LISTEN: How Music Reveals the Holy Face at CU Boulder

(Photo provided)

“Arise, O Lord! And let thy enemies be scattered and let them that hate thee flee from before thy Holy Face.” Psalm 68

Jesus Christ is – by far – the most frequently depicted person in human history.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence, coupled with new scientific evidence for the Shroud of Turin, have flooded the internet with new attempts to capture the true face of Christ. But this is nothing new: for centuries, iconographers, painters, cinematographers and actors have endeavored to capture the likeness of Christ in their work.

The desire to see God is perhaps best expressed by the Psalmist’s cry, “Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face…”

Moved by this same spirit, Brian Lambert, music director at St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Boulder, has written and premiered a musical meditation (“Arise O Lord”) on the terrible beauty of the countenance of Christ.

His intention? To satisfy the hungry hearts that “seek truth and are moved by the beauty which springs forth from the ultimate Truth,” he told the Denver Catholic. His piece aims to help us contemplate the face of God.

“The idea for the piece formed in my heart soon after I was introduced to the Holy Face Chaplet,” Lambert explained, recalling the prayer that formed a key component of the local stage of the National Eucharistic Revival. His roommate had picked up a prayer card from the Archdiocese, and soon Lambert and his friends began to develop a devotion to the Holy Face.

“I realized that the central prayer of the devotion could work really well as a text for a motet [a choral piece],” Lambert said. It was initially challenging to find time to write the piece until Renova, the new choir at CU Boulder, asked him to write them a piece. “I immediately got to work writing the piece while praying through the devotion. It was tough writing in this style, but I believe that leaving the process open to the Holy Spirit through prayer made it easier.”

Lambert’s piece takes its words from the central prayer of the Holy Face Chaplet, which comes from the Psalmist’s words in Psalm 68: “Arise, O Lord! And let thy enemies be scattered and let them that hate thee flee from before thy Holy Face.”

(Video courtesy of Brian Lambert)

Lambert explains that the Holy Face Chaplet guides the faithful in contemplation of Christ’s full humanity, with particular attention to each of Christ’s five senses. As Lambert put it, by focusing our attention on the senses of Christ, we can “attune [our] own senses with his senses.” Lambert says that because the chaplet orders our attention to focus on the full humanity of Christ, it also provides a window through which to “peer into his divinity” and thus transforms the soul.

“The concept is known as theosis,” Lambert explained, “the state of becoming more and more like God.” This, he says, is the central theme of his piece.

“Another way of looking at [theosis] is like an old married couple,” he explained. “As they interact more with each other, perhaps meditating on each detail of each other’s face, they begin to look like one another. It is the same between one who prays prayers such as this and Christ.”

The chaplet has remarkable power to aid in preparation for the right reception of the Eucharist because it considers the awesome power of the face of Christ where divinity and humanity meet. This is, of course, at the very heart of the mystery of the Eucharist: man partakes in Christ, who is God and man.

In his introduction to the piece, Lambert said, “Christ bridges this unbridgeable gap” between the human and the divine “and provides the face by which all people may receive their faces – that even as human beings, they may both encounter the divine and share in its nature.”

His piece begins with a Gregorian chant-style solo of the verse over a drone. Then, as if awakened from some mysterious slumber, the whole choir is stirred up, and the initial chanted line becomes interwoven into a motet of mixed voices.

Though the piece begins with chant, the entire motet draws on a wide range of Catholic musical traditions, taking inspiration from the intertwining lines and cadences of Renaissance polyphony and Lambert’s contemporary stylings.

“Just as a person’s soul is lifted and expanded through interface with the divine,” Lambert said, “so too is the simple chant made more than itself by being caught up in something greater.”

Through the simple chant, Lambert hopes to encourage the faithful to contemplate the great mystery of the Incarnation — God becoming man — and its restorative power in our lives. St. Athanasius wrote that the Incarnation actually restores man from his fallen nature. Because God himself, who made man in his own image, enters into our humanity, he likewise recreates man in his image and, mysteriously in so doing, makes man more like God.

Lambert’s piece considers the awesome power of the sight of the Holy Face. That face, both divine and human, fills the enemies of God with terror and provides the greatest possible hope for Christians — because in the face of Christ, man witnesses his own eternal destiny.

“I love that I get to share this devotion with people of all walks of life through my music,” Lambert said. “I hope that when people hear the music, they will be stirred to greater devotion for the Holy Face and drawn deeper into the Christian mystery. I hope that, if this is their first encounter with these aspects of Christianity, it will provoke further consideration of the truths of what we believe as Catholics. Especially in the Lenten season of repentance, of ‘thinking again,’ I hope that this piece places a foot in the doorway of someone's heart and inspires others to refocus their lives on Christ.”

Lambert continues to write music and is pleased to premiere a new piece with Renova on April 22nd — a setting of the St. Michael Prayer in Latin with full choir and organ.

+++

For more information on the Holy Face Chaplet, read more.