Miserere Mei, Deus

Miserere mei, Deus. I‘ve been listening to Gregorio Allegri‘s setting if the 51st Psalm at the office this evening. Dunno, I just seem to be thinking about things tonight. Like how the deep black feeling of sin can produce something sublime - like the Miserere.  I suppose I‘m thinking a bit of the odd juxtapositions of vileness and beauty.

For instance: put one man in prison and you get Alfred Camilleri - in and out of gaol until he hit the jackpot with the rape and murder of two schoolgirls (now serving life without possibility of parole). Put another man behind bars and you get “To Althea, from prison“.

Make one woman a sex worker and you get Kayden Kross, writing about the world if porn with acuity and not a little humour. Make another one a working girl and she becomes Brittany Holberg (now on death row in Texas for stabbing a punter multiple times)

Put one man in a war and get Josef Mengele. Put another at the sharp end and he becomes Wilfred Owen (Dulce et Decorum Est is one of the most heart-rending poems ever written, in war or otherwise).

I‘d love to say it‘s because suffering can be redemptive, if you want it to be. But that just seems too glib, too easy. And maybe not explanatory. Consider Denis Prendergast, an inmate at the penal nightmare at Port Arthur. He was eventually hanged there for (literally) beating a guard‘s brains out. But before he died, he write an incredibly beautiful, tender letter to his lover.

The only thing I can seem to draw from this is the capacity of people to be sublime, and to be wicked, mean and self-destructive.

And maybe this is the working out of our nature: vile and poor clay, but stamped with the image if God.