Justin Appel

Dear Friends in Christ,

Today’s Gospel reading includes the Johannine account where John the Baptist refers to Jesus as the ‘Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world’. This phrase and the image of Jesus as the Paschal Lamb continues to be repeated in every Eucharistic liturgy in the Ordinary text, Agnus Dei.

Today, I am thinking about a remarkable example of an Agnus Dei setting used in a movie. In this case, the scene in question is at the denoument of Terrence Malick’s virtuosic The Tree of Life, a film that David Bentley Hart calls ‘dark, often radiant, emotionally austere, and deeply contemplative art.’

I watched The Tree of Life in the theater soon after it was released, and I was overwhelmed by the way Malick weaves profound topics together with music from great composers like John Tavener, Bedrich Smetana, and Hector Berlioz. Wait, what, Berlioz? I don’t think I’ve ever really appreciated Berlioz until I saw this movie.

In what can only be described as a truly bizarre final scene, the Agnus Dei from Berlioz’ Grand Messe des Morts fills nine minutes of cathartic integration of all the themes explored hitherto in the movie: the pain and suffering of loss, the mystery of creation and of God’s hidden wisdom, and of the gathering up of suffering in the good will of the Creator, to name a few. This last scene occurs largely in a salt flat which also merges with a kind of heavenly shore where the main characters — a disappointed father, a grieving mother, a disenchanted son, and the other son lost to a war many years in the past — all of them are reconciled in this sacred moment. Not only do the characters find each other, but the mother, a kind of Mary-like creature, offers her lost son back to God.

I have to hand it to Terrence Malick for hearing the possibilities of meaning in the Belioz Agnus Dei, which accompanies this final scene to astounding effect. You can listen to it and form your own conclusions, but I especially enjoy those stark, eternal chords at the opening of the movement, and of the rising and falling arpeggios at the ‘Amens’, while the timpani beat out a marked, ‘heavenly’ kind of rhythm.

I hope you can see the film sometime, but you can also listen to the Agnus Dei in the video here.

Yours in Christ,
Justin