Psalms Archives - Page 26 of 32

Come Holy Spirit : expressing the inexpressible

The feast of the Holy Spirit, the feast of Pentecost

Pentecost is nearly upon us, the feast or celebration of the Holy Spirit. Who is this third person of the Trinity, the one who proceeds from both the Father and the Son, the third side of the triangle? This is the one usually represented in art by a dove (I have seen it referred to as the ‘holy pigeon’).

This Holy Spirit looks endearingly like a duck

The Paraclete, the Advocate, the Comforter. Lots of abstract titles, but this most shadowy member of the Godhead (itself a difficult subject to grasp) remains unclear. The more we try to put it into words, the more it escapes us, and for once Jesus isn’t much help; he is responsible for some of those abstract nouns which we adopt to hide the fact that we are groping in the dark here. But this is the Holy Spirit who teaches ‘little ones to think and understand’, the one whose fruits are wisdom and understanding, not fuzz and confusion. So it’s worth putting some work in.

The Holy Spirit is not male

One of the reasons I particularly appreciate the Holy Spirit is that it is the least male Person of God. Although God has no gender, he is overwhelmingly referred to through male metaphors, including by Jesus, and although there are references to God as a mother in the Bible (e.g. Isaiah 66:13), these tend to get lost or ignored compared with the weight of male metaphor (but thank God for Mother Julian of Norwich). Jesus himself is incarnate as a human man (though one without the sexist assumptions of his contemporaries, which is pretty miraculous in itself, if you think about it), and he always talks of God as his Father. The Bible occasionally uses female imagery for God (Isaiah, Hosea), but does not refer to him as ‘she’. Some people use the feminine pronoun for the Holy Spirit, which I find tempting but a bit of a cop-out, as there is no evidence or tradition to justify it. I’m using ‘it’ to refer to the Holy Spirit precisely because it is odd and specifically non-specific, and one of the most important aspects of the Holy Spirit is its mysteriousness.

Numinous accounts of experiencing the Holy Spirit

All the accounts of the Holy Spirit are vague and baffling, and even the authors of them are frustrated by their vagueness. It is ‘like’ the rushing of a mighty wind. It comes down ‘as’ or ‘as if’ tongues or flames of fire (which is impressively inept as a description; as opposed to flames of water?).

The holy Spirit as dove and flames — Baptising with the Holy Spirit and with fire, in a musical manuscript

It comes with a whoosh and completely fills the place it comes to, just like the cloud of God in the Old Testament, and it is most evident in its effect, making people speak and understand languages they do not know, in a reversal of Babel. (in a beautifully appropriate coincidence, Pentecost Day Mass is one of the incredibly few occasions when everyone with an Anglophone Lectionary sings exactly the same words at the Alleluia verse.) What they cannot do is explain coherently what happened to them, because the Spirit has not been sent for that, but to enable the important message to be passed on.

Illumnated capital showing Pentecost and a dragon — An unusual Holy Spirit as dragon : flames of fire with a vengeance!

Even someone as brilliant, articulate and educated as Blaise Pascal, after an experience which sounds very much like the Holy Spirit, is reduced to an impressionistic babble of emotion and conviction, though the Pensees as a whole are almost forensic in style. Pascal is a mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist. This is like Stephen Hawking being reduced to incoherence and trails of dots on the page.

Experiencing the Spirit through wonder

This means that writing about the Holy Spirit does not get us very far. It is precisely the mysterious and ineffable aspect of God which we would be tackling. What seems to work better is to develop and express our sense of wonder.

Beautiful dawn — This is ‘ just’ the sky from my garden, and I could have taken lots of different photographs equally beautiful

Children tend to be much better at this than adults, because they accept the new amazing things that happen to them as new and amazing, without the cynicism which adults employ to prevent them looking silly when they come across something new. But we miss so much when we think like that. Creation can be the source of so much wonder, if we let ourselves feel it. Never mind the Northern Lights, dawn and sunset are totally amazing, and they happen every day. No-one before you has ever seen that new shoot in the herb bed that has come up overnight. Every new flower or fruit or leaf is as exciting as a baby, only we don’t appreciate it because there are so many of them. Tides, mountains, storms, creatures: all these are evidence of God’s Spirit moving, because the Spirit brings light, warmth, noise; it brings life. The Catechism calles the Spirit ‘God’s artisan’ (CCC#741 and #1091) and ‘the master of prayer’, as well as helpfully defining it as inexpressible. (That always makes me smile, because ‘inexpressibles’ was a Regency euphemism for trousers, but as I said, the Holy Spirit is in fact the least male Person of God.)

Abstract Pentecost centred on dove — Bird’s eye view

Expressing the Spirit in words (and music)

When I was thinking about the Holy Spirit, I realised that a lot of my ideas come through the Holy Spirit hymns, and when I looked for illustrations for this piece, I was delighted to notice how many Pentecost illustrations are on musical manuscripts.

Even if we restrict ourselves to English translations of the Golden Sequence, the Veni Sancte Spiritus, this is a rich collection of images and ideas, and these hymns make good prayers. Throwing up lots of images and letting them float in the air together is one way to approach the unsayable – this is what George Herbert does in his sonnet which attempts to define prayer, and it works better than anything else I know. If we put poems together with music, we are finding ways to tap into other ways of perception, and this also helps.

The Psalm for the Vigil and the Day Mass: same psalm but different

So we have Psalm 103/104, in different versions for the Vigil and for the Day Mass. The Response is the same both times, but the verses are different, enough so that I have set the psalms as though they were completely different. The emphasis for the Vigil is on God the Father, his greatness, the riches of his creation, and how well he looks after it. It’s like one of those beautiful pictures of the Peaceable Kingdom, with all God’s creatures disposed around, coexisting happily and being taken care of as a well-ordered household. God here is his own agent; he creates everything in the second strophe, feeds it in strophe 3, and the spirit only comes in the fourth strophe (once for US, coupled with ‘breath’, twice for everyone else; but no capital S). I’ve tried to keep some of the feeling of mystery by starting the Response with some growly chords and letting it move on and up as it renews the face of the earth.

The Day Mass psalm

I wanted to develop this more in the day psalm. The Response and the first two lines are the same as for the Vigil, but then instead of dwelling on God as Creator, we move on immediately to creation itself. There is now a slight problem in the verses for the US, because the order 1,2,3 in Year A is changed to 1,3,2 in Years B and C. I’ve had to alter the music so that the movement is still felt as forward throughout. I’m not sure whether the order change is deliberate, as it goes against the running order in the psalm itself, but both my Missal and the published Lectionary do it like this, so I have followed them. Everyone else stays with 1,2,3 for all three years, and the effect is strongly cumulative, as the second strophe (third for US) makes it clear that the Spirit is the source of life for all living things, not the food which God provides in the Vigil version.

God sending out multiple flames and doves

The Day psalm is shorter, only three strophes: 1 is about God making everything, 2 is about the spirit being the only source of life, so its absence means death, and 3 is a paean of praise, like a mini-Doxology. That seemed to me to give a beautiful narrative arc, so I decided to make the music grow in the same way.

Making the music move

Most people can only sing comfortably in quite a narrow range, so when I wanted to move up the keys, I was very limited. I wanted to start deep and quiet, and I knew this would be the simpler music, so I could put this into a key I wouldn’t normally dare to tackle (all those flats). Each verse lifts into the next key up, and I still had to be able to play and sing it once it became more cheerful and more elaborate, so that’s why it starts where it does and ends where it does. The music at the beginning is meant to give the sense of the Spirit brooding over the face of the waters like in Genesis, dark and inchoate, and if you miss any of the flats here, it doesn’t matter because here we have primeval chaos. Accidental discords are a plus!

2nd strophe, and the Spirit goes out and starts working. Harmonies start coming into the accompanying parts, and even the voice part begins to move more freely. The recorder gives little twirls of dance : I’m trying to show things starting to grow, to sprout and to move.

3rd strophe and even more so : everything is beginning to dance and sing together and in patterns. Trying to give the feeling of ‘free form’ in a Responsorial Psalm is very difficult without the whole thing coming off the rails and the congregation giving up, so I’m suggesting, rather than going for the full effect here, but you should be getting a feeling of expansion, light and freedom. That’s what I’m aiming for, anyway.

Apostles and Mary at Pentecost — Don’t trust any Pentecost picture that omits Our Lady (and note the stave lines here)

The downside of this is that I can’t produce compacts, because I can’t stack the verses if they are in different keys. So I’m sorry about that, and you will need someone to turn over for the instruments, but I hope you will feel that it’s worth it. Think of it as a musical version of one of those little videos that people send instead of cards at Christmas or birthdays, where the picture is built up, bit by bit, or like a timelapse photograph of a plant coming into flower. Only this is Creation, and it’s a whole rose garden.

Come, Holy Spirit, the most mysterious Person in the Trinity, and possibly the most exciting. It is the one who starts things. Who knows what they will go on to be? Pentecost is the feast of unlimited potential.

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One of the best song lyrics ever

By the rivers of Babylon

The middle of Lent is approaching, exciting because it’s the Pink Sunday in the middle of so much purple, because it’s Mothering Sunday, because it’s the one that starts by encouraging us to rejoice; and also it has Psalm 136/137 as its responsorial Psalm for this year, Year B.

This has to be one of the best song lyrics ever written. It’s a good length (four verses); it’s regular without being repetitive or boring; it’s poignant, but not simply miserable; and it’s beautiful. It’s also elegant, witty and self-reflexive: it is a song written about the impossibility of writing a song. It talks about the impossibility of singing, while singing.

Initial S with illustration for Ps 137 - the best song lyric — By the rivers of Babylon, hanging harps and tragic captives

The two verses we leave out

There are two more verses, which are usually omitted in performance, as you might say. The first one is a curse against those who attacked Jerusalem, to pull it down; the second amplifies the curse and warns Babylon that vengeance is coming, climaxing in a truly horrific image of the child of the guilty man being seized and dashed against the rock. I’m not going to speculate about whether these verses are part of the original psalm, as I don’t have the linguistic tools or the expertise. I would just say that this was written in a time very different and remote from our own, in a culture where cursing your enemies and seeking violent vengeance was accepted, expected and even virtuous. Jesus showed a different way, for which we are deeply grateful. But you can’t edit bits out of a historic text just because you don’t like them. However, you can choose which bits to use in the liturgy, so it’s fair enough to stop after the four verses we have for Sunday.

Unusual shape for a psalm

The form is really unusual. It has five short lines to each verse, and the UK Response has such a strong ternary movement that it is written as three lines in the Missal (I think this is unique among the psalms). The Response has an exclamation mark, which is again unusual, but intended to show strong feeling (which, as the words are a self-curse, is also arresting). The line of the verses looks short, but in fact it rolls on like a great wave, with the parallelism (‘our captors, for songs; our oppressors, for joy’) that is so strong a feature of the psalms here deepening the feeling and accumulating it until the wave breaks into the response. It reminds me of the movement of the lines in ‘Of the Father’s love begotten’ when you suddenly realise that each seven-line stanza is only one sentence (a wonderful piece of hymn translation).

It’s a perfect lyric because it is attractive in both shape and content, and you can see immediately why so many people have wanted to set it to music. Presumably some are attracted more by the form than the matter, and vice versa, but the whole is irresistible to musicians. From Palestrina to Don Maclean, from Victoria to Boney M, it calls out to be set to a good tune, and the tune we make never fulfils all our aspirations, so we have to keep trying.

Singing a sad song

Unlike many psalms, though, it is only rarely used in the liturgy (this is its one outing as a Sunday psalm, so only once every three years). I think this is because it is painful to sing. It is a lament. Crucially, it is in the past tense, so we are looking back at past rather than undergoing present suffering, and I think this is because it would be unbearable if it were in the present tense. As well as a lament, it is a prayer for survival. We are reminded of the Jewish orchestra in Terezin concentration camp. Singing the Lord’s songs in a strange land has been a part of the Jewish experience for centuries. As it says in the Book of Tobit,’I give him thanks in the land of my captivity'(ch 13). The paradox of making a song to renounce music is itself comforting. If we were not able to look back at the experience from a better place, we would not be able to address it at all.

Setting the scene : water and trees

The words are immediately gripping, and we identify with them so simply that it’s easy to miss how clever they are. ‘By the (rivers or waters) of Babylon/there we sat and wept, remembering Zion’, and we are immediately there in the story, remembering, or imagining, if we are lucky, how it feels to be desolate. The waters of Babylon remind the psalmist of the beloved and blessed river Jordan, but the setting is also somewhere which should be a place of pleasant repose: ‘near restful waters he leads me to revive my drooping spirit’ (Psalm 22/23) and every locus amoenus has a water feature. River banks are green and pleasant places.

Narcissus by a piscina — Water, trees, and greenery : must be a locus amoenus

Here are also trees, and it was only when I came to think about this that I realised that I think of them as weeping (of course) willows, because that’s what I associate with rivers. These are poplars, because that’s what grows in the Holy Land, but apparently ones that look like willows, according to the Lion Encyclopedia of the Bible. Job has willows by the stream (40, v.22) which are also translated as poplars. It seems that foreign tree names are as tricky to translate as exact species of fish. The US translation has aspens. When I was little, reading Anne of Green Gables in an English edition, one of the later volumes was called Anne of Windy Willows. I felt cheated to discover it was Anne of Windy Poplars in the US and Canada, but I reckon this is another case of the same overlap.

Willows on the riverbank — Willows (or poplars, or aspens) by the water

The trees are where the harps are hung….and left behind. This is a total renunciation of music, and goes with the awful self-curses which make up the Response. Remember, this is in a culture where every joyful event, every victory, is marked by singing a new song. Here though, my tongue should cleave (CAN cling) to my mouth, I should be unable ever to sing or even speak, and my right hand, the one I use to play, should wither and be of no further use. I shall not need my harp, so I hang it on a tree (I don’t destroy it, because others might be able to use it) and I leave it behind. Rivers mark borders as well as resting places.

Musical instruments hung on a tree — Hanging up all sorts of instruments

Not silence but silenced

The idea of silencing people is a terrifyingly powerful act. That is why the protests where people sew up their mouths are especially horrific. Even a taped mouth produces a visceral fear in the onlooker. It seems even worse than gagging, because it obliterates the means of communication (remember that bit in The Matrix, where Neo’s mouth is removed). Taking away someone’s voice is a sign of complete hostile power (the legend of Philomela, Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, the Church’s attitude to female voices singing or speaking until very lately). This is why speech therapists are so important, and why what they do has so much impact.

What had happened before the psalm was written

The link between the First Reading and the chosen psalm this week is particularly clear. The first reading tells the history of the destruction of the Temple and the whole of Jerusalem, with Nebuchadnezzar carrying the survivors off to Babylon and into captivity, but ends on a note of hope as Cyrus, in a voice like a bugle, says that God has ordered the building of a new Temple in Jerusalem. He continues,’Whoever there is among you of all his people, may his God be with him! Let him go up.’ This would truly be a situation full of joy, and therefore, naturally, songs of joy. ‘I will come to the altar of God, the God of my joy. My redeemer, I will thank you on the harp, O God, my God’ (Ps 42/43).

Jerusalem the other character in the story

Zion or Jerusalem is lovingly named in every verse, in the context of remembering, not forgetting, or singing. The song itself does what it is talking about not being able to do, and the tenses move from a simple dreadful past (sat and wept, hung up our harps) to a past conditional (how could we sing) and then pivots towards the future: ‘if I forget…if I prize not Jerusalem’. The psalmist moves from renunciation to a determination to keep the song going, and prays only for the physical capacity to do so, for the memory to stay green. Like Henley’s Invictus, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, who specifically rejects ‘eternal silence’, this perfect lyric is a testimony to the unquenchable human spirit, so it never goes out of fashion. From the ashes of desolation arises a strong determination never to give up, never to stop singing.