A beautiful little boy in my old parish died this week from a sudden accident. One moment he was playing, the next he was seriously injured, and the next, he died.

Death is not ok. It was never supposed to happen to us. Jesus changed it, and made it the door to eternal life, but it is still a bad thing. He cried to see the cup before His eyes, on the night He was betrayed.

I think of this wonderful, promising little boy, baptized and of tender age, standing at the choir Mass with his family in the front row, with their hymnals open. I hope we did right by him. I hope that our prayer together prepared him to sing today with the angels.

O the happiness of the heavenly alleluia, sung in security, in fear of
no adversity! We shall have no enemies in heaven, we shall never lose a
friend. God’s praises are sung both there and here, but here they are
sung by those destined to die, there, by those destined to live for
ever; here they are sung in hope, there, in hope’s fulfillment; here
they are sung by wayfarers, there, by those living in their own country. -St. Augustine

If you sing the chant too slowly, you lose the sense of the chant, you lose the meaning because the chant, the text, becomes less and less understandable.  Yes, you have to understand what the text is saying.  You don’t have to be a Latin scholar to know that (though that helps a lot).  People in the pews have books they can follow, that is true.  But singing the chant too slowly risks breaking the integrity of the text’s meaning.  Try listening to an audio book at a really slow rate of reading. As you turn the pace down, it eventually becomes incomprehensible.

If you sing chant too quickly, you tend to retain the meaning of the text, but you put its sacral character at risk.  The texts are sacred.  They deserve respect and time.  They must not be rushed.  They must be savored.  Chant that is rushed has a nervous, jittery quality to it.   It lacks the essential quality: it isn’t prayerful.  The pace of a Mass must not be lugubrious.  Every Mass and every element of Mass must retain a sense of progress, of moving forward towards a goal.   When you tear through a chant, you might be making progress, but you lose the essential sacral sense.  Every word of the chants are the voice of the Church singing with Christ’s own voice.  Christ is the true Actor during Mass.  He borrows us, the baptized, and uses our gestures and song.

More from Fr. Zuhlsdorf here