Pop 89: Choirs & Angels

By Madonna Hamel

One of the greatest gifts I inherited from my mom is music. From the very beginning, its universal language, its rhythms and rhymes, permeated my bones. In fact, my mother was choir director of our church and was in rehearsal for Easter Mass when she went into labour with me.

All my early memories have music attached to them — surrounded as we were by bedtime lullabies, Sunday hymns, Christmas carols and music festivals.

By the time we were in school, my mother had turned us into a family choir, singing three-part harmony. We sang at weddings and graduations and at every midnight Mass. And from adolescence onward, I grew up turning to music to soothe my oft-broken heart and hurt pride.

Later, I wrote songs for performances and eventually collaborated with other musicians. That’s when I learned how creating, playing and touring with other musicians fuses a solid and unique bond between people who otherwise have absolutely nothing in common. Even with the tensions borne of long hours squished together in a van, driving all day and night to the next gig, speaking entirely different languages (often literally), once we hit the stage we were joined together in shared song. Such is the power of music.

Recently, Pope Leo held a Christmas concert for folks struggling financially. “Music is not a luxury for the few,” he said, “but a divine gift accessible to everyone, transmitting feelings, emotions, even the deepest stirrings of the soul, lifting them up and transforming them into an imaginary stairway connecting earth and heaven.”

“Music,” he said, doesn’t serve simply as a distraction or diversion; it reminds us that “we are far more than our problems and our troubles.… Singing belongs to those who love,” he said. “Those who sing give expression to love, but also to the pain, tenderness and desire that dwell in their hearts.”

“It is not a coincidence that the feast of Christmas is very rich in traditional songs, in every language and every culture,” he went on to say. “It is as though this mystery could not be celebrated without music, without hymns of praise.… After all, the Gospel itself tells us that while Jesus was being born in the stable in Bethlehem, there was a great concert of angels in heaven!”

Most beloved Christmas carols feature angel choirs. And some angels are more boisterous than others. “Look up and harken to us!” the choir in Hark the Herald Angels cries out. “Join the triumph of the skies!” However, the angels are less noisy in It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. It’s late, there’s been a lot of activity, Mary is exhausted, so they “bend near the earth,” playing “their harps of gold” and singing of “peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”

And in O Little Town of Bethlehem, we don’t even hear them. But they’re there, “gathered all above, while mortals sleep,” they “keep their watch of wond’ring love.”

And then there’s Handel’s Messiah, the lyrics taken from both Testaments of the Bible and arranged by librettist Charles Jennens. In my mind, there is no better depiction of ecstatic winged creatures belting hallelujah than The Messiah’s vibrating oratorio filling the skies suddenly full of heavenly song.

I am also reminded of the great gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s classic, “Up Above My Head,” where she sings: “Up above my head I hear music everywhere. I really do believe there’s a heaven somewhere.” Tharpe, who grew up in the Pentecostal church, brought gospel into the bars. And unlike Ray Charles, she didn’t change the words to fit the audience. She trusted the power of the music and the message to lift us out of the mire of our daily frets and prejudices. As her biographer Gayle Wald wrote, Tharpe was called everything from a “hymn-swinging evangelist” and “religious shouter” to a “Holy Roller singer.” But as often happens in music, nobody was offended. And more than a few were converted. That’s how music works.

My dear friend Kelly Joe Phelps, who left this world far too soon, marvelled at the way he could fill his songs with praise and awe for his own conversion experience and no one complained, but if he were to talk religion, “people would just get all crazy.” Combined with the beauty of his guitar playing, his songs transcended social and religious thought and theory and launched us into the sublime ether.

When I first moved to Val Marie, I read the autobiography of Jean Stav, a local whose family farmed the field my mother’s family eventually built on, years later. Stav, who referred to himself as “the barefoot boy from Val Marie,” wrote about an evening when he was coming home from feeding the cows. The sky was filled with ethereal light, and above his head he swore he could hear angels singing. After that night, nothing could trouble him very much for very long.

A generation later, my aunt was walking in the same field, worrying over whether to marry or become a nun. She too swears to have heard angels singing. And when she returned from her evening’s agonizing, she knew exactly what to do. Soon after, she entered the order of the Sisters of Providence and became a chef for retreat houses. Her specialty was desserts. When she died in her 90s, the superior who ran the nuns’ retirement home phoned me and asked if we would like them to put her ashes in her favourite cookie tin.

Both Jean Stav and Cecile Laprise were so altered by their respective encounters with musical angels that nothing could shake them — in that experience they placed all their trust. They had their struggles, their fears, their questions and pains, but neither needed further evidence of being watched over and guided and deeply loved.

In a world wherein many of us make our way through the day leaning on bluff, may I suggest, this Christmas, you look — and listen — up.