Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for August 2020

A Summons to Encounter in Unhurried Beauty

Prelude 1: Danseuses de Delphes (Dancers of Delphi)

Imagine a healthy person moving slowly. How can you tell if such a person is hesitant, or dawdling, being sneaky, or being solemn? Where someone is attempting to move at a solemn pace, how might we distinguish between genuine piety, sanctimony, and lumbering?

In almost every wedding rehearsal I’ve attended, the priest or minister has had to instruct the bridal party to walk more slowly. We are not accustomed to the solemnity and dignity of well-executed ritual. What makes a hasty bride appear gauche? I suspect that it is related to what George Steiner called “ceremonials of encounter” in his important book Real Presences. As I suggested in an earlier post, all beauty promises an encounter. Do we miss this encounter because we have lost the feel for ceremony?

With these thoughts in mind, I suggest that you listen to this three-minute piece, which was inspired by the “Acanthus Column.” Debussy was familiar with a replica of this column, which depicts the ritual dance of worshippers of Apollo at the god’s shrine at Delphi. In my hearing, this dance also takes the form of a procession toward the shrine.

[image: by Ricardo André Frantz (User:Tetraktys), editing by User:Jastrow – cropped and colour-adjusted from Image:019MAD Room.jpg taken by Ricardo André Frantz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3370119]

Danseuses de Delphes is to be played slowly and seriously, and the opening measures are also marked “soft and sustained,” or, perhaps, “elevated.” The piece is an imagined accompaniment to a pagan liturgy. Debussy would have had no direct experience of pagan ritual, so it is safe to assume that he borrows from his experience of traditional Catholic liturgy, with its slow processions and deliberate gestures. He was an admirer of the restrained craft of Palestrina, considering it the true sacred music of the Church. This sense of a public liturgy is reinforced by an interesting performance direction at measure 11 (1:12 in the video), doux mais en dehors, which would indicate something like, “soft but outward,” meaning that the quiet dynamic is not a sign of privacy or introversion. It is a sacred hush, as the dancers move nearer the shrine.

The opening melody is played twice, at :02 and at :37. There is an important difference in the second version. After each of the slow notes of the ascending melody, an echo in the upper register is introduced, almost as if the god has heard the prayer of the dancers and is responding from a distance. At 1:12, a new theme is introduced. In this new section, the melody and echo have switched places, with the high carrying the melody, and the middle range responding. Notice too, that the two parts are now moving toward each other, toward an “encounter.” The high notes descend gently and the middle notes ascend in response. It is very much like the ascent of the Catholic priest to the altar, and his prayer that the Holy Spirit might descend upon the gifts presented there.

The arrival or encounter proper takes place at measures 15-17 (1:34-1:50). Such a beautiful moment! The mysterious music in measures 21-24 (2:13-2:38) perhaps represents the withdrawal of the god back into the sky. 

Let me compare this piece to two other “liturgical” pieces. In the work of Palestrina, the careful balance of dissonance and consonance gives the listener a sense of directionality. Whenever a dissonant interval is introduced, it awakens a desire that finds its temporary resolution in the following consonance. This practice develops within a religion that arises out of a certain “problematic,” the question of sin, alienation, and suffering, which have been overcome so as to point the way to a consummation in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Debussy’s style in the first Prelude abstains from functional dissonance. He uses clusters of notes, but often in such a way as to deepen musical color rather than to suggest an unfinished desire. This suggests a religion that is a mystical projection of simpler desires, not so obviously concerned with questions of justice and suffering.

The lack of any haste or drive in the piece suits the worship of Apollo. His cult was frequently contrasted in the 19th century (most famously by Nietzsche) with the Bacchic, frenetic, emotionally suffused worship of Dionysus. Three years after the publication of Debussy’s first book of Preludes, Stravinsky shocked the world with his very different depiction of pagan liturgy, the Dionysian Rite of Spring. 

The lack of haste suggests reverence and confident self-possession. How does our fast-paced society not only rob us of our personal dignity, but make it difficult for us to show reverence when it is time to pray? Does our rushing about constrain us by betraying a lack of confidence in God’s nearness? What can contemporary Catholic liturgy learn from Debussy’s imaginative scenario, which borrows from an earlier Catholic sensibility?

Might the addition of ceremony into more areas of life also introduce meaning? Many of my friends and family members who are tea drinkers attest to the importance of ceremony in brewing and drinking tea. Nearly everything in monastic life is ceremonialized. Is this a sign of a nervous, controlling culture? Or the expressed desire to encounter?

***

Note: I’ve linked Barenboim’s performance because his observance of Debussy’s instructions is the most scrupulous of the performances that I could find. However, it is always worthwhile to hear others’ interpretations. We should bear in mind that the performed piece is the best interpretation, and that my written comments are only meant to open the ear to the performers’ interpretations, and the eye to the world that inspired (in-spirited) both Debussy and his interpreters.

If you have the time, I recommend listening to each piece two or three times, perhaps in different versions.

 

Here is Palestrina’s most famous motet, on the text (apt, for this post) “As the hart desires after fountains, so my soul desires after You, O God.” The use of dissonance to suggest desire and resolution is clearest where the text anima mea (my soul) appears at 2:13. If you can read the music, you will see that the first syllable of anima is often tied over a barline. When the barline hits, a new note, dissonant with the one being held on anima, creating that sense of tension. Note that the resolution of anima is downward, creating a sense of rest and repose.

And here is Stravinsky’s “Dionysian” ritual. Notice how restraint is gone, and ceremony has been transformed into something fearsome, especially at 3:00. This ritual will end with human sacrifice:

 

Learning Contemplation With Debussy

After Vigils ends around 4:30 each morning, I make my way from the sacristy through the monastery courtyard toward the cloister. At that dark hour, it is an enchanted place, and the quality of the light changes with the phases of the moon and the cloud cover. Quiet rustlings betray the presence of cats and, sometimes, raccoons or possums. Most mornings, the birds are not yet awake. I enter the cloister, retire to my cell with a mug of black coffee (a caffeinated “sacrament” as a friend and fellow monk from Mexico once put it to me), and begin reading the Scriptures. All the while, I am aware of the slow dawning of the new day, as the morning star appears, the horizon begins to turn grey, and the birds begin their songs. An enterprising squirrel might scamper by on the mulberry tree outside my window.

God’s mysterious beauty is all around. We need not travel far to find it, even in an urban environment. It’s good to be reminded of this. Observing beauty is an urgent task in times of crisis, such as we have been experiencing here in Chicago. I propose this not as a distraction. Rather, as we respond to the pandemic and to violence, it is important to remind ourselves what our hopes are, and few things generate hope like an encounter with the beautiful. How we understand our situation depends on what we choose to occupy our attention. To the extent we delay our encounter with the beauty that God has built into His cosmos, we risk giving ourselves up to despair.

The contemplative life teaches us to notice beauty in places where others haven’t seen it yet. From our own attentiveness, we can learn to point beauty out to others. This is part of my hope in this series, that I can share with you some of the fruits of this attentiveness.

In the first set of reflections, I will enlist the skills of a great listener, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) to assist us. In 1909, he began composing a set of twelve piano preludes. They are masterful evocations, often of everyday settings. Each has a descriptive title, drawing our attention to the wind, evenings scents, footsteps in the snow, cathedral bells, and amateur musicians, busking in the park, serenading at windows.

Until recently, I had been reluctant to admit Debussy’s profound influence on my own musical sensibilities. His style can strike the new listener as intoxicating, perhaps hedonistic. Quotes from the composer himself seem to reinforce this initial impression:

“Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.”

It’s almost as if Debussy was intending to alienate someone like me, who is suspicious of decadence and who, as an aspiring composer, once spent hours learning theory. Yet, his music has attracted me again and again. And it’s grown profounder as I’ve learned to listen more closely.

“Water Lily Pond and Bridge” by Claude Monet, 1905. Monet’s visual techniques are often compared with Debussy’s musical effects.

Here is a more sympathetic reading of the above quote. When Debussy says that his goal is to “render what [he] can hear,” we should bear in mind that the man speaking is widely regarded as a musical genius, someone who is likely able to hear things that the rest of us cannot. His wish to render what he hears is akin to what a painter does for us visually. A great painting can make the familiar seem new and strange. Monet, a painter whose art is similar to Debussy’s in many ways, could make a haystack seem beautiful by his ability to capture the light around it in varying ways. In a similar way, Debussy will call our attention to nuances in our surroundings. His musician’s ear catches aspects of life that most of us would miss. He invites the listener to reflect on the beauty present in everyday experience.

The older I’ve gotten, the more sympathetic I am to Debussy’s critique of rules. I’ve learned through experience the importance of rules and also their insufficiency for many tasks in life. Wisdom discerns those moments when the rules can be dismissed.

As a young composer, Debussy demonstrated that he could work within the conventions of the time, but he was also willing to dispense with rules of musical theory in order to capture the unpredictable reality of life observed. He also was no dilettante. The Preludes especially are the work of a perfectionist. There are no notes out of place.

The variety and unfamiliarity of Debussy’s individual pieces are responses to the variety and unfamiliarity of life’s experiences. In the Preludes, we hear this strangeness refracted through Debussy’s highly refined ability to hear and notate what he hears. In other words, Debussy had cultivated a kind of contemplative approach to music-making. He is giving us the opportunity of seeing and hearing the world around us with greater precision and insight. 

Before diving into the Preludes, let me leave you with a much earlier and more famous piece, his youthful masterwork, Clair de Lune (moonlight). As you listen, see how the music uses different dynamics (volume levels), registers, and textures to suggest different facets of the moon’s appearance, and the dreamlike traits of moonlight. How do the different textures of music depict the moon’s movement through the night sky? When was the last time we carefully observed the moon, or familiar objects made mysterious by its diffuse illumination? Is Debussy also drawing our attention to clouds or wind or other celestial objects? What does the experience of moonlight say about God?

The Transfiguration as Divine Enchantment

“Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain.”–Proverbs 31: 30a

“Through delight in the beauty of these things they assumed them to be gods.”–Wisdom 13: 3

His face shone like the sun.

As I develop the theme of beauty as a revelation of God, it is important to offer some clear theological foundations. Providentially, the Church has provided exactly the right Mystery for this task today, the Feast of the Transfiguration. Let me take this opportunity to name the themes I intend to convey in the coming posts, and how they are explained by the Transfiguration. As the two opening quotes attest, the Bible gives us an ambiguous presentation of beauty. Beauty seduces when misappropriated. The Church’s tradition also teaches that it conduces to holiness, under the right circumstances.

Beauty is Incarnate. God clothes Himself in a body, but this body is precisely what conveys to Peter, James, and John the splendid divinity of the wearer. God communicates through physical signs, and manifests Himself in the material world, as He did in the pillar of cloud and fire.

Beauty is both lucid and opaque. “A bright cloud overshadowed them [Matthew 17: 5].” This image is paradoxical; the cloud is apparently a bright shadow. It is parallel to the sign of God’s presence at the crucial moment of the Exodus: “the Lord in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down upon the host of the Egyptians [Exodus 14: 24].” This paradox is connected to the “cascade of mysteries” to which I referred in my opening post. Just when a beautiful object seems crystal-clear, it can suddenly appear strange.

Beauty gives us hope by revealing God’s nearness and His ultimate triumph. In a seventh-century homily, Saint Anastasius of Sinai writes, “It was as if [the Lord] said to them, ‘As time goes by you may be in danger of losing your faith.’” To save us from this, the Lord revealed His glory on Mount Tabor. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are now able to hear (or read) all languages–including the language of creation, the natural world–in our own vernacular. “The Lord is at hand! Have no anxiety about anything [Philippians 4: 5-6].”

Beauty gives us hope by revealing our destiny of glory. “Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body [Philippians 3: 20-21].” The Transfiguration is a foreshadowing of what will happen to our bodies, and the bodies of all creatures, when God becomes all in all [cf. 1 Corinthians 15: 21], and “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the water covers the sea [Habakkuk 2: 14].”

Beauty demands a moral response. “Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Rise, and have no fear [Matthew 17: 7].’” The Apostles had fallen, death-like, on their faces, aware of their smallness beside God’s glory, but the Lord commands them to rise and to continue on their way with Him.

Saint John of the Cross, one of the great poets of the Spanish language, possessed a delicate sense of beauty. He grew in sanctity and earned that sense of beauty through an eight month ordeal of solitary confinement.

Our glorious destiny is by the Way of the Cross. Jesus commands them not to tell anyone what they have seen until the Son of Man is raised from the dead. The full realization of the Transfiguration is reserved for the Resurrection [N.B. Jesus’s appearance after the Resurrection is often “opaque”!]. Beauty is apt to be misunderstood and misappropriated if we desire it without renunciation.

We will recognize the true beauty in all creatures to the extent that our moral response to beauty is a cruciform renunciation. This summarizes the last few points, and it adds one last dimension. It is true that beauty can be seductive, and therefore poses a spiritual danger to us. We can combat this danger by renunciation. There are various ways of going about this. Saint John of the Cross gives us a rule of thumb: if we encounter something beautiful and immediately think of God, it’s safe. Otherwise, we probably need to grow in the virtue of temperance, and specifically in the subvirtue of chastity. By meditation on the Cross, we can learn to be detached from all creatures. The reward of this detachment is that we will come to see all creatures no longer as material for us to possess and manipulate, but as sacraments of God’s presence.

Remember Beauty: God Is Near

Beauty is an epiphany. Encountering someone or something beautiful opens a sudden abyss before me. The arrestingly beautiful object arrives as an answer to a question I had not thought to ask. And yet the answer is not the end, but the door into a cascade of mysteries. In other words, the right kind of aesthetic experience is theological.

Our first experiences of the beautiful are always embodied. They are encounters with real objects: sunsets, the Milky Way, Lake Michigan, forests, cardinals, orchids. Artists use their inspiration and ingenuity to craft beauty in artifacts: paintings, music, cathedrals, gardens, vestments. By a process of abstraction, we can think of ideas as beautiful. For example, I find a number of mathematical equations strikingly beautiful. But this “disembodied” version of beauty is always analogous to the embodied version of beauty.

So we are presented with an important paradox involving beauty. It is, on the one hand, theological and mysterious. At the same time, beauty is embodied and real. I opened by saying that beauty is an epiphany. An epiphany happens when a material object reveals a spiritual meaning. We see the object, and then we also see “beyond” it to significance. Beautiful objects are bridges between the material world and the infinite.

The Fibonacci sequence present in the interior of a sunflower.

For several reasons, I am planning a series of posts on beauty, particularly beautiful music. The goal is not to distract, but to model ways in which we can redirect our focus from the virtual to the real. This idea began with a request from a friend who was encouraging me to write more after my posts of April and May. Then, last week, a pastor from a non-denominational church addressed the brothers on various topics relating to his ministry in a neighborhood that faces challenges of poverty and violence. The two of us briefly discussed the role of anxiety in outbreaks of violence, and he urged me to write more on this topic. I will do that, and one way into this topic is through what the ancient monks called natural contemplation, and what I might call “beauty and the real.”

Beauty is often thought to be a luxury of a leisured wealthy class, irrelevant, say, to a community dealing with with poverty. To me, this sidelining of beauty is a major mistake. Beauty is a patrimony, even a right, of all human beings. More importantly, the loss of beauty produces anxiety and despair, the very ingredients that continue the cycle of violence and poverty.  

Now let me tie a few things together. The visiting pastor shared a number of very helpful insights. He noted that the uptick in violence in Chicago has been fueled, in no small part, by the increase in social media use during the coronavirus lockdown. A key source of harm of the lockdown has been the retreat by larger and larger groups from the real into the virtual.

The Garden of the Phoenix in Chicago’s Jackson Park, a gift of the people of Osaka, Japan.

Remembering beauty can help to bring us back to the real, to ground us. Moreover, beauty can reawaken in us a desire for a genuine life of the spirit. Beauty reminds us that we are made for a life that transcends insipid materiality. Beauty awakens hope, a very important theological virtue for us to cultivate at the moment.

In follow-up posts, I am going to be speaking more about “natural contemplation.” This practice, seemingly forgotten in recent centuries, consists in the habit of seeing things as God intended them to be seen. Since all things were created through God’s Word, all things reveal God, if we learn to view them properly. This would further imply that all things that exist are beautiful at some level, and that the experience of beauty can be a reliable indicator of God’s nearness and the soundness of our best intuitions. Once again, the created world needn’t be reduced to pedestrian materiality, but should instead, through faith and hope, be elevated and “sacramentalized.”

For today, I would invite each of my readers to take time to notice beautiful things around us. Take a few moments to contemplate the beautiful persons you’ve known and the beautiful experiences that you have had. Perhaps you could go further and think about the eternal beauty that the faithful believe awaits us in heaven, a beauty that breaks through even now when we gather to pray and celebrate God in the holy liturgy.

Jesus first manifested His glory by the gift of fine wine at Cana.

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