On Monday, while walking through the Garment District in Manhattan, I stepped into Holy Innocents Roman Catholic Church on West 37th Street between Broadway and 7th. When I sat down in the pew halfway into the nave, I was surprised at what I saw, and took a picture of it. There were the shadows of workers up in the air above the altar, laboring behind a white scrim, walking up and down metal rigging, guided by hanging lamps. (I believe that part of the church is called the reredos, the wall behind the altar, or simply the sanctuary wall.)

I later learned from the church website that the workers are restoring a nineteenth century painting of the crucifixion. But what impressed me in that moment was the similarity in look and feel between preparation and reparation, between roadies preparing a stage for a rock show, and these conservators at work repairing a church. I felt the overlaps immediately: the quiet stillness of a space that can be otherwise ebulliently loud with song, the tink-tink of tools indicating a level of concentration known only to the person up there behind the screen, the dim multicolored light filtering across the scene that whispers of the brighter lights to come, the unamplified murmurs of workers whose ordinary speech is correlated with their intimate knowledge of the space despite the impression that will later be given that the priest/choir/artist/band has owned the space with their sound.

Over everything hung the sense of making-ready for an event whose seams of preparation must never show once the actual event is underway, and watching this was like the odd fascination and mild obscenity of watching a sped-up film of a seed bursting from the soil and growing rapidly into a flower.

And sitting there, I realized how much of my own interest in the connections between theology and music are on the level of form, aesthetic, space, and experience.

Tommy Beaudoin, New York City