“Now What” Sunday
“I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one.”
This is a 12th C English illumination of the Ascension from Hunterian Psalter. For as simple as the composition o the image is, the wonder and confusion and chaos among the disciples is palpable!
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
— Our Lord Jesus Christ, before his Ascension to the Father’s Right Hand (Acts 1:8)
Sixth Sunday of Easter (Rogation)
Texts for Today
Prayer
O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting.
An Alighting Hail
I have to confess that more than half of the reason this song is featured this week is that it is a compellingly beautiful piece performed beautifully. The contemporary Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo abstracts a simple chorus from the medieval Flemish mystic Hildegard von Bingen’s Marian hymn, “Ave Generosa:” giving the ancient and mysterious words a fresh and fitting, evocative acapella arrangement, here beautifully performed by the Dutch girl’s chorus, Aarhus Pigekor — with a subtle but effective choreography that is really the icing on the cake.
The Latin words we hear sung translate roughly like this:
Hail, generous, glorious, inviolable Maiden:
You are the pupil of chastity, the material of sanctity
who pleased God.
Of course, we Protestants tend to roll our eyes at such excesses of Marian piety, and with good reason. The initial substance of Hildegard’s verse is a meditation on the angelic greeting to the Mother of God, but it expands and escalates into a fantasy that is biblically ungrounded and easily misleads into a skewed reverence for purity, if not into idolatry.
If we understand how to read Mary typologically, it goes part way to quieting this objection. Mary is the new Eve: a type of the people of God, of the Church; of the mystic, of the preacher, and of the soul redeemed; she in whom Christ dwells, and through whom he is born into a waiting world. What is said of Mary thus opens some interesting avenues for poetic contemplation. But we would do well to note that even here the mystic pean is overwrought. Such purity does not exist in our broken world, nor even if it did would it evoke God’s favor, which is poured out as his free gift, and not according to merit.
And yet, in the end, the thought of such otherworldly purity speaks something true. The Church, beneath her brokenness and scandal, remains this beautiful and perfect bride, washed in the blood of the Lamb and awaiting the consummation of his promises. We are there, too: and as we await the Lord and the fulfillment of his promises, we, like the girls of Aarhus Pigekor, wander and wonder and sing our foolish songs, testifying to the shimmering hope, the impossible possibility of this once and future truth of divinity-in-man inbreaking our reality and redeeming it with his blood.
Beauty of this type stirs something within us: a sweet and heavenward pining. The form of it is fleeting; the words that grasp towards it, foolish and frail. And yet, they awaken a silent memory, the promise of that sweet comfort that is to be with us now, and will carry us to the age to come.
