HE emphasizes that one of the outstanding features of monastic spirituality was “a sense of the Lord’s majesty”, which can be most clearly appreciated in monastic liturgical compositions: antiphons, responsories, hymns, tropes, and sequences.  “It was,” he states “in and through the liturgy that the monks came into contact with the Scripture and the Fathers; and [through the liturgy] they were permeated by the great traditional religious themes.” (Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 1957).

WHILE the liturgy was thus a principal source of monastic spiritual insight, it also came to reflect the results of monastic contemplative prayer.  Monks and nuns who experienced God in the liturgy wrote prayers and poems describing their spiritual perceptions: these poems, in turn, became antiphons, responsories, and sequences in the monastic antiphonal (the book of music used at the Liturgy of the Hours) and gradual (containing the music used at mass). In this way, over many centuries experiences of contemplative prayer were set to music and incorporated into the liturgies that had originally inspired them.

 LITURGICAL prayer therefore affords an encounter God at many different levels.  Two of these are reflected in the literary genres that compose the liturgy:

[1] God is present both in the historical narrative and “beneath the letter” of the inspired biblical texts which make up the majority of the liturgy; and

[2] the non-biblical poetry (hymns, antiphons, responsories, sequences) and prayers of the liturgy invite us to make our own the interpretations and experiences of our Christian forebears.

CONCERNING the mystical significance of the sequences and responsories Leclercq writes: 

    The traditional bases were primarily the Bible and the Fathers. If all these compositions are essentially poetic in character, they owe it to minds which had been fashioned by Holy Scripture. Their modes of expression are concrete and rich in images. The value of their words lies more in what they mean than in what they actually say: their evocative power is greater than their precision; each of them is like a note which awakens harmonics.

    All the delicacy of liturgical poetry comes from the free and har­monious use it makes of the sacred words: the groups of versicles, each of which, because of its origin and own particular meaning, has special significance and whose combination produces a more complex, and a newer whole; they are daring in juxtaposing two texts, one of which throws light upon the other, thereby forming, because it is so different, a contrast with it which makes each one’s individual light more intense; their way of lending a wide range of different colors to the same unchanging texts by, for example, incorporating verses of the Psalms within the antiphons; the continual passage from fact to allegory, from event to idea; the alternation of formulas, each of which evokes a different reality, which complete each other within a whole that is richer still, as the facets of a diamond permit us to see all its fires asparkle. 

(The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, A Study of Monastic Culture, 
Jean Jeclercq, O.S.B. , tr, C. Misrahi, (Fordham Univ. Press, NY, 1961, 1974). p. 295.)

HOMO QUIDAM

THE following prolix responsory illustrates many of these features. It represents the musical and poetic application of the practice of lectio divina to the  liturgy.  Meditation on the meaning of Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, has interwoven the Lord’s parable of the great feast (which does not have a happy ending) with the much more joyful cry of Wisdom in Proverbs to “come eat the bread and drink the wine” she has mixed. This responsory is also the focus of both readings in the Office of Readings for Wednesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time (v. 3, pp. 209-213: Prov. 9:1-18; Commentary on Proverbs by Procopius of Gaza).

THIS English antiphon for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time is based on the prolix responsory above:

VENI SANCTE SPIRITUS

VENI CREATOR SPIRITUS

Antiphonale Synopticum: Neumes, square-note, and Latin text: http://gregorianik.uni-regensburg.de/cdb/3095

This Webpage was created for a workshop held at Saint Andrew's Abbey, Valyermo, California in 1990....x....  ’ “”.

SEE FULL TRANSLATION

Second reading
From a commentary on the Book of Proverbs by Procopius of Gaza, bishop
The Wisdom of God has mingled wine and spread a table for us

Wisdom has built herself a house. God the Father’s Power, himself a person, has fashioned as his dwelling-place the whole world in which he lives by his activity, and also man who, created to resemble God’s own image and likeness, has a nature which is partly seen and partly hidden from our eyes.

And she has set up seven pillars. To man who was made in the image of Christ when the rest of creation was completed, Wisdom gave the seven gifts of the Spirit to enable him to believe in Christ and to keep his commandments. By means of these gifts the spiritual man grows and develops until, through firm faith and the supernatural graces he receives, he finally reaches maturity. Knowledge stimulates virtue and virtue reflects knowledge. The fear of the Lord, understanding and knowledge give the true orientation to his natural wisdom. Power makes him eager to seek understanding of the will of God as revealed in the laws by which the entire creation is governed. Counsel distinguishes these most sacred and eternal laws of God from anything opposed to them; for these laws are meant for man to ponder, to proclaim, and to fulfill. Insight disposes man to embrace these expressions of God’s will and to reject whatever contravenes them.

She has mingled her wine in a bowl and spread her table. Because the Word of God has mingled in man, as in a bowl, a spiritual and a physical nature, and has given him a knowledge both of creation and of himself as the Creator, it is natural for the things of God to have on man’s mind the inebriating effect of wine. Christ himself, the bread from heaven, is his nourishment enabling him to grow in virtue, and it is Christ who quenches his thirst and gladdens him with his teaching. For all who desire to share in it, he has prepared this rich banquet, this spiritual feast.

She has sent forth her servants with the sublime message that all are to come to the bowl and drink. Christ has sent forth his apostles, the servants of his divine will, to proclaim the message of the Gospel which, since it is spiritual, transcends both the natural and the written law. By this he calls us to himself in whom as in a bowl there was brought about by the mystery of the incarnation a marvelous mingling of the divine and human natures, although each still remains distinct. And through the apostles he cries out: Is anyone foolish? Let him turn to me. If anyone is so foolish as to think in his heart that there is no God, let him renounce his disbelief and turn to me by faith. Let him know that I am the maker of all things and their Lord.

And to those who lack wisdom he says: Come, eat my bread and drink the wine that I have prepared for you. To those who still lack the works of faith and the higher knowledge which inspires them he says: “Come, eat my body, the bread that is the nourishment of virtue, and drink my blood, the wine that cheers you with the joy of true knowledge and makes you divine. For in a wonderful way I have mingled my divinity with my blood for your salvation.”