Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, or as it is often called in England, Michaelmas.

On this important feast day, which celebrates three angelic beings — Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael — we also read Psalm 103 in its entirety.

This wonderful psalm is a regular fixture in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, that service which has become the norm for Sundays through the Eastern Orthodox world. As the divine liturgy came together as a historical phenomenon, various traditions of entrance led to the beginning of the service. In the Slavic tradition, for instance it became customary to sing two psalms or ‘antiphons’ by way of this entrance to the service: Psalm 103 and Psalm 145.

Thus, this pre-service sequence of antiphons served to highlight the community’s entrance, both into the service and into the heavenly places. Alexander Schmemman, a beloved American Orthodox author who is well-known to liturgical Christians of various denominations, described this action as the gathering of the community in the name of the world, that is, on behalf of and for the salvation of the world. In this act of gathering, the people offer praise to God in an individual voice:

‘Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And forget none of his benefits.’
(v. 2)

This deeply individual expression in the context of communal gathering is a characteristic of the Orthodox ethos, and that sensibility finds its way into the Slavic choral tradition attached to these liturgies.

To illustrate this, we can listen to the ‘First Antiphon’ or a segment of Psalm 103, from the setting by Sergei Rachmaninov, who was composed music for the Divine Liturgy just before the Bolshevik Revolution. Here at Saint Philip’s, we sang this and other settings from the Divine Liturgy four years ago on the occasion of Michaelmas, so it’s appropriate to remember this music now.

Below is Rachmaninov’s ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul’ from The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, sung by the Netherlands Radio Choir (skip forward to 5:47 to hear the beginning).

Yours in Christ,
Justin