The Beauty And The Imperfection

Years ago, I used to listen to a Joni Mitchell song that contained the lyric "...you turn your gaze to me...weighing the beauty and the imperfection to see if I'm worthy."

A few years back, Norm, Spence and I went to England with the Valley Forge Choir of Men and Boys, a traditional Anglican choir. Spence and Norm both sing in the choir.

Choirs in this tradition perform a choral service called Evensong, which takes place in the late afternoon, at 4 or 5pm. Many churches in England have resident men-and-boys choirs; some even have choir boarding schools for the boys. During the trip, which took place in July, the Valley Forge choir became the choir in-residence at two ancient English cathedrals - Ripon Cathedral, in Ripon, England, and Carlisle Cathedral in the city of that name.

The group of us who traveled together included the boys and men of the choir, the director and organists, and family members. During the week that the choir sang in Ripon, we all stayed in the choir school, located about a mile outside of town. The men and boys of the choir would go into town each morning for rehearsal, have the afternoon off, and reconvene at the cathedral in the afternoon each day for Evensong.

We family members and choir hangers-on would sightsee in the town, and then take our places in the pews each afternoon, usually about a half-hour before Evensong. This means that we spent a great deal of time in each of the two cathedrals, sitting in quiet contemplation of these spaces both before and during the services.

Ripon Cathedral is very old, especially by American standards - underneath the church are the excavated remains of a church built by Saint Wilfred in 672. It is one of the first stone churches built in England. The current cathedral is the fourth incarnation of that early church; much of it dates to the 13th century.

When you sit and stare at a space for hours, day after day, you get to know it in a different way than when you pass through it in tourist mode. You really get to see what is there. In the case of Ripon cathedral, the church has been rebuilt several times, and when you look upward at the vaulted stone arches and windows of this beautiful space, you can see places where original design was replaced with later design; parts of the church nave collapsed and were rebuilt, but never finished (due to the appropriation of all church funds by Henry VIII).

As a result, the inside of the church is hardly symmetrical. Columns do not match; arches are cut in half; windows partially obscured. You look at these things and you think about the designers of the various renovations, and the stonemasons who did the work. You think about the fact that eight hundred years ago, people sat where you are sitting and looked at these things exactly as you are doing now, and talked about how to finish off this part, or that part, or what exactly to do here or there to merge into the existing work.

You see the design imperfections in the church, and they reveal the humanity of the people who worked on it. You can see their desire to do something wonderful, something lasting, to honor God. You can see the hard work, and the sweat, and the patience that went into creating this space, wherein stone is transformed into something of worth. A thing does not have to be perfect to be beautiful.

The choir enters and takes its place in the carved choir stalls. It sings psalms and gorgeous choral anthems, some of which were written by Palestrina or Thomas Tallis almost five hundred years ago. They are intricate and multilayered, much like the walls of the cathedral.

You look at this space for hours, and it becomes a part of you. You listen to the music of the choir, sung in a place that was built for such sounds, and you lose the sense of time, and consciousness of self. If there are any imperfections in the music, you can't hear them, because the space and its echo transform the music into something beyond mere song.

And the music and the space transform you.