Though it appears as I write (8 April 2026) that a cease-fire in Iran may have allowed for some deferral of escalation in that part of the world, I have been reflecting on power and threat in the same week that the Church has been celebrating the resurrection. Doing so reminded me that the composer Olivier Messiaen once compared the power of the resurrection to that of an atomic bomb. The context in which he made that comparison was a comment that the imprint on the Turin shroud connected, for him, with the imprint ‘human shadows of Hiroshima’ – silhouettes of people made in the moment of their destruction.

Connecting this not only to the thoughts of a composer but to a work of music, I turn to Messiaen’s Livre du Saint Sacrement, and specifically to its seventh movement Les ressucsités et la lumière de Vie. Organist Gillian Weir writes that ‘the movement has a stark strength and directness that is almost brutal; it is much ore than energy, and has a flavour subtly different from any of the earlier works. One might have expected a softening from the older composer, but the opposite seems to have occurred.’ Another organist, Jon Gillock, also calls it ‘stunning and dramatic. It is like a trumpet call of the Day of Judgement.’

The movement begins and ends with the word ‘resurrection’ spelled out in a musical-alphabetical cipher Messiaen called his ‘langage communicable‘ (spelled out in French, of course, but helpfully the same Latin-derived word in French as in English) marked fortissississimo. In between these statements the dynamic is ‘merely’ fortissimo or fortississimo! Harmonically rather complex, but the main structural points at which the music comes to a momentary rest on long-held chords underpinned by pedal descending tritone which functions in place of the more tonal perfect fifth as a cadence point. These moments are on major chords on B, then D-flat, and finally C (this final time with an added 6th, which gives a slightly sweeter savour to the sound). The climax on C recalls the same composer’s opera about St Francis, in which the bright white light of C major represents the eternal consummation of the resurrection life.

Even without Messiaen’s colour associtations in which the brown of B and grey-green of D-flat give way to white in C, these articulation moments on major sonorities give audible contrast to the rather more terrifying sounds of the restlessly energetic movement in the rest of the piece. Messiaen was strongly aware that the moment of resurrection is a moment of power and awe, but also (for believers at least) of joy and gladness. Divine truth will be seen in the midst of the untruths we tell ourselves daily, and these truths shine like light into the darkness, darkness which cannot overcome it.