Last Thursday evening, it was a full house at the Maison symphonique de Montréal…
The whole audience was singing Christmas in chorus with Rafael Payare, musicians and singers from the OSM as well as the little singers of Mount Royal. Sometimes the joyous crowd timidly hummed theHallelujah of Handel, sometimes, encouraged by the choir director Andrew Gray, she sang at the top of her lungs the traditional Quebec airs, of which the composer Gilles Bellemare made a pretty bouquet of festivities.
All those tunes, I still have them in my head, the lyrics, I still remember them. They are as lively as during the Christmas season of my childhood, when with my twin brother, we served, in red cassocks and white surplices, the three midnight masses (high mass and two low masses). at the Saint-Bernardin church in Waterloo.
TEARS OF RAGE
When René Jolin, the regular tenor of the choir, sang holy night, I couldn’t hold back my tears. We all know music that capsizes our hearts and tears us to tears. Me, it’s that Gruber tune, two centuries old. holy night played the same trick on me at the Maison symphonique when Payare’s baton gave the signal to his musicians. This time, instead of bittersweet tears, tears of rage came to my eyes.
I no longer heard the music, but the clamor of sirens, the crackle of guns, the whistle of missiles preceding the deafening crash of explosions, the din of collapsing walls, the cries of rage and despair. I no longer saw the musicians of the orchestra, but the images of misery, cold and war that television has been broadcasting since Putin’s armies crossed the borders of Ukraine.
These deafening noises and these frightening images came back to me on Tuesday evening, when I crossed the snow-covered park that runs along the Sainte-Sophie Orthodox Cathedral, Saint-Michel Boulevard, in Montreal. With my wife Maryse, who regularly demonstrates against this war in front of the Russian consulate, I went to the welcoming ceremony for little Mariia Legenkoska, killed by a driver last week on her way to school. .
THE GIRL LIKE AN ANGEL
By pushing the door of the church, silence fell suddenly and the images of war vanished. Mariia’s all-white coffin was there, in front of us, guarding, so to speak, the entrance to the nave where a few hundred people – almost all of them Ukrainians – had already taken their places. Then, with a solemn step, clerics dressed in religious ornaments pushed the coffin to the front of the church. They opened the lid, revealing the little girl, an angel dressed in white whose head had been adorned with a crown of flowers.
Tears in my eyes, I started dreaming. If the Christmas music conducted so happily by Rafael Payare, if the soothing prayers of the Orthodox Archbishop of Saint Sophia, if the resigned words of mother Galyna and the tears of her husband, who had just arrived from the Ukrainian front, could only forever silence and erase the horrifying sounds and images of war.
There was more light on Tuesday evening in Saint Sophia’s Cathedral than there will be on Christmas night in the devastated streets of Kyiv, Ukraine. The death of little Mariia will not change anything.