Called Out of Darkness Page 0,6

at the moment of the Consecration the miracle of Christ coming into the bread on the altar was being enacted or repeated, and we bowed our heads and said our most personal and emotional prayers.

"Jesus, you are here." It was that sort of intimate whisper.

"Lord, you are coming to us." "Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come to me."

Our feelings were those of immense gratitude and wonder. We believed in this miracle as we believed that streetcars passed our house, or that rain fell in great soft glimmering sheets in the afternoons.

One key church service dominates all others except for the Mass. Every Tuesday night, in the chapel, as well as in the main churches of our parish, there was a novena service to Our Mother of Perpetual Help.

Strictly speaking, a novena is a series of nine services devoted to one cause. But most churches had weekly novena services, and how and when you went to nine in a row was your call.

We loved to go to this service. There was no air-conditioning anywhere in those days, except in certain drugstores, and on summer nights the floor-length windows of the chapel were open on all sides. The evening hummed with cicadas.

The chapel was filled with electric light. The priest and the altar boy presided. And usually there were some hundred people or so crowding the dark wooden pews.

I no longer remember the order of the service. I remember what took place.

Benediction was part of it, a ceremony in which the priest removed the white Host of the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle, put it into a round glass compartment in the center of a golden monstrance - a one-legged stand with golden rays emanating out from the glass compartment like rays of the sun. Incense was liberally used during this ceremony, with the priest taking the smoking incense holder from the altar boy, and swinging it gently on its chain back and forth to fill the church with the thick delicious perfume.

The priest was attired especially for this ceremony in a gorgeous robe and a small shawl, which was sometimes a bit crooked when the priest knelt before the monstrance - and the Blessed Sacrament - to lead us in prayer.

The hymns we sang before the Blessed Sacrament every Tuesday night have left perhaps the most indelible impression on me of any music I ever heard before or since. It's this way with many Catholics of my generation. There is a particular love of those two hymns.

Both were in Latin. The first was the most solemn in tone: O Salutaris Hostia,

Quae caeli pandis ostium,

Bella premunt hostilia,

Da robur, fer auxilium.

This was sung out with a tender tone of appeal, and again a sense of gratitude, a sense of trust. This was Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, this was a special moment of adoration, and one gave oneself to it with one's entire heart.

I don't recall caring much about the English meaning of this hymn. The meaning was in the tone and the sound.

The second hymn was sung with positive vigor. The chapel rocked.

Tantum ergo Sacramentum

Veneremur cernui:

Et antiquum documentum

Novo cedat ritui.

Praestet fides supplementum

Sensuum defectui

Genitori, Genitoque

Laus et jubilatio:

Salus, honor, virtus quoque

Sit et benedictio:

Procedenti ab utroque

Compar sit laudatio,

Amen.

The hymn was great fun to sing and it reached its highest emotional pitch and most swinging rhythm with the words Genitori, Genitoque! - which happen to mean "To the Everlasting Father, and the Son who reigns on high" or so The Baltimore Book of Prayers tells me. But to repeat, the words didn't matter in those early days. The sentiment, the sense of the sacred, the sense of the splendid opportunity, were all embodied in the tones and the music.

There were some churches that sang the Tantum Ergo in a more solemn manner, but that wasn't for us in our church or chapel. We bore with it when we attended services in those parishes.

Today one can buy recordings of these ancient hymns, and if you give such a recording to a Catholic of my generation, you can move that person to tears. If you know an old-guard Catholic who's dying, a recording of these hymns may be one of the best gifts you can give that person.

But these recordings are made by large disciplined choirs.

They don't really express the enthusiasm, or the conviviality of the services of my time in which people stood or knelt belting out these Latin words in homage to the Divine.

Let me stress again: a translation of the