Getting A Handel On Things

Thick fog here, a white-out, our own gentle California version of snow. I woke up in the middle of the night with a snippet of an aria from Handel’s Messiah in my head, and it has become my soundtrack, a kind of mantra, over and over: “Every valley shall be exalted…”

There are worse ear worms, and this one feels particularly fitting for the holiday season. Things are looking very festive here in Solvang. The entire month has been proclaimed as Julefest, and the town is awash in lights and sweets and celebratory silliness. Happy tourists crowd the streets holding hands and smiling, buying t-shirts, soap and pastries, taking selfies in front of the windmill. Who am I to scorn it? I’ve made it my mission not only to avoid cynicism, but to unabashedly embrace sentimentality. Uncomplicated happiness is preferable to anger and anxiety, and we all need a reprieve now and then.

One afternoon, I saw my friend Lynne in front of the building that houses Youth Empowered, a welcoming space she has created for a community of folks, young and old, who might not easily fit in elsewhere. There’s a gym, a corner for doing art or homework, tables and chairs for simply being and feeling at home. Lynne was standing outside in a red hooded sweatshirt having a pensive moment during a lull in activities, looking like a beacon of light and love. We reminisced for a few minutes about the days when we were colleagues at the middle school, the laughter that we shared, the good things we still hope to do. “This is who we are,” she said. Lynne taught me long ago about integrity. Seeing her always reminds me who we are and what we are not.

At the holiday potluck of our hiking group, silver-haired ladies (like me) came bearing cookies and casseroles, and I was charmed by the simple renditions of Christmas carols on a church piano, our hesitant voices singing along, somehow remembering the lyrics across the decades. It was fun and regressive. These were songs about jingle bells and decking the halls and chestnuts roasting, frivolous and catchy, nothing too serious. And I loved seeing women with whom I have walked on mountain trails dressed up a little, slightly sparkly, Lisa in a velvet dress. I spoke with the vivacious Barbara, at 90-something the elder of the tribe, who was with this group at its inception nearly fifty years ago. I told her she was a role model to all of us. “That’s a lot,” she said modestly.

And the soundtrack in my head continues. “Every valley shall be exalted…”

I am remembering a Christmas ten or twenty years ago. It had rained in the night, a series of intermittent showers, and there was a stunning full moon, but somehow I managed to sleep anyway, and I awoke feeling cheerful and ambitious. We were living at the Ranch, of course, and it was a chilly morning, so I donned a knit cap and fleece jacket to supplement my plaid flannel pajamas, and I was inspired to bake bread -- I had in mind some rustic, crusty whole wheat loaves. Miranda had by this point moved away, and it sometimes didn’t feel like Christmas without her, but while the yeast was proofing, I had a hankering for certain excerpts of the Messiah. Soon the kitchen was filled with the joyful noise of "Unto Us A Child" and the Hallelujah chorus, and sunlight poured in through the steamy window, and all was well.

And that’s the way it is with this oratorio. It meanders, but it ultimately lifts me. Baroque is for the broken, I suppose. In fact, I recently heard a discussion about Handel’s Messiah by a music scholar named Charles King, who has written a book called, oddly enough, Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah. King suggested that Baroque music was the Punk of its time, encompassing rebellion, raw emotion, and social and cultural developments that mirror much of what we are experiencing today. Maybe. It sort of resonates.

I was in the children's choir of St. Mark's Methodist Church in Brooklyn in the 1950s when I first encountered Handel’s Messiah. I didn't fully understand it, of course, especially some
of the slower passages, which even now seem heavily operatic and vaguely ominous to me, but we were to add our voices, angelic and perhaps off-key, to the full choir and congregation at the Easter Sunday service. And when it all came together, it became an expression of pure jubilation. I felt that I was a part of something beautifully transcendent and celebratory. I remember walking home afterwards; it was springtime in the city, and every street proclaimed new life. There were lacy chartreuse buds on trees, and yellow forsythias in bloom, and crocuses and daffodils, perhaps. Even the ladies’ hats were sprouting flowers.

Many years later, in the dark days of Syracuse, I went with my roommate Patty to one of those Messiah Sing-Alongs held in a stately old church downtown the week before Christmas. Patty was annoyed at me (and with good reason) when we entered that church, but somewhere in the midst of the singing and the organ music, all mundane resentments vanished. She reached over and took my hand, and I held hers back, and we were friends again. Afterwards, when we stepped outside into the cold winter night, we beheld a world transformed by snow and moonlight. It was a magical night, a diamond night, a hallelujah night.

As I have gotten older and perhaps wiser, I usually experience Handel’s Messiah as an expression of the universal yearning of humanity, not so much rejoicing as a sense of hope and longing. And I understand King’s assertion that it is a work of anguish as well as promise, of profound worry as well as joy. I don’t know enough about music or scripture to grasp how structurally radical it apparently is, but I feel the dissonance and unease of it. Handel’s librettist, Charles Jennens, drew upon text from the King James Bible to craft his own customized, nonlinear sequence, conveying an ominous sense of doubt and despair that only eventually, but ultimately, leads to triumph, and then it pairs nicely with the glory of the world.

I don’t need to tell you how dismayed and heartbroken I often feel these days, and if you read this blog or simply pay attention to what’s happening, you understand the reasons why and carry, as I do, that grief and disbelief. But hope is my religion, as I have often said, and I also know, as much as I believe anything, that cynicism is a poison imbibed and served by the lazy, and that when the universe offers grace, it is gracious to accept it and be grateful.

In recent years, my innate joy has become tainted with guilt, incongruously weighted with awareness of concurrent suffering everywhere. I’ve written of it often. Even the miracles of nature are infused with a sense of endings drawing near, and I have had to convince myself that partaking of the gifts fortifies the spirit and thus makes better outcomes more likely. This is when I practice my trick: I let myself be happy for a moment. It’s okay to bake a cake, go for a walk, return renewed and do your best. It works. The joy sustains us.

And the world is my church. I go there daily.

I walked up to the top of a mountain last week with a dozen other ladies, and we were whipped and nearly whisked away by the infamous Gaviota winds, which circled us with gale force, our hair and hats flying, nothing to hold onto. It was a Wizard of Oz kind of wind, and below us was the shining sea, and all around the rugged peaks and trails and foliage of the beloved backcountry, familiar and strange, and we were so insubstantial that we might as well be air, but we also felt like children again, and all we did was laugh.

Every valley shall be exalted.