My wife and I have been watching a
choir competition on TV this week, and it’s been a tear-jerker.
Like other emotional events that surprised us, it’s taken us a
while to figure out exactly why. Neither my wife nor I have ever sung
in a choir, and our knowledge of music is sketchy at best, but we love
to hear, and dance to, music.
In this TV show, choirs were formed up in five
different cities, chosen and directed by five musical stars. It’s
a sign of our ages that we only knew the music of two of the stars,
Pattie Labelle and Michael Bolton, but it was marvelous to watch the
selection of the “civilian” singers as they auditioned by "the stars".
Then the choirs had to compete, which struck us as being rather
difficult and needless. They were all wonderful, and the
“stars” all showed that they were great musicians and
perhaps more nobly human than the tabloids ever give them credit for being.
The choirs sang their hearts out. Ordinary looking
people were transformed into heroic figures before our eyes, and we
just felt tremendous pride that this mixed bag of folks (black ones,
white ones, female ones, old ones and young ones, all the mixtures that
surround us so often we don’t even notice it much anymore)
were all Americans, all of them were Us.
It is worth noting and remembering, after the show
has ended and all of these wonderful new choirs have by now probably
returned to their hometowns (where we hope they are booked solid for
performances) that for a very long time in history, a great force tried
to keep these sorts of gatherings from happening. Humans were, and are,
kept separated by color, by sex, by age, by size and by class. We can
think of this force of separation as satanic if we wish to be literary
about it – note I said “literary” and not
“literal”.
We can choose to think of the force that brought
this group of very disparate Americans together as Love. And
that’s the message of Christmas, sung by a bunch of choirs who
probably didn’t realize it when they first met up and started
singing together. The message of Christmas that we hear but don’t
always see is that “Love Wins.” Passing through the hatred,
separations and divisions, the political necessities, religious
doctrines and denominations comes the news that try as we might to
remain apart and despise each other, every now and then the heavenly
choirs will stand and sing and remind us that “Love Wins,”
that the terms “God” and “Jesus” and
“Christ” and “Allah” and “Buddha”
and “Tao” and on and on all have the same root in the word
“Love.” And Love Always Wins, if we just wait long enough.
So sing
on, lovely choirs and beautiful stars. Sing
on, and keep the message of Christmas going. The heavens will smile,
and I’m sure that the angels will be singing along with these
very wonderful and very American choirs.