Time and un-Time
Liturgical music, eternity, and temporality
The passage of time is one of the most profoundly human experiences. From birth to death and everything in between, we experience the reality of time. We make time, we waste time, and we even kill time. Nothing created escapes time.
But entering into time from eternity, Christ makes all created things holy, time included. Jesus Christ is the new man that sanctifies all humanity; this so that we can celebrate the Mass in a church, the space that sanctifies all space; and this first of all on Sunday, the day that sanctifies all days as we celebrate the Mass of Jesus’s Resurrection. The Mass is a happening that takes place within time and throughout time but touches far beyond, participating in the singular, ordained-before-all-eternity sacrifice on the Cross. In this celebration, we are both reminded of our own timeliness (especially when the homily drags on too long) and brought to see a glimpse of God’s eternity. The Kingdom is present both now and not yet, as we look forward in hope to the end of time and the coming of eternity — in a sense, the un-time.
When we celebrate the Mass, we enter into the mystery of time and un-time perhaps most palpably through music. As Maritain writes in Art and Scholasticism, art is something perceived through the senses, materially, that points beyond to a greater, immaterial beauty. Liturgical music is something perceived by our senses within the span of time, forcing us to consider more closely our experience of time, but which also points beyond to the beauty of God in eternity.
As a first example, let’s look at Paweł Bębenek’s setting of the “Kyrie” (“Lord Have Mercy”) from his Missa De Sanctis.
This Mass setting uses a common theme through all of its parts, but I find this theme works best in the “Kyrie,” which we find in the first minute of the above recording. This prayer — Lord, have mercy / Christ, have mercy / Lord, have mercy — is a desperate appeal to God in three movements. As we pray it, we acknowledge our presence on this earth in time, but we beg and plead here and now for the presence of God with us. Waiting for God’s response firmly grounds us in the experience of time as we look toward our teleological hope of union with God.
Bębenek’s setting is also teleological, perfectly fitting the words it accompanies. We begin the first phrase, “Lord, have mercy,” on a unison pitch, but the melody begins to move upward, followed by the harmony line, reaching the climactic peak on a tension which resolves downward and fades, almost like a hopeful sigh. On the repeat, the bass and tenor parts add in, strengthening our voice, but the bass line reveals that the hopeful ending has now become a minor chord — our prayer has not been answered.
The music intensifies, beginning on a higher pitch — we cry out, “Christ, have mercy!” On the repeat, the ascending bassline gives a sense of growth and urgency, and we end with a major chord — we smile: “pretty please?!” Things are looking promising.
For a third time, we entreat God — “Lord, have mercy” — but at a softer dynamic than the second phrase. We’re tired, out of breath, but still trusting. We even use the same melody we did the first time. But the harmony changes dramatically on the repeat, beginning with this poignant tension and resolution, pushing again towards what we hope will be a lasting resolution, an answer for our prayers. But we are left waiting — the final chord does not have a third scale degree but only the root and the fifth, and is thus neither major nor minor, eventually disappearing into silence. We are neither dismissed nor delivered, but in hope and in the presence of time we await God’s merciful eternity.
On an entirely different note (pun intended), James MacMillan treats the “Kyrie” quite differently in his Missa Dunelmi.
Rather than the reasonably familiar, comfortable sounds present in Bębenek’s setting, MacMillan’s “Kyrie” gives us something more ethereal and haunting. The music sounds other-worldy, like nothing else we are accustomed to hearing. It borrows much from earlier chant traditions, both in the way it feels almost meterless, without any consistent pulse, and in its modal melodic lines. The harmony is more dependent on the echoing and interweaving of moving lines than it is on any formal chord structure.
I certainly can’t break down a narrative of this setting of the “Kyrie” in the way that I did for Bębenek’s. But this is exactly the point. MacMillan brings us out of our standardized, metrical perception of time into an experience of something else. Instead of being teleological, pointed toward a goal, this music feels almost eschatological — like we’ve already arrived at the end of time. In the Mass, we participate, to a degree, in eternity. The long, drawn-out, discordant writing of MacMillan’s “Kyrie” reminds us that the Mass is our participation in the un-time of God, something we can’t possibly hope to understand in this life. However, this music also forces us to notice that it is played out over time. It does not behave the way we want it to, it is ungraspable, and so we have no choice but to listen to it as it comes. And so we are grounded in the temporal by the eternal.
Both settings of the Mass teach us something about God and about ourselves, and about our relationship with time. We are timely creatures, looking forward in a meaningful and hopeful waiting toward our own participation in eternity. By music, we are trained both to anticipate the future and to perceive the present. And so when we celebrate the sacred liturgy, during which we sanctify time through music, we uncover more fully the link between time and un-time, between human and the divine, and between the Christ and the Christified.
