RSCM: coming soon.

Today I mailed off nine applications to this summer's RSCM Course: six young men (trebles and teens – two of the trebles will be going to their first Course); M., who is at college now and is returning for the Course; E., who is the father of one of the teens; and myself.

Those who read these pages know what this Course means to me, and to many of the others who attend. It is good to get today's reminder that we are almost there.

Last summer, I wrote: “All I ask is that the memory of these sounds and these choristers light my way through 'time-fettered night' until next year's Course.” God has granted this request; I can remember the voices of last summer in the St. Cecilia Chapel, Grace Church, and the Basilica, and Mr. Lole, and the ATB rehearsals, and dinners in Cranmer, and the friendships and good times of the Course as if it were last week.

This is a poem I wrote some years ago, after a chance encounter with an RSCM-er during the offseason. It still applies:

With some, we sing for a week; with some, for years,
but the beauty of the song is not measured by duration.
I will not forget that Fair and Delectable Place,
nor Cecilia's hymn in her Chapel,
nor our lines intertwined in Smith's Responses,
the rain-blackened trees watching, listening
outside in the early dusk.

There is Another who remembers such things,
fitly joining together his children's songs
across time and space.
We hear them dimly, even now.