There was a moment circa 1995 when everybody was inexplicably listening to Gregorian chant. Some Spanish monks had released this album, Chant, and it became a multiplatinum bestseller. I don’t know why everybody else bought it, but I ordered my copy from Columbia House thinking it was going to be monks singing over synth beats, like in that one Enigma song. Instead it was just a bunch of guys extending all their vowels over too many notes in a room that needed better soundproofing.
[Paul said,] “As I went through [Athens] and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’” – Acts 17:23 (NRSV)
Not that that kept me, or millions of others, from listening. I sometimes wonder what the ancients would have made of so many people putting this sacred music on their secular playlists, right between “You Oughta Know” and “Gangsta’s Paradise.”
Probably some would have been offended by the context, vexed by the fact that most of us had no idea (or interest in) what the monks were singing. But this is the kind of thing Paul would have approved of. He was happy to use the tools of the culture to get his point across. He traveled Roman roads, he absorbed pagan philosophy, he told the people that the unknown god they’d built an altar to was the God of Jesus Christ. Tricky.
I truly have no idea why that album went so big, and I don’t know whether it truly did any work for the gospel. But I don’t know how else I would ever have come to memorize “Puer Natus Est Nobis.”
Prayer
Bring your word to us by any means that work, whether we understand or not. Amen.
About the Author
Quinn G. Caldwell is Chaplain of the Protestant Cooperative Ministry at Cornell University. His most recent book is a series of daily reflections for Advent and Christmas called All I Really Want: Readings for a Modern Christmas. Learn more about it and find him on Facebook at Quinn G. Caldwell.