Expressing un-speak-able joy
Sing to him a new song. (Ps 32:3) Take off the old: you’ve learned a new song. New man, New Testament, 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 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 bounded by the syllables of words. Sing well to him with whoops. (Augustine, Enar. in. Ps 32-2, 8; PL 36, 283)
I hope this doesn’t offend any St. Augustine lovers, but it seems to me that Bishop Sheen’s attitude towards his listeners was very similar to Augustine’s — totally unstuffy. It almost seems one-on-one. I bet Bishop Sheen studied Augustine’s sermons.
I’ll leave aside the comparison to Bishop Sheen… Augustine’s sermons, were obviously prepared but the great majority of them were not written out in advance, but were oral events. This is clear from the way in which he interacts with his congregation, noting when they seem puzzled, thanking them for their attention, grateful when they express their agreement, etc. Sometimes it helps to read the sermons aloud to get a sense of all this, and to imagine a congregation responding the way the folks often do in black churches–he was, after all, an African addressing Africans. He often imagines a dialogue with one of them: using the second person singular (as in the example above). Stenographeres took down his words as he preached and wrote them out, including examples of imperfect Latin, or when he got caught in a sentence that he didn’t seem able to get out of grammatically (anacolouthon). Etc. The sermons were copied and widely circulated in his own time and whether in while or in selected parts were a great source for preachers during the Middle Ages.
Augustine’s style is in great contrast with that of Leo the Great whose Latin is beautifully crafted, with perfectly balanced periodic sentences: they seem to have been chiseled by a master stone-carver.
One of my favorites among the wonderful images that Augustine evokes. But I prefer “jubilation” to “whooping” (perhaps it’s the proximity of Fenway Park!). Bene cantate ei in iubilatione.
Bob: The only problem with “jubilation” is that people tend to pass right over it, or think that it’s one of those things that religious types do. That it means “make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” one may doubt–what would such a joyful noise sound like?–, and even if they do, they may be content to leave that, too, vague, with the result that no joyful noises are made to the Lord! Whereas “whoop” will stop them at least for a brief moment, and think about what whooping to God might mean, both in its original sense and in a metaphorical sense, as when Augustine says that we should sing well to the Lord, with whoops, with our lives and not just with our tongues.
Watch people’s faces when they’re singing, “Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee”–and see if they look the part. And you know Nietzsche’s quip.