Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with Solemn Vespers

The Mother of God and the Incarnation

It is common to use evergreen boughs to decorate for 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 decidere, to fall into ruin, to die) world, signs point us toward this inexhaustible font. The contrast between the autumnal coloring of leaves and the steady greenery of needles, like the contrast between the sidereal firmament and 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.

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 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.”
—Romans 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 this night, 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 tonight’s antiphons. 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!

Understanding Christ’s Kingship

The concept of kingship, considered throughout history and in multiple cultural contexts, varies quite a bit. Contemporary Americans tend to equate kings with tyrannical figures wielding huge amounts of arbitrary governmental power, whether it be the power of taxation exercised unhappily by George III at the expense of the Colonies, or the power of complete policy control as brandished by the Sun King, Louis XIV (“I am the state,” “L’état, c’est moi,” was his memorable way of expressing it).

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Reflections on Wisdom

[The following is from the program notes from our last celebration of Solemn Vespers.]

“Because of her pureness [Wisdom] pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entry into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God [Wisdom 7: 24-26].”

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On the Nativity of Mary

The Church celebrates the birthdays of only three individuals, preferring, in most circumstances, to celebrate instead the entrance of the saints into everlasting life. The three exceptions appear in the monastery’s Deisis, the triptych of icons above the high altar. On either side of Christ Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, are the two esteemed forerunners of His gospel. On our right is John the Baptist, the greatest prophet and exemplar of the Old Testament or Torah. On the left, the Holy Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven, whose birth was the dawn of salvation. Parallel to John the Baptist, she is frequently named as the greatest disciple of her Son and the exemplar of the new life of grace.

Today’s celebration marks nine months from the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic Church has formulated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The large window in the south transept of our church shows Pope Pius IX declaring the dogma infallibly, surrounded by a variety of Church Doctors whose teachings had clarified Mary’s role in salvation history. The pope’s decision to define this dogma has occasioned some controversy and some tension—hopefully creative tension—with the churches of the East, where Our Lady’s sinlessness has been understood in differing ways.

This range of interpretations makes today’s feast all the more significant doctrinally and historically. The first celebrations of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary take place in the East, probably in Syria. This is a clear indication that the devotion of the faithful to the Mother of God included an awareness that her birth was extraordinary.

In fact, the roots of this awareness go back even further, to the remarkable second-century document known to us today as the Protoevangelium of James. Calling this book “apocryphal” is something of a slight, even if it was not ultimately accepted as Holy Scripture. In it, we find the story of Joachim and Anne, an annunciation of the birth of the Virgin (again, parallel to the annunciations by the Archangel Gabriel of the births of John the Baptist and Christ Himself), and the early consecration of the child Mary to service in the temple.

Recent scholarship has made this temple service more plausible. It seems that groups of virgins were designated to weave the curtain that separated the main body of the temple from the Holy of Holies, the same curtain that was torn at the death of Christ. In iconographic depictions of the Annunciation, the Blessed Virgin Mary is shown either reading Scripture, or, in the Eastern fashion, weaving. Whereas the curtain separated the sacred from the profane, Our Lady would, from that moment on, knit together the body of the Savior, Who weds heaven and earth, drawing all things to Himself in a supreme act of reconciliation.

As Solomon’s temple had been understood to be God’s residence on earth, the womb of the Blessed Virgin became the new tabernacle, the tent in which sojourned God the Son before the time of His birth. As the temple was to be kept pure, Mary’s body was understood to be free of the stain of Adam and Eve’s transgression. Quietly, in an obscure home in Nazareth, God prepared a dwelling for Himself and began, with the consent of the Virgin Mary, the restoration of the cosmos.

With this momentous event now widely known and celebrated, the Church hearkens back to an even quieter and more obscure commencement, the entry into the world of the one person chosen to be the Mother of God and the Mother of all the living. And here is the last distinguishing feature I would like to highlight. In ancient patriarchies, the birth of a son was widely anticipated and celebrated. Here is a new occurrence. We celebrate the birth of the great “daughter of Jerusalem,” and it is precisely Mary as woman that we honor. In the Blessed Mother of God we glimpse the full and unique dignity of women. Rightly let us sing together, “Today is the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary whose splendid life illuminates the whole Church!”

[Please come and pray Solemn Vespers with us tonight–Friday–at 7:00 p.m.]

Discontinuities in Liturgical Music

If you are in the Chicago area this Friday night, I hope that you will come by the monastery for Solemn Vespers at 7:00 p.m.  The service will last for about 45-50 minutes and will feature the exquisite motet Tu solus, qui facis mirabilia. Unlike the version in the embedded video, however, our Schola will be singing it as a part of the liturgy, and your hearing it will be as part of the publicly assembled Church at worship! Also scheduled: Magnificat by Palestrina and Gustate et videte by di Lasso. And finally, we will be debuting a piece composed just for this celebration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Auctor beate saeculi by Kevin Allen.

I spent Monday morning at the Regenstein library at the University of Chicago, in the forlorn area of the stacks where rest the a cappella liturgical compositions of the 14th century to the present. I was enjoying myself browsing, hoping to discover some long-overlooked masterpiece (I found several dusty books of obscure pieces–we’ll see whether they turn out to be masterpieces). After about an hour of browsing, I was struck by the almost complete gulf between the music of the sixteenth century and that of the seventeenth. Compare, for example, a Magnificat by Orlando di Lasso (ca. 1532-1594):

…and a setting by Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1554-1612):

So these are two composers separated by one generation. Gabrieli is thought by many to have studied under di Lasso, which is why I chose these two in particular. In di Lasso, one can hear already some incipient Baroque elements, to be sure. And he was a much more prominent composer of secular music than was his exact contemporary, the hallowed Palestrina. But Gabrieli moved in an entirely new direction (Mind you, I love Gabrieli’s music!). He was not alone. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643), a priest, was the most celebrated figure of the revolution from Renaissance to Baroque style. Significantly, he was one of the pioneers of the new secular humanist entertainment, opera. His opera L’Orfeo is the earliest opera still in the repertoire.

Back to my Monday experience: what we see in liturgical music of the seventeenth century is precisely the importation of these secular humanist elements into liturgical music, necessitating a break from tradition. For example,  the tradition of alternating chant and polyphony in the singing of the Magnificat, is almost always dropped, so that the whole text is set for the choir and orchestra. Also quickly gone is the association of the Magnificat with a particular ecclesiastical mode (or scale), drawn from the proper antiphon of the day (On Friday, we will sing Palestrina’s Mode 1 setting because the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart uses the antiphon Ignem veni mittere in terram, “I came to send fire upon the earth…” which is in the First Mode). Practically speaking, this means that in the new style the monks, canons or nuns, whose job it is to pray the liturgy, are squeezed out in favor of the professional musicians. The particular consecration of specific men and women for the performance of the liturgy is obscured. I will leave an exploration of the consequences of this obfuscation to a later post.

There are many other similar consequences. That these were not apparently felt at the time is somewhat surprising. Why? I mentioned Palestrina’s name with hushed, respectful tones above. He was the greatest composer in Rome at the time of the Council of Trent, and he took it upon himself to forward the Tridentine reforms. Among these were calls for the simplification of liturgical music. Some council fathers had been prepared to restrict liturgical music to Gregorian chant, and legend has it that Palestrina himself rescued polyphonic music for the liturgy with his composition of the sublime yet direct setting of the Mass for Pope Marcellus II:

So within two generations of the council, it seems that liturgical music was largely going its own way, quite contrary to the expectations of many at Trent.

I wrote last week about discontinuities in monastic tradition and the difficulties that these pose for the recovery of a vibrant monastic tradition. Here, I suggest, is a similar discontinuity in liturgical music, one that is probably as radical, in its way, as that which happened after Vatican II. On the other hand, it has more in common with the hidden discontinuities in the broader intellectual tradition of the West, in the sense that it was not clearly perceived as such at the time. And when it was perceived as at least a change, this change was celebrated by those in the know as a liberation from hidebound tradition and a recovery of ancient models of music, which it was not–this was pure propaganda of the sort that Renaissance thinkers excelled in.

Next time: the specific problem of discontinuity and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s brilliant remedy of the Hermeneutic of Continuity.

Lord, Teach Us to Pray

Last night, we celebrated the Great Litany before Solemn Vespers. We used a somewhat shortened version of the litany itself, but I did insist on keeping the very long Collect in place

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