Justin Appel

Dear Friends in Christ,

Happy Feast of All Saints!

Today, the Gospel lesson is from Jesus’ sermon from the mount on the Sea of Galilee. This first section, called the “Beatitudes,” describes a blessed way of life.

This passage is associated with the saints because they are ones who live their lives in light of the Kingdom of God, with an existence focused on spiritual things.

The saints are those who, unlike many of us (including myself) struggling with a divide between spiritual and mundane existence, have made God the center of everything they do. They acquire a reputation for holiness in their local communities. They are able to see what is truly important in life: being healed and transformed, as much as it is possible, into union with God, in whose image we have been created.

Arvo Pärt’s setting of the Beatitudes illustrates this connection in a profound way. His choral setting features a strictly controlled musical system that “harmonizes” both a vertical, harmonic perspective (the Divine) and a horizontal melodic dimension (the human) into one fused musical reality (an image of the Incarnated Christ). Interestingly, in the Beatitudes, this Christological formula involves a logical movement around a repeated recitation note that grows higher through the setting, increasing the felt sense of tension. At the crux of the music, the choir concludes the text to dramatic chords on the word “Amen” and the organ proceeds to “unwind” itself by following the chordal progression already traced, but now in reverse. The effect of this sequence is to communicate, in an eerily powerful way, the meaning of the whole exercise.

The meaning of this music—as with much of Pärt’s work—is to hold both the suffering of the world (think of the “mourning” of saints who lament their own sin and the suffering others endure in this life) together with God’s mercy (the sense in the music that things will work out in the end). This reconciliation, musically speaking, parallels a rhetorical progression: the saint moves upward to God and is justified, so to speak, by the divine “Amen.” Also, the temporal movement to the Kingdom of God becomes reversed, or better yet, moves outside of any temporal limits. The saint enters eternity, and does so now, even in the present moment.

Somehow, the music expresses all of this. It may also contain something of the resounding and universal call of sainthood.

Yours in Christ,

—Justin