Nine years ago, I was in Reims, France on a bicycle. I’d sat in a restaurant with a bottle of champagne and a plate of escargot until after dark, but I still wanted to glimpse the town’s famous cathedral, a giant and historic one where French kings were coronated for 1,000 years.
The streets were empty and the cathedral closed, but its façade was lit from below, making long shadows of the statues of saints that populate the entrance of the place, above its three, deep portal entries. So I stopped.
Something rustled in the shadows and I made out what appeared to be a dozen or so street urchins, pressed up against the cathedral’s locked, timber doors. After a bit, one started singing and slowly others joined in unison, creating a sound both ethereal and haunting – the voices of fragile youth echoing against ancient stone, chasing away darkness.
I returned the next day for a look inside the church, to see daylight paint its stained-glass Rose Window, to stare up at its vault ceiling, to feel the full weight of the history that was made there. But none of the sights matched the impression of the place left by the chorus of faceless voices in the night.
Years earlier my wife and I had rushed into a cheap motel room in the California desert to watch television coverage of the New Year’s celebration, Jan. 1, 2000. Nations were pulling out the stops, welcoming the new millennium with dazzling parades and booming fireworks.
Australia, my wife’s home country, was among the first to see in the new era. To honor its arrival, figures were placed atop the peaks of three arches of Sydney’s famed Opera House, facing the rising sun. On the lowest of the peaks a woman played a saxophone, and on the next, an Aboriginal man hummed into a digeridoo.
The top peak was a reserved for a solitary child in a white tunic, singing without a microphone into the horizon, an indelible image both angelic and courageous. What more to offer the future than the voice of an innocent? All the hoopla scheduled all around the world could have been scratched at that moment. The opening act consecrated the event and stole the show.
In New York City in the black days of the COVID epidemic, when millions were all but trapped in the confines of tiny apartments, citizens marked 7 p.m. each night by honoring hospital workers with cheers and applause.
Adopting a ritual started in Italy as its death toll mounted, Broadway legend Brian Stokes Mitchell took to his window ledge each night to belt out “The Impossible Dream,” a defiant anthem that pits the futility of the human condition against the aspirations of a single soul.
With no amplification, Mitchell’s voice rang through the canyons of tall buildings to the lonely and the fearful, to the living and the dying and the dead. No person can watch the recording of that scene without a gulp of pride in our striving, doomed species.
Is it any wonder that our generation’s greatest singers – Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke among them – received their training in churches, yearning with all they had to please the almighty?
The hope we hold for the world resides perhaps nowhere more deeply than in a solitary, unadorned voice.