Today’s offertory anthem is one of the most well-known and beloved jewels of Anglican church music. Written in 1565 by Thomas Tallis, it remains such a vital part of just about every church choir’s regular repertoire. I can imagine that the walls of our church have heard this piece a great number of times, but it certainly bears repeating.

One of the things that I find fascinating about choral music from this time was how it was conceived. If you look at a modern score of this music, you’ll see all the parts stacked up on each other starting with the soprano at the top, and moving down to the bass. But in the 16^th century, when you performed this music, all you saw was your part, which didn’t contain bar lines. It was one, continuous flow of notes whose rhythms largely corresponded to the accents of the words themselves.

Choirs in those days stood around large, four-sided music stands with each individual part printed out on one side. If you sang soprano for example, you couldn’t see what the alto was singing on the opposite side of the stand. Furthermore, the notes on the parchment looked very different than they do now. They were squared off, some looked like diamonds. Some had dots or swooping figures called ligatures to signify pitch and length. If you want to go way back to the 13^th century, the earliest form of musical notation were little squiggles above words to signify if the notes go up or down. But largely, chanting was mainly passed down aurally.

The evolution of musical notation is fascinating, but it falls woefully short of exactly what music is, when we hear it. How can we ever encapsulate the totality of a piece of music by translating into symbols on a sheet of paper? If you could gather up the trillions of bits of experiential sensation, when you actually hear music, there would not be enough paper in the world to get it all down. That’s because experience itself is so abundant, it cannot be described in words. Likewise, musical notation cannot represent what’s fully intended by the composer. So, what does that leave us with? It leaves us with room for interpretation. It leaves you to decide what it means. How it translates into your own mind and heart is an aspect of faith. And that’s what this anthem is all about, the spirit of truth and love which can only be experienced, never fully described.

Everything, if you attempt to put it into words,is subject to interpretation. Divine experience is immersive, just like music is. I like how God gives us that blind spot, that room for interpretation to make up our own minds about what is real, what is true, and what cannot be fully put into words. Words lack indisputability, but we keep “arguing” with the opposing side, don’t we?

Divine certitude is confirmed from within and can never be fully described. At some point, we all must find God by faith, because the spirit of truth eludes all descriptive means. But isn’t that the nature of the spirit? You can’t pin it down by trying to encapsulate it into an image or a group of words. The minute you do, its fullness vanishes. For the abundance of God’s truth and love, you must come to it on your own to fully experience its effects. I think that’s pretty nifty. Soli Deo Gloria!