Comfort ye

Timely inspiration

“The Annunciation,” Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898

The number of distressed people reaching out to me in recent days for comfort and companionship has been unprecedented. More than after 9/11 or traumatic incidents of mass shootings. And the most heartbreaking of all are elderly people who know they do not have much time left and feel a gloomy foreboding about four of their remaining years in a country they hardly recognize.

Then, just the other day, a timely piece appeared in The Washington Post: “Unsettled by the future? This is the moment for the ‘Messiah.’”  Charles King, a professor at Georgetown University, has just published a book entitled, Every Valley: The desperate lives and troubled times that made Handel’s Messiah.

Thank you, Jesus.

It turns out that Handel’s time had remarkable similarities to our own, a reality reflected in oratorio. “There is despair at the disorder of the world,” the author writes, “and exasperation at the lies gobbled up by a gullible public.” Further, King says,

In Britain, riots and rebellions regularly shook the governing establishment. A sizable portion of British society regarded the reigning royal line, the House of Hanover, as illegitimate. 

Imperial wars around the world had ballooned the national debt, which led to a series of bad decisions, resulting in the loss of the American colonies.  Slavery, brutality toward women, neglect of children, and a barrage of pamphlets and cartoons not unlike our social media bring to mind obvious parallels in our day.

Yet, this is the chaotic and distressing environment in which Handel’s “Messiah” comes to be.  Professor King writes:

The “Messiah” was born of — and built for — a world awash in political turmoil, social unrest and fear about the future. … At its core is a hidden method for thinking our way toward hope.

Already, I’m feeling hopeful.

And Professor King doesn’t disappoint. The libretto for Handel’s “Messiah” is a string of quotations from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, put together by a friend and patron of Handel, Charles Jennens. But the oratorio is not asking for blind faith.  Rather, King writes,

It is instead the working out in song of a purposeful, systematic and moral imagination of things you can’t yet see. Every performance begins with a promise. “Comfort ye,” a tenor commands just after the overture, the words drawn from the Book of Isaiah. To remake the world, start by rethinking it. Envision a reality different from the one outside your front door, and then be attuned to the evidence of change lying right before you.

After I read this opinion piece, I listened again to Handel’s “Messiah,” and I’m sure the opening “Comfort ye” will never sound the same.  It’s as if the words are reaching out from an invisible realm, from what a former Archbishop of Canterbury once described as “a world within the world”:

There is a deeper level of reality, a world within the world, where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work, a world with which contact can be made so that we are able to live honestly and courageously with the challenges constantly thrown at us.  (Rowan Williams, Easter Day homily, 2011)

In other words, don’t focus only on the ugliness and brutality you can plainly see; instead, draw from a deeper, invisible place. “Envision a reality different from the one outside your front door,” Professor King writes, “and then be attuned to evidence of change lying right before you.” For myself, this different reality and “evidence of change lying right before us” has come in the form of older, grieving folks – if they were okay with demonizing rhetoric, they wouldn’t be crying in my office. They were there because of a light shining in their darkness.

The fact that something as ennobling and inspiring as Handel’s “Messiah” was born in a period of turmoil similar to our own gives me hope. Professor Charles King puts it beautifully:

It was a piece of music that did well because people expected it to make them good. The words and music produced a transporting sense that something profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.

I love that.

And perhaps many contemplatives would agree that Handel’s “Messiah” also evokes a felt sense that something profound is going on in the invisible realms, beneath the ugliness that we see all too plainly.  “There is a world within the world,” as Rowan Williams says, “where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work.” And this activity in the deeper, invisible realm is what enables us “to live honestly and courageously with the challenges constantly thrown at us.”

A hundred and ten years after the premier of Handel’s “Messiah” (1742 in Dublin), Frederick Douglass, former slave and tireless abolitionist, gave a speech in 1852 entitled, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?”  As presidential historian Jon Meacham points out, the Supreme Court in Douglass’ day was hostile to his cause, having declared black people less than equal to white people; Douglass faced a string of elections of presidents who were indifferent or hostile to ending slavery; and the country kept voting in ways that he could not understand. 

Yet, in that fraught time, Frederick Douglass still refused to despair of our country; because, he said, “The fiat of the Almighty, ‘Let there be Light,’ has not yet spent its force.” 

As a theologian, I am moved and persuaded by Douglass’ conviction, which seems to me to be reflected in the “Messiah” as well.  But Professor Charles King suggests that a theological approach might not be needed, which is great news in our day when religion, and Christianity in particular, is understandably regarded with suspicion. King concludes:

Even without the theology, the core messages in the “Messiah” still come through. Amid awfulness and evil, the triumph of goodness depends on the radical power of acting contrary to expectations. A key to living better is practicing how to believe more, to affirm that the present need not dictate the future — a time when, as Jennens put it, quoting the prophet Isaiah, “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low.”

If you need a break from the news and pundits, consider relaxing with Handel’s “Messiah.” Maybe the “Messiah” is one way you can sense the fulfillment of God’s promise, “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Mt 11:28) And maybe the “Messiah” will conjure for you “that world within the world, where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work, a world with which contact can be made so that we are able to live honestly and courageously with the challenges constantly thrown at us.”