Wounded by Beauty
I was wounded by beauty.
I know of no other way to express the feeling… The music was so beautiful that it wounded my soul. But this was not the wound of an aggressor, but rather the wound of a loving Surgeon who inflicts a healing pain so that the patient may come away better than before.
And just what, exactly, “hurt” me?
Byzantine vespers.
I was blessed enough to attend the 2023 Sacred Music Institute at Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati, OH, for the second year in a row. This conference focuses on authentic liturgical music, and this year featured a Byzantine priest (bi-ritual priest, actually) who led us in the Byzantine manner of sung vespers.
Squeezed into the stunning adoration chapel, about 50 musicians came to worship our Lord. And then, we began chanting the “Great Litany”.
The non-stop, cascading music; the dialogue between the priest chanting each invocation (†1) and the congregation responding “Lord, have mercy” in harmony, over and over, and over again; the energy…that is paradoxically imbued with a certain celestial stasis…
It was profoundly overwhelming.
And so, I cried. Rarely in my life have I ever so earnestly prayed “Lord, have mercy!” as in that moment. But the curious thing was: it hurt, in a way. It was so beautiful, so peaceful, and so holy that I experienced a pain in my soul. It was the pain of longing and wonder. It was a desire to never leave whatever Spirit inhabited that beautiful prayer… and wishing that liturgical music could always be so hauntingly beautiful, and unmistakably sacred. It was, in a word: a brief glimpse into the beauty of celestial worship.
• • •
This experience has proven a profoundly enlightening one for me, and has shifted my goalpost for what I understand sacred music to be (or perhaps more accurately: how sacred music should lift the instinctual aspirations of the soul). Not every musical experience in church should be an emotional one—indeed, it is fairly safe to say that the vast majority probably should not be, to safeguard worshippers from chasing infantile, emotional highs which are often a sign of an un[der]-developed spiritual life—but music should move the soul in some way toward that place where the veil between earth and heaven thins. It should elevate the prayer to the point that one imagines oneself outside the pearly gates yearning to enter into the garden.
• • •
It is my hope that latin-rite music ministers will have the opportunity to experience Byzantine liturgies in some capacity (I suspect it will be as good for you as it was for me) and that we all begin to think more carefully about how we can inculcate that “spirit of the liturgy” with our music, where the music of heaven is rendered present to us here on earth.
†1 • In fact, not a word of it was spoken… the entire vespers was sung. Watch this video for a better idea of what this is like.
