The beautiful feast of Corpus Christi seems an appropriate occasion, given its especially “incarnational” flavor, to launch a little blog-project I’ve been thinking about for some time.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, our fall publication schedule at Idylls Press has seen to it that I haven’t had much time for anything else of late, but trusting that I will soon be over this hump, and in consideration of the fact that I don’t work on Sundays, this feast day seems the perfect moment to begin my “Sunday Appreciations” series—a small appreciation, published every Sunday, of some particularly beautiful or gripping or inspiring cultural or natural artifact.

Though not itself the subject of my musing this morning, I’ve gleaned the term “Appreciations” from C.S. Lewis’ classic book Four Loves. ”

“Appreciative love,” Lewis writes,

…makes us feel that something has not merely gratified our senses in fact but claimed our appreciation by right….it is the starting point for our whole experience of beauty. It is impossible to draw a line below which such pleasures are “snesual” and above which they are “aesthetic”….in the Appreciative pleasures, even at their lowest, and more and more as they grow up into the full appreciation of all beauty, we get something that we can hardly help calling love and hardly help calling disinterested, towards the object itself. It is the feeling which would make a man unwilling to deface a great picture even if he were the last man left alive and himself about to die; which makes us glad of unspoiled forests that we shall never see; which makes us anxious that the garden or bean-field should continue to exist. We do not merely like the things; we pronounce them, in a momentarily God-like sense, “very good.”

….This judgment that the object is very good, this attention (almost homage) offered to it as a kind of debt, this wish that it should be and should continue being what it is even if we were never to enjoy it, can go out not only to things but to persons. When it is offered to a woman we call it admiration; when to a man, hero-worship; when to God, worship simply. Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: “We give thanks to thee for they great glory.”

“Appreciative love” is, in other words, a love and admiration for something or someone that in some way, large or small, gives off glints (”like shook foil,” as the poet said) of God’s glory.

It is no accident that Hans Urs von Balthasar chose The Glory of The Lord as the title of his magnum opus on theological aesthetics. It was von Balthasar who wrote:

We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love” (The Glory of the Lord, volume one, p. 18).

This passage should be meditated on regularly by every Christian artist, writer, filmmaker, and musician.

So, in appreciation on this Corpus Christi Sunday, I offer up to music-lovers everywhere a gorgeous little piece of vocal music our family recently discovered by way of a recording entitled Simple Gifts by Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel—a man with a truly glrious set of pipes, who will no doubt be aubject of an upcoming “Sunday Appreciation” in his own right.

Have you ever noticed that the most sublime music is almost always written in honor of either the Blessed Virgin or the Eucharist? Well, the piece in question is a bit of both. It is a contemporary arrangement of Ave Verum Corpus. Alas, I can’t (for obvious copyright reasons) upload the entire song, but you can listen to a sample of it on Amazon’s “product detail” page of the album here.

(Scroll down to “Listen to Samples” and click on number 11, “Ave Verum Corpus”). The first voice you hear isn’t Bryn Terfel’s, by the way, but the marvelous British bass-baritone Simon Keenlyside. Bryn comes in on harmony, and it is a magical combination. For my part—the combination of text and music, the exquisite voices—I almost cannot hear this music without bursting into tears.

And here is the medieval Latin text of the song, followed by an English translation.

Ave, verum corpus natum / Hail the true body, born
de Maria Virgine: / of the Virgin Mary:
vere passum, immolatum / You who truly suffered and were sacrificed
in cruce pro homine: / on the cross for the sake of man.
cuius latus perforatum / From whose pierced flank
unda fluxit et sanguine: / flowed water and blood:
esto nobis praegustatum, / Be a foretaste for us
in mortis examine. / in the trial of death.

Not to forget the composer, the glorious arrangement was written by Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. I had never heard of him before, but this piece has definitely put him on our radar screens. Check out his web page.

I cannot now find the source, but I read somewhere on the web that the piece was actually commissioned by Bryn. Whatever the case, God bless them both for giving us such a beautiful gift in honor of the Body of Christ.