Solemn Advent Vespers at the Cathedral
You can’t read much in the history of Christianity
without running across the story of the 10th century
Russian emissaries who, being sent by their ruler Prince Vladimir
to discover the true religion, decided that they had found it
when they witnessed the Divine Liturgy in the Church of Hagia
Sophia. “For we knew not,” they told the Prince,
“whether we were in heaven or on earth.” I
don’t think anyone—at least, anyone who knows the
state of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church—has much
hope, still less expectation, of having such an experience in any
Catholic church in our time. But it can happen. It has happened
to me.
For some years now, the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
in Mobile, Alabama (that’s mo-BEEL, not
MO-buhl) has offered solemn vespers on the Sundays of
Advent. I haven’t attended as often as I would like; the
cathedral is twenty miles away and for one reason or another it
has more often than not been inconvenient for me to take the
time. But it was at one of these services a few years ago that I
had a momentary taste of what it might actually feel like to
praise God in heaven, and I knew that there might be more than
metaphor to those images of the redeemed singing eternally
there.
The idea of an endless church service sounds more like hell
than heaven to most of us, and is one of the reasons why people
say those very ignorant and foolish things about preferring hell
because it will be more interesting than heaven. But that’s
a defect in us, and in our modes of worship. I have spent many
years complaining, sometimes bitterly, about the drab and
deadening quality of most Catholic worship: ugly buildings,
wretched music, lifeless language. So it delights me to be able
to report a ray of sunlight in the gloom.
The interior of the cathedral is beautiful and has unusually
fine acoustics. For a cathedral, it’s rather small, and so
an organ and a small but talented and well-directed choir can
fill it with sound. The choir director knows how to use the
space, with long slow lines of chant and polyphony that have time
to bloom sonically. Most of the texts are sung, which means that
our dispirited liturgical translations have little chance to work
their negative spell. There is no badinage whatsoever. Offhand I
don’t in fact recall a single word spoken this afternoon
that was not part of the liturgy.
Above all, I think, there are two things operative here that
make this service so worshipful: the first, the sine qua
non, is reverence, and the second is a kind of taste which
follows from and is supported by reverence. I don’t mean
simple aesthetic taste, although that’s important. I mean
also a sense of propriety as to what is compatible with
reverence. The worst days of marginal competence in Catholic
choirs may be over—I hope they are over—but I have
heard any number of capable choirs sing a hodgepodge of peppy
pop-worship songs and traditional hymns which always somehow seem
to be calling attention to themselves, a quality strengthened by
too-prominent placement of the choir and all their guitars, amps,
mikes, keyboards, and mixers at the front of the church. In the
cathedral the choir is in a traditional loft at the rear of the
church, and the sound floats out into the huge reverberant space
above us.
This reverence doesn’t seem the least bit strained or
inauthentic, nor this taste self-consciously exquisite. Rather
they seem to be the natural unforced result of a sense that we
are approaching God and that our understanding of Who He Is leads
naturally not to any sort of shallow conviviality but to a
respectful attentiveness that necessarily becomes an external and
internal quiet, because its object is outside itself. Nothing,
therefore, seems directed toward the nurturing or manipulation of
our feelings. The music is at the service of the texts. The texts
are at the service of the Advent message: Something wonderful
is about to happen. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.
The only disappointing thing about this afternoon’s
vespers was the slight attendance. I don’t think more than
fifty people were there. If anyone in the Mobile area is reading
this: there’s still one more Sunday in Advent.