Let all the world in every corner sing……. Lent Day 16

A facsimile of Herbert's Antiphon (1).

I remember singing this Antiphon in the 1980's, at an Evening Praise Service in the Thomas Coats Memorial Church in Paisley. I was minister there from 1980-84.

What made it memorable was a coincidence of sensory experiences of sight and sound. The church had a highly trained choir and one of the finest organists around, temperamental and brilliant. We were gathered in the choir stalls because it was a small gathering. The sun was setting and shining in mellowed light tinged with rose and cream, which streamed through the pale tinted glass in rays that fell across the mosaic floor of the chancel. The result was breathtakingly beautiful.

As we began to sing, the voices of the congregation were supported and supplemented by a full choral range, controlled and enlarged by a William Hill four manual organ, played with expert restraint, and followed by a brief moment of pure silence. It was a unique episode of worship as gift, and of praise as the joining of heaven and earth in the heart. 

The Antiphon is defined as: "a composition in prose or verse, consisting of verses or passages sung alternately by two choirs in worship." That's what we did that August evening. Of course what made the entire experience so memorable that it can be recalled with such detail was the combination of the context, and the content. Because this is one of Herbert's more straightforwardly simple poems about the heart's responsiveness to God; it is one of the moments of pure praise uncomplicated by Herbert's spiritual sensitivities about guilt and unworthiness. 

If Lent is about self-sacrifice, this poem of Herbert's requires of us a different kind of self giving. No less appropriate for Lent.  Not the eyes cast down of penitence, but the face uplifted in praise, the conjoining of heaven and earth in our prayers, and the fusion in praise of the individual heart and the gathered community. But while we must shout our praise together in church, it is the individual heart that carries on the music when the hymn ends, and in the quiet continuum of an obedient life.

There is a version of the Antiphon over here. And the photo below was taken by Charlee Maasz, and shows Coats Memorial with light streaming across the chancel.