Chant

I love to listen to Gregorian Chant. This year I was able to spend a couple of different periods at Mt. Saviour Monastery and yesterday I visited Genesee Abbey with my mother. There is something very restful and sacred about chant. Today with the help of Apple’s ITunes I was able to download “Chant from the Hermitage.” I’ve got a couple of other albums from John Michael Talbot and I learned today about this album. It’s new to me, but the album was produced in 1995, so its far from new. Chant is ageless though. This week I’ve been reading a book by Brother David Steindl-Rast and he states that: “In all our worldly busyness, there is a dulling of the senses. Our senses and awareness are so overcome that they easily lose their acuity. Our eardrums are so often bombarded, our taste buds so overwhelmed, our diet so rich and overabundant, that we can’t really hear anything well or savor what we eat. Chant, with its lean lines of arresting simplicity, its transcendent beauty, asks for our full attention. Emerging from deep silence, it quiets the mind as we drink it in with our heart as much as with our ears. It is a kind of music that does not dull our hearing but refines it.”

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david steindl-rast, john michael talbot, gregorian chant