Shirin McArthur

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Today the Episcopal Church remembers Kassia or Kassiani, a ninth-century poet and liturgical composer from Constantinople. (If this is a surprise to you, that may be because Kassia was only added to the liturgical calendar last year.)

Kassia came from a family of means and founded a convent in western Constantinople, becoming its first abbess. Because her convent had a close relationship with a nearby monastery that had a key role in Byzantine liturgical reform, her work survived in an era when few women’s writings were preserved under their own names. Not only that, several of her hymns are still used in the Byzantine liturgy today.

Here in the West, we are more familiar with the medieval female composer and abbess Hildegard of Bingen. She lived two centuries after Kassia, and her work was not preserved in our liturgy, but was largely rediscovered in modern times.

I doubt that Kassia imagined her words and music would be remembered and used in worship 1200 years in the future. After all, she was writing hymns to meet her own community’s liturgical needs. The fact that her work has endured is perhaps due to the agency of the Holy Spirit and certainly not to anything Kassia would or could have done to preserve it.

None of us know what works of ours—if any—will endure for a year or a decade, much less twelve centuries. I personally don’t believe that should be our goal. Like Kassia, we write and serve and craft and build in response to the needs the Spirit shows us in this day and time. As the psalmist exhorts us today, “Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him, and he will bring it to pass.”

And perhaps, if our work is blessed, our words may endure. The singing group Capella Romana plans to issue recordings of all Kassia’s extant works. The first one is available here and excerpts such as this are available on YouTube.

Whose words and/or music have inspired you, years or centuries after they wrote? What hymns do you hope will be sung 1200 years from now, and why are they so important to you?

Peace,

Shirin McArthur