Urbi et Orbi

At their best, hymns can pack a ton of theological information, and religious emotion, into a small space. Here's a familiar Easter hymn by Charles Wesley.

1. Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!

Sons of men and angels say: Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply: Alleluia!

2. Vain the stone, the watch, the seal; Alleluia!
Christ has burst the gates of hell: Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise; Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise! Alleluia!

3. Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting?
Alleluia!Once He died, our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

4. Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

5. Hail, the Lord of earth and heaven! Alleluia!
Praise to thee by both be given; Alleluia!
Thee we greet triumphant now; Alleluia!
Hail, the Resurrection, thou! Alleluia!

Aside from the excellence of the entire hymn, which takes us proleptically from the Resurrection of Christ to our own resurrection (in keeping with the remarkable Pauline logic of I Corinthians 15), there is a single line of such exquisite theological intensity that I've tried to "steal" it in several different ways already in my own writing.

"Vain the stone, the watch, the seal; Alleluia!"

Frankly the rest of verse 2 is somewhat pro forma, because after this line, what else is there to say? The tomb is empty! Death has been defeated, the powers of earth have been defeated. Their efforts are vain--kenotic--empty, and against God.

The images are directly Scriptural and used as Scripture uses them. And yet they come through the hymn in a fresh way. First, they demand a small amount of work, like a puzzle: in context and as a group they can only mean the three things they mean, but first one must think. Which stone? Watch (a multivalent English word)? Seal (the same)? The hymn points us back to Scripture to rediscover a story with concrete details, including the unusual situation of soldiers guarding a dead man. Secondly, they are very short words, one of the keys to Wesley's perennial appeal. Here his short words are nouns (and an adjective) but just as often they are verbs: "FIX in us thy humble dwelling/ all thy faithful mercies CROWN" (from another excellent Wesley hymn, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling).

Thirdly, these short words have big, open sounds. Vain is an emphatic word, a word that excludes, but its long vowel would seem to suggest the opposite. (Notice that the sound of the old word "fain" captures a sense of longing.) "Stone," one of Thomas Merton's favorite words, implies weight and solidity, with its long O. "Watch" is exceptional here. The vowel is short, the consonants much more expressive. "Seal" has a very long vowel, a diphthong anchored in its long e.

Verse 3 will taunt death, death in se, in the Pauline way. But here at the beginning of verse 2 we are still in the mode of wonder at the fact of Jesus' resurrection, as much declaring the resurrection as reflecting upon it. And yet there is some taunt in this line: it is both "joy" and "triumph."

As with all great hymns a congregation becomes like little children saying "Can you believe it? Look at the great things God has done!"

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.

Christ Is Alive! A good idea, a problematic hymn

Christ Is Alive!

This hymn, while popular, is theologically problematic. In verse 1, the image of an empty cross against the sky is used. Biblically, this image cannot represent the resurrection, because the cross was already “empty” on Good Friday evening, when the Lord was dead. The empty tomb is the biblical symbol of the resurrection, not the empty cross. Poetically there is a problem as well: the usual reworking of the fourth line “His love in death shall never die” is not a clear English expression. In verse 2, the implication is that there was a time when Christ was “bound to distant years in Palestine.” But that implies that the Trinity was deficient during the time of the earthly life of Jesus, which cannot be correct. Verse 3 implies that God was remote from His people until the resurrection. But this is not true for many reasons: first, God’s holiness was a holiness of presence and intimacy with the Hebrew community. Secondly, I John connects the tangibility of Jesus with the Incarnation, not the resurrection. In verse 4, the idea of the Risen Christ suffering is at the very least controversial.

Although it’s good to connect the Resurrection with its implications in daily life, this song fails to do that quite correctly.

That Pretty Little Dutch Tune

The verses are--okay. But the refrain more than makes up for that brush with mediocrity by its celebratory rendering of I Corinthians 15--St. Paul's theologically all-important text on the Resurrection.

In which he says, "But someone may ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?' What a stupid question!"

By George Radcliffe Woodward, who also gave us the fine theological text Ding Dong Merrily On High.

This joyful Easter-tide,

Away with care and sorrow!

My Love, the Crucified,

Hath sprung to life this morrow.

Refrain

Had Christ, that once was slain,

Ne’er burst His three day prison,

Our faith had been in vain;

But now hath Christ arisen,

Arisen, arisen, arisen!

My flesh in hope shall rest,

And for a season slumber;

Till trump from east to west,

Shall wake the dead in number.

Refrain

Death’s flood hath lost his chill,

Since Jesus crossed the river:

Lover of souls, from ill

My passing soul deliver.

Refrain

Regina Coeli

The first time I really noticed the Regina Coeli was not in its chant version, but in a rollicking rendition that may be peculiar to Redemptorists. Back in college, during my "junior year abroad" in Annapolis, I was the Saturday evening cantor at St. Mary's Church. Soon I was the cantor for the choir Mass as well, and as things went, I was asked to cant for the Triduum. Alas, I didn't sing the Exsultet as the choir director loved to do that possibly as much as I--and he was the choir director. But on the Easter Vigil there were a number of Psalms of course, and plenty else for me to do.

St. Mary's is an active parish with elementary and high schools, and also functions as a retirement home for the Redemptorist province. I met some wonderful priests there, some of them elderly. When religious priests are older, they are apparently asked to do less and less. Most of the priests had no official role in the Mass except as concelebrants. I was the only layperson on the altar, just me and all those priests. I kept thinking about the Psalm, "You have set them in the company of princes. Yes, with the princes of your own people." It struck me as very ironic that I as a laywoman, with no institution of any kind, had so many interesting roles to play while these good priests were pretty much silent. (I guess this betrays an error on my part concerning the dignity of a concelebrant.)

They were silent, that is, until after the Communion song. "The young ones" were still distributing Communion. I sat down, and the organ started up this highly raucous Regina Coeli. It really must be a Redemptorist setting--I haven't heard it before or since. The older fathers in their chairs came in loud on the first note and didn't let up till the end. It was the most joyous singing I have ever heard.

***

For most of the year, the Church has a tradition of saying the Angelus prayer, recalling the Anunciation of the Lord, at 6 am, noon, and 6 pm. But during Easter, we sing the Regina Coeli.
The prayer is addressed to Mary as she is now and forever, the Queen of Heaven. (You could call her Queen of Martyrs or Queen of Apostles, both of which she is, but why not just cut to the chase?) It is in the imperative mood, which is very beautiful: we are telling Mary to rejoice. Not really, though. She will rejoice whether we tell her to or not, but when we ask her to, that gives us a way to enter into her rejoicing personally. It's a little like an Afro-American congregation telling the preacher, "Preach!" It's not like he's going to stop preaching if you don't say it, but you feel better that you did.

Queen of heaven, rejoice, Alleluia

For He whom you merited to bear, Alleluia

Has risen as He said, Alleluia

Pray for us to God, Alleluia.

In the parish where I work as a cantor these days, I try to slip a little Latin hymn in after the Communion song whenever possible. In Ordinary Time I often slip in the Salve Regina. So far I've sung Regina Coeli at each Easter Mass. Sometimes when I'm singing I focus my efforts on the good of the congregation to the glory of God. Most times, that's what I do. I do hope that a lot of folks in the congregation, especially this congregation which is very prayerful, will be happy to hear a brief Latin hymn chanted to the Mother of God. But the Regina Coeli--I sing that for priests.