Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with beauty

The Holy Triduum

We have arrived again at the holiest time of the Church’s Year, the annual celebration of the Paschal Mystery, our Lord’s Passover. It’s hard for me to believe that this will be my 27th Triduum at the monastery. The liturgy for this holy time can be bewildering when we first encounter it, but also exhilarating–and for the same reason. Everything is new, slightly disorienting. Time is suspended. Melodies and rituals suddenly appear that remind us of our first childhood memories of Easter.

Over time—and this is especially true for monks who must study the liturgy and practice it regularly—the ceremonies become more familiar, even if they remain special to this time of year. For some of us, there is a temptation to a bit of boredom—the old feelings no longer emerge with the same intensity. Every Triduum features a liturgical blunder or two–sometimes the same one many years running, and this can tempt us to cynicism. But these temptations should be dealt with in the same way that we deal with every temptation: with resistance. When we begin to understand the liturgy, not as a prompt for good and edifying feelings, appropriate as these might be, but as central to our permanent identity as children of God, we can transition into a deep sense of belonging to Jesus Christ and His Church. This identification and belonging will remain with us and inform the rest of our lives as Catholics throughout the year.

Once again, this applies especially to monks and nuns, who have espoused themselves to Christ. The transition of which I am speaking is analogous to one that we see in certain married couples. They begin their lives together with excitement, expectation, even a kind of infatuation with each other, and the joy of having been loved and accepted. There are new experiences of owning a home, of pregnancy, childbirth, school, in-laws, new family rituals at Christmas, and so on and so forth. This gives way eventually to routines, and as the new and exciting becomes the familiar and dull, there is a risk of each spouse focusing on the small annoyances of any relationship with inherently limited and even flawed persons. There are heartaches with children who suffer health problems, disappointments with careers and there are compromises. The temptation is to boredom and even a sense of resentment. But if this temptation is resisted, what emerges is the beauty of belonging to one’s spouse, of totally identifying with that person with whom I have made a lasting covenant, and struggled to live those vows in fidelity. These are the couples who can sit together for long periods of silence, simply content to be with their “better half,” appreciating the presence of the long-beloved.

The Holy Triduum is like the Church’s wedding anniversary, the annual reminder that we have been espoused by the great Bridegroom Who laid down His life for us, Who poured out His Blood to cleanse us and make the Church a worthy Bride for Himself, spotless and beautiful. When this reality is newly embraced, it can move us to great torrents of emotion. It can so move us even after many years. But it can also carry us away to a different kind of experience, that of profound and peaceful contemplation, the silent adoration of the Holy Trinity, to Whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.

The Mystery of Christmas

I have received many positive comments about the article that led our newsletter for Advent, so I would like to share it with a slightly different readership. I will preface this with a few more thoughts of Christmas, and why this celebration led me to my vocation. What gives coherence to the meaning of Christmas for me is the deep mystery of life itself. How is it that we–each of us a self, an “I”–observing the world and “All things counter, original, spare, strange; [Hopkins]” see things similarly, see things differently, see and understand anything at all? How often do we stop and wonder at it all? Something about Christmas always stopped me in my tracks and forced these questions upon me. The answer to this mystery is not the solution to a puzzle, but the sheer gift of love, of shared life and wonder. At the center of all that it, is a God Who wishes to be included in all things with us, our joys, sufferings, our boredom, weariness, excitement, community, loneliness, the whole labyrinth of life that each of us experiences. And in sharing the beauty of all that He created, He does so in most unprepossessing way possible, as a poor child of poor parents in a poor village, but rich in wonder and observation (read any of Christ’s parables and see how He never outgrew the child’s power of noticing things). We need not cross the sea to discover mystery–it is right in front of us and opens the way to participation in the Source of life.

Merry Christmas!

[The article from our newsletter, entitled “Christmas and Everyday Life”]

One of the brothers recently asked me if there was a particular Christmas song that evoked strong memories for me. I couldn’t really answer the question because there are many such carols, in addition to the sublime arias and choruses of Handel’s Messiah and the magical dances of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. I eventually settled on one carol, not because it is my favorite, but because it somehow summarizes the importance of Christmas to me: O Little Town of Bethlehem.

With a bit of imagination, the music of this lovely carol takes me back to decorating the house in preparation for the holidays. I always wanted to help set out the traditional nativity scene as well as the Christmas “village,” a tradition picked up from my father’s Polish family. We had pieced together this village over several years, and it included tiny houses, into the backs of which were inserted bulbs from strings of lights that would shine through the colored film windows. Miniature cars drove down snowy streets and sat in the parking lot next to the village church (which had a detachable steeple that occasionally was knocked over by our Labrador retriever). A mirror served as a skating rink, and a model train traversed the circumference of the town.

And of course, the were the tiny people there to celebrate winter by skating and skiing. In setting them up, we had to thread a tiny “rope” attached to a sled through the mittened hand of a bundled-up and straining adult. And then there were two blanketed children to be perched upon the sled. A thumb-sized collie ran alongside the family.

Perched behind all of this activity was, incongruously, the thatched barn giving shelter to the Christ child in the manger, adored by Mary and Joseph, and a motley band of shepherds. A variety of beasts kept the watch. To my eye, there was nothing quite as beautiful as these figurines, especially the shiny apparel of the Wise Men, the haughty camels, and the one poor shepherd, kneeling and offering a few coins resting in a cap in his hand.

Not only were these scenes separated by two millennia; they were not to scale. And yet, somehow, the ensemble spoke perfectly to me of the mystery of Christmas. The Son of God came, not only for the salvation of persons of the first century, but for every human being, for every human community. Not everyone in the Christmas village was in the church at that moment, but the church was there, its steeple pointing the way to heaven, or, in our humble tableau, to the angels singing above the newborn King.

Bethlehem was much like any other village, with its public spaces, rows of homes, families, children, pets, and other animals. When God sent His Son to redeem us, He came, not with spectacular show of “shock and awe,” but quietly, into a small home, beneath the same stars that we see today in the midnight sky. God thereby demonstrated that to be His child, it is enough to be human like anyone else.

The celebration of Christmas eventually had a profound effect on my own vocation. The beauty of God as a child, as an adolescent and young man, making friends, attending family weddings (I attended many weddings, as best man and as a musician)—the whole lot of everyday human life—made Christ especially present to me and made me want to respond by offering my life to Him as best I could, with the hope that perhaps others could experience what I had intuited: that into the darkness and obscurity of our quotidian existence, has shone the everlasting light. Now all the humble details of human life, the joy and tears, the sweat and rest, sowing and harvest, are illuminated from within by God’s Word. And that Word is Love.

 

What to do…

Amid much uncertainty in the world at the moment, we have gone about our monastic business quietly, praying for the nation, our city, the world. We’ve tried to keep our corner of the Bridgeport neighborhood, quiet, safe, and where possible, beautiful. Our garden has been quite fruitful, providing raspberries, blackberries, chard, beans, peppers, tomatoes. The deep green of trees gently waves outside my office window and elsewhere. The cats, domestic and stray, lounge about and are eager to eat when the food is brought out.

When we arrived thirty years ago, our properties featured a lot more concrete and less greenery. This meant, perhaps, less work cutting grass, weeding, and trimming trees. But the quiet reminder of God’s plentifulness that we see in the slow and sure maturation of the plants, fed by the rhythm of life-giving rain and sun, is worth a little extra work. So much anxiety comes of forgetting that reality does not depend on us. All that we receive in this world from God is a sign of His love and a pledge of the greater and permanent gifts He has promised. Are we watching for the clues He is leaving us each day?

I should add that I am in no way an isolationist or a fideist, advocating a willful ignorance of the challenges that we face at the moment, seemingly on all fronts.  But in any action we might take to encourage one another, to right wrongs and seek justice, for this to be more than desperate bluster, we should want it to spring from an authentic encounter with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. First of all, this will this mean that we are not reactively engaging out of pressurized fear and anxiety, but out of a sense of calling or vocation. This will help us avoid be manipulated by circumstances. We will tend to address problems that we know that we can solve, or at least ones to which we can offer competent pieces of a solution. But more importantly, we will be reminded of what the goal is. Like Sam Gamgee calling up sweet pictures of the Shire and Rosie Cotton amid the industrialized evil of Mordor, we will be fortified against bitterness and blind anger when our actions have the purpose of cooperating with, and restoring truth, goodness, and beauty.

More to come.

Life in the Spirit

“For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him?” [1 Corinthians 2: 11]

When Beethoven was a young man, one of his principal patrons, Count Waldstein, predicted that he would inherit the spirit of Mozart. Music historians will often make statements to the effect that the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe was dominated by the spirit of Beethoven himself, and that the second half was strongly informed by the spirit of Wagner. The negative expression of this latter reality belongs to the iconoclastic composer Claude Debussy, who said that his task was the exorcism of the “ghost of old Klingsor, alias Richard Wagner.”

Beethoven’s spirit is often connected to the rise in democratic movements following the French Revolution. He famously erased Napoleon’s name from the manuscript of the Eroica symphony when he heard that Napoleon had  crowned himself as emperor.

To what does all of this refer? Two aspects come to light. The music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner was experienced by many of their near-contemporaries (and many of us today) as touching on something profoundly true and beautiful. The crystalline perfection of Mozart’s symphonies and the heroic pulses of Beethoven’s symphonies inspired (in-spirited!) many young composers to take up the quill and try their own hand at composing. Musical composition is always a process of interior listening, testing to see how musical ideas imply other musical ideas, and how these in turn touch ineffably on the meaning of the human and divine. When one is immersed in the music of a Mozart, one learns from him how to listen and how to discern the true from the false, the profound from the trivial.

The first practical effect of this discernment is that early Beethoven sounds very much like Mozart’s music. Wagner’s earliest compositions sound eerily similar to Beethoven’s middle and late periods. Notice that Wagner’s music would almost never be mistaken for Mozart’s though. Something has changed with the appearance of Beethoven. This fact points us to the second important idea of the “spirit” of a man. However much Beethoven inherited Mozart’s spirit, as this spirit entered into another  unique individual, Beethoven’s own creativity was quickened into life, an unrepeatable life. Thus emerged Beethoven’s own spirit that he bequeathed to the varying compositions of Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, and Wagner.

“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” [Romans 5: 5]

Wagner’s spirit led him to reconnect with a heroic past in mythology, a similar intuition to that of J.R.R. Tolkien in a later generation.

All the baptized partake of an analogous reality. But instead of inheriting the spirit of a fellow creature, we have received the Spirit of Christ, the Son of God. This is a true inheritance: “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.” Being led by the Spirit does not mean in any way that we become marionettes, any more than Wagner robotically reproduced Beethoven’s music. The Spirit quickens what is latent in us, and we develop into ourselves. This is why Scripture speaks of the Spirit as both our inheritance, and a pledge of a future inheritance into which we have yet to enter. “[You] were sealed with the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it.” [Ephesians 1: 13-14] Led by the Spirit, we are already God’s children and yet something still greater awaits: “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be.” [1 John 3: 2]

Who among us is as free as the saint of God?

Just as a composer infused with the spirit of Beethoven learns from studying the master’s work, we will grow in the Holy Spirit to the extent that we accompany Jesus Christ in our daily lives, make Him our model and learn from Him how to discern the true from the false. We do this by participation in His mysteries in the liturgy, by meditating on Holy Scripture, and by recognizing Christ’s presence in His Body the Church. Many of us resist this with a false understanding of what it means to take responsibility for our own lives. Critics of religion will claim that the Church’s morality deadens our individuality, infantilizes us by scripting our own lives for us. But as my examples of composers demonstrate, the spirit of Mozart did the opposite for Beethoven. It freed Beethoven to develop into the great light for so many who came after him. If this is so with the spirit of a man, how much more will the Spirit of the Creator God free us to mature into true individuals, as articulated members of Christ’s Body? As C.S. Lewis well expressed the freedom of those led by the Spirit, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.”

Come Holy Spirit!

Prior Peter Funk
Pentecost, A.D. 2021

New Year, New Life: All Hail the Mother of God!

Evergreen boughs abound during the Christmas season. Like the image of the Burning Bush, the evergreen points us toward a mysterious source of life, a current just beneath the surface of our world, bursting through like a hidden spring at certain moments. Amid the entropy of our deciduous (Latin cadere, to fall) world, this inexhaustible font is thus perceptible. The contrast between the autumnal coloring of leaves and the steady greenery of needles, like the contrast between the fixed firmament of constellations and haphazardness of plummeting meteors, speaks to us of a contrast between a permanent world, as yet only hinted-at, and the restless burgeoning and decay of the palpable.

(O wonderful exchange! The creator of the human race, taking a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin; and becoming man without man’s seed, enriched us with his divinity.)

The signs of permanence and stability, the evergreens, the stars, the Burning Bush, appear very much within our world of flux. This is itself significant, for it suggests that our salvation is not so much a separation from the material world as it is a rejuvenation of the very cosmos itself. So says Saint Paul:

“Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.”

—Roman 8: 20-21

It is because of this link between our salvation and the liberation of creation that the prophecies of the Old Testament have retained their value. Even after the Fall, creation has borne traces of its lost transparency as well as its destined rebirth. This is to say that creation itself has continued to point toward God its boundless Source. “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things have been made [Romans 1: 20].”

Danger enters from the darkening of our intelligence that followed on the loss of trust in God. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil lost its sign value as a marker of God’s love and guardianship of Adam and Eve and became (falsely, by the trickery of the serpent) a counter-sign of a supposed arbitrary tyranny. Once faith has been broken by this kind of mistrust, creation ceases to speak lucidly. We ourselves are tempted to be entrapped by the disintegrative forces unleashed by sin, to try and hold on to creatures whose decay is meant to warn us to return to the source of life.

According the Wisdom of Solomon, our predicament can be thus summarized:

“From the greatness and beauty of created thing comes a corresponding perception of their Creator….as [the pagans] live among his works…they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful….But [they are] miserable, with their hopes set on dead things.”
—Wisdom 13: 6-7; 10

Even the chosen people of Israel needed constant reminding of the invisible and immaterial God Who communicates through the visible and material. It is significant (another “sign-being-made”) that in Hebrew, the same word, dabar, means “word” and “thing”—a commingling of the spiritual and the perceptible. The prophets communicated not only by speaking, but by proto-sacramental actions and objects. All of these point to the mystery that we celebrate at the beginning of each calendar year. We see the sudden illumination, not of a lowly shrub on the side of Mount Horeb, but of the human race and all creation by the Motherhood of the Virgin Mary.

We can describe in minute detail how conception takes place, in terms of the mingling of genetic material and the implantation of an embryo in the tissue of its mother’s womb. But can we perceive how a human life, consciousness, the whole mystery of personhood is set in motion by these intricate biological events? Once more we are brought to the boundary between contingent materiality, and the mysterious Source of life itself. This Source has been at work since the beginning of time. Moses and the prophets, culminating in John the Baptist, pointed to its manifestations, celebrated in the antiphons chanted at the Divine Office (I’ve linked to polyphonic versions of these texts, with translation where they aren’t provided with the video on YouTube).

We the baptized have the joy of partaking in it:

“For in the mystery of the Word made flesh
a new light of your glory has shone upon the eyes of our mind,
so that, as we recognize in [Christ] God made visible,
we may be caught up through him in love of things invisible.”
—Preface I of the Nativity

May your New Year be filled with the illumination of the Son of God and His immaculate Mother! May we learn anew how to live sacramentally, pointing others to God’s manifestations in our world today.

Merry Christmastide!

—Fr. Peter Funk, OSB

 

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.

Does Chant Style Matter? Part 1

Pray Tell Blog recently posted my review of Benedicta, a CD collection of Marian chants sung by the monks of Norcia. It’s really two reviews in one. One part of me admires the lovely singing, the warmth of tone, and the ringing intonation of the brothers’ voices. On this level, the recording stands up with the better chant recordings I’ve heard. The other part of me is uneasy, however, about some choices the monks made. Among these choices was their use of the “Solesmes method” of interpretation (which, as I understand, is no longer used even at Solesmes Abbey itself), which I identified as part and parcel of the larger problem of presenting the chants without context. The lone comment on the blog suggests that it shouldn’t matter whether the Solesmes method or some other approach is used. What matters is that the music is beautiful.

Even before reading the comment, I was puzzling over what I take to be the importance of getting past the Solesmes method. Is my position truly defensible? Or is it a personal preference? I believe that my position is rational, and therefore to be preferred to a ‘pre-rational’ assessment.

But defending my position will take some work. Let me give an example of the uphill battle we’re talking about here.

I was at a reception after Vespers recently, speaking with two members of our own Schola Laudis. I mentioned to them that one of the things driving my interest in chant and Renaissance music at the liturgy is that I was seeking a rational way to go forward with the composition of church music. I meant by this that we should have reasons for choosing one type of music over another. When it comes to church music, it seems that we are usually content with saying that we want music that is beautiful. Fair enough. Would it be too pedantic of me to ask why we consider some music to be beautiful and other music to be maudlin, ugly, or overly sentimental? Some people consider “Send in the Clowns” to be a beautiful song (me…not so much, though I get its appeal). I personally find the Prelude to Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde to be quite beautiful, in its way. These are not, and should not (I think) be models for church music. Many people, on the other hand, find Gregorian chant dull, elitist, hard to understand, difficult to sing with any connection to one’s emotions, etc. Yet church documents make very clear that this style is the basis of our sacred music tradition.

Much of what we take to be beautiful depends on our cultural upbringing and, one hesitates to point it out, on our level of achievement in virtues like moderation, chastity, and humility. Lacking such virtues might lead us to prefer ecstatic music to sober music, manipulative music to ordered music, or simply music that we liked as children to music that adults tell us we’re supposed to like when our tastes develop a bit more.

Therefore, simply saying that music ought to be beautiful is not specific enough. Church music needs to be beautiful to certain types of persons. And those of us who are not yet those sorts of persons need to be able to make an act of faith that the beauty of such music will become more apparent as we grow in virtue and knowledge. Furthermore, I think that it is reasonable, based on experience, to hope that exposure to “virtuous” music will actually assist us in growing in virtue (this argument goes back at least to Plato, though it is much contested). We have more likely been exposed to the opposite phenomenon, someone descending into vice accompanied by depressing, libidinous, or cruel music.

What remains, then, is for me to explain why the approach taken by the Norcia monks is delightful on one level, but, in my opinion, does not quite approximate the beautiful in the fullest sense. Furthermore, I should be able to show that their recording falls somewhat (not entirely, mind you) short of what it could have been because of specific choices that they made: the use of the Solesmes method, and the somewhat random manner in which the chants were selected (random with regard to liturgical rationales). These proofs will have to wait for a later post.

Bonus tracks: Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde…music that is not quite chaste, deliberately eliding tonal boundaries in a manner uncomfortably parallel to the elision of marital boundaries in Wagner’s personal life at the time of its composition. He was falling in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, and perhaps carrying on an affair with her. Wagner’s indiscretions resulted in his separation from his wife Minna.

Here’s my example of ‘ecstatic’ music, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, a piece not without its own kind of beauty and order, yet clearly not in any way a model for church music.

And surely you didn’t think I’d leave you without “Send in the Clowns…”

 

 

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