Hodie

[Ralph Vaughn Williams (1872-1958), Hodie Christus Natus Est (solos/choral/orchestral cantata in 16 movements).]

O Lover,

It was thirty-seven years ago this week. I was driving truck in what would become in retrospect the seam between the two halves of my life. Although ordinarily working with a co-driver, in my memory I was driving solo that night transporting nameless freight from one location to another, perhaps in western Pennsylvania. The PM snowfall had extended well into the night, the temperature rendered “water like a stone,” and continuing my journey was getting edgy. In the mountainous terrain I managed to find a safe pull-out where I parked the rig near a single light jousting with the darkness. I weighed whether to climb back into the sleeper and get some rest, but that inclination was intercepted by my growing awareness of my environs. Through the frosted windows I caught glimpses of the world around me becoming increasingly crystalline and magic, intermittently set afire by the lights of passing vehicles. While far from home and perhaps vulnerable, I knew no fear.

And suddenly—I sequestered, immobilized, alone—something wonderful happened: I turned on the radio and most improbably stumbled upon a performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Hodie Christus Natus Est, a 1954 work mostly in English I had not known existed. Indeed, in the seam back then I was only beginning to appreciate the power of such music. The way in which Vaughan Williams’s crescendos were bearing along momentous phrases such as “He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High,” “Glory to God in the highest,” “Immanuel,” and “the Word was God” left me astounded and in tears. 

Now decades later I am still transferred into the seemingly pure receptivity with which I imbibed that hour: melodies exuding uncontainable joy; harmonies both tonal and most untraditional; driving percussive rhythms repeatedly, almost violently, shifting; all in service of texts Lucan, Matthean, Johannine, and more modern showcasing Your bared axis of all things. There in the pull-out amid my mid-life dark night I somehow experienced my own Bethlehem, increasingly aware that the cosmos was being bathed in the Light Divine with the enshrouding darkness never able to extinguish it.

Much has changed since that holy night in the seam: the newborn of Mary has unfolded in my consciousness into the Cosmic Christ; the scope and scale of Incarnátus is becoming Your “all in All,” Your “Totality”; the Feast of the Nativity, thus perceived, has become my first feast. But it is also true that back there in the pull-out I indisputably experienced the self-evidency and splendor of Your embrace which would be harbinger of much of what was to follow. And it all happened on a dark and foreboding night in a truck cab in a nameless pull-out.

What was, remains. So once again my gratitude, O Lover!