Once again, what an old Arab man told me years ago is confirmed… Nothing is accidental in this life and nothing happens five minutes earlier than it is supposed to happen. And neither  after.

I had been visiting some friends. Good mood, food and plenty of drinks. Upon our departure, absolutely by chance (so I thought at the time), we passed through a small Romanian village, absolutely typical in everything it had to offer. Atypical however, in that landscape was a little wooden church, built around 1600, a little church from which some apparently incomprehensible sounds struck us with their absolute significance. And, as curiosity is part of that “myself” (so well-known to my friends), I entered the place of worship; my friends were following me.

The decor was simple: one man, an organ, lit candles, the smell of melted wax, the atmosphere of fire in the ice and the Christmas blizzard from outside, the simple painting on the unadorned wooden walls, shriveled by weather and time. The man briefly looks at me then goes about his business. He tunes the organ which, in theory, had no place in that Orthodox Church.

Without asking him anything in particular and without getting out from the pattern he wanted to follow down to the smallest detail, he began to tell something. And the sound of his voice seems to come from somewhere under the cold dome… 

“I make this organ work as it should. You can’t go wrong with Adeste Fideles. Have you heard of Adeste Fideles?”

I had no idea. I shrugged, clearly confused. 

“It’s a carol sung in the Anglican Christian rite, with roots in the Sarum and Celtic rite. Do you want to listen to it?” 

I nodded silently, looking at the little bearded man who was rubbing his hands together like a great pianist before a big concert. And he began.

I don’t know how I could describe the whole experience I lived,  there was a rush of sensations with reference to the rituals of the Last Supper chained with Celtic sacredness and everything like the psalms on the walls of the proscomydia of the Wooden Church in Urși. And the voice flowed evenly. Like music.

“It seems to have been written in 1743, by Francis Wade, an Englishman, music professor ….”

At that moment, Maria, my best friend (I didn’t understand what she was doing there because she hadn’t been with us,  where had she come from?) went to the organist who was singing his Latin incantation and began to accompany him with her crystal-clear voice. I knew she was an excellent opera singer but then and there, it was much more than a show. It was an explosion of silences singing about those holy initiations into the sacred cult from which we were born thousands of years ago. It was a communion with the Divinity and Spirituality of ancient Rome. It was that sixth sense of an apostolic era. Or, perhaps it was just a part of a litany, with the sacred and mythical form of the old rite, in archaic English that I (suddenly) understood. And it all happened in a small church of the Christian-Orthodox rite, with the patina of a 17th century, somewhere in the heart of Transylvania, on a Christmas day, a day that marked my existence and memories.

 “You have to listen live, at Cambridge, “The 9 lessons and Carols”, you have to listen to the University Choir often, because it is truly unique”. The old man’s fingers stopped suddenly but the girl’s voice floated for a long time over the stillness that encompassed me.

“That’s it. It’s good now,” the man said. He packed his tools, got dressed and came to me. I could only say a weak and anemic “To you, Lord.”  He took my hand and kissed it briefly then disappeared.

I stayed in that little church for another 3 hours in a complete numbness. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think of anything. The music filled my every fiber and cell and nothing else fit in. And only when I left, a question from my friends suddenly brought me into a strange reality that I didn’t understand:

“Mala, who were you talking to in the church? There was only us and the paintings on the walls.”

…………………….

It had been three weeks since this strange incidence happened to me and I still can’t explain it. The emergency room called and told me they have a new patient. I entered the patient’s room and two (still-alive) eyes made me squint at the memory of that winter evening. A weak but so familiar voice, barely audible:

 “It’s not about Adeste Fideles this time.”

I’m not dreaming! It’s neither a hallucination nor a delirium. But what really happened  that Christmas night?

A fight for life followed, a fight that seemed to be doomed from the very beginning. It ended quietly, as quiet as the one he has been living and as angelic as the music that suddenly was heard from somewhere from an iPhone forgotten on a white hospital chair: it was “Adeste Fideles”.

A few days after the old organist’s death, a phone call brought me news that literally turned me to stone. It was the news of Maria’s passing. Car accident.

……………………

Adeste fideles, laeti triumphantes,
Venite, venite in Bethlehem.
Natum videte Regem angelorum,
Venite adoremus 
Dominum.

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