Letter #42, 2024, Sunday, October 20: Trastevere
I went to Santa Maria in Trastevere this warm Sunday evening in October, with a week to go until the end of the Synod, to attend the weekly Byzantine liturgy in Italian.
The liturgy is more beautiful than I can describe.
The words are all sung, by the priest and the choir, and flow up to the mosaics in the apse in a type of auditory incense.
The entire experience brings us who are present, with all of our humanity, all of our human concerns, into the presence of the very meaning of our existence, Christ, the crucified and risen Lord.
It is always extraordinary to attend this liturgy anywhere in the world, but… to be in Rome, and to be in this most beautiful of churches — the oldest church in the world dedicated to the Virgin — is extraordinary squared.
It is “beyond.”
Beyond words, into the infinite, the eternal…
It is something overwhelming to the mind, to the eyes, to the soul — the uneven columns from various ancient Roman temples (for every column and pedestal is different), the intricate Cosmatesque floors, unparalleled in the world (where my eyes seek and find patterns and the breaking of patterns, as I wrote a few days ago), the magnificent mosaics of Christ and the Virgin and a flock of sheep (we are the sheep) covering the apse (dating, I am told, to more than a thousand years ago, before the eastern and western Churches were divided) — all of it silences me, humbles me.
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“Kyrie eleison,” the choir sings, in Greek. “Lord have mercy.”
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Who is this “Lord”?
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The choir answers:
“Christe eleison.” “Christ have mercy.”
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This Lord is Christ.
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And why do we ask Him for “mercy”?
Ah! That is the question.
Because we are in misery, in the misery of the self, the “I,” of being attached to our own will, the very will he has given to us as a sublime gift, because, having a will, we are free, and that means something astonishing in the universe.
We can choose.
But we have chosen wrongly.
We have chosen many types of slavery.
So we pray that He have mercy on us, who have fallen into that very slavery which we desired and chose for ourselves…
***
He is above us and beyond us, but also behind us and beneath us.
Above us, as divine.
Beyond us, as immortal, triumphant over death.
But also, behind us, as he arrived among us long ago, 2,000 years ago now.
And beneath us, because he experienced our pain and our abandonment, because he was incarnate, and indeed because he descended into hell, as we say in the Apostle’s Creed, so that we might know that this Lord is a worthy Lord, one who has borne what we must bear.
He meets us where we are, often at our lowest point, and, turning to look upon us, into our eyes, tells us we must continue on to where we have never yet been.
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“Lord, have mercy on us,” we pray, as Christians have prayed here century upon century for 20 centuries now, “have mercy on us, for we have exchanged your Holy Spirit, your very Life, into which we also have been baptized, for a spirit of avarice, envy, lust, selfishness, hatred, murder and pride.”
“Lord, have mercy.”
“Kyrie eleison.”
Return us to our own right mind, which is Your mind.
***
The choir sings:
“Let us, who mystically represent the Cherubim,
who sing to the Life-Giving Trinity the thrice-holy hymn,
now lay aside all the cares of life,
that we may receive the King of all,
escorted, invisibly, by the angelic orders.
Alleluia.
***
Who are we?
Mystically, we represent the cherubim, angels, spiritual beings, who ceaselessly sing the praises of God, who is the ultimate and final reality, continuously.
How do we know the cherubim do that?
Because Isaiah, who lips were purified with a burning coal — not like the lips of the politicians and merchandise vendors of our time — tells us they do.
What did Isaiah say?
At the beginning of Chapter 6 of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet writes:
And it came to pass in the year in which king Ozias died, that I saw the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, and the house was full of his glory.
And seraphs stood round about him, each one had six wings, and with two they covered their face, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.
And one cried to the other, and they said “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts! The whole earth is full of His glory!“
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The word “Alleluia” is the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew hallelu-yah (“hallelujah” in English), meaning “praise the Lord.”
St. John heard the heavenly choir chant “Alleluia!” with “the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunderpeals” (Rev 19:1,3,4,6).
Modern ears, even unchurched ones, are perhaps most familiar with the word through George Frideric Handel’s oratorio The Messiah and its iconic “Hallelujah” chorus.
Gina Christian writes (link): “Handel himself wasn’t in the best of places when he composed the work: in 1741, he was in serious debt after a series of musical failures, and his career looked to be over. Providentially, his friend Charles Jennens gave him the libretto, and with funding from Irish charitable groups, Handel wrote the score in just 24 days for a benefit performance to free men from debtors’ prison. The project left him with little sleep or appetite, and Handel’s servants often found their boss in tears while writing. Yet the end result was exultation: after completing the “Hallelujah” chorus, Handel is reported to have said, ‘I did think I did see all heaven before me, and the great God himself seated on his throne, with his company of angels.’”
Here is a link to The Messiah: the Hallelujah chorus is at 1:54:51 of the performance.
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Afterward the liturgy, outside in the piazza, I met my friend Maestro Aurelio Porfiri, the well-known Italian writer, composer and organist, and his son, Aureliano, and we went to have a plate of “Primavera” pasta “Da Gildo,” just as we did last Sunday night.
It was a beautiful evening. The streets were filled with tourists and pilgrims. The restaurants were full. The night air hummed with voices speaking many languages, Italian, English, German, French, Spanish, and others still.
Aurelio said he was worried about the wars in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and possible expansions of these conflicts, and then others, perhaps in the far east.
We talked a while longer, of this and that, and then I looked at young Aureliano and said, “Remember this night, Aureliano, October 20, 2024. Remember this peaceful night here in Rome, despite the terrible wars elsewhere. Remember the people walking peacefully, the calm night air. Let us pray that this peace remains, and that, if it is ever shattered, let us pray that it returns, when we finally learn to beat our swords into ploughshares, and so are finally able to live in that time of peace that has been prophesied.”
—RM
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