Through a mask, darkly, cradling hand-written chant in one hand and a tapered candle in the other, I croak my way through the ancient service of Tenebrae.
A ragtag crew of rusty, veteran singers returns to St. Mary Magdalene’s this week to sing the 8 choral services required during Holy Week, the slow and solemn march toward Easter Day.
I am one of that old guard asked to brush up their vocal armour and return to the choir. After two years (or ten years) of non-singing, this Quixotic company of comrades requires courage, and a letting go of pride, knowing our voices need a good polish.
Tenebrae is a service of chanted psalms, sung in its entirety from top to bottom. No spoken words, no interpretation of what is happening, an experiential, theatrical, almost hypnotic exercise. By the end of the service, we’re all left in darkness to make sense of what we’ve experienced. No one tells us what to think or feel. You decide.
Chanting the old language of those psalms, singing about our ‘reins’ (that’s reins, not veins – like kidneys) and psalm upon psalm pleading for forgiveness borders on the absurd – singing words that have lost their meaning. But afterward, I do feel weirdly cleansed, somehow purged after that arduous evening of chant is over.
Can this spiritual spa scrub down the sins of the world? Can I chant down those crimes of violence far away? Can I croon away the horrors of history? Can I sing in my own forgiveness? I have the same sparks of human greed in me that fuelled those terrible acts.
My imperfect singing cannot tune this dissonant world. It can’t relieve real pain or need in my own neighbourhood or halfway across the world. But it isn’t meaningless. Somehow chanting for forgiveness shakes away the helplessness, brings us together, creates a ‘tabula rasa’ on which to write a fresh narrative.
Holy Week services continue at Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, Toronto, April 14-17, 2022.