HE emphasizes that one of the outstanding features of monastic spirituality was “a sense of the Lord’s majesty”, which can be most clearly appreciated in monastic liturgical compositions: antiphons, responsories, hymns, tropes, and sequences.  “It was,” he states “in and through the liturgy that the monks came into contact with the Scripture and the Fathers; and [through the liturgy] they were permeated by the great traditional religious themes.” (Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 1957).

WHILE the liturgy was thus a principal source of monastic spiritual insight, it also came to reflect the results of monastic contemplative prayer.  Monks and nuns who experienced God in the liturgy wrote prayers and poems describing their spiritual perceptions: these poems, in turn, became antiphons, responsories, and sequences in the monastic antiphonal (the book of music used at the Liturgy of the Hours) and gradual (containing the music used at mass). In this way, over many centuries experiences of contemplative prayer were set to music and incorporated into the liturgies that had originally inspired them.

 LITURGICAL prayer therefore affords an encounter God at many different levels.  Two of these are reflected in the literary genres that compose the liturgy:

[1] God is present both in the historical narrative and “beneath the letter” of the inspired biblical texts which make up the majority of the liturgy; and

[2] the non-biblical poetry (hymns, antiphons, responsories, sequences) and prayers of the liturgy invite us to make our own the interpretations and experiences of our Christian forebears.

CONCERNING the mystical significance of the sequences and responsories Leclercq writes: 

    The traditional bases were primarily the Bible and the Fathers. If all these compositions are essentially poetic in character, they owe it to minds which had been fashioned by Holy Scripture. Their modes of expression are concrete and rich in images. The value of their words lies more in what they mean than in what they actually say: their evocative power is greater than their precision; each of them is like a note which awakens harmonics.

    All the delicacy of liturgical poetry comes from the free and har­monious use it makes of the sacred words: the groups of versicles, each of which, because of its origin and own particular meaning, has special significance and whose combination produces a more complex, and a newer whole; they are daring in juxtaposing two texts, one of which throws light upon the other, thereby forming, because it is so different, a contrast with it which makes each one’s individual light more intense; their way of lending a wide range of different colors to the same unchanging texts by, for example, incorporating verses of the Psalms within the antiphons; the continual passage from fact to allegory, from event to idea; the alternation of formulas, each of which evokes a different reality, which complete each other within a whole that is richer still, as the facets of a diamond permit us to see all its fires asparkle. 

(The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, A Study of Monastic Culture, 
Jean Jeclercq, O.S.B. , tr, C. Misrahi, (Fordham Univ. Press, NY, 1961, 1974). p. 295.)

THE following prolix responsory illustrates many of these features. It represents the musical and poetic application of the practice of lectio divina to the  liturgy.  Meditation on the meaning of Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, has interwoven the Lord’s parable of the great feast (which does not have a happy ending) with the much more joyful cry of Wisdom in Proverbs to “come eat the bread and drink the wine” she has mixed. This responsory is also the focus of both readings in the Office of Readings for Wednesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time (v. 3, pp. 209-213: Prov. 9:1-18; Commentary of Proverbs by Procopius of Gaza).

THIS English antiphon for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time is based on the prolix responsory above:

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