Singing with the Angels (Part 2)

Images from Scripture

On the basis of accumulated experience of this kind, singers begin to read the monastic Fathers with more interest and understanding. Such instructions as these from Richard of Saint Victor begin to seem less remote, more understandable: "Let one who eagerly strives for contemplation of celestial things, who sighs for knowledge of divine things, learn to assemble the dispersed Israelites - let him endeavor to restrain the wanderings of the mind." Or this by Hesychius of Jerusalem: "The ear of the silent mind will hear untold wonders," or, from Saint John of the Ladder: "Do not lose heart when your thoughts are stolen away. Just remain calm, and continually call your mind back." Singers also discover that the quiet mind absorbs everything in more vivid detail. As Origen observed, the spiritual senses are able to "examine the meaning of things with more acute perception." Likewise, one's sense of the life of the text becomes more vivid. As Origen again put it, "For of a truth, nobody can perceive and know how great is the splendor of the Word, until he receives doves' eyes - that is, a spiritual understanding."

In this sense of the life of the Word, singers also begin to encounter the orthodox view of sacred Scripture; that is, the view of the monastic Fathers. Or perhaps more accurately, the singer's experience may raise questions which only that view of sacred Scripture can answer adequately.

I remember one evening years ago in Washington DC, when this investigation into the chant had barely begun. The Schola was discussing a passage by Saint Athanasius on the personal meaning of the psalms. One singer observed that he could understand to some degree what Athanasius meant, but, he said, "When I sing the psalms in the liturgy, I frequently feel something else that isn't like that, isn't personal somehow. It's different; it's up over my head somewhere, I can't describe it."

This singer, I believe, was talking about an experience of the Word as an action, not as words on a page. Monastic tradition points to many images in sacred Scripture for such an action. One of my favorites is this from the Song of Songs: "Behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills. My beloved is like a roe, or a young hart. Behold, he stands behind our wall, looking through the window, looking through the lattice."

This passage is only one of many in which, according to the orthodox view, sacred Scripture is speaking to us about itself, about its own nature, and its own ways of acting within us. The variety of these images should give us pause, as if we are being told to be suspicious of any simple, one dimensional understanding of what the nature of this book really is. What we need most to understand, the Fathers seem to say, is a that this book is essentially a sacred, living Mystery, which acts within us in many different ways, and feeds each person exactly according to his condition and need.

The singer I mentioned a moment ago had had some experience of that Mystery, of something puzzling and different. A question had been raised: What is this? Such a question can point the way to an entirely new world and a new relationship both to sacred Scripture and to prayer, and to the Christian faith itself. It is a question which may point the way back to the contemplative tradition of the Fathers.

Saint Gregory wrote that the struggle between Jacob and the Angel is an image of the contemplative life. He pointed out that Jacob encountered this angel as he was on a journey back to the land of his parents, or, as Gregory interprets the passage for us, a secular world, music, that is, the ancient chant, offers us what may be a guide for this journey. Saint Bernard wrote that "In matters of this kind, understanding can follow only where experience leads." The singing of the chant can offer to us, as it offered to one singer in the choir on that particular occasion, at least the beginnings of inner experience of a traditional kind - a traditional way of seeing ourselves, a more "objective" way. From those beginnings, guided by the monastic writers, we may be able to regain the contemplative way.

Contemplation and Action

For this obvious reason, then, the Fathers believed that the experience of contemplative prayer was essential to the life of the monk. Perfection in the contemplative life, however, did not lie in leaving the active behind. Pure contemplation is not considered possible in this world. Perfection lay in finding the proper balance between the two, and from that balance arose a third condition which Saint Gregory describes as "blessed." This balance can never be permanent, and so one must continually search for and rediscover it. When the balance is struck, the third element appears; when the balance is disturbed, it disappears.

One can understand the chant as an exercise in the search for this balance. The musical material of the chant contains elements of speaking - activity - and elements of quiet - contemplation. If we understand the articulation of the text as the active life of the singer in this situation, careful listening and watchfulness during the silence between the phrases of the chant or between verses of a psalm become the contemplative. Singers discover that these two are related, but there is no mistaking their different directions. The contemplative direction is clearly one of gathering in toward oneself, what the monastics call "recollection." Saint Teresa described it as a turtle pulling into its shell. The active direction, the recitation of the text with enough lightness and simplicity to be responsive to its meaning, is clearly outward. Speaking the text with complete freedom demands a fine quality of energy. A tired singer has to find that energy. Sacred Scripture points us in its direction with the image of the leaping stag I mentioned earlier, and in other images of the active Word - as dew falling upon Mount Hermon, a shower upon the grass, or as rich oil poured out.

Singers discover too that each of these directions depends on the other. The feeling of recollection - a sense of life in the silence - doesn't appear until a certain freedom and simplicity of recitation are sustained, and vice versa. But here too, the contemplative element is seen to be more important. Attention to silence is the life of the chant. As Saint Gregory wrote: "The censure of silence is a kind of nourishment of the word ... we ought not to learn silence by speaking, but rather by keeping silence we must learn to speak."

What Gregory calls the blessedness of that perfect balance between action and contemplation, speech and silence, is unmistakable when it is present in the choir. But it cannot be controlled. Its appearance is a gift, but a gift for which we must prepare. It is, the Fathers would say, a movement of the Holy Spirit.

And here we are brought back to that first principle of the chant with which we began, because it is by this movement of the Spirit that the singer is able to listen with a quiet mind, find a deeper intelligence, and hear the text speak with its active, symbolic life, in its simplicity, in its "own voice." Then, for that moment the "school of speaking" has done its work, and briefly, as Gregory wrote, the ancient prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled in the singers, and the "bit of error which was in the jaws of the people is destroyed, and [we] have a song like the voice of a sanctified assembly."