A Third Candlemas Hymn

The third and last response to Fr Daniel Lloyd's challenge to me, to translate some German hymns for the Presentation into English.

The first two (see here, and here) were from the Reformation tradition, dating from the 17th century. Here is one from the Paderborn Catholic diocesan hymnal of 1874, Sursum Corda. The authorship is unattributed.


Word of the Father, Light to every nation,
Bright in the Temple, all the world’s salvation,
Here sees glad earth in You its consolation,
Saviour appearing.

Small in your Mother’s arms Your life is proffered;
Vast in compassion comes the life You suffered
Sacred to be, the spotless Victim, offered
For our redeeming.

Thus dawns the Light that lightens every mortal;
Thus comes foretold the sacrifice that bought all;
Thus in the Temple opens heaven’s portal,
Mary, God-bearing.

Simeon departs in peace, Your Light perceiving;
Hannah goes forth in joyful song, believing.
Out from our dark we follow, grace receiving,
Your face achieving.

Wort des Vaters, Licht der Heiden,
Heil und Trost der ganzen Welt;
heute bist Du unter Freuden
in dem Tempel dargestellt.
Klein, auf Deiner Mutter Armen
ziehst Du in den Tempel ein;
und du läßt Dich voll Erbarmen
zum Erlösungsopfer weih’n.

„Nun“, ruft Simeon voll Freuden,
„nun will ich in Frieden geh’n!
Das verheiß’ne Licht der Heiden,
unser Heil hab ich geseh’n!“
Freudig tritt, vom Geist geführet,
Anna in der Frommen Kreis;
und, von Gottes Huld gerühret,
stimmt sie ein in Dank und Preis.

Fröhlich wollen wir Dich preisen,
aller Menscheit Heil und Licht,
mit den beiden frommen Greisen
harren Dein mit Zuversicht.
Laß in Deinem Licht uns wandeln,
stets die Nacht der Sünde scheu’n;
nur nach Deinem Vorbild handeln,
einst im ew’gen Licht uns freu’n!

From Sursum Corda, Paderborn, 1874
trans. Mark Woodruff © 21.03.2015

The English translation is best sung to Iste Confessor. The German tune is unremarkable and what you need to say is not easily to be fitted into its metre (Fr Daniel had proposed Abbot's Leigh). Hence the choice above of the English form of the Sapphic metre.

Istanbul to Great Dixter and Gardening Back Again

Imagine driving through the junction of London’s M25 and M3 motorways. Then imagine, in place of the fields and woods, it is at Canary Wharf, surrounded by a high-rise new financial district with towers of luxury flats. Next imagine between the sliproads are as much as you can get in of Kew, RHS, Darwin’s Downe, Ryton, Chelsea, Edinburgh and Great Dixter gardens. Imagine, too, after some demise in great-house gardening following the Great War, it has taken 80 years to start them up again and re-awaken Britain’s interest in growing plants. Welcome to Istanbul’s Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanic Gardens, a green lung on the city’s Asian side, which Fergus Garrett (CEO and Head Gardener, Great Dixter) and I visited in November 2014.

Here on 32 hectares in eight traffic islands linked by tunnels and bridges, amid 50,000 trees and shrubs are conserved the native plants and flowers of Turkey, from each of its diverse habitats that give Britain most of what we grow in our gardens here. One island is for the 2,000 species of Istanbul province. The large Anatolia island has mountain, high plateau, Black Sea and Mediterranean, salt and arid habitats, each requiring mineral-rich regional soils and stone to cover land left bare after motorway construction. The latest project is a volcanic mountain tulip meadow.

Fergus spent his earlier years on the Bosphorus and so Turkey springs up everywhere across Dixter, from the geophytes to the verbascums and the giant fennel familiar at a glance, to the lesser known flowers he has trialled from seed. If you ask, “Would they make the transition; how are they propagated; where would they thrive?”, you see the bond with Turkey is not just for more exuberance at Great Dixter, but transferring knowledge that strengthens the conservation of plants and biodiversity everywhere.

Likewise the Gardens in Istanbul are about awareness of Turkey’s own forgotten horticulture, the exceptional richness of its habitats and the urgency of protecting the natural environment. While Istanbul’s annual Tulip Festival depends on imports from Holland, whole hillsides risk being industrially stripped of wild tulips for commercial export. So Dixter is helping to restore the balance: two students from Istanbul were invited over in January to learn how bulbs are prepared and planted out, and so restore skills to the region they first came from. Already when you go to Nezahat Gökyiğit Gardens, you can’t miss the new succession-planted border – and those trademark Dixter pot displays.

Mark Woodruff, a Friend of Great Dixter, works for the Monument Trust, which helped secure the future by purchasing Dixter Farms, now home to our scholarship students and the Education Centre.

From the Friends of Great Dixter Newsletter, March/April 2015

Walking Together: Second Interview for "Both Lungs" at Royal Doors

Brent Kostyniuk came over to London in early 2014, attended our Liturgy, and later interviewed me for his column, Both Lungs, which is about Christians of East and West needing each other and learning from each other. It is syndicated to the English-language Ukrainian resource page, Royal Doors. Part one (Here: Bi-ritual Faculties) looked at serving in two rites. Part Two considers how the different sides of the Church, east and west, Catholic and Orthodox, need each other and must come together:

http://www.royaldoors.net/2015/02/walking-together/


For six years now, this column has worked at spreading the message of St. John Paul II who proclaimed that the Church – that is you and I – should breathe through both lungs, East and West. One who breathes through both lungs is Fr. Mark Woodruff a priest with bi-ritual faculties serving both the Latin and Ukrainian Catholic Churches in London, England. Having previously explained how he came to his deep appreciation for the East, Fr. Mark now offers his views and experience of East and West. Moreover, based on that experience, he challenges us to go beyond simply breathing with both lungs.

Fr. Mark was asked what East has to offer to the West. “In my view, this is the wrong question. Too much ecumenism is about how we can make others come round to our way of thinking and so be more like us as the precondition for rapprochement. This is not standing up for principles; instead it’s forcing ourselves on others, actively and passively – it’s manipulation and even bullying. Pope Francis has just said that evangelization is not proselytizing, with its undertone of pressured persuasion – the Gospel gains its response by attraction. So, instead, it is important for the West to identify what it can learn from the East and thus what it lacks at the moment to be more truly itself. Christianity is, after all, an Eastern religion in origin. By the same token, the East needs to identify what it can learn from the West. We talk about Orientale Lumen a lot – but some of my Orthodox friends also say, at least privately, that they need some Occidentale Lumen.

Fr. Mark next considers how East and West might grow closer together. “The more we go on saying, ‘they have nothing to teach us,’ or ‘all they need to do is to acknowledge they are heretics, give up their error and conform to the true faith,’ whether that comes from Latins or Orientals, the more fixed will be our separation. I believe that, largely speaking, the matters of dogmatic difference between East and West have been addressed thoroughly through dialogue, and if they have not been resolved then they are still being talked through towards that end, or else they are not necessarily Church-dividing. Sadly, the perspective of some on one side or the other can be that they alone must prevail to the exclusion of the other. This gets us nowhere other than confirmed in an opposition that is native to neither Catholic nor Orthodox traditions.”

“Neither Orthodoxy nor Catholicism as we understand them now is an end in itself but aspects of the same, single reality of the universal Church that both are to manifest. We tend to use these terms to describe the distinct Church communions contained within the boundaries of ‘Roman Catholic’ and ‘Orthodox.’ But Orthodoxy should explicitly be a mark of the Catholic Church no less than Catholicity should mark the Orthodox Church. A very eminent Orthodox priest made this point very strongly to me a few years ago, saying that the trouble with the schism meant that he could not describe himself as ‘a Catholic priest’ in England because that would be misunderstood. Yet, he said, being a priest of the universal Catholic and Orthodox Church he was indeed a Catholic priest, but in no exclusive or denominational sense, just as by the same token I am an Orthodox priest. This brought me up short and I found it quite humbling.”

Our respective Church organizations seem to be making exclusive truth claims; but I often think that these only make sense in terms of the unified life we will have after reconciliation and reunion, and which were the conditions for existence prior to the emergence of Byzantine and Latin, Catholic and Orthodox as distinct traditions and ecclesiastical realities. Pope Paul and Patriarch Athenagoras removed the anathemas between the Roman and Constantinopolitan patriarchates – so even though we have not finally resolved our theological differences or achieved the restoration of communion, nonetheless we have said what holds us apart is not, in the end, necessarily church-dividing – the mutual out-casting has gone.” Fr. Mark adds our distinct ritual and spiritual-theological approaches can be preserved as full manifestations of the Gospel and the life of the one Church. “We have much to learn from each other because God has given his gifts within each of the Churches for the benefit and perfection of all.”

The road ahead, however, will not be without difficulties. “What we have yet to learn is how to take down the barriers erected through human failure, so that we are no longer prevented from freely and fully receiving what he has given, as well as freely and humbly offering everything that we are in the hope that it will be fully accepted. There are principles, and as the faculty for bi-ritualism points out, there is no place for syncretism and mixing everything up – we must respect each other’s integrity too. Diversity is the measure of the universality of one Church with one faith.”

“The image of the two lungs East and West is very striking, and it instantly makes its point – that we are self-incapacitating by separation. But I have never felt it was figuratively accurate. But what of the lungs of the Syriac, Assyrian, Armenian, Coptic, and Ethiopic traditions? I prefer the image of Paul Couturier, the great and holy French Catholic priest who encountered the Russian refugees in camps around the city of Lyons after World War One and was so moved that he transformed the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity from being an Octave of well intentioned, but counterproductive, prayer to get others to conform to Roman Catholicism, to an exercise in seeking ever greater sanctification by imitating the holiness of other Christians in their pursuit of union with and in Christ. He called it ‘spiritual emulation’ and this is what is meant by ‘spiritual ecumenism,’ also a phrase of his that found its way into the Decree on Ecumenism at Vatican II.”

“How is this achieved, he asked? He made up yet another word: parallelaboration, by which he meant working things out together as we hurry eagerly along the road together side by side to the same destination: two close tracks alongside each other that almost unnoticed converge in effective reality now, as they do from a distance, at the same place, namely in the same Person – union in and with Christ. Christ prayed for us to be one so that the world would believe it was the Father who sent Him, after all.”

“But rather than speaking of each side struggling with one lung with all the depleted effort that implies, I’d rather think of the two as the excited disciples who were so inseparable in their discussion and zeal as they made their way to Emmaus consumed with the news of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, that they did not realize that their twin paths beside each other had actually converged upon the Risen Lord Himself, making Himself know to them in the Breaking of Bread. So – not so much two lungs, as two disciples who race after and fix their eyes on the Pioneer, and who meet in him – even collide – as the Perfecter of their faiths” (Hebrews 12).

“Ecumenism is not a diversion from the main business of being the Church where God has set us. It is the joy of being free of the encumbrance that keeps us apart and of the sin that tangles us up.”

Breathing through Both Lungs. Walking together. Will this column have to change its title?

Another Candlemas Hymn

Following an earlier post, my friend Fr Daniel Lloyd of the Oxford Ordinariate group sent me another German text.

Here is my effort at translating it and putting it into hymn-verse. We will use it at the 2015 Biennial Ecumenical Marian Pilgrimage to Walsingham, 17-20 March.

Maria ging geschwind mit ihrem lieben Kind;
sie ging von Betlehem zur Stadt Jerusalem
und trug zum Tempel ein das zarte Jesulein.

Sie opfert diesen Hort nach des Gesetzes Wort.
Sie gab das Kindlein dar, von Täublein auch ein Paar,
und löset ab mit Geld den Herren aller Welt.

Sankt Simeon, der Greis, kam auf des Herrn Geheiß.
Er nahm mit großer Lust das Kind an seine Brust,
davon sein Herz aufsprang, und er vor Freuden sang.

Auch kam Sankt Anna hin, die fromme Seherin.
Auf tat sie ihren Mund und macht das Kindlein kund.
Sie lobt das Kindlein sehr, und sagte, wer es wär.

O Kind, o Gottes Sohn, wie froh ist Simeon.
Wie froh Sankt Anna ist, daß Du gekommen bist!
Ach, komm und mach also von Herzen alle froh!


From Bethlehem with haste the Virgin on her way
went forth to Sion’s hill with thankful heart to pray:
And in the Temple to present
The tender Child from Heaven sent.

By sacrifice for love, keeping the Law’s decree,
Her arms their Son release His world at length to free:
The pair of doves, the store of gold,
Are naught beside the Lord foretold.

Now Simeon beholds the Light of all the world;
God’s glory he perceives in human frame unfurled.
Salvation in his heart’s embrace
Breaks forth to praise for endless grace.

By wonder’s silent hope the righteous Anna nears,
Redemption’s rise to see, expectant all her years:
Then lifts her voice in song to praise
The Saviour come to crown her days.

For Simeon the Light to human eyes revealed;
For Anna, Son of God, redemption born a Child:
As once You came, their whole delight,
So earth entire, all hearts, make bright.

Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, 1623 trans. Mark Woodruff © 21.2.2015
This goes to Harewood or Crofts 148th

Last of the Leopards: Sicily's Fading Nobility, in the Weekend Telegraph Magazine, No 71, 4th February 1966

Princess Alexandra di
Lampedusa,
widow of the writer of
The Leopard
 

Last of the Leopards: Sicily's Fading Nobility

Story by Godrey Blakeley,
Photographs by Elliott Erwitt

Lenten Acclamations To Genevan Psalm Tunes

The following article was invited for "Views from the Choir Loft" on the CC Watershed liturgical music resource and publisher website (February 11, 2015)

DURING THE 1980s, a great friendship developed between the Catholic Diocese of Bruges (Brugge, in Belgium) and the Anglican Diocese of St Edmundsury & Ipswich, facing each other on opposite sides of the North Sea, four hours away by ferry. Not only were there friendly ecumenical visits and dialogue (it had been in Belgium in the 1920s that Cardinal Mercier had conducted the Malines Conversations to explore the possibility of reunion, through an “Anglican Church, united not absorbed), but also spiritual exchanges: Bruges houses the shrine of the Holy Blood, with its world famous Procession each Ascensiontide, and the Anglican Cathedral in Bury is adjacent to the site of the Shrine of St Edmund King & Martyr, England’s first patron saint. In 1989 I heard about a retreat for English priests (Catholic and Anglican) arranged every year at the Benedictine Abbey of St Andries at Zevenkerken, just outside Brugge. Famed for its school and history of theological scholarship it had been a medieval foundation, closed under the French Revolution that swept the old Austrian Netherlands and refounded in an independent Belgium as part of the Beuronese monastic renewal and mission movement. It was also a centre for the Liturgical Movement. A monk of Maria-Laach Abbey in the Rhineland was the architect, and the community formed the Benedictine Belgian Annunciation Congregation along with two other monasteries associated with the Liturgical Movement, Keizersberg (Mont-César at Leuven, to which Lambert Beauduin belonged) and Blessed Columba Marmion’s Maredsous. Those with old missals and chantbooks will recognise the Abbey of Zevenkerken more easily as the editorial seat for the liturgical works of the Desclée press: the Abbaye de St André les Sept-Églises, at Bruges (the nave, aisles and chapels of the remarkable Abbey Church correspond with the seven principal basilicas of the city of Rome).

Following the permission of vernacular language at worship in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, northern Belgium translated the liturgical books into Flemish, the local version of Dutch spoken by the majority. This coincided with the decline of French as the main language of public life, St André les Sept-Églises became Zevenkerken St Andries; and the Abbey’s relationship with the historical Liturgical Movement as part of a French-speaking world changed. Now it was part of Flemish-speaking Church with close relations to the Catholic Dutch to the north in the Netherlands. What was striking to an English visitor was the vigour of the psalmody, in a liturgical translation from the early 1970s, Het Boek der Psalmen, a collaboration of Dutch and Flemish Benedictines and Cistercians, set to newly composed simple tones in the eight modes, with antiphons. Anyone knowing the Coverdale psalter in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer could become familiar with the import and rhythmic structure of the Dutch text.

But Dutch, like French, is familiar with another and very historic way to sing the psalms: the metrical psalms of the Genevan Reform. It was Dom Lambert Beauduin who realised that the singing of psalms and the reading of the Scriptures in divine worship was the greatest bond between Catholics and Protestants; at the monastery he founded at Amay (now at Chevetogne) he not only provided for the celebration of the Slav-Byzantine rite but also increased the readings from Scripture at the offices to intensify desire for recovering unity with Christians of the post-Reformation traditions by a demonstrable and liturgical enrichment of Scriptural fare, especially from the Old Testament. While the psalms at the western offices at Amay were of course in Latin, by the time of the liturgical changes after Vatican II, across Belgium and the Netherlands there emerged a new possibility to make use of the 400 year old liturgical patrimony of the Protestants – not only reading the Scriptures in the vernacular but also singing psalms in famous metrical versions, integral to Dutch-speaking religious and musical culture, and even familiar to Catholics. Thus at Lauds, Vespers and Readings at Zevenkerken, one of the psalms is a metrical version sung to an exhilarating tune from Geneva or Strasbourg. It made me think that such singing as this must have been why the Reform in Geneva was at first so exciting—no organ, no choir, no harmony, but a strong and rhythmically engaging monody in which all participated as one Body and internalised the words of the Psalms, not in their translated Scriptural form but as memorable verses.

The melodies struck me as especially powerful because, despite being a Church musician (I was precentor of the Anglican St Edmundsbury Cathedral at the time), I hardly knew them. The English tradition of metrical psalms is different, employing different metres more suited to the way the language works in metred verse. Perhaps the most famous is “The Old Hundredth” Psalm, All people that on earth do dwell, which has outlasted its update. Another is The Lord’s my Shepherd, well known in Scotland but all but forgotten in England until Princess Anne chose it for its tune and descant at her wedding. So, despite the Dutch-French-Swiss psalms and their tunes being so appealing, it was not easy to imagine how to make us of them in English worship. Those that had not died out were associated with an old-fashioned way of singing hymns, already losing ground to new kinds of worship songs. Thanks to one of those retreats at Zevenkerken, within a few years I made my journey to the full communion of the Catholic Church and was ordained priest in 1995. I continued to take part in the retreats alongside my old Anglican friends in this Belgian Catholic Benedictine abbey and the metrical psalms of the Dutch Reform, gladly appropriated by the Dutch and Flemish Catholics, approached me in a new way.

Having grown up in a liturgical Church where there is a great deal of singing—the classic English hymns, the ordinary of the Eucharistic rite, and the canticles and psalms of the Office—it dismayed me that the reforms in the Catholic rite had hardly engendered the restoration of the Mass as normatively a solemn sung celebration as I had been used to in the Church of England or, for that matter, the Catholic places of worship I had visited on the Continent. In England, as in Ireland, Low Mass had given way to a spoken mass with hymns (and not the best of what the English religious culture had to offer by any means, let alone appropriately selected and deployed) and new worship songs: not even the proper chants either in Latin or English (I had been used to the propers in English translation arranged to Gregorian chants, but suggesting we used these, even provisionally or as ancillary to the songs, was dismissed as belonging to the past). I was most dismayed by the gradual/responsorial psalm almost invariably being said by a reader instead of sung with the leading of a cantor. And with nearly always the same tune for the Alleluia (the simple beauty of the chant from the office at the end of the Paschal Vigil now debased from overuse all but every day), Lent was no relief because the Gospel Acclamation was rarely sung by a cantor, let alone with the involvement of the people.
     
It struck me then that those wonderful Reform tunes beloved at Zevenkerken could at last be put to use in English Catholic worship. So I adapted the texts of the Lenten Acclamations in the Lectionary for each of the three years into metrical form and harmonised four of the tunes. I make no claims for the verses, but at least they have been used to make singing the Lenten Acclamations possible.

Here is the link to the resource, from which it can be downloaded:

* * Website • Lenten Gospel Acclamations to Four Genevan Psalm Tunes

Monastery of Chevetogne, Belgium

My good friends at the Monastery of Chevetogne, of which I am an oblate.