National and world events today are characterized as Dire Times by many in the various media (mostly anti-social, despite being characterized otherwise) and perhaps even from pulpits and street corners.
Sixty-one years ago today, a Friday as it is again this year, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated — murdered — in Dallas, Texas. I have written previously about where I was and what I was doing and how the news of President Kennedy’s death affected me. Those who might be interested can read that 2020 post.
Sixty-plus-one years ago, and onward for a while, many regarded November 22, 1963 as a day of wrath and doom. At times, especially in the 1960s, it seemed to some of us that we were on the eve of destruction — recall the eponymous Barry McGuire song. Doom was imminent.
It was not, as it turned out, the eve of destruction at all.
In retrospect, the next half century reminds me of the Antrobus family in Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth: humankind bungling onward, but incrementally upward. There is no way to know whether the nation, or the world, would have been better off, worse off, or about the same if Lee Harvey Oswald had not fired the shots, or if he had missed. We almost had a similar event last July. But contra-factual historical speculation is a fool’s errand.
Dies Irae is Latin for Day of Wrath. These are the first words of a recitation in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass and other Christian denominations’ liturgy, recited or sung in the sequence preceding the proclamation of the Gospel. Vatican II in the 1960s eliminated its use in the Catholic liturgy as too reminiscent of Medieval negative theology. Its use in other denominations has lately not been obvious. It may have been used and sung in Latin at Kennedy’s funeral. Perhaps its most recognizable musical renditions today are in Mozart’s Requiem and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique – the latter containing the ominous tolling of a funeral bell.
The first stanza in an English translation of the hymn is “Day of wrath and doom impending, David’s word with Sibyl’s blending, Heaven and earth in ashes ending!”
But the Dies Irae is a long poem and has been abbreviated for musical compositions and for liturgical use. If you look at the whole poem, you see that its finale is not as pessimistic and negative as critics allege. I end this essay with the final stanza and include it here especially for the soul of President John F. Kennedy: “Lord, all-pitying, Jesus blest, Grant them thine eternal rest. Amen.”
