As one who has spent most my life filling the unforgiving minute, there's the small question of how to fill 360 minutes of travel per week. I do it by car so the laptop isn't the answer. A combination of Radio Four and Classic FM helps, but at the times I'm travelling it tends to be news (Radio 4), and that becomes cyclic after half an hour; or you get weary of Classic FM's daft juxtapositions of Ave Verum followed immediately by silly advert jingles, or the Mozart Clarinet Concerto slow movement followed by a condensed milk voice dripping syrupy words about smooth classics!
So. A strategy. I have long wanted to explore the treasures of Baroque music, and I have a friend who knows stuff about Renaissance and early sacred music. So each journey I listen to a CD, sometimes the same one twice. This week it was a new double CD of Thomas Tallis, whose work spans the 16th Century Tudor period. Most of this is new to me, one or two I have a vague recollection of hearing before, but no real previous engagement with this range of early choral music. My one complaint is there is no copy of the words, Latin or translation. Now in complex choral music sung in parts, knowing what is being sung seems to me to matter – certainly to those unfamiliar with the pieces. That said. The central piece is Spem in Alium, which to my embarrassment I only recently discovered through the afore-mentioned friend asking if I knew Thomas Tallis. The first hearing of it was magical, shared in the background of quiet conversation, and immediately marked it for me as a quite beautiful expression of hopefulness and longing, human voices lifting that longing heavenwards in sounds that are breathtakingly lovely.
So I listened to Spem in Alium several times on the way home yesterday – for this one I do know the words and they are included below. It did what great music should do – it lifted my heart, it reconfigured the world around, it restored my inner climate, it was an experience of recovered equilibrium. One of the most important discoveries in my own faith development is that prayer is a much more thickly textured experience than any one Christian tradition can contain or express. For me great art like the Rublev Icon, the Caravaggio of Jesus calling the disciples (pictured), glorious music like Ave Verum or Laudate Dominus, or poetry like Herbert and R S Thomas, as well as great liturgies and great cathedrals, mountains, sunsets, mountain avens, a hovering kestrel, the face of a friend – they are all ways of recognising the presence of God, and the touch of love through created things. And perhaps prayer only happens at those points of recognition, when something other than us, greater than us, less self-consciously anxious than us, takes hold of the heart and mind and renews feeling and thought. That was what happened on the way home yesterday. Some might call it music therapy – I call it God healing the heart through created things, including those few people who know us best, and those people of genius in whose work we hear, see, apprehend, encounter, A God who is hard to ignore.
- Spem in alium nunquam habui praeter in te
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Deus Israel
- qui irasceris
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et propitius eris
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et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis
- Domine Deus
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Creator coeli et terrae
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respice humilitatem nostram
- …………………………………….
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I have never put my hope in any other but in you,
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O God of Israel
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who can show both anger
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and graciousness,
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and who absolves all the sins of suffering man
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Lord God,
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Creator of Heaven and Earth
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be mindful of our lowliness
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