Fire, Work, and Remembrance: The Johanna Kiln at Saint John’s

“They’re firing up the big kiln while you’re on campus,” Jenn (Carnell, a regular co-author and friend) told me. “You should go!”

I’m so glad I did. The firing of the kiln is a regular formal ceremonial practice here at St John’s. The kiln itself is gigantic – built so that loading forks can drive into either end! – and it runs for ten days and ten nights at temperatures that could have converted that badly singed “Smelly Book” I mentioned in a previous post from book all the way to ash in mere moments. (I looked it up; temperatures inside the kiln will reach up to 2,500°F!)

It’s the largest wood-fired kiln in North America, and is called the “Johanna Kiln” after Sister Johanna Becker, OSB, whose work profoundly influenced the potters here on campus. And, by its size, the kiln certainly has the “wow” factor:

Kiln door

The work of loading the kiln, we were told, had taken 6 weeks, and the work of keeping the kiln lit goes to two groups of volunteers, one of whom keeps the wood stoked and ensures that the process is running smoothly, and another group to support the first group by preparing food. The collective group laughed about the excellent food, so much excellent food, and about the work day and night to ensure the fire’s regular feeding. We toasted the volunteer team with ceramic cups of Sake.

In all, several hundred people turned out for the kiln firing. There were people from as far away as Japan (!) – someone who’d been in residence at St John’s and came back for the ceremony – and from California. Not to mention Tennessee. (That would be me.) This photo shows about half the crowd in attendance – it’s from after the ceremony was over, and you can still see how many people had joined in!

About half the crowd...

As with many such events, there was opening chitchat, and a talk about the kiln’s founding in 1994/5 and its historical firings. There was recognition of those who’ve been in attendance – for 28 years, for 30 years, at every firing that has happened since they entered high school in 19xx. This is an event that has tradition at its back.

But it also has the spiritual ceremonial elements. It was not just the living who were recognized; the losses to the local art community were also recognized – and in two different ways. First, we heard their stories of connection to the campus, the abbey, and the kiln. (Hearkening back to all the mentions of preaching from the pulpit in the memoria endowments that I’ve been writing about-- recognition of the dead at a moment of importance to the community is a looooong-standing practice!)

And second, there were spirit boats created for each of the three of them, hosted on a table adjacent to the kiln wall, with incense and salt, flowers and fir cuttings and images. We remember people through the things we say, but we also remember them through the things we do. As the speaker said, the spirit ships mark the last time they will sail on the lake behind the kiln – a marker of their farewells to these surroundings and the people they loved. They plan to use a hot ceramic piece on October 25^th to ignite a candle, and then light candles in the boats honoring the three dedicatees. They’ll be carried by canoe to the center of the lake, and released as a final goodbye.

Spirit boats with salt, incense, photo, flowers, and fir offerings

The firing ceremony had two songs, an unaccompanied song newly created for the event, and another, with guitar, that is evidently a regular recurring part of the ceremony. The lyrics put us in the right frame of mind for the unfolding of events; I wish I’d recorded them somehow because the wording had slipped my mind by the time I got back to my dorm.

There was also a prayer, asking for blessings to come for the items in the kiln, the people who made them and tended them, and those of us who had gathered here in community to witness the start of the work.

And then it was time for the lighting itself. Only about the front three rows could see exactly what happened at the moment of ignition, but the firing – assisted by family members of those being remembered this year – includes a short prayer, a purification of the kiln area with rice, salt, and sake which took about two minutes and follows Japanese tradition, and ends with ignition of the two starting fires with a handmade torch. I at the back only had a chance to go into the kiln shed once the fire was lit, and even then, the sunlight was streaming HARD into my eyes (and the camera lens):

Within a few minutes of lighting

They’ll be stoking the fire for ten days; the wood stacks run floor to ceiling inside the kiln shed, and there are additional 4-foot poles stashed outside the shed and covered with tarps. Before the ceremony, someone was joking about all the tarps – “time to think about an additional structure just to keep the wood dry” was the sentiment, which got agreement and laughter from standers-by! You can see a wee portion of the VERY abundant wood in my photo here:

soooo muuuuuch firewood

And when I came back after my walk (and the sun had settled toward the horizon), I got to hear more about the work involved. They have to be careful to keep the downdrafts of cold air from flowing into the kiln, so you always move the sticks a bit before placing the new wood to ensure the fire’s heat is even. 

tending the fire evidently includes telling stories about it!

Also, wearing good gloves is important – one volunteer got $175 brand new elk-hide gloves and was extremely proud of them. But on his first time stoking the fire, he reached in with them on, and by the time he pulled his arm out, the gloves were on fire. (Heat will do that!) So they buy cheap gloves – though what was cheap last time is rather more costly this time, what will all the tarriffs. (Wow, the crowd nodded at that! We ALL know about inflation these days!).

In all, it was a very moving ceremony. I was strongly reminded of the way in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary when the proper attitude is brought to bear. On the one hand, the idea of kiln-firing and the preparations and act of treating pottery is simply a part of the artistic process – a necessary step in the act of creation, but not one that signals “I’m a spiritual moment” on its own. It’s work, and rather hard work, what with the chopping of wood, the tending of fire, the need to ensure even heating, and so forth.

But this ceremony reminds us that work too can function as an offering up of our daily tasks as good that we do on behalf of the spirit. The act of firing here creates community; it’s a team effort; it reflects the connectedness even of the artistic work as part of broader human enterprise. The purification and dedications that were folded into the ceremony also connect that community to its chronological ancestry – through ritual, we make an unspoken argument about the continuity of human activity, both what has come before, and what promises to lie ahead of us. Will you be back in two years? The ceremony suggests that the answer is “yes,” whether you come in person or in the memories of others who attend. And it creates a ritual moment of centeredness, where the act of doing becomes a prayerful activity.

In the Benedictine mindset of “Ora et labora” – of prayer and labor – this is a moment that reminds us that the two are inextricably intertwined.

May it be so.

---

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

• A Day In the Life of a Carpenter Fellow at HMML: What brought me to Collegeville in the first place? Manuscripts, microfilm, and questions about Franciscan sisters—with lakeside walks and time to follow an interesting question wherever it leads. https://
• Seven Times a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice: Stand, kneel, speak, repeat: medieval prayerbooks asked their readers to build devotion through repeated actions. This post explores how those small practices shaped time, attention, and daily religious life. https://
• The silence of the woods is full of noise: What do we mean when we call the woods “silent”? A reflection on listening, the comfort of familiar rhythms, and the restorative sounds we sometimes overlook.

A Day In the Life of a Carpenter Fellow at HMML

Post amended 10/17/26 to add the Johanna kiln firing of 10/16/26. 

The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) is a treasure-trove of medieval materials – much of which is on microfilm, part of their long-term mission to preserve our written past. It is, for nerds like me, a fabulous place to do research. In a single day I can compare things from Italy, France, Germany, and Austria without getting on an airplane or having to worry about figuring out how to manage dinner after a full day’s work. I’m lucky to be here in Collegeville, Minnesota as a Carpenter Fellow, with housing, meals, and research support that let me concentrate on a project that draws on HMML’s collections.

HMML is not just European, of course – a couple of days ago I got a whiff of the “Smelly Book,” an Ethiopian Psalter from the 17th century which has had some haaaaard history, blackened as it is by fire– and HMML is consciously working in various places where the written record is under threat. Syriac, Armenian, Lao: there is an abundance – literally hundreds of thousands – of things in languages I don’t speak or read.

But, as I indicated, I’m here because HMML lets me put manuscripts from different places into conversation as I work on my book about Franciscan sisters. I’m currently looking at the rules that shaped their daily lives – and getting happily sidetracked by the words women spoke when they made their vows, their “profession formulae.” After all, these women were Franciscan Tertiaries, whose religious life could take several forms. There’s a tension between “we’re not nuns” reality of their Tertiary status and “we live in community following rules” that’s an interesting space for my book project to live.

For example, here’s one difference that caught my attention (and ate my mid-week): a profession formula from Solothurn, published by Brigitte Degler, explicitly makes room for a woman who might later feel called to a more rigorous monastic life. The Freiburg versions I’m working on instead have her promise “for all the days of my life.” That sounds like a minor difference, but it opens up a big question: how did these women understand the commitment they were making, and what possibilities did they imagine beyond it?

This is the kind of question that gets me to my (standing) desk in the morning. And HMML makes a Latin Editing Before Lunch kind of lifestyle possible, letting a scholar dive deep into a project while leaving the dishes and laundry back home.

So here’s a bit of what a day here at HMML looks like for a scholar in residence, the pictorial version:

walking with a book in the Emmaus residence basement, with coffee and tea, and more coffee

 

small but comfortable housing; 3 meals a day in the refectory

beautiful campus – with a glimpse of the lake on the way to work

The most visually arresting campus image: the abbey church

“My cell”: microfilm reader, computer, notebook, coffee -- all the fun stuff!

Working on bibliography in the Alcuin library

 

walking campus trails: lake-side, arboretum; last week’s step-count was 106,529 steps, or 50.4 miles!

(Okay, okay, regarding step-count: I did go backpacking over the weekend – here’s a couple of pictures of bears, all three, including mama bear playing peekaboo. Those were from off campus, though – up at the Paul Bunyan State Forest on the North Country trail...)

For the adventurous: Walking to St Joe’s via the Lake Wobegon trail. (One could bike, if one biked. It’s 6 miles, each way, so plan enough time. Weekends can be well-spent!) I recommend Flour & Flower for the baked goods.

Late-breaking addition -- I attended the Johanna Kiln firing on Oct 16th

Progress!

So, what does progress mean to me? Well, at this point, it's:

• 23 tabs open across three browsers. 
• 19 footnotes on a working edition that will be the basis for discussion of “lived life” in Chapter Zero, the book’s introduction.
• 88 files of notes, bibliography, and outlines for the middle section of Chapter One.
• 28 pages of handwritten notes.
• An outline of the book’s opening gesture – often the hardest part to figure out. Yay, I have a hook! (It’s still a secret, but I’m having such fun with it! And I figured it out while walking at lunchtime looking at the leaves change color.) 

The way I treat HMML is as an almost frenetic immersion in my material. The goal here isn’t to produce prose, it’s to produce the knowledge that will inform my prose when it comes time to write. There’s a great deal to be said for having the time to follow a question past the “here’s a footnote” stage until it actually becomes interesting – and then keep following it. Here, I can do that, take a walk by the lake, and arrive at dinner without having had to plan it. For this Carpenter Fellow, that’s a very good day.

---

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details: A repeated phrase, a payment, a candle at a grave: small details can answer questions earlier readers never thought to ask. This post explores how patient attention to familiar sources builds new historical knowledge.

Using Research Questions – Defeat data-hoarding and discard the chaff!: There’s always another source to read and another detail to collect. Here’s how research questions help give that collecting a purpose – and help you decide what belongs in the project.

Vacation work… not an oxymoron: Ideas have remarkably little respect for office hours. A reflection on downtime, scribbling, and the long simmer that lets new connections emerge without turning every thought into another task.

Seeds, Sculptures, and the Art of Paying Attention

Attention is something people teach one another.

I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve hung about in Northern climes; I may be hard at it in my library research (as a HMML Carpenter Fellow; more on that in other posts), but my weekends are filled with new-to-me experiences.

To take an example (or two): I worked a prairie refurbishment day up by Poplar Grove IL at Kinnikinnick Creek Forest Preserve and Conservation area, Caledonia IL last weekend, and, oh, was it lovely! 

Often the tasks there are to cut back invasives, but here at the end of the season it was time to collect seed for next year’s new patches of rewilding lands. So a group of half-a-dozen volunteers went out on a Saturday for a supervised “pick” on the soon-to-be-closed-for-winter patch of prairie at the conservation area. When I say supervised, I speak as the novice; everyone else had definitely been out there before, and most of them were professional or quasi-professional preservationists of one type or another.

For our morning’s labor, we were collecting two major types of seeds -- pagoda plant (in three species: downy wood mint, hairy wood mint, and horse-mint bee-balm) and silky wild rye. Pagoda plant really does look a set of piled pagodas on a stalk. We started off just wandering the field up on the hillside, but once someone had actually found a plant, we grouped up for a mini-lesson in plant identification, and then each person took off on their own wander to play “I spy.”

Once we started finding the plants, an abundance mentality set in. They grow in patches, so if you find one set of seeds, you usually find between 20 and 50 sets of seeds. Of course, as good conservationists we took the top half so the rest could re-seed for next year. Caring for the local prairie patch is priority number one, leaving enough seed for new plants, but also for the animals that need to overwinter.

I actually did not-half-bad on the hunt-and-find for pagoda plant; I was mostly responsible for downy wood mint, but turned up a great deal of horse-mint bee-balm as a result. (Those seeds went in the other bucket so I didn’t get to count them as MY totals!) Still, every once in a while I would find a patch of the downy wood mint, enough so that I noticed that I had used my bending over muscles a good bit while out on the hillside!

The silky wild rye grew in a giant and quite obvious patch, as you may have noticed in the picture above. So harvesting there was a matter of pick a large handful, drop it in a bucket, pick another large handful, drop it in a bucket. Rinse and repeat. We had such abundance that we wound up having to combine buckets to make way for the seed bag, designed to hold about 40 lbs of animal feed. We got that bag more than half-way full, so it definitely felt like success!

By the end of that second picking, I understood the idea that one could put in an order for “75 lbs of such-and-so seed” and the main office wouldn’t actually blanch at the request. I also learned that every year, they obtain a selection of seeds, and those go into targeted refurbishments elsewhere. Every little bit helps.

Listening, I though I'd notice wind and birdsong, and it was certainly there, but I found myself instead drawn to the people telling stories -- the community they'd built, their friendships, their stories of leadership and not wanting leadership on firelines, and restorative burns and the ways in which the newbies (me?!!!) interact, particularly in "those" moments, and motivations and the ways that people respond to nature. About the building where during winter months our seeds would be cleaned and further sorted and prepared for next use.

I wasn't listening to nature, I was listening to nature being managed. And that, for me, was pretty cool. The prairie’s abundance had people behind it, people with knowledge and friendships and stories worth hearing.

Of course, I mainly took pictures of flowers instead of the dead stalks of mint plants, so my flower pictures from that trip are better. Oh well.

Common Blue Wood Aster, Aromatic Aster, and Coreopsis

What the flower pictures indicate – what our labors show – what a morning of close inspection taught me – is that the nature of the prairie is in its abundance. That abundance is not to be measured just plants-per-foot, but in kinds of plants-per-foot. Of course there were grasses, and sedges, and little vines which seemed to want to trip you. But as Jessie, our leader, gave us our instructions, she taught us to use the shapes of things – to look for a pile of pagodas, or for the waving stalks of rye – to see one shape among many, so that its shape could go on to re-seed new plots of land with similar diversity when the time comes.

Isn’t that a sweet meta-lesson on how the earth should be?

And speaking of earth, the other thing we did was to attend E(ART)H, a “Land Art” show at Nature at the Confluence, South Beloit, IL. Nature at the Confluence used to be a dump, for decades, with just piles and piles of debris on top of once had been an important tribal meeting ground. (Says something about respect and its lack, eh?) The land has been reclaimed, and a community park made through extensive efforts. There are winding trails and an interpretive center with picnic areas.

The idea behind the show was for the artists to use found materials placed within the context of this reclaimed land to make statements about the connection we all have to the earth around us. It was really well attended; in the three hours we were there I counted more than 130 people, and it had been running all day (including while we were out doing our prairie refurbishment). The opening included live music and performance – including a movement choir – as well as remarks by the artists.

Each of the artists had chosen a different array of materials and a different array of techniques. They were linked by eco-awareness; positioning their work in the landscape was a choice, and the guided tour took us variously along stream-bank, into the shaded woods, and around the circle of mown land as it edged up against prairie grasses. Place is part of art’s perception, and each artist spoke to why this spot – the fallen log which landed in the crook of the tree; a favored spot where the murmur of water joined up with the mosaic flower image to create a fibonacian meditation; the shaded nook where creation seems to both spring up from the earth and come down from the trees above.

The other reality is that art can become a way of asking us to think about place in new ways. “Mother Bison” by Jenny Mathews, for instance, creates the image of a bison but is made out of things like willow branches and grapevine, with prairie grasses and gourds for eyes. It is held together by string. Jenny placed it so that it is emerging from the taller grasses, which seemed particularly symbolic given both the history of the landscape around it and the history of the bison and its reintroduction.

Fun aside: the bison is in part a meat animal, and bison ranching for food is integrally tied up with its successful management, yet ranchers and indigenous peoples have very different views of how the animal should be treated. “Bison”-branded meat in the store is good for the animal because ranching has maintained biodiversity among the herds; we are still at the point where more animals is better for the species.

And yet, “bison” then becomes a ladened term, associated more with what can be read as exploitative culture. “Buffalo,” though colloquially familiar to us in the USA, is technically not the right word for these animals, because, as wikipedia taught me, bison are yak relatives, genus Bos, and buffalo are in two genera, the African Syncerusand the Asiatic Bubalus. All kinds of species in this world, eh?

Anyhoo, we have tended to use the misnomer “buffalo” for these majestic animals (“Where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play…”), and so the label “bison” is doing some heavy lifting in the world these days. Enough so that when Jenny approached members of a local tribe, they at first shrugged her off, because she was using the technically correct term “bison” and they thought that stood in for a way of thinking about the animal. She now leads with the term “buffalo,” and has been much more successful at connecting with them out of shared philosophy of what these majestic creatures mean for us and our mutual – if not always amicable – history.

Jessie Crow Mermel, “Ecology of a Breath” uses the echo of dendritic patterns with their branching structures – in the hand, in the lungs, in the nerves, and in the river systems. She used images on cloth, but also incorporated moss lungs, since moss actually put out more O₂ than trees do! “Patterns,” she says “can serve as a mirror and remind us how deeply we are interwoven with the rest of the Earth.” Plus, I have a particular affection for Jessie’s work since she’d been the Person In Charge of the morning’s Prairie work. It brought a real sense of the nature (pun intended) of community.

The artistic statement used to advertise the exhibit seemed in keeping with the spirit of the weekend: “Our collective goal is to spark wonder, acknowledge eco-anxiety, and inspire new connections.” “Spark wonder” is a phrase I might ordinarily pass over in an exhibit announcement. This time, though, I’d spent the morning discovering how much there really was to find in a patch of prairie, and the afternoon discovering how many ways artists could ask us to look at reclaimed ground. Wonder had acquired both very particular and very memorable shapes.

It had also come with something to do. Learn a plant, gather seed, leave enough behind for an envisioned future. Listen to an artist explain why a piece belongs beside this stream or among these grasses. I can’t claim that a Saturday settled my eco-anxiety, but it did give me a few useful places to put my attention—and, for part of the day, my hands. My bending-over muscles have registered their opinion too.

NOTES

The E(ART)H Land Art exhibit is installed through 17 Oct. 2026 in South Beloit, Illinois; more details are available at https://natureattheconfluence.com/event/earth-a-land-art-exhibit/

---

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Soundscape compositions, Chicago style: What happens when art invites us to experience a familiar place differently? Two Chicago installations—including a composition heard among the ferns of Lincoln Park Conservatory—explore how sound, surroundings, and our own movements shape what we notice.

Listening to the Birds: Bird calls can tell us what is happening around us, if we learn to hear their differences. Jon Young’s What the Robin Knows offers ways to develop that attention, from recognizing alarm calls to noticing how our own passage changes the sounds of the woods.

The silence of the woods is full of noise: Streams burble, crickets chirp, and small animals rustle through the leaves—so why do we remember the woods as silent? This reflection explores how identifying unfamiliar sounds can turn apparent quiet into a comforting sense of the life around us.

Silences That Hurt: The Nashville Symphony’s 2026–27 Season (un-)Suspension: UPDATED

 

[update of 10/5/26: the Nashville Symphony's Season is "back on" with a significant gift -- $10M -- from Oracle. The good news post by new Nashville Symphony CEO Mark Tillinger is here: https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/22883. And yes, we're playing rotating CEO; Mark Cantrell stepped down the day after announcing the planned furlough and was replaced by Tillinger; details here. Topsy-turvy time in Symphony-land!]

Some days are painful. The Nashville Symphony has announced that it will suspend the remainder of its 2026–27 season after October 18. Its board describes the decision as the first step in a financial restructuring, so that’s something. And there’s a transition plan: Music Director Leonard Slatkin will still conduct the October 16–17 concerts. But after that, the orchestra’s musicians and many of the staff will be furloughed.

Mr. Micawber from Dickens’ David Copperfield says in the book, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” His observation fits here: in 2025, the Nashville Symphony brought in $28.1 million; it spent $30.4 million. The difference was $2.3 million—that’s rather more than sixpence. And the overall deficit is a good bit larger: the stated operating gap is $10 million. These are stark figures. But the first loss I and many of my peers imagine is a good bit simpler: it’s that evening when an audience would have gathered, the musicians would have taken their places, and instead the hall stays quiet. That’s a silence that hurts.

Of course, there are some things that do continue. Fundraising concerts; a couple of big events; and hall rentals. But the symphony players are back to the experience of the pandemic: no set schedule, no financial promises. It’s a scary time.

I should acknowledge my own place in this story. I was not a season subscriber this year. (I am on sabbatical, and it is hard to attend concerts in Nashville from Minnesota or Italy.) Still, an orchestra is part of the life of a city even when any one of us is away, or misses a season. Among the comments I’ve saved, one person compared the orchestra to a library: you may not go every week, but you want it to be there. That’s exactly right: a great city deserves a great orchestra. It matters.

I’ve done some work on the symphony as an institution, of course. There are precedents that offer hope, though none of them promises an easy return. The Denver Symphony went bankrupt, and the Colorado Symphony emerged in its place; after another period of severe financial trouble and canceled concerts, the newer orchestra reported a budget surplus in 2016. Likewise, Syracuse’s former symphony closed, but musicians helped form the cooperative now called the Syracuse Orchestra. These are stories of people rebuilding musical institutions through changed structures and sustained work. But, of course, there are also reminders that the original organization does not always survive: the Honolulu Symphony was liquidated, although musicians and supporters subsequently brought orchestral music back through the Hawai'i Symphony Orchestra.

That distinction matters in Nashville. A hall can still host events while an orchestra is silent, as ours is doing. The musicians, however? They need work. Plus, an ensemble’s shared sound takes years to make. Slatkin, newly appointed to a three-year term -- and already connected to the orchestra through the opening years of the Schermerhorn Symphony Center -- has said he intends to remain its music director and work toward its return. I do hope Nashville gives him and my many musician-friends something solid to return to.

I named this blog Silences and Sounds to honor the observation that silences can be meaningful. But this silence hurts. I would rather hear the orchestra.

Sources and further reading

• Nashville Symphony, “An Update from Nashville Symphony CEO Mark Cantrell,” September 28, 2026, https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/22879.
• Nashville Symphony, “Leonard Slatkin Announced as the Nashville Symphony’s Music Director,” February 11, 2026. https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/media/press-room/press-releases/news-releases/2026-press-releases/leonard-slatkin-announced-as-the-nashville-symphony-s-music-director/
• Nashville Symphony, “Nashville Symphony Appoints J. Mark Cantrell as President & Chief Executive Officer,” July 16, 2026.
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 12.
• Stephen Trageser, “Nashville Symphony to Suspend Season Amid ‘Financial Crisis’”, Nashville Scene, Sept 29. 2026, https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/nashvillecream/nashville-symphonysuspend-2026-2027-season-financial-crisis/article_5f35ae09-bbad-4686-a940-601fc5c4f46f.html
• ProPublica, “Nashville Symphony Association,” Nonprofit Explorer (financial filings). https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/620550979
• Colorado Symphony, Nick Dobreff, “A Centennial Celebration” (September 5, 2023), https://coloradosymphony.org/a-centennial-celebration/ and “Colorado Symphony Announces Budget Surplus for the First Time in 26 Years” (September 12, 2016), https://coloradosymphony.org/colorado-symphony-announces-budget-surplus-for-the-first-time-in-26-years-appoints-brett-mitchell-as-new-music-director-in-2017-18/
• The Syracuse Orchestra, “Meet The Syracuse Orchestra,” https://experiencesymphoria.org/meet-the-syracuse-orchestra/
• Steve Flanter, “The Music Returns to Honolulu,” International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, https://www.icsom.org/senzasordino/2012/02/music-returns-honolulu/
• New Mexico Philharmonic, “About Us” (another example of musicians and supporters establishing a successor after an orchestra’s closure), https://nmphil.org/about-us/.
• Image: Schermerhorn Symphony Center, photo by Ryan Kaldari, Wikimedia Commons

“I Sang with the Others”: Voice, Healing, and Margaret of Hungary

This is the first of several posts inspired by my summertime visit to Budapest’s Margaret Island, where the ruins of the medieval Dominican convent still preserve traces of the community in which Margaret of Hungary lived, prayed, and eventually became the focus of a thriving cult. I’m grateful to the Fyfe Faculty Excellence Fund, which supported the travel and research behind this work.

For a Dominican Sister, losing your voice meant losing more than speech. It meant losing your place in the sung services – a central part of the rhythms of religious life. In the thirteenth-century miracle accounts gathered to support Margaret of Hungary’s reputation for holiness, two stories (across three witnesses) tell of her restoring the ability to sing. Each begins with a multi-day sore and painful throat.

Margaret of Hungary (1242–1270), daughter of King Béla IV, lived as a Dominican nun in the convent on the island that now bears her name. The miracle stories recorded after her death offer rare glimpses not only of her cult, but also of the devotional and liturgical life of the women around her.

Dwell with that for a moment; consider strep throat, or tonsillitis, or the raging rawness of the Cold That Would Not Go Away. Pain, inability to eat, the lift of the shoulders as one tries to swallow. This is a human lived reality, in which the small irritation can be magnified, as the only, ONLY thing on your mind. No distractions, just the “ugh” of illness, mixed with the frustrations of being unable to do the work expected of you.

So there you are, a Dominican sister, unable to sing. You’re miserable. You’re mute. You’re unable to audibly join in, while all your Sisters are diligently doing their duty, singing the Liturgical Hours.

And in both these stories, the turning point comes right at the end of the liturgical day, when dusk descends and the sisters join together for Compline. The sick sister can be present, can hear, can pray – but she cannot add her voice to the sounds around her.

That’s where miracles happen.

The two women approach Margaret rather differently. Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen V, makes her petition physically. Catherine, the convent’s cantrix, on the other hand, calls upon Margaret verbally, invoking Christ’s Passion and Margaret’s own tearful response to it.

Elizabeth actually goes to Margaret’s tomb. She puts her throat against it. As she does so, she petitions Margaret. The liturgical details matter: this is Compline on the Assumption while the Salve Regina is sung. And then, by Matins, her cure can be tested: “I was cured,” she reports, “and I sang with the others.”

The same pattern shapes Catherine’s account. After Compline she asks Margaret to heal her “so that I could sing and perform my office.” When she rises for Matins, she discovers that she’s cured. The pain is gone, her voice has returned, and she performs her office successfully. Both women also insist that their vocal affliction never returned.

Why Compline? We cannot know whether the end-of-day exhaustion mattered to either woman, but the timing is striking. In both stories the petition comes as one cycle of communal prayer closes, and the cure becomes apparent when the next begins.

These are also Sisters who think in terms of sacred networks. For Lady Elizabeth, the Marian connection is explicit, for she specifically mentions the Salve Regina as context for her petition. In fact, her moment of intercession is doubly Marian: it is the feast of the Assumption, and the sisters are singing the Salve Regina. Catherine, on the other hand, makes a different connection. She asks Margaret for help through the Passion of Christ, remembering how Margaret herself had listened to accounts of the Passion with tears. The two petitions thus call upon different memories of Margaret’s devotional life.

And then there’s the who. Both stories are about choir nuns, rather than lay sisters. Both are expected to contribute audibly to services, so the gap left by a missing voice mattered. Healing, in these accounts, means not simply feeling better but returning audibly to the community.

But one of the two stories – the one with two witnesses – is even more significant. For the sister who lost her power of audible prayer is none other than the cantrix Catherine, and the week is Holy Week, a time when sung services are central to the whole of the convent’s experiences. Her recovery, attested by herself and by her fellow nun, a Lady Candida in whom she confided, occurred between Compline of Maundy Thursday and Matins of Good Friday. The Cantrix, in other words, miraculously recovers her voice just in time to perform her Office in the middle of the Triduum, when the community’s liturgical demands are unusually intense.

Candida supplies something Catherine cannot: another pair of ears. She remembers Catherine unable to speak or sing, and then suddenly being able to do so. When Candida asks what happened, Catherine tells her—quietly, in the choir—that she had been healed after invoking Margaret. The cure has become audible.

To my eye (and ear!), Catherine’s story makes the stakes especially clear. She was not simply a nun who liked to sing; she was the convent’s cantrix, charged with leading others. A damaged throat therefore interrupted both her body and her office. And this is why her testimony and that of her witness matter: her cure was proven in the most practical and audible way possible: Catherine got up for Matins and was able to do her job.

In a community built around voices raised together, perhaps that is exactly what a miracle of healing should sound like.

---

TESTIMONY

The three depositions behind this post are reproduced below, using the translation from Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis, cited below.

Lady Elizabeth, daughter of King Stephen of Hungary of illustrious memory, a sister and nun of the said monastery on the Island in the Danube, (193ff, here p. 195-197)

“A year ago I had a terrible pain in my throat, so that I could hardly eat, and I couldn’t sing, and then I went to the tomb of the said Margaret and placed my throat upon her tomb, and I asked the blessed Margaret to cure and deliver me, and I was made healthy through the merits of saint Margaret herself.” When asked the month, she replied, “I don’t remember.” When asked the day, she replied, “The day of the Assumption of the Blessed Mary.” When asked the hour, she replied, “The hour of compline, while the Salve Regina was being sung.” When asked how many days she had that sore throat, she replied, “For two or three days.” When asked how long her soreness lasted after she placed her throat on the aforesaid sepulcher, as she said, she replied, “When I got up for matins, I was cured, and I sang with the others.” She also said that she [Margaret] used to visit the sisters and nuns when they were sick, and she was very attentive about doing for them whatever she could.”

Lady Catherine the cantrix, daughter of Lord Andrew of Várad, sister and nun of the same monastery, (379ff, here p. 387)

“One day at the Lord’s Supper, I was supposed to lead the choir, because I was the chief singer, and I had such a sore throat that it hurt terribly and I couldn’t sing, and then I asked this saint Margaret to heal me through her merits and the passion of Christ, which she tearfully used to hear expounded, so that I could sing and perform my office, and I said this after compline, and when I got up for matins, I was so healed and delivered, that I performed my office well.” When asked if there were others present at the time when she asked this of the blessed Margaret, as she said, she answered, “No.” When asked how many days she had that pain in her throat, as she said, she replied, “For four days.” When asked how many days she went without having that throat pain or something similar after she was delivered in this way, she replied, “I did not have that pain afterwards, nor have I had anything like it to this very day.” When asked if other sisters at the time knew she had the said pain, she replied, “Yes, Sister Candida.” When asked how many years it had been since she was cured, as she said, she replied, “Three.” When asked the month, she replied, “The month of Easter.”

Lady Candida, daughter of the late Lord Taurus of Gaura, a sister and nun of the same monastery, took the oath, (393ff) [Here, p. 401-3]

When asked about miracles, she said, “One of the sisters had such a sore throat that she couldn’t speak well or sing, and this condition lasted from Palm Sunday until the very early Friday morning, and then she began to sing, and when I asked her, ‘How can you sing? Are you cured?’ she replied, ‘I can sing well and I’ve been well and truly cured by calling on the name of the blessed Margaret.’” When asked the name of that sister who was ill in this way, she replied, “The cantrix Catherine, daughter of Andrew.” When asked if any other sisters knew about the said illness, she replied, “I don’t know.” When asked if any other sisters heard, when she asked how she had been cured, and what the said Catherine said to her, she replied, “No, because she was speaking softly into my ear.” When asked where they were at the time, she replied, “In the choir.” When asked how many years ago this was, she replied, “I don’t know for sure, but I think it is three years ago now.” When asked the month, she replied, “In the month of Easter.” When asked how long she had seen her thus delivered, as she said, she replied, “Until now.”

---

RESOURCES

I have truly been enjoying having fun with the bilingual edition of Margaret’s miracles; I recommend it highly, and promise a return to its evidence in the weeks to come.

Legenda vetus, Acta processus canonizationis; et, Miracula Sanctae Margaritae de Hungaria = The oldest legend; Acts of the canonization process; and, Miracles of Saint Margaret of Hungary, edited by Ildikó Csepregi, Gábor Klaniczay and Bence Péterfi, translated by Ildikó Csepregi, Clifford Flanigan and Louis Perraud (Budapest, Hungary; New York, NY: Central European University Press, 2018).

---

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

SevenTimes a Day: Prayer as Humane Practice: What did it mean to organize an entire day around repeated prayer? This post looks at the daily rhythm of the Hours and the human experience of returning, again and again, to prayer.

Dominican Prayer Gestures: Medieval Dominican prayer involved the whole body. Bows, kneeling, prostration, and other gestures reveal just how physical devotional practice could be.

“Bulgy enlargement” and medieval hearing loss: Insights from Flohr and Kierdorf (2022): What happens when illness changes the way a medieval person hears? This post explores hearing loss as part of the lived experience of a world shaped by speech, bells, prayer, and song.

Reading with a Job to Do

So, I’m writing an article. This one is a big hairy deal; I’ve already agreed to submit it by a particular date, and it is the ONE thing standing between me and my book. Well, aside for cleaning the garage. And finishing the task of putting in the fall garden. And, dates with Tom. But I digress.

So, again, I’m writing an article. And in order to commit article prose, it is necessary to Engage the Discourse. Which I do, regularly. In fact, I teach a class on this topic, and *always* teach with new literature, each and every time I offer it.

And yet there are so many juicy bits one never gets to. Article writing is time to gather the flock of “Unreads” and convert them into “reads.” Which I’ve duly been doing. At three articles a day, I should definitely be done sometime this year, though perhaps several months after my deadline comes and goes.

And the reality is, one does not need to read in article mode the way one reads in understanding mode. I know, I know, that sounds weird, but hear me on this.

When you’re reading for understanding, all the little bits are the compelling part. Those are where the next big insight may come from – the fragments of understanding that piece together to make the mosaic of the story come to life. It’s the nuance, the compelling document, the momentary “aha.” It’s the chaplain who didn’t collect from that family for three years that opens the door into “oh, something interesting there!” Read the footnotes, I tell my students, that’s where all the cool stuff lives! You’re never going to learn about the priest absolved from having 5 children with that woman until you read the footnote that also explains that he had to come back and ask forgiveness for having three more. (Now, darn, where did I put that citation? I know, just know it’s on my computer somewhere…)

Those kinds of details are the framing out of a localized picture that is going to change what you actually think about your own data. You’re reading deeply, and it’s so very, very cool.

That’s not the kind of reading you need to do for an article. If all goes well, you already know the broad strokes of what you’re trying to say. They say that writing is often a kind of discovery – and it is, but at a more local level, I think, because you already had the big picture in mind going into that writing spate. No, reading for an article is “I want to know the discourse on X,” or “this was contentious, and I’d decided I believe Y, now what were the details of the arguments about?”

Because reading for an article is grappling with human fallibility. The reasons *I* remember a particular article don’t always jibe with what the author was doing with the article, and it’s important to separate out those threads if you’re going to be citing the thing, and I believe in honoring the work of the author where I can.

So, when you’re reading for an article, you’re working on your fairness positioning: what did the other side of that debate argue, and why does it matter?

When you’re reading for an article, you’re looking for the delimiters. Do I need to say “after 1640,” or change “all” to “most,” or (savvy writing here) put “So-and-so argues that…”? Sometimes checking the boundary of a claim takes every bit as long as writing up the claim in the first place – and that’s going to be the part that matters most to at least one of your readers. So go that extra reading mile.

When you’re reading for an article, you’re looking for any latent misattribution habits. I remember Jones said this. Wait, was that Jones? Or even worse, “everyone says Jones says X.” Yeah, but DID they? If you haven’t checked it yourself, you aren’t allowed to write it down, people. That’s because scholarship is harder than fiction, as my daughter once reminded me. I have to check all my facts, while she just gets to make them up. Be slow; be thorough. When in doubt, (re-)read. Check.

When you’re reading for an article, you’re also looking for the formulation of information that is going to be most helpful to your reader – not necessarily the yummy archival documentary study that found “the thing” but the one that put that new detail into a broader context.

And, when you’re reading for an article and you get to the wild-ass claim that means you’d never willingly converse with this ____ (insert category of closemindedness here), you can STOP READING. Because if you wouldn’t have this person in your life, what would they be doing in your footnotes? Step away and find something written by a better human being. (I’m not saying you don’t need to know the literature. I am saying that you don't owe every published argument your attention merely because it exists. If someone else has already thoroughly deconstructed the claim, maybe that's the article you need to cite. Why contribute to the citation count of flaming trolls?)

Reading for an article is reading to a purpose. Be ruthless (and not Ruth-less, because Ruth has actually written some pretty compelling arguments there!). Stop reading on a topic if you’ve already got more information than is going to fit in its paragraph. More is not better, it’s just avoidance.

Instead, when you’re reading for an article, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is: am I ready to commit prose? And that’s your reading exit strategy. Don’t keep reading “just because.” Don’t keep reading for the beautiful writing, or the compelling narrative. Read for the purpose. This bolsters paragraph 3. That might be in the footnote for paragraph 7. This will make the assessment of the controversy more compelling. That shows the strange hoops that scholars have jumped through to ignore such-and-so. So sure, read on all these things. But stop as SOON as you can.

Reading is tempting. Washing dishes is tempting. Heavens to Betsy: even LAUNDRY is tempting when it’s time to commit prose.

So go forth, and read no more.

At least until it’s time to work on the next section of your article!

---

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: Before the prose comes the plan. This post works through choosing a journal, figuring out an article’s likely shape, building a broad outline, and assembling the bibliography that will support the writing.

Using Research Questions — Defeat Data-Hoarding and Discard the Chaff!: Research questions are useful for more than framing an argument: they are also excellent winnowing devices, helping distinguish what the article actually needs from all the fascinating material that can safely wait for another day.

Managing Bibliography By Spreadsheet: A pile of PDFs is not yet a literature review. Here’s the spreadsheet system I use to prioritize reading, track what matters, and turn an unruly bibliography into something that actually helps the writing move forward.

From Conference Paper to Article: Turning Talk into Prose: Turning a conference paper into an article isn’t really a matter of expansion—it’s translation. This post walks through my spreadsheet-based method for breaking a talk apart, adding the scholarship and evidence it needs, and rebuilding it as article prose.

AR for Your Ears

This post offers an idiosyncratic assessment of:

Michael Frishkopf and Scott Smallwood, “Auditory Augmented Reality for Well-Being,” in Augmented Reality: Situated Spatial Synergy, edited by Michael Cohen (London: IntechOpen, 2026), DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.1011786

Listening to things does us good. AR could, therefore, usefully migrate away from its visual obsession and consider the “technologically simpler and lower cost” option of sound-based “auditory augmented reality.”

This is the claim of Michael Frishkopf and Scott Smallwood in their recent chapter, “Auditory Augmented Reality for Well-Being.” It caught my attention in three ways.

• First, they mention EARLIDS, and earlids are a quirky rabbit-hole of mine.

• Second, they are talking in specific and measurable ways about how to develop useful, healthful sounds – that is, soundscapes that enhance well-being. I like that, it fits into my worldview!

• Third, they’re talking about AR, Augmented Reality, instead of AI, Artificial Intelligence (a misnomer), and I am very much there with that! Plus, the added bonus that they’re essentially saying: the AR community is getting it wrong, investing heavily in a tool which distracts, visually, rather than one that soothes, “mixing harmoniously” with the background. Yes, yes, YES.

They are interested as well in exploring lower-tech interventions – they mention headphones, loudspeakers, and personal listening devices, not just mega-gajillion dollar systems that block out the world around you. Now, add in some tech gear so the system can adapt to the subject’s location, actions, and motions and the costs go up. But not as much as their visual counterparts!

What do they claim? Well, one of the important observations is that

the auditory channel is widely regarded as far more potent … generating an affective response by indexing environment features, carrying paralinguistic emotion, evoking affective memory, or setting a mood via musical properties like timbre, melody, and harmony.

In other words, sounds move moods. Plus, and here is where the earlids come in, sound suffuses the environment; as they put it, “There is no auditory counterpart to “looking away” (“hearing away”?).” No earlids, no blocking the input.

If soundscapes change our moods, then, we can use them as a force for good. They are interested in deploying soundscapes to support wellness. To do so, they argue for a mixed-modality sound mixture, one that is a “steady-state, nonperiodic admixture of natural, musical, and synthetic” sounds. I’ve talked about the intermingling of nature noises and created ones before – and to this they add the notion of soundwalking – moving through a landscape with a directed acoustical accompaniment. They draw on the composed installations, particularly in their techno-mediated forms.

In all, they propose three kinds of interventions.

place-based augmentation: take a place, add sound to it so that listeners experience the place differently. In Sounding the Garden, for instance, GPS-triggered poetry and music overlays a physical garden. Sound installations and soundwalks fit this category.

individual adaptive soundscapes: intervene more directly with the individual listener using biosignals and machine learning to select and mix calming sounds for thee different than those for me. This makes ALL kinds of sense; musak gives me hives, but some of the chants I find calming my partner thinks are a bore. Let technology help figure it out.

shared adaptation: musical (well, sound-based) experiences as a social practice. Bringing the power of joint experience to bear on music’s infiltrative powers to allow a group of people to experience and inform the sonic environment. From this, you can get calm, concentration, and social connection.

See, doing good!

If you want a single take-away, it’s that sound should be treated as environmental design: something that can be deliberately composed to support well-being, individually or collectively, rather than simply as entertainment. Think about countering the all of the crisis-noise in a hospital (one of the examples that landed the hardest with me): sound intervention can be a solution to the sound problems that surround us.

Because, at the end of the day, sound can be something that changes the meaning and experience of a place rather than merely adding a soundtrack.

Pretty good observation!

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

Manipulations of Reality’s Sounds — on the intermingling of natural and constructed soundscapes

Mapping Soundscapes — another way of thinking spatially about what we hear

Soundscape Compositions, Chicago Style — sound treated as something composed into and through place

And, of course, there are always the various explorations of earlids: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/p/earlids.html