“Gloria: A Music Sunday Reflection”
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
April 28, 2019

Reading: gloria mundi from “far memory” by Lucille Clifton

so knowing,
what is known?
that we carry our baggage
in our cupped hands
when we burst through
the waters of our mother.
that some are born
and some are brought
to the glory of this world.
that it is more difficult
than faith
to serve only one calling
one commitment
one devotion
in one life.

Reflection

This morning we are blessed to listen to Vivali’s Gloria in D, offered to us by the USNH Choir and the Haven String Quartet. We can settle into to our seats and let ourselves be lifted away
on the wings of glorious music designed for that very purpose – the lifting our hearts and minds and spirits out of the worries of our worldly existence.

The Latin words that Vivaldi set to music in the early 1700s came from a hymn originally composed in Greek, sometime in the second century of the common era. Introduced to the Western Church by St. Hilary of Poiters, the hymn can be found as a daily morning prayer
in the fourth book of the Apostolic Confessions from the third or fourth century.

Interesting, you might say, but what, if anything does that have to do with us?
Well, here’s where we come in.

St. Hiliary had a nick name: Malleus Arianorum, The Hammer of the Arians. He got this nickname because of his commitment to persecuting Arians and rooting Arianism out of the early Christian church.

And who, pray tell, were the Arians?

The Arians were the spiritual ancestors of the Unitarians.

In the third and fourth centuries, Christians who believed that Jesus Christ was truly the son of God and not God-himself, meaning that he was “begotten of the Father” and before he was begotten, he did not exist, were called Arians after their leader, Arius.

Arius, was a Lybian priest. In a letter to his colleague, Eusebuius of Nicomedia, a Lebanese priest, stating clearly the beliefs of the Arians: “We are persecuted,” Arius wrote, “because we say that the Son has a beginning but that God is without beginning.”

We say that the Son (S.O.N.) has a beginning but that God is without beginning.

Arius’s beliefs about Jesus were deemed heretical at the Church Council of Nicea in the year 325. I always say we were the losers of those early Christological controversies. Nonetheless, Arianism persisted and headed debate continued in the early church. It gets very esoteric very quickly, so I won’t bore you with the details.

Suffice it to say that St. Hilary of Poitiers hated Arianism and Arians and sought to rid the church of those he called “the priests of Anti-christ.”

The hymn we hear today, the Gloria, was an attempt to put into word and song the orthodox doctrine of the trinity. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

I think St. Hilary might literally be rolling in his grave to have a bunch of Unitarian Universalists singing it here this morning.

And my question is: what does it mean for us – as Unitarian Universalists, as the spiritual descendants of the so-called heretical Arians – to sing and enjoy and take in and revel, even, in the Gloria?

So knowing, what is known? the poet asks.

So knowing, what is known?

That music is a medium that transcends language, transcends faith, makes it possible for people with every different belief under the sun to appreciate beauty and harmony and transcendence.

That we each bring our own selves to this music, and many of us bring our baggage: the time we refused to recite the apostle’s creed in church or told our mother we wouldn’t attend catechism any more, or walked out of religion class.

So knowing, what is known?

That still there exists in us that niggling, needling, nagging desire to shout Gloria! at a sunrise or a sun set, or a baby’s birth, or at the first bud after winter, or at the weeping cherries this week as they burst into bloom.

Gloria mundi, Lucille Clifton says, the glory of this world.

And we know deep within us that there is still a hunger for connection and community.
For lifting our minds and our hearts and our spirits above our worldly worries – and they are many.

And we know that we devote ourselves, commit ourselves, are called to serve in ways as profound, perhaps, as the way St. Hilary of Poiters felt he was serving his tri-une God.

We devote ourselves to the surviving and the thriving of our fellow human beings.

We commit ourselves to the surviving and the thriving of our earth and the beings with which we share this precious planet.

And we are called to bask in and proclaim the glory of this world.

And so, this morning, as we listen to this music, this glorious music, written by a priest, Antonio Vivaldi, who had devoted his life to God and to music.

This morning, some of us might feel the presence or the desire for a presence that calls us beyond what we know to a love and a peace that is beyond our understanding.
And we just might feel the urge to whisper: Receive our prayer. Have mercy on us.

The Gloria is a statement of faith. It is a statement of faith that few of us in this room this morning could – or would – make. And yet, we are faithful people. Oh, most of us would be declared heretics by the church just like our ancestor Arius. Some of us may well have been declared heretics by our families. And yet, we are faithful people.

We are called and devoted and committed to that which is beyond our small sphere. We hold out hope and faith in humankind, though that, at times, has felt harder and harder of late. We have faith in each other and in our children. And we have faith, ultimately, that the arc of the universe,
though long, bends toward justice, and that each of us has a part to play in that bending.

We hold on to the arc of the universe, each of us, all of us together, and we pull. It’s hard to imagine deeper faith than that.

So Gloria mundi, Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax.