Advent Art: "Comfort Ye," G.F. Handel

a voice crieth out in the wilderness (spoiler alert: it's a tenor)

Welcome back to "Advent Art," a special series exploring the intersection of faith and creativity. Each week in December, we'll delve into a work of art, exploring the biblical texts and spiritual themes that inspire these artistic expressions as they illuminate the path to Christmas.

Thomas Cooley performs "Comfort Ye" from Handel's Messiah with Boston Baroque, led by Music Director Martin Pearlman, 2019.

Text: Isaiah 40: 1-4

1 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

3 The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.

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Music, like a friend, has always tended to some deep longing in me. It has stretched me beyond myself, made me feel completely inadequate, sure, but mostly, she has been a trusted, near-constant companion.

Unlike other kids my age, my life’s soundtrack was not Ace of Base, NSYNC, or the Spice Girls (although I did like the music on the radio, too); it wasn’t my dad’s classic rock, my mother’s easy listening, or my siblings’ pop, country, and R&B. No, somehow, despite growing up in a sports family in rural South Carolina and having never stepped foot inside a symphony orchestra concert or piano recital, I preferred the purity of Bach, the passion of Beethoven, the wide open chords of Aaron Copland and the syncopation of Leonard Bernstein.

I would listen to specific tracks on repeat, hoping that by osmosis, I’d come to understand: how does the composer do that? I longed to know what made it great. To climb inside the kaleidoscope of chords and colors and understand how Barber’s Adagio for Strings made my heart ache and why Beethoven’s Fifth sounded like fate. I was insatiably curious, but mostly, back then, whenever I felt I’d somehow been born into the wrong timeline, it was my music that kept me company.

Photo by Patti Black on Unsplash

From the boxes of plastic cassettes to the impossibly stout annals of CDs that sat in the passenger seat of my car as soon as I learned to drive, my music was always with me.

I remember loading my entire collection onto my first iPod and feeling ecstatic and free—all of it, right there in that tiny rectangle! To this day, my Apple Airpods, wrapped in my favorite van Gogh’s Starry Night case, and my Spotify Premium membership are among my most prized possessions.

I look back on that girl, blaring Mahler’s Second Symphony on two-lane backroads in the dark, and I wish I could show her all the places music would take us. I wish I could tell her she’d play principal on that piece with rehearsals entirely in German. I wish I could tell her about the gift that Honors Theory in undergrad would be, how the professor (who let us call him Mike) would be the first person (but not the last) she’d ever meet who loved music as much as she did, and how he’d finally shed some light on what made the music great. I want to tell her she’d write a dissertation about Schubert and that she’d lose count of how many times she’d played in Carnegie Hall. That one day it would feel easier, sometimes even effortless, reading the notes, making them sing.

I want to go back and warn her not to forget the way she felt God’s presence, listening and playing music—even secular pieces. To show her the ways she’d be tempted to use music as a means to prove her worthiness instead of experiencing it.

In truth, there were entire strings of years where I, by that time a Doctor of Musical Arts, felt distant and divorced from my music, moments where I preferred to leave my iPod in my backpack and walk in silence, where I never attended concerts in which I wasn’t paid to play. (You can read more about these years in my book, The Artist’s Joy.) Music became a stranger, an intellectual and sometimes physical exercise, a battlefield on which I could prove my superiority, a tool I used to demonstrate my merit.

But like any long-term relationship, music and I have this way of finding our way back to one another.

One Christmas in those estranged years, I sat in a rehearsal for Handel’s Messiah, bored. You’re probably familiar with the famous “Hallelujah Chorus” (certainly on any classical music greatest hits compilation album), but what you may not realize is that the entire oratorio (think sacred opera without costumes or set) takes almost three hours to perform. At Christmas, it is common to hear just Part I—often called the Christmas portion—which also skips ahead and adds the “Hallelujah Chorus” at the end, of course. This still takes at least an hour with no intermission.

That day, I got to rehearsal later than I had hoped (only 10 minutes early instead of my usual 30). It was cold already, and they had the oboes in the back against the paper-thin stained-glass windows in the drafty sanctuary. I don’t remember where I’d come from or why I was running behind, but what I do remember is the way my insides felt: knotted up and exhausted. Out of place and profoundly lonely.

I hadn’t been inside a church in a while. What I haven’t told you about those years of avoiding music was that I was also avoiding God. Sitting in a church and playing overtly religious music was not what I wanted to be doing right then. In short, I would have rather been almost anywhere else. Plus, it wasn’t even a particularly fun piece to play. As much as Handel loved the oboe (having played the instrument himself), he sure let the oboists do a lot of sitting around in Messiah. I buckled in for what would certainly be a long and captivating (sarcasm) rehearsal.

Yet, when the tenor soloist stepped forward after the overture and the strings began their lilting opening of “Comfort Ye,” I felt tears rise in my throat.

Have you ever been in the same room as something, heard it so many times…but never really listened?

That day, the soloist sang straight to my lonely heart. The opening comfort ye, a descending scale, down a third, the most consonant of intervals, sounded like an exhale. Comfort . . . When was the last time I’d felt that? I started to analyze, to use all the tools I’d gained striving at fancy music schools, but all I could think was, Why am I crying? At that moment, in a cold, unfamiliar church, hearing music I’d played a dozen times again for the first time, I let the tears flow, and I started listening, not with my head, but with my heart.

God spoke to me across millenia: through Isaiah’s prophecy from the 8th century B.C., translated through a German composer into English ten centuries later, through a small group of regional orchestra players and a tenor voice crying out to me in my own wilderness.

As I cried, I realized so much of my bitterness toward God (and about music, for that matter) was based on my fear of judgment, of my own lack.

I was afraid I would find myself in God’s presence, and instead of “Comfort ye,” God would say, “Get ye-self together!”

My striving hadn’t made me feel worthy; it hadn’t helped me find any lasting sense of belovedness or even the excellence I’d dreamt of. The more I learned about music—the more I tried to prove myself—the smaller and more inadequate I felt. I had turned a beloved thing into an ultimate thing.

Through the descending scale of that opening solo, God was inviting me to listen, to play along, to find myself in the great story the music was telling. In the scripture passage upon which the aria is based, Jerusalem’s “warfare” is done; other translations say “hard service” or that she has “served her sentence.” At that moment, I felt God opening the door to a prison cell, which I myself had shut and locked, setting me free from my own ego, battling for control.

I suddenly knew—not by my own erudition and sensitive musician ears, but by God’s Spirit that sang in the only language I could understand then, music—that what makes music great is the same thing that makes God great. “Withness,” the persistent nearness, the gentle shouts of Comfort Ye’s crying out when we need them most, telling of Jesus who longs to be with us. It has nothing to do with perfect intonation or ornamentation, appropriate performance practice, or endurance. Being loved by God requires no striving, no discipline, no perfection—only surrender, only listening.

This Christmas, you will hear (and perhaps perform) music and stories that you may, like me, have heard every December of your life. God sings into our lives through the major prophets and minor chords, through the twinkly lights on the darkest night of the year, through the prickly ivy leaves and the blood-red holly. These symbols have lasted centuries for a reason. Christmas tells us of a God who, from a place of deep longing, broke through the noise to love us with his life. Music and art’s companionship, the way it bears our pain and speaks to something deep within—this is a way a God loves us; it is God making good on the promise to be with us always.

And how does the Great Composer do it? With diatonic scales and descending thirds, with ordinary, flawed people, like smelly shepherds and magi from an entirely different religion, with a lonely oboist and a tenor soloist, with you.

Yes, you.

I pray that you’ll have just enough faith to let God comfort you this Advent. That you might surrender to the blessed release that is having the hollow mountains of your ego made low, and the crooked plains and knotted-up insides of our too-small and too-safe plans made straight. I pray that when you hear God crying out to your deep loneliness, that you’ll listen, play, and sing along, not with your head, but with your heart.

May you let the persistent “withness” of God, the wonder and transcendence with which all great music and art glow—may it lead you back to Christ.

May you allow him to tend, like a friend, to those places of deep loneliness and longing.

May you meet him singing this Advent along your own wilderness road.

From behind my music stand on Christmas Eve 2023 at Kirk in the Hills Presbyterian Church (PCUSA)