Perspectives

[Teresa Davey, there are three videos in this post. Each is inserted below the paragraph that refers to them. It should be possible on your phone to click on them and so play them on YouTube, but let me know in the comments if you have trouble with that and I'll try to figure out a strategy. I thought if I inserted the video into the block of text, rather than linking a word, it might be easier for your fingers to find. I hope so, because I'd love you to be able to listen to them. If it helps, on 21st December I posted just the inserted video of O Holy Night, with no accompanying text, so it may be easier to get to it through that.]

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For about the thousandth time this winter I went back to YouTube to listen again to the tenor Harry Gant singing O Holy Night, in the course of the 2024 broadcast of Carols from Kings (not the 2025 one).

Everything about it is beautiful.

That service starts in the remains of daylight at three in the afternoon, but is in total darkness by the end. When they were singing that carol, the chapel is entirely dark, lit by the candles inside their simple protective lantern sleeves of gleaming glass. You can see the people who have been lucky enough to attend the service — and how privileged and special that will feel — sitting quietly in their best clothes, their hands resting on the service sheets held on their laps.

The cameras in their various locations show us first of all Harry Gant start to sing, and the sensitivity he brings to it is its own kind of reverence. I have no idea what his personal faith may be, but I can see in his face that he understands the value of what has been entrusted to him. He sings not only the music, but the hymn. And then the other cameras show the rest of the choir — the trebles, just little kids, singing without affectation because music is woven into the everyday round of life for a boy at choir school. It's very wise, the dailyness of it sands away performance and exposes the music underneath. Then another camera on the man standing quietly beside Harry Gant, alert for the moment to add his voice. And one camera shows the accompanist, so sure and focused — four keyboards and the pedals to get right as well as reading the music. Organists astonish me.

I posted about it back in December, but here it is again in case you didn't see. 

What struck me watching it this time through is how young they all are. It took me right back to years gone by living in York, when we were just kids ourselves, university students. The man who became my husband singing in the Minster choir and playing the organ at Selby Abbey, all of us who lived in community together in St Martins Lane singing Vespers at All Saints Pavement, writing papers for the Theology Group at More House, staying at Ampleforth and joining in Vespers in the dark of winter evenings with the monks, sitting on the stairs to sing Compline every night at St Martins Lane (we made the staircase our chapel and the cantor sat on the half-landing), singing Irish folk songs round the supper table after supper. We were so young. Mike was the oldest of us at twenty-four.

And I know that if the people we were then could look at me now, all they'd see is an old lady.

Harry Gant and the young men standing beside him in Kings College chapel, they look to me as much like kids as the trebles. 

It's a curious thing, isn't it — I can see how young they are, and they can't; and they'd be able to see how old I am, and I can't. It's like the tradesmen who have worked on our house through this last summer; there's a sort of gentle understated gallantry, making sure we're all right, carrying heavy things upstairs for us, doing extra little things to look after us. It makes me realise how old we look to them, Tony and me.

It gives me a sense of life passing. I feel my body growing old, see it in the mirror, notice that I couldn't possibly run up a flight of stairs as I once always did, see the skin in wrinkled folds on my hands. But at the same time, I just feel like me. And it's only when I watch Harry Gant and the young men beside him singing O Holy Night that I realise how young I was then, all those years ago, when I didn't know I was young, I thought I was just me.

Here's a recording of Mike and John and Rog, singing the Agnus Dei from William Byrd's three-part Mass for the chant project Rog did towards his degree in 1977. They were in the Lyons Concert Hall at the university. What I treasure is that they were also friends, and living together in community, and used to sing that piece along with so many others, any evening of the week, just for the love of it.

And here, more than forty years later, our family (and Donna) playing at Pett Chapel in the Sussex countryside. Alice on French horn, Rosie with her trombone, Hebe and Donna with their violins, and Grace with her viola (it's at a stately pace to take account of mixed ability). But on the wall behind them, the stained glass cross that Alice made in the eastern window, and the forged cross that Bernard made — the cross of Christ at the heart of creation — above the pulpit.

Such a sense of time and change, of growing old and of being young,  but also of treasures of the heart that never fade, that nothing can erase.