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.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta and the Suffering Foundresses

On the 10th anniversary of the death of Blessed Mother Teresa, I thought I would blog a little about an unusual category of Catholic saint: the suffering foundress. Much as St. Paul suffered in founding the early Christian communities, these nuns suffer in bringing forth new religious families of prayer and service.

A classic telling of the story of a "suffering foundress" is the book Foundations by St. Teresa of Avila, a very candid first-hand account of this very paradoxical holy woman. She was cloistered, but always travelling. Debilitated by constant, serious illnesses, she worked against many difficulties to found an average of a monastery a year for her last 16 years. (Imagine setting up a new household every year.) She was a mystic, in Spain, under the very eye of the Inquisition. Uneducated, she wrote treatises and is honored as a Doctor of the Church.

But Blessed Teresa of Calcutta was not named after "the great Teresa", but after Teresa of Avila's daughter, St. Therese of Lisieux, whom Teresa called "the little one." She was so little that she did not worry if Jesus ignored her, or tossed her aside like a toy. That is how she felt, and she accepted, with a very willful freedom, the "mystical abandonment" that is the purification of the saints. Her life's story--which was brief enough, as she died when she was 24--has converted many people of all backgrounds, including many French intellectuals.

A similar abandonment must have been experienced by Blessed Maria Teresa Scrilli, who founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, a community of Carmelites. This is what happened to her:

The political leaders of Montevarchi, who frowned upon the Carmelites' presence, confiscated their school in 1859 via the law of partial suppression and obliged them not to wear the religious habit. But the Sisters would not admit defeat, and the Foundress opened a house and private school in Montevarchi. Due to lack of space in the new premises and to avoid further difficulties, several Sisters and Mother Maria Teresa lived at her family home. In 1862 individual citizens were deprived of the right to earn a living - let alone to run a private school -, and the Religious had to close their school and return to their respective families.

When Sr. Maria Teresa died, after a lot of trouble, the new congregation consisted of two sisters, a novice and a postulant. It must have seemed like it was all over. But it was not. The sisters serve in education, health care, prison ministry, and eldercare in 8 countries around the world.

Last October, Blessed Maria Teresa Scrilli was beatified by the Catholic Church. My collaborator, the Roman composer Aurelio Porfiri, was commissioned to write an oratorio for the celebration, and in view of recording the oratorio he asked me to write 2 songs and translate one of his. My translation of Aurelio's song is very direct, and, unusually, it is a song about the painful difficulties of the spiritual life. Here's the first verse and refrain:

The earth has become like a desert

No fruit coming forth from the land

What will become now of the life I gave you?

What will I become?

If grain will not fall to the ground

To die, to give all of itself,

No fruit will come, and nothing remains for us:

Nothing will remain...

Tonight I attended a special Mass for Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. The pews were full: partly of the "regular" crowd of students and area residents, but mostly with the Missionaries of Charity (Blessed Teresa's community) and some of the people to whom they minister. I sat next to a little girl brought by one of the sisters. Throughout the Mass, the little girl often moved her arm so it pressed against mine. Kids often do this when they would like contact with someone older--some affection and quasi-parental devotion. I should her what kindness I could, but it was nothing at all, really. What matters is the generosity of the women who care for her every day, whose lives of joyful service are made possible by the mystical graces of those who preceded them in faith--mystical graces, gifts of God, that often seem so mysteriously wrapped in darkness.

The Music of the Spheres

Isn't it funny how you can hear a song for years and still notice something fresh, hearing it again?

I've never before noticed that the Beatles' "Hard Days Night" has a drum track just like Buddy Holly's--never before today.

In the Eastern Christian tradition, heaven is said to be a gradual unfolding of the depth of our joy. God's glory, always present, is always new and always being discovered.

Just like music.