The One-Eyed Angel Song

Today's Lenten reflection is on beauty in the liturgy. There is an unfortunate movement to remove beauty from the liturgy because it is "extraneous" and we should focus on what is important: God. My reply to this school of thought is, "Would you want an ugly house? Then why would God?" After all, He gave us our senses of sight, hearing, and smell so it only makes sense that He doesn't mind us engaging them all in the liturgy. Think of a Greek Orthodox liturgy, which is an all-out assault on the senses with the riot of colors on the iconostasis, the polyphonic chanting, and the furls of incense. I'm just saying, if I were God I'd rather hang out there than at some bland, ugly suburban parish with bland, ugly music and only the scent of too much perfume on certain parishioners.

When I was a little girl splitting my time between the Episcopal church on Sundays and Catholic Mass on Wednesdays, I was torn between the beauty of the Episcopal service and something deeper going on at my bland suburban Catholic school's church. One thing does stand out: that in neither case did they water things down for us children. God is a mystery no adult can grasp, so why would we think we can make Him so small and simple that children can understand him? He made Himself small and simple as a child at Christmas, and that is as simple as it needs to get. Children love mystery as much as adults; when we steal it from them and make Jesus a nice guy who healed sick people, they just tune out. My experience from years of teaching catechism is that children love mysticism and deep concepts, even if they cannot fully understand them.

I remember a hymn we often sang after Communion at the Episcopal church, full of mysterious words like "vesture" and vanguard" and imagery of spiritual battles and seraphim in the thralls of worship. The tune was minor-key and haunting, but it was the words that really made the hymn; to my childish mind, they were the closest description of Heaven any human could find. I loved that song and would ask my mother if we were going to sing "The One-Eyed Angel Song" at church, but she had no idea what I was talking about. Of course, being a child, I was literal-minded to the point of ridiculousness, so when we sang a line in this song that went, "Cherubim with sleepless eye," I envisioned strange beings with a single eye they veiled from His Presence. I'm sure the poet who penned the words to "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" was not imagining cycloptic angels, but after all, in the line before he had written about "six-winged seraphs," so he had already stood my image of angels as young women with two wings on its head. And for that I will be eternally grateful, because even if he led my childish imagination astray, at least he led it away from the cloying and mundane toward the strange and mysterious. He gave me a lifelong understanding that the things of Heaven are beyond our human power to envision. During the liturgy, when the angels of Heaven bow around the altar, we should feel some of that beauty and mystery, which is much easier to do when a schola is chanting than when someone is playing lounge music on the piano during the Eucharistic prayer.

Famous Hat