There�s a lesson, here. I know it. The Protestants always sang �Amazing Grace� at concerts and us Catholic kids had to learn �Ave Maria� (the original, not the Schubert). This means something. Let�s first take a moment to compare. What are the differences between the two? Our song was incredibly difficult, no one except the handful of housewives who took voice training at 1 in the afternoon on Wednesdays (imagine!) could sing it. Meanwhile, any hick with an inbred accent could humble out �Amazing Grace.�

Good, that seems like something. What else? Well, it�s in Latin, nobody understands the words but everyone agrees it�s important, that it�s sacred and sad and good in the most invisible of ways. It�s uninviting, foreign, it�s barricaded. That�s excellent, it�s barricaded.

I don�t think I�ve quite hit the nail yet, but there�s a gesture there, a hint.

On the Sundays leading up to Easter Mass all the kids in the catechism classes got together in the basement of the rec hall to practice. Practicing meant being positioned and repositioned by the junta of church ladies who prepared us for the concert. Practice was about preparing the show, not the song. Everyone knew the song was impossible. Mrs. R�, who sipped coffee spiked with rum while assigning us numbers based on height, would years later share time with me in the bathroom line of a party, would say wildly inappropriate things for a married mother of four, would spill wine on her shirt, would hold back tears, gallantly, while discussing our separate chronometers. She was a queen. We loved her. I forget her husband�s name, he might have died a few years back.

As for the song, I�m doing it a disservice by being so dismissive. The first time I heard it was the summer I turned seven, sung by a young woman in a blue dress with a tulip on the bust. Yes, a whole tulip. We did not bow to fashion in my town. It was intrinsically beautiful then and it remains so, despite the frustrations of meaning and interpretation and social self-alignment and religiosity. �Ave Maria� presents me with the problem that a person this grounded and populist in his artistic consumption might one day come to love the opera; that I don�t have to get a song, lyrically, to like it.

A bigger fallout (and one rife with a certain predatory existentialism) is the idea that someone as cynical as I am may one day approach a religious experience. If something as common as the pirated file of an a cappela prayer could elicit goosebumps, what else am I capable of? If someone who sees a reflection on a hymn as an opportunity to scour denominationalism could forget to exhale until the end of a refrain written in a language nobody speaks, then how big could the world really be?

We forget (I do, anyway) that part of artistic experience is the displaying of the otherworldly, and forcing your audience to rearrange their perceptions to allow for this new presence. Essentially, forcing them to repeat themselves. The otherworldly is inherently barricaded from its audience. And uninviting. And foreign. And excellent. It�s barricaded, that�s excellent. There�s a lesson, here. I know it.

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© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.