Shape and Substance

Shape and Substance, No.8

17 December 2024

O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
iacentem in praesepio!
Beata Virgo, cujus viscera
meruerunt portare
Dominum Iesum Christum.
Alleluia!

O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the newborn Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed Virgin whose womb
is worthy to bear
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia!

The American composer Martin Lauridsen set this ancient Latin text, the fourth responsory for Matins on Christmas Day, to unforgettable music, first performed in Los Angeles on 18 December 1994, thirty years ago tomorrow. It has since become a staple of Christmas repertory for choirs and chorales all over the world. I’ve sung it a dozen times. Pat is playing the Robert Shaw recording of it while I write these words and she bakes my birthday cake (pineapple upside-down cake, if you must know). When I heard the opening strains, I got up from my desk and padded into the kitchen, sat down at the island to listen, while tears rose in my eyes. It is one of the two or three most beautiful, transporting pieces of music I have ever sung.

As the last notes disappear into the ether, I find myself wondering why this piece moves me so. The answer, I think, is this: it is a musical rendering of mystery, characterized by what one reviewer, Susanne Stähr, called “volksliedhafte Schlichtheit, ätherisch entrückte Klänge, eigenwillige Expressivität (“folksong-like simplicity, ethereal otherworldly sounds, personal expressivity”).[1] Stähr is right; Lauridsen’s music soars into the ether on the wings of rising open fourths and falls back to earth in open fifths. Dissonant seconds sustain tensions that resolve finally into thirds, never cloying but somehow soothing. The music moves, but the movement seems more like stillness than motion. And through it all, one has the sense of sitting in the nave of some grand cathedral while the air fills with unknowable, inexplicable mystery.

The text Lauridsen uses is the sung response to Lesson IV in the liturgy for Matins of Christmas Day. I am not Roman Catholic, but what I understand of the Roman liturgy of Christmas Eve/Christmas Day is that Matins immediately precedes the Midnight Mass, which then gives way to Lauds, the liturgy of praise on Christmas morning. Before the praise comes the dark and the silence. Matins on Christmas is a liturgy for and in darkness and wordlessness. In this fourth responsory, there is not a single human or divine figure to be found, other than Mary (and she only as a womb, rather than a whole person). No shepherds, no wise men, no innkeeper, no Joseph, no Herodian guards prowling about—no people to confuse the moment with commentary and obscure the scene with sensationalism. There are only the animals, and they alone are admitted to the “admirable Sacrament.”

Don’t misunderstand; this is not some PETA-ized Christmas column, no misanthropic rant. Rather, what I’m pointing to is the silence, the absence of talk, the sheer awestruck wonder that transcends words and can somehow best be appreciated by those beings for whom words are both inaccessible and unnecessary, who live every breath and heartbeat in the presence of Mystery. I confess to no small envy of them.

We’ll be in worship on Christmas Eve. We’ll sing the appointed songs and read the appointed texts (and hear the inevitable sermon ostensibly derived therefrom), confess our sin in scripted unison and mumble “the peace of Christ” in the general direction of our fellow congregants to the accompaniment of a holy fist-bump. By the time all is said and done, I trust that most of the gathered worthies in the sanctuary will have some sense that they have celebrated the advent of the One into human life.

I doubt that I will, however. I suspect that the hour spent robed and seated in the choir loft singing and listening to the words of Christmas will leave me pretty much as it increasingly does: with the sense that I’ve sat through a ritual that has outlived its usefulness for me (I recognize this is an idiosyncratic sense not necessarily shared by others). I am weary of words said in worship, having spent my life writing and saying them. Words are like clothing: they conceal more than they reveal, provide places to hide as much as occasions to communicate. Words are little invitations to dishonesty. It’s not that I don’t believe them (although some of them I don’t); it’s that, used too often or too glibly, they cease to deliver what they promise, are flattened like champagne left open on the table overnight.

It won’t be until later, perhaps in the middle of the night, perhaps just before dawn on Christmas Day, that I will experience the Incarnation in the way I have come to know it best: in the wordlessness of the Great World that curls itself beneath my windows and waits just outside my door, in the chill of the pre-dawn frost, in the twinkle of stars alight in the windswept darkness of the night sky—in short, in a cosmos brimful-to-overflowing with the presence of the One who speaks not a word and yet who gathers all words and all things unto Itself. I will stand in the dark on my back porch and draw my bathrobe closer against the cold and open myself to the Sacrament once again.

And then it will be Christmas.

Here is a poem:

Matins, Christmas Morning[2]

O magnum mysterium …

                        -Fourth Responsory for Matins on Christmas Day

Mystery needs no consecration.

It sighs in the wind,

crackles in the hoarfrost,

burrows earthworm tunnels in the loam,

eddies in the water where trout hold, unheard, unseen—

…et admirabile sacramentum…

I wake before the house,

stand on the back porch in the wintry air

of the not-yet-dawn of day.

Cold flash-freezes sleep within my brain.

The dog is attending to his urges,

aware, I imagine, that the brittle grass he sniffs

and the wisps exhalant from his nose

are pregnant with Mystery.

It waits to be born.

Or no—

it is already here, has always been here,

before we began these daily offices

of field and forage.

He knows.

He knows because he is Mystery.

He clothes Mystery in the soft swaddling of his fur.

…ut animalia viderunt…

Borrowed Question:

Why is this night different from all others?

Answer 1: It is the same as every other.

Answer 2: There has never been another like it.

Answer 3: It is the womb of a new creation.

Dawn breaks, a birthing mother.

Fluid light soaks the horizon.

Mystery is being born. Again.

Each morning is birth,

each evening is death,

…dominum natum iacentem in praesepio…

Sanguine and pure,

Mystery pulses in the veins of creation,

coursing with the nourishment of life—

or spills, pouring out onto the land,

a death that does not die

but seeps between the living rocks

into the light-starved caverns of creation,

an aquifer recharged by wonder,

life come at last

to the womb’s dark heart.

It gestates there, in night-bound silence, waiting…

O beata virgo, cuius viscera meruerunt portare dominum Iesum Christum…

The dog has finished his oblations.

I cinch my robe against the cold

and reach behind me for the doorknob.

Inside is warmth, and food, and she, asleep.

Why is this day different from all other days?

It is no different.

There will never be another like it.

Mystery is born this day. Again.

Alleluia.

Merry Christmas.

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[1] Susanne Stähr, “Morten Lauridsen O magnum mysterium”. klassik-heute.com 15 February 2007.

[2] Paul K. Hooker, The Longing: Poems. Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024, p. 49.