Breaking in sounds so … criminal.
Unless it’s light breaking in, or insight, or a penetrating sense of hope.
February 1973, public restroom, Hawaii:
Pre-Luau, six friends wash up. Judy sings Ju – bi – late Deo (rejoice in God). We all chime in. Great acoustics, a 15th-century round—we sound like a choir in a soaring cathedral.
Later the luau bandleader says, into the mic, “We heard heavenly music … coming from the ladies’ room.”
(laughter)
We slide down in our seats.
“Would those angels please join us onstage?”
(crowd, rubbernecking, applauds).
“Everyone should hear you,” he adds.
Before an international audience we sing and sing—in Latin. The long-dead language rising, rising.
We finish. A person could hear a lei petal drop.
“We sing. Things become fresh,” Walter Brueggermann writes.
“But then the moment breaks.”
In this half-broken world “a song’s always breaking in,” my friend Barb says.
Listen for it.
And sometimes, be one.
When have you heard the sound of hope breaking in? What happened?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed.
—Lisel Mueller (excerpt), “What the Dog Perhaps Hears”
Hear “Jubilate Deo” here: 15th century round, or perpetual canon, written by Michael Praetorious.
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