How Shall I Fitly Meet Thee?
Another year, another weekend following Thanksgiving, and I find myself ruminating on yet another melancholy and wistful Sufjan hymn cover. Last year, I wrote about “Ah Holy Jesus (with reed organ),” a Lenten hymn about Jesus’s death. And this year, of all the remaining 25 songs, I chose “How Shall I Fitly Meet Thee?,” an Advent hymn about preparing one’s cold, dark heart to meet the Christ child. Both Lent and Advent are seasons of fasts, not feasts. They are days of restraint and inward contemplation, of waiting and longing and hoping in the midst of despair and darkness. Why didn’t I choose another genre? I ask myself. Something more cheerful or zany or irreverent, like “Up on the Housetop!” Even the cacophony of “Ding-a-ling-a-ring-a-ling” sounds appealing to me now.
But how could I pick another song? Much of my adult faith has been about longing for God, and Sufjan’s music has been a friend, a touchstone, and a gateway in this longing. There was a time, a long time, when I longed for God because I did not believe in her. I had been an earnest, faithful Christian, a youth group all-star, when I lost my faith in one swift moment, standing in the shower on a weekend afternoon. In a reverse baptism, the hot water brought painful clarity: There was no God. And still, I longed for her. Every attempt to find God, or pray to God, or enter a church again filled me with shame, because I knew God wasn’t true. One of the only times that it felt okay to speak of God, to say “God,” without betraying myself was when listening to Sufjan Stevens.
The God of Sufjan’s music is the God I longed for. A God who mysteriously does not always heal the sick, but who can take my shoulders and shake my face (“Casimir Pulaski Day”). A God who hides (“Oh God, Where Are You Now?”). A God whose cross does not provide shady relief from suffering (“No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”), but a God who would cross Lake Michigan for just a moment with me (“To Be Alone With You”). A God who wears my shoes and my jacket, too. (“Vito’s Ordination Song”). This was the God I could slowly, gradually begin to believe in, to trust, to sing to, to long for.
Now that I am training to be a priest, one might think I have “found” God entirely, as if God were the iPhone that fell between the couch cushions; all I had to was turn on location services, listen for his alert, then scoop up his sleek, plastic case, and slip him safely into my pocket, to carry with me always. But no, more often, God is the fluttering cloak disappearing around the corner or the scattered seeds of a dream that blow away upon waking. Rainer Maria Rilke writes in his Book of the Hours: Love Poems to God, “Our hands shake as we try to construct you, block by block. But you, cathedral we dimly perceive—who can bring you to completion?” The more I try to build God, in all her fullness, the more God feels out of reach. I am left longing to touch the hem of the cloak, to see the vivid God dreamscape in all its color, but I see through the mirror only dimly.
At each slow pause of Sufjan’s piano introduction to “How Shall I Fitly Meet Thee,” I feel what Blaise Pascal called the “God-shaped hole” reverberate inside my heart. Before the choir can join in, the question is already mine: How shall I fitly meet thee, God? And give thee welcome due. The nations long to greet thee, and I would greet thee, too…
How shall I fitly meet thee? Each Christmas, God gives the gift of meeting me in the most unexpected place: in the helpless baby lying in a manger. And I meet God in the music that fills me with longing and reminds me that I never want to live apart from that longing. May “How shall I fitly meet thee?” always be my prayer.
Shannon Page has been a devoted Sufjan Stevens fan since the O.C. soundtrack and would get a Carrie & Lowell-inspired tattoo if she were braver. When not listening to the Sufjan Christmas catalog, Shannon is a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School and hopes to become an Episcopal priest. She especially enjoys writing and thinking about the intersection of art, music, and faith.