December 12th New Zealand
The Christchurch Town Hall was not full but the centre sections of the gallery and the stalls were. It’s an annual event, The Messiah, that is, and for everyone there it was, I imagine, normal. For me it was extraordinary. It was the first live concert I’ve been to for about ten months.
As I had a couple of hours to spare I’d wandered through the town centre before the performance. There were people queuing outside the Theatre Royal in Gloucester Street for the ballet, ‘Nutcracker’. Then after walking through Regent Street, the wine bars and cafes already full, I passed ‘Piano’. There were people going in to what I discovered later is a small concert venue chiefly used for chamber music.
I arrived at the Town Hall three quarters of an hour before Messiah was due to start and was surprised at the number of people already in the foyer. Then I realised that as well as the main auditorium there’s also a theatre. There was a performance of Irish music and dance there starting at 7.00pm. Somewhere else in town some of my family were at the Court Theatre for a performance of ‘Jersey Boys’. It’s booked out into January.
Christchurch, New Zealand has a population approaching four hundred thousand. It was devastated by earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 . Much of the centre city still shows signs of the destruction, buildings shored up and empty city blocks where buildings have been cleared. The cathedral which was partly destroyed is in the process of being rebuilt.
And on the evening of Saturday December 12th 2020 in this comparatively small cathedral city there was chamber music, ballet, theatre, dance and Handel’s Messiah.
December 16th Beethoven and Canterbury
This morning, along with about a hundred others, I celebrated the anniversaries of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven in 1770 and the arrival of the SS Charlotte Jane in what is now called Lyttelton Harbour, Canterbury, New Zealand in 1850.
The former anniversary needs little comment other than this. To be part of a gathering coming together on a sweeping lawn surrounded by trees in the late morning of a warm summer’s day and then to move into a large and elegant drawing room for a performance of Beethoven’s music, two Sonatas for Violin and Piano, and afterwards to mingle on a terrace sipping a sparkling wine, was an extraordinary and I suspect unique experience in the world as it is today. Here Beethoven was being celebrated in a way not possible, I suspect, anywhere else in the world. I think most New Zealander’s have no idea how fortunate they are.
The second anniversary, of the arrival of the Charlotte Jane, and therefore of ‘Founder’s Day’ for the Province of Canterbury, New Zealand, has, understandably, less international significance. We celebrated both. A toast was proposed, in Maori and in English, to Beethoven and to the Province, and we drank it with gratitude.
December 17th The Geraldine News
The weekly newspaper has a review of a musical presented by a local village primary school. The village is Woodbury. The musical ‘A Very Woodbury Christmas’. There were four performances in the village hall with a demand for an extension to the season. From the newspaper report I gathered there had been a good deal of local cooperation and support and that local characters and situations featured in the production which had been created by one of the teachers at the school. Every one of the 102 pupils were involved.
The musical was described by the newspaper as, ‘Based loosely on a Christmas theme in a rural community where everyone had forgotten what the real meaning of Christmas was about’. The community discovers the real meaning of Christmas amidst all the commercialisation and busyness. The show included Christmas carols with a local twist – ‘Jingle Bells’ became ‘Tractor Wheels’.
In due course a little angel, performed with considerable enthusiasm by a very young pupil, the newspaper reported, helped the community to discover that ‘the real meaning of Christmas is spending time with the people you love’.
I’m sure it was great and very good for a local community where the realities of Covid19, in whatever mutation, barely exist. However I am especially aware of so many of my family and friends this Christmas who, because of the law, regulation or common sense, cannot spend time with the people they love.
And I think of that even greater reality of Christmas which is centred on a baby in a crib, on God become human, and a message which goes further than being or not being together. Behind every authentic Christmas crib there is the shadow of a cross. And there is the star which is surely at least a hint of the light of the resurrection.
December 19th Blue Christmas
There was a service at St Mary’s Geraldine this evening for ‘Blue Christmas’. When we came in the music was a recording of Bach’s ‘Air on the G String’. The service was quiet, reflective and thoughtful. It was especially for those for whom Christmas includes loss, and was attended, chiefly, by widows and mothers whose children had died. During the service we sang verses of ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’ and we were reminded that this hymn is a song of people in darkness longing for God’s light.
We were invited to light candles of remembrance and the readings included the one from Isaiah chapter 40, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’, which I’d heard sung on Saturday the 12th, and from Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 11, ‘Come unto me all you who labour and are heavy laden.’
Among the Vicar’s closing words were,
‘As people who are familiar with the darkness, we also know that our way is illumined by the light of the Christ Child this Christmas Season. May the hope and light of Christ sustain us in our darkness.’