Stranger in a Strange Land

Christmas Mass from San Marco, Venice, c. 1600Music 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 etadmirabile 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.