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.

“Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle” (Pange Lingua)

Maundy Thursday is the culmination of God’s Covenant to Israel. I was born into a Messianic Jewish family. The irrevocable bond between Passover and Maundy Thursday is not appropriation: it’s my childhood roots. On this night, we celebrate both the “newer rite” and the “type” that preceded it, for they are one. This night that Israel was born by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, a bloodied paschal lamb, and bread without yeast. The night that Israel was fulfilled when God’s mighty arm passed Himself on to be taken by sinners, you and me, as our Passover Sacrifice, our sinless Bread. The night that God’s mighty hand passed Himself on to be taken by His disciples, you and me, Body to eat and Blood to drink.

Maundy Thursday is the culmination of the world. It opens the Paschal Triduum, beginning the culmination of the Church year. The Veneration of the Sacrament at the Altar of Repose, sung with St. Thomas Aquinas’ hymn for Corpus Christi, culminates every Mass, every Benediction, and every meal we eat. It celebrates the gathering of wheat and grapes, soul and divinity, perfect humanity and loving God offered to the Father and given to us in bread and wine. It looks forward to the Great Feast two days later, and the Lamb’s Supper at the end of time.

Types and shadows have their ending;
For the newer rite is here.
Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us;
Therefore let us keep the Feast.

- Matthew Neugebauer

Ubi caritas by Maurice Durufle

My earliest memory of singing Maurice Duruflé’s motet Ubi caritas is the dark grey of an English chapel, a summer funeral for a woman in her early 20s, the sister of a fellow chorister at my Oxford college. I’d sung the piece before, but in the warmth and grief of that gathering, I heard it properly for the first time. The plainchant that holds the piece together, sung by the altos, is almost a lullaby, the child wrapped in the swaddling clothes of close harmonies. The closing amendies to a whisper, the low E-flat in the bass almost a vibration. 

I was surprised to learn later that the text, and hence the motet, belong not to Christmas but to the foot-washing of Maundy Thursday, a moment of physical intimacy on the last day of Lent to book-end the ashes imposed on the first. Perhaps these words – where love is, there God is also – remind us that in penitence, we call to mind and seek to amend our distance from God, a God who is nevertheless always present to us. 

- Dhananjay Jagannathan

“Were You There?” (Were You There)

My childhood memories of Maundy Thursday are strangely specific. Growing up in the Central Gulf Coast, footwashing was unheard of. Stripping the altar was the thing. Legions of Altar Guild women (and in those days, it was all women) converged at the end of the service to remove everything that wasn’t tied down. As they did so, the lights would go down and the choir would sing:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? 
Were you there when they crucified my Lord? 
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. 
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  

I recall very clearly seeing my father, a stoic Mississippian, openly weeping as he knelt during that hymn. He did so every year. We come to Holy Week and desperately want to look around, to find someone else to blame, someone else to take the fault. We want a scapegoat for what’s about to happen, and indeed this is the root of so much Christian antisemitism that has been so deadly throughout the centuries. We want to talk vaguely of structural sins and injustice, as if they could be separated from your sins and mine. But this hymn comes as a sharp rebuke. Don’t look around, it seems to say. Don’t look at the person next to you, don’t look to that group over there, the group we’re proud not to be. Look to yourself. Look inside yourself. And look honestly at what you find there. Look honestly at what it means to say that God is for us – for me – in the cross of Jesus Christ. It is good news, but it also brings me faltering to my knees.

 Was I there? Oh yes. Yes, I was.

- Kara Slade

Psalm 22 (Gregorian Psalm Tone II)

I was wholly unprepared for my first Holy Week six years ago. Everything about the week was new to me, and I searched for touchstones during each liturgy. So the stripping of the altar took me by surprise, especially as the lights lowered in the church. Our cantor began singing Psalm 22, the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” haunting in the darkened church. Over the years, I latch onto different parts of the psalm during the recitation: my heart within my breast is melting wax; God does not despise nor abhor the poor; I am a worm.

But that first night, I found myself closing my eyes and joining the congregation in praying the antiphon, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? over and over again, kneeling in the dark. The words are pleading and pained, full of the grief that Jesus carried while praying in the garden. In the darkness, the bareness of the altar and the fullness of the Triduum is made all the more stark. I am reminded every year of the importance of taking each step towards the cross, of walking alongside Christ in the Passion instead of trying to run ahead to the Resurrection. Especially this year, I know that Jesus knows grief and grieves with us. The psalmist and these holy days remind us that God answers suffering with an unwavering presence and with new life.

- Elis Lui

Today’s Authors

Matthew Neugebauer is a lay volunteer at St. Stephen’s, Maple in the Diocese of Toronto.
Dhananjay Jagannathan is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University
Kara Slade is an Assistant Rector of Trinity Church in Princeton, Associate Chaplain of the Episcopal Church at Princeton, and Canon Theologian of the Diocese of New Jersey.
Elis Lui is the Youth Minister at Christ Church Bronxville and the Spirituality & Practice of Faith editor for Earth & Altar.