Today we celebrate the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time with the Gradual responsory chant. The text is from Psalm 32, verses 12 and 6. The blessed nation, the chosen people sung about here, is obviously Israel. But Israel was only the figure of the Church; she is the blessed one and we are the chosen people, the one whom Christ received as an inheritance, whom he conquered with his blood and made his own by making them one with him in the same life.

The verse sings of the creative word that organises the world; indeed, it seems that this is the meaning to be given to ‘caeli’. But this word of God is the Word that orders the whole universe for Man and, from generation to generation, to Christ and the Church which gives it its fullness. Thus, both in the responsory verse and in the first part, it is the Mystical Body that is sung. 

The melody’s intonation is stamped with a nobility that develops and acquires a magnificent magnitude throughout the melodic ascent to ‘Deus’. A mood of joy and peace mingles to finish with the cadenza in F of ‘eorum’.

The second phrase continues with the same idea. The melodic expression is also the same. However, there is something more intimate, like a feeling of gratitude that makes the melody very ardent; note the pressus, the triple note of ‘populus’ – an episematic trivirga – and ‘elegit Dominus’ with the tinge of tenderness that becomes increasingly delicate and prayerful as the melody fades into the bass.

This gratitude is illuminated with hope and desire in the momentum-laden melodic ascent of ‘hereditatem’ and then becomes fully contemplative in the gentle and oh-so-fine rhythms of the ‘sibi’.

In the verse, the expression is somewhat different. The Church, in these words so full of meaning, pauses to contemplate the marvellous work of the Word and the Spirit in the world. In ‘Domini’, in the first phrase, and in ‘Spiritus’, in the second, she gives herself up to a lingering tenderness, while in ‘caeli firmati sunt’ and ‘omnis virtus eorum’ she exalts herself in beautiful outbursts of admiration.