Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Liturgy

Homily for Christmas Eve

The entrance of the Son of God into the world is the most consequential event in all of history. Whatever we previously thought it meant to be human is fundamentally changed—very much for the better—by the discovery that our nature is completely compatible with God’s nature. Whatever we thought it meant to be God is also changed—and again, this change is for the better—because we now know that God is love, that God is communion. And of course, these discoveries about the two natures of God and man are an improvement over whatever went before simply because they are also true.

We often say that Jesus became like us in every way except for sin. And this is undoubtedly true, well-attested in the Scriptures and in the Tradition. But this qualification about sin obscures something of earth-shattering importance: sin is not natural to human beings; sin is a corruption of human nature. I will return to this in a moment, but for now, let us note that human nature is compatible with the divine nature, so long as that human nature is freed from sin.

When I said a moment ago that the Incarnation changes our knowledge of God, we should note that it is a change foreshadowed by God’s history with the human race. There are two aspects of this history, at least as I would like to tell it to you this evening. The first is the gradual realization of human beings that God is utterly transcendent. This realization was quite an achievement; most cultures are content to have a provincial idea of God. Ancient peoples were fine with there being multiple gods, and were apt to switch allegiances when one god seemed more powerful than another. It is the genius of two different cultures, the Jewish and the Greek, that they gradually came to understand that for God to be truly godlike, there could only be one, and this God must be somehow greater than the universe. When I mention Greek culture, really mean a small, radical subculture of Greek philosophers who derived the notion of monotheism.

Such a God is terribly powerful, and yet both the Jews and Greeks intuited that God is also just and true and therefore is not given to arbitrary displays of power. Here, though, is where the two cultures diverge. For Greeks like Aristotle, God withdraws into an inaccessible solitary bliss. For the Jews, God is puzzlingly close to the downtrodden, exiles, widows and orphans. They knew this because they experienced it. The Jews were conquered in turn by the Babylonians, the Macedonians (after being liberated by the Persians), then by the Romans. We hear this evening that Joseph and Mary needed to travel to Bethlehem to satisfy the
taxing strategy of Caesar Augustus. They are an occupied people at the moment that God appears as a child of a Jewish woman.

Throughout all of these tragedies and disappointments, God did not abandon His people, and this suggested that God was somehow a God of love. This was abhorrent to the Greeks. Love makes us vulnerable, and gods by apparent definition, can never be weak or vulnerable, and certainly not the supreme God. Love seems to imply that we need someone else, and God cannot need anything.

And so when we peer into the manger tonight and see God, the Son of God, as a vulnerable infant, dependent utterly on His Mother for sustenance and nurturing, this is a radical discovery about God, that He really loves us so much that He is willing to offer Himself to us, to placed in our arms, on our tongues. This is, strangely, who God is, and yet when we think of it, it rings true. It somehow confirms what we had not dared to hope, that all of creation, good as it is, beautiful as it is, is yet gratuitous, a grace a gift from a God Who loves us, and made us for Himself. He is not a God Who dominates, Who pulls rank. He is not first of all a scold, a gaslighter Who claims to love us while pointing out our every flaw. He is love pure and simple, vulnerable and waiting for us to say, “Yes, I love you, too.”

All of these insights we could derive from the Christmas story. But what about our response? Is the Incarnation something we celebrate today because it happens to be the anniversary of Jesus’s birth? Is it something that God did once upon a time, and now He no longer Incarnates Himself? Clearly this isn’t the case, and here is where I return to a thread I left off a few minutes ago. I said that sin is a corruption of human nature, and we know this because the perfect union of the human and the divine is in a sinless man. Jesus is not an isolated example of sinlessness. He is the beginning of our sinlessness, our union with God. In the words of Saint Athanasius, “God became man so that man might become God.” We are invited to follow the example of the Virgin Mary, and by the invitation He gives to us in baptism, to welcome the life of Christ in our hearts, to be transformed by love, and, let’s be honest by vulnerability, that sin might be rooted out of us, that we might die to ourselves so as to live the divine life of Christ. This can be a scary proposition for sure, but this night we have this assurance from God: He loves humankind so much that entered completely into our human world, with all its typical concerns, struggles, joys, heartaches,
boredom, insight, whatever we experience as human beings, Christians experience with God as our eternal partner in love.

Homily for Gaudete Sunday

If you have a feeling of déjà vu at this morning’s liturgy, what might be the cause? Obviously, it’s not the rose vestments, which we haven’t worn since March.

Do you remember what the gospel was last week? It was John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert, and, Matthew says, “All Judea and the whole region around the Jordan were going to him.” Today, John is no longer in the desert, but is in prison. And it is in prison that he hears about the works of Christ, which he had predicted last week.

Except there is a difference.

Last week, when speaking of one mightier than he, John said of the Messiah, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand….the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So, it’s interesting that this week, when he asks Jesus whether He is one, Jesus doesn’t quite answer directly.

And it’s not an invalid question. After all, we don’t see—or we seem not to see—Jesus with a winnowing fan in his hand, even metaphorically. Where is the wheat and the chaff?

Instead, Jesus responds with a strong paraphrase of Isaiah chapter 35, today’s first reading. And this is interesting. Who is effecting these cures in Isaiah? The first two verbs are in the passive voice: eyes will be opened, ears will be cleared. This is what is sometimes known as the divine passive. Isaiah does not specify who is opening the eyes of the blind. It magically happens.

But we know that this happens when God comes to save His people. “Here is your God…he comes to save you.” That’s when eyes get opened.

So that’s Jesus’s response: if eyes are opened and the lame are walking, then God must have come to save His people. So, was John wrong? Did he have the wrong Messiah?

Of course, this can’t be the case, because the gospels go out of their way to underline the Baptist’s importance as the one who prepares the people and gives witness to Jesus.

The Fathers of the Church struggled with this passage, where John doesn’t seem to know whether Jesus is the Messiah. Did he not hear the voice from heaven pronouncing Jesus the Son of God at His baptism? What they noticed about this episode is that John is not asking Jesus a question directly; he is sending his disciples with the question.

Is it possible that they were the ones who were taking offense? That the Messiah appears bearing mercy, healing, and forgiveness rather than condemnation? This is a good explanation, I think, but it just shifts the burden.

If Jesus is the one who is to come, when are we going to see the winnowing fan, the wheat gathered and the chaff burned?

This is the second surprise. If the first is that the Messiah is not only a human king, but is God Himself, the second is that baptism by the Holy Spirit makes us not only human, but sons and daughters of God by adoption.

The chaff that is to be threshed out and burned is our sins, our worldliness, all that would make us unfit to be God’s heirs.

What about the wheat? Would this not be everything good that God has given us, and every effort, however small, that we have made to say, “Yes,” to do God’s will?

Oftentimes it feels as if our good deeds go unnoticed. Or when they are noticed, others respond with mild cynicism or outright cynicism.

We do good, hoping to build up all that is good in the world, and it seems like evil goes on its way unconcerned. It is as if our good deeds limp, a good word meets a deaf ear. God’s beautiful creatures are obscured, eyes are blind to the stars hidden behind streetlights, living things perish and decay.

This is where Jesus comes to set things right. In His kingdom, which is not of this world, he will have gathered up all those efforts at fidelity. They will no longer Iimp, but will dance before us, and all good words that were uttered will become a song of joy and praise. The dead will be raised, and there will be no tears or pain in that new world, which God wishes to be ours, that world in which even the least is greater than John the Baptist.

Why would we take offense at this? Why would John’s disciples have taken offense?

I believe they were hoping to divide the world between the good people, namely the people of the covenant, and the bad people, like the Romans and their collaborators. Would we not at times also like to see our opponents get burned—at least a little bit—for causing suffering to others?

If we do not see ourselves as lame and blind, at least in some sense, are we not prone to rancor when the undeserving receive mercy and healing? We will answer this with the words of Saint James: “Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another, that you may not be judged.”

If we can welcome each other as Christ has welcomed the least deserving, we will have that much more wheat to bring to God and that much less chaff to be burned away.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

The Book of Genesis starts off on a very high note. God creates all things and finds them good, even very good. Adam and Eve, our first parents, are given paradise for their home. It is a vision of a world in which evil does not exist: plants spring up from the well-watered ground, animals help the man and woman to keep the garden.

As we all know, this does not last very long.  I believe Dante suggests that it lasted about half an hour.

In today’s first reading, we hear the tail-end of the story of man’s transgression, the attempt to attain wisdom in a manner contrary to God’s intentions. This begins a dismal series of chapters in which humankind goes from bad to worse, to the point that God laments ever making man because the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil continually.

It feels like that line from Genesis describes much of our world today. God never gave up on us, and so he began His great plan of redemption by calling Abraham to leave the world of idolatry. There was a long road ahead for Abraham’s progeny. We see that every time God sends a blessing, there is a corresponding resistance, even rebellion.

Eventually, the people of Israel go into exile, and the temple is destroyed. This marks a new approach: more and more, the people of Judah look to respond to God by a humble submission to His law, not seeking the power of kings, but seeking renewal interiorly.

Instead of having thoughts entirely on evil, meditating on God’s law, day and night. This was a good strategy, since God had promised blessings to those who kept His law in their hearts.

What I am describing here is the gradual training of the people of Israel to cooperate with God’s grace. This was a challenge because the rest of the world didn’t know God and went about with its wars and industries, measuring success by worldly standards while Israel became more and more negligible.

But this was all a part of God’s plan. He was seeking one person who would truly say, “Yes,” with a pure heart. And so, to an aging couple, whom we call Joachim and Anne, God gave the gift of a daughter who would be that perfect response to God’s invitation to know Him and love Him.

The covenant with Abraham, that agreement between two parties, is brought to fruition through one who will say, “May it be done to me according to your word.” It is at this moment God finally enters His creation to save it from within.

Today’s solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is not just a celebration of this event, but a reminder that each of us through baptism is part of the same drama of salvation. Each of us, in saying “Yes” to God’s invitation and pledging ourselves to Him in baptism, has brought Christ into the world in our own hearts. We are now striving to bring Him to birth by becoming saints. As Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception was prepared for by generations of humble, anonymous men and women, we are beneficiaries of generations of Christians who have striven to be faithful to Christ.

Seeing God’s hand in this history and recognizing His many gifts to us, let us respond to His invitation and say, “Yes,” with our whole heart.

Homily for the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today we celebrate the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the temple. Our knowledge of this event is taken not from the canonical Scriptures, but from an important text, called the “Protoevangelium of James,” written in about the year 150. The Protoevangelium also gives us the names of Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna. The book is an excellent witness to the importance of the Blessed Virgin in the earliest decades of the Church. We see the earliest Christians reflecting on her role in God’s plan, requiring her to be set apart. Like the prophet Samuel, she is dedicated by her parents to God, to live in the temple and serve the priests who ministered at God’s altar. One of young Mary’s tasks was to weave the temple veil, the veil that would be rent at Jesus’s death.

The Church has always seen in this dedication of the Virgin Mary a foreshadowing of consecrated life. Those called by God to leave the world are to live, like Mary or the apostles after Pentecost, in the temple, praising God at all times. There, we wait upon God’s will, and following the pattern of Mary’s motherhood, we dedicate ourselves to welcoming the life of Christ given at baptism. With the help of God’s grace, we aim to bring that divine life to term by a life of sanctity and purity of heart.

Today we also conclude the monastery’s annual retreat. As it happens, this year’s retreat is shorter than usual, as we are planning to move it back to February. But it has been unusual in many other ways, and perhaps not as quiet and reflective as most of us would have chosen. This might be a reminder from God that no life of sanctity comes without a struggle to accept what is. It might be a reminder that as monks, we can’t afford to use the retreat as a time to “refuel” before we get back to work. We have to be the ones in the Church who say “no” to whatever distracts us from our primary purpose of serving God alone. Is there a difference in kind between withdrawal from the world and retreat? I think that they are both the same thing, differing only in degree. If God has seen to it that we haven’t had as much time for spiritual exercises this week as we would have hoped, this is perhaps a reminder that, for us, spiritual exercises must come first at all times, and not just on retreat.

I don’t want to be too elliptical for our guests: Fr. Edward is doing fine after having surgery on Wednesday night, and while he has a lot of rehab ahead of him, we have reason to expect him back. Other distractions have been more elective, and, as I say, a spur to imitate more fully the example of Our Lady: to put our own plans to the side and say, “Let it be done to me according to your will,” so that we may be a true sign to the Church that God’s will is our peace and not any accomplishment of our own. For whoever does the will of Jesus’s heavenly Father is His brother, sister, and mother, kindred of all the saints in heaven and destined for eternal life.

Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome

Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, it seems like a good moment to reflect on the subject of ecclesiology. Ecclesiology means the study of the ecclesia, the Church.

What is the Church? What does it mean to be a member of the Church? These questions are not as easy to answer as we might think at first blush.

For example, when we ask what the Church is, the answers that we get from theologians vary, depending on the perspective from which we view the Church. It is the mystical Body of Christ. It is the sacrament of salvation for the world. It is the People of God, or the Perfect Society, through which we, the members, receive grace and are sanctified and perfected in union with our shepherds, the bishops, under the special care of the Holy Father, Christ’s vicar on earth. And of course, any one of these “models” is itself a mystery, and therefore open to ongoing reflection.

I would like to offer the idea of the Church as a kind of fractal, just to make things at first even more mysterious and perhaps overly complicated.

What is a fractal? In certain popular usages of the term, it refers to a shape that is made up of several connected versions of the same shape on a smaller level. Imagine, for example, a snowflake, with it six points. Now imagine taking six of the same snowflakes and connecting them around a center so that it makes a new hexagonal snowflake. And imagine that this new snowflake has the same shape as each of the six smaller snowflakes. That’s what I mean by fractal in the case. As we zoom our or zoom in, we see the same shape emerge each time. That shape is repeated at different levels.

So, there is one Church, as we say in the Creed. That is because Christ Himself is the One mediator between God and Man, and the Church is His Body and His Bride. There can only be one Bride for Christ and that is the Church.

Now, a brief side note on the Lateran Basilica. Just over two thousand years ago, in the City of Rome, there was a family that had recently become a part of the wealthy class in pagan Rome, and their name was the Lateran family. They built a palace on the site of what is today the Lateran Basilica. This palace was confiscated by the Emperor Nero and became part of the government’s property. Three hundred years later, when the Emperor Constantine became Christian, he donated that former palace to the pope at the time, Pope Miltiades, and it became the seat of the bishop of Rome. The building was destroyed several times, and the current building was built over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fourteenth centuries, the building was destroyed by two fires while the pope had moved his administration to the city of Avignon in France. When Saint Catherine of Siena persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return to Rome, he found the Lateran Basilica completely in ruins. So he moved his administration to Saint Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican hill, and this is where the pope continues to exercise his governance of the Church. However, the Lateran remains the cathedral church of Rome, and therefore is the Mother Church of the entire Roman Catholic world. Hence our celebration today. It is a sign of the unity of the Church under one pope, and a sign of the Incarnation, inasmuch as there can be only one Mother cathedral, and for God’s purposes, He chose Rome to be the home of this church.

Now, let’s return to the idea of a fractal. So, you remember that I said that when either zoom in or zoom out, we see the same shape emerge. This is what we find in the ecclesiology, when we look at the Church. When we zoom all the way out, we see the universal Church, with billions of members all around the world and in heaven and in purgatory. A glorious sight to be sure.

But when we zoom in, we don’t find an isolated “piece” of the larger Church. We find a diocese. And at the head of the diocese is the Bishop. And by dint of his ordination as bishop, he is just as much a successor of the Apostles as is the bishop of Rome. One of the principles vigorously enunciated at the Second Vatican Council is that each bishop receives his power and authority directly from Christ, not from the pope. The pope receives particular powers reserved to him, but the normal powers of a bishop, to teach and preach, to celebrate the sacraments, and to govern the Church, comes directly from Christ. This means that each diocese is, in some way, the fullness of the Church in a local, miniature setting. The whole, single, Church is present, and this is especially visible when the bishop celebrates the sacraments. For Christ is acting in the fullness of His power through the bishop.

Now, if we zoom in yet another level, we get to the parish. Again, the parish is not simply a piece of the diocese. There is, again, a sense that the fullness of the Church is present locally, through Christ’s ministry, now through the instrument of the priest. Now, we should say that the parish is a more inadequate symbol or instantiation of the universal Church. For example, a priest cannot celebrate the sacraments without the permission and mandate of his bishop, and certain sacraments are reserved to the bishop, such as ordination or the consecration of an altar. Certain decisions belong to the bishop. But even if the picture is slightly dimmed, this does not mean that the fullness of the Church is not actually present when the priest acts in the person of Christ, whether teaching governing or sanctifying.

This fractal nature of the Church is denoted by the fact that we celebrate three church dedications each year. Today we celebrate the Church’s unity at the highest level. On October 11 each year, we celebrate the dedication of the diocesan cathedral, in our case the archdiocesan cathedral of Holy Name downtown. And last but definitely not least, we celebrate the dedication of each parish or religious church. In our case, this is on October 24. And this celebration at the most local level is the highest-ranking, liturgically speaking, of the three.

This means that while today’s celebration is a feast in this church, in Rome it is a solemnity, the highest-ranking category of a liturgical celebration. This once more connects us to the Incarnation. It is God who has chosen to consecrate this place to Himself, and it is likewise God Who chose to consecrate the Lateran basilica. He does this to deepen His relationship with the actual people who come here. But we are never, for that reason, isolated from the other churches. We recall on this day each year that our small community is not just a piece of the universal Church, but in some way makes present the entirety of the Church, which is best understood from the perspective of the ministry of unity given to Saint Peter and his successors.

So, we can give thanks to God this day for calling us to be members of His one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, and for reminding us that what we see here, however humble it may appear, is in fact an opening to the grand and glorious city of the redeemed, an opening to the kingdom where we hope to enjoy God’s glory forever. Amen.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Church

[The dedication of our church took place on June 19, 1910.  The monastery now transfers the Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication to October 24.]

The Church’s liturgical directives instruct us to celebrate each year the anniversary of the dedication of the church building. This year we celebrate 115 years since this building became what Saint Benedict calls an oratory: a place consecrated to prayer. Saint Benedict goes on to say that the oratory should be what it is called: we come here to pray.

Eleven years ago, Cardinal George consecrated our new altar, and so we had a smaller-scale experience of what a church dedication looks like. The first thing to notice about it is that it can only be done by a bishop, in other words, by someone who is a part of the line of apostolic succession. A bishop is the spiritual descendant of those men upon whom Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit, commissioning them to teach, govern, and sanctify. The bishops share this commission with their helpers, the priests and deacons, but the most important actions are reserved for the bishops, who bear the fullness of Christ’s sacramental priesthood.

When any item is blessed, it is set apart in some way as dedicated to God, and therefore it bears something of God’s holy presence. Holy water, for example, can drive out the simpler demons. When we were baptized, we were set aside for God, and God took up residence in our souls. When this happens, it is as if a light goes on inside us, and we become spiritually alive. Certain latent powers, rooted in the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, are activated and begin to grow. This illumination that takes place is signified by the candle, lit from the Easter candle, Christ Himself, and given to the newly baptized.

When a priest is ordained, this process takes on a specific contour: not only is God present in the soul of a priest, but Christ now promises to act through the priest in specific ways. Again, a certain latent potency in a man is activated, and God’s sanctifying power now manifests itself in the priest changing the elements of the Eucharistic sacrifice into Christ’s Body and Blood, to note the most radical example.

And so it was with this church, when the bishop anointed its walls and the stone of the altar. In the case of our new altar, the relics of Saint Benedict and Saint Vincent of Saragossa were buried inside it, incense was placed on the altar, and finally a candle. And at this point this building came alive spiritually, as it were, and became God’s dwelling place. Every time we light the candles at the altar, we recall this in a profound way—this is one reason why the Eucharist is never celebrated without the candles being lit.

When the lights come on in the Church, or when the sun streams in through the stained glass windows, we see signs that this is a holy place. The images, the altar and the canopy above it, called a reredos, the twelve columns signifying the twelve apostles: these are those latent objects that become illuminated, alive with God’s presence because they are in a holy space. And all this ornamentation is meant to show us who we are as a Church. For we are being built into God’s dwelling, we are the stones being sanctified.

There is so much to dwell on in this theology, but time being limited, let me offer two brief final observations.

First of all, you are aware that this building has undergone a lot of repair in the last few years. In this world that has become infected with sin, objects are subject to decay and decomposition if they are not regularly repaired and renewed. Sometimes this work requires vigorous scraping, even removal of decayed brick and wood, before new brick, wood, and paint can restore the original beauty. This is a sign for our souls: sin has caused all of us to lose the original glory that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the garden. But God’s rescue mission is restoring this glory and spiritual beauty. Sometimes this requires scraping and extraction from us of improper attachments and so on, and this can be painful. In our suffering, it’s important to set our eyes on the goal, which is the beauty and glory that we will enjoy for all eternity with God and the saints. A beautiful church assists us by giving us a glimpse of what this will be like.

Which brings me to my second point. For this encouragement to take root in us, it is helpful to expose ourselves to it. The brothers will tell you that I frequently remind them not to close their eyes at the liturgy. I don’t bring this up to shame anyone, but to point out that in our modern context, our tendency is to seek God within ourselves, and more or less exclusively within ourselves. I have already said that He dwells within us because of baptism, so this is not entirely wrong. But interiorly, we are not yet fully purified, or at least I’m not, and I’m guessing that most of us aren’t. All the visual, aural, and olfactory cues in the church, dedicated to God’s glory, remind us that the goal of salvation is much greater than ourselves. Not only that, but the church is a symbol for a well-ordered soul, and therefore helps us to know how to identify God’s presence within us. What should we look like interiorly? Are we ornamented with images of salvation history and the examples of the saints? Is the incense of constant prayer filling us? Are we offering regular sacrifice to God upon the altar of our hearts? How might we grow as Catholics by today’s celebration? How might the illumination of our souls bring God to the world today?

Liturgy and Rationalism

When I was younger, I wrote a lot of poetry. Often it took the form of song lyrics. But sometimes it was just poetry for its own sake, because I love poetry. One of the things about writing a lot when you’re young is that your work sticks around. You can read it when you get old and think, “This wasn’t very good.” Or more importantly, “This reveals more about me than I realized at the time. I didn’t recognize that feeling or insight for what it really was.” Occasionally, you discover, “Oh, there is actually an insight here that I didn’t even know I had at the time.” This comes about because, when we’re trying to make poetry work, we’re not using just our rational faculties. We’re using a certain kind of intuition, a felt, tactile sense of reality. We want to feel how the words fit together and create a rhythm together. When we’re writing poetry, we’re accessing our embodiedness in a way that we don’t when we’re writing an essay or an instructional manual.

I believe that an analogous process has taken place in the Liturgy. As Catholics, we profess that the Holy Spirit guides the Church in its development, and therefore that He also guides the development of the Liturgy. The Liturgy was assembled over many centuries by different people working in different places under different influences. These people made choices whose consequences none of them could have anticipated. The Holy Spirit may have inspired them to move in some way, knowing that a certain intuition would bear fruit 300 years later. Also, new people arose over time, bringing new insights. One example is William Durandus, a prominent medieval commentator on the Liturgy. Today, not everyone agrees that his works serve as a good critical resource for understanding the meaning of the Liturgy. But they do provide a snapshot in time: what people in the 14th century understood the Liturgy to be. This is different from what people in the 11th century thought or people in the 21st century think. To a certain extent, each period’s insights are valid, and we can learn from them all.

The problem with rationalism is that it takes an abstract schema—for instance, revealed truths, arranged in a certain order—and then imposes that on the Liturgy. It gives us the illusion of control over the Liturgy and tempts us to exercise it. But it misses the intuitive aspects that were put there either deliberately by human choice or unknowingly under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

This is a challenge for the Church in our time. The reforms that happened after Vatican II were infected with rationalism. But rationalism was never sufficient to the task of comprehending and communicating the mystery that the Liturgy celebrates. This is why it’s important that we access earlier versions of the Liturgy and use them to help us understand the current one.

The Ultimate (Sacred) Musician

In the Catholic tradition, one composer stands above all the others in eminence for capturing the essence of liturgical music. This year, we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Pierluigi di Palestrina (1525-1594), whose impact on both sacred and secular music in the West can hardly be calculated. On Saturday, October 18, at 5:15 p.m., here at the Monastery, we will be celebrating Solemn Vespers during which all of the choral compositions will be pieces by Palestrina. That we have such a selection of his music is itself an indication of his importance as a liturgical composer.

What is it about Palestrina’s art that stands above other Catholic composers? To answer this, it might help to take a step back and examine some theological questions.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina

The Christian faith is based in God’s self-revelation. However, God’s “unveiling” is always paradoxical. That is because no matter what we can say about God, there always remains an infinite amount that we do not yet know. All theology, if it is to avoid becoming something idolatrous, must bear this paradox in mind. Theologians must speak cautiously about the true and infinitely free “God-Who-Is” and not be satisfied with a lesser but more manageable god conjured up and constrained by logic and syllogisms.

With this in mind, we can see how the Church’s liturgy is an important source for theological reflection. In the liturgy we hear Christ speak through the Scriptures and we experience His actions as members of His Body. The liturgy conveys something of the sovereign majesty of God as the One Who is always greater than what we can know. The Church has traditionally conveyed this excess of meaning through the liturgical arts.

For example, the liturgy takes place in buildings that convey mystical truths through architectural and ornamental symbols. Bishops, priests, and deacons wear elaborately decorated vestments that cloak their individuality and suggest other presences. Icons and statues convey their mysteries through the medium of visual art.

But the art that best symbolizes God’s mysterious presence is surely music. Music communicates the divine by being meaningful while nevertheless remaining opaque to verbal descriptions. Nothing I can tell you about a piece of music can take the place of you hearing it. And whatever meaning a piece of music has for me, any attempt to explain that meaning runs the risk of trivializing it.

Palestrina’s work has long been recognized as being particularly apt at finding this balance of intelligibility and mystery. His compositions have the power to move the emotions deeply without ever becoming sentimental, grotesque, or manipulative.

In the coming weeks, I plan to offer a series of blog posts discussing why I believe that the honors given to Palestrina are well-deserved. Hopefully readers will come to understand why he is considered one of the greatest composers of all time.

Since I have said that there is no verbal substitute for hearing an actual piece of music, we can hardly begin a commentary or exposition without some experience of what his music sounds like. Here is one of his most famous pieces, the Kyrie eleison of his Missa Papae Marcelli, the Mass for Pope Marcellus.

As we conclude this introductory post, keep these three things about Palestrina in mind…

The first is how his music flows without becoming nebulous. Palestrina was part of what was already a long tradition of liturgical composition. An earlier high point of this history sprang from the composers of the “low countries,” what we now call the Netherlands and Belgium. Composers like Adrian Willaert (ca. 1490-1562) aimed to offer us a taste of the vast angelic choirs through a technique called “seamless polyphony.” In my opinion, this is an extremely beautiful style. As implied by its name, the music flows seamlessly, without jarring transitions. The very lack of transitions can become its own problem, however. Liturgical music is based upon texts, which are broken into phrases and clauses, and Palestrina’s art honors this textual background especially well, balancing the need for transitions that are distinct yet never abrupt or jarring.

Second is the effortless beauty that suggests more than it says. As a general rule, Palestrina did not attempt to “interpret” the text by implying any kind of emotional affinity between the words and his musical setting. The approach that seeks to encode the music with an emotional  or figural illustration of the words is sometimes known as “word painting.” It would be embraced by the great composers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries like Handel and Bach. I will have a lot to say in later posts contrasting the genius of Bach and Palestrina. For now, let us just note that Palestrina, by avoiding any kind of interpretation, gives more of an impression that the music arises of its own accord, rather than being the product of a human mind. Word painting techniques can create a certain distractions by calling to mind the cleverness of the composer.

Third, whatever music you might need for any given liturgy, Palestrina has likely done a version of it. He lived right at the moment of the Counter-Reformation, when the Catholic Church was in the midst of sustained reflection on the meaning of the liturgy, which had come under attack from certain Protestant Reformers. Palestrina translated the musical principles of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) into an extremely fertile set of practices which became standard for Western music in general for the next four centuries. Every composer from Buxtehude to Brahms relied on the craft of Palestrina when honing his own techniques. Even today, when a composer wants to suggest the sacred, he will often rely on methods perfected by Palestrina and the generation of composers to which he belonged.

The heart of this technique was the way that composers handled dissonance, which will be the subject of the next post.

* “Rightly, then, the liturgy is considered as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ.”–Sacrosanctum concilium [the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II]

The Faces of the Transfiguration

In the beautiful mystery of the Transfiguration that we celebrate today, Saint Matthew tells us that Jesus’s face shone like the sun. It is a dazzling image. Do we have any analogous experiences of this?

I think that we do. Many years ago, I helped plan a surprise birthday party for a good friend. When he arrived at the restaurant where about thirty of us were hiding in a banquet room, he was expecting something like a quiet meal with his wife. When he entered the banquet room, he began to recognize all of us. As he looked around the room, his face very much “lit up!” It was a recognition of love, that all of these friends had made time to show him appreciation.

The second example I often reflect on is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Toward the end of her life, she was quite bent over, and her face was lined and tanned. Yet, whenever she saw someone, especially a young person, her face would simply beam.

What we see in the face of Christ is this light of intimate love. The Father says, “This is my Beloved Son!” The effect of this love is illumination: most especially of the face of Jesus, but also of all around it. I have already hinted that this potential is in every human face. Indeed, God wishes that all of us will one day shine with the same transfiguring light. Every person we meet today—whether it be a coworker, a beggar, an elevated train conductor, or a spouse—is loved by God in his or her innermost reality. That great light is waiting to shine forth when we have experienced the purifying fire of God’s love. May we live this reality today and every day!

Corpus Christi in Bridgeport

Last Sunday, we celebrated Corpus Christi with a Eucharistic procession. We processed around our neighborhood of Bridgeport, singing hymns. It’s always a bit amusing to see the reactions of unsuspecting denizens when they see us coming! We also had some students from the Chicago College of Performing Arts (at Roosevelt University) join us, singing Mozart’s Eucharistic motet Ave verum corpus (Hail, true Body!) and other music. It was an uplifting experience making a public confession of our faith in the loving Lord Jesus Christ, Who continues to nourish us spiritually and to guide us toward His kingdom.

I don’t believe that anyone in the neighborhood was doing Corpus Christi processions when we arrived. About twenty years ago, we approached Father Donald Craig, then the pastor of our nearest parish, Saint Mary of Perpetual Help, about collaborating on a procession. He was extremely enthusiastic, and for many years, we joined forces with the parishioners there. Now we each do our own separate processions (and cover more ground that way!). And it seems that these processions are really making a big comeback, here in Chicago and in other U.S. cities, which is very encouraging.

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