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Trying to Have It Both Ways

Hymn and Psalm: “A Simple Song,” from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, Performed By Alan Titus (1971), encountered 1972

Buy it here | See it here | Sheet Music here

Sharm el Sheikh, by Ran Eliran (1967), encountered 1972[1]

See it here | Lyrics here

             When I was a young adult, religious faith came easily to me. I might have tired of the nuns who’d taken me through eighth grade, but that didn’t keep their certainty from having proved both contagious and durable. Many of my contemporaries had experienced the clerical corruption you hear so much about (the Vatican Bank-pedophilia-love-of-luxury side of things), and I guess I’d seen a little, but most of the nuns and priests who’d brought me along had been extraordinarily good people, and, deservedly, they’d made a great impression. I was no fool for trusting in them or what they told me. And if that were not enough, I had the example of my mother’s more literary and sophisticated faith to bolster me.[2]

As a result, at the time I got married, I had shed little of the committed, intellectual Catholicism in which I had been raised. I’d stopped going to confession,[3] and obviously my sex life was not in accordance with the official Catholic line, but I remained a true believer, or at least one with an asterisk for matters related to sex.

Affirming Them Both

This posed quite a problem when I found myself married to a Jewish woman who took her own religion seriously. (Our union was concelebrated by a priest and a rabbi.)[4] This led me to try to find ways to affirm both of our traditions, together if possible.

Part of it was a joint project of me and my wife, both of us bookworms, to read up and educate ourselves on the intersections between our faiths, for instance common history, both biblical and recent. It also expressed itself musically.

A prime case of the latter was my interest in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, a theater piece based on and inspired by the Catholic Mass. Fittingly, I was introduced to the original recording by a Catholic priest, in fact the priest who had officiated at our marriage. I knew the records; I’d taped the priest’s version. I think I also knew the PBS version that aired in 1973.[5] This is a work I’ve written a lot about since, but it intrigues me how different are the things I found interesting about it in 1972 or 1973 and the things that interest me about it today.

For those who don’t know it (and my own writings are a decent introduction to it), the work follows (for the most part) the sequence of the Catholic Mass, but on that path follows the Mass’s Celebrant as he and his flock move from a simple, secure confidence in God through a crisis of faith, a dark night of the soul, and thence into an uneasy return to something like faith at the very end. To me, at that point, it was the initial confidence that interested me the most.

The Simplest of All Things?

This confidence is expressed strikingly at the outset by the first entrance of the Celebrant. As the piece begins, a jangling, atonal, modernistic Kyrie is pouring out of the sound system. The Celebrant strides into the light and dispels the annoying music by strumming a single loud G chord on a guitar, and then launches into A Simple Song.

Shortly thereafter, the Celebrant is quoting from one of the most serene of the Psalms, No. 121:

            Actually, however unmitigated by doubt are the words the Celebrant sings, and however directly lyrical those words may be, the music is anything but simple (just try to pick it out on the piano and you’ll see what I mean), a mixture of Eastern and Western scales in keys that are constantly changing. It is a measure of Bernstein’s artistry that this still seems simple.

But to me at the time that song was the heart of it.  As the Celebrant’s faith gradually broke down over the course of the piece, the proceedings seemed more and more conventional and even hackneyed.  The two points where I was completely back on board were the equally confident Word of the Lord segment, and the echoes of A Simple Song at the very end.  I just couldn’t buy into the existential angst that fuels most of the rest of the piece to one degree or another.

Today, it’s reversed.  In recent years, as later Theme Songs pieces will reveal, I’ve had my own dark nights of the soul, and I’ve come to appreciate how well Bernstein conveys what the process feels like. It’s the happy talk parts I so closely identified with then that sound superficial to me now.  (“God is the simplest of all [things]”? Not bloody likely.)

But hearkening back to what I liked about it then, I think I also saw in Bernstein someone Jewish who saw in Catholic ritual and faith something entirely complementary to his own spirituality, as I saw it in his Judaism.

Folk Mass Man

Music was becoming more important to my religious life then in any event. I had joined the Newman community[6] at Hopkins, and shortly found myself (without the benefit of any training worthy the name)[7] leading the music at Sunday Mass, standing up on a platform at the front of a classroom, armed only with a chromatic harmonica. To my great good fortune, I was assisted in that effort by a number of talented undergrads and grads with enormously more developed instrumental skills. But it meant that I was constantly listening for music that might work for our Mass.

About which a word. This was the era of so-called folk Masses.[8] That label covered a multitude of things which differed from congregation to congregation. At Hopkins Newman in that era, the folk Mass canon allowed in a lot of pure pop like the Beatles’ Nowhere Man and Simon & Garfunkle’s Sounds of Silence, songs which lacked a specific religious referent, but which raised questions to which we were trying to come up with answers that honored our religious perspectives. It went nicely with the sermons by our pastor, Father Phil, a man with a remarkable facility for drawing moral and theological lessons from the latest movies.

Our congregation used an improvised hymnal of our own devising, of which I hope all copies have since vanished. I hope that because it was reissued while I was there, and I made a couple of anonymous contributions to the new edition. Each song was a rendering into English and a religious context of songs I’d heard on a compilation album belonging, I think, to my in-laws called Jerusalem of Gold.[9] Let’s just say that, when it comes to literary callings, mine, if I have one, is as an essayist, not as a lyricist.

Inspired

But for present purposes, it really matters not whether I was a budding Alexander Pope or on the contrary, a budding Colley Cibber.[10] The point is that I was listening to and drawing inspiration from an album of Hebrew songs. And not just any songs, but specifically songs in an album inspired by the Six-Day War, the war that tripled Israel’s land mass and gave a tremendous shot in the arm to the morale of all of my in-laws and their connections. One of the songs that spoke most to me was Sharm el Sheikh, by Ran Eliran, an evocation of the port down at the bottom of the Sinai captured from Egypt in 1967.

The chorus goes (in transliterated Hebrew)

(and in translation)

            The rest of the lyrics are a poetic evocation of the town (reportedly largely a fishing village) together with a strong message that the singer and his people belong there. In other words, given the events that are implied, it is a message that Israel’s being in Sharm el Sheikh was a reversion to something right and natural.

Not Quite Our Own

I turned this stirring music into a song about – some Christian doctrine or other, let’s just leave it at that. When I listen to Ran Eliran’s song today, the music continues to stir me, more now that I have a better idea what the Hebrew lyrics portend than I did then. They have to do with feeling one has returned to a place that is right and appropriate (dare I say, in the Catholic phrase, meet and fitting?) for one.

That is what I was trying to feel about a marriage with one foot in a faith that was not my own. I think Eliran got closer to really feeling it, though, given the subsequent history of the town (restored to Egypt in 1982), one cannot help wondering. Perhaps a lot of us sing loudly of feelings that are not quite our own, assert kinships and allegiances we do not exactly feel, try to feel familiar and comfortable in places where we are not thoroughly welcomed.

[1]. This cover for Jerusalem of Gold may or may not be the current cover of the album I’m trying to describe. See Note 9 below.