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June 9, 2020
Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM
Sister Suzanne Toolan wrote the hymn “I Am the Bread of Life” within a few years of my joining the Sisters of Mercy in Burlingame. I belong to the very sisterhood whose gifted composer’s song from the “Bread of Life” discourse in John 6-7, is sung in churches all over the world in many languages. When we sing it in Burlingame at the Sunday Eucharist, or at a funeral Mass for one of our sisters, it has a special meaning because it’s “ours.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, famous Dominican theologian, author of theology volumes called the “Summa Theologica”, is lesser known as a poet and composer of a 1264 hymn titled by its first lines in Latin, “Lauda Sion” (Praise, O Zion, your salvation). This “sequence” or hymn-poem for Corpus Christi is known as the “Pange Lingua” (Sing, my tongue).
A hymn carries a feeling a catechism lesson doesn’t. There’s a big difference between thinking about theological issues when I recite the Nicene Creed at Mass, in contrast to singing those same words during rehearsal of Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis” or Mozart’s “Mass in C” with the San Jose Symphonic Choir.
What difference? During the Nicene Creed, I can feel held hostage by examiners in a theological seminar. I see words projected onto the wall, and for some unpreventable reason, I notice the repetition of “begotten.” I get distracted by “consubstantial.” I wonder why Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor, gets remembered along with God, the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is sometimes inconvenient to be a theologian.
But when I sing the same words? The melody is serene affirmation. No arguments, no stopping to puzzle or question. I feel uplifted, the music leads the words, and the words are responsive, flexible, altogether a different reality than argument. Voices unite and divide into harmonious chords. Instruments support, carry, lead and follow the notes bearing the words. Leroy Kromm, our symphony choir maestro, urges us to capture the spirit of the Baroque composer, “Forget the words, just sing the notes!”
Yes, Corpus Christi is a day to review theological definitions like transubstantiation, to explain why children and new converts receive the sacraments of baptism and penance before Eucharist. We can mull over Scripture behind Jesus saying, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood. ...” But from a believer’s lived spiritual history, this is a day to remember a timeless spiritual continuum of daily and Sunday Communion, or evening exposition of the Blessed Sacrament on first Fridays. It is not merely nostalgia to remember 40-hour devotions with the Eucharist on the altar for a prolonged period of parish prayer, the monstrance carried under a canopy through the church – and in European towns, through the streets – the sign of Jesus’ human presence here and everywhere in the world. The incense – that sweet fragrance used to be a centuries-old prompter of higher consciousness, though today the swinging of the thurible is rarer as a signal of communal faith – this is holy ground.
I think of Corpus Christi as a day to remember my first Communion, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, the feeling of personal devotion and communal faith at the singing of “O Lord I Am Not Worthy,” the calming of the heart at the first notes of “Panis Angelicus” and “O Sacrum Convivium,” the feeling of being spiritually at home during the singing of “Tantum Ergo” – strengthened in carrying burdens, eased in grief, led through darkness, interconnected in aloneness, calmed in distress.
We have come to be convinced, especially since Vatican II, of the “we” of Corpus Christi. We are the body of Christ, right now, with these human beings, believers and unbelievers alike, a world interconnected by news media, by pandemic, by protest. The suffering of George Floyd and the black community is not “his” but ours, not “theirs” but ours. The justice and reform demanded is a change needed in the whole body, not a benefit for merely one part, one ethnic population.
Corpus Christi is a day to repeat as our own the words of Jesus, “I in them, and you in me” (John 17.23) prayed with devotion.
Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM, is Sister of Mercy and Ph.D. theologian, as well as an attorney in private practice in family law. She lives in San Jose.