Born This Happy Morning

Apart from when I saw Nick Cave sing The Mercy Seat live, the music that has made me battle tears in public most often has always been sacred music. (Okay, also God Only Knows at the end of Love, Actually, but that’s kind of sacred too.) It’s the same with weddings – in church weddings I often feel like I’m about to cry when the couple is pronounced man and wife, but in the first secular wedding I attended I was shocked to realize that it didn’t touch me anywhere as much, or feel as meaningful. (To me, that is, of course I know it was deeply meaningful to the couple.)

Today in Mass during O Come All Ye Faithful, as the organ arpeggioed up towards “Glory to God! Glory in the highest!” and as the music softened down again for “O come let us adore Him” I had to close my eyes and stop singing. There’s no cool way to say this, and I guess some of you would rather I get back to talking about stuff like how I start every day with Satan, or my gay-soaked childhood, but at that moment I felt stunned by His glory, without which I really am nothing. Despite more than a year of feeling almost completely disconnected from Mass in Singapore, I imagined my life if I continued to keep God out of it, and it felt empty.

That’s all. Merry Christmas, everyone. We now return you to this site’s regularly scheduled blips of indie music blathering, frivolous vulgarity and cat pictures.