Emmanuel
“Closet Sacramentalists”
My children are as catholic as they come — and “Catholic,” too, in the
way the late Andrew Greeley, SJ, was fond of using the term. They
inhabit a world that is nothing if not “enchanted,” one suffused with
symbolic meaning and revelatory of some hidden truth that lies just
beneath, just beyond, just outside the immediate face of things.
To my way of thinking, they are “closet sacramentalists,” custodians of
an array of objects and rites and indelible markings borrowed more or
less from the outward form of the religion to which they were exposed
through years of Catholic education and countless turns at lighting
the family Advent candle, marking the front door at Epiphany, or
stoking the parking lot bonfire that announced Easter’s yearly arrival
in the parish where they were baptized.
Their music — overtly dirge-like at times and almost always in the minor
mode — is the hymnody of a perpetual celebration of the Eve of All
Hallows, as legitimate an artistic confrontation with human mortality
as any concert-hall performance of a Requiem Mass that masks death
for the sake of aesthetics. It makes sense that mask-wearing of one kind
or another should appeal to them, a convention mostly associated in
this country with the gleeful Trick-or-Treating of children, but borne
of an ancient and serious desire to transform the self while scaring
away the more menacing agents of the Underworld.
To see them perform on stage amid the dark silhouettes of amplifiers,
mic stands, and instrument racks, a throng of onlookers before them
holding cell phones aloft like lighted tapers, is to be transported to
the burial-place settings of the Dia de los Muertos celebrated annually
in Latin American countries or the Samhain handed down in Celtic
regions to welcome the “darker half” of the lunar calendar.
One can imagine them pouring out the remains of the beers and soft
drinks that multiply at their feet as libations for the invisible Muse
they serve or fidgeting with the carved figure of a santos or two, the
decorative details of some nicho or retablo or the glowing, round form
of a Jack-O-Lantern in place of the soundboard dials and faders that
bring their performing to life.
Swept up in their music, my kids experience the “liminality” known
throughout history by the creative and the pious alike, the dervish-
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