Adoration, the Angelic Doctor, and Adoro Te Devote

Here is one terrific homily, preached by my friend Fr. John Corbett, OP, a Dominican priest in Washington, DC.

It is on the one hand a reflection on St. Thomas Aquinas, on the occasion of his Feast Day, January 28. St. Thomas was a Dominican friar too, and the seminary/ graduate school where this homily was preached teaches with a special emphasis on the works of St. Thomas.

However, this homily is as much about praise as it is about theology. I think it's worth a listen!

This is a passage from Pope Benedict's Easter Vigil homily. He spoke about two of the symbols of the Vigil, fire and water, and then about a different kind of symbol: song.

The third great symbol of the Easter Vigil is something rather different; it has to do with man himself. It is the singing of the new song – the alleluia. When a person experiences great joy, he cannot keep it to himself. He has to express it, to pass it on. But what happens when a person is touched by the light of the resurrection, and thus comes into contact with Life itself, with Truth and Love? He cannot merely speak about it. Speech is no longer adequate. He has to sing. The first reference to singing in the Bible comes after the crossing of the Red Sea. Israel has risen out of slavery. It has climbed up from the threatening depths of the sea. It is as it were reborn. It lives and it is free. The Bible describes the people’s reaction to this great event of salvation with the verse: "The people … believed in the Lord and in Moses his servant" (Ex 14:31). Then comes the second reaction which, with a kind of inner necessity, follows from the first one: "Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord …" At the Easter Vigil, year after year, we Christians intone this song after the third reading, we sing it as our song, because we too, through God’s power, have been drawn forth from the water and liberated for true life.

There is a surprising parallel to the story of Moses’ song after Israel’s liberation from Egypt upon emerging from the Red Sea, namely in the Book of Revelation of Saint John. Before the beginning of the seven last plagues imposed upon the earth, the seer has a vision of something "like a sea of glass mingled with fire; and those who had conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name, standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands. And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb …" (Rev 15:2f.). This image describes the situation of the disciples of Jesus Christ in every age, the situation of the Church in the history of this world.

Humanly speaking, it is self-contradictory. On the one hand, the community is located at the Exodus, in the midst of the Red Sea, in a sea which is paradoxically ice and fire at the same time. And must not the Church, so to speak, always walk on the sea, through the fire and the cold? Humanly speaking, she ought to sink. But while she is still walking in the midst of this Red Sea, she sings – she intones the song of praise of the just: the song of Moses and of the Lamb, in which the Old and New Covenants blend into harmony. While, strictly speaking, she ought to be sinking, the Church sings the song of thanksgiving of the saved. She is standing on history’s waters of death and yet she has already risen. Singing, she grasps at the Lord’s hand, which holds her above the waters. And she knows that she is thereby raised outside the force of gravity of death and evil – a force from which otherwise there would be no way of escape – raised and drawn into the new gravitational force of God, of truth and of love. At present she is still between the two gravitational fields. But once Christ is risen, the gravitational pull of love is stronger than that of hatred; the force of gravity of life is stronger than that of death. Perhaps this is actually the situation of the Church in every age? It always seems as if she ought to be sinking, and yet she is always already saved. Saint Paul illustrated this situation with the words: "We are as dying, and behold we live" (2 Cor 6:9). The Lord’s saving hand holds us up, and thus we can already sing the song of the saved, the new song of the risen ones: alleluia! Amen.

0 GOD, I love thee, I love thee-

Not out of hope of heaven for me

Nor fearing not to love and be

In the everlasting burning.

Thou, thou, my Jesus, after me

Didst reach thine arms out dying,

For my sake sufferedst nails, and lance,

Mocked and marred countenance,

Sorrows passing number,

Sweat and care and cumber,

Yea and death, and this for me,

And thou couldst see me sinning:

Then I, why should not I love thee,

Jesu, so much in love with me?

Not for heaven's sake;

not to be out of hell by loving thee;

Not for any gains I see;

But just the way that thou didst me

I do love and I will love thee:

What must I love thee, Lord, for then?

For being my king and God. Amen.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

One of the hymnals has an Easter hymn set to Engelberg, and I thought I could do something similar but better. Or at least more to my own taste.

I may have forgotten a verse and if so I'll include it later.

If it's not too early to say so, Christ is risen!

Let Easter alleluias fill this place
for God has sanctified the human race,
fulfilling all the pledges of His grace,
Alleluia!

Why seek the Living One among the dead?
The Lord was raised in glory as He said.
That we might follow where our Master led,
Alleluia!

The path of glory shines before our eyes:
the Christian road that leads beyond the skies.
By crucifixion and by death we rise,
Alleluia!

Come quickly, Jesus, prove your promise true.
Bring all creation into life anew:
a living sacrifice of praise to You,
Alleluia!

c. Kathleen Pluth. This text may be used freely during Eastertide 2009. All other rights reserved.

Today was the first Palm Sunday for the youth Schola that I began at my parish last summer, so it was the first time these children sang and processed about the children who sang and processed. Twenty-odd kids in red and white robes, dressed and ready to warmup at 8:15 in the blooming morning!

From morning prayer: "God grant that with the angels and the children we may be always faithful, and sing with them to the conqueror of death: Hosanna in the highest."