Psalmody
In a wise, poetic essay, Armando Pego describes a visit to an abbey where he delves into silence after a train trip alongside travellers full of that joy ‘only the sea can give’. They go on to ‘scatter like solitary starlings’; he, meanwhile, is bound for a definite goal: ‘At Poblet I find the rest the hours of the Office give. Along with a handful of guests, joined by more or less sporadic tourists, or on my own at daybreak or for None, I find myself on a pew distant from the choir, trying to abandon subjective pretensions. We live in times that give great weight to personal experience and sentiment, to that in our ego which is at the same most moving and most onerous. I wish to propose as counterweight an inner life alert to the objectivity of liturgy. I desire to stop being the centre; to lean towards the vertigo of God’s greatness. We can touch it, just about, through psalmody, which lets us glimpse it as a boundless fount of love. There is no trace of a concert or spectacle; there is no enthusiasm, no ecstasy. We make a superhuman effort to rise above our smallness, gathered as a community that, in unison, harmonises stammering. I always come out a loser. About to yield to discouragement, I console myself that I have had a lesson in humility. Had I been victorious even for a moment, it would all have been in vain.’ You can read the entire piece (in Spanish) here.
