01-16-05 Divine Liturgy

01-16-05 Divine Liturgy

My first Divine Liturgy. Here is how it happened. Last Saturday I suddenly realized it was four o’clock and I had been thinking all week about going to check out the little neighborhood churches to see what kinds of church choirs sang there. I stopped everything and hurried downstairs.

To get to these churches is in itself interesting. My district of Tbilisi is called Sabertalo, and this whole area used to be a big field, a fairgrounds of sorts for the Tbilisians of old. Rather a series of long valleys in-between ridges of stone which stream out of the nearby hills, this whole area is now covered in a mixture buildings: standard huge Soviet concrete blocks interspersed with a ramshackle hodgepodge small houses and shelters along the steeper slopes. The streets run parallel in the valleys, with very few perpendicular roads across the ridges. Instead there are all kinds of little footpaths and handmade stair cases that weave around between people’s backyards, down little alleyways filled with trash, and past tiny homeowner stores all containing the same stock of chocolates, cigarettes and Fanta sodas. Abused street dogs wander the trash dumps, and humanity finds a place here amidst the concrete; old men play chess under a street lamp one evening, I look at the sunset with a shop owner another day; jogging, I suddenly passed a schoolyard of staring kids, a wrong turn and I found myself scaring up five chickens in someone’s backyard. A carefully tended persimmon tree nears it’s tenth year in another corner, an old woman’s prize from her abandoned home in the country perhaps. There aren’t very many trees in this part of the city, much to my chagrin.

I hustled up and down these ridges on a familiar trajectory crosstown, having explored my whole region several weeks ago. At the first little church, the very same in which I once randomly attended a funeral, the service was just drawing to a close, and there were three women chanting. One older woman was the leader, and she had two teenage girls singing with her.

I left and went up and over another ridge to a tiny little out of the way church, all concrete because they ran out of money to cover the outside in traditional stonework. I went into an empty church. Service finished, shucks. So I stood around and waited for a couple boys to leave, wondering what to do. Suddenly I heard singing from outside! I went out there, and four teenagers were huddled together, -it was freezing outside on Saturday, singing a Mravalzhamier! I sidled over, and cranked up the bass part a few notches because they only had one sixteen year old kid on the part. They held back their surprise long enough to finish the song, then fired off a dozen questions at me, having seen that I was a foreigner while we were in the church.

We sang three or four more songs together, and their director, a cute lady in a fur coat named Antonita, came out to sing with us. They all invited me back for the Divine Liturgy sunday morning. Interesting that both choirs have middle-aged directors with teenage choir members. Orthodoxy is a religion of the young people year, the older generation having grown up in a confusing era of official atheism mixed with cultural Christianity.

So Sunday morning I showed up at 8:45. No choir at all. Finally Antonita came in and asked me where the choir was. How was I supposed to know, I shrugged with my international sign language? But as with most things here, at the last minute two of the guys appeared which left me wondering how they were going to sing a trio?

Antonita asked the priest for a blessing for me to sing with them, and before I knew it, I was sight reading the middle voice of a chanting trio for a four hour service. I was on my toes the whole time, sometimes signaling with sign language that I was going to sing the bass part, sometimes signaling that I could read the middle part.

It is not canonical for a non-Orthodox person to participate in the communion part of the sunday service, and though I don’t know all the reasoning behind their decision to allow me to stay, I suppose I posed no threat theologically. Besides, they needed a singer!

Some chants I knew distantly being able to pull them up from old times; Futen guys you’ll be happy to hear that I had to sing Jvarsa Shensa, Shen Khar Venakhi, and Svanuri Tsmindao Ghmerto during this service. However, most of the time, I relied on reading the notation that was present. Many of the chants contain a long body of text on a single note followed by a short melodic section sung on the last word or two of the phrase. We were reading music from handwritten photocopies of small Georgian writing. I was extremely hard-pressed to read the words fast enough to keep up with these guys and was embarassed to have to mumble through half of it.

No one seemed to notice, and the priest talked about some ‘americalebi’ for his sermon which I guess was me. After the service, I had lots of old ladies hugging my arm and kissing my shoulder, asking me if I spoke Russian, and no, I spoke Georgian? More kisses. I was given an icon, then a second and third, and wasn’t able to get out of there without about ten little icons and fifteen little rounds of blessed-bread baked with a cross on the top. Outside, I waited with the two choir guys, and we sang our mutual folk song repertoire stomping around in the frigid air waiting for Antonita. Then we all went and broke the fast together and sang more songs. 4pm.

I’m to go back next weekend for services and I was given about fifty pages of handwritten music and text in case I want to be prepared.