PROJECT : ENCORE™: Holy Communion

This piece was composed for a wedding. It celebrates the complexity and beauty of love, understood as both the sacred emotion of bride and groom and also, in a broader sense, as charitable love, as taught by Christ and expressed in this case in the second letter from St. Paul to the Corinthians.
 

George Herbert (1593-1633) was born in Montgomery Castle in mid-Wales. His beautiful poem, “Paradise”, has long appealed to readers both for its sentiment and for its successively “pruned” end-rhymes. When I learned that one of the root meanings of the word “paradise” is “walled garden” I knew this poem would be particularly appropriate for the 75th Anniversary of the Gregynog Festival.

The Genesis of Exultation Mass

I chose this text because I think it asks us to acknowledge the minor misdeeds and omissions we permit in our everyday lives. So often we make small allowances for ourselves, fudge things that are difficult for us, or mistreat our loved ones in little ways. Most of the time we allow ourselves to ignore these things, hoping that nobody, perhaps not even ourselves, will notice. I think that those small things are often far more important than they seem, and I hope that this text, and this piece, will remind us to be more careful of ourselves and of one another.