Sing a New Song to the Lord
Fr. Vincent Ferrer, OP, leading the community in choir practice
If you happened to be around our monastery a few weeks ago, you would have heard some rather unusual phrases…
“Do, re, mi, re, dooooo…”
“Where’s your tongue?”
“So, what’s the difference between t and d?”
“Let the breath drop in!”
At the end of July and beginning of August, our community was blessed to have a week-long liturgical music workshop with Fr. Vincent Ferrer Bagan, OP. Father is a good friend of our Sr. Cecilia Maria, and he came to play organ and conduct our choir for Sister’s perpetual profession in 2019. Ever since then, we have wanted to bring him back to work more intensively with our choir, so that we can praise the Lord more beautifully through the gift of song. When that opportunity finally arrived this summer, we had a packed schedule lined up — and Father rose to the occasion magnificently! Our activities included:
Twice-daily choir practice
Daily conferences on the history and spirituality of music in the Church’s liturgy
Personal voice lessons for any Sisters who desired them
Sessions with our two Sister organists
Re-arranging our seating in choir to help us hear one another better
As contemplatives, the sung liturgy is the heart of our lives, and so this week was a great blessing that helped us to grow in our ability to truly pray this prayer of the Church. We are enormously grateful to Fr. Vincent Ferrer for his generosity and enthusiasm as he shared with us his passion for music. We hope and pray that we can have him back again some day! (Father, it will be fun!)
We learned this Introit chant for the Solemnity of the Assumption this year!
“When they are sung these sacred words stir my mind to greater religious fervor and kindle in me a more ardent form of piety than they would if they were not sung.”
“The use of music in the divine praises is a salutary institution, that the souls of the faint-hearted may be the more incited to devotion.”
“The faint-hearted are all of us.”