We are in the full swing of Holy Week, and I had some mysterious thoughts that are now scattered and lost.
What a linchpin the music is for our faith! Not in itself carrying the doctrine or dogma as in Tradition and Scripture, nor supplying directly the graces of our God as in the Sacraments, nor supplying the application of the faith to our lives as in the Magisterium. Rather, it is the voice with which the faithful cry out to our God and bind ourselves together. It is that supreme vehicle of adoration and praise, of supplication and thanksgiving, carried out in the brimming stillness of our hearts and sung out by the Visible Body of Christ on Earth, the Church Militant and Singing! In it we find reflected the mathematical and aural beauties of God’s Creation that we have been fashioned to recognize and respond to married to the sub-creative genius that God has given us.
The Mass teaches us, through the deft application and realization of Scripture, how the Church Singing is not just of this earth, but rather that the Church Triumphant and even God’s angels and ministers in Heaven sing as well. Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, we sing. Domine deus Sabaoth! Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Hosanna in excelsis! Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis!
Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Hosts! Heaven and earth are full of Your glory. Hosanna in the highest! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!
Surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, indeed!
Speaking of a cloud of witnesses, I am not surrounded by a cloud of swimmers. Grill culture really is dead, as they say.
Speaking of lamenting, I should listen to more of the musical settings of the Lamentations. Kind of obsessed with their poetry, symbolic significance, use of Hebrew letters as interludes, and tradition within the old Triduum service of tenebrae. Alas! that I could not be at either of my parents’ music-of-Lent-and/or-Holy Week concerts! I am bereft. But also very excited for when the Grinnell Singers sing Duruflé’s Requiem and Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb in May. And even more for Memorial Day when I can sing the Duruflé Requiem with Cantores. And for seeing my family and reuniting with Grace in the coming Cantores Eastern Europe tour! I really should start working on that music.
I was looking at the most recent journalesque on Miscellany. Goodness, was I dramatic. No, I should not transfer, and yes, Grinnell is good for me and I for it, and no, the world does not end when people plan on transferring. Also, the priesthood? No reason to worry. If it happens it happens, and if it doesn’t, then nothing changes. Be still!
My good friend Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection would like to make some closing remarks:
There is no mode of life in the world more pleasing and more full of delight than continual conversation with God; only those who practice and experience it can understand it.
Eine schöne Woche. Bis später!
Ecce Lignum Crucis in quo salus mundi pependit. Venite adoremus.
Behold the wood of the Cross on which The Savior of the world was hung. Come let us adore him.
hail holy blog!!!
Do not be afraid!