Surrexit Christus spes mea

I scheduled this post to appear at the time of sunrise on Easter Sunday in Jerusalem. Clever, no?

Happy Easter, everyone. May the new life of our Risen Lord well up in every heart!

I thought that since many will be denied the sequence at Sunday Mass today, even though it isn't optional, I would post it for you.








Victimae paschali laudes
immolent Christiani.

Agnus redemit oves:
Christus innocens Patri
reconciliavit peccatores.

Mors et vita duello
conflixere mirando:
dux vitae mortuus, regnat vivus.

Dic nobis Maria,
quid vidisti in via?
Sepulcrum Christi viventis,
et gloriam vidi resurgentis: 

Angelicos testes, sudarium, et vestes. 
Surrexit Christus spes mea: 
praecedet suos in Galilaeam. 

Scimus Christum surrexisse 
a mortuis vere: 
tu nobis, victor Rex, miserere. 

Amen. Alleluia!


Christians to the Paschal Victim
Offer your thankful praises!

A Lamb the sheep redeems;
Christ, who only is sinless,
Reconciles sinners to the Father.

Death and life have contended
in that combat stupendous:
The Prince of life, who died, reigns immortal.

Speak, Mary, declaring
What you saw, wayfaring.
The tomb of Christ, who is living,
The glory of Jesus' Resurrection;

Bright angels attesting,
the shroud and napkin resting.
Yes, Christ my hope is arisen;
to Galilee he goes before you.

Christ indeed from death is risen,
our new life obtaining.
Have mercy, victor King, ever reigning!

Amen. Alleluia!

Postquam hostem et inferna

I have to admit it. I love to sing. So I was happy this morning when the choirmaster announced that for a communion meditation we would sing Adam of St. Victor's sequence for the Ascension, Postquam hostem et inferna.

It begins:

Postquam hostem et inferna
spoliavit ad superna
Christus redit gaudia
angelorum ascendenti
sicut olim descendenti
parantur obsequia

"After despoiling enemy and hell,
Christ returns to joyful heights,
ascending as before he descended,
attended by the angels."

That's very loose. As always, translation improvements are welcome in the comments!

What is Contemplation?

I tend to avoid the terms 'contemplative prayer' and 'contemplation' because I have so often heard them used as value judgments rather than descriptive terms. Sometimes--especially in religious life--certain forms of prayer (e.g. devotional prayer) are looked down upon as less advanced. My experience along the way in my own journey as well as working with other pray-ers has convinced me that prayer is so intimately bound up with temperament and condition of life that the best form of prayer is the one that fits, not the one that anyone says is more 'advanced.'

For me, I've always found a quiet form of prayer to be a good fit. Early on along the way God provided me with a spiritual friend who introduced me to the writings of Thomas Keating and the Centering Prayer method. After sixteen years of practice I would hesitate to call my prayer by that name; it has become something else. I have also come to regard some of Keating's writing as eccentric, though I still think the practical doctrine is of great value.

So, given all of that, lately I have been playing with a definition of contemplative prayer and contemplation:

Contemplative prayer is the practice of consenting to let our desire attend exclusively to its Ultimate and Final object, Who is God. In this practice we come to know ourselves in our own deepest identity, as fruits and expressions of the Love who desires us into being, and Who restores us to beautiful being by emptying Himself into our humanity in Christ. Contemplation is the obscure knowledge that these two loving desires are ultimately identical. Christ, then, in the perfect union of his two distinct natures, is perfect contemplation itself. The person of Christ is thus both the model and the object of contemplative prayer.

Hugh's Advice to the Unchaste

What shall you pay to the Lord your God for your virginity, which you vowed and after the vow lost?...Is there something else which may be paid for this, so that the debt may be paid and so great a vow fulfilled? If there is nothing else which may be paid for this, there is no salvation for those who vowed this and cannot pay it after it was lost....Let him who dares, say this? I neither presume nor wish to do so. Let him beware who should should wish to say this, lest perhaps he raise a danger in himself. What other thing? Pay your penance. Pay your humility. For virginity of the flesh pay humility of the heart. For broken flesh break your heart....it will suffice. (De Sacramentis, 2.12.6, Deferrari's translation)

The Master is speaking to consecrated virgins and religious, but his wisdom is easily applied to those who know falls from the chastity proper to other states of life as well.

Hugh on the Paschal Candle

Pope Zosimus established that a large candle be blessed on the Holy Sabbath of the Pasch, which the deacon blesses after benediction has been received from the priest. This candle designates Christ: in the wax humanity, in the fire divinity; and as it illuminates it precedes the catechumens to baptism, just as once a column of fire preceded the children of Israel as they crossed the Red Sea, illuminating by fire and shading by a cloud. (Hugh of St. Victor, De Sacramentis, 2.9.5, Deferrari's translation)

There's my next Easter Vigil homily, should the Holy Spirit ever give me the opportunity again! One could go a lot of places with this particular image of the divinity and humanity of Christ, but I'll tell you right now, not all of them would be orthodox. I'll be careful, I promise. I'll be sure to have my homily certified. Get it?

Hugh's Advice to Lectors

Let them consider what is to be read in the indicative, what is to be pronounced as an interrogation, where there is a distinction in speech or a middle distinction is to be made, since these matters when poorly observed disturb the intellect and provoke those who are of the stamp of grammarians to laughter. The voice of the reader should consult his ears and heart, not his eyes, lest by undisciplined motion or gesture on his own account he make spectators rather than hearers, equally avoiding broken and effeminate sounds as well as coarse and rustic sounds.

--Hugh of St. Victor, De Sacramentis 2,3,6 (Deferrari's translation)

I Know Great Book You Must Read

The title comes from Enrique, a young Spaniard. During the semester of college in which I was alleged to be studying philosophy in Ireland, a bunch of my friends at home made a tape of their greetings and sent it to me. It was all very funny, but most amusing was how this Enrique, whom I hardly knew, would occasionally burst in with reading recommendations delivered in a thick Spanish accent. He would say, "I know great book you must read; is called...Hoog [sic] of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Catholic Faith" or "I know great book you must read; is called...Icelandic Sagas!" Seventeen years later I'm happy to say that I've almost read the first (in Deferrari's translation), but have not yet approached the second.

One of my ascetic principles is that I don't tell anybody what to read unless specifically asked. This is one of my particular applications of 'do unto others as I would have them do to me.' For whatever reason, I don't like being told what I need to read. I might even want to read something, but I can't. Sometimes I'm just not able to get through a book at a certain moment in my life; I tried to read The Ascent of Mount Carmel many times without success. Then, all of a sudden, on a certain retreat, I read it all the way through. Providence was saving it for the moment when I would have the right combination of desire and experience. If you really want me to read something, it would be better to tell me not to read it, so that I might do it out of curiosity and contrariness. This is how I came to read Kazantzakis's life of St. Francis when I was a novice; an older friar had told me that reading it had messed up his spiritual life when he was in novitiate. Something for the inner dualist, I guess.

Right now the thing I'm supposed to read is The Shack. If I had a nickel for every parishioner who has told me about my absolute need to read this book, I could go get tacos al pastor and a Dr. Pepper for lunch every day of the Easter season. I even tried to read it, but was unable. I got about two-fifths of the way through and was unable to proceed. Now someone has even given me a commentary on the book, but I don't want to be the guy who reads a commentary without reading the thing itself.

I love you and I thank you for your solicitude about my spiritual reading. I am sure that it is your prayers that hold me together through the day. But I can't always read the things you think I should. So world, let's come to an agreement. I won't give you unsolicited reading advice and you won't give it to me. Enrique is excepted.

For anyone who is curious to make up my negligence in the larger spiritual economy, check out the Icelandic Sagas Database.

Hugh on the Nature of the Scriptures

This morning I am about my ponderous project of reading Hugh of St. Victor's De Sacramentis, and in I:6:12-13 I arrive at an interesting definition of the content of the Sacred Scriptures:

Before the fall, the human being had three kinds of knowledge that pertained to prelapsarian perfection: of God, of himself, and of the rest of creation over which he was meant to have dominion. This third area of knowledge is revealed in the naming of the animals (Genesis 2:19), as the human being was meant to use his own reason and knowledge to take care of the world.

Now only the first two categories of knowledge were obscured in the fall, so it's only these that are contained in the tutelage and remedy we receive through Sacred Scripture. That's why the Bible doesn't teach anything about math, goat care, or hut construction, because these sorts of knowledge were not obscured by original sin.

Vox Aquarum Multarum

I have been warned to expect to be back at school by this time next year, so I've been trying to get back into some serious reading each day. I almost forgot that there were texts like this to conquer:

On the second day the firmament was made and was called heaven, and it was placed so that it made a division between waters and waters, and the waters which first were waters were made waters, the waters which are under heaven and the waters which are above heaven. And heaven was made heaven and heaven; heaven above heaven and heaven under heaven. Even to this day also heaven is above heaven, and heaven under heaven, and the whole is from one heaven and is one heaven. But before this heaven, which is called the firmament, was made from that heaven, that heaven was not heaven and heaven, but only heaven. Nor were those waters waters and waters, but only waters. Both the waters and heaven were one heaven; and that heaven and those waters were neither above heaven nor under heaven, but above earth; and there was nothing between heaven and earth because there was nothing except heaven and earth. And yet there were waters, and there was darkness, and there was the abyss: the abyss in the earth, the darkness and the waters in heaven.

Hugh of Saint Victor, De Sacramentis, I,1,6, trans. Roy J. Deferrari