A Harmony of Spirit

We heard the last “Gloria” before Christmas from a quartet, in Dickensian attire, caroling in Crocker Center in downtown Los Angeles. They were standing at the foot of an escalator, in front of Robert Graham’s graceful bronze of a naked young lady acrobat standing on her head, between a patch of poinsettias and a grove of palm trees. The atmosphere was permeated by the pungent emanations from the Chinese restaurant on the mezzanine above.

The young, elegant voices managed to overcome the interference of splashing fountains and chattering passers-by with such beauty that the contrasts--should we say contradictions?--of the scene did not occur to us until we were walking back to the office in the hot December sunshine.

Nothing more complicated than sentimentality may have left people smiling as they slowed their pace to catch another verse in that busy, work-directed place. Maybe it was merely a blind affection for tradition that allowed costumes of another century to harmonize with the glazed steel structure that looks upward, through the glass, not to cathedral spires but to some of the city’s tallest commercial towers.

Or perhaps the sense of joy that permeated that incongruous place was a measure of the ineffable spirit of this season--a spirit that seems to reach beyond the Christians, for whom the season has a particular significance, to illuminate all lives in the secular society with a light of beauty and compassion. That light seems to shine with equal effect in village stables and skyscraper atriums.