In a great void, breathing rarified air as sharp as shards of rarest crystal, a spirit known as God sadly contemplated His Creation. In His mind's eye fugal visions of wars, famines and catastrophes flitted like a child's kaleidoscope: evil generated by man's own limited experience and ineptitude.
Around this blinding patch of pure white fire, the abstraction of God, angels, rendered invisible in such blinding heat, flitted like ethereal moths drawn to the light from the furthest limits of the universe. A deep celestial silence that was so deep and so perfect that it pervaded the aural senses like the most amazing music rose and fell to mysterious rhythms and coursed along melodic lines that streamed like molten lava.
For hundreds of thousands of years, time in heaven had stood still and yet it rushed backwards and forwards as if in a perpetuum mobile of the constant present. The pre-ordained course of the solar system, the majestic progression of the millions upon millions of stars in yet another million galaxies meant little as they revolved around the all-seeing and all-knowing Spirit who is beyond human comprehension, He who knows all things no matter how insignificant or how great they may be. When life on earth began, with what is today known as the Big Bang, the Spirit moved across the turbulence of creation in the making. Since then the history of this minute and insignificant planet has been hallmarked by violence and strife both natural and man-made.
In the aftermath of a terrible war in which, as usual, all sides invoked the spirit of God to be with them, and in which millions had died, some mercifully quickly, some slowly and horribly, impaled on barbed wire, wounded in the leg or the groin and breathing in mustard gas, their shrieks and groans becoming the stuff of indelible nightmares to their fellow soldiers in the muddy stinky trenches a few yards away, the living were trying to blot out the horrible darkness in frenetic and febrile dissipation. The war to end all wars, they said, while God wept just because He knew how short-lived and untrue that statement was. It was on the feast of the Transfiguration in 1923 from some remote corner of a desert that a new voice, one that, for once, was not steeped in the flowing blood and lacerated and burned flesh of sacrifice, but that was infused with unsullied spirit, rose up to penetrate the impenetrable as had the fragrant smoke from the high priest Melchisedech's pure sacrifice many thousands of years before.
A man, another priest, was unable to get hold of the essentials to be the instrument of that mystical transubstantiation. So great and all-consuming was this man's faith that a paeon of prayer to the purest of spirits was engendered like a burning ember that purified the lips of the prophets of old.
Amidst the cries of the muezzins and the heavy metallic whirring of bronze prayer wheels, Latin and Greek incantations and the almost imperceptible thuds as the Hasidic Jews knocked their foreheads to the Wailing Wall, God heard this almost visceral cry, a primeval all-devouring desire to be consumed in the fire of His love. The humdrum noises of ritualistic worship were deadened by its sheer force; even the bells that pealed or tolled out from every corner of the globe were for a few brief moments muffled by the strength of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's molten contemplation of the divine.
La Messe sur le Monde, written at a time when the world was still suffering of the open wounds of a conflagration that was just short of apocalyptical, uses the imagery of fire to convey the intensity of God's love. Fifty years after its conception in the desert, a place wherein the greatest of prophets, saints, stylites and shamans have found enlightenment, a young composer from an island said to be the navel of the world, Malta, composed or, rather, conceived the music that reflected de Chardin's vision, music that approached, in its unadulterated intensity, the soundless but unbearably deafening, unspeakably beautiful music that envelops the great spirit of God in its blinding light.
Last Tuesday, the great literary work of faith by Teilhard de Chardin was read out in Maltese, a language curiously close to the Aramaic spoken by Our Lord. In it God is referred to as Alla, just as he is by the Muslim world. A spellbound audience let the waves of theological prose poetry wash over them in their own language that was translated from the original French by Fr Peter Serracino Inglott. Although the rich baroque magnificence and heraldic boastfulness of the temple of Knights of St John was rendered almost tawdry when compared to the purity of vision that was conjured up by the text, the music that was composed way back in 1973 by Charles Camilleri clarified the manifold messages of the Messe sur le Monde that was beautifully read by Fr Claude Portelli, and transfigured it with its disconcertingly minimalist and abstract beauty.
Composed for organ, an instrument long known to contain an infinitesimal echo of the voice of God, this utterly emotional yet richly cerebral work broke through the barriers of jasper and walls of malachite that border the Kingdom of Heaven. It reverberated through long corridors of iridescent pearl while the rock crystal lights held by cherubim and seraphim tinkled in delight. As it wound around God's golden throne that was held by the winged symbols of the four evangelists, the lion for Mark, the bull for Luke, the eagle for John and the angel for Matthew, a poignant and sad smile was said to have appeared fleetingly on the faceless face of the Almighty. It was as if a quantum leap had somehow happened; a greater understanding of who and what He was, is and is still to be was triggered off by those heavy modal chords that shook the hallowed temple to its foundations, played so brilliantly by Kevin Bowyer.
In a world that lives in constant threat of an imminent Armageddon, the music and the words of Missa Mundi combined to touch the divine, and although it was impossible to repeat any of those mantra-like contemplations about the Sacred Heart and the all-consuming intensity of Divine Love and despite the fact that the music was so unearthly and removed from the shackles of orthodox progression that it is impossible to recall one snatch of it, the immensity of the vision created by both works in tandem created this one, my own; an almost transcendental meditation by a troubled soul undergoing its own dark and tortured night.
Although I was convinced that there is still a great council underway in the porphyry-and- gold-columned throne-room in Heaven in which Augustine and Aquinas have locked horns with Dominic and Ignatius as to what was really said last Tuesday, and that a little humble priest called George Preca who was new to the place was brought in to translate a couple of passages, there was no denying that Heaven had become warmer and more welcoming; more open to the imperfect, the sinners whose very humanity betrays them time and again and who never felt altogether at home in the flawless but crushing perfection of God's mansions.
As the echoes of the arguments about evolution and someone called Darwin by the great doctors of the Church reverberated, the smile on the lips of Siddhartha radiated intense joy to the hosts and hosts of saffron-robed spirits that surround Him, the trillions of firefly-like souls devoted to the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva took on a new and more relevant meaning, the constant prostrations of the Muslims caused a thousand new suras to be sung in praise of the One, and in the celestial synagogues the fire in the menorahs suddenly intensified.
It was the universality of the words of de Chardin and the music of Camilleri that, for a brief moment, as Missa Mundi pervaded the many mansions of the Celestial Kingdom as no words or music had ever done before or since and changed divine perception forever.
kzt@onvol.net