Lent III | Theophanic Eclipse
A contemplation of child-like suffering in the hands of a Loving God.
The below is an email I wrote yesterday. I’ve a pastime of writing emails to irl friends about beautiful things—art, music, poems, et al.—at specific points of the Church year. This year, this Lenten series, has been drenched in personal anecdotes and recordings of music peculiar to choirs I have been in. In short: they consist of personally identifiable information (PII), and so they have not made their way to this medium. This entry, for the Third Week of Lent, however, is void of PII. Note that I speak of attachments, which of course Substack does not permit. Many of the pieces of music I have written about, or intend to write about, in this series, do not even have recordings available on the internet—making email the ideal medium of transmission. But enough introduction.
Dear friends,
With all due respect to Mr. Handel—who, no doubt, merits quite a lot of respect—one of his works narrowly missed being selected for this week. Instead, by sheer coincidental happenstance, or scintillating Providence, or whatever label for fortuity you elect, our dear Russian Romantic is giving an encore, this time with a much more popular work.
Holy Radiant Light, by Alexander Gretchaninov. See attachment.
If you insist upon a YouTube link, this recording makes me smile at points:
[But truly, I think the attachment much more expressive, yet simultaneously more formal, more archetypal. There are plenty of recordings with fewer mistakes than the attachment, but they all tend to do overly silly things with the tempo in places.]
While the great majority of this song is a wondrous, shimmering continuation of last week’s closing note—that we might find comfort and purpose and joy in singing praise, even evermore; while the wonderful, rich, multi-textured music so often resembles that of a chamber orchestra, of swelling strings, the kinetic texture of vibrato, cavorting chords—my focus here is, rather, on a very small, short little bit of music, near the beginning:
Come we now to the hour of setting sun; the lights of evening round us shine. Holy, holy.
While writing this, I realize that to go where I wish to go with this, I shall have to double up.
See also: Tonight Eternity Alone, by René Clausen (who works in my beloved MN)—a composer who will soon be appearing again:
In truth, I do not even particularly love this song; but I do find it remarkable. Now that I have outed myself as a troglodyte Philistine who sometimes listens to / sings, even, gasp, contemporary choral music, let us continue.
There is no space for fear.
Holy Radiant Light, despite the title (or is it despite?), occurs, narratively, if you will, at nightfall, at a time not ordinarily known for being bathed in light (holy radiant or otherwise). Now, I haven’t read about the bibliography of this work, because I am not a serious person. I prefer to make things up. I suspect, however, that this piece was written for some Orthodox version of Evensong, or a Vigil, or something along those lines. But let us take it at face value: it is a song of worship which transpires at sunset. The lights of evening are shining. There is no explicit mention of The Lesser Light, Luna; rather, just the lights of evening. Clear skies, stars, maybe the moon, maybe not, and no sun.
Here, let us lurch off the path of conventional textual consideration. Let us instead lurch into my possibly nominally schizophrenic consideration, one now five years old, almost to the day. These are not young thoughts.
When panic sets in, when a young child is distressed, when something (as likely imaginary as not) has gone askew, and the crying comes, and the parent kneels down—not on one knee, as though to get up again soon, but on two knees, and the floor is hard—and your arms reach out, and you pluck up the child beneath the shoulders, lifting up, rotating your torso, perhaps ninety degrees, perhaps even one hundred eighty, and then plop the child back down, all the while smiling and soothing him. And his arms thrust out, and possibly his legs too, in protest of the short flight, although all along, it is truly all he wanted. And in this motion, the sky of the child has been completely changed, completely altered. Were there stars in the ceiling above, they should have all been transposed, translated; the constellations should be utterly transformed geometrically. But the child is not looking at the stars, those imagined constellations amidst the ceiling. No, the child is looking at you: the child is looking into your eyes.
And you set about teaching the child something, some kernel of Goodness, or Truth—some fraction of Prime Reality—even if it is only as simple as, “Everything will be okay. I am here.” And the child is looking up at you, for even on your knees, you are towering above the child. And in this moment, for, however long it is, however many minutes, two, ten, twenty, it is all but one Moment—you, the parent, you have eclipsed all. You plucked the child up, rotated into another plane, put him down in a new place, and you have eclipsed—outshone—all else. The toys, or other children, or dog, or spilled food, or whatever other props are scattered upon the stage that is Life—no, that is all gone now, and the stage, tabula rasa, now. There is only soliloquy. Only you.
The lights of evening round us shine. It supposedly was, after all, a fellow countryman of Gretchaninov who penned these words in consideration of such astral arrangements:
The darker the night, the brighter the stars; the deeper the grief, the closer is God!
It is not for nought that the Scriptures so tirelessly testify that God the Father is, indeed, the Father. That, we might say, we have a Heavenly Parent. Of course, to say Father is far better than the bizarrely a-gendered parent, but let me briefly mention a meaning—my meaning—of that little word, parent. As ever, I am not a serious individual, I am making this up; this is not philological advice. Consult with your etymological general practitioner, etc. But: if I am not gravely mistaken, the Latin paro, -are… is accordingly of the first conjugation, rendering the word “parent” to be, if translated literally as written, the active subjunctive present third person plural—they may prepare. For do parents not prepare? Or rather, they are called to; not all do prepare, build up, teach, their children, although they ought (again, the subjunctive). They may prepare, or mayn’t. And of course, does God not prepare us, His Children, for those good works unto which we are called, and for whom they are prepared?
But sometimes, in the wheeling kaleidoscope of Providence, we become distressed. Something has gone askew, and the crying comes. What, in a poetical sense, would it look like, for God the Parent to rehearse what I delineated above? For God to kneel down, to pluck us up, to rotate, to gently place us down, to teach us: would not God eclipse, Utterly and Totally Eclipse, all else? If a human parent may eclipse Earthly things, how much more must the Infinitude of the Father! Whether the sun had set or not would be immaterial, literally, much less metaphorically: the Majesty of God should blot out all of Helios’ light as though it were but a candle amidst a maelstrom. Luna too, utterly eclipsed by the merest Shadow of God. The stars, so dilute in that ocean of boundless, flooding Light of Light as to be salt crystals glittering in the blinding sparkle of sun-splashed seas.
… round us shine. Holy, holy.
God, of course, is Holy; that much is obvious. But in this place, this astronomically displaced dimension of teaching, of eclipse and consolation—are we not, too, holy? To be holy is to be set apart, and can one be more set apart than to have been plucked by the very Hand of God, rotated, placed, etc.? No, to be plunged into the dis/re-placement of theophanic eclipse is a holy estate indeed, even if it be terrible, of terror, terrifying, in a way. And I think it is unfair to say it is anything else. But. While the human instinct is to fear in the face of such impossibly overwhelming, disproportionately affecting Love, the whispered rejoinder? There is no space for fear.
For as vast and immense the cosmos is—much less this darkened, yet blinding, plane of unalloyed Eclipse, where only child and Father, impossibly juxtaposed, face one another—there yet remains no space for fear. Despite seemingly infinite volume, the slightest speck, a mere atom, of fear, is too large a thing to fit. This is why, of course, when we fear, we lose something of ourselves. The only way to make room, to make space, for fear, is to tear off some fraction of ourselves. Fear, the insatiable twin of Pride, the two a Janus inscribed upon the very gates of our hearts.
But let us not move so quickly on past this idea of terribleness, of terror, in the billowing Radiance of Eclipse. When I speak of sanctification, of preparation (there’s parent again), in terms of vulcanization, this is what I mean. To be plopped into the crucible, amidst the molten slag: this is not a pleasant thing. And we may wonder, whatever is God doing? My skin shall boil, my heart shall burst, my bones shall turn to ash. And we look up, and we search for the North Star, or the Southern Cross, or anything by which we might divine a reckoning—but all is Eclipsed! And the sun, he is gone; and the moon, she is gone. Everything, everything, Eclipsed. For Light can reach such an intensity that it blinds, and then all will appear dark.
But the vulcanization passes, of course. Our dross, consumed, leaving behind silver, or gold (or, in my case, perhaps tin). And the Hand, that Piercèd Hand, again reaches out, and plucks us up, and the rotation follows, and we are re-placed. But everything is different now, of course, because we are.
… praising the Son of God! Holy Radiant Light; Praise Thee now and Evermore.
The vulcanization can be long. The Eclipse can seem eternal. What to a child is but two minutes, to the adult perhaps is two years. Purgation is rarely, if ever, painless. But remember what the Earthly parent might say: “Everything will be okay. I am here.” Mightn’t our Heavenly Father say the very same? I AM.
I have run very long, and for that, I apologize. There is much else I might write, but this shall, this must, suffice.
In the Collect for this week, after all, do we not ask, … stretch forth the right hand of thy Majesty, to be our defence against all our enemies[?] And perhaps our enemies could at times be so great as to necessitate His Hand covering not only across our faces, but indeed our entire flesh? And would that not, from our limited vantage, appear as nothing but needless Eclipse—when it in fact is precisely that which we, rightly, sought?
Blessings unto you all,
Paul
I suspect that other entries from this Lenten series will not end up here. Perhaps they shall, though. Peace to all of you.