“O magnum mysterium et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natumut anima jacentem in præsepio.”
“O great mystery and wondrous sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord lying in their manger.”
Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium” is, to me, the greatest Christmas carol ever written.
I first heard Lauridsen’s composition a decade ago, as our church choir got adventurous with their Christmas music. I remember weeping profusely as I listened. There was probably other stuff going on there, but part of those tears was absolutely because Morten Lauridsen succeeded at taking a Christmas motet that had been around since the 16th century and breathing modern life in it. He beheld a mystery and recreated his encounter with it in me. My obsession with it has only grown: One Christmas, I made a playlist that is just 38 different recordings of Lauridsen’s anthem.
The most popular setting of this 10th-century text was by Tomás Luis Victoria — Spain’s answer to Pierluigi Palestrina, the Italian father of polyphony. Many choirs still perform Victoria’s setting to this day. Victoria’s setting sounds like a classic Renaissance chant you’d expect to hear in a candle lit cathedral, but Lauridsen’s sounds like an intrusion of winter wind and the heat of animal breath into a choir loft.
Lauridsen’s motet, composed in 1994 for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, is infused with what C.S. Lewis would call “northernness.” It’s suffused with longing — Sehnsucht — and a sense of deep mystery, magic and belonging that stirs in the corners of our memory.
Lauridsen’s melody is thoroughly Romantic and a bit uncanny. It’s full of dissonance — for good reason. His surprising notes “shine a spotlight,” as he has said, on the entire story of Incarnation — Christ’s Passion contained in the moment of Christ’s birth. His goal, as he wrote in an essay 15 years after its composition, was to reproduce an effect that a still life painting by Zurbarán had upon him: a complete undoing by beauty. What better way to describe incarnation? To be completely undone by the arrival of a mystery, enfleshed in something earthy, ordinary and unexpected.
In a world that makes the Christmas holiday a list of tasks — some mundane, some more sacred — Lauridsen’s music slows us down. He expands two thoughts over six and a half minutes. So, sit with him. Listen to the mystery. What is Christmas all about? It’s about animals looking at a baby. God has invaded their space, has come down to meet them. Did they know him when they saw him? Whispers of belonging at the back of their memory? Christmas is about animals staring at a baby who is God. It’s about a virgin who mourns her son’s death even as she celebrates his miraculous arrival in her arms.
Let Christ’s entrance into the world become strange again. It was always meant to be shocking, a bit weird — not proper or tame. Let the wild mystery wash over you again. May you be undone by its beauty.
