Behold, I tell you a mystery (a witty allusion there to a Biblical passage sung in Handel's Messiah). It is that although we are an increasingly unchristian and secular society (our 2016 census with its amended questions on religion is forecast to show that Christians are an Australian minority now) there is no sign of any loss of public interest in rocking up to and especially of singing in performances of Handel's Messiah.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The Canberra Choral Society's Come and Sing Messiah is looming. The performance will be on 12 December. Recruiting of rank-and-file Messiah-loving warblers is underway and the CCS's Kelly Corner knows from experience (for the CCS stages a Come And Sing Messiah every two years) that at least 100 Canberrans, lots of them agnostics and atheists, will leap at the chance to take part.
Back to this big, spiritual subject in a moment but first we report (giving a little Hallelujah! of joy as we do it) that Canberra's most famous representative of God's creatures, the Powerful Owl (affectionately known as the Powl) is still among us.
This column is famous as the headquarters of the Powerful Owl Fan Club, dedicated to bringing Canberrans news and photographs of this statuesque fowl. The news is that the magisterial fowl, the most famous and most-photographed individual bird in the history of our bird-blessed and bird-appreciative city, is still haunting the neighbourhood of the North Canberra Bowling Club at Turner. We bring you John Bundock's very recent photograph of it with, attractively slung across a branch, its latest kill, yet another possum.
The bowling club's Terry Bird informs us that the club is so fond of the owl ("It's our club mascot because it's been here since November 2014") that it is having a unique, custom-made set of bowls made, embossed with the grand creature's awesome image. The bowls will be the irresistibly desirable prize in a raffle at the club's Open Day on Sunday 18 October.
But back to Handel's irresistible Messiah and to how the CCS's Kelly Corner and this columnist have had a little chortle together at the thought that the CCS might insist of its Come And Sing Messiah applicants "must be a Christian".
That's unthinkable, and yet we agreed that it is intriguing that so many people who today take part in singing the Messiah (whether as regular choristers or as Messiah enthusiasts doing it every now and then) surely must be agnostics and atheists who never normally bother God. They can't have the foggiest idea what they are singing about.
Handel's Messiah is mostly a series of settings of passages of the Bible, a demandingly large book that fewer and fewer Australians ever dip into. So for example a modern post-Christian choir tackling the Messiah will find itself singing with conviction the great chorus "And He shall purify the sons of Levi" but with few choristers knowing Levi from a bar of soap or knowing why his sons are so grubby and need a good purifying.
But Kelly Corner says that lots of the sacred words of the Messiah turn out to pack quite a secular buzz.
"Singing it and listening to it is an uplifting experience in so many non-religious ways."
So for example she says that the terrific chorus "All we, like sheep, have gone astray (We have turned every one to his own way)" can resonate in the bosoms (my form of words, not Kelly's) of all of us who sense that there is a sad lack of common purpose in society, in the world.
Then, she fancies, Messiah lovers revel in the way in which the Messiah and its music "are about glory, about victory".
Yes, although in the strict sense the victory celebrated in the Messiah is a believers' victory over Beelzebub and death we somehow pick up from the triumphant mood of the victory arias and choruses a joy of victory over almost everything that's malignant. It is a wonder, really, that no AFL team has for its team song (bellowed in triumph after every victory) a setting of the thrilling Hallelujah Chorus. No wonder legend has it that King George II, at the London premiere of Messiah, spontaneously stood up when the triumphant strains of the Hallelujah Chorus stirred his soul and stirred his regal bones. That chorus makes all sensitive souls, believers or sceptics, feel very, very good to be alive.
But surely there is, for thinking people, a great strangeness about the way something so Christian as Messiah (although we now hear it most at Christmas Handel is thought to have meant it to be a faith-stoking thing for Easter and Lent) seems so impregnable in these post-Christian times. The CCS is planning, some time before the performance, a public forum "Why do we keep doing Messiah?" at which this mystery will be probed. Your columnist, at the same time a committed atheist and a committed Messiah buff and disciple, looks forward to having this conundrum unpacked. We don't normally believe in winged angels (in the Messiah there are flocks of them) and yet, for the duration of the Messiah, they feel as palpably real as the winged magpies (and owls) of suburbia.
Applications to be part of Come and Sing Messiah are open until 12 October. Go to the CCS website canberrachoralsociety.org for details. Rehearsals start 2 November and the performance (using the heavenly, angelic acoustics of the Llewellyn Hall), is on 12 December.
