Blog #32, July 18th

How Can I Keep From Singing?

Guidance and visitation on a wing and a prayer

After a fascinating and valuable two days in Seljuk, making pilgrimage to St. Paul’s Ephesus, a huge magnificent set of city ruins (letters to the Ephesians), St. John the Gospel writer’s huge Basilica, and Mereyemana, the final home of the virgin Mary after Jesus was crucified and she was cared for by St. John, I took a bus from Seljuk to Izmir Airport. As usual, Turkish Airlines flight was a little late, but not too difficult to make connection from Istanbul to Paris. This was especially because the Istanbul flight was delayed for 2 1/2 hours, with no explanation.

As a result, instead of landing in Paris at 5:00 PM, I arrived at 7:30. Baggage was extremely slow coming off the plane, so It was 8:30 PM before I could pick up the Hertz rental car. I did not want to linger or get caught in Paris, so I had reserved a hotel in Chartres, about 65 km south of Paris. I was chagrined when I learned that Charles de Gaule airport is 35 km north of Paris. I was shocked when the Herz people said they did not have a map. They directed me to airport Information, who also did not have a map of France, only maps of the Paris subway system. Fortunately, I had travelled west from Turkey, and gained an hour, and it got dark much later here, further north as well. Paris is about the same latitude as Washington state.

I received vague directions to get out of the airport and which highways to look for from the rental car lady. Driving a nice little standard transmission Nissan (gray:-), I headed south on extremely fast moving, busy highways, heading directly into Paris, with sudden splitting off roads, exits, and highways as I looked for the ring road, The Peripherique. I drove for 18 km and was getting closer into the city, exits San Chappelle, La Defense, Champs Elysee etc. Without a map, 2 1/2 hours late and dark approaching, plummeting toward the city streets of Paris, I picked a random exit, couldn’t read much of the French signs, to try to get my bearings, ask someone if I had passed my exit, before I arrived in the choked, one-way streets of the city.

I admit, I had been praying and breathing as I “trusted in the process”….. “Saying to myself, you are crazy, or you have a lot balls doing this”. The exit turned out to be a gas station with a convenience store. There, I purchased a map, some water, and food. Despite my nonexistent French, the only-French speaking cashier gave me excellent directions that I could trace on the map. Guardian angels are everywhere.

Despite a few slowdowns on the Peripherique, I made good progress around the city from the north east side to south west, heading for Chartres on fast moving toll road, 130+ km per hour. I was on the outskirts of Chartres by 10:10, just as the sun set. I made a few random turns to try to get into the town and they were blind alleys or led to one way streets with no way forward. I was looking for a live person to ask, none seemed to be about. I happened to see two guys working on a car with its hood open, in the driveway of a building. I pulled in and asked directions. The young man spoke no English at all. I bastardized French, sign language and showed him the address of the hotel. He knew where it was, but struggled to communicate anything. Then, I happened to notice the reception of the building he had unlocked and led me into. It had stands with brochures and maps of the town. So, I gave him my pen and he traced the route for me to the hotel, one way streets and all. I arrived at the hotel at 10:30 PM, last of the twilight.

When I arrived at the hotel, I found they had no parking available. They suggested that I could park at the nearby train station over night, but had to move it to an expensive paid parking garage by 8:00 AM, in order not to be towed away.

It was noisy with my room’s window overlooking the street across from a Kebab shop near the train station where activity and voices were loud until 1:00 AM. The next morning, after breakfast, I walked over to the Chartres Cathedral, only 5 minutes away. I had been here once before when I was chaperoning a middle school trip to France with my son, David. As I walked into the vast, breathtakingly beautiful cathedral, with its soaring gothic pillars supporting the conjoining arches of the nave 120 feet overhead, I realized that I hadn’t really seen it when I was there before. In a sense, I hadn’t really been there, as I had been so focused on riding herd on the middle school students and companioning with David. It’s troubling to consider how many places that I have visited and seen without being fully present enough to really see!

It was odd, how somehow, as I left Turkey and flew to Paris, without real thought, I knew I wanted to wake up in Chartres; without knowing it, being there was an essential part of my pilgrimage. As I craned my neck in awe, I took pictures, gazed at the original 13th century stained glass windows, more beautiful and arresting spiritually than anything I have ever seen, a marvel of sacred space. I spent hours there, meditated for an hour, not wanting to leave. I hung around until 2:15 PM when I was able to join a French tour of the extensive underground crypt below the cathedral. The tunnels went on and on. I could not understand any of the French tour guide, but it didn’t matter; it was a privilege to be in the ancient cool darkness beneath the earth.

Later, I wandered around the small town, purchased a French phrase book. Unfortunately, they only had a French/English phrase book for French people to learn English. Despite its limitations and no phonetic pronunciation of the French words (only the English:-), it helps a little. I returned to my hotel to lie down for an hour and to journal and answer emails. I had seen a poster for a concert at 5:00 PM in the cathedral. It was a touring choir group from Southern Mississippi University. There was a moderate crowd there, and I found a good seat. It turned out they were a handbell choir. I have never been all that excited by handbells when played occasionally at my church. They began simply and gradually built up and up until they were filling the choir area of the cathedral with more and more complicated and deeper range of musical bells. Several of the male students in the second row were athletically dancing up and down the velvet table switching bells and hands ringing in perfect time, a rich and swelling chorus. Near the end, one of those men, sang a solo with the bells; it was the hymn “How can I keep from singing?” so beautiful and such an apt question that it choked me up. I will not undervalue handbells again.

I had also learned of a light show at the cathedral at 10:30 at night, to which I returned. With music and myriad colored lights and shapes precisely projected onto the facade of the cathedral, it was magical. I stayed to watch it twice.

Again, the street was noisy units after 1:00 AM, and awake at 6:30. When I went to move my car from the train station, before 8:00 AM, after having moved it out of the paid parking again for the night, I had received a 35 euro parking ticket, sigh.

Packed and ready to go on my long drive toward Lourdes, in the south of France, that day, I went back over to the cathedral to meditate before departure and to see it one more time. As I entered, about 9:00 AM, the huge pipe organ was filling the lofty expanse with powerful music that moved me to tears, and sobs, off and on for an hour. At first the chords were low and tragic, haunting, and filled with subtle anguish. Gradually, they rose and fell with ore power and passion; they filled the huge space and my chest with awe and terror. I could sense and see God creating endlessly one Big Bang after another, an infinite number of expanding universes. I shook and shuddered and wept at the majesty, beyond describing, as I felt my self shrink to submicroscopic size and bowed low before such terrifying power and might. Never have I been broken open by a spiritual experience so all encompassing before. Again and again, the huge waves of sound, uplifting, crushing, magnificent, broke over, in, and through me. It was as if everything that I had been doing and searching for had been mere preparation, to soften me up, break down my intellectual shields and the habitual numbing that the medical profession calls objectivity. I was transfixed, as wave after wave of sacred sound swept and washed over me. I began to wish that it would be over soon, as I bathed and drowned in the maelstrom of sound and movements, and also deeply grateful, realizing what the prophets and saints spoke of when they described their awe, tears, fear, and trembling before the God, PantoCrater (creator of all). After 10:00, the organ paused or stopped playing and I very slowly circumambulated the cathedral once more, allowingmmyneyes to meet the stained glass windows, images, and architecture, then staggered out into the bright sunlight.

I have long loved the passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, “do not say that God is in my heart. Rather, say, I am in the heart of God”.

“My Life Flows on in Endless Song”,

Robert Lowry first wrote this hymn in 1868. In 1950, during the protests against McCarthyism and the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee in Congress, Doris Plem wrote some new verses and edited out some of the religious language of the original hymn. Pete Seeger made it a signature piece. Later, Marty Haugen, Enya (on album Shepherd Moon),and Judy Collins recorded their versions of this song.

My life flows on like endless song
Above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the sweet, tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation;
Thro’ all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul —
How can I keep from singing?

What tho’ my joys and comforts die?
The Lord, my savior liveth;
What tho’ the darkness gather round?
Songs in the night he giveth.
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that refuge clinging;
Since Christ is lord of heaven and earth,
How can I keep from singing?

I lift my eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smooths,
Since I first learned to love it;
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing .
All things are mine since I am His–
How can I keep from singing?

In 1950, Doris Plem added

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And near their death-knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile,
Our thoughts to them go winging;
When friends by shame are undefined,
How can I keep from singing ?

What Hurts the Soul? Rumi

We tremble, thinking we’re about to
dissolve
into no existence, but no existence
fears even more that it might be
given human form!

Loving God is the only pleasure,
other delights
turn bitter. What hurts the soul?

To live without tasting the water of
it’s own essence.
People focus on death and this
material earth.
They have doubts about soul water.

Those can be reduced! Use
night
to wake your clarity. Darkness and
the living water
are lovers. Let them stay up together.

When merchants eat their big meals
and sleep their dead sleep,
we night-thieves go to work.

Love is the way messengers
from the mystery tell us things.

Love is the mother. We are her
children.
She shines inside us, visible-
invisible,

as we lose trust or feel it start to
grow again.

Close to Being True. Rumi

How can we know the divine
qualities
from within? If we know only
through metaphors, it’s like when

children ask what sex
feels like and you answer, “Like
candy,
So sweet”. The suchness of sex

comes with being inside the
pleasure.
Whatsoever you say about mysteries,
I know or I don’t know, both are close

to being true. Neither is quite a lie.

This World. Mary Oliver

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But, it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps it’s petals open
and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.

So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.

As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who know, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.