Last night I went to a screening of the movie Shining
Night: A Portrait of Composer
Morten Lauridsen at the Rafael Theater. The composer himself was there, as was the director, Michael
Stillwater. The film was lovely
and simple, beautifully photographed, and part of a larger body of work called,
“In Search of the Great Song.”
According to Stillwater’s website, Song Without Borders, Lauridsen’s
gorgeous works are, “. . . the most frequently performed choral music of modern
history.”
Truly a mystic, Lauridsen does a great deal of his writing
on Waldron, one of the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest, the place
where he says he first felt whole.
Speaking after the film was shown, he described when he purchased, sight
unseen, his wonderfully dilapidated house on the island. Seeing the structure for the first
time, the realtor apologized profusely, and the woman Lauridsen was with was looking at him as if he were insane. But Lauridsen was ecstatic. "No, " he said. "Look at what you can see from here.” He didn’t care what the house looked
like; he cared that from this place he could see spectacular beauty.
This came back to me as I sat this morning. Feeling, perhaps, a little dilapidated
myself, I suddenly stopped looking at
myself and began to look through
me to what was all around.
Lauridsen’s house might not last many more winters, but the land on
which it was built will survive a series of structures that come and go. My perspective shifted from the view of the self to the view from the self, and for just a moment I became invisible,
like a very clean window.
While it is human to love what death will take, there is a
blessed stillness in loving death itself, to stop – for just a moment – the
ceaseless renovation and nestle into the arms of that which takes us home. I felt patient and safe. Everything I’ve built became
irrelevant, and I beamed as though I’d discovered a new color, the color of
appreciation. I never wanted to
come back.
