Fr. Mark Patrick Hederman
John Cage, the American composer tried to change our attitude to music. He was ‘a voice crying in the wilderness.’ Probably his most famous piece 4 33 has musicians coming on stage as if to play music, and then sitting with instruments raised, doing nothing for four minutes, thirty-three seconds. This was not meant to be four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, in his view, but an invitation to the audience to hear the real music happening around them. The sound of a lawn-mower outside the window, laughter from another room, someone sneezing in the audience. Music, according to Cage, should not be an attempt to make our ugly world seem more lovely. Music should be a way of waking us up to the very life we’re supposed to live. Listen to the cries of the 60 million refugees in our world today, the families of those drowned trying to cross the Channel between England and France, the starving people of Syria and Afghanistan. Then you can eat your turkey and sing Happy Christmas.
Peggy Guggenheim, his friend, was having none of this. John Cage was a sourpuss killjoy according to her. She brought him to hear some real music, to shake him out of his lawn mowers and belching cattle outside the window. A Christmas performance of Handel’s Messiah was where they went. ‘Well john, wasn’t that wonderful? Didn’t you just love the Alleluia chorus, weren’t you moved?’ I don’t mind being moved, he replied, but I hate being shoved!’
We should not allow ourselves to be shoved into Christmas. When I tell you that there are only 21 shopping days left to Christmas, do you feel a twinge of panic or of guilt? What the hell are you doing here listening to this nonsense when you could be out shopping till you drop with Harvey Norman; and when they’re gone they’re really gone and there’s no use crying about it, you missed your opportunity.
Let’s try not to celebrate Christmas at too high a pitch. The media and the advertising moguls wind us up to high doh, an hysteria of gluttony and greed. We don’t really need any of this stuff – it’s a false illusion.
Advent should be a time of quiet anticipation.The mystery we celebrate is a singular and a silent one. Because it is almost impossible to understand, it becomes easy to swop the facts for the fiction.
It is going to take something pretty original, something miraculous, something unheard of, to make this world of ours in 2021 a happy Christmas. And you might be the very one one being asked to initiate some of that originality, or at least contribute towards it. But you would have to step off the whirligig to hear the off-stage whisperings.How could this world we are living in become a better place for the seven billion people presently alive on our planet? Step back and ask yourself: How’s it going? Am I on the right track? Am I driving my own vehicle, or is someone else at the steering-wheel? I would need to find a small stable, an out-house near the three-storey mansion I have just built; somewhere small and simple where something personal, original, something divine, could be brought into being against all the odds. Remember ‘What the Donkey Saw’ who was present on that first Christmas beside the crib:
No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable,
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host —
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love nor money. Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.
‘What the Donkey Saw’ by U.A. Fanthorpe [1929-2009]