“The Eyes of All Wait Upon You”
[“The eyes of all wait upon You, and You give them their food in due season. You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Ps 145:15-16). Driven from his Mannheim opera conducting post by Nazis in the 1930s, the Jewish Jean Berger (1909-2002) fled to France, Brazil, and in 1941 to the United States where he would live for sixty years. In 1959 he set the above text for a cappella choral ensemble.]
O Lover,
One of my idiosyncrasies these years is that I often awaken in the morning playing in my head a piece of music, much of it hymnody or choral, from some segment of my earlier life. This happened again recently, the piece du jour being Jean Berger’s choral setting of Psalm 145:15-16. Although I had known of the piece much earlier, it was the Notre Dame Basilica Liturgical Choir’s performance of it several times in the last decade as part of the Sunday liturgy that first moved me. However, the recent AM awakening experience went well beyond the previous experiences. You of whom I am aware because of Your Lógos (“Word” [Jn 1:1,14]), give me words so as to communicate of that translucent musical experience.
One of my childhood memories had me marveling that I am; that I had been, however involuntarily, seemingly “thrown into being” (Heidegger’s term, used much later), rather than not being. I was, in effect, exclaiming vive la difference! regarding the two states decades before I knew either the words or what was at stake! That state of wonder that I am would remain a fixture throughout my subsequent life.
Enter the recent early morning recital of Berger’s composition. The score unfolds in a manner both understated and yet exuberant. The ever-modulating harmonies, here and there flirting with dissonance but then waning into resolution, are fetching throughout, not least in the pianissimo segments. Above all, the entangling of score and poetic text, the transformative fusion at the heart of great choral music, gives rise to an artistic power far greater than either or their sum. Few other human endeavors so demonstrably exhibit the possibility of co-creatorship with You, O Womb of all!
Awakening to such a piece can set the ambiance for an entire day or season. It, first of all, deepens my life-long wonder that I am rather than am not, that I am neither self-generating nor auto-accounting, that I am recipient from You upon whom I wait and in whom I rest. That both I and all of Your other finite beloveds are graced with being is the central miracle, this more than some outlier experience of a paranormal or contra-natural sort.
Furthermore, the wedded score/text elicits my gratitude to You for the simple, commonplace, and necessary, bread in this case. This awareness has various layers. For example, this piece surely has eucharistic overtones for me, You experienced as ever Self-outpouring, as always giving Your Self away to us of the creaturehood. At the same time, in a world of massive hunger for, and growing maldistribution of, food I can get a metaphorical stitch in my side when expressing gratitude that I am among the privileged. And then there is here the constant reminder of dependency upon You for the sustaining of my very being.
Finally, the text speaks of satiation of the desire of every living creature, this from Your opened hand. Here, though, my encounter with the piece is laced with questions. How do I reconcile the text’s second sentence with the omnivorous character of the bio-food chain, “red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson), which I have experienced up close in my Chesapeake decade? On another front, how do I correlate that same sentence with the strand of Christian mysticism (e.g., Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner) for whom eternity itself is too brief a duration for such sating, a strand which has moved me powerfully? And what all is the meaning of satiation when referencing You, The One upon whom “the eyes of all wait”?
Ah yes, in the words from The Song of Songs explored by Bonaventure in his Journey of the Soul to God: “As the ego was asleep, the heart remained vigilant” (5:2).
