Starting
Point Flavored by cherry red candy
By JAMES STEPHEN
BEHRENS
In my 52 years I have gone to one
opera. It was a production of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. I cannot
remember the name of the opera or any of the arias. I cannot remember the stage
settings, the names of the soloists. I cannot remember if I went by car, bus or
magic carpet. I do not know if the fat lady sang at the end or if there was one
at the beginning. I do remember feeling very cultured, sitting up in the
balcony with people who looked rich, dignified, limousined, furred. I looked
all around me that evening, which is why I do not remember much of anything
else. I had no interest in the libretto, and it was too dark to read it
anyway.
But here is what stands out most sharply in my memory of that
night. I pulled a candy out of my pocket. It was cherry red. It was wrapped in
cellophane. I instinctively knew that the slightest noise in an operatic milieu
was uncouth, unforgivable, gauche, low-life, off-the-street behavior. But I
wanted that candy so badly. So I unwrapped the cellophane with the delicacy of
a brain surgeons hands. But there was a crackle. And then another
crackle. It was too late to re-wrap it because that would have caused more
crackling. So with a flourish and a clenching of my teeth I went for it and
tore the rest of the wrapping off.
Heads turned and eyes glared at me. There were a lot of tsks, even
a hiss. Some lady in front of me shifted back and forth in her seat, silently
sending me the signal that she had just experienced some sense of discomfort in
or near her rear end. I was her discomfort. The candy didnt taste so good
anymore. The crowd didnt look as good as it had earlier. I missed the
outside. I knew I did not belong. I was out of my element. I guess I am a
street opera kind of person.
To this day I wonder at the sacrosanctity of silence at the opera.
Not many yards from where I sat that night in the balcony there seethed all the
glories and tragedies of real life and death Manhattan. That was where the real
opera was, minus the silence, the hush -- but no less deserving of awe, no less
beautiful, no less tragic. And free.
Well, maybe people can better listen or think at the opera if the
folks in the aisles are silent, like in a huge cathedral. I can live with that.
But if I am ever again given a ticket to the opera, I may just give it away and
sit on a city street that night, popping candy after candy into my mouth and
watching with awe the mystery of life sweetened with the flavor cherry red.
Trappist Fr. James Stephen Behrens lives at Holy Spirit
Monastery in Conyers, Ga. His new book, Memories of Grace: Portraits from
the Monastery, has just been published by ACTA.
National Catholic Reporter, October 12,
2001
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