In “The World’s First Love,” Archbishop Fulton Sheen reflects: “All mothers sing to their babes, but here is one mother who sings before the Babe is born.” Truly, if any mother had reason to sing for joy, it was Our Lady. Her love for her Lord, now incarnate as her child, overflowed in rich emotion from the noblest heart imaginable and could only naturally break into song. The Gospels offer very few glimpses of the Blessed Mother, hence it is deeply significant that her Magnificat (see Luke 1:46-55) is one of them. Mary’s longest Scriptural discourse is a song of gladness to her child and about him!
Our part in awaiting Mary’s child is also deeply bound up with song: The first taste of Christmas music each year is incredibly sweet. Yet we are often presented with a firm contrast between this interior disposition and the external reality of these days. While the holidays surround us with their noise and bustle, holy Mother Church leads us toward a certain stillness, silence, and waiting – the spiritual refuge of Advent.
Previously, Advent was a deeply penitential time, and an element of moderation still marks this season today. In particular, our liturgical music adopts a longing and subdued spirit so that the jubilation of Christmas will be all the greater. The Sunday “Gloria” and the fanfare of organ postludes are reserved for the great feast to come; perhaps the exuberance of instruments also scales back. Even amid such restraint, however, a current of joy remains present. Meanwhile, the bells and jingles of secular yuletide have already played through the commercial world scores of times. How might we balance Advent’s tranquil waiting with Christmas jubilation?
Sing in exultation
As with so many things in the spiritual life, Our Lady is the answer. I believe that Archbishop Sheen’s insight into the musicality of her joy offers new richness for our own Advent, showing us how to unite the beauty of expectation with the new music within us. We, who also await the Lord in joyful hope, are invited to sing before the Christ Child is born – to sing with and through Mary.
We love our classic Christmas carols, and the canon of traditional Catholic hymnody offers many excellent titles for this sacred season. Yet, from my love for choral sacred music and deep devotion to Our Lady, I wish to share three great masterpieces that specifically orient us toward the Marian musicality of this time. Each piece is profoundly serene and contemplative, and coincidentally, the texts of all three are rooted in other languages or far back in liturgical tradition. I hope these selections reveal the symphony of Our Blessed Mother’s soul, placing your heart in harmony with hers during the sacred days of Advent and Christmastide.
‘Alma Redemptoris Mater’
Did you know the Church rotates several Marian antiphons throughout the liturgical year? Although the “Salve Regina” is the most popular of these chants, it belongs to Ordinary Time. Advent and Christmastide feature the “Alma Redemptoris Mater” in tribute to Our Lady as the “loving mother of the Redeemer.” The text includes various Marian titles, honoring her role in the Incarnation:
“Loving mother of the Redeemer / Gate of Heaven, Star of the Sea / Assist your people who have fallen yet strive to rise again. / To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator / Yet remained a virgin after as before. / You who received Gabriel’s joyful greeting / Have pity on us poor sinners.”
Palestrina – a great Italian Renaissance composer whose quincentenary is in 2025 – transformed the simple tone Latin chant antiphon into a choral treasure. Palestrina’s “Alma Redemptoris Mater” perfectly encapsulates the theme of the antiphon with its simultaneous brightness and profound tranquility. Ascending scale runs are echoed by the other voice parts in a call and response that evokes the soul’s upward motion of praise and plea. I feel deeply immersed in Advent once my parish choir turns to Palestrina’s “Alma” each year; it is requisite to the season.
‘Maria Walks Amid the Thorn’
It may seem odd to relate something deeply resonant with Holy Week with the hope and peace of Advent. Yet “Maria Walks Amid the Thorn” (“Maria Durch Ein Dornwald Ging”), a German Advent hymn from the Middle Ages, does this. The text relates how roses bloomed on the thorn trees along the path that expectant Mary traveled to Judea, heart-to-heart with the unborn Christ Child. Haunting and doleful, “Maria Durch” melds promise with sorrow, Advent with Lent. In particular, the “Kyrie Eleison” of each stanza points ahead to the mercy of Calvary; Christ is born to die, but a hue of hope prevails.
VOCES8 offers a sublime performance of the original German with a magnificent final verse in eight-part harmony, while the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles render it quite lovely in English.
‘O Magnum Mysterium’
Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium” is altogether sublime. This contemplative polyphonic masterpiece (and, uniquely, a modern composition, dated 1994) is lush with harmonies and soaring notes that seem to float in ethereal suspension. The text of this work, also originally a plainchant, is drawn from the Matins (morning prayer) of Christmas and translates as follows:
“O great mystery / And inexplicable wonder / That animals should see the Lord / Lying in the crib / Blessed is the Virgin whose body / Was worthy to bear Christ the Lord.”
Perhaps the most poignant mark of this piece is the momentary haunting dissonance at the words “Beata Virgo” (which I recall reading was an intentionally poetic decision on Lauridsen’s part). This artistic move expresses the theme of sorrow that would mark Our Lady’s motherhood, placing it in delicate tension with her joy. The complexity ultimately resolves as the various voices build, echo, and surge again toward the refrain of “O Magnum Mysterium” – a ray of light piercing through.
While each of these selections elevates us toward eternity in a profound way, I am convinced that heaven is a perpetual and perfect “O Magnum Mysterium.”
Where heaven and nature meet
I must offer one more musical recommendation, which, in addition to the prior pieces, forms the soundtrack to my December days. “Advent at Ephesus” by the Benedictines and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring: Christmas with the Dominican Sisters of Mary” each feature a delightful array of music including time-honored chants, new arrangements of best-loved carols, and lullabies that profoundly reveal Our Lady’s love for the divine babe. The pure voices of these brides of Christ remind us that each woman is called to approach the tender child Jesus as a little mother.
Indeed, Christmastide music offers many Marian selections (such as “Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming,” “What Child is This,” and “Gabriel’s Message”), and the vast majority of our traditional carols also illuminate Our Lady’s nearness to the gift of the Incarnation. I hope you will include some of these, along with the three pieces I shared above, in your contemplative and celebratory listening.
Ultimately, it is deeply meaningful to enter this holy season through forms of prayer and praise that transpose the earthly up into the transcendent, helping our little human hearts expand toward the immense mystery of the Incarnation. Just as music stands at the crossroads between the temporal and the eternal, so too, heaven and earth unite in the Immaculate Blessed Mother, and in fact, only because of Our Lady do the divine and human meet at Christmas. May we magnify this wondrous gift alongside her, journeying nearer and nearer to God through the music of her love and her most pure being, “evermore and evermore.”
Leila Joy Castillo graduated from Ave Maria University in May 2024, where she double majored in humanities and communications with minors in theology and marriage and family studies. Given this, she now does her best to balance a multitude of literary interests and writing ideas but may also be found drinking tea, dreaming of mountains, or deep in conversations that always somehow include personalist philosophy.
