• antiphon
from Medieval Latin antiphōna responsive singing < Greek ( tà ) antíphōna, neuter plural of antíphōnos sounding in answer •
• in Roman Catholic liturgical music, chant melody and text sung before and after a psalm verse, originally by alternating choirs ( antiphonal singing) •
There is a conversation that makes me laugh in a scene I love from the movie The Commitments based on Roddy McDowell’s novel by the same title about a rag-tag group of friends who are young amateur musicians forming a soul band in Dublin. It is Jimmy Rabbitte’s desire and intention not only to bring soul music to Dublin but also to form the “World’s Hardest Working Band.” Of course, every band needs a name. So the fledgling bandmates are sitting around discussing various possibilities.
Outspan Foster: There’s a band around called “Free Beer”. Always draws a big crowd.
Derek: I like “A Flock of Budgies”.
Jimmy Rabbitte: We have to be “the” something. All the great sixties bands were “The Somethings”.
“We have to be ‘the’ something.” Right you are Jimmy. Right you are. If we were to form a band from the motley crue (hey, that’s not a bad name for a band) of characters who come each month to The Human & the Holy (I say this with love in me heart), we could do far worse that to call ourselves THE ANTIPHONS. Granted, it does make us sound like the backup singers for a main act, and admittedly, it has more of a Doo-Wop ring to it than a soul band, but nonetheless it does seem apropos.
One of the most fundamental vocations, tasks, privileges, and responsibilities for human beings is to respond. “The something” we have to be, if we are to become who we truly are, is First Responders. A couple on their way to the restaurant to celebrate their 40th anniversary forego the linen napkins and a three course meal and instead pull over and buy a bottle of champagne and a bag of ice, drive to the desert beyond the lights where shoulder to shoulder they lie down on the earth’s floor and gaze up silently at the ridiculously overplanted field of stars. They respond. A young hitchhiker happens upon a women’s monastery in upper state New York where they support themselves by making cheesecake, and accepting a sister’s gift of a complimentary slice has what later he says can only be described as a most delicious religious experience. He responds. A soldier returns home from two tours in Afghanistan with death and dirt and nightmares in his nose, stops going to bars and instead takes to the trails in the hills above his home and finds himself on each hike stopping every quarter mile to breathe in deeply through his nostrils the aromas of the wilderness that he finds inebriating and silently healing. He responds. A man in his fifties realizes for the first time just this side of too late what it means to be a father, lowers the bar of the hospital bed, climbs in, and caresses the translucent skin of his gay son’s cheek. He responds. A thirty-something woman drained from the trinity of lawyering, mothering, and partnering, uncharacteristically accepts an invitation to go to a concert with a friend and closing her eyes in a wordless prayer of exhaustion listens to Morten Laurisden’s Lux Aeterna as the tears the prayer makes write two vertical lines down her face. She responds.
Silence creates a still space within us where together they slowly arouse our desire to listen. Genuine listening flowers into deep responsiveness. All of creation, all of life sung forth from the great, primal silence by the divine Singer, sets in motion and sets in stone and sets in human hearts the antiphonal nature of life. I am convinced that the other-than-human world, the world with less apparent consciousness than humans, actually express this natural or native capacity rather proficiently. Humans take notice. From the dark depths of its rootedness to the tips of its branches, the almond tree knows itself as an antiphon and blossoms. Feeling the air currents under its massive wings, the condor knows itself as an antiphon and sails on the air in a prayer of soaring circles. After years at sea, the Chinook salmon knows itself as antiphon and returns to its home upstream to lay and guard its eggs and die. All around us – antiphon.
Humans, on the other hand, who are able to bring another level of consciousness to a wholehearted response, often are lax or late or lacking altogether in response. As if instead of humming a response to the Spirit’s hum, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Whatever.” Ho hum. Indifferent, callous, too busy to be bothered, bored. Or maybe our response is more like the observation of one writer: “It was a mystery and we tried to measure it.”
To be human, let alone a person of faith, is perhaps most fully manifested in lives of intentional responsiveness be that response wonder, gratitude, praise, delirious delight, joy or righteous anger, intense pathos, mercy, or compassion. Whether consciously directed toward the divine, toward Mystery, toward the More that permeates life and wakes us up to the ineffable benediction of being alive or intentionally toward another person, a lover, a grandson, a beggar, or toward a dog, a hummingbird, a cloud, a valley of wild flowers, or a painting, a memory, to be human is to intone an antiphon in this earthy cosmic chant.
Today, be aware of the chant of life all around you. Join in. Be an antiphon.
Dia Dhuit