Four reflections for Holy Saturday (1): John Rutter, Requiem

Patrick Comerford

We have been listening to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, singing Requiem Aeternam from John Rutter’s Requiem.

It has been a real pleasure, during my regular visits to Cambridge in recent years to visit the Chapel of King’s College. But so often we associate the choir of King’s College with Christmas and the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols.

As I was preparing for this service for Holy Saturday, I thought how important it was to remember that Christmas is meaningless unless it is truly a preparation for Good Friday, for Holy Saturday and for Easter Day, the most important day in the Christian calendar.

John Rutter, who wrote this Requiem, was a student at Clare College, next door to King’s, and has asked whether the sound of the choir at King’s has been a subconscious influence on all his choral writing.

Rutter concedes that his Requiem is more a concert work than a liturgical Requiem, but many of us have also found it deeply theological.

Throughout this Requiem, the Easter hope of the Resurrection breaks in compellingly as fragments of the Easter Sequence, Victimae paschali laudes, are played on the flute, particularly in the Agnus Dei before and during the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

The first and last movements of Rutter’s Requiem – Requiem aeternam, which we have just heard, and Lux Aeterna – are prayers to God the Father, underpinning and supporting the whole arch-like structure of the work.

The words of this opening movement are:

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord:
and may light perpetual shine upon them.
Thou, O God, art praised in Sion:
and unto thee shall the vow be performed in Jerusalem.
Thou that hearest the prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.

As Christians, we are very good about talking about our life with Christ and in Christ. But today, between the Cross and the Resurrection, as we think of Christ in the grave, we are given assurance that those who have lived with Christ and died in Christ are not forgotten in the grave.

In death, Christ reaches out to all in the grave, cross the barriers of time and space.

Light perpetual shines on them.

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, Dublin. This is the first of four reflections at a service of readings, music and prayers for Holy Saturday in Whitechurch Parish, Dublin, on Saturday 11 April 2009.