In 1328 Henry Suso, a Dominican monk and mystic, wrote of himself in his autobiography, “It seemed to him in a vision that he heard angelic strains and sweet heavenly melody, and this filled him with such gladness that he forgot all his sufferings.” Suso’s sufferings mostly consisted of extremely harsh self-mortification which he undertook to purify himself and become worthy of heavenly joys. In the vision, Suso was instructed by God to “cast off his sorrows” and to dance “in heavenly fashion” in the company of angels around the infant Jesus.

The song which he heard was a carol still sung today, known to English-speakers as “In Dulci Jubilo” or “Good Christian Men Rejoice.” The song, which expresses joyful wonder at the mystery of the Incarnation, has been sung in the intervening seven centuries in settings by Bach, Buxtehude, and many lesser known musicians; a nineteenth-century setting by Robert Pearsall is a mainstay of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge.

Of the many arrangements of this song, the English translation by Pearcy Dearmer found in the 1928 Oxford Book of Carols best preserves the spirit of the song as found in fourteenth-century manuscripts. The lyrics are in the macaronic style, alternating between English and Latin, suggesting a conversation within the soul: “Comfort my heart’s blindness / O puer optime” – O  best of boys.

After receiving this heavenly vision, Suso came to understand that God did not ask him to inflict sufferings on himself. Instead, with “delight and pleasure” we rejoice over the child in the manger who gives us “cœlorum gaudia” – the joys of heaven. “Oh, that we were there,” the song ends, a longing that finds its way into the Advent episode of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow where the song “climaxing now with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping three- and fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church” leads us to heavenly joy, “Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have crossed, the way home….”

This recording by The Sixteen includes a wonderful organ solo.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lFKSc3V4UAs?si=7YI6wcjysm60ELm_