Today we celebrate the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time with the Communion chant. The text for this Communion is taken from Psalm 118. Several communion antiphons are taken from this psalm. This is due to the character of ‘ruminatio’ of the law of the Lord, that is, of meditation on the Word, something typically biblical and appropriate for this moment of Eucharistic post-communion. What is essential in the text of this Communion is to remind God of his word, in which the faithful have placed all the hope of their lives. The text is divided into two sentences that seem to set up an opposition: the first sentence is an appeal to God to remember the word given to his servant; the second is the faithful's remembrance of the help already experienced before the divine consolation. They are therefore two memories: that of God and that of the faithful. 

The melody of this Communion antiphon is composed in mode 4, and although it has a very limited melodic range, it achieves a very rich expression in its content. The first phrase is an appeal to the Lord to remember the words he gave to his servant. The intonation manages to give, with just a few notes, great force to this prayer, starting from the F to cadence on the G with a "clivis" which must be well rounded in the song, as this figure will continue to resonate throughout the first phrase as the musical figure par excellence, but each time covering a larger space (A-G, A-Fa, G-R), echoing the memento and giving it the force of insistence. Thanks to the repetition of this musical figure of the clivis, the supplication to God acquires an aspect of insistence and repetition. The whole of this first phrase is in a cadence which begins at the end of the intonation, and descends by degrees until it reaches the ‘Domine’ which is embroidered around the E, the fundamental of mode 4, in an inverted cadence. The strength that the figure of the ‘Lord’ takes on for being in the fundamental gives great support to this prayer. This is ratified by what follows: ‘in quo mihi spem dedisti’. This is a similar construction to the previous one in its beginning and cadence, thus overlapping and assimilating the two statements: the Lord is the true support of our hope. Here, the melody takes a very broad route, rising a fifth on the D. This opens up the musical narrowness of the first supplication, which moved in narrower musical spaces.

The second phrase is a reminder of the experience of divine help already lived, and the other prayer is based on this. This phrase consists of two parts and there is a play of melodic counterpositions between the two. The first, ‘haec me consolata est’ (she, the word of God, is my consolation), begins with a very consistent and expressive ascent (‘haec me’), as it rises to the B natural, which is very sonorous. The aim is to musically support the expression of having lived this consolation with great vigour. The second part, on the other hand (‘in humilitate mea’), descends from the treble to express in the bass of mode 4 the experience of the humiliation experienced and in which he found consolation. It is a whole ornamentation around the fundamental E, which accompanies in a low register the memory of the humiliation experienced by this servant of God.