Weekly Reflection – O What Their Joy and Their Glory Must Be!

This week the church celebrates the wonderful feast of All Saints, to whom our cathedral is dedicated. On this feast, churches up and down the country enjoy singing a number of rousing hymns whose lyrics and tunes are both majestic and glorious. For All the Saints is one of them, composed by the first bishop of this See, though one of my own favourites is O what their joy and their glory must be – a hymn of the mediaeval theologian Peter Abelard translated into English by JM Neale. O quanta qualia (to give it its Latin title) is the only hymn written by Abelard that we possess. Unsurprisingly then, Abelard, who was a monk, is not generally remembered for his hymnody, though he is remembered for his scandalous affair and secret marriage to Heloise, a niece of Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame de Paris! Nonetheless, his hymn is a wholesome product of his monastic life. We believe the text to be based on words from St Cyprian of Carthage, who wrote, ‘How great will your glory and happiness be, to be allowed to see God, to be honoured with sharing the joy of salvation and eternal light with Christ your Lord and God…, to delight in joy of immortality in the Kingdom of heaven with the righteous and God’s friends.’

Here Abelard focuses on the unparalleled joy that reaching heaven will bring, because it is then that we will see God. And the hymn in fact goes on to convey the idea that to be in God’s presence, to be worshipping him face to face, is bliss, and brings us peace and contentment. This corroborates the impression we get in the Scriptures – think of the scene in the book of Revelation where John is reminded that there is no more mourning or weeping or crying or pain, because the former things have passed away. God had become our all-in-all.

All Saints hymns, however, don’t just tell us what heaven will be like. They contrast and compliment that with our present experience of earth. Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptu Mundi, which provides the text for our Jerusalem the Golden, is one such hymn. Written at a time when individuals were physically seeking Jerusalem in the crusades, and those who could not venture there were imagining what Jerusalem was like, Bernard draws a distinction between the world ‘out there’ where he sees oppression, disease, poverty, unrest, degradation and war, and reflects that whilst these trials may occur in this life, the next life will be different: God will call creation to account for its wrongs, wickedness will be called out through judgment, and evil will be defeated and vanquished. And all of this will give way to the triumph of Christ, whom Bernard calls ‘the Gem of Beauty’, ‘True God and Man’, the ‘Door, the Pledge the Husband, the Guardian of his Court: the Day-star of Salvation, the Porter and the Port.’ This porter will open to us the gates of the holy city, a busy place whose streets will always be in festival-mood, as its citizens feast in the triumph of the great King.

The celebration of All Saints certainly gives me a warm feeling inside, because it helps me put into perspective the difficulties I see in the world today, and gives me hope for a brighter future where God has righted the wrongs of the world, and given us all we need to be fulfilled. I hope the joy of the saints, whose feast we keep, might spill over into your own life this week.

Blessings,
Father Christopher