Her time there had left a deep impression upon her. She
spoke often of the nuns she heard rather than saw. Occasionally, one would
catch glimpses of them through wooden gratings, but their singing drifted out
into the chapel, and from there plunged a dagger of beauty into the heart.
The Gregorian chant of the nuns is a prayer sung. Plainsong,
the official music of the Catholic Church, predates both harmony and polyphony.
Andree, I should mention, was a singer, and music for her even now sets her
soul aflame. And so, here was this cleansing wave of beauty washing over her,
the poetry of the texts in Latin informed with the inexhaustible and numinous mysteries
of Christ’s birth, passion, death and resurrection.
Later, we visited The Abbey of Regina Laudis together. No
doubt Mother Delores Hart was among the nuns behind the grate, her voice folded
into the canticum novum, lost in a prayerful sound that for more than a
thousand years has spiraled up to Heaven from Benedictine monasteries.
We did not see her. We were not meant to see her. But she
was there, and is there.
Comments