“Shall We Gather at the River?”
[“And he showed me a crystalline river of the water of life . . . coming forth out of the throne of God and of the lamb” (Apoc 22:1).]
O Lover,
All of it was most improbable: although it was Shrove Tuesday, I found myself sequestered at home in the wake of a medical procedure. As I do for simple pleasure from time to time, I resorted to YouTube and VOCES8, the British a cappella octet which can arrange and sing anything from Gregorian to Lauridsen. Now immediately following Fauré’s Pie Jesu I stumbled upon Blake Morgan’s arrangement of “Shall We Gather at the River?” by the 19th century hymn writer Robert Lowry, that track’s cohort having morphed to an even dozen.
And then, to the best of my awareness, two intertwined things seemed to happen. First, as ensemblist Morgan’s arrangement of tight harmonics and ascending modulations unfolded, I sensed that these choristers were singing for their lives in our shared world now so fractured and ominous. To this listener well aware of the encircling gloom their faces were increasingly fusing with their voices in expressing defiant and uninhibited joy. In score, text, and arrangement they were singing the song I seek to sing, at least on my good days.
And then, their arrangement ascending yet further, the group sang for the final time this refrain: “Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river; gather with the saints at the river, that flows by the throne of God.” It was with passion, urgency, and a collective exuberance, dissonances repeatedly surrendering to resolution, that they relentlessly approached and then mounted the refrain’s summit, the apotheosis which was self-evidently more than text and/or score. As sound and image faded and they were left in muted and reverential silence as lovers often are afterwards, I found my face wet with tears. In a way allowing neither description nor explanation, I had been, however briefly, swept up in the River.
Several days have now passed, the strange confluence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day giving way to Lent, but I remain deeply marked. Just what happened on Tuesday? In the grand tradition of the via negatíva, I can speak less of what did than what did not transpire. The experience was no mere aesthetic jolt or escape into denial of the darkness or hankering for some bargained-for afterlife. Much more than a quest for this or that, I am convinced that what I experienced was one of Your unprovoked and unsolicited ambushes erupting via an unexceptional sliver of finitude, in this case a piece of music hitherto commonplace to me. Indeed, perhaps the only via positíva thing I could offer is the way in which the images for You of “river” or “flowing stream” in the scratchings of mystics of the ilk of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Ruusbroec, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas Keating have over the years repeatedly skewered and left me out beyond knowledge. And on Tuesday the Apocalypse was added to that list of riverine glimpses into You who are Reality Itself, here and now.
Although I have embraced an “apophatic heart” stance (for reasons of self-protection?), like Teresa de Jesús I am needful of what she dubbed “favors” because of fragility of faith. But on Tuesday last, at least briefly, I was inexplicably, unaccountably, and unquestioningly in and of the River who is You. To paraphrase Isaiah of Jerusalem (6:5): “the eyes [of my heart] have seen the [Lover]!” That awareness, however infrequent and fleeting, was, is, and ever shall be enough! And insofar as the title of the musical piece of this post is a query, I respond “yes!” to it with all of the strength of my being.
