“Hymn to the Creator of Light”
(1/25/23)
O Lover,
On the overcast and sleeting 3rd Sunday of ordinary time, “in the bleak mid-winter,” I was preparing myself for Mass as I do weekly by listening to the “Sing for Joy” program of sacred music from St. Olaf College. Suddenly I heard John Rutter’s “Hymn to the Creator of Light” sung by the Dale Warland Singers, a recording I have in my own collection. An early 17th Century text wed to an acapella score for double-choir, this motet held me silent and transfixed as it deposited me into a deeper awareness of Your presence.
The text of Rutter’s composition of worship and adoration of You begins with reference to the “visible light” emanating from the sun, “the flame of fire,” and thus by implication encompassing all that is physical, material. This is the kataphátic (“with images, words [both read & heard], linearity”) dimension of the work which attributes all creation apprehendable via the senses to You, the Source.
The text then shifts, proceeding with these lines: “Creator also of the light invisible and intellectual: That which is known of God, the light invisible.“ This, for me, is territory of apophática (“sans images, words, linearity”), a dimension in which the musical score does the heavier lifting. It was this second dimension, involving principally the musical score, which both skewered and transported me in the “bleak mid-winter” Sunday last.
So how do I in this word-saddled prayer-blog convey something of being encountered by Your apophatic “invisible light”? How can I use words to communicate intimations of Your glory which transcend language or any other depiction? How can scratchings from a kataphatic verbal toolkit possibly aid in sharing an experience of Your indescribability? How do we name (and thus seek to characterize) the Whirlwind? (The reader should know that such questions have been a chronic itch within me since the beginning of this blog nearly a decade ago, an itch the scratching of which, Gregory of Nyssa has taught me, I will never accomplish to my full satisfaction, neither now nor “after.”)
So what can I write in the aftermath of Sunday last? From the very opening measures of Rutter’s work I was aware of being abruptly snatched out of a mode of faith centering in the cognitive, creedal, theological, and head into one more open-ended, experiential, intuitive, mystical, and seated in the heart. For however many moments this transport lingered, I found myself stripped of doubt, argument, or anything else, seemingly blissfully and unknowingly adrift in You, Mare Pacífica. For that brief duration awareness of the lavish Mystérium of You was self-evidently far more than enough. And, in retrospect, it seemed incontrovertible that it had been the Rutter’s composition, particularly the score, which had mediated Your invisibility, Your unspeakableness, Your too good to be true Mystérium.
Not entirely unlike Dante’s Beatrice, such music in my experience has repeatedly been conscripted to serve as Your angel (“messenger”). I lean toward viewing such music—rife with capacities for expressing the haunting, the etherial, the luminous, the numinous, the wondrous, these via major-minor shift, dissonance resolution, drop-jaw harmony, and the gloriously inimitable human voice—as oxymoronically akin to mystery, as a sliver of the finite somehow allowed to slip its bonds, however momentarily. I experienced Rutter’s motet, its feet like all music anchored in mathematics and physics, as escort service into Your lavish embrace, into what Hadewijch of Brabant termed the “Totality,” where all is One and all shall be well. I celebrate music of this sort as my eighth sacrament, one repeatedly the most impactful of the whole lot.
