Silence, Music, and Deep Prayer 7

This evening, we surveyed a bit of the monastic contribution to contemplative prayer and the prayerful music of our friend Brother Stefan Waligur.

I was assisted with some of the singing by soprano Blair Boak, a recent graduate of Southeastern. She started our musical time with a beautiful rendering of Stefan's "Consider the Lilies," which is a setting of Jesus' admonition to trust in God's provision as conveyed in Matthew 6. The song is also a moving expression of the trust to which a monk, and particularly an itinerant one, is called.

Listen here to another friend, Sarah Jessop, sing "Consider the Lilies" with the composer at the piano. (Some participants in our class, as well as readers of this blog, might be interesting in purchasing recordings of Stefan's music. Those can be ordered here.)

A favorite picture with Stefan

Stefan Waligur

Kathy and I met Stefan a little over ten years ago at Andrew's House, the house of hospitality for Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.. Stefan was the only other person staying there on that occasion and he bravely and compassionately came to check on us one morning because we had been violently coughing all night. He shared a CD of his music and we found that listening to his music almost instantaneously drew us into a sense of God’s presence. I was inspired by the vision behind his CD, and my experience of it helped to end a creative block regarding composition that had frustrated me for a long time. Since then, we have been involved with Stefan in planning various concerts, retreats, and school visits.

 

Stefan is from Buffalo, NY where music had a tremendously positive role in his youth. He went on to study music and theology in various settings, worked as a minister and then as a chaplain at American University. He has taught at Memphis Theological Seminary and has pursued extensive studies in Celtic traditions. He’s now an oblate of a Benedictine community and lives out his monasticism through poverty, celibacy, and activism expressed by peacemaking and proclaiming God’s love.

It seems to me that Stefan's work en-musics the late Gordon Cosby's call to "be with the poor." While Stefan was trained in the traditions of Classical concert music, his great contribution is in the area of worshipful music that is accessible to participation by all. Indeed, it focuses us on being together, not just with professional singers and instrumentalists who read notes quite well, but also with those neighbors who don't have the skills to read words in their native tongue. It is music for those with comfortable homes in which to sing but also for those who sing day and night in the cold on the street. It creates a space for the Spirit to extend hospitality to everyone whether they be believers, seekers, or non-believer's, and whether we see them as friends or enemies.

 

Here is an excerpt from Stefan's website describing his distinctive musical style:

"After a life-changing visit to the Taize Community in France (he) began to write music in a similar style . . . but incorporating American rhythms and harmonies, Celtic tunes, and the call and response style of Indian ragas." 

Our worship this evening

This evening, we worship following the organization of the Mass Ordinary so as to reveal more layers of meaning in our experience of Stefan's music. Most of the songs we sing come from his collection, Songs of Peace, which includes music composed for a weekly meeting of homeless men.

In recent weeks, our own Father Reid has been stressing that Christianity is intensely counter-cultural. He has reminded us that, “There are lots of reasons to hate people, but no biblical ones,”and that being driven by wealth and possessions is clearly not what Jesus what calls us to.

These words are easy to understand, and we might prefer to file them away in some safe corner of our minds. But they need to move from the head to the heart so they can shape the way we live. The mood and repetition of Stefan’s music are intended to slow us down in such a way that the words can make that vital journey.

In the foreword to Songs of Peace, Stefan writes:

"Essentially these are songs to be prayed; in other words, sung prayer: an ever essential human expression, both ancient and ever new. Their chant-like repetition invites us into a prayer of the heart which transcends words, and brings us to that place of encounter. This is a place of humanity fulfilled, a way of being, an openness, a universal love. It is that original childlike trust and delight in God; in the midst of all things, the peace of God."

Kyrie

"Lord Have Mercy" 

page 36 in Songs of Peace

It occurs to me that we need to pray for mercy for many things, not just for our sins as individuals.

We need mercy to face the complexities of our lives –

mercy for dealing with thoughts and feelings that we're not sure we can share without being judged

mercy for processing things we’ve seen or heard that we might not be able to talk about with anyone

mercy for coping with things that have been done to us

And we need to pray for mercy for the whole world, for issues of suffering and unrest on a global scale.

Many of Stefan's prayerful pieces end on inconclusive, open-ended cadences. This is is so that, even when the singing stops, the prayer might continue within us. 

Gloria/Credo

"When I Listen to You" 

page 46

You can listen to a sample from Stefan's own recording here.

Appropriate to both the Gloria and the Credo, the message of "When I Listen to You" is one of God's glory and peace on earth. It also coveys something very important for us to believe.

On Sunday, we heard these sublime words which are a part of Eucharistic Prayer D:

"It is truly right to glorify you, Father, and to give you thanks;
for you alone are God, living and true, dwelling in light
inaccessible from before time and for ever.

Fountain of life and source of all goodness, you made all
things and fill them with your blessing; you created them to
rejoice in the splendor of your radiance."

God is radiant and sometimes we discover that aspect of God's image in the radiance of a child, a spouse, or a friend. This discovery stirs our tenderness and we desire to be kind to those radiant ones. This stirring of tenderness might also remind us of the intimacy with which God made us. 

Our challenge is to expand this caring gaze in the Spirit beyond those whose radiance has stirred our tenderness, beyond those who are easy for us to love –

to the co-worker who aggravates us with issues that are not the priority they think they are

and to the person who shares our church pew but not our political view . . .

 

If we find it a struggle to build our ethics on the fundamental fact that humanity is made in God's image as described in Genesis, we might find Jesus' way of putting very motivating. I wonder how literally we take this passage.

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, ³³ and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. ³⁴ Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; ³⁵ for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶ I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ ³⁷ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? ³⁸ And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? ³⁹ And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ ⁴⁰ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ - from Matthew 25

Sanctus/Benedictus

"We Are Beloved of God" 

page 45

This song expresses the essence of the Sanctus and the Benedictus as it celebrates the sanctifying love of the holy Christ in becoming one of us.

As Stefan puts it, this song addresses two questions: 

Who am I? 

and 

Who is God?

Our answers to these questions indicate something about how much we truly believe God loves us.   

Stefan's points out that "Jesus’ baptism answers these questions and his baptism is our experience."

⁹ In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰ And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹ And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” - from Mark 1

Stefan writes:

"As we begin to see ourselves as beloved children of God, we see our true selves. This song came from reflecting on the moment in Jesus’ life when he heard the voice of God saying to him, “You are my beloved child.” When we listen, we, too, hear these deeply beautiful words addressed to our own hearts."

Agnus Dei

"Lamb of God" 

from Celtic Mass

You can listen to a sample from Stefan's own recording here.

 

In his Celtic Mass, Stefan seeks to quicken the deep pulse of Irish folk-song within the walls of the Church. He sets this "Lamb of God" to a tune by Turlouch O’Carolan who was a blind itinerant harpist at the turn of the 18^th century. I imagine Stefan feels some affinity with O'Carolan as a traveling retreat leader and musician.

Similar to Alice Parker’s setting of the Agnus Dei, Stefan’s setting emphasizes the lamb-ness of Jesus to shift our minds and hearts away from violent images.

In Revelation 5 we learn that, of all the possibilities, it is the Lamb who will be worshiped by the beasts and the elders with harps and prayers of saints. It is the that slain lamb that “ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands of angels proclaim to be “Worthy to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.”

And at the heart of the Mass, the sacredness of this non-violent Lamb has been enshrined for centuries. 

Dismissal

"All Shall Be Well" 

page 24

We conclude our evening by singing the famous comforting words of the 14th/15th century mystic, Julian of Norwich. Between choruses, we read further excerpts from her Revelations of Divine Love, chosen for the occasion by Dr. Cameron Hunt McNabb. These are copied below.

"Our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. I saw that for us he is everything that we find good and comforting. He is our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love, so that he can never leave us, being himself everything that is good for us." - Chapter 5

"Where truth and wisdom truly are, there is truly love coming from both of them, and all of God's making; for he is supreme unending truth, supreme unending wisdom, supreme unending love, uncreated; and man's soul is a creature within God which has these same qualities in a created form, and it always does what it was made for: it sees God, it contemplates God, and it loves God." - Chapter 44

"And from the time that this was shown, I often longed to know what our Lord meant. And fifteen years and more later my spiritual understanding received an answer, which was this: 'Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For love. Hold fast to this and you will know and understand more of the same; but you will never understand or know from it anything else for all eternity.'" - Chapter 86

 

With Blair Boak and Dr. Rickey Cotton