Holy affirming,
Holy denying,
Holy reconciling,
Transubstantiate in me
For my being.
Listen
I wrote this chant after a fellow Wisdom School student pointed out Gurdjieff’s lyric to me with the suggestion I provide a musical setting for it. On this first acquaintance the technical challenge was immediately apparent – so I agreed to have a go.
The chant is a prayer to be sung to the Holy Trinity by one who invites the grace of divine transformation. The words address the Trinity in terms of the metaphysical Law of Three. Briefly, this proposes that a situation involving two opposing forces (called the affirming and denying forces) will remain in stasis until a third, reconciling force is applied, whose effect is to bring something totally new into being that resolves the deadlock. This new arising is not a compromise between the original three forces because it operates outside the space defined by them. The law provides a fresh perspective on the creative impulse of the Trinity in that it shifts the emphasis of our perception away from the traditional concept of static Personhood to one of dynamic energy. Or, as Thomas Keating has expressed it, ‘God’ is a verb.
This version of the prayer can be found in Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson”. I have found that the uneven musical phrasing I used rapidly starts to feel natural as you sing it.
