liturgia horarium

The monks here sing all the hours of the Divine Office, beginning with Matins at 3.30am, and ending with Compline at 7.15pm. Not a single day of the three I’ve been here have I made it up in time for Matins, nor do I know if I ever will. As it is, I know I will miss it here so very much.

Growing up, I had never really liked the Psalms. That isn’t to say that I didn’t think they deserved to be in the Bible, or anything like that, but I didn’t feel any kind of connection with them. They weren’t particularly poetic–okay, yes, good imagery but such drab tones and colours–and I never quite forgave them for that, although realising that they’re translations into a quirky mongrel language (read: English) helps. It’s not their fault at all.

But two things have happened, and I think I can say that I like them more now. At least, I can feel the beginnings of an appreciation for them. The first is that I learned Latin, and psalms in Latin, being able to take advantage of the freedom of word arrangement, read better and more beautifully. Plus, if you use the Ecclesiastical pronunciation, basically it all sounds lovely. Just read it – caeli enarrant gloria Domini vs. See how the skies proclaim God’s glory!

The second is that I discovered Gregorian chant. One of the biggest annoyances that I had with the psalms and reading them in the Divine Office–whenever I could get to it, because I’m a lazy bum, so don’t think that this is me saying I’m all high-falutin’ and good at praying–was that it was just words upon words upon words. They weren’t terribly mellifluously arranged to begin with, and good imagery for me needs time to steep before it effects anything, and so all in all, I’d read a psalm and promptly forget most of it, with my mind itching all the while.

Granted, I have issues with attention span and impulse control, having spent just about half my life now glued to the Internet. (That’s terrifying.) But I still struggle with that whenever I get the chance to sing the Office, so I don’t think that impatience is really the itch. Rather, as I once heard someone say, chant is both weightless and heavy at the same time. It draws your mind up, but centers you at the same time. I have to listen to sing with everyone else, to begin with, which makes me pay attention, and disposes me to the active listening that prayer, basically, is. And in a church with good acoustics–I don’t know how to say this well–the voice parts of the singing recede into the distance compared to the ringing overtones, which the acoustics amplify. As a result it feels like I imagine being suspended in the river of time must feel like. Water and sound are swirling around, gentle and mystical, and everything is new and old at the same time.

 

in omnem terram exit sonus eorum

Their sound went into all the earth: and their speech continually unto the ends of the world. Ps. 18:5

There’s a little bit of a mystery as to which text exactly this is a quotation from–it doesn’t correspond to the Nova Vulgata, and I am rummaging around on the Internet to see which earlier Psalter it’s from–but in any case, at the time I didn’t know about this oddity, but just found it a striking piece of mosaic art. (And Latin!) It is from the entrance to the Madonna Della Strada Chapel on the Lakeview campus of Loyola University, where I visited this past Monday.

Directly opposite this, flanking the other side of the doorway, is a corresponding piece with a quotation from a place both surprising and not –

It asks, ‘What region in the earth is this, not full of our pains?’ It is 1.460 of the Aeneid. Aeneas himself speaks this, when they stumble upon Tyre and find it, unexpectedly, a wealthy, regal land. Of course, Christians for millennia have found Vergil the most Christian of pre-Christian writers, and this is not a surprising pairing. It is quite beautiful, though.