Salve Regina /Hail, Holy Queen was sung by crusaders in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  St. Bernard (d. 1153) loved the hymn and spread it all over Europe.  The Salve figured largely in the evening devotions of the confraternities and guilds that were part of life from the 1100s and into the 1200s. Dominicans have been singing it since 1220’s and the Franciscans in their renewed breviary not long after that. The Carthusians sang and still sing it at the end of Evening Prayer and Cistercians have sung it that way for centuries.

When we celebrate the funeral Mass of one of our Jesuit men, we have not failed to sing it, and I’ve been a Jesuit since 1947. The Salve Regina ends our recitation of the rosary, too.  Maybe only the Our Father is said more around he earth in the course of a day than is the Salve Regina.

One line has stuck in my brain since I had to learn the hymn some time between the two World Wars:  Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle. /  To thee do we send up our sighs, Mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

“In this valley of tears”?  Certainly, this describes some places on earth accurately at any given time. But the cosmos that we know is not a valley and it is splendor and magnificence, not tears. And weeping does not characterize Christian lives at any but the rarest of times.  It’s not what Jesus told us to do.

At the end of His instructions, He said, I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. And the only condition put on this joy is this:  My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you (Jn.15:11). So we joyfully sing the Salve Regina, valley of tears notwithstanding.