St
Bernard said that the person who sings prays twice.
This is because music lets us express ourselves in
more than just words: our heart, soul and spirit
can sing. It helps us bring a very deep level of
our being to the work of prayer. Music engages our
body as well as our minds, and it unites us with
other people at prayer both in body and in spirit.
Music expresses the unity and the diversity of the
community at a human level, and to create a deep
relationship in the spirit between the human and
the divine. Although it seems to conflict with the
solitude a monk needs to make space for God in his
heart, in fact it fulfils him because a monk is able
to rediscover himself in relation to God as part
of the communion of those who worship him in spirit
and in truth.
This communion in the
spirit reaches across time and culture. The traditional
chants of the monastic liturgy seem to go back to
the synagogue and other religious milieux of the
Eastern Mediterranean – and to extend into Mesopotamia
and beyond the borders of the Roman empire. The music
created to meditate on Christ’s passion, death and
resurrection was born from the texts and forms of
Jewish worship, above all in the psalms and canticles
that stand at the heart of monastic liturgy; it has
been elaborated by the Christian imagination in the
hymns, antiphons and responsories that complement
the psalmody and teach us to share in the contemplation
of the mystery of our faith has been handed on across
generations of communities at prayer.
What has long
been shared in this way by peoples of all nations
and cultures, can help especially today to reach
out across the conceptual boundaries of Christian
faith to people of all religious persuasions and
even of none: the chant is truly one of the most
universal of all forms of prayer.
Besides making us
part of this great communion of faith and hope, monastic
music also has an intensely personal dimension. Nearly
all music expresses human passion in one form or
another. Someone has said that the eight traditional
modes used in Gregorian chant encompass the complete
range of human feeling. So monastic music helps us
to express our human passions and to earth them in
the poetry of the liturgy; music helps the work of
prayer transform us. This explains the peace many
people find in monastic chant; it brings into harmony
the discordant noise of the human spirit.
Monastic
life follows rhythms which itself has a musical quality
similar to that of the chant. In the darkness of
Vigils, the chant is simple and unadorned. As the
day advances, the chants gain in amplitude and often
in musical interest: some of those sung by monks
during daily Mass are very elaborate. The music of
Vespers already expresses a sense of completion and
at Compline the quieter sense of commendation of
oneself to God’s care for the night. Similarly the
different tones of the Christian year and the feasts
that punctuate it help us take the particular meaning
of those times and celebrations to heart, and to
let our lives be modelled by the mystery of Christ.
In this way, the monk is able to say ‘For me to live
is Christ.’
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