A Moment of Eternity

I sit in my sister’s purple room on her swing chair. The music is playing from my phone and it fills the whole room. It swells out into the room and eventually drowns out the sounds of the living room, my dogs, and the voices of my family members. The “familiar secular world”(Swain 117) fell away. The voices of the mass, the entire unity of the full mass, and the dynamics throughout the songs are like waves that rise and fall with the chant. This experience echoed what Kirkman said of the mass, “Through the agency of the cyclic Mass, the unity that was felt to envelop the ritual as a whole in a consistent message received the enhancement of a sonic marker that bound together its various parts…” (Kirkman 204). The unchanging nature of God seems reflected in this component of the mass. Each word is accented because it creates the rhythm of the song. The words fall like leaves in the wind- they sway through the air and lightly rock their way from the heights to the ground. Even as one singer’s breath ends in the Gloria in the mass Missa Dunelm By John Macmillian another voice rises to where it fell from. The high voices also work to create tension against a backdrop of intermittent silence when they are not present. The resolution is found in the few moments when all the voices seem to level with one another in the return to the pattern. The final moment of the “Amen” is chilling; it has perfect control yet explosive power as it draws to an end the exalting of God The Father.

In my listening to the mass Missa Dunelm, I found that I could not help myself but attend to the music. The distractions around me were pulled away by each ascending and descending voice that sang. I understood clearly, when listening to this mass, what Blaxam meant in saying, “Music, whether chant or polyphony, provided the sonic underpinning of this ritual drama: it accompanied action, gave voice to praise and plea, confirmed belief, and conveyed the sacred stories contained in the ceremony. Decisions regarding structure, style, pacing, and declamation of both chant and polyphony for the Mass hinged, to a greater or lesser degree, on practical, symbolic, and affective ritual considerations. This is especially so in the Sanctus, whose function it was to provide the aural setting within which the miracle of transubstantiation took place” (page 518 Bloxam). The mass itself carries the act of Christ both in musical form and in actual content; the mass demands the attention of the spectator because the familiar theology we are taught in words suddenly encounters us in an all-consuming experience.

The understanding of the words themselves gave a roundness to the experience; my convictions as a Christian about the person of Christ took on form. The music of the Sanctus was powerful in its message and particularly draws my attention, “The first part of the Sanctus signifies the joining of the earthly church with the heavenly hosts in the song of praise” (Kirkman 192). The music of the Sanctus had one low and steady voice that I almost had to strain to hear at times. The higher voices of the song sang at a steady pace till they pushed forward with a high dynamic that quickly fell again. The ethereal sound that this creates seems to create an experience of Men and angels joining in praise (Kirkman 196). Then, just as Christ himself descended to ascend, about one minute and forty seconds into the mass and two minutes and thirty seconds into the mass, the silence after the descent of the voices is broken by the ascent of the soprano voices. They are singing in unison with the low voices and yet still dynamically louder. Till at about three minutes and two seconds in, the voices all meet together to finally rise in a powerful singing of “Hosanna”. This pattern seems to pervade much of the mass. This form of the mass also led me to think about the power in the descent of Christ. The consistent love that he has for us, and yet his distinct act in history that through descent allows us to now rise with him back into a relationship with The Father. “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, He will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you” (Romans 8:11).

Begbie said of Taverner, “…some view his music as a route to eternity” (129). Taverner’s work, Missa Wellensis, was most definitely an experience that pulls one from the ubiquitous processing of time into a moment that feels suspended. If the human’s deeply talented capacity to be distracted exerts itself, the music artfully pulls your attention back to the song by the voices that dip in and out creating a dynamic that in some way is like the paradox of the ocean- the water itself does not move it is still and yet waves pass along its surface in oscillating patterns, up and down. As Begbie says, “The sense of changelessness and motionlessness is sometimes heightened indirectly through juxtaposing such music alongside strongly contrasting sections” (139 Begbie). This seems to also create the eternal dimension of this mass.

Further, through its form, the Mass captures the eternal truth of God in its limited time. Although the total time I spent listening to Taverners music was approximately no more than fifteen minutes, the mass manages to capture much of the character of God. As Robertson says of Caput masses, “Medieval worshippers had not one, but two mental images of the overthrow of Satan in theology and art: Christ and all Christian soldiers driving a spear into the dragon, and Mary standing atop the snake. Only in music did one melody, for a time, draw together both themes under a single rubric” (Robertson 612). Demonstrated here is the powerful ability of the mass to draw eternal truths into a temporally understandable form that is still somehow transcendent and overpowering in its magnitude.

The mass itself provides evidence for the importance of its own materiality. I experienced the transcendent pouring out of self before God in worship through the mass’s form, arrangement, and injected silence. The song itself has a rhythm to which one must attune because it is not specifically found in the common temporal, “1…2…3…”. Rather, one must wait for the words of praise and awe to find their place before an awesome Creator just as the worshipper must shift their attitude in mass and liturgy to be “attuned” to the richness of the moment. The singers take their time, and you become lost in the time of worship — not searching for the end but rather following the proclamations of God and His eternal character within a suspended moment. Participating in mass helps one to realize their position relative to God’s time. “…Prayer inhabits an act of the presence of the invisible. Prayer is the act by which the person praying stands in the presence of the being in whom he believes, but whom he cannot see, and makes himself manifest to that being” (19 Chretien). We are placed in the presence of God through prayer and the worship in mass does this as well. Worship is as much about us experiencing God as it is about ourselves being found before God. Further, the practice of contemplating and “wasting time for God” in a play-like way is necessary to worship correctly. The mass trains one to meet this demand as they participate within it. One is demanded to submit the demands of the day-to-day in a “self-emptying” way. Worship becomes a participation in a time that belongs to a God with no beginning and no end as we are literally plunged into an experience of repeated, chanted, and slow proclamations of truths about God. “To share in music is to find a temporality in which- at least to some extent- past, present and future have been made to interweave fruitfully” (150 Begbie). Further, the words are present in their current declaration and my reception of them, however, the acts that they proclaim were at one moment in the past, and yet they still reflect a God of the future.

One thing that I have always noted about Mass is its ethereal nature. The ethereal nature of mass as a kid made me think of it as “alien”. Interestingly, Swain directly addressed this capacity of the liturgy he says, “Its strangeness is its saving grace. For it is the very strangeness of liturgy that most often inspires and helps us somehow transcend the familiar secular world, though momentarily” (Swain 117). Swain is correct in his assessment of the power of worship. The power of worship and the worship of the mass to transcend is undeniable. Even in the most familiar of settings through its form, it brings one beyond the visible to the invisible things of God. Like eternity caught in the blink of an eye, true worship is an interplay between our temporal selves in a singular moment reaching out and, through grace, touching and being touched by an eternal God.