December 23, 2005

Readers share favorite Christmas memories

Singing brought healing for vocalist on Christmas Eve

By Mary Jean Wethington
Special to The Criterion

It had been three decades since I had lifted up to God the offering of my voice to the newborn Christ Child in a choir for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. 1994 was the year of healing for me through the medium of music.

At the time, I belonged to the parish community of St. Peter in Chains Cathedral in Cincinnati. The music director asked for volunteers to sing with the cathedral choir at Christmas. Most of the choir members were from the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. The audition went well, but never in my wildest imagination did I envision what all it would take for the offering of my song as gift on Christmas Eve. The music director was a perfectionist who had chosen some of the most difficult yet most beautiful classical hymns ever written.

That year, Christmas Eve was a chilly, snowy night. When the 14-member choir gathered for the 45-minute concert before the eucharistic liturgy, we found out that the lead soprano was sick. I was asked to take her place.

Perhaps because it was Christmas, perhaps because it was time to heal, as the choir began our Christmas gift to the cathedral community, the music moved from being song to being absolute prayer. As lead soprano, my heart and voice could—and had to—soar with the music. Likening myself to “The Little Drummer Boy,” I sang my best for God, for the Christ Child, for the healing of my heart. That was the real gift. “Then, he smiled at me, pa rum pum pum pum”—me, us, the choir and our Christmas song.

(Mary Jean Wethington is a member of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Parish in Bright.) †

 

Local site Links: