I might have possessed for hitting high C. Throughout my life music has been far more important to me than ritual or atmospherics, and I really didn’t have a bad voice if I say so myself, so I might well have been happier all told if I had stuck to “Jubilate Deo” instead of going for the cruets and cluster bells, the censors and ciboria, of the sanctuary.

Thing was, though, altar boys were seen. They were right up there at the front of the church doing important things alongside the priest, their movements, like his, precisely choreographed, their backs ramrod straight, their countenances solemn and assured. They never sang anything, never said anything either, but that was okay. They were right there next to the priest, who said a lot and set the pace for everything, much more so than any choir director. And the things the priest said went somewhere. They developed themes and condemned Satan and forgave everybody’s sins and enjoined everybody to praise God like their lives depended on it. And they did, their lives, if you considered it from the vantage point of eternity, which vantage point somehow seemed more available to an altar boy than a choir boy in the back of the church staring madly from behind a railing at some fussily gesticulating nun.

In short, I guess, in the weekly performance that was the mass, I wanted to emerge from the chorus and become one of the principals. The altar was approximately a stage, and maybe I was approximately a little stage-struck. I wanted to be watched along with the priest, attended to, knelt in front of as at Communion I sidled along with him levelling the paten while he administered the hosts. In this office, I got to stand right at the edge of the altar with my left hand over my heart gazing a little condescendingly down while burly policemen, formidable dowagers, bullies, shop clerks, and pretty girls knelt before me. Lifting their faces to the priest, they opened their mouths like chickadees and thrust out their tongues for sustenance. During this process they seemed at least somewhat beholden to me in my role as assistant, and even sort-of confidant, to the omnipotent priest. All in all, for a young boy beginning to cultivate young boy fantasies of the sort of commanding figure he would present to the world upon acceding to manhood, it was an attractive gig.

I do think there was another reason for my decision, though, which was related to the inaccessibility of the Latin texts of many of the hymns we sang. I happened to grow up in a family that was obsessed with understanding things, especially when it came to God and the Church and Canon Law and the multitudinous theological distinctions determining the morality of just about every move one might make in a given day. That is, the atmosphere at home was heavy with pronouncements. If I had been lucky enough to be a character in, say, one of those beautiful allegories John Bunyan wrote, the house I lived in might have been called The House of Pronouncements.

Anyway, certitude took precedence over the other thing that often filled the air between meals, namely music, its mystery. People were always singing in my house, namely my dad and my next-eldest brother, both of whom had truly beautiful Irish tenor voices along with swelling operatic hearts. While I could sing, I never by any stretch of the imagination thought myself—Sister Helen Louise’s opinion notwithstanding—the equal of either of them. So, the House of Pronouncements being a noble enough abode, I began at a fairly young age to appreciate the gravitas accruing to what now gets called “’splaining.” Although I was the youngest in the family, I was pretty good with words and probably unhealthily given to abstractifying life whenever I happened to think about it. Eventually I became sententious beyond my years, tediously and obnoxiously so.

On the side, I had also begun to suspect that one shouldn’t attest to the truth of something unless one had happened to work out all the whys and wherefores. Attesting just because it felt good or you “knew it in your bones” didn’t seem right to me. I suspect that, with regard to my abdication from the choir loft, singing something with conviction in a language I didn’t actually understand came to seem, well, too gratuitous a pleasure. Up front on the altar, where post-Vatican II English was spoken, I knew exactly what it was that I was acting out the truth of, and that seemed not only more appropriate to my budding sense of self-importance but also a more tenable position intellectually, particularly to one who hadn’t begun yet to question the truths in question.

It took Paul McCartney, as the next blog in this series explains, to help me understand that truth and music weren’t opposed, really, and that music could sometimes “say” what words stunned by their own truth couldn’t.