Jubileum S.P. Dominici
This year, the Order of Preachers celebrates the 800th Anniversary of the death of its Founder, St. Dominic de Guzman. Like the celebration of his birth, or that of his founding of the Friars in 1216 – and the Nuns in 1206! – this celebration is the celebration of a beginning. Having run the full length of God’s will for him with enormous energy, this Jubilee marks the moment St. Dominic entered into the Father’s house and promised his spiritual children that he would be of greater help to them in Heaven than he had been on earth. It is a lofty promise, considering the intensity of his life!
Then, how do you mark the life of a saint, much less a founder?
Novelist George Bernanos agonizes a little in his ‘Saint Dominic’[1], that “the strict sequence of events… reveals nothing or very little…” To tally the moments of his life is not enough. We cannot measure a man by his achievements, or even the outward radiance of his sanctity. “Sanctity is not a thing of formulas,” Bernanos struggles; rather “it possesses all formulas”. We can no more enclose St. Dominic in his last words than we can exhaust his spirituality by counting the number of his miracles. What are a number of years of activity, however fruitful, when you glance down the halls of eternity?
For all we know of this man, what can we possibly know of him?
That question, of course, is far bigger than a blog post, and the reason begins to be clear as soon as we try and probe at it – the nature of a man’s sanctity is a mystery. Like the God who is its author, the depths of sanctity cannot be sounded with total meaning, total understanding. All that is left to us is to look closely at it and be touched by its radiance, the beauty of God’s masterpiece. Let’s not pretend, however, that one corner of God’s beauty is not enough to overwhelm our desires for an age and, more than this, to move us ever nearer to the same reality at work in us. The more we look at those aspects of him that we can see, the more we allow the Light that shone in St. Dominic to enter our own minds and hearts.
The Dominican Chant ‘O Lumen Ecclesiae’ sung by the nuns each night at Compline after the Salve Regina. This has been the practice of the Order since at least the 14th Century.
This ‘looking’ is what inspires the writing of an Antiphon like the ‘O Lumen Ecclesiae’ of Constantine of Orvieto, which lingers almost ponderingly on the great virtues of the founder of the Order of Preachers, trying in love to capture him and eventually succumbing simply to the plea for similar blessedness:
Light of the Church,
Teacher of Truth,
Rose of Patience,
Ivory of Chastity,
you freely poured forth the waters of Wisdom,
Preacher of Grace,
unite us with the Blessed.
Written so soon after St. Dominic’s death and sung each night by the Order after the Salve Regina, we thought it would be a fitting way to mark the Jubilee by reflecting on this beautiful Dominican chant ourselves over the months before St. Dominic’s feast on August 8th, in hopes that we might share a little of his light. We hope you’ll join us each fortnight as we reflect on the virtues raised by this prayer and celebrate together the great gift we have in St. Dominic as our intercessor and father in faith, and welcome the same grace more and more into our own lives.
Blessed Saint Dominic, pray for us!
[1] Saint Dominic, George Bernanos, 1939, ed. & trans. by Fr. Anthony Giambrone, O.P., Cluny Media, 2017.
