The Sisters Roche & The Glory Of The Lord

And: Salvation History On A Church Wall; Austen Ivereigh On 'Living In Wonder'

The Roches, (l to r) Terre, Suzzy, and Maggie

This morning I re-discovered one of my favorite Christmas albums: We Three Kings, by the Roches. Maggie, Terre, and Suzzy Roche are (or rather, were; Maggie died in 2017) three sisters from New Jersey who sang like angels. You can get their Christmas album on Spotify, and find individual cuts (like “For Unto Us A Child Is Born”) on YouTube. The full Spotify playlist has some songs that I don’t think were on the 1990 album, including some serious misses (“Frosty the Snowman,” “Deck the Halls”), and leaves off one of the very best from the album (“The Hallelujah Chorus,” which can be seen here, in a 1980s live performance) but for the most part, this album is luminous! Here’s my favorite; it gives you a sense of how beautiful their singing is:

Back in the day, the Roches were known for their a cappella Christmas concerts on the sidewalks of New York. I saw and heard them once, at an incredible time in the life of our country. I wrote about it in Touchstone magazine. It’s about a snowy day just before Christmas 2002, when all of us in the city were still reeling from the 9/11 attacks just over a year before. On that evening, my then-wife and I went with our two-year-old son to hear the Roches sing on the sidewalks of Battery Park City, a downtown neighborhood next to the hideous crater that we all called Ground Zero. Here’s a long excerpt:

I stood across the street, at the fence ringing the site, and noticed the large steel-beam cross on its pedestal, its arms holding up a thin layer of snow. Just beyond it, someone had put up a huge Christmas tree, which would in days be festooned with lights, and hymned by choirs, but which tonight was merely evergreen. A sign of life. I offered my prayers for the dead, then turned away and walked back to where my wife and son were standing. A man in a trenchcoat hustled off making some kind of noise. Julie pointed to him, with a look of astonishment on her face.

“Did you hear that?” she asked. No, I hadn’t. “He was a businessman, I think, and he was singing Ave Maria at the top of his lungs as he passed the site.”

On we went to Battery Park, on the banks of the Hudson. Julie and I laughed when we first stepped into the park, where the snow lay like frosting on tree branches. Before us was a winter wonderland worthy of a Christmas card or a department-store window display. As we approached the loose knot of people gathered around the corner of a building, the Roches had just begun the “Hallelujah Chorus” in three-part harmony. We got hot chocolate and Christmas cookies, and stood under trees in our boots listening to these sisters sing the most beautiful versions of sacred and secular carols I’ve heard in ages.

The snow was still falling on the dark waves of the Hudson, and my boy told me he wanted to cross over to Jersey. “That’s where Edison lives,” he said. But we stood in the snow with the neighborhood folks, listening to the music, with hearts full of gratitude for this city and our place in it. A little over a year ago, on that terrible day, this neighborhood was covered with ash, and choked by smoke from the inferno a few blocks away.

Tonight, though, thanks to the cold and the snow, everything was clean and white and crystalline-pure. Watching the children in their wool caps laughing and eating peppermint canes and throwing snowballs at each other, I thought about how terrified they must have been on 9/11, and wondered if they and their parents ever thought their neighborhood would see a night so serene and joyous as this one.

More:

As the Roche sisters sang, I noticed an older man, maybe a businessman, attending an older woman in a wheelchair. She must have been his wife. She was wrapped snugly in a gray shawl, her thin face swaddled by a red scarf. Her face looked so forlorn and expressionless, I thought she must be depressed. Then he brought her a Christmas cookie, and she brought her right hand out from under the shawl to take it. Her hand shook violently, and she labored to bring the cookie to her mouth. Parkinson’s. This would account for the frozen expression on her face.

From that moment, it was hard to take my eyes off the couple. The old man was so tender with his wife, fussing to see that she had what she needed, that she was warm, that she felt the touch of his hand. When the Roches began to sing O Holy Night, the old man knelt in the snow, placed his face on his wife’s shoulder, and softly sang the words to her. I could read his lips. His bright eyes brimmed with love and mercy, hers stared into the distance. “O night! O night divine!” they sang, the sisters for the gathered neighbors, and the old man for his wife.

“A thrill of hope,” the song went, and I thought of these New Yorkers who did not leave the city, but who stayed to rebuild and renew their neighborhood, and indeed their broken hearts. I thought of the Cross and the Christmas tree at Ground Zero, and the simple act of commerce at Brooks Brothers, new life where there had once been nothing but smoke and flames and death.

Most of all, I thought of this gentle soul, sharing the cup of suffering with his true love, trying to bring her warmth and consolation and joy. Everyone there has lived through or is living through pain and destruction, and yet here they were, on a magnificent winter’s night, making something beautiful for God.

There is not enough evil in the world to extinguish the good in the hearts of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Read it all.

As the essay says, I was carrying a heavy burden when I came to hear the sisters sing. Not only was 9/11 very much on my mind — on everybody’s mind — but my faith was being sorely tested by a year of scandal in my Church. And yet, on that night, in that snow, with all those strangers, and the sweet miraculous harmonies of those sisters, it all melted away.

You know how I keep referring to that scene in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, when the shade of the iconographer Theophanes appears to Andrei, standing broken in the ruins of the sacked cathedral, and tells him, elliptically, that suffering will always be with humanity, but that his vocation is to keep making beauty to proclaim hope to the grieving people? Yeah, that. That’s what the Roche sisters gave us that night in lower Manhattan. That’s what they keep giving me, in the recollection of that grace.

This morning, listening to We Three Kings for the first time this year — and maybe for the first time in a few years — I was very nearly brought to tears by its beauty. “For unto us a child is born,” they sang, in Handel’s version of the Prophet Isaiah’s words. Carried along on their voices, the truth of those words pierced my heart with joy. I could not have known that night in Battery Park City of the pain that lay ahead for me and my family, of the promises to be broken, of the falling away yet to come from so many certainties. But that night, friends, was perfection itself. The memory of it comforts me, in part because it reveals not only how we are to endure this present darkness, but because it shows to us the light yet to come, and the peace we will have when all tears are washed away, forever. Because unto us a Son is given.

(If you like the Roches’ Christmas songs, you’ll want to hear what I think is their best tune, “Hammond Song,” which came out of Maggie and Terre’s leaving New York to live for a spell in the small Louisiana town of Hammond. The song’s narrative is two sisters singing to a third, who is tempted to leave them, and her career, to follow a man to Hammond. It’s emotionally complex and harmonically gorgeous. Give it a listen.)