A Facebook friend said I could still write an Easter-themed post, even if I missed the deadline. In her words, “Easter is a season.”
It’s a little story I’ve never told. Well, once. To a former nun who ran the music store in Batavia, NY, twenty-five years ago. (I am a born liar: And once to my Mother).
I was singing Zuniga on a tour of ‘Carmen’ with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. We performed in the open air, under the stars in Jerusalem, before thousands of people for seven nights. It was just in view of David’s Gate to the Holy City. Each night’s performance was magical for me… The spell of hearing Bizet’s famous interlude that precedes Act III on each of those still nights, under a sky of indigo blue, luminous with a full moon and with the heavenly jewel-like stars above, is for me forever fixed in time and memory.
Some other day I might talk about the marvelous international cast of that ‘Carmen,’ and my sudden new friendships with certain members of the chorus from London, but I’ll stick here to the basics. When we were not performing, there was considerable time for sightseeing, and many of us chose to get out of the city to discover Bethlehem, Tel Aviv, or enjoy touristy things like camel rides on the outskirts of town. For some reason, I chose to remain in Jerusalem, to more amply discover it’s history and it’s atmosphere in the back streets, the markets, and notably the Western Wall (the Wailing Wall), and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Alone one afternoon, I visited the towering, octagonal Dome of the Rock, one of the most inspiring architectures I have ever entered, or in which I have set foot (in my stocking feet obviously, as one does there). It was all amazing. At the moment I exited the shrine, a local guide appeared from nowhere, and spoke to me as if we were friends. He was Arab, and mustered relatively good English. He took me around various viewpoints surrounding the monument, and when his little tour ended I asked where to rejoin the path that would lead me to my hotel. I payed him with a few small coins, and then he added, as if an afterthought, that to orient myself I might turn my gaze over to the hill in the distance. There were many hills to discern, but I did make out where he meant. Then he said, with some indifference, “That is the place where Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven.”
And then he left me, disappearing before I could even react.
I stood there, in shock. At that point in my life I was rather a non-believer. Not an active practitioner, let’s say. But the words this Muslim man said so matter-of-factly were filled for me with meaning, for I had been drilled for years with Catechism. I looked up to the blue sky, and in my clear view, close enough to touch, was a type of evergreen branch, with long needles, and the branch was moving gently in the still silence. I remained there for a long moment to gather my thoughts.
It reminded me of a short story my Aunt Alice had written at the beginning of her career in the 50s, which I read as a child. She described her grandfather, my great-grandpa Schultz, whom she recalled calmly waiting, seated on the porch out on the farm. He was very old, and blind. But he had the gentlest disposition, and accepted his fate. His clear blue eyes, hazed by cataracts, still revealed his goodness and his gentle nature. In the article, Alice described a subtle breeze that suddenly came up from the West, and touched Grandpa’s face. She described that breeze as God touching Grandpa’s with gentle reassurance.
Since that April afternoon in Jerusalem, over twenty-five years ago, the sight of slowly moving branches of pine in a warm breeze has never failed to bring together for me these two mysterious events.