Inside the Beehive Chapel

Standing before the open gate of the compound of Mary Undoer of Knots, I paused a minute to take in the beautiful vista of the buildings and the forested mountain ridge beyond. 

Just as it was the first time seeing the gate open, it was the first time I'd seen people in the compound. What looked to be a family with teenage sons was crossing the short footbridge to the octagonal wooden chapel. The structure had the unique and pleasing appeal of appearing old in design yet recent in construction. 

Without lingering further, I crossed the gate opening, happy to finally be inside the compound after four times staying in Summerhaven. It was not quite yet four o'clock, so I took a few minutes to explore the compound, poking around the outdoor shelter structure, which turned out to be dedicated to veterans of the various branches of the armed services. I connected it to the fact that I'd seen Gene wearing a military service cap. It also explained why one could hear "Taps" playing each evening from the compound.

Then I inspected the small wooden residence, which turned out to be a guest cottage that rentable by single people or married couples (as I would learn from the website). Then I crossed the footbridge to the chapel. I went the long way around to the entrance, as it turns out, and tried to go what amounted to the side door, which I opened and immediately found Father Martin standing on the other side in his priestly vestments. He recognized me from the day before by name, and then directed me further along to the front entrance.

There on the downhill side of the chapel I found what was obviously the front entrance, as the doors were wide open and one could see inside, and hear the singing. I wondered if I had come late, but it turns out this was preliminary activity of some kind, which probably has a name. This kind of thing is typical in Orthodox services, which can be long and ongoing. The idea is that people come and go during a longer liturgy, and in traditional parishes, one stands the entire time unless one is to weak to do.

At the door I was greeted by a woman whom I correctly identified as Catherine, the wife of Gene, who had identified himself the day before as "Catherine's husband." She was wearing a lace headcovering pinned to her hair. She greeted me with a happy smile, and handed me a small stack of items, including the current week's bulletin as well as a hardbound book of the Divine Liturgy with a rainbow of colored ribbons dangling from various pages, telling me that they would indicate various places that would be called out for us.

I stepped forward from the tiny vestibule all the way into the chapel, which was even more marvelous from the inside than the outside. The small structure was already crowded with about fifteen people sitting the plastic chairs that were set up in three rows of with a central aisle.

Along the sides of the chapel were wooden seats, separated from each other by small partitions as one sees in a traditional church. All of these were filled on either side. There were also plastic chairs around the back wall, and I quickly found one of the last ones available there and took a seat, gazing around the room, and upwards through the layers of the beehive structure to the top, where a round icon of Christ looked down on us. Around the walls were icons, and directly above our head was a octagonal metal ring structure for lighting.

It was only after sitting that I noticed the baby carriage next to me, which contained not an infant but a small black dog, which greeted me by licking my hand in a friendly manner. The woman on the other side mildly rebuked her pet, but I indicated it was no big deal, all the while hoping that in fact it would be no big deal during the service (it wasn't, and the dog was very well behaved).

In the back, past the wooden partition that separates the main part of the chapel from the inner sanctuary where one finds the altar, I could see Father Martin in his vestments waiting to start. 

Across the aisle from me I recognized Gene. He was standing at what I would later learn is the analogion, a wooden lectern with a steep slanted surface on which books or icons can be placed, and usually with a small lamp, so that one can read while standing up. He was singing, and several members of he congregation were singing as well, from the same book I had been given. I due course Gene called out a ribbon color and page number. I opened my book and found the page. I attempted to sing along from the music. As I did so it brought back a flood of memories of being in my college choir in Salem, attempting to sight-sing music on the first try. I was terrible at that, having had little training. Almost everyone else around me, seemingly all the baritones, knew how to do it. The music majors could pick up a piece of music and sing it correctly in rhythm and pitch right off the bat. The guys who knew how to play brass instruments like the trumpet were the best, since sight-singing is not too far off from how one makes notes on a trumpet.

To me this was, and still is, a mysterious skill that seems outside the ability of my mind to understand. I college, I learned my parts by going to the piano rooms in the music building on my own and plunking out the notes one by one (at least I could do that).

Now forty years later, I wondered if I could do any better. The music snippets Gene was singing was small repetitive chants, sometimes with the same words but in a different sequence of notes each time. Trying to follow him I lapsed into the same frustration as in college, but then I decided just to switch off my worry. I decided not to worry about figuring out the pitch but just listen to everyone else and try to jump into the note along side them. So I was always listening to everyone else, just trying to sing in tune with the guys around me.

But I did notice that if I ceased carrying about pitch but instead focussed on the rhythm---quarter notes, half notes, etc.---I was fairly decent and being able to read how long to hold a note. 

Also I noticed that I could scan the notes and anticipate when the line was descending to the root note at the end of the phrase and could hit that note on my own when we got to it. It reminded of a trick in language learning I had figured out along the way. One of the most difficult aspects of language learning for me is the listening. Even if I can communicate in a foreign language, it can be very hard to understanding anything anyone is saying. 

This has been a long frustration of mine, especially with French, which I learned to speak in high school through great diligence of practice with grammar and repetition. But for the life of me, I can barely understand anyone speaking French in a full speed conversation even to this day. Hanging out with friends in France back in the day, I could tell them anything I needed to say, and they would understand, but when they spoke to each other, it was always a big blur and I could infer from context at times, but not always. I would try to understand each sentence, and maybe I would get the first couple words, but my mind could not keep up after that and each sentence would descend into a confused jumble in my head

As such I was always looking for the trick that would allow me to make the mental shift to understand languages. The Internet, especially Youtube, changed everything At some point recently, I made a breakthrough. I realized I had it backwards, literally. I realized that one should not attempt to understand by following each spoken sentence in a linear fashion. Instead one should focus on attempting to pick out and understand the last word of a sentence, and working back from there. Somehow this produced much better results and was far more relaxing and less frustrating than to try to understand each word as it was spoken.

Fortunately I was spared the burden of sight singing because after the service started--promptly at four byt the tolling of the bells outside---Catherine came inside and stood on my right side, in front of a small bench that was obviously her usual perch by the door. With her nice alto voice in my ear, I found it easy to stay on pitch the entire service. And there was lots of singing, and page flipping from ribbon to ribbon, with page numbers called out by Gene.