If you’re lucky, life affords you a few moments when you feel as if you are exactly where you are meant to be, doing exactly what you are meant to be doing. Once in a while, such a moment coincides with one of your children having that very same experience, at the very same time. So it was yesterday afternoon, as the lights dimmed for the final St. Olaf Christmas Festival concert of this year. My husband and I had flown from New Hampshire to Minnesota for this Sunday afternoon performance. As the audience hushed and the orchestra musicians finished tuning, the vast gymnasium grew silent, reverent. The five choirs filed in and took their places. I didn’t expect to cry, and yet, when the violin section’s first notes rang out, sudden tears rolled down my cheeks. There is something about seeing and hearing over six hundred student musicians, all joined together in exquisite harmony, that can prompt an already full heart to, well, overflow.
A couple of hours earlier, we’d talked with Henry over lunch about the idea of him studying music abroad for a semester next year. “Not in the fall,” he’d said definitively. “There’s no way I’d miss Christmas Fest.”
Peering through the darkness to pick him out in the crowd — second row from the back on the long risers, dressed in a scarlet robe, eyes trained on the conductor — I understood. Playing piano for a musical, performing in a jazz ensemble, rehearsing with singers, jamming with friends–these are all things my son loves to do. But one discovery he’s made since he left home, went off to college, auditioned for a choir and began to take singing lessons, is that there is nothing that makes him feel more alive than to join his own voice with others.
Judging from the level of commitment and the talents of the St. Olaf singers, he is not alone in that. For two breathtaking hours, those of us in the audience were swept along on a spiritual journey in song. Most of us had traveled some distance to be there; now, thanks to these gifted young musicians, we were truly transported. In a world that too often seems bleak and overburdened, here was redemption, hope, and light.
“Scatter the darkness,” the words above the stage proclaimed. Tiny white bulbs outlined the Christmas trees on each side of the stage and shone like stars above. Voices soared. Harmonies wove shimmering tapestries of sound. Slowly, sumptuously, the hymns and carols gathered in strength and power. My son sang. We were there to hear. How glad I was in that moment — for him, for us, and most of all, for passions discovered, claimed, and realized.
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