“My whole soul burns most ardently after it”

Through a series of serendipitous events, Dick and I went to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s Ring Christmas Bells concert last weekend. It was being filmed for PBS, and it was the fanciest performance I’ve been to in a long time. Perhaps ever.

But as I watched the dancers, in odd (but modest!) angel-nun costumes, and the high school bell choirs, in odd marching band-liturgical robes, swarm the stage in front of the choir, behind the orchestra and the elaborate Victorian Christmas decorations, all I could think of was the long rehearsals. The rushed dinners, the set-building and instrument tuning, the costume-sewing and voice exercises, the light checks and sound checks, and the driving and planning and parking and waiting and the taking-it-again-from-the-top.

Despite all the spectacle and the moments of great theater, it just wasn’t spectacular enough to transport me to that place where you forget everything going on behind the scenes.

Or maybe I’m getting old, and tired. When I read a good post lately, I think of the blogger hacking away at her computer, trying to tune out the kids or the husband or the shrieking mounds of laundry. As I eat a delicious meal, I think of the pots and pans stacked in the sink, and the garlic chopping and potato dicing.

At the Mo-Tab, I got goose bumps during the a capella sections of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, and we laughed delightedly at The Friendly Beasts. But several of the songs were a bit blah, despite the star-worthy voice and presence of Brian Stokes Mitchell and the moving dramatic reading of Christmas with the Longfellows by Edward Herrmann.

(Edward Herrmann was great, by the way; knowing that he played Goldie Hawn’s loser husband in Overboard only added to his performance.)

We were late picking up our kids. The show was longer than I expected, the underground parking garage was stuffed with concert-goers, and the roads were icy. We grabbed a snack at Carl’s Jr, and I had Dick put on coconut verbena lotion afterwards so our friends wouldn’t smell the hamburgers and fries on us and know that we hadn’t hurried home quite as fast as we could have.

It was all so exhausting. The dressing-up, the babysitter-arranging (including reciprocation), the smiling at our seatmates, the standing for Handel’s Hallelujah chorus, the sucking of seventeen cough drops and the fretting over driving in a blizzard and the pressing question of exactly who chose those bizarre habits for the angel-nun dancers.

We wondered if the evening was worth our effort. I wondered if it was worth the efforts of the hundreds of performers. How many moments must be sublime for a performance to be worth it? How many images in a post or bites in a meal?

Usually I find that if I’ve forgotten for even a second the toys scattered on the floor and the errands to be run, then a story or an idea or a prayer has been worth the time.

As her teacher Mr. Carpenter reminds Emily in L.M.Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon, the Lord would have spared Sodom and Gommorah if ten righteous people had been found there. That’s after he’s looked through her reams of poetry and found only a dozen lines worth keeping.

There are so many hands to be washed and lessons to be taught. So many dinners to be cooked and books to be read.

Will it be worth it to work at creating my own art?

I don’t know.

But it was worth it for Longfellow, who wrote I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day a couple years after losing his wife in a fire that burned him badly trying to save her. His son had been crippled in the continuing Civil War. He said “How inexpressibly sad are all the holidays” the year after Fanny’s death. And the year after that he wrote this:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”