Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

I think it’s fair to say that Lent is a difficult season to make sense of liturgically. Speaking simply as a musician who works with church music, it’s challenging to find music for the season. When it comes to the more dramatic extremes of the story, say, Christmas on the one end, or Good Friday on the other, we have plenty of material. But Lent?

Why do I say this? Well, perhaps it’s due to the fact that we tend to simplify Lent’s themes a bit, to think of it in terms that equate ‘penitential’ with ‘passion’, to treat the 40 days leading to Easter as a warmup to Good Friday’s dark despair.

However, if we think of Lent as a long, quiet pathway, filled with the ‘bright sadness’ of repentance, and leading to the inevitable, unstoppable joy and light of Easter — suddenly things fall into perspective.

This is why the lectionary bristles with stories and songs like the temptation of Jesus, Psalm 27 (‘The Lord is my light’), Psalm 63 (‘O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you’), the Prodigal Son, the raising of Lazarus. During this season we contemplate God’s mercy, his power to save — even to raise the dead, and Jesus’ own response to temptation. These various themes combine in a larger progression of contemplation and self-examination, but in a way that ultimately relies on the trinitarian movements of creation, mercy and redemption. 

In a way, a major theme of is one of pilgrimage, of moving along the way towards Christ. Thus, texts like the Salva nos, Domine, set here by Jean Mouton, are a beautiful expression of Lenten piety:

Save us, O Lord, waking,
and guard us sleeping,
that we may watch with Christ,
and rest in peace.

This setting well embodies the text very well, depicting the kind of quiet wakefulness, a kind of spiritual awareness, quiet yet active, that characterizes our Lenten ‘watching with Christ’.

Yours in Christ,
Justin

(Please click on the link ‘See original post' below to see the video of Jean Mouton’s motet Libera no, salve nos.)