The song is "O Fire of the Paraclete." But in Latin, so "O Ignis Spiritus Paracliti." The story of the first time I heard this song is a well-documented one. It even made it into a performance piece one time. The story, I mean. Though, come to think of it, the song was part of the piece too.

It is a story of a too-long bus ride and an inability to sleep in moving vehicles. It is a story of an accidental happening upon an almost-frequency, of the haunting voice that passed my ear and hit me someplace deeper, and of my hand upraised in the darkness--not in a celebration of religious spirituality--but in a searching grasp for something beautiful and true.

I got to the theatre on opening night of Forensic and the Navigators very early. I sat in the middle of the stage floor. No lights were on. "O Fire of the Paraclete" surrounded me, an aural blanket that seemed to flow from the speakers above and envelop me. I played it so loudly that it knocked from my mind every ounce of doubt and knot of stress. I sat in that theatre sightless but sure with the music as comfort and guide. In ninety minutes or two hours the same room would be in utter chaos--chaos I had organized--covered in breakfast cereal and filled with shouting rage. But for a moment it was calm, and for a moment it was perfect.

I have sung in cathedrals older than I can imagine. I have touched the stones of walls older than my mind can comfortably process. I have blended my voice with others and known for a moment at least a part of the whole. This music nine centuries old that nonetheless feels like a letter addressed just to me.

Here in Central Park today the song is the same. The bench I've chosen is dedicated

Every Second of Every Minute
August 8th 1997 -

The second part of the equation is left blank, waiting for an ending date.

Every second of every minute.

Rising above me, the buildings of this city with height to outmatch any cathedral I've seen. But between those buildings and this place that I sit are flowers, and this lake, the arc of a bridge sweatered in ivy, and birds skimming low across the glimmering surface.

I don't know the words they're singing. I think I prefer it that way. For me it is just the voices as one, stretching upward like my hand in that darkened bus. The voices calming my spirit like they did in that empty theatre. The voices altering the world in front of me just slightly. I am not sitting on a bench in a man-made park surrounded by this heaving metropolis.

For now it is a cathedral. This bench a pew. This pond and these trees an altar. These towering buildings stained glass above me.

O Fire of the Paraclete.

The song and this place are offering me something, I gradually learn. As the solo becomes a choir and the voices blend and pitch and yaw and soar the trees suggest the movement of a windy day. I am offered something here, so I reach my hand out expectantly to grasp it and for just a second I know that I have it. But I pull my hand back empty. And I have to wonder now if it was anything at all.