[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]
With immense gratitude to Almighty God and to the Mother of God, Mary Most Holy, I offer some reflections on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of our founding.
Monks in the modern world are daily confronted with incongruities. We dress in tunics and scapulars that were the workaday clothing of sixth-century peasants. We pray the Psalms, composed some three thousand years ago in a language that does not translate into contemporary idioms very well. Many of our customs date from the early Middle Ages (suddenly a controversial era!), presupposing a worldview that is unfathomable to many of our neighbors in Chicago.
[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]
Saint Gregory the Great is one of the few late Western Fathers whose works were also highly esteemed in the Christian East. There, he is known as “Dialogos,” the writers of the great Dialogues. One-quarter of this famous collection of the lives of saints is given over to Saint Benedict, which means that Gregory holds a special place in Benedictine monasticism.
Our next celebration of Solemn Vespers with Schola Laudis will be this Saturday, July 28. What follow are my program notes for the occasion. For more information, click here.
[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]
The figure of John the Baptist loomed large in the imagination of the early Church. This is a challenge for most Christians today. Sure, no one was born of woman greater than John the Baptist, but wasn’t that under the old dispensation? Isn’t the least in the Kingdom of God greater even than John?
Yesterday, I received an email from Jon Elfner, a friend of mine. The email read, in part:
[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]
The Sixth Sunday of Easter is not the flashiest of liturgical events. We’re a good ways out from the euphoria of Easter, but not quite at the Ascension yet. It seems like a good time to step back at think about the liturgy in general.
Poetry tills and harvests in the fields of metaphor.
When Shakespeare’s Romeo muses, “Juliet is the sun,” he is not making a statement that is literally true. But it is true. How so? Oddly enough, answering this question involves us in more metaphorical speech.
[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Saturday, April 7.]
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was more than a new event within the old, tired world, laboring under sin and death. In fact, it was the end of that world and the inauguration of a new creation. All who are baptized into Christ belong to this new creation, and our lives “are hidden with Christ in God.” As the first creation was made in six days, with God resting on the seventh, the new creation required a new day, the ‘eighth day’, a day outside of the closed cycle of the broken world.
One important symbol of this eighth day is the celebration of an ‘octave’. Each day between Easter Sunday and the Sunday following (now referred to as ‘Divine Mercy Sunday’) is part of the same Easter reality, each day a liturgical solemnity, the eight days of the new cosmos breaking into ‘secular’ time and renewing the old world from within.
Traces of the eighth day motif are already present in Saint John’s gospel. It is on the eighth day that Jesus appears and invites Thomas to touch his hands, feet and side, and Thomas comes to believe. Jesus then pronounces blessed all who believe without having seen, who put their faith in this hidden life in Christ.
In the present Roman calendar (of the ‘ordinary form’), only two official octaves remain, those of Christmas and Easter. In the medieval calendar, virtually all major feasts had ‘octaval’ commemorations at the very least. The liturgical reformers around the time of the Second Vatican Council considered these to be cumbersome complications. Perhaps this was so in some cases. It also may be that the traditional language of the eighth day had fallen into desuetude, perhaps as part of the overall weakening of an eschatological theology (a theology of the ‘last things’, as both present and yet to come). The Orthodox churches have tended to retain a robust sense of the octave as theologically central. In the center icon of Christ in glory behind the altar in the monastery church, one sees two interlocking stars of four points each. The combined eight points indicate that Christ’s coming, both now at every liturgy, and fully revealed at the summation of history, happens on the eighth day. As we celebrate the eighth day of Easter, we are overjoyed to join with you to praise God for the victory of His Son and the gift of new life in the Spirit.
One of the implications of a “new creation” is that God’s manifest beauty is, in the memorable words of Saint Augustine, “ever ancient, ever new.” Kevin and I have frequently discussed together the importance of the creation of new liturgical music that reflects the perennial confidence and vigor of the Catholic faith. After making a few attempts to realize a collaborative Renaissance English setting of tonight’s troparion on Psalm 115, we decided that this would be a perfect text for our own collaboration. We took turns setting the verses meant for the Schola as part of an effort to forge a shared style. We hope that all profit from our labors as we meditate upon and celebrate our own Exodus from the world to the Kingdom of God.
Christ is truly risen!
[The following is from the program notes for Solemn Vespers of Saturday, March 3.]
According to St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism and co-patron of Europe, every day in a monk’s life should be as if in Lent. I like to think that this is because every tomorrow for a monk is the Resurrection. We rise early every morning in the hope of Christ’s glorious return, and learn to live in this taut expectation.
The Church’s liturgy offers us a similar perspective, this time on the life of all the faithful. We might say that there are indications that the lives of Christians during Lent should be more ‘monastic’. One interesting indication has to do with the place of the Psalms in the Church’s liturgy for Lent. This can be best seen by looking at the Church’s Divine Office antiphons during Advent and comparing them to Lent.
The antiphons for Sundays in Advent tend to be somewhat free paraphrases of texts from Isaiah and other prophets. This allows for an enjoyable re-interpretation of the typical Psalms sung on Saturday and Sunday evenings and on Sunday morning (Pss. 144b-147, Pss. 109-112, and Pss. 50, 62, 117, and 148-150 respectively). The antiphons color the meaning of the Psalms and encourage us to pray imaginatively.
During Lent, the situation is a bit more plain and even, we might say, ‘chaste’. Now the antiphons for Sunday are taken from the Lauds Psalms and so highlight the Psalm texts themselves, unadorned with the prophetic sense of expectation. Traditionally, the Psalms are to be prayed with the voice of Christ, and in this fashion, we are drawn repeatedly to contemplate the Passion of Christ, His appeal to the Father in ‘reverence [Hebrews 5: 7]’, and His triumph in the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, contrary to what we might expect, we are called not so much to a focus on repentance that might become self-involved; rather we are invited to contemplate the One Who walks with us this path to redemption.
We note a similar phenomenon in the liturgy of the Mass. The texts of the communion chants for each weekday of Lent are taken from consecutive Psalms, beginning quite deliberately with Psalm 1. That is to say that Psalm 1 appears as the communion on Ash Wednesday, Psalm 2 on the following Thursday, and so on. This intense focus on the Psalms is quite ‘monastic’, as any monk would be quick to point out. The 150 Psalms shape everything we do at prayer in community, and much of how we think even in private.
The focus on the Person of Christ comports well with the traditional gospels for each Sunday (preserved as the selections for ‘Year A’ in the current lectionary cycle). The First Sunday retells Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, the Second Sunday brings us the foretaste of Christ’s glorification in the story of His Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. And on this third Sunday, we find Him promising the Holy Spirit to the woman at the well.
These indications within the liturgy are a good reminder that the austere life of the monk is not at all meant to be joyless, but provides precisely the atmosphere in which the believer can better assent to the fullness of the Good News of our salvation and sanctification. Lenten fasting and abstinence is far more than a means simply to address deficiencies in our moral characters; they form the context in which we conform ourselves to Christ’s self-emptying [Philippians 2:6-11], so as to receive with greater intensity the indwelling of the divine life given at our baptisms. This we long for as we make our way toward the renewal of our baptisms at the Easter Vigil and on Easter Sunday, the foretaste of our own resurrections in Jesus Christ.