The recitation of hymns, antiphons, psalms is actually all sung and the voices of the monks, in the alternation of choirs, solo voices, the sonority of the words and their meaning, contribute to making a home. I dwell in their voices, “I make a monastery” in their chests aflame with breath, in the origin and end of everything and everyone. In God.
«I seek shelter
in the naked voice,
in the teaching of breath (…)
I make a monastery
in the chest burning with breath,
in the beginning and in the end…»
Livia Chandra Candiani
Some time ago, during a theology lesson at the PIME Seminary in Monza, Vivier, a young Cameroonian on his way to the priesthood, faced with the many expressions of Jesus in the Gospel of John of this tenor, The Father and I are one – The Father is in me and I in the Father – As you Father are in me and I in you, may they also be one in usasked me if all these statements are just metaphors, idioms, or correspond to the truth.
It is normal that the abstractions of Trinitarian theology are questioned by young people who are gambling their lives not for metaphors, but for a faith that should correspond to the needs of their hearts. After a year I come back to that question and do it through voice and song. To tell the mystery of a Father who lives in the Son and vice versa, burning with an effusive love which is the Holy Spirit. But at the same time I would like to introduce Vivier and her companions to “feel” that their prayer, even if it were a Rosary, and their life, is part of the procession, that is, of the eternal movement of the Father who generates the Son and of the Son eternally generated by the Father. Nothing less!
If we take the Gospels, we discover that God the Father manifested himself to Jesus for the first time through the voice. During the baptism received from John, Jesus “heard a voice from heaven: ‘You are my beloved Son …’ (Mk 1:11). From then on, walking through villages, preaching the Gospel, caring for the sick, until his arrest, trial, conviction and death, Jesus will never detach himself from that “naked voice”. It is the Father in him. It will become his home, his “shelter”. He will seek it in night prayer, in order to be able to repeat to himself again: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (Jn 14:11). “I seek shelter / in the naked voice” – writes Chandra Candiani – “I make a monastery / in my chest burning with breath”.[1] Like “the Son in the bosom of the Father” (Jn 1:18). Because stronger than the voices of the breaking latest news, the voices of the crowds, the depressive voices that are never silent within us, is the voice of the Father: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Psalm 2).
«I live in your voice / and when it is silent / silence is winged»,[2] – writes the poet again. Because we too seek a home in other people’s voices, hoping they will speak words of love.
I would not have written about the voice if I hadn’t come across, in the monastery where I am, a deep, visceral voice, where I often seek “shelter” during daily prayer. The recitation of hymns, antiphons, psalms is actually all sung and the voices of the monks, in the alternation of choirs, solo voices, the sonority of the words and their meaning, contribute to making a home. I dwell in their voices, “I make a monastery” in their chests aflame with breath, in the origin and end of everything and everyone. In God.
The voice I’m talking about, slightly over the top yet measured, also expected by the other monks, is Lino’s. Which often, following the dictation of the scores, becomes a second voice, low, serious, visceral, “hypostatic”. This last adjective, perhaps never before applied to a voice, comes from hypostasis, a Greek term dear to Trinitarian theology, which means “that which lies beneath”, irreducible to something else, which substantiates a thing for what it is, and remains in the flow weather. It is used to indicate the Father, the Son and the Spirit as irreducible hypostases, but which are what they are, only one inside the other, in a communion without residues. In other words: the three do not substantiate themselves, but it is the mutual relationship that gives substance to their life and identity, always irreducible to the others. Well, Lino, singing the lowest notes, acts as s-bottom to the other voices and it is by living in the unity of all those voices that one perceives the echo of “what is below”: the Father, the Son, the Spirit, foundation, shelter, communion without residue and home for all. Because, however, here and now and I don’t know why, it would be imperceptible to me without the s-bottom of Linen!
It is a living and true experience, not just a metaphor. Enough of believing and praying voices in a domestic and monastic atmosphere. Lino is the only one in the monastery who knows how to drive the big bulldozer, which is invaluable for clearing the snow, who loads the wood stove, which is essential for heating us, and does the laundry for everyone. And then he sings, with that hypostatic and springing voice which, always with the others, but bringing them to greater depth, together, give voice to the “Word, which creates and contains everything”, “substance of all creation”, “secret of every word”. The monks sing these verses from DM Turoldo in the time after Christmas. On this earth, nothing more than the voices which, although singular, interpenetrate praying and singing in unity.I ambetter expresses the mystery of the three divine hypostases which, although irreducible, interpenetrate (in-dwell) one in the other and I am one.
However, there is one last passage that concerns the voice and I say it again with poetry. «We are not all just / earthlings. You can see it from how / the jay makes its nest … from how sad you are / and you don’t know why». Lino’s voice is still “hypostatic” because he seems to have “what is underneath” inside. We all – continues M. Gualtieri – «we carry a lack / and every voice has a voice / buried inside, a plaintive cast of sound / that aches a little even when / it sings». Knowing how to “listen even to what is missing”… “the lament of your pain / with her breath piled up on the pillow / a chained song that does not come out”.[3] Don’t be afraid of this.
Perhaps it is this lack “that speaks to us of the inexhaustible notion of the Trinity that dares to think of a triune God within which the lack of every single person, their being a non-whole, their not being even the others, it no longer appears as an objection,”[4] but like an inner emptiness that becomes desire and home for the other. The Father has desire and space for the Son and together, for the Spirit.
Scripture, the monastery of SS. Trinity, Lino’s voice, Vivier’s question, the verses of Chandra and Mariangela, the final accent of the philosopher, everything, like an understanding, corresponds to our heart. Now calm and grateful, bye!
[1] LC Candiani, The boxer girl or the precision of love, Einaudi 2014, p. 22.
[2] Idem., Drinking tea with the dead, Interlinea 2015, p. 34.
[3] M. Gualtieri, Beast of Joy, Einaudi 2010, p. 128.
[4] S. Petrosino, Desire. We are not children of the stars, Vita e Pensiero 2019, p. ninety two.