Chant and Time

I'm listening to "How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place" from the German Requiem by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). It nearly moves me to uncontrollable tears each time I hear it, so beautiful is the writing. So, while I wouldn't want a diet of only Gregorian Chant, I do enjoy listening to the sisters of the abbey sing.

This excerpt from Music of Silence helps me understand why. Author David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, strives to show how to "incorporate the sacred meaning of monastic life into our everyday lives."

Saturated with information but often bereft of meaning, we feel caught in a never-ending swirl of duties and demands, things to finish, things to put right. Yet as we dart anxiously from one activity to the next, we sense that there is more to life than our worldly agendas.

Our uneasiness and our frantic scrambling are caused by our distorted sense of time, which seems to be continually running out. Western culture reinforces this misconception of time as a limited commodity: We are always meeting deadlines; we are always short on time, we are always running out of time.

Chant music, on the other hand, evokes a different relationship to time, one in which time, while precious, isn't scarce. The pure, serene, yet soaring sounds of the chant remind us that there is another way to live in this noisy, distracted world, and this way is not as out of reach as it might seem.