Canticle

The Venite

Tuesday, they attended Evensong on St. Patrick’s, the first such performance of this traditional service at Christchurch Oaklands during the now-fourth year of the ministry of Fr. James.

This was a bit misleading because Fr. James sat in the same pew as they did in the knave, with one child in his lap, several beside him, and the rest of his brood nearly filling the pew immediately behind.

Initially he looked to be wearing informal khakis and it was only when he caught up a noisy child to leave mid-service, that it became apparent he wore his usual black shirt with starched dog collar.

Nor was this odd, for in the pew ahead were another gaggle of little ones and so it went throughout the Church.

The front two rows were filled with adults, a few stalwart members of Bob St. Claire’s usual choir.

Earlier, before leaving home he imagined it might be crowded and so they arrived early while the choir was still rehearsing with an unfamiliar organist named Miss Gloria Erikson, according to the single broadside service handout.

They had never heard of her.

His wife was always nervous she might do the wrong thing while the congregation was otherwise unified in the various risings, fallings, kneelings, singings and utterances common to Anglican Evensong.

At processional entry from the foyer, it was Fr. Paul the assistant Rector, not James the Rector, celebrating and Paul was preceded by postulant and former construction manager Gus Thomsson, who would deliver the homily, who in turn followed commercial jet pilot Brookes Stanbury, who would read the First Lesson, bearing the processional cross.

***

He hadn’t known what he had expected.

Before service, the church reverberated like a daycare center.

Between the Rector and a very few parishioners, there were a dozen or more toddlers, and then there were those with only one single pair of happy feet to chase up and down the aisle, both before and during the service.

The uncanny sensation was somewhere between familiarity and bewilderment.

There were, in the three dozen attendees, very few familiar faces.

He was momentarily gripped with the sensation that he inadvertently had touched down among a group that was no longer his own, but had drifted off to faces and names he did not know.

Some had met his wife, but in most cases, she, or they, had forgotten.

Once the singing began, she calmed down and joined him: fortunately the Church was full enough with better voices, that theirs did not matter, in the process adding to the volume and nearly drowning out the cries and outbursts of toddlers.

Fr. Paul followed the canticle chants with tunes that brought back his upbringing. For this he was thankful, and it was the primary reason for his effort at attending on a Tuesday evening.

However, instead of the simple responses, the organ and tiny choir seemed to catholicize with an unnecessary embellishment every single time. It struck him, that call and response with participation of celebrating priest and congregation, was more satisfactory than a choir singing unfamiliar arrangements that seemed to exclude the rest of the congregation.

Brookes did his usual excellent reading of Ezekiel 36:33, although for the life of him as a mere attendee, he was, three days later, unable to recall the gist of the text without looking it up. Yet, he was certain it was weighty and important.

It seemed like Fr. Paul read the second lesson, Matth. 5:43, but perhaps he wasn’t paying attention for all the howls and fussing of children.

On the other hand, Gus’s homily was stiff, humorless and grandiloquent. He personally had liked Bishop Peter Manto’s style above any the congregation had heard in recent years, but of course, he was not in attendance on St. Patrick’s. Gus, a midlife convert, may yet make an excellent priest, but he was delighted that he, as a congregant here, wouldn’t be a member of that congregation.

Gus’s recap of the life and accomplishments of St. Patrick was nevertheless enlightening for those who had not heard the full history. His wife, who only rarely attended, remarked later, she had not known that a young Patrick had been carried off from his native England by a marauding gang of pagan Irish raiders.

Interspersed were various hymns and prayers and fortunately, they were out the door headed for the parking area in no time at all.

***

It may have been that echoes of Evensong remained with him that Friday, both then and years ago.

It was about the service but more about memories of those attending years past, the ones from his boyhood.

Three in particular: Linda Russell, Emily Bixler and foxy Kathryn Chisolm. Linda was prematurely stacked; Emily was his friend. But Kathryn was a brilliant writer, as judged by her later work: he had dated her once a few years later in college. To clarify, she invited him to her elite students dorm room but was surprised how rough he was, and that was that.

Of that Young People’s Fellowship years back, he remembered only one of the boys, John Baxter, because the two of them had studied under the Rector’s guidance, for the Scouts God and Country Award. After college, John became a fighter pilot, flew combat in the Middle East, and retired as a Captain from United.

There was another Baxter story about the Rector’s family camp at the base of Tongue Mountain, Lake George, which the Rector loaned to John and two other boys for a post-Senior Prom party in school.

Naturally, he had taken Sue. You could imagine, with ample scotch in a secluded camp and privacy to match, how things went. It had always tempted him to contact the others at a later stage of life to ask how their visit to the back side of Tongue Mountain had gone, but perhaps that was no longer as important at his age as it was at age 17.

The events of that day were still amusing to recall them: when he mentioned it to Sue shortly before she died, she surprised him to say it was the worst day of her life. He had, all these years, entertained a more positive view of his younger self.

He had always thought John was special in the eyes of the bachelor Rector, who loaned John both secluded lakeside camp and his vintage mahogany Chris Craft which the Rector had inherited, but that ought not be elaborated further.

It was not nostalgia, nor was he a particularly devout man at this stage of life.

However, the old style canticle O come let us sing unto the Lord, filled his mind before coffee that morning.

He could recite from memory the first lines and intermittent verses, and could hear the tune of the canticle in his imagination, but could not place it by title or to which service it had belonged.

It took some searching but all the versions online were the wrong tune.

The memory and song were so persistent that morning, he finally tracked it down as Ventie, exultemus Domino. Not just any verse and arrangement but music as set down in the 1940 Hymnal. The text came from Psalm 95, the tune written by Richard Goodson.

***

It was not the delicious memory of being seventeen, and of that Lake and that Camp or that young woman or that canticle, that remained much in mind that Friday.

…O come let us sing unto the Lord; let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation…

No.

The last word of that line was Salvation.

By the Grace of God, he was still alive to write all this exactly one calendar year after his diagnosis of stage four metastatic prostate cancer.

This was why he arose on that first day of spring, with a song in his heart and joy on his lips.

Alive.

The rest was nostalgia perhaps.

But he had been granted time he thought would pass him by.

He had been meaning to write this down for a while, but it had come to this.

***