Gaelic brings a New Year

On the second Sunday of Advent, Clary Croft, Gordon Stobbe and Margo Carruthers stood side by side at the front of Christ Church, where the steps end and the sanctuary begins, and their voices blended into the Alleluia chorus in the Gaelic lullaby Taladh Chriosda.

The impact of perfectly pitched voices _ deep male, warm female and crystal clear male tenor _ in our darkened church was Celtic magic, taking you from the hard pew seats back in time to a green, mossy peace somewhere in Iona 200 C.E.

Music becomes embodied prayer at such moments, as our forgotten but still longed-for Island language wraps itself around the ancient Hebrew word for "Praise God," and literally moves our bodies with its Creative energy. The mother's strange longing flowed into the room from Carruthers.
 
My love, my dear, my darling Thou;
My joy, my fine young treasure
 
The title of the event was "A Nova Scotia Christmas Celebration." It was a mere $10, or $12 at the door, a true bargain.
 
Still, I might not have gone, had it not been for my neighbour, who is Jewish, inviting me, breaking through the routines of my tendency now to spend many weekend nights picking up teenagers, working, or reading.
 
"I want to see Gordon Stobbe," said Davey, who has organized folk dancing in the city for decades. "He's played for years at our dances...but I've heard about his playing of the fiddle at this concert, and that it's special."
 
Indeed, Gordon's fiddle was gentle and even humourous, providing us with a Christmas Eve Waltz that he imagines as an introduction to the turkey dinner, much as a piper plays in the lobster dinner in a Prince Edward Island community hall.
 
The feeling of the evening developed into one of a trio recalling our community, reading it stories of Christmas preparations from the past, some of it drawn from Croft's mentor, folklorist Helen Creighton.
 
The people listened and laughed and sighed at the recollections of how the preparations for Christmas wove community together, becoming a marking point for good times and sad as well.
 
Stobbe and Carruthers and Croft took us through the early 20th century newspapers' advertisements calling upon residents to spend, and then spend more on the annual runup of gift giving. Buy a piano, buy a television, buy the Rudolph the Red-nosed reindeer record turntable! Each era had its pitch.
 
Yet, how irrelevant that all seemed in comparison to the times of sorrow.
 
After the sudden flash of the unexpected explosion on Dec. 6, 1917, the recollections shifted. A notice appeared indicating thousands of children were separated from parents by the disaster. Many were orphans.
 
A five-year-old girl, Moira Cleveland, wrote to Santa from West Dover to note she'd been "saved" from the explosion and to ask that she "not be forgotten."
 
Carruthers read a letter from another young girl who lived in the Woodside "cottages" in poverty, in the 1920s.  Myrtle Wood's letter asked St. Nicholas for a hat and a coat, perhaps a school bag, and a badly needed school text.
 
Simple gifts.
 
These stories become journeys into people's hearts. Wood's letter found its way into the now demolished Dartmouth Heritage Museum, where years later her sister came upon it and wept to recall how little they'd had.
 
This year, on Nov. 6, when an early winter storm hit our city, I'd journeyed with my friend Rev. Peter MacDonald to the Seton Spirituality Centre to study the prayers of Meister Eckhart.
 
We were late by half an hour, after sitting in bridge traffic due to drivers being terrified by the ice.
 
When we arrived in Terence Bay, we were taken in by Sister Vivian Mancini, who asked us to contemplate the various sayings of the 14th Century mystic, monk and contemplative in the chapel on the centre's third floor, overlooking the slate-grey ocean.
 
Part of Eckhart's imagery of God is called the Via Creativa, which involves seeing God as co-creating the world with us, so long as we're willing to walk alongside in this venture. "God becomes where any creatures expresses God," he wrote.
 
It is this creative imagery that I feel drawn into during Advent.
 
It is imagery of God as rich and full of possibility. Eckhart writes, "The seed of God is in us...a seed of God grows into God."
 
And Mary's pregnancy is certainly an imagery of possibility, of yet-to-be-born events in our life with Christ. In my notes from the day with Eckhart, I had copied down his saying, "the mystical heart is ever pregnant with the expectation of God."
 
In the last song of the evening, Carruthers sang a verse of Silent Night in Gaelic, Ciuin an oidhch, naomh an oidhch, Still is the night, Holy night and then we joined, one verse later, with "Son of God, love's pure light."
 
Light.
 
It cast my mind back to earlier in the day, the candles being lit by a young girl in the church.
 
As she ignited the candle my eyes had fallen upon Psalm 25, printed in the bulletin. "May soul waits for the Lord."
 
In that meditation, the Christian New Year begins. Or at least, the second week of New Year.
 
The singing, the second candle, the moment when Clary Croft's voice soars up into the ceilings alongside the two others in their Alleluia _ all of this stirs new Creation and hope.
 
It's the resetting of secular time with Christian time, casting your mind into a moment that has long past, when a little girl had nothing after an explosion, or a young woman was wondering why she was pregnant.
 
This Church calendar, its insistence on a way of life that cracks apart the secular addictions to work, the clock, the ceaseless schedule, is meant to shatter time.
 
Nora Gallagher, in her book Things Seen and Unseen, describes it as "living by a calendar that runs parallel to my Day-Timer, a counterweight...It tells of mysteries and journeys, things seen and unseen, the world of the almost known. It dreams of impossibilities: a sea divided in two, five thousand fed by a loaf and two fishes, a man raised from the dead."
 
Mysteries and journeys that are still present for us, on an clear-moon night in Dartmouth when the Gaelic words soared, and the holy broke through the ordinary.