Many times has the tale been told of the composer Lewis and how, fasting, he spent a full day and a night creating his famous chorus Entry into the Courts of Heaven, a chorus which would become the axis, the centrepiece of the latter portion of his symphonic diptych Redemption. After completing it, he was moved to tears and declared that it needed no revision, for he had but recorded the music exactly as he had heard it when, transported from his study, he had stood in those very courts with angels thronging to the left and right of him.
Less embraced by oral history is the equally interesting tale of Jacobâs Ladder, the centrepiece of the first half of Redemption, which, though almost as renowned and adored as Courts of Heaven, caused him many pangs of labour to deliver live and not stillborn. Inspiration had been in such short supply that he had been constrained to cobble together pieces from his musical ragbag, that collection of orphaned snippets of likely pieces whose greater works had either suffered from drought or block at a critical point, or which, though performanceworthy, had been deemed unfashionable by patrons and were thus abandoned as unprofitable. To the trained ear it was evidentânew lyrics sat oddly on musical trills that had been tailored to fit other, more secular wordsâand yet the public loved it and found in it something near to that other, effortless God gift.
Paama knew of both tales and often consoled herself that since very few people could tell the difference between gross human toil and sublime heavenly message, there might be an element of the heavenly in the former, and of the human in the latter. She had never realised that others thought the same way until she saw the legend on the arch of the gate to the House of the Sisters: Work is Prayer.
She rang the gateâs bell and waited.
I canât swear to it, but I think I was inspired to write this from what I knew of tales about the Hallelujah Chorus and For Unto Us A Child is Born from Handelâs Messiah.
This is one of my fave bits of Redemption in Indigo, and one of the pieces of writing Iâm most proud of across all my books.
