Richard Ely.
A little after 4 o’clock on Christmas Eve, I’m standing in the balcony at the Unitarian Universalist church on University Bay Drive, singing “The First Noel” with 400 other people. I’m not a Unitarian, or even a Christian, but I love Christmas carols. The music shoots memory darts into the vivid brightness of my childhood: winter skies at dusk, the silence following a deep snowfall, Sunday mornings at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. Back then, the church was magical: the tall stained-glass windows, the wrought iron lamps suspended from the vaulted ceiling, the stone walls and arched doorways. The choir in their white and red robes, the organ pipes rising in the shape of a pyramid against the back wall, the surprising force of my mother’s voice as she sang from her hymnal. The music filling the ancient space, the world brimming over.
During most of my childhood, my mother taught 3-year-old nursery school every Sunday morning. She arrived early to set up her classroom and stayed late to put things away, freeing me to roam the vast, half-empty building. I never tired of exploring the staircases and rooms and hallways, the nooks and crannies. The Parish Hall was in the newer part of the church where my Cub Scout troop met and where I gorged myself on sweet rolls and donut holes after church on Communion Sundays. On the stage where, in fourth grade, I sang “Bring the Torch, Jeannette, Isabella” to a packed hall as my younger brother and sister gazed up at me with such adoration that I almost cracked up laughing.
Every year the church staged the Christmas Pageant in the chancel of the big church, beneath the large mosaic of a berobed Christ emerging from a background of shiny gold tiles. Mary and Joseph, a baby doll in a manger, wise men and shepherds with fake beards, plus a toy sheep or two all huddled together on the hay-scattered ground. Teenage girls dressed as angels stood in the aisles in their bright, shiny costumes with wings, and I was in love with them. They were beautiful, but my love was not romantic or sexual. I was too young for that. I was simply one of those wide-eyed kids, mouth open, rapt with wonder.
The church was in a neighborhood of old wealth, and many of those angels were debutantes-to-be. Our family didn’t exactly fit in there. Our father had “married down” to my small-town, working-class mom and distanced himself from the debutante-y world. Later I would suffer from these differences in social standing, but as a small child, I felt at home in the church. The old ladies loved me, I was buddies with one of the assistant ministers, and after Sunday school I “helped” two bachelor brothers count the coins from the collection plates in a little room off one of the hallways.
Here at First Unitarian Society, we are singing again, and I’m brought back to the present by the piercing soprano voices of two women behind me, each reaching the kind of operatic high notes that, in the comic books and comedy shows of my childhood, could shatter window glass. My own singing voice is not strong, yet I sing as loudly as I can. “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Joy to the World.” I still know the words, though I tend to ignore their meanings now that I understand them. When I was small, the words seemed incomprehensible — what in the world was a “round yon virgin”? — and I’d often mumble syllables and sounds, like at school when reciting “The Lord’s Prayer.”
In our Pittsburgh home on Christmas Eve, my siblings and I would jockey for position on the couch, complaining and arguing until our mother cried out, “Children, please! For one day, on Christmas, no fighting!” And somehow, we would calm ourselves, lean into our mother’s shoulder or lay a head across her lap, and listen, in the darkened room, to the Christmas carols playing on my father’s stereo, the melodies suffused with joy and sorrow. “O Come O Come Emmanuel/and ransom captive Is-ra-el.” Whatever that meant. We oohed and aahed at the crackling fire, the bright orange sparks leaping from the fireplace onto the hearth, everyone shouting when a spark landed on the rug, until I, the oldest boy, leapt from my seat and stomped on it.
Now, as the Unitarians begin to sing “Silent Night,” a different memory surfaces, from a profoundly different time. After my father died, my mother eventually settled in Rhode Island, becoming “Granny” to my three young nieces who were growing up nearby. She found a small, homey church that satisfied her religious yearnings more than Shadyside Presbyterian ever had, and she stayed true to her Christian ideals until the end. In her mid-80s, it became apparent that she had Alzheimer’s, and in the fall of 1999, I moved from Madison to live with her and care for her. As her dementia progressed, she became ever more silent.
Still, she remained at the center of our lives, a quiet, loving presence in nearly everything we did as a family. That was the case on Christmas evening of 2001, on the cusp of Mom’s 89th birthday, when a small group of us were sitting around her dining room table after a meal. In her small house, there was no fireplace, no sparks, no squabbling. My brother-in-law Mike was picking out the guitar chords as we all sang carols. “What Child Is This?” “Away in a Manger.” “O Holy Night.” “Silent Night.”
It was then that we heard my mother’s soft, girlish voice, so unexpected, almost miraculous, singing with us, “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright…,” the last time we ever heard her sing.
Even as this memory brings tears to my eyes, I can tell you truthfully that I do not yearn for the past. Not for childhood or any other time. I am content here in the balcony of the Unitarian church, a 75-year-old man with a ragged voice, beset with aches and pains, with nothing to prove to anyone, including myself. As a young man, I used to believe I was special, but over time I have learned that I am not so different from other people, that life is hard for everyone. Silent, holy nights of calm and brightness are rare, peace on earth a faraway dream. Still we sing, for the joy of our blended voices. And tonight, I will sleep — at least for a while — in heavenly peace.
Richard Ely is an artist, editor and writing coach in Madison.
