Psalmody and silence

January 8 - Weekday in Christmastide -
PSALMODY.
Flung back and forth across the choir from side to side
In gallant game, ordered and rhythmic as the tide
The verses mount their crest, then die away,
Begin again, to mark the Hours of night and day.
Potent the praise as surging wave succeeds to wave,
Persistent game that echoing from choir to nave
Soars and rebounds as verses mount the crest
To break upon the shore eternal, where the best.p
Of players join the game: answering Angels toss
The verses back to earth across
The net between Time and Eternity
Alert in reciprocity,
While all the Saints in heaven linked to saints below
Echo from world to world the ordered ebb and flow.
~from GREGORIAN CHANT, VOLUME TWO ~ Justine Ward

THIS SOMEWHAT WHIMSICAL poem got my attention. These verses are right to describe this exercise, in verse 2, as tidal, “ordered and rhythmic”, and even in their somewhat abrupt shift to imagery that sounds more like a game of badminton, with verses passing “back to earth/across the net between Time and Eternity…”.

I am not the only person to sense a powerful affirmation proceeding from the recitation of psalmic verses rendered choir-wise, in monastic fashion, with the lines traded back and forth across an open space, and with significant silences observed at

intervals within the text.  The script of the surprisingly popular British TV series, Call the Midwife, has the chanting of psalmody by the program’s Anglican nuns as the soundtrack for almost every critical scene. This device strikes me as an effective way of referring to the generous and humane tradition that, without intrusive piety or sentimentality, underlies the entire premise of this gentle  television series.

Is it possible to write or say anything meaningful about silence?  It seems like a contradiction in terms to do so, yet the convergence of sound and silence is what creates a large part of what I am trying to convey. “Words spun around silence” is how I described the psalms chanted by the brothers of The Society of Saint John the Evangelist when I first stayed with them in 1995. It is this elusive quality of silence that is hard to translate, whether it is into the imagery of a badminton game or the rising and falling of the tide.  

Last year I wrote these words: at the daily office, even as we plod methodically through the psalms, sometimes the words begin to throb with a strange intensity, and to dance in the air like overcharged particles of light. Around us the  air seems to ring with the anticipation of bells and birds. What can we do in response to this unexpected surge of incipient light? In fact, all we do is proceed  with our psalmody, for we are a battered and weary church, wearing our ancient vocation like a salvation army coat, wearing it in full knowledge that in so doing we have made ourselves a target for God’s alarming emptiness, and that aliens and strangers will teach our own truths to us as if we had never heard of them before.