The Tongues of Angels and of Men: Iubilatio

January 26, 2016 in Liturgy, Music, Uncategorized 1 Comment Tags: Augustone, Iubilatio, John Chryostom, Jubilatio, Jubulus, Liturgy, prayer, speaking in tongues, Teresa of Avila

As Men Rejoice at the Harvest

Orchestral version

From The Tender Land

Catholic and Protestant Reformers both sought to preserve the intelligibility of the text in sung church services, the text medieval music sometimes obscured.

Paul had dealt with a similar problem in Corinth, where speaking in tongues seems to dominate the liturgical assemblies. He expresses strong reservations about speaking in tongues, because they are not intelligible:

“Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret. ¹⁴For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. ¹⁵What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. ¹⁶Otherwise, if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say the “Amen” to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying? ¹⁷For you may give thanks well enough, but the other person is not built up. ¹⁸I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you; ¹⁹nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue.”

But there is another tradition in the church which does not confine praise to intelligibility.

In addition to the music that does not conflict with the intelligibility of the text (e.g. Merbecke’s Mass setting), Mount Calvary also uses Gregorian chant settings of the Proper of the Mass, settings that contain melismas (many notes on one syllable), as well as anthems in Latin (which even for us who have a smattering of Latin are not immediately intelligible) as well as organ preludes and postludes that have no text at all, and sometimes no reference to a hymn tune. These represent types of church music that fell into disfavor, especially among Calvinists, shortly after the English Reformation, but were revived by the Oxford Movement.

The melismas, especially at the end of the alleluia, may have a direct ancestry in the jubilatio (although musicologists are uncertain about this) but in any case they resemble the jubilatio. What, may you ask, is a jubilatio?

In the early church there was the gift of tongues, which seems to have died out by Augustine’s time (354-430), but there was another type of singing which did not use human words. In his commentary on the psalms Augustine describes it and implies it is a practice in the church:

“I am about to say what ye know. One who jubilates, uttereth not words, but it is a certain sound of joy without words: for it is the expression of a mind poured forth in joy, expressing, as far as it is able, the affection, but not compassing the feeling. A man rejoicing in his own exultation, after certain words which cannot be uttered or understood, bursteth forth into sounds of exultation without words, so that it seemeth that he indeed doth rejoice with his voice itself, but as if filled with excessive joy cannot express in words the subject of that joy.”

“To manifest his joy, the man does not use words that can be pronounced or understood, but bursts forth into sounds of exaltation without words… What is jubilation? Joy that cannot be pronounced or understood, but bursts forth into sounds of exaltation without words.”

Jubilation is a natural activity, an expression of deep and profound joy. Augustine explains why we do it and should do it:

“See how He Himself provides you with a way of singing. Do not search for words, as if you could find a lyric which would give God pleasure. Sing to Him “with songs of joy.” This is singing well to God, just singing with songs of joy.

“But how is this done? You must first understand that words cannot express the things that are sung by the heart. Take the case of people singing while harvesting in the fields or in the vineyards or when any other strenuous work is in progress [play Copeland’s The Promise of Living]. Although they begin by giving expression to their happiness in sung words, yet shortly there is a change. As if so happy that words can no longer express what they feel, they discard the restricting syllables. They burst out into a simple sound of joy, of jubilation. Such a cry of joy is a sound signifying that the heart is bringing to birth what it cannot utter in words.

“Now, who is more worthy of such a cry of jubilation than God himself, whom all words fail to describe? If words will not serve, and yet you must not remain silent, what else can you do but cry out for joy? Your heart must rejoice beyond words, soaring into an immensity of gladness, unrestrained by syllabic bonds. Sing to him with jubilation.”

John Chrysostom (349-407) praises jubilation:

“Do not look for words, as if you could put into words things that please God. Sing in jubilation: singing well to God means, in fact, just this: singing in jubilation.”

Centuries later the Benedictine Rupert of Deutz 1075-1130 A.D.) sees jubilation as an essential part of praise:

“By the term jubilus we understand that which neither in words, nor syllables, nor letters, nor speech, is it possible to express or comprehend, namely, how much man ought to praise God.”

Jubilation became rare, but Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) seems to have experienced it:

“Amongst these favours, at once painful and pleasant, Our Lord sometimes causes in the soul a certain jubilation and a strange and mysterious kind of prayer. If He bestows this grace on you, praise Him fervently for it; I describe it so that you may know that it is something real. I believe that the faculties of the soul are closely united to God but that He leaves them at liberty to rejoice in their happiness together with the senses, although they do not know what they are enjoying nor how they do so. This may sound nonsense but it really happens.

Augustine knew that “words cannot express the things that are sung by the heart.” We feel a joy that is not irrational, but that is beyond words. Jubilatio is a song of praise without words. Absolute music, whether by means of the human voice or instruments, is not a way of imparting doctrine, but is a way of expressing something that is not contrary to reason, but beyond it.

God as Therapist?

April 14, 2013 in Catholic Church, prayer, Protestantism 23 Comments Tags: Luhrmann, Personal relationship with God, prayer

Tanya Luhrmann wrote When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

She has a column in today’s NYT, “When God is Your Therapist.”

IT had never occurred to me to think of God as a therapist when I began to spend time, 10 years ago, at an evangelical church in Chicago. Like many secular observers, I was interested in the fact that people like me seemed to experience reality in a fundamentally different manner. I soon came to realize that one of the most important features of these churches is that they offer a powerful way to deal with anxiety and distress, not because of what people believe but because of what they do when they pray.

One way to see this is that the books teaching someone how to pray read a lot like cognitive behavior therapy manuals. For instance, the Rev. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life,” one of the best-selling books of all time, teaches you to identify your self-critical, self-demeaning thoughts, to interrupt them and recognize them as mistaken, and to replace them with different thoughts. Cognitive-behavioral therapists often ask their patients to write down the critical, debilitating thoughts that make their lives so difficult, and to practice using different ones. That is more or less what Warren invites readers to do. He spells out thoughts he thinks his readers have but don’t want, and then asks them to consider themselves from God’s point of view: not as the inadequate people they feel themselves to be, but as loved, as relevant and as having purpose.

Does it work? In my own research, the more people affirmed, “I feel God’s love for me, directly,” the less stressed and lonely they were and the fewer psychiatric symptoms they reported.

More strikingly, I saw that the church implicitly invited people to treat God like an actual therapist. In many evangelical churches, prayer is understood as a back-and-forth conversation with God — a daydream in which you talk with a wise, good, fatherly friend. Indeed, when congregants talk about their relationship with God, they often sound as if they think of God as some benign, complacent therapist who will listen to their concerns and help them to handle them.

I am not sure how it fits into the mainstream of Christian spirituality, but it does not sound bizarre or harmful to try to talk to God and listen for His response (always remembering that we might mistake another voice for His, and even when He speaks we hear Him filtered through our receptors).

God certainly wishes to comfort the distressed, families whose father had died, parents who have lost a child.

I saw the same thing at another church, where a young couple lost a child in a late miscarriage. Some months later I spent several hours with them. Clearly numbed, they told me they did not understand why God had allowed the child to die. But they never gave a theological explanation for what happened. They blamed neither their own wickedness nor demons. Instead, they talked about how important it was to know that God had stood by their side. The husband quoted from memory a passage in the Gospel of John, where many followers abandon Jesus because his teachings don’t make sense to them. Jesus says sadly to his disciples, “You do not want to leave, too, do you?” and Peter responds, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”

This sounds mature to me.

Luhrmann doesn’t discuss what kind of response people get when they talk to God about cheating on their spouses or stealing from their employers. If God is still benign and complacent I would have doubts about this approach to Him.

Luhrmann also claims that

This approach to the age-old problem of theodicy is not really available to mainstream Protestants and Catholics, who do not imagine a God so intimate, so loving, so much like a person. That may help to explain why it is evangelical Christianity that has grown so much in the last 40 years.

“so much like a person” – but almost all Christians believe in a personal God, whom they know in Jesus Christ. Although there are problems with the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the relationship is certainly personal. And Lutherans have a strong personal relationship to Jesus, “Jesu, meine Freude.”

I am not sure that Luhrmann is right, or perhaps what evangelicals mean by a “personal” relationship with God is something completely different from what other Protestants and Catholics mean.

Births and Belief

April 18, 2009 in demography, Uncategorized 3 Comments Tags: birth rates, prayer, Worldwide Values Survey

Focus (April 11, 2009) in “Fructbarer Glaube” (not on-line yet) reports on the birthrate in Switzerland in 2000.

Children per woman according to religious membership

2.79 — Hindu

2.44 — Moslem

2.06 — Jewish

1.62 — Eastern Orthodox

1.42 — Buddhist

1.41 — Roman Catholic

1.35 — Protestant

1.24 — Jehovah’s Witnesses

1.11 — No religious association

The Worldwide Value Survey (1986-2004) correlated the number of children and the frequency of prayer

Number of children — Frequency of Prayer

1.48 — Never

1.61 — Seldom

1.86 –- Many Times Times a Month

2.24 — Many Times a Week

We have six children. I say grace at meals, morning and evening prayers (brief) and the Rosary. If Europeans would resume praying, they might not die out.