EDITOR’S NOTE: As someone who continues to be fed by the richness of the Anglican Choral Tradition, one of the biggest losses for me through this whole Coronavirus situation is that of singing some of my favorite hymns and anthems during Holy Week. As such, we here at Earth & Altar are pleased to offer Sounds of Holy Week, a set of articles that will come out five times (including today) over the next week, with thoughts from us and some of our friends about our favorite hymns and anthems of this time, alongside a YouTube playlist you can listen and sing to as you read.

“My Song is Love Unknown” (Love Unknown)

Some hymns stick in the mind; others pierce the heart and remain lodged there. I remember the Tenebrae service where I first heard "My Song is Love Unknown." It had followed Allegri's Miserere (a difficult act to follow) and it had surpassed it. What, exactly, is so transfixing about this song? In part, the hymn tune itself. Halfway through each verse, an accidental twists the song in a new direction, and the lyrics follow suit. But hymns are creatures of music and word alike, and the words of this hymn set it apart. While humanity's failure to provide—our failure to provide—Christ with the love and glory he deserved is central to "Love Unknown," it is not an indictment of those "men made strange" who crucify God made man. Rather, it is a song of bereavement asking a heartbroken, unanswerable "why?" to humanity's frenzied, all-destroying hatred, which killed the God who came to save us and in so doing set us free. It is a simple, sorrowful lament for a carpenter from Galilee, for a God who became flesh and suffered death—even death upon a cross.

It is, in my opinion, the most beautiful hymn ever composed.

- Elizabeth Loupe

“Jesus, Remember Me” (from the Taize Community)

"Prostrate yourself on the ground, take hold of his feet, soothe them with kisses, sprinkle them with your tears and so wash not them but yourself." -- Bernard of Clairvaux

Fridays at Taize are for prayer around the cross. The whole assembly chants as those who wish come forward before the prostrated icon of Jesus on the cross. People often approach on their hands and knees, crawling their way to the cross to pray, sealing it with a kiss. I was blessed to get to chaperone two trips to Taize with my seminary field placement, and so two times have found myself in the bleak mid-February crawling on hands and knees to the cross. My seminary years were ones with many griefs, and both years I inevitably unraveled from a big, tough, stickler of a chaperone to a weeping mess as soon as I whispered, "Jesus." 

Fridays were always our last nights in Taize. At the end of the service, the youth would scatter for final goodbyes with their new friends at the Oyak. I would walk to the end of the road. Next to the sign that let you know you were leaving Taize, there is a cross on a concrete pedestal. Both years I sat there leaned against the iron cross, and poured out my prayers and tears on that spot, soaking up the love of God under the cold twinkling night sky. My seminary field placement always did their Good Friday service in the style of Taize, with a replica of the icon. Even though I've been away for years ministering to my own community, Good Friday still takes me back there. To that icon, to the warm feeling of a crowded prayer hall, to that blessed parish that nurtured and formed my ministry, to the cold feeling of the iron cross on my back. To the place in my soul where I know that Jesus remembers me. 

- Caitlyn Darnell

Good Friday Anthems: Extolling the Glory of the Cross by Russell Schulz-Widmar

My first Holy Week during my time in college was the first time I ever experienced a sung Good Friday service (and, additionally, my first full Triduum!) One of the things that always stands out to me is that on Maundy Thursday, no later than the chanting of Psalm 22, the organ is turned off and is not played for the next 48 hours until the proclamation of Easter at the Great Vigil. This means, for better or for worse, that the Good Friday liturgy is the only major service in Sewanee’s chapel over the whole year that does not have any organ - everything is a capella. We sang this setting of the the BCP1979’s anthems for veneration during my freshman year, and it has always stuck out with me.

These texts become more meaningful when spaced out for meditation. The starkness of the cello is the perfect accompaniment to that meditation. And most importantly for me is Schulz-Widmar’s harmonies - there are few dissonances, all the harmonies feel natural and right, and it’s all relatively quiet and simple, perfect for silent veneration.

- Richard Pryor, III

“O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded” (Passion Chorale)

On Monday, Dr. Elizabeth Joyner wrote about Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. This work is one of my desert island pieces; when I was a poor grad student, I spent $200 of my food money on a cloth bound urtext edition and survived on peanut butter. There are a hundred miracles in each selection, but one of the things that makes it hang together is the use of popular chorales or hymns throughout the work. An 18th century Lutheran congregation would have known these chorales intimately, and so Bach was able to use them as commentary on the passion narrative. Bach knew that by inserting well-known hymns, he would bring the drama of the Passion into the “now” of the listener. Whenever I sing “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded” on Good Friday, I try to remember this. It’s hard for me, because the language is so intimate; at times it feels awkwardly personal, and I want to run away from it because it reminds me of the evangelical fundamentalism of my youth. Yet, there is something to be gained from drawing nearer to Christ’s passion in intimacy, and there is something to be gained in asking myself why I resist this intimacy. In the second stanza, “thy beauty, long desired, hath vanished from our sight” is a reference to the Isaiah 52 reading for Good Friday - “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” And yet, we are called to look - to behold. 

It is not a maudlin or gory text (as some Pietistic texts can be) for God’s arms extended on the cross are not stretched in defeat. They are “extended upon the cross of life.” Hassler’s tune and Bach’s harmonization are a perfect pairing because of one musical technique: transformation. In each and every phrase, the tonal center transforms- from major to minor, from major to secondary major, and back. The cross is an object of transformation- it changes death into life. 

Lord Jesus Christ, who didst stretch out thine arms of love
on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come
within the reach of thy saving embrace: So clothe us in thy
Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring
those who do not know thee to the knowledge and love of
thee; for the honor of thy Name. Amen.   (BCP 58)

- Michael Smith

Today’s Authors

Elizabeth Loupe is a lawyer in Louisiana.
Caitlyn Darnell is the Director of Formation and Mission at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Columbia, SC and the Arts and Culture Editor for Earth & Altar.
Richard Pryor, III is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of the South and the Creative Editor for Earth & Altar.
Michael Smith is the Director of Music at St. Thomas Whitemarsh.