Last night we streamed parts one and two of Martin Scorsese’s biopic of Bob Dylan – “No Direction Home”, and like so many veterans of our generation it triggered some complicated memories leading inexorably into that conversation about life changing moments. There’s never anything complicated or even related about these moments. For me, with “Hard Rain” – the song he was singing the first time I heard him – I was standing at the window of a house in Hartcliffe in a party where me and my best friend Eddy turned out to be the only guests of two girls we fancied. We were high up on a hill and I remember looking out across Bristol and knowing that after hearing Dylan nothing would ever be the same again. Notwithstanding our best efforts the night remained completely chaste and we all kept our jeans on, four in a bed. A couple of years later Madame and I found each other and the second great tsunami of our teenage years overwhelmed us.
Watching the film, many years later, I was completely captivated once more by Dylan’s capacity to own the song; to inhabit it (and I wasn’t one of those who hated his electrification). There was always that complete correspondence between the sung words and the experiences behind it, even when those experiences were not personal, but grown in the fibre of overlapping lives. That night I couldn’t sleep I was restless and troubled by another memory.
My route into Christianity (and out of it again!) was long, convoluted and often painful. I finally decided to throw my hat into the ring because living it out was the only way I could imagine ever finding out what it was about. (Madame finally said to me – “You’re not going to be a bloody vicar are you?”). Thirty years later I was increasingly dismayed by what so-called organized religion really stood for, and it’s a subject I don’t feel much need to enlarge on. However, concealed in the warp and weft of everyday unreflective religion are some practices of enormous heft and significance and singing was one of them.
There’s a song called the exultet (sometimes exsultet) which tradition demands is sung by the Deacon (a priest near the end of training in the Church of England). It’s a prolonged unaccompanied plainsong explosion of joy from some time between the fifth and the seventh centuries, and you really need to be taught it because the archaic notation passed out of common use centuries ago. So it fell to me to sing the exultet in the church to which I was sent on the first Easter eve after I arrived and I sang it for 25 years in the parish I took over; the last time being 10 years ago. The first time I sang it I’d been overworking (we all did) in the lead-up to Easter and on Good Friday morning I got out of the bath and slipped head first through the plate glass window of the bathroom. There was a great deal of blood, Our oldest child solemnly pronounced that I’d severed an artery and I would be dead within minutes; our next door neighbour came to help but after one glimpse of me naked and covered in blood she fainted. In the end I was saved by our other neighbour who, being a midwife, was used to that sort of thing and bound me up in towels and got me off to A&E. A waggish nurse asked if I wasn’t overdoing Good Friday, turning up there with wounds in my hands and feet and a huge sliver of glass in my side. Ha Ha I thought and then asked politely if it was OK to pass out. The next day was Easter Eve and I just had to sing the exultet. Some lovely gentle men came and cleared up the mess as I sat in the garden and contemplated my stitches. On Easter eve I swallowed a large glass of brandy on the advice of the choirmaster and organist and sang as if my life depended on it. Maybe it did.
The Easter vigil happens every year on the evening before Easter Day. It’s a long service of readings and psalms at the end of which all the lights are turned out and the first light of the new Christian year is brought into the church with great ceremony, prayers and responses. The big Paschal candle is lit and everyone in the congregation gets their small candle lit from the large one. When it reaches the stand where it normally lives, the exultet is sung into the candlelit darkness and silence. It’s an overwhelming experience to sing it – so overwhelming in fact that every year I had to lock myself in the church and sing it over and over again until I could stop myself crying as I sang. And here’s the link back to Bob Dylan. I was always possessed by the song. I never quite knew whether I was singing the song or the song was singing me. Thirteen hundred years of tradition, embracing billions of people and thousands of cultures I would never encounter, all seemed to be joining in the great song with me. I have never missed anything in my life as much as I miss singing the exultet.
When I retired from institutional responsibilities I also stopped singing; I stopped music altogether because I couldn’t bear it any more. George Bernard Shaw called it the brandy of the damned. I must be the world’s greatest sinner.