“Holy! Holy! Holy!”

“Holy! Holy! Holy!” is a threefold acclamation whose most sustained significance comes from Jagna’s response to Jasio during Mass. The words register more than reverence: as the phrase recurs, her love seems to transform the church, the surrounding fields, and the ordinary passage of days into a continuous celebration. The narration makes the acclamation both a private utterance and the refrain of a world newly perceived as sacred.

The acclamation in Jagna’s vision

During Mass, Jagna looks up at Jasio, dressed in white, with his hands pressed together as he moves through incense and colored light from the windows. He appears to her like a living angel descending from a holy picture. Overcome, she falls face down in the dust, presses her lips to the place where his feet have passed, and sings, ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ The sequence joins a concrete devotional setting to an intensely personal vision: her response to Jasio takes the form of worship.

The scene does not present the acclamation as a detached theological statement. It emerges at the height of Jagna’s rapture, after the Mass’s music, incense, and prayers have shaped what she sees. Her bodily gestures—prostration and a kiss on the ground—make the sacred quality of the moment physical, while the words give that sensation a concise, repeated form.

Repetition beyond the church

Jagna often remains kneeling after Mass has ended and the congregation has left. When Ambrozy jingles his keys in the empty church, she is still gazing at the spot where Jasio stood, absorbed in joy and tears. This lingering devotion gives the acclamation a duration beyond the service itself: its emotional force continues after the public rite and its other participants have departed.

The narration then carries the phrase outside the church. For Jagna, the fields, ripe wheat, parched earth, fruit-laden orchards, distant woods, wandering clouds, and sun all seem to ring with festivity. The second ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ follows this widening perception, as if the whole landscape were joining her hymn. Repetition binds the two moments together: first the phrase voices her response to Jasio, then it gathers the natural world into the same expression of gratitude and joy.

Private devotion and communal ritual

Elsewhere, the novel depicts religious and communal ceremonies through collective gestures: women bless Jagna and bid her farewell before her wedding, returning villagers kneel together at a cross, and a church procession moves beneath a red canopy with banners, candles, incense, and a monstrance. These scenes establish a shared ritual world in which prayer is embodied and public. Jagna’s acclamation differs in scale: it begins in her solitary attention to Jasio, even though it draws on the language and atmosphere of worship.

That contrast gives the repeated words their distinctive role. The acclamation does not announce a change in the village’s formal religious practice; it renders Jagna’s own experience of love in sacred terms. Its movement from church to fields enlarges a private vision without erasing its source in a particular moment of prayer. The result is a brief refrain that makes devotion, desire, and the living landscape sound as though they belong to one continuous hymn.