O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger.
O blessed virgin, whose womb
was worthy to bear
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!
This evening began our last thematic celebration of the Divine Infancy, this liturgical year: February 2, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, Candlemas. St. Alphonsus Liguori names the Nativity of Jesus the “ Dies ignis, the day of fire… on which a God comes as a little child to cast the fire of love into the hearts of men.” This current feast, this culmination of the event of Christ’s Nativity, is a feast of encounter – indeed, it is known to the East as the “Feast of the Meeting,” Hypapante tou Kyriou; it is a feast of manifestation, on so many levels, “that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed”; it is a feast of light, the light of revelation to all peoples. Ultimately, behind the narrative, is the divine initiative of encounter, the revelation of his own heart as self-sacrificing charity, illumination through the darkness, the warm and gentle glow of the consuming fire of his ardor.
The Presentation is the first entrance of the Savior into formal organized religion; the circumcision, eight days after his birth, took place elsewhere, though art has often conflated the events. He arrives, helpless and carried, drawing back the curtain on divinity, to the site where the curtain will be rent, his body again entrusted to others, his heart utterly revealed in flowings-forth of blood and water. It was precisely at the Temple that a sword was prophesied, and an eminent scholar holds that the Temple was the last image our Lord saw from the Cross, before he closed his eyes in death; that even true religion could be twisted to the prime locus of rejection and injustice was not unknown to God…
Tomorrow afternoon, I will have the honor of leading a theology group founded by Dr. Roger Duncan. Originally a Communio study circle, the group turned under Roger’s direction toward a treatment of Balthasar’s Theo-Drama, all five volumes successively and then back to the first, shortly before his death. This is now the second time I will be leading this meeting.
A month ago, on the weekend of Epiphany, Paul and I went from glory to glory. I had spent much of the preceding week preparing to lead Roger’s group for the first time (a huge and overwhelming honor, of which I was acutely conscious), while also studying a challenging and highly commended choral piece for morning Mass on Epiphany. There was a tremendous cross-influence: the intellectual preparation for the meeting colored how we heard the music, and the music very much remained with us, as a lingering presence during the meeting and beyond.
That Epiphany morning, we sang the Lauridsen setting of O Magnum Mysterium, which we had never heard before that week. We had sung the Victoria, of course, most notably in a small schola assembled by Roger, for which he himself sang bass. It is amazing how much a musical setting can influence your hearing of a text. The Victoria had always been for me definitive, as it has been for most since the 16th century – which only made the Lauridsen all the more of a revelation.
If one is accustomed to the Victoria, the first great surprise is what Lauridsen makes of the word “mystery.” In the Victoria, the soprano declares straightforwardly: “O great mystery.” “Magnum” dips down by a fifth and then returns, hinting at something cavernous and unfathomable indicated by that greatness, but “mystery” itself is undramatic. Victoria immediately repeats the text, at which point “mystery” becomes ornate, but only after he has established “sacrament” as the pivotal word. For the Lauridsen, we are immediately and unmistakably being drawn into “mystery,” which becomes the defining concept for the whole piece. This approach hearkens back to a patristic mindset, whereby mysterion and sacrament are fully equivalent. So, rather than hearing: “O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament,” we hear “O great mysterion” and then, set higher for emphasis, “O great mysterion (the Latin mysterium, but drawn closer in meaning to the Greek mysterion) and wonderful sacrament,” with no comma, as it were. For Lauridsen, moreover, even the “O” is invested from the first; in both iterations of the key phrase, one of the parts (first the alto, and then the tenor) has movement, and there is even a light suggestion of dissonance; we know we are in the province of an ineffable gravitas. Lauridsen wrote of this piece that he wanted it “to resonate immediately and deeply into the core of the listener.”
The words of the motet are themselves something of a mystery, according to the more conventional sense of the word. While they are drawn from Christmas Matins, they have no known prior precedent in Church writings – which makes only the more unanswerable an obvious question which we perhaps take for granted: what exactly is the referent for “sacrament”? Is it fully Christological, here predicated exclusively of the Infant? Is it the event of his revelation before all creatures? Does its meaning redound secondarily to the pristine worthiness of the Virgin, central to the scene?—the mother of Christ as depicted at the Nativity, by Mosaic prescription herself ritually impure – who was to remain, after an initial seven days of such impurity, three and thirty days “in the blood of her purification”? Note the irony of the divine plan! She who was forbidden even to touch anything sacred, nursed the Christ child. As Pope St. John Paul taught, “The term ‘purification’ can surprise us, because it is referred to a Mother who had been granted, by a singular grace, to be immaculate from the first moment of her existence, and to a Child who was totally holy.”
But here, we are in the realm of mystery. In the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “The mysterion draws its boundaries in a way that is directly opposite to the way that men draw boundaries. It sweeps aside all these ‘mysteries’ because it delivers what they promise but do not have: entry into the innermost thinking of God…” What the Cardinal is indicating is that, where carnal wisdom would jealously guard its elitist gnosis through restrictions and exclusions, God as pure light throws open the floodgates; all are invited to be drawn into him, via his pierced heart – all the while bearing in mind that, prior to its narrow ecclesial designations and broader applications of relatively recent vintage, “[t]he sacrament [mysterium] of God is nothing and no one but Christ,” as laid out by St. Augustine in his letters.
The Queen of Heaven was to mark out this path of humility first: she accepted formal ritual exclusion from the inherent sacramentality of the worship of the old dispensation. Why did she do so?—that she might, having accessed the innermost thinking of God, present that God as the light of the Gentiles, as the Sacrament – the mysterion – of God par excellence. Again St. John Paul II: “Luke speaks of the ‘time for their purification’ (2:22), intending perhaps to indicate together the prescriptions involving both the mother and the firstborn Son.” The mother was willing to submit to the exterior forms of exclusion, that all enter before her. If Paul could wish this on behalf of the people of Israel – for I could wish that I myself were accursed and separated from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kin according to the flesh – how much more could Mary, on behalf of all of us. And yet Mary is not separated from Christ, but rather something more extraordinary: Christ implicates himself even in Mary’s ritual impurity. Luke’s plural possessive pronoun is otherwise inscrutable; mother and son share alike in undeserved but freely chosen abandonment.
And so it is in the Temple, the singular place of religion and blood sacrifice, that Mary’s heart is pierced by the first of seven dolors – seven indicating perfection and completeness. In the form approved by Pope Pius VII in the early 19th century, the Church has prayed:
I grieve for you, O Mary, most sorrowful, in the affliction of your tender heart at the prophecy of the holy and aged Simeon. Dear Mother, by your heart so afflicted, obtain for me the virtue of humility and the gift of the holy fear of God.
It is worth considering that, in the beginning as in the end, religion is the foreordained conveyance of the inner grief borne unto liberation and healing. By the prophetic grace of office, Simeon and Caiaphas testified to the truth, though Simeon did so knowingly and in righteousness, while Caiaphas, speaking out of craven political expediency, witnessed unwittingly. Both alike prophesied the death that was to come and the victory that was to follow.
From the crèche tableaux, so often reduced to snowglobe sentimentality, Lauridsen somehow intuited the comingling of pain and glory. He understood the inseparability of the single mission: incarnation, passion and death. Lauridsen, by his own testimony, “lost sleep” regarding how he was to express this: “How can I, in a very direct piece, very direct setting of a piece, indicate her sorrow – her profound sorrow of seeing her son murdered?” Mid-motet, the penultimate note of the “Virgo” melisma in the alto line intones a G# against the A natural of the soprano. This stunning minor second, coming from an inner voice, irrupting from the firmament of a creation groaning in expectation and need, speaks to the complexity of Mary – the suffering genius-mystic-innocent carrying within her virgin heart a luminous enmeshed amalgam of joy, grief, glory of unfathomable inner depth.
In order to move forward from here, we must consider in detail the reality denoted by mysterion/sacrament. Only then can we begin to examine the implications of that reality, which are powerfully framed by the Communio article we have been discussing in Roger’s group. I will be adding more in the days to come.
Image: Wikimedia: Blessed John of Fiesole (Fra Angelico), Presentation of the Lord, San Marco Florence. Photographer: John Pope-Hennessy, 1981. Public Domain.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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