Whooping to the Lord
A couple of people have asked me to expand on the theme of jubilation/whooping to which I drew attention in his sermon on Ps 99(100). The verb jubilo and the noun jubilatio occur often in the Psalms, and almost every time he encountered one of them, Augustine would point out that the word referred to a vocal expression used to express a joy or happiness too immense or too deep for words. He often pointed to the example of agricultural workers who, besides singing songs with words, would often break out into jubilant sounds. That meaning is not unknown in other ancient Latin writers, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary gives the following meanings: jubilo: “to let out whoops”; jubilatio: “wild shouting, whooping”; jubilum: (a wild shout, whoop”).
The Oxford English Dictionary offers these meanings: Jubilation: The action of jubilating, loud utterance of joy; exultation, rejoicing, gladness; public rejoicing. An expression of exultant joy”. Whoop: An exclamation, or representation of a shout or cry, expressing excitement, surprise, derision, exultation, incitement, etc.”
All of that led me, a couple of years ago, to propose here that the best translation of these Latin verbs and nouns, at least in Augustine’s sermons, was “whoop” and “whooping.” I was told by one friend that this “secularized” jubilation, but Augustine takes the “secular” meaning, presumably familiar to his congregation, and uses it to explain the meaning of the words in relationship to God. In any case, here are a couple of quotes from Augustine”; if “whooping” or “whoop” offends your sensibilities, just substitute “jubilation” or “jubilate” (or “joyful shout” or “joyfully shout”) for them. (Several English translations use: “Shout joyfully” or “Sing joyfully”.)
Augustine was commenting on Ps 99(100):2– “Whoop to God, all the earth!”–and recalls Ps 88(89):16–“Blessed is the people that understands whooping.”
What use is it to whoop and obey this Psalm when it says, “Whoop to God, all the earth”, and not to understand whooping, so that only our voice is whooping and our hearts are not? Understanding, after all, is the heart’s sound.
What I’m about to say you already know. One who is whooping does not speak words. Whooping is a certain sound of joy without words; it’s the sound of a mind poured forth in joy, expressing an affection, as far as possible, but not grasping its meaning. A person rejoices in his exultation, and after some words that can be spoken and understood, he bursts forth into a sound of exultation without words. It’s as if he indeed rejoices but is so filled with joy that he cannot explain in words what makes him joyful…. People who work in fields are most given to whoop. Delighted with the abundant produce and rejoicing in the fruitfulness and fertility of the soil, reapers or vintagers or those who gather other fruits sing in exultation, and among the songs they utter in words, they insert some sounds without words, so great is their mind’s exultation. And this is what whooping means.
When, then, do we whoop? When we praise what cannot be said…. After considering all of creation that we can name and run over in our minds, let the soul ask: “Who made all these? Who created them? Who made you among them? What are these things you are considering? What are you who are considering them. Who is the one who made both the things being considered and the one considering them? Who is he?” …
I have considered all of creation as much as I could. I have observed bodily creatures in heaven and on earth and a spiritual creature in myself who am speaking, who am animating my limbs, who am using my voice and moving my tongue, who am pronouncing words and discerning meanings. And when do I ever comprehend myself in myself? How, then, can I comprehend what is above me? …
When you have begun to be like God and to draw near to him and to feel [persentiscere] God, the more love grows in you, since God is love (1 Jn 4:8), you will feel something that you were trying to say and could not say. Before you felt God, you were thinking you could express God; but then you begin to feel him, and then you feel that you cannot express what you are feeling. But when you learn that what you feel cannot be expressed, will you be silent, will you not give praise to God? Will you be silent in the praises of God and not give thanks to him who willed to make himself known to you? You praised him when you were seeking him. Are you going to be silent now that you have found him? Of course not! …
But, you say, “How shall I praise him? I cannot even express that little bit that I am able to feel “in part, in obscurity, in a mirror” (1 Cor 13:12). Well, then, listen to the Psalm: “Whoop to the Lord, all the earth.” You have understood the whole earth’s whooping if you whoop to the Lord. Whoop to the Lord: don’t divide your whooping among several things. The other things can be expressed in some way or another. Only he cannot be uttered who spoke and all things came to be. He spoke and they came to be (Ps 32:9), but we are not able to utter him. The Word by which we were spoken is his Son; so that he might be spoken by us, however weak we are, he himself became weak. We can express whoops for the Word, but we have no word for the Word. So: “Whoop to the Lord, all the earth!” (Augustine, EnPs 99 (100), 3-6; PL 36, 1271-1275)
Sing to him a new song. (Ps 32:3) Take off the old: you’ve learned a new song. New man, new covenant, new song. The new song doesn’t belong to old people; only new people learn it, people reborn by grace out of their oldness and already belonging to the new covenant that is the kingdom of God. And all our love sighs with desire and sings the new song. But let us sing the new song by our lives, not just by our tongues.
Sing to him a new song; sing well to him. Everyone wants to know how to sing to God. Sing to him, but don’t do it poorly. He doesn’t want his ears to be hurt. Sing well, brother. If without musical training you are told to sing in order to please someone who knows how to listen to music, you are afraid to sing lest you displease him because what someone unskilled doesn’t hear an artist will criticize. Who would offer to sing to him if God were to judge singers that way, if he were to examine them that way, if he were to listen that way? When can you ever offer such elegant singing that you don’t offend God’s perfect ear in any way?
But look: he gives you a sort of way of singing: don’t look for words by which to describe why you delight in God. Sing with whoops. This is what it means to sing well to God: to sing by whooping. What does this mean? To understand that what is sung in the heart cannot be expressed in words. People who sing, whether during the harvest, or in the vineyards, or in some work they love, begin by expressing their happiness in the words of songs; but then, as if filled with such happiness that they cannot express it in words, they turn from words with syllables and go off into sounds of whooping. A whoop is the sound someone makes to show that the heart is giving birth to something it cannot tell. And whom else does such whooping befit but the un-speakable God? For “un-speakable” means the one whom you cannot speak, and if you cannot speak him, and you must not be silent, what else remains but that you whoop, so that your heart can rejoice without words, and the vast expanse of your joys will not be limited by the syllables of words? Sing well to him with whoops. (Augustine, Enar. in. Ps 32-2, 8; PL 36, 283)
The theme was familiar in the Middle Ages. Aquinas quoted the Glossa: “A whoop is an un-speakable joy which cannot be kept silent yet cannot be expressed because it surpasses comprehension” (On Psalm 46:1).
I’ve read that this sort of jubilant outcry is the spirit in which words like alleluia, hosanna and maranatha were proclaimed (exclaimed) by the early Christians.
I went to a charismatic renewal meeting once where some people I think were whooping.
JAK ==
This whooping might be particularly African. There is a phrase used by black people here in New Orleans, “lining out”, which refers to (as I understand it) a kind of calling back and forth of slaves working in the field (an a cappella call and response thing) which was one of the origins of gospel music, and jazz.
Also see Wikipedia about “field hollers”, which are also known as “whoops”, and were precursors of the blues
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_holleres:
I don’t know whether the African-American music of the Gullah people of Gullah Island Georgia and nearby coastal areas did any whooping. (Gullah music is the African-American music that influenced George Gershwin. It’s quite different from New Orleans African-American music.) (Wikipedia says that both Michelle Obama and Clarence Thomas have Gullah roots.)
On the other hand, I googled the phrase at my trusty One Look Dictionary and found that the phrase was used by the workers who built the American railroads as they lay tracks. It was rhythmic and helped them synchronize their movements, apparently.
http://www.folklib.net/folkfile/l.shtml#lining_out
Then I checked Wikipedia and found that the phrase was used in England as far back as the 17th century for a sort of hymn singing, another call and response kind of thing.
Lining out – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
All these uses could be related linguistically. But at any rate, the African call and response thing might tie in with St. Augustine. It would be interesting to know if St. Augustine called out when preaching and if his audience answered him. I can’t help but think that at times he whooped to them.
The women where I lived in North Africa would ululate to express approval/enthusiasm. I could never even come close to making the sound, but it certainly was a “whoopee” kind of noise. I liked it.
Ann: Augustine’s sermons were taken down by stenographers as he preached them, and a good number of them show him interacting with the members of his congregation. He notes, for example, when they react with shouts or murmurs, when they are anticipating the answer to a rhetorical question, etc. Sometimes I am put in mind of African-American congregations today with the people shouting out “Amens” and “Thank you, Jesus,” as they feel moved. I tried to read a passage in which he spoke of the beauty of Jesus, and had my class respond with appropriate “Amens.”
The first complete English translation of Augustine’siExpositions of the Psalms, very ably translated by Sr. Maria Boulding, O.S.B., has been published in six volumes in the last decade or so. One criticism of her work that I have is that the character of the sermons as spoken doesn’t come through well enough, so that they can read like lectures rather than like homilies.
I don’t think the whooping in the fields is distinctively African. There are examples in other parts of the ancient world, at least according to the dictionaries of classical Latin.
I wonder whether “jubilo” and “whoop” are not etymologically related, at least in that they both seem to be onomatopoetic–like “ululate,” as Gerolyn and Irene have pointed out.
I am struck in the reading above by Augustine’s relating whooping to the ineffability of God–because we can’t put into words what we have been given to experience of God, and because we can’t refrain from praising him, we have to whoop. Whooping as the proper response of those who know the utter transcendence of God. Early on in the Confessions, he has this wonderful line: “Woe to those who do not speak of you, when those who speak most say nothing.”
Joe:
Permit me to mount a mild defense of the late Maria Boulding. She translated from a written text quite possibly edited by Augustine himself from the stenography of his notarius – Augustine himself probably tidied up the text. I like her translation a lot.
When Madame Acarie established the Carmelites in Paris, there were issues that arose because of cultural difficulties. See: http://tinyurl.com/75st9qs
From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris, by Barbara Diefendorf, Oxford University Press, 2002.
“The Spanish nuns even brought their distaffs into the church and continued to spin during religious offices and prayers.”
The French nuns disliked a “highly spiced dish of cod with prunes” that Sister Ana prepared.
“They also appear to have regarded as unseemly the joyous cries with which the Spanish punctuated their prayers.”
Wow, great stuff. Many thanks Fr. Komonchak, and all the commenters above.
Here’s some contemporary gospel music “whooping”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr41skFqzb8
It stretches my spirit (in a good way) to imagine Catholics in Hippo “whooping” as Augustine preached, or the Israelites “whooping” as Miriam danced—and to imagine that they would recognize themselves in Kirk Franklin’s song.
Larry: But you can sense the difference between Augustine’s actually preached sermones ad plebem, whether later edited by him or not, and the ones that he never preached but dictated in order to complete his treatment of a biblical book, as both for the Psalms and for John’s Gospel. But I certainly do recommend Boulding’s translation. I just wish she had felt a bit freer–more along the lines of Edmund Hill’s translations of the other sermons.
You have to wonder what it would take for, say, a group of reasonably affluent suburban white people to start whooping. I think it would take a lot more than what we currently can muster. It seems to me that today there’s so much confusion in belief and so much “niceness” in liturgy that whooping is beyond our reach. Instead, we sing bland, self-referential songs about singing joyful songs: “Here we are, altogether, as we sing our song, joyfully …”
IMO, the style of too much liturgy has gone kitschy, in the sense that it’s predictable, it’s easy, it’s not disturbing, it does not demand; it does not force you to transcend yourself. It satisfies with sentimental emotion—the fellowship of community vs. the awesomeness of a majestic God.
Like Milan Kundera says in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “… kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence … kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.”
Catherine Madsen has a great rant on this in her article Kitsch and Liturgy. I think it’s a quite important insight because kitsch, where it exists, pretty effectively kills whooping.
http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2001_madsen/print
Whooping is not that far removed from us. Rebel yell, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_yell
I always wanted to learn to yodel. I’ve come close, but haven’t achieved it. My husband learned from Yodel the Cowboy Way, by Rudy Robbins and Shirley Field.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Yodel-Cowboy-Rudy-Robbins/dp/1574240358
If you want to hear the ultimate whooping and hollering, do come to the New Orleans Jazzfest and go to the Gospel Tent. You can find it easily — it’s often INCREDIBLY LOUD!!!! It’s the most popular attraction at the fest except for the celebrity headliners who perform the last nights.
It will grab, shake and rattle you. Listening to recordings would be a pale, pale imitation of te reality. It makes you understand something of the strength of the religious beliefs of the singers. I’d say you have to be born to it to do it right, or even to do it at all, and in a sense that’s true, but I think there’s much more to it than that. The music is patently *religious*, and its power reflects the power of the grace of God. There is also triumph in it now — they have overcome. If you feel the need to be uplifted, they’re for you.
I’ve heard people stand up and cheer in St. Patrick’s Cathedral at the Rite of Election. Totally unexpected and spontaneous, in response to something Cardinal O’Connor said that touched off the energy in the room. The applause and the cheering rolled, and surged with every successive refrain of a song we sang — the jubilation was for God, and we were all part of it, a holy joy that came from deep places. One of the participants, a religious sister, said to me later that she stood there and said to herself, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”
You have to wonder what it would take for, say, a group of reasonably affluent suburban white people to start whooping.
It’s not that people don’t have that urge. It’s that they refrain it because it’s unseemly. They’re self-conscious.
Remove the presence of others and you get something close to whooping, don’t you? Singing or whistling in the shower when aware of the joy of being alive; shouting, running, singing, skipping while hiking alone in the mountains when aware of the beauty of creation. When people are alone, all sorts of actions come from their overflowing heart, uncensored by self-consciousness. “Whooping” doesn’t have to be done as a group, does it?
Claire –
You’re right. Not all whooping is communal. But if done by a group there has to be something terribly important that all the individuals share.