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I took a crash course in Gregorian chant. Literally.

I took a crash course in Gregorian chant. Literally.

Last updated on: September 26, 2016 at 10:02 am by Jessica Mesman Griffith

I took a crash course in Gregorian chant. Literally. 2016-09-26T10:02:35-05:00 Jessica Mesman Griffith

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When the email circulated that there would be a traditional Latin Mass at our parish for the Feast of the Assumption on August 15, I immediately and foolishly wrote back that I wanted to be in the Schola Cantorum, the chant choir.

The extent of my Gregorian chant experience at this point was one weekend at the Abbey of Gethsemani five years prior, a year of Latin in college, and a CD of hymns by Beth Nielsen Chapman in heavy rotation in my house every Christmas. I’d been to exactly one Latin Mass, almost a decade ago, and remembered only how completely lost I felt among all those Mantilla-clad women, shuffling the pages in the Missal, never able to find my spot. All I had was naive enthusiasm for the music.

Soon after we settled on a schedule for practice, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with brain cancer. I’d taken on what suddenly seemed to be a stupid amount of freelance work—all due on August 15. The baby, 10 weeks old, stopped sleeping and started drooling buckets, cutting what looked like four teeth at once. I reached a Zen state of sleep deprivation.

And yet I felt cosmically propelled to see it all through. Maybe it was the memories of the cantors at Notre Dame, their voices ringing out like bells, sonorous and clear, or the holiness of the monks at Gethsemani, chanting the psalms, not always beautifully, but faithfully, through the night. If only I could chant, I’ve always thought, I could really pray. And prayer seemed the only solution for the current state of emergency.

I’d read somewhere that chant comes so naturally, anyone can do it. But the Mass of the Assumption is a High Mass, with propers and antiphons trotted out only on the Marian feast days, some of them so complicated on the first listen that I laughed out loud. I was in way over my head.

When I showed up for the first practice, I did not find monks or choir nuns with years of experience. I found two other women, a Sony Megabass jambox, and a CD from the monks of Solesmes, one of the best chant choirs in the world. This is actually how it’s been done for centuries—not by CD, but viva voce, following the example of another’s voice, chants acquired by immersion, by many years of experience in a Schola Cantorum. We had exactly three weeks.

We practiced as often as we could, working around my infant’s erratic schedule, the other ladies driving well out of their way to accommodate me. I’d rush through dinner, hurriedly nurse the baby down, grab my rumpled and coffee-stained music and drive to the church, listening to the CD in the car.

I listened while cooking three meals and two snacks for my preschooler, while washing and drying each round of dishes, while checking email, nursing, changing diapers. Soon my husband was playing it too. I’d slouch into the kitchen for morning coffee to the sounds of the Sanctus. I even heard Charlotte humming the mournful Kyrie as she labored over a drawing. It was taking hold in all of us. We never said as much, but I knew that as Dave and I went about our days chanting with the monks, our thoughts turned to his mother.

On the last night of chant practice, just as I was leaving the house, we got a call that she’d been rushed back to the hospital with a high fever, signaling a dangerous infection in her brain. I was late getting to the church. The other two ladies were waiting patiently in the pews. We’d stumbled through the Sanctus once when I sat my water glass on the window ledge behind us. It caught on the lip of the sash and began to tip. I lunged to catch it just before hit the stone floor, set it back on the ledge, and when I whipped around to run for a paper towel to mop up the spill, tripped over the plug to the Sony MegaBass, and landed, face first, on the arm rest of a lacquered wooden pew.

I remember the cold stone on my bare legs as I slid to the ground, the warm rush in my cheeks as blood filled my mouth. Loretta, a nurse, rolled me over on my back, and I managed to ask her, Did I lose a tooth? “Smile,” she said, and I smiled obediently. She shook her head no. I laid back, closed my eyes, and everything went black.

My head ached for days, the outline of the pew a shadow on my right cheek. By the 15th it had faded to a sickly yellow and I was no longer dizzy. We three ladies stood in a semi circle, under Mantillas that constantly slipped an fell to the floor, and we chanted. I was so nervous I don’t remember much about the Mass. I’m pretty sure I heard someone in the pews snort, and that we sounded less like a choir of angels than a murder of crows. But the chants no longer seemed impossible. They seemed inevitable.

Now that hectic week of chant, work and family drama is a distant, yet somehow, pleasant, memory. My mother-in-law, impossibly strong, survived her surgery and fought her way through our last Christmas together. My bruised cheek healed. But the Sanctus remained gloriously stuck in my head, with the vision of the late August sun rising behind the red barn, and my daughter turning from her drawing to smile at me at the now familiar call:

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.

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