Alleluia

Is a previous post I wrote about my dad, who observed that the Orthodox churches had dared to include an Alleluia in their requiem mass, whereas we Catholics hadn’t.

It pleases me greatly to inform you that he was wrong -well, sort of. Ever since the liturgical reforms started by the Second Vatican Council, no less than four Alleluias have been included in the Latin requiem mass as an alternative to the so-called ‘Tractus’ that is traditionally sung.

One is an Alleluia that takes its text from the requiem mass, but borrows its tune from another, fairly common Alleluia-theme:

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Give him eternal rest Lord, and may perpetual light shine on him.

The other three are genuine Alleluias, taken from other times in the liturgical year. They’re the first verses of:

Psalm 129

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine, Domine exaudi vocem meam.
Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.  Lord, hear my voice

Psalm 113

In exitu Israel ex Aegypto, domus Jacob de populo barbaro
When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language (Judah was his sanctuary, Israel his dominion)

This text actually stops half-sentence and in itself makes little sense, unless you realise it refers to the Exodus-story.

Psalm 121

Laetatus sum in his quae dicta sunt mihi: in domum Domini ibimus.
I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.

Honesty obliges me to say that none of these are ever sung during a requiem, as they are not traditionally part of the requiem mass, but an innovation. Since it’s up to the people to decide, they’re not chosen. I presume because they’re not what the average believer is used to.

Mourning

Last Saturday we buried my dad. He died at the age of 82. Over the past two years he had been ill and his condition grew slowly worse with time. Medical intervention became more and more difficult as both medicines and his faltering organs interfered with each other. Last week the pain from his failing heart became so intense that the doctors gave him enough morphine to combat the pain. As a result he slowly and quietly drifted off.

My dad was an organist by profession and a church musician. He had his own ideas about what his funeral had to be like. Already years ago I had learned from him that a funeral needn’t be just sad mourning and sorrow. According to his faith, there were also reasons for joy. He had managed to find things to express that joy that were different from the ones we had talked about before. The most notable thing was: they were not expressed in words, not even in song.

All candles in the church were lit, something that is only done at occasions like Christmas and Easter. It was not explained, nor mentioned. It was just visible.

When my father’s coffin was carried out of the church all four church bells were rung. It is customary to only ring one (usually a low one). Ringing all bells is again something done at festive occasions. At some point in his life my dad had written a poem about why he wanted to be ‘surrounded’ by the sound of all bells ringing when his coffin was carried out. This poem was read just before that, so there were words to it, but the expression itself was just sound.

Later in the day, after we had buried him, we had dinner at a restaurant across the church and the same bells rung, this time for a wedding. My father would have liked that. He had an enormous antipathy for crematoria, because these were places that you only went to when someone had died. They were places of death, whereas churches were places where people lived: they were baptised there, married in it and were buried from there. For every important point in life there was some ritual available in a place intrinsically linked to life: a church.

There was one ritual that neither my dad nor any other family member had thought of. It was sort of imposed on us by the parish priest at the service the night before the funeral. A small wooden cross bearing my father’s name and dates of birth and death was carried by us to a corner in the church where a collection of crosses inscribed with all the names of those recently deceased were kept. The crosses are kept there for a year, hanging on a wall for public display. Those who want to, can burn a candle im remembrance of the departed.

This ritual struck me as important, exactly because is was -ever so nicely- imposed on us. Those in mourning tend to see their grief as their own. My mom lost a husband, my brother and I a father. Those losses are real, but not the only ones. The community as a whole has lost one of it’s members. Even if that is not felt as acutely as the losses of my mom, my brother and me, it is still real. We are not alone, even if the company isn’t perfect.

Oh, when the saints go marchin’ in

Most of us wouldn’t expect people to sing such an up-beat song at a funeral, unless you’re black and you live in the south of the United States. When I was still a little boy, that was exactly what my father told me about African Americans. The joyfulness at their funerals came from their faith that taught them the deceased was in heaven. That faith was reason for joy and happiness. So this is what they sang at funerals:

We are trav’ling in the footsteps
Of those who’ve gone before,
And we’ll all be reunited,
On a new and sunlit shore,

This was one of my father’s first lessons on the meaning of the words ‘service’ and ‘liturgy’. A lesson I had long forgotten when years later Lady Diana was killed in a tragic car accident. All the world could see her funeral on television. So did my father and I. A few weeks after that we talked about what the choir sang when Lady Di’s coffin was carried out of Westminster Abbey: ‘Song for Athena’ by the British composer John Tavener:

Alleluia. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Remember me O lord, when you come into your kingdom.
Give rest O Lord to your handmaid, who has fallen asleep.
The choir of saints have found the well-spring of life, and door of paradise.
Life: a shadow and a dream.
Weeping at the grave creates the song:
Alleluia. Come, enjoy rewards and crowns I have prepared for you.

The text is partly taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and partly from the Greek-Orthodox funeral service. My father and I wondered about that choice. Both first and last word of the song was ‘alleluia’ and also in between the other lines it sounded: ‘alleluia’: ‘praise the Lord’.

In the Catholic liturgy an alleluia-song is meant for a festive occasion. It is sung before the reading from the gospel. During the fifty days of Easter –the most festive time by church standards- it is even sung twice during mass, whereas during Lent and at a funeral it is not sung. But the Greek-Orthodox liturgists had thought about a festive song at a funeral. ‘They had the guts!’ my father said, and he sounded jealous.

A few years later his brother died, my uncle. At his funeral only Gregorian plainchant was sung and this had a reason. Long ago some monk had pointed out the character of the Gregorian requiem to my uncle: it is sober, but not at all sad. You can hear this best towards the end of a Gregorian funeral, when the deceased is brought out of the church to it’s final resting place. Then the ‘In Paradisum’ is sung:

May the angels lead you to paradise,
And may the martyrs receive you on arrival
And lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem.
May the choir of angels receive you
And may you, with Lazarus, who was once poor, have eternal rest.

That text is not an alleluia-song that rejoices in a certainty, it does not have the elation of ‘Oh, when the saints…’ –even though the first four notes are the same. The text is written as a careful, pious wish: ‘may the angels’, ‘may the martyrs’ and ‘may you’. But if you listen to the melody, you hear a different tune. The singing says: it is.