Prayers for the Time of Trial

Track 1: Lighten Our Darkness

Text: ‘Collect for Aid Against Perils,’ from the Service of Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Though the Collect for Aid Against Perils from the Book of Common Prayer is not usually associated with Good Friday, I think it nonetheless captures an essence of the day itself. It is usually prayed during evening prayer, and like that liturgy, Good Friday expresses the evening shadows of despair that ever threaten to fall over the landscape of our hope. Here we are met with the unavoidable darkness of the cross; and yet to that symbol we are invited to bring all our own individual sorrows and failures, recognising in Christ's Passion the love that enters into the complete depth of forsakenness and accompanies us there. For as we remember today, the Light of The World is no stranger to the experience of that forsakenness. We are able to have hope in the midst of that darkness, and the darknesses of our own lives, for though those shadows may seem for now to be inescapable, we know that they were unable to overcome the light. And so it is to that light that we cling today: 'Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world' (Jn. 16:33).

May you sense the radiance of Christ's self-giving love lightening your darkness this Good Friday, and may each of you have a blessed Triduum. - J.C., Good Friday, 2021

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I’ve always loved the second collect for Evening Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, the Collect for Aid Against All Perils. There is something so profoundly vibrant about the imagery of the light of Christ made present even as darkness falls. I especially love how the text makes clear that the light is born from the love of the Father for the Son, and how that love is bestowed upon us. It is a light planted in our hearts, born of divine love, which darkness cannot overcome.

We live in a time of artificial light, when the shade that comes with evening can easily be mitigated by simply flipping a switch. We are able to hold at bay the feeling of vulnerability and fear that was so real for our forebears, who had only frail candlelight to hold back the shadows. If we begin to feel crowded in by the gathering gloom, we merely turn on the light and forget about it.

And yet we live in a time of lurking shadows, from illness to social turmoil, from racial injustice to economic ruin. We have become accustomed to believing that our technology and our progress will save us from the darkness, and we may be able to hold back the shadows of actual twilight, but we find ourselves helpless before the shadows of uncertainty, discord, grief, pain, and fear. Perhaps for the first time in many of our lives, we have realised that there is nothing we can buy, nowhere we can travel, nothing we can do to mitigate this kind of darkness. The world we live in is broken, and though we have more means of hiding ourselves from this fact in our current age than we might have in the past, eventually the wave of that inexorable fact peaks and crashes down, sweeping us up in its unstoppable surge.

The Collect for Aid Against Perils, as found in the BCP, is only one iteration in a long line of similar prayers stretching back to the beginning of the church. For the earliest Christians, the knowledge of the brokenness of the world was as present to them as breath. Facing fierce persecution up to the point of complete annihilation, there was no pretending that this world could provide any real security from sin, evil, and death. And yet, they were overcome with the assured inner belief that the darkness, no matter how intense or close at hand, was never an equal combatant in the fight between the light and the dark. For them, in and through the paschal mystery of Christ—His death and resurrection—a reality had begun to break into the world that could not be mitigated, a reality in which the eventual restoration of all things was already at work.

At dawn, they sang the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, the hymn of the angels, joining their praise with the heavenly host itself who are ever in the presence of God's light; and at dusk, they sang the Phos Hilaron, which recognised how the light of creation is a living analogy of Christ the true light, a sun which will eternally remain after our own sun has set for the last time. And just as the sun disappears at night but remains a true and persistent reality that will return at dawn, for these early Christians, Christ, the light that shines in the darkness, is an immutable reality that, even in the night of our own history, is at work beyond our sight, weaving into our world the signs of the final, everlasting dawn, in and through us.

Perhaps in a time like ours, when the darkness is so close and there is no real escape from it, these prayers might help us cling to the love of Christ from which nothing in heaven or earth can separate us, the love that shines brightly in our hearts and keeps vigil with us in the shadows. To know this love is not to escape the shadows around us, but to know that Christ has entered into them Himself, and accompanies us close at hand. It is He who walks through the darkness with us, assuring us that in time, the passing shadow of all things will fall away, and as Revelation says, He, the lamb, will be our everlasting light.

The Collect for Aid Against Perils has often comforted me, and drawn me close to the light of Christ in the midst of my own shadows. I hope that this setting might give you comfort too and help you also draw close to Jesus as you navigate through the uncertainties of this current time. - J.C., June 18, 2020

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Track 2: Hail King

Text: ‘At Whitehead Bay,’ By Sarah Clarkson

HAIL King! / Of sea-flung wind, / And far-gemmed marshes bending / Low, those cliffs / That jut rough shoulders ‘gainst the sky, / And stand unbent, / Amidst the tug and shove / Of sea; the heave! of blue, and / Ho! of God’s past motion, / Spirit’s hover o’er the ocean / In the hush and dusk / Before our time began. / Hail King! / Of light unbridled / And the seagulls plunging wild / And hard as daylight, riled, flings a storm / To earth. The surf foams up, / A breathless, frenzied rush / Of dark to catch the light, / And deep to touch the soft, white / Skin of shore, the gentle sand / The roughened ocean waves / Adore.

I find the Palm Sunday account in scripture so fascinating. In one sense, it’s a dramatic spectacle, of God himself entering His Holy city, to great fanfare. There’s a strangeness to it; Christ on a donkey, surrounded by the crowds with palm branches, some of them waved as a genuine offering adoration, perhaps many more simply appearing from those curious and excited to be part of the throng. Jesus’ reaction to all of this fanfare, his weeping over Jerusalem, is jarring, and yet it meaningfully anticipates the moment only days away when words of veneration are traded for the jeers of a riotous mob. And yet, there is something transcendent in the overlooked donkey, in the cast-aside palm branches. Even though the humans made to offer creation—and themselves— as a sacrifice of praise fail in their vocation, creation itself still bears forth as a persistent testimony to God’s glory, steadfastly staying the course, reflecting the aspect of a divine glory.

This year, many of us have been preoccupied by the intensity of the events surrounding us, and it has been easy for those upheavals to overtake our whole vision. But even now, as we find ourselves locked into our homes and into our worries, the whole of creation has continued to sing. The rocks cry out, the trees raise their hands in praise, the sea breathes its song of worship. I am reminded of this every time I take a walk nearby here in Scotland. The seascape provides an ideal touchpoint with this creational reality, the glory of God’s creative act always visible and remaining at work in the world.

Not all prayers during times of trial are those of petition, of desperation. The singular purpose of our lives as humans, and indeed, of all creation, is to praise; and that praise is still possible in moments like the one we find ourselves in now. The song creation sings echoes the eternal song of worship, offered before the throne of God before the foundation of the world, and which will reverberate in Heaven for all of eternity when all is put to rights again. The song reminds us that the story isn’t over yet. On Palm Sunday, we are invited to take up that song in praise again, knowing, even as we enter into the shadows of Holy Week, that the Lord we celebrate today is the Triumphant King over all the Universe, who has conquered death and the grave, and for whom all creation sings in honour.

Sarah's words in this poem are themselves full of musical expression. There is a lilt and a spring to them that perfectly captures that poetic sense of diving seagulls or crashing waves. More importantly, it encapsulates the sense of God’s creative activity in nature as something which orients our consciousness to its epochal sense of time, something which stretches back to the “hush and dusk before our time began”, and which reveals the underlay of divine movement continuing its ancient dance in the motions of creation we see even today. It provides a glorious foil to our reflection on this Palm Sunday, pressing us to enter into and remain in a posture of worship, in preparation for the journey of Holy Week.

I hope it encourages each of you wherever life finds you at present; and I wish you all a truly blessed Holy Week. - J.C., Palm Sunday, 2021

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Track 3: Ubi Caritas

Text: ‘Ubi Caritas’, attributed to St. Paulinus II, c. 796. Antiphon for foot-washing liturgy on Maundy Thursday

Latin:

Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. / Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor. / Exsultemus, et in ipso jucundemur. / Timeamus, et amemus Deum vivum. / Et ex corde diligamus nos sincero. / / Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. / Simul ergo cum in unum congregamur: / Ne nos mente dividamur, caveamus. / Cessent iurgia maligna, cessent lites. / Et in medio nostri sit Christus Deus. / / Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. / Simul quoque cum beatis videamus, / Glorianter vultum tuum, Christe Deus: / Gaudium quod est immensum, atque probum, / Saecula per infinita saeculorum. Amen.

English:

Where charity and love are, God is there. / Christ's love has gathered us into one. / Let us rejoice and be pleased in Him. / Let us fear, and let us love the living God. / And may we love each other with a sincere heart. / / Where charity and love are, God is there. / As we are gathered into one body, / Beware, lest we be divided in mind. / Let evil impulses stop, let controversy cease, / And may Christ our God be in our midst. / / Where charity and love are, God is there. / And may we with the saints also, / See Thy face in glory, O Christ our God: / The joy that is immense and good, / Unto the ages through infinite ages. Amen.

For last year's Maundy Thursday, Joy and I recorded and posted my original setting of 'Ubi Caritas,' which will be available online soon as part of Joy's and my EP 'Prayers in the Time of Trial.' As I reflect on the "mandatum" (“mandate”) at the heart of Maundy Thursday—Jesus' command in John 13:34 for us to love one another—I find that I need it now more than ever; but even more, I need the full scope of what makes that mandate possible to honour and obey. Last year, when I first put up this video, the pandemic was still in its beginning throes, and the spirit of neighbourliness was more in-vogue for me, even if just for a moment. Now, I find myself fatigued, tired, less patient, just wanting this season to be finally over. I need that mandate more than ever; but not as judgment, not as a critical divine eye cast in displeasure down upon me. I need that command, because it reminds me where that love comes from. It comes from the one who loved with such a great love that he walked into the darkness of death for me.

This year, I need to hear the mandate behind the mandate: “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” Just like Peter, in my exhaustion and frustration with this season, my temptation is to shrink into myself, to shut others out: “I am simply surviving right now, and I cannot give or receive.” Like Peter, I am inclined to say to Christ, “you shall never wash my feet.” It is hard to receive; whether because of pride, or shame, because we feel we must earn our favour or because we feel we never will, we keep it at a distance, placing a price upon something which is beyond price. We create a version of it in our minds that we hold as a vague ideal, of something we might achieve someday but not now, because the radical givenness of the real thing, offered to us in this very moment, would shatter the barriers of our own self-preservation. And yet I can never live out Jesus’ life in my life, abide in his grace and offer its abundance to others, unless I receive it. It is given lavishly not because we could ever earn it, but because that love is at the very heart of who God is, revealed to us in Christ. We can never hope to live out the command to love one another, unless we relinquish the right to receive God's grace in the way we wish, and instead receive it in the way He offers it: willingly, unequivocally, the infinity of his love flowing through our finite, fragile selves, even washing over our grubby, soiled feet.

This year, I hope you will hear that mandate behind the mandate. Christ longs to wash our feet, to lavish us with his kindness. There is nothing we can do to earn it, to make ready for it. We cannot wash ourselves and dress ourselves up in preparation for it; it is precisely our dirty, tired, achy feet that Christ longs for us to place before him, the uncut marble from which he will sculpt the beauty of his redemptive work. Only in that space of receptivity to his love, grace, and forgiveness, knowing, as Henri Nouwen says, that we are “beloved”, can we hope to live out belovedness to others. For it is not in our strength that we live out Christ’s mandate to love one another, but His life flowing through us, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Friends, may you be blessed this Maundy Thursday, and know Christ’s love as you walk through each of His paschal mysteries in this coming Triduum. - J.C., Maundy Thursday, 2021.

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The Ubi Caritas is most fundamentally associated with Jesus washing His disciples' feet, and commanding them to love one another. "Maundy" comes from the latin "mandatum," meaning "commandment," referring to Jesus' final instruction to his disciples. On Maundy Thursday, we remember that the last act of Jesus was to take the role of the servant, to give himself, in the washing of feet, and in the institution of the Eucharist. On Maundy Thursday, we are called to remember this spirit of self-giving. We are reminded that to be like Christ is to lay down our own lives for the sake of others, in service, and in love.

The words of the Ubi Caritas bring this to life in a vivid, arresting way, and in my setting, I wanted to capture that sense of how what seems to us to be the simplest acts of service for others can often shine out with the illumination of a heavenly love; the actions of self-giving we take on behalf of each other and the world are icons of Jesus' love for the world. On this Maundy Thursday, even as we wait in the uncertainty of our homes for what comes next, we have these bright and shining lights all around us, in those putting their lives on the line to heal, to protect, to assist. They show us how at the very heart of human existence is the call to love one another, to lay our lives down for each other, and to serve others. Their actions reveal God's hand at work in the world redeeming even in the midst of the darkness.

Their witness is also a clarion call to us, to ask ourselves daily how we might give our own selves for the sake of those around us. Whether this is calling someone who may be lonely, making one more meal for our families, self-isolating out of love for others, or simply saying a prayer for those in need, everyday, we are given the opportunity to participate in acts of love, both great and small. And it is in those acts of love that God draws near to us, that He makes Himself known to us and those around us. "Where charity and love are, God is there."

May each of you have a blessed Triduum, and know my prayers are with you all! - J.C., Maundy Thursday, 2020.

English translation courtesy of Thesaurus Precum Latinarum.

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Track 4: Sub Tuum Praesidium

Text: ‘Sub Tuum Praesidium’, anonymous hymn to the Theotokos (Mother of God), c. 3rd century.

Latin:

Sub tuum praesidium / confugimus, / Sancta Dei Genetrix. / Nostras deprecationes ne despicias / in necessitatibus nostris, / sed a periculis cunctis / libera nos semper, / Virgo gloriosa et benedicta. / Amen.

English:

We fly to Thy protection, / O Holy Mother of God; / Do not despise our petitions / in our necessities, / but deliver us always / from all dangers, / O Glorious and Blessed Virgin. / Amen.

The Sub Tuum Praesidium is one of the oldest known still-existing hymns from the early church, likely sung by Christians during times of intense persecution. The first Christians were all too well aware of the peril their faith represented in the ancient Roman world, and were constantly under threat of complete annihilation. In many ways, that fragile faith was kept alive by a profound awareness of the world beyond our own, the awareness that, as Paul says in Romans, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

Some settings of this vibrant text have focused on the comforting aspects of the words, the sense of reassurance and hope. And yet the word “praesidium,” translated generally as “protection,” has a sense of military might. With my own setting, I wanted to capture the intensity of a glorious and beautiful heavenly reality that has not come simply to comfort and succour us, but to fight on our behalf, to enter into the fray and cast away the darkness.

As you listen to the piece, I hope that in our own time of uncertainty and fear, you will attune your ears to the tensions in the harmony, and experience within them the ringing truth that in our struggles, we are not alone, but that we are accompanied, by the one who has entered into our suffering, and who, with the whole host of Heaven, and all who have gone before us, fights on our behalf. - J.C., March 29, 2020

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Track 5: May the Peace

Text: Compound text of several liturgical iterations of prayers and sentences of peace, by Joel Clarkson.

‘May the Peace.’ It sets a text that is a composite of a number of liturgical texts, not the least of which is The Peace, which is offered during Eucharistic worship in many Christian traditions.

Of course, that liturgical act has its roots in Christ’s offering of peace in various points in the gospels after his resurrection. I find the response of the disciples to Christ’s greetings of peace to be so revealing. At first, this offer of peace causes them to be “startled and frightened,” as Luke 24 tells us. It is only when Christ’s body, the body broken and given on the Cross, is apprehended that their trepidation changes to “joy and amazement.”

Isn’t that the way of Christ’s peace? It comes to us in the locked rooms of our own lives where we huddle in fear. Today is Easter Monday, and though we are in the liturgical season of feasting, the Lenten spirit of our world endures. Yesterday, we celebrated the joy of the resurrection; but today, we must continue in our journey, back into the real world where our sadnesses and tragedies and frustrations endure. Like a beam of sunlight which catches our vision for a moment and the flitters away, peace eludes us.

Where then is peace? The world around us talks of achieving peace; peace with our neighbours, peace between nations. It is an idea, a hopeful concept, which we hope might be made real in our world. And yet, somehow, whatever peace does, at times, occur, seems to last only for moment. Its mirage shimmers often on the sands of history; and as soon as it is approached, it dissipates and fades away. We long for its substance; but it never seems to solidify enough to keep hold of.

“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give you.” The peace Christ offers is not a state of equilibrium, a coming to harmony with the world. No, rather, it is a radical disruption of this world, an opening up of its septic wound. For the Peace which Christ gives is Himself, in his body, for us. And that peace, that coming into contact with the divine heart of love, must break our hearts and open them up to the glory we behold in that Body.

When we offer The Peace in our worship, we must not do so as a sentimental smile upon our neighbours and fellow congregants, as reassuring gesture. The peace we give is the declaration—the promise—that through the work of the Holy Spirit, we will make the journey to the altar and there again meet our Lord, who gave Himself; not as spiritual, disembodied mantra to chant or idea to comprehend, but a body, a Sacrament, that fractures our space and our time, our very world itself, and opens it up to the shalom of a Heavenly reality. And even more, the sign of peace we offer in worship must be the firm confidence that that encounter with the manifestation of divine love itself in the Sacrament will transform us into a redemptive body as well. Our very lives, our bodies, lived out in the daily acts of love we offer as a sacrifice, might, through the gift of Christ acting in and through us, also be given as a testament of peace to a world that finds it so elusive.

In writing this setting, I wanted to grasp what it is to experience and live out the beauty of that peace, a beauty which occurs for us in the midst of a constantly changing external world; not because we have transcended that broken world, but because our God has entered into it and met us there. While the harmony is hopeful and at times warm and rich, it never remains centred tonally for more than a short time; when it finally comes to a close, the composition ends on an ambiguous minor chord. The pinnacle of the piece is a high A natural, which comes at the end of a suspended sequence, thereby leaving little room for easy breath control; it requires each of the performers, especially the sopranos who sing the high note, to push to the edge of their vocal capacities to achieve the moment. Perhaps even we as the listeners feel in our own bodies a sympathetic strain of muscles and vocal cords.

This is the way of Christ’s peace. It does not come to us because we have ‘found our bliss,’ or achieved some sort of balance. It isn’t a nice thought or even a transcendent spiritual supposition. It is the Lord Himself, who has surpassed the locked doors of our hearts and gives Himself, His wounds, as a sign of His love for us. And he calls us to that cosmic act of transformation, to become part of His body, to share in His suffering, to make His peace known to the world through our very lives.

Friends, I pray that as you press on into this Eastertide, you will recall that peace. I pray that you will meet it both in the Sacrament of Christ, and in each other, Christ’s hands and feet. And I pray that you and I will make our very lives a sacrifice of praise, living out Christ’s peace to others in turn.

A special thank you to Joy Clarkson, who has accompanied me through this whole journey of recording choral music from our living room this year. Not only was it such a generous gift of her prodigious talent, she gave willingly of her time and energy while also writing a PhD draft, a gargantuan task in itself. Her amazing voice has brought such a beauty and, yes, peacefulness to each of these recordings; but more importantly, that beauty comes from an inner beauty that Joy exudes in her life. It's been such a blessing to me and I know to so many of you too.

God bless each of you, and may you know His resurrection peace today! - J.C., Easter Monday, 2021