Filled with the Holy Ghost, they spoke with other tongues

A FEW weeks ago, on the weekend after the tragic events associated with the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, I was beguiled by the serendipitous alchemy of a choral Evensong prayer service.

The memory of the martyrs of Christchurch was still fresh in our hearts as we gathered in the calm of a peace-filled Sunday evening. The greater percentage of our congregation that night was of the Muslim faith.

The Song of Mary, or the Magnificat, is a feature of service, and is sung in various settings. On this occasion the choir sung the version composed by Father Chris Chivers, a previous Precentor of our Cathedral.

Evensong has its origin in the Byzantium levant along with Vespers, the lighting of the sunset candles, which is part of our Abrahamic legacy inherited from our Jewish forbearers in the faith.

The monastic prayer regime sought consistency with the promise of the Psalmist: “Seven times a day I praise you”. The brothers would emerge from their quarters in the Byzantine monasteries in the greater vicinity of the Bosphorus Strait of Istanbul or from their desert caves and hermitages the remote parts of Egypt and elsewhere. They would intone the prayers of matins, “At midnight I rise to praise you”. They would seek some repose in their dormitories till Lauds or the Dawn Prayer.

William Dalrymple, the travelogue writer and historian, in his pilgrimage along the Levant visited a monastery set in the mountains above Aleppo in Syria. He joined the monks for lauds, at the end of which Dalrymple asked the abbot, “Why do you pray like Muslims?”, referring to the deep salaah of bowing and touching the forehead to the ground, prostrate and then standing upright again. He was told, “We’ve always prayed like this, we prayed this before Islam”.

As the Christian faith moved westwards the body language of prayer – for reasons that merits further researched based inquiry – was literally refigured. Vespers – a liturgical feature and a gift from the cultural treasuries of our Eastern Christian homeland – evolves into the service of Evensong.

It entered our city and region, journeying from the cold metropolis of the British Empire along the hard road of colonialism. And Father Chris Chivers, an Englishman, revisited the ancient Magnificat, an insurgent song of a young peasant woman with its lilt and cadence of the Orient East. He took it, choreographed as it had been in the westward movement of the Church, cast in the musical literacy of the West. Chris took the rhythm of our land and textured the Magnificat of our Eastern faith roots into the musical tapestry of our African soil, the Motherland of humanity.

After Evensong the congregation processed out of the Cathedral and gathered on its steps on Wale Street where a candlelight vigil was held. The vigil – largely a silent one, was interspersed with prayers from the Qur’an and soft chants of lament for the dead – lasted for 50 minutes. Each minute served as a reminder of each person who died during the attack on the Al Noor and the Linwood mosques in Christchurch.

As the time for Maghrib, the sunset prayers, drew close, members of our group gathered to salaah (pray) in The Link end of the Cathedral.

I am sure all this – the music of a quintessential English choral Evensong and the prayers of devotion and praise in Arabic – must have made Allah very happy.