Stranger in a Strange Land

Mark A. Noll | posted 11/01/1998

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Christmas Mass from San Marco, Venice, c. 1600
Music of Giovanni Gabrieli and Cipriano de Rore
Friday, October 24, 1997, 8 p.m.
The Church of St. Ignatius Loyola
980 Park Avenue at 84th Street, New York City

In illo tempore "In that time," so the gospel reading starts,
Augustus issued a decree. In this
time here we are (filled full with narrow tasks)
in narrow pews (worn down by papers piled
and pixels panicking) beneath a vault
of stone (strung out on talk) as voices clean
mount ancient strings with brass, rise high aloft,
and pass in understated order by
(so often threads, the sense, momentum lost)
the timeless, boundless stations of the cross.

O mira Dei pietas! O wondrous compassion of God,
and a pretty good joke as well, in this place
to discover a papist bestowment of grace
for a Protestant working, working hard.

Quem vidistis pastores? If I a shepherd there had been
and peered into that face,
far more I think I would have seen
than just a present grace.
This birth contains fecundity
of everlasting life,
its light enough for me to see
my parents, siblings, wife,
a few historians, some very
large and others slight,
two gentle pastors with red hair,
a host of authors bright,

and—please, oh word in flesh, whose star
proclaims the end of fear—
the lambs you gave to us who are
so dear and very near.

O magnum mysterium et
admirabile sacramentum
ut animalia
viderent Dominum natum
iacentem in praesepio.
Alleluia! So first apologies: to Winston—cat
of daughter—then to Sophie in Belfast
who more than once my hauteur has endured,
and twinges also of lament for Hatches'
Bernie lately crisped to doggy ash.

But then a spreading awe and breath drawn out
in harmony with airy echoes from
Venetian night of holiness: if beasts
unnamed did wonder at the Incarnate gift,
what may we hope, though crossed by anxious love
and travail worn, who hear with human ears
this mystery and see such mercy sent
with eyes fixed on the mangered sacrament.

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