Saturday, March 31, 2018

"Let this holy building shake with joy..."

The Easter Vigil Mass, SS Peter and Paul, Mitcham, 2008
The Easter Vigil Mass in my South London parish, 2008
Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven,
Exult, let Angel ministers of God exult,
Let the trumpet of salvation
Sound aloud our mighty King's triumph!

Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,
Ablaze with light from her eternal King,
Let all corners of the earth be glad,
Knowing an end to gloom and darkness.

Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,
Arrayed with the lightning of his glory,
Let this holy building shake with joy,
Filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.

This is the opening (in English translation) of the Exsultet, the Church's beautiful hymn for the Easter Vigil.  Beautiful it is in its images, its language and its theological underpinnings — which somehow make themselves felt even to those like me who do not understand every gesture or reference — and a poetic treat indeed after bitter Lent. 

It has occurred to me how full Holy Week is of paradoxes.  There is Palm Sunday and the divine, asisine entrance into Jerusalem.  There is the first Eucharist on Maundy Thursday followed by the year's only Massless day, Good Friday.  Easter is itself, of course, the universe's greatest paradox (life everlasting springing from where God had known death), but it encompasses other, smaller twin-truths.  At the Easter Vigil there is the candle-light which blazes all the more brightly for the darkness it has to dispel.  Thus, turning to the candle, we sing:

But now we know the praises of this pillar,
Which glowing fire ignites for God's honour,
A fire into many flames divided,
Yet never dimmed by sharing of its light,
For it is fed by melting wax,
Drawn out by mother bees
To build a torch so precious.

It seems astonishing at first, the difference in scope between, on one hand, the praise of these bees in their tiny particularity (a passage brought back a few years ago by the new translation of the Missal) and, on the other, the praise of the massive and cosmic truth that is the burden of this prayer.   There, as the poet compasses the eternal, is the microscopic and prosaic in the same breath: another paradox for the list.  And we have already praised the 'happy fault', the 'necessary sin of Adam', 'that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer' (a mystery also mentioned in the fourteenth-century English carol 'Adam lay ybounden').

How, then, should these fine words sound when sung?  Here is a bracing Polish rendition of the Exsultet by Fr. Mateusz Łuksza, a Dominican priest of Jarosław:



Wishing a Happy Easter to one and all!

Friday, March 30, 2018

Good Friday

Now to the calendar's zero, Good Friday.  The liturgical year grinds to a halt.  The church is stark; the altar is bare; the tabernacle is a shocking void.  

It is three o'clock.  Such intense emptiness: no distractions; no comfort; no Mass even.  Only the fact of the Cross.


Psalm 22, sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Up on the Downs

Westwards along the South Downs Way, between Southease and Firle Beacon.
It was not quite the mid-March walk I had had in mind, into a penitential head-wind and in temperatures below freezing, up on an unsheltered ridge of the South Downs...  I did not reach Firle Beacon as I had hoped to.  But I don't regret the excursion.  The Downs were bare and brazenly prehistoric, different from the wooded North Downs I know: impassively stranger than bohemian Brighton or respectable Eastbourne or even than Lewes, grey in the distance with all its tales and secrets.  There is so much of so little of England.

It has been a hard Lent this year, as if there is definitely to be no hint of Spring before Easter.  Let us hope it will turn out to have done us good!

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Ruth Gipps — Seattle — Saturday

Don't forget!  This coming Holy Saturday, 31st March, the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra will give the United States première performance of Ruth Gipps' Symphony No. 2, amongst other works.  This might seem a long delay for a work written in 1945, but given that Gipps' fifth symphony has still not received a single broadcast in her home country, or that no commercial recordings exist of any but the second, and that hardly any of her other music is known or performed, this is actually a very good sign that her work is receiving new attention, and deserves an international stage.  The conductor, Adam Stern, speaks of a 'joyous journey of discovery' in preparing the work, and says that this is 'one of the most important premières the Philharmonic has ever done'.

I don't know from this distance whether this performance will be broadcast, or if a recording will be available afterwards, but in a way it is exciting enough simply to know that the performance will take place.  I will be very interested to hear how it goes. Hopefully this will spur our own musical life in Britain into action!

Conductor Adam Stern explains the work:


Thursday, March 01, 2018

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

4th March, 2016: Aberystwyth and Cardigan Bay in several moods at once, as usual!
Happy Saint David's Day to all Welsh readers and lovers of Wales!