TIME TRAVEL: BERNSTEIN’S MASS*
I sit in my time machine
and dial my tablet to 1971,
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
and take my seat in the vast theater.
With great anticipation I await
with Jacqueline Kennedy Onaissis
the great work of musical theater
she commissioned Leonard Bernstein
to compose, a living musical
memorial to her late husband,
MASS: A Theater Piece For
Singers, Players and Dancers.
This is no Mass of my memory,
Missa Solemnis, Mass in B Minor,
nor anything that would ever
spill from mind to quill to paper
by Mozart, Schubert, or Palestrina.
A formal choir, a street choir,
a boy’s choir, dancers, rock musicians,
assemble on stage, two orchestras,
one on stage, the other in the pit,
cavalcade of motion, bright colors,
tonal colors, a brilliant and messy
litter of musical styles: chant, rock,
classical consonance, Jazz, blues,
atonal dissonance and electronic.
I ponder what I am witnessing:
prayerful profanity? Sacred sacrilege?
Thrilled, stunned, captivated, repulsed?
No, no this is no Mass of my memory.
Built upon the musical block of
the old Latin stoic, emotionless
Proper of the Tridentine Rite,
juxtaposed with English language
tropes, probing, questioning,
doubting, condemning blind faith.
Music shaping stoic belief
with life influenced disbelief.
The celebrant’s desperate attempt
to move, persuade, instill faith
into an atmosphere of escalating cynicism.
Sung rebuffs of “Where is God” –
in mass genocide, in terminal
and chronic illnesses, in the
torture chambers of dictators,
the families of the disappeared,
in poverty stricken ghettos,
in the racism of Jim Crow,
in cultures of excess?
The doubt and disbelief crescendos,
in a cynical circle dance to Agnus Dei’s
Dona Nobis Pacem, “Grant us Peace,”
the singers dance, the dancers sing,
a whirl of accusation against a God
who promises peace but in whom
none find peace. A chaotic peace,
chaotic demands for peace
assail and tear at the celebrant,
his soul as ripped as his vestments,
holding the sacred species,
as a shield to ward off
in desperation the sonic assault
of anger and disbelief.
In frustration and defeat,
chalice and monstrance cast
to the floor, shattering, spilling,
broken shards of Christ’s body,
mixed with that of his own.
How well have I experienced
my own soul shattered,
my spirit’s blood spilled
by the people I served,
by the Church I served,
used, abused, and abandoned.
How many times have I raised
my arms to the heavens
and cried, “Dona Nobis Pacem!”
Then,
nothingness.
Silence.
Gathering the shards
of my broken self,
carefully, trepidatiously,
fit them together, and
like the broken celebrant,
hand grasped by an innocent,
return to ministry,
parting with my abusers,
with an empty “Pax Vobiscum”.
My time machine whisks me back,
no longer in my theater seat,
but my red chair at home.
Incredulity and condemnation,
cheers and jeers, praise and
admiration echoes from the
now distant past premier.
I bask in its sacred acrimony,
uncanny its wondrous prophecy.
The Church more chaotic peace,
than Dona Nobis Pacem.
The ordained offspring of
John Paul and Benedict,
clericalism parading about
sanctuaries, a sanctimonious
La Cage aux Folles. Demigods
adorned in gold lamay,
evoking Latin as it were magic,
their backs to the people,
their magician arms waving
about trying to return
to a time when priests
were thought demigods,
stripped of all humanity,
though well we know
by the lives shattered
by their sexual sins of the past,
their broken human nature.
Present day demigods
seek peace built upon
a false past. Their
Pax Vobiscum as
empty as their
mythological memory
of what was once.
What truth is gleaned
by Bernstein’s Mass?
It was composed by
a broken composer
for the broken widow
shattered by the deaths
of her assassinated husband,
her assassinated brother-in-law,
and a nation broken
by war, prejudice and violence.
God’s Dona Nobis Pacem
is not the domain of those
who are whole,
but on the fingertips
of our broken fingers.
(c) 2019, Robert Charles Wagner. All rights reserved.
*As quickly as it was recorded, I bought a copy of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass in 1971. The family record player was in the finished basement of my parent’s home and I spent a countless amount of time listening to music there. I must have worn out that double LP set of the Mass. It was so out of the realm I knew as sacred music. It was sacred and profane at the same time. It was disturbing, musically transporting, captivating, and wonderfully corrupted by modern musical idioms. I have listened to it now and again over the years, but after forty-two years of church ministry have had the freedom to REALLY listen to it again, with a reflection on my experience juxtaposed with that of the celebrant.
