Dear Friends,
At the 9am on Sunday, I commented that learning things by heart makes a big impact on our minds and on our spirits. Whether facts, faces, formulas, music, prayers, texts, or skills, the things we learn by heart shape our thoughts and reactions as much as the genes we inherit. This is why the Church has always commended the practice of committing so much of its sacred treasury to memory. Psalms, Sunday Gospels, hymns, prayers, and the others, all leave avenues for the Holy Spirit to work in us, even when we’re not at church or actively thinking about God.
And then, when we do set ourselves to private prayer or corporate worship, we can do so without looking down at our books, leaflets, or hymnals all the time. We can look up, or close our eyes; we start to notice other things than whether we’re getting the words right, start to feel that we are really moving when before we might have been just keeping up. These kinds of beginnings help expand our imaginations and make connections that we might not otherwise have made. They introduce us to a world entered through a text, but which we can only properly inhabit through a far broader constellation of relationships.
Which is one of the great pleasures of Saint Mark’s musical tradition: author, composer, singer, conductor, organist, acolytes, congregation, the room itself, all meet across centuries and continents, to make music in praise of Almighty God. If I can listen with the ears of my heart and not just read with my eyes, I can hear that the church is far more crowded than it first appears: it is full of all the people, central and peripheral, in the lives and backstories of all the living and departed who have had a hand in creating this music. It’s likewise full of the same crowd of prophets, apostles, and anonymous authors whose writings make up the Bible, not to mention the hundreds of saints whose images fill our church and whose feasts punctuate our calendar.
As All Saints and All Souls draw nearer, then, I encourage you to consider putting some portion of the Church’s sacred treasury to memory. Perhaps a favorite hymn or anthem text, or a frequently used Psalm; maybe a particularly impactful Sunday Gospel or parable; maybe one or more portion of the mass ordinary, or the evening prayer canticles, or the office of compline; or the Angelus or one of the four Marian antiphons. Whatever you choose, I hope you find it a doorway into a larger room, a larger world, free of the page, book, or screen.
Yours faithfully,
Fr. Sawicky
