Gentle Reign

Making the 60-second Sermon (C26O) (C06O)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 15:33:00 +0000

First, have you ever thought about how hard it is to say something, just one thing, something you feel strongly about in a persuasive way, in just one minute? When I was asked to contribute to the PrayTell blog's "60-Second Sermon" series, I knew that it felt like a good idea, but I didn't realize how hard it would be to try to say anything meaningful in one minute. The time I spend editing my idea down to a single minute is a much, much longer process than coming up with an idea and writing a draft.

Living at St. John's Abbey (and University) in Collegeville, MN, Benedictine monk, musician, and liturgical scholar Fr. Anthony Ruff began the PrayTell blog in 2010 as a well-informed and "intellectually grounded" forum for "pastors, liturgists, musicians, and scholars," containing "practical wisdom about prayer, sacraments, and the community of the faithful – in short, worship." The blog has certainly evolved into a wonderful meeting place of minds, people of various points of view, engaged in mostly respectful dialogue on every imaginable subject related to the discipline. In the latter part of 2018, Ruff contacted a few dozen people from his address book and asked them to film themselves giving a "60-Second Homily" on a specific Sunday or feast day, and the series has, first under John Kyler and Nic Cortez and now Jason Horstman (SJU grad assistants) been online consistently since the first Sunday of Advent in 2018.

I've seen a lot of the posts, but not all, and know that familiar faces and names like Rita Ferrone and Rita Burns Senseman, Jaime Cortez and Craig Colson, Diana Macalintal and Kate Williams and Michael Silhavy have all contributed.

In October of last year, John Kyler contacted me on behalf of Fr. Anthony, asking if I'd be part of the new project. The concept, he said, was that each "preacher" would give a one-minute message based on the gospel, inspirational and "right-to-the-point." The part that really interested me was that the message be characterized by "compelling imagery, short anecdotes, and wit and humor," all of which appealed to my style. Later, I was assigned the 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time earlier this year, for which I wore a cheap crown and referred to King George III's song in the musical "Hamilton" to talk about the reign of God. So much fun.

I got my friend Mark Karney, a videographer at whose studio we have made several albums and who has made some catechetical videos from my songs for parish events, to help me realize some of my ideas. He made the videos way better than anything I could have done. I mean, it's the gospel, it's a minute-long commentary, not a Spielberg movie, but people are accustomed to a certain level of professionalism in video, and Mark definitely contributes that piece. Using green screen and background graphics and videos made the "sermon" more interesting and engaging, and Mark loves doing this kind of thing as much as I do.

Then, this summer, PrayTell asked me to do a handful more of these during the year, and I was delighted to be able to say "yes." Our second little sermon is on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.

Here is the new video, if you haven't seen it. Note that the "famous" crown from my first 60-Second Sermon has been placed casually to my right on the bookshelf, in front of the "Atlas of the Bible." This was by popular demand, and I think it is a very great idea that references Alfred Hitchcock's style and will have filmmakers talking for generations. 😅 Click here to see the readings for this Sunday to which the video refers.

Pro tip: when you're green screening in a video, don't wear a shirt with green checks. 😑🙄 How was I to know? Who am I, Bill Maher? I'm not even Matt Maher. Luckily Mark is a genius and you can't tell.

I actually made two "test" videos to share with a small group of friends to get feedback on which idea they liked better, and I think they chose wisely. What I presented to the crew at PrayTell was pretty much the first of the two ideas I'd had, though I changed the ending at lunch on the day we taped it, right before heading over to Mark Karney's house to make the video. The second one did have its advocates, however.

In that second test video, I focused more on the responsorial psalm as a representation of the (fictional) Lazarus's faith, and wondered, "I wonder what the rich man is singing today?" The question is reminiscent of a (possibly apocryphal) Tom Conry story from the 1980s (but if it didn't happen, it should have), when Tom said at a conference that he had a gut sense of what was wrong with the church when he heard a church assembly of well-fed white suburbanites (like me) singing John Foley's "The Cry of the Poor" (like me) and thinking that they were singing about themselves (like...😳) Here's the rough video that I did not send to PrayTell.

And, because there's no end to this once you start, here's a third one that I wrote but didn't video. It was too late and I had already made the one you saw. That doesn't stop Brain from working. This is about 20% too long, so I would have had to do some serious editing to get it down to a minute.

LAZARUS, VERSION 3:

We have a wealthy man, and outside his doorway, a poor sick man named Lazarus.
The rich fellow doesn’t see Lazarus.
He is selectively blind to Lazarus, to his pain, his need, his hunger.
I’m that rich guy.
No question that through very little fault of my own I have a good income,
Good health, good family, a home,
And once I get over the shock of realizing how that separates me from most of the world,
I have to start asking myself,
Who am I not seeing?
Who am I walking over to get comfortable again?
I hoard my time.
So when Mick corners me on Sunday morning with the list of his woes,
I can’t wait to break out of that conversation.
Lazarus was probably relieved to hear Jesus say that there’s no freaking way the rich can get inside the reign of God. Not even Abraham has strings to pull.
So whatever you’re rich in, start giving it away.
Do everything you can to wake up to people’s need.
Pour yourself into the breach.
That’s how the chasm between the heaven and hell inside us—and between us —starts to disappear.

That's a little bit about my little contribution to Fr. Anthony Ruff's terrific project out of Collegeville, the 60-Second Sermons that are published on the blog every Monday for the following Sunday. Here is a link to the archive of the series, so you can click around and hear what different people did with different gospels. The wonderful richness of everyone's insight is really edifying in the best possible sense.

That's about it. This is important to me because the process makes me distill my insight, knowledge, and faith experience about a certain group of scriptures down to an essence of one minute, and so I have a responsibility to be both clear and evocative, using images and the resources of my personality to express truths that don't originate with me or belong to me. It's like both poetry and music: at the end, you want the piece to say more than you actually put into it, and you trust that it does because, first of all, you never had it all in the first place. Like the seed scattered in the field, it grows when we're asleep, it does our work in us, and we pass it on as best we can. It's just a story, from a man who told really good stories about a reality for which there really are no words: the reign of God.

I look forward to doing a few more of these. Keep listening, friends, and pass the stories along. If necessary, as St. Francis of Assisi said, use words!

Now, since all free video comes with a commercial (in this case, a PSA!) and these couple of Sundays give us prophet Amos as well as Lazarus and mammon, I wanted to offer you one of many ways that we can actually do something on behalf of the poor: support the Crop Hunger Walk in Barrington on October 13. Here is a link to my walker page: some choir members and other parishioners are walking the 10K in support of fighting hunger, with people from all the churches of Barrington. I will keep you in my prayers that Sunday at my masses, and hope that the word of God will always remind all of us to be doers as well as hearers. Crop Hunger Walk, an activity of Church World Service, does just that. Thanks for reading this far!

The parable of God's Name (C3L)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 21:56:00 +0000

"Jesus Christ is the face of the Father’s mercy. These words might well sum up the mystery of the Christian faith." Misericordiae Vultus, 4/11/2015, Pope Francis

The Lord is kind and merciful. Full stop.

Is there any word from beyond which we need to hear any more during Lent? In these days when we are more aware than ever of how how impossibly vain we are and how futile our attempts to do good are, how far we are from what the gospel calls us to do and to be, what's more important to hear that those six words from the psalm Sunday? Or these, from the first reading: "I know well what (my people) are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them."

Of course we want God to come down to rescue people from their suffering, and when triaging that, we hope God gets to us first, however self-focused and petty our misery. Meanwhile, we tend to carom between amazement and blame when we witness the suffering of others, still convinced in our heart of hearts that the Deuteronomist was right, that those who suffer are being punished for their sins, or for being infidels, or for being born in the southern hemisphere, and that those who are doing well are the blessed and chosen.

In these readings for the third Sunday of Lent in year C, it seems to me that we have a couple of parables of God's mercy, one from Luke and one from Exodus. We see, as it were, God's Son in one and God's name in the other, and from both of those there radiates the tenderness and compassion we hear proclaimed for our violent, exploitative, and recidivist race, the spark of whose interior life nevertheless shines with the very image and likeness of the creator.

Reports come in to Jesus asking for his judgment on an item heard on Herod-the-Fox News, about an abomination perpetrated by the sadistic Roman governor, apparently murdering some Galileans in the middle of some religious rituals. Quickly losing patience with their bewilderment, Jesus throws in another story making the rounds, about the deaths of eighteen people when a tower collapsed at a site near Jerusalem. His point was not to shock the crowd into silence, but to make them stop wondering whether the victims were somehow at fault for what happened, more worthy of their terrible fate than other Jews including his listeners. The question is, how did he get from their misfortune to "unless you repent, your fate will be the same"? Is he saying that repenting of sin will render the penitent immune from disaster?

It's hard to think so, looking at the arc of history and the rest of the gospel kerygma. But what if by "repent" he continues to mean "get your meaning and destiny from God," and start believing and living in the kingdom? Stop believing in Rome, and start believing in your own God, in solidarity, community, and social equality. Start believing in a God who doesn't prevent disaster but is present to disaster, and become agents of God's presence with your healing and hospitality.

Jesus turns to a parable, as he always seems to do when discursive language isn't enough. When we hear this parable, we often want to turn it into an allegory. Who does the fig tree represent? Who is the planter? Who is the gardener? The trouble with an allegory is, if you get a character wrong the first time around, it blows the meaning of the whole story. Are we the fig tree and is God the planter? (Psalm 80 and other scriptures could support this reading.) Maybe. That might fit the "angry God" theory, as though Jesus and God disagreed on the fate of the world, and Jesus talks God out of chopping us down. Is that how we want to think of God? Is it possible for the Father and Son to be so out of sync with each other? I can't imagine it.

But maybe the planter is just "the way everything is." The planter is the law of entropy. Everything deteriorates to chaos. The planter is "might makes right" and "survival of the fittest" and the Pax Romana. The planter is the way all of us look at the wreck of our lives, at the destruction wrought by our culture, when we take the time to assess it and admit our complicity. The planter is the voice that says, "It was worthless anyway, throw it out. Let them die. They deserved it. Life is futility, chaos. We bring order. Rip it all out and we'll try something else." And maybe, just maybe, God, and therefore Jesus, is the gardener. When we turn back to the values of our culture for the thousandth time, when we refuse to believe in peace and equality, when we work and vote and support terrible, divisive ideas that take life away from people, that steal from the poor and give to the rich, even after decades of listening the gospel and singing the songs and going through the rituals, and we're right at the place where no one would blame God or Jesus or anyone else from throwing the book at us and letting us experience some of the very suffering we've caused the world, God steps between the victim and the axe, the culture and its victims. Christ the gardener takes the maligned tree tenderly in infinitely merciful fingers and says, "Wait a minute. Here I am. Let me work with it again." Here's someone, finally, who can make something out of nothing, a world out of the dust that we are. Someone believes that we have possibility. Can we remember that touch?

In the Exodus story, God sees the way things are, the "normalcy of civilization" in Crossan's wonderful phrase, and comes to Moses in a sign that breaks open the possibility that "normalcy" isn't the way things are going to be any more. There is a bush. It is on fire. And it is not burning. There's something you don't see every day. God sends Moses, a renegade slave hiding from a murder rap, back to the seat of power, to Pharaoh, to demand the release of the Hebrews. The conversation around the name of God, which Moses thinks would be a good idea to know, since the Egyptians know so many gods that they're bound to ask him which one sent him, is exasperating in how little it reveals. In other words, it tells the truth. "You don't know me. You can't even imagine my name." That's one way of reading the unpronounceable, unknown name Moses receives. Another way, one excellent article suggests, is that the text is in the future tense: "I WILL BE THAT WHICH I WILL BE." The (Jewish) commentator says that the future tense is used in the Hebrew, which the commentator finds interesting because it's the only form of the verb that doesn't specify gender. "The people will come to know God through their unfolding experiences together...(The name) seems to tease us, saying, 'You want to know my name, just wait and see!' While God is absolute, there are no divine absolutes; each of us, in our own time, will come to know God in our own way." (The article is here.) (And another good one.)

In the gospel, Jesus reminds us that repenting is for everyone. And Jesus doesn't mean beating our breast and being miserable: he means turning in another direction, he means turning toward the Father, and he has already said that he is showing the direction ("follow me"), ditto his honor-bestowing mother ("Do whatever he says") and Father ("Listen to him.") The baptismal message of Lent is: God keeps coming after us. Stick together. Wash off the "way things have to be" and start living in the new world. Stick together. Take care of each other. Make peace through your just living.

See, God is the protagonist in the universe. It is God who is acting from utterly beyond all knowing but more intimately than we can imagine. We are players in God's world. Or would be, if we weren't constantly being distracted by the counterfeits of peace, safety, and power that are being pushed on us by "the way things are," the normalcy of civilization. That is Egypt. That is Rome. That is empire. Our refusal to turn, or blindness, or fear, whatever it is, is what is making us so unhappy. The "other god" demands unanimity or destruction, cooperation or the cross, submission or slavery, participation or marginalization. The One who reveals self in action, "I AM WHO I SHALL BE," invites us to walk through the cleansing water to the margins of civilization and do something new. Together. With Jesus, the "face of the Father's mercy," we place ourselves between the fig tree and the axe, and ask for a little time to work on things.

Here's what we're singing this weekend at St. Anne:

Entrance song: Lead Me, Guide Me

Kyrie: Daigle-Kendzia "Lead Us to the Water"

Psalm 103: The Lord Is Kind and Merciful (Cotter)

Gospel acclamation and General Intercessions: Mass of Christ the Servant (still in beta)

Preparation Rite: Be Merciful (Haugen)

Mass of Creation

Lamb of God: Mass of St. Aidan

Communion: Christ Be Our Light

Closing: Amazing Grace

Life without Alleluia

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 20:38:00 +0000

Literally burying the Alleluia at
Fraternity of St Joseph the Guardian
in La Londe-les-Maures, France

My friend and uber-musician from Long Island, Christopher Ferraro, posted on Facebook a quotation from Dom Prosper Gueranger’s masterworkThe Liturgical Year. Gueranger was a French monk, the abbot of the Solesmes monastery for nearly four decades in the mid-18^thcentury. The classic 15-volume work ($459 on Amazon--cheap!), written over the years from 1841 until his death, was left unfinished. Ferraro’s quotation concerned the “Suspension of the Alleluia” during the season of Lent:

"That indifference for the liturgy of the Church, which is the strongest indication of a weak faith, and which now reigns so universally in the world, is the reason why so many, even practical Catholics, can witness this yearly suspension of the Alleluia, without profiting by the lesson it conveys. A passing remark, or a chance thought, is the most they give to it, for they care for no other devotions but such as are private; the spirit of the Church, in her various seasons, is quite beneath their notice.…Why be indifferent in this present instance? Why deem of no interest to piety this suspension of the Alleluia, which she, the Church, considers as one of the principle and most solemn incidents in her liturgical year?”

It struck me that, though I try to maintain the practice of figuratively “burying the alleluia” on the Sunday and (now) the Tuesday morning before Ash Wednesday, I’ve never actually put into words for myself why I ought to notice it, or why it is important enough that, through the changes of the Second Vatican Council, it survived in liturgical practice in Western Catholicism even though in the East the Alleluia continues to be sung through Lent. I came up with three thoughts we might ponder while we are not singing the Alleluia. (After Mass, of course…don’t be distracted from the homily!)

Remembering God. Years ago, Walter Brueggemann, in his book Israel’s Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology, reminded us that when we read and pray scripture, especially in the psalms, we should keep in mind that in Israel there was often too-close a connection between the court, which ruled Israel in the world, and the Temple, which preserved the presence of God and the memory that it is the just and merciful God who is the only true king of Israel. It is difficult to tell in the psalms just who is being enthroned and worshipped: the king or God? It was the job of the priestly class (and when they failed, the prophets) to be sure those lines were neatly drawn. Sometimes, as in Psalm 150, the line is completely obscured. It seems to be a litany of “Alleluia! Praise the Lord in the temple! Praise him in the sky! Praise him with all your instruments!”, on and on without ever saying why? When prayer gets like that, all "Alleluia, ain't life great," it becomes oppressive, a tool of the status quo, the ruling class and their interest. But other psalms, even some Hallel psalms (psalms with the words “Hallelu Yah” in them, “Praise the Lord”), are more deliberate. Psalm 146 is a good foil for 150. It encourages us to “Hallelujah” because God is always faithful, is just to the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, and so on. This “doxology” in the prayer is a reminder to the king that God is in charge, even of the king, and that the king should act like God, and “give bread to the hungry” and “set prisoners free.” So the first thing we could do when we miss singing the Alleluia is remember why we sing it in the first place: to help us remember that God, and the works of God in Christ, are the very reason we rejoice. The status quo isn't always good for everyone—it rarely is, but God is always good, has been in the past, and will continue to be into the future.
Solidarity with those who live without an Alleluia. There continues to be a danger, there is for me, anyway, that my “Alleluia” is a word of worship of an idol, of a god who props up the prosperity and power of the rich and powerful (I include myself in this number when speaking about the world as a whole.) “Alleluia” in our worship as it announces the gospel and peppers our music can be a real cheerleader’s “RAH!!” for the first world. So on one level, fasting from the Alleluia during Lent gives an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of the poor, the persecuted, and the hopeless. The number of these people, our brothers and sisters in Christ, beloved children of the same Father, is nearly one in two in the world. Nearly one in four live in extreme poverty, on less than the equivalent of $1.25 a day. When we sing “The Lord hears the cry of the poor,” to paraphrase, possibly apocryphally, Tom Conry, we’re not singing about ourselves. Silencing the Alleluia for a while can help us remember that. At the same time, it can help us to remember those who are not living an “Easter” existence, even in a temporary sense. Brutally knocked down by loss of security, by sickness or death, many people whom we know have lost the Alleluia in their heart. Again, the silencing of the Alleluia for Lent can help us remember them and act on their behalf if we choose to do so mindfully.
“If Christ is not risen, our faith is empty.” Finally, and certainly not least among these three, is the opportunity to reflect on what the world might be like if Jesus of Nazareth were just a rabble-rousing nationalist preacher and had been forgotten after enduring the sentence of capital punishment executed upon him by the Roman governor. What if God had not intervened, had left us to wonder, had not snatched Jesus from the grave to let the authority of his life give us a shining option to the normalcy of violence and “might makes right”? Christians hear and pray and sing “Alleluia” as our Easter song, as the anthem of resurrection and the proclamation that Christ is alive in the life and mission of the Church. Not singing the Alleluia for the duration of Lent gives us an opportunity to imagine the chaos of a world without the Sermon on the Mount, without the Good Shepherd and the Good Samaritan, without the good news of a God-who-is-with-us, a loving Parent for all, who calls us beloved children. It’s a bleak prospect, a dystopia in which love is even more fragile than now, without the hope that every act of self-giving imitates the One whose love formed the world.

One mystic (Abbot Rupert, quoted in Guéranger) speaks of the “Alleluia” as “a stranger amidst our other words. Its mysterious beauty is as though a drop of Heaven’s overflowing joy had fallen down on our earth…For this reason, the word Alleluia has not been translated. It has been left in its original Hebrew as a stranger to tell us that there is a joy in his native land which could not dwell in ours.” Perhaps "Alleluia" is the song of the "already-not yet" reign of God, and during Lent, we ponder the "not yet" of God's reign and our participation in with others who refuse to "hear the cry of the poor" by forgoing the "already."

Preface 1 for Lent, in the previous translation, included these words: "Each year you give us this joyful season when we prepare to celebrate the paschal mystery with mind and heart renewed." During these weeks when we “fast” from singing or even saying the word “Alleluia” during our liturgical prayer, maybe some of these thoughts can help us find a place to take that sense of discomfort and maybe even loss to find an even greater joy when it returns to the liturgy at the Easter Vigil.

Beam and Splinter (C8O)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:38:00 +0000

My first thought while considering the gospel this week was to advise you to take its warning seriously when reading this blog: "Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?" The message isn't "don't read this blog," it's "this blog isn't the gospel, so exercise discretion and use discernment."

As I've grown older, and a little more open to criticism and other points of view, I've more and more come to understand the great wisdom in the "beam in your own eye" gospel adage. Of course, there is a certain irony in it that is inescapable: you always hear it from someone else, and so it's probably generated from inside that person's conscience, that is, the beam in the accuser's eye noticing the beam in yours. The point is that we all have beams. Some of them are light beams, and they actually help us see our own faults in the faults of others. Because of mimetic desire, we jump at the chance to distance ourselves from the wrongdoing we see, while neglecting to accept the truth that what we see in the other is a reflection of something within us.

Relationships with friends and family may provide an example. Let me make one up, this is completely fiction. But let's say your brother and his wife have an argument. I know your brother and his wife. They're both really good people, altruistic, hard-working, fun to be around. But your brother's wife thinks he's too critical of her: she tells him from time to time that he always finds fault

with what she says, is constantly correcting her, and she finds this wearisome and hurtful. Your brother, meanwhile, is thinking to himself, "Luke 6: 41-42," but doesn't dare say it because your sister-in-law will look it up and begin divorce proceedings.

The thing is, they're both right, probably, to some extent. But no matter how big the beam is, the story doesn't end there. Dig deeper and what do we find? All kinds of childhood hurts, lack of affirmation, denial of worth, the imitation of learned behaviors of criticism. We all do this: we try to make ourselves feel better by making someone else feel worse, and often by doing the same things we are accusing the other of doing. We can't help it. We were made to imitate others. When we act in self-defense we tend to use the weapons at hand.

I'm going to let go of this now because I'm not a psychologist and I'm not even that good an observer of human nature, I'm just trying to know myself better and I know that I do criticize in others what I don't like in myself. When I look back even at older posts in this blog at snarky and read the nasty things I've said about this priest or that politician, I'm shocked sometimes to realize that there are traits in me that are exactly what I was criticizing in my splinter-afflicted target.

Maybe those beams are all splinters? Maybe we're all the sum of all the treatment and mistreatment we've received in our lives, and some of us (I include myself in this group) have been unreflective about how that pain has influenced our interaction with the world, with the people we know and the decisions we make in our lives.

I'm guessing that to God, they're pretty much all splinters, and God is like a grandma who loves us so much, sees us with the finger-pointing and name-calling, and can't do much more than shake her head, get us a cold Pepsi and some fried chicken, and change the subject so we learn to see each other again as siblings instead of feral beasts or sworn enemies. And that's why Jesus wants to stop learning from each other, but to learn from and imitate him, because he imitates God who is "kind to the ungrateful and wicked." To learn from Jesus is this regard is its own reward, because as we heard in last Sunday's gospel, "...the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you." Not only will our lives be full of the divine love that gives rather than the mimetic divisiveness that seeks to destroy the other in order to build ourselves up: Jesus promises that "when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher."

As I said earlier about the Sermon on the Plain, after his Nazareth sermon about his vision of his ministry and vision of the arrival of the jubilee, Jesus gathered disciples, embarked on a campaign of miracles and exorcism (healing and liberation) and now takes the time to do some mystagogy with them on what all that means. They, and we, need new hearts to understand what we are seeing and hearing in Jesus. We have no other experience of someone who acts not to be admired or to divide and conquer enemies. We've lived by the rules of "how things have to be," of the normalcy of civilization for so long, that this surprising announcement of a new, peaceful kingdom is befuddling because we want it to become like all the kingdoms we've known: one that defeats enemies and makes us rich and powerful. It is not, and will never be like this, not in our world, not even in our homes. It is a place and time and method of invitation, collaboration, and self-gift. It is a reign of love by a Father-God or, if it works better for you overall (it does for me), a Grandma-God, who gathers rather than rules, who feeds rather than conquers, wait us out rather than gets angry.

I want to get inside of being my grandma. I'm the right age, anyway. I want to listen to the gospel, and finally act my age. I hope you don't have to wait this long!

Here's what we're singing at St. Anne this weekend:

Entrance Song: We Are Called (Haas)
Penitential Rite: (Kendzia/Daigle) "Lead Us to the Water"
Psalm 1: Roots in the Earth (Cooney) not the psalm of the day, but a wisdom psalm that summons us to delight in good and grow where the nutrients of the soul are most abundant
Celtic Alleluia (O'Carroll/Walker)
Preparation of Gifts: Were I the Perfect Child of God (John Bell) This charming text and accompanying Scottish melody seem wonderfully suited to today's liturgy, tacitly acknowledging both the faults have and the grace that helps us correct them.
Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)
Lamb of God and Communion: May We Be One (Daigle/Cooney)
Recessional: Halle, Halle, Halle (Bell, arr. Haugen) To bury the Alleluia until Easter!

My enemy: God's beloved (C7O)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:52:00 +0000

The readings this weekend are amazing, particularly the graphic scene in the first reading from 1 Samuel in which David refuses to kill his enemy Saul when it would have been both easy and expedient, and the gospel that continued Luke’s Sermon on the Plain with its discomfiting if familiar urging that we love our enemies, stop judging, and do to others as we would have them do for us.

The last time we had these readings was in 2007, and my friend Rev. Cyprian Consiglio OSB Cam. was visiting us and giving a little concert in the church. He said mass a couple times that Sunday. He began the homily with a story that gave us an immediate glimpse into where he might be headed, a story about a prior at the abbey where he attended seminary admonishing the body of seminarians never to use the words, “What Jesus really meant was...” Obviously, none of us really knows “what Jesus meant to say.” What we know is what is in the gospel, which is what Luke meant to say, and even that is under considerable scrutiny from divergent sources and innumerable cultural and linguistic variants through the years. Last week, for instance, there was an entire meme on Facebook and Twitter on the difference between what the Gospel said ("Woe to the rich") and what homilists said in their homilies ("Jesus didn't really mean 'Woe to the rich.')

But in the context of this gospel, Cyprian was clearly headed in a specific direction. Rather than try to pasteurize (and thus bowdlerize) the gospel command to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us, he told us to take it for what it is: the heart of the gospel, the Spirit-empowered nurturing of divine identity. To love our enemies is to be like God, who loves the good and bad alike. Cyprian went on to mention not only René Girard, but also the wonderful theologian James Allison in his homily, so I was completely in heaven, and thrilled that at least one other person in the room was resonating with what I was hearing. What a feeling of solidarity!

That same evening at St. Anne, a visiting Congolese priest, Father Mokucha, began his homily with Mahatma Gandhi and ended with Martin Luther King, and even asked for personal witness from anyone in the assembly who had experience “loving those who hate” us. A lovely woman, who looked like she might be a mother of middle-school-age children (read, younger than I) talked about knowing that a friend of hers gossiped about her behind her back, and she wept when she talked about how much that hurt her, because she wanted this person so badly as a friend. She said that the way she tried to love this woman was to be extra kind to her children when they came over to play, which was remarkably touching and perfect for all of us to hear. All in all, that day, twelve years ago, was a good day for preaching. You might say, “perfect.”

I think we just try to keep what's happening in Jesus's Galilean ministry in front of us as we hear these gospels. He is baptized by John, undergoes some kind of validating transformation in which he understands the depth of God's love for him and, one must conclude, everyone. He is the "beloved son," in whom God is well pleased. John's baptism was exactly about washing off the contamination of empire and returning to the Promised Land, the "kingdom of heaven", by passing through the waters of Jordan. It was a rejection of the values of the conqueror, and being washed in the values of the Torah and the prophets. Then Jesus is driven "by the spirit" into the desert for his retreat, the testing and sussing out of his mission, at the climax of which he gives "messiah lessons" to the Tempter, describing the difference between human ways, the ways of empire, and the ways of God. He returns to Nazareth and gives that startling homily in the synagogue, opening the word of the prophet Isaiah, declaring it fulfilled "here, on this day," and then explicating it in such a way as to offer the freedom and healing of God's intervention to the whole world, not only to the "chosen." Avoiding an assassination attempt, he moves to Capernaum, calls followers, and begins a campaign of healing and exorcism in Galilee. Finally, here, where we are these Sundays, he takes to openly teaching about the reign of God, how it is not what anyone expects, how it begins and ends with love freely exchanged among all as unlimited currency, available to all who seek it from the infinite source that is Abba. When even this does not shake off the habits of empire for want of power and status, Jesus resorts to parables, and finally a march to Jerusalem, where the Luke's story really begins, and then begins again, in Acts of the Apostles.

More on "Even sinners do the same" (Don't the pagans do as much?) Part 1 Part 2
More on "Enemy love"

About a year ago, I wrote the following about my song “Be Perfect,” based on the Matthaean version of the same Jesus sayings. I’ll just quote it here as I close, because it contains both my thoughts on this text and my own inspiration for writing the song. Maybe you’ll find some hope or inspiration in it as well. "Be merciful" is the way Luke puts the same thought: mercy is the defining quality of God, which of course doesn't define at all. As we reflected recently for an entire year, Jesus is the "face of God's mercy," the icon of the invisible God. "Perfect" refers to the mercy of God which treats everyone equally, no outsiders. Jesus keeps coming back to this: love of God and love of neighbor are the same thing. As we hear later in Luke in the parable of the Good Samaritan, mercy is as mercy does. We become neighbor when we "do" neighbor.

“Be Perfect” is a song I wrote from the intersection of the parish travails of a good friend and colleague of mine and my reading of the French-American anthropologist Réné Girard. Part of Girard’s thesis about the origin of societies and religion in violence, a thesis generally termed “mimetic desire,” is that we don’t want things in themselves, but we want them because others have them. We learn to desire from others, and want what others have simply because they have things.

Girard’s theory, while complex and necessarily oversimplified here, is that this desire escalates into violence unless a “scapegoating mechanism” is triggered, and the violence within society can be focused on a single person or group and thus released. Girard, a Catholic, saw the Paschal Mystery as the way out of the cycle of escalating violence and scapegoating by revealing our violence for what it is, an assault upon an innocent victim. Scapegoating only works by associating God with the accusers, by making a demon of the one cast away. But in the Christian story, Jesus is revealed in the resurrection to be both innocent and the Son of God. The false religion of sacrifice is revealed for the murderous thing it is.

By refocusing our desire after the desire of Jesus, to be like the Father who loves unconditionally and “makes the rain fall and sun shine upon the just and the unjust,” we can be part of the emergence of the reign of God. The passage upon which the refrain is based, taken from the Sermon on the Mount, is almost invariably watered down by homilists afraid to imagine that it might be possible to act as Jesus does, and imitate the perfect love of God. There is a certain sense in which the admonition to “be perfect” has been understood in a semi-Pelagian way, that is, that we need to keep practicing our spiritual exercises until we get them right, and arrive at some state of sinlessness reserved for the true spiritual Olympian athlete. This sort of thinking denies both the perfection of divine love, which loves us right in the midst of our sinfulness, and the divine initiative, by which we mean that grace precedes and enables the response of repentance.

But there’s something even more important here: to be perfect means to be like God, to make being-like-God the object of our desire of our loving imitation. And this is not being like just any God, but being like the God of Jesus, who “makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.” To keep Jesus’s admonition before us to “be perfect” is to resolve not to forget the admonition to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us. It keeps the church honest, and helps us to recall that it’s not enough to “be nice” and to love each other in our families and communities of intention. The gospel call is to love everyone with the divine love, the love that puts the good of the other first, even if, especially if, the other is our enemy. ...

Full disclosure: let me be the first to admit that this "love your enemies" stuff, hard as it is to even say the words, it's WAY harder to actually practice. We live in such a fractious culture. If the world scene weren't dangerous enough, even within the American sphere, even within the church sphere, it is hard to love one's enemies. In church, we shouldn't even have any! But it goes back to the mimetic rivalry process: we define ourselves and who we are against other people: I'm not a Mormon; I'm not Muslim, I'm not a Leninist. But it gets even crazier, right? I'm not a Trumpster, I'm not a socialist, I'm not an EWTN Catholic, I'm not a liberal, I'm not 1%, and so on. Turns out we're enemies in some way with people within our own families, and every conversation is either walking on eggs or full of vitriol and expletives. How do we stop that? How can I even say I follow the gospel if my heart is riddled with the cancer of violence, even if it's just violent or abusive speech?

One thing I think we can do is "first do no harm." "Love your enemies" might start with "don't kill anybody." Full stop. Most of us think that's something we do already, but we might take a second and look at the politicians and policies we support and see whether even there we fail against this precept of the kingdom of God. Avoiding "near occasions of sin" is an old expression we used to describe a therapy of repentance. If you're an ax murderer, for instance, avoid hardware stores. But it might mean avoiding Facebook, or Twitter, or "comments" after online news stories. I've taken to just deleting people from my "friends" list who are recidivist haters, whose only method of discourse is ad hominem attack. I can understand how this might make me vulnerable to confirmation bias with the people I have left, but in all honesty, I've unfriended fewer than 1% of my contacts, so there's that. I still have to try to stop wigging out at every (perceived) insane thing that our current President, beloved child of God that he is, blasts out on social media. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy to filter out news from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or Mar-a-Lago. But I can refrain from commenting, especially when using certain emoji to help make my point.

Anyway, friends, let’s get out there and “be perfect." Or merciful, if that suits you better! Every journey starts with a single step. One less cyber-finger, maybe.

Here's what we're singing this weekend:

Entrance: The Call Is Clear and Simple (text: Ruth Duck, PASSION CHORALE) This text by the late Ruth Duck made me do a double take the first time I read through it, and it continues to both challenge and attract me, so I'm unleashing it on the congregation to sit with it as they hear the readings. Love, however "clear and simple" the gospel call, isn't easy, and there's not really a clear map about how we do it right. After our Liturgical Composers Forum sessions with Bernadette Farrell and Kate Williams' recent article in GIA Quarterly about the women's perspective in songwriting, I realized (rightly or wrongly) that maybe a man could not have written this song. I couldn't have, anyway. So maybe this is a good thing.
Psalm 103: The Lord Is Kind (Cooney, OCP) My setting uses the 19th century James Montgomery text that Stephen Schwartz appropriated for Godspell.

Presentation of Gifts: Be Perfect (more on this blog page)
Communion: Be Merciful (Haugen) (YouTube audio above)
Recessional: Let There Be Peace on Earth (Jackson/Miller) This camp song from the 1940s by the once-married couple moves the talk of love and mercy to the global view. I attended a Unity church in St. Louis with Terry a few times, and the service would invariably end with this song and with the minister and his wife walking down the aisle to the doors smiling and reaching out to the people who had attended. My only wish is that someone would make a definitive text so that there aren't so many different versions of the "with God as our Father/Brothers all are we" in the books. People have a hard enough time reading a hymnal. Why make it harder with alternative texts printed in the book?

The world turned upside down (C6O)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 20:24:00 +0000

I've been writing this blog since 2016, though some of the content was borrowed and expanded from older versions of my writing online back in the days of Apple's "iWeb" pages. Some of my oldest blog pages date to 2006! But it still occurs occasionally that I come up against a Sunday or, in this case, as series of Sundays which I have not written about before. In 2019, we have the 6th, 7th, and 8th Sundays in Ordinary Time, Year C. The first two haven't been in the liturgical calendar since 2007, and the last one not since 2001. That wasn't before I was using the internet with a noisy modem, but it was before I had even heard the word "blog." Thus in the hope of trying to write something on each Sunday of the church year in order to maybe someday write a book, here we go with some thoughts on the 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, or in my personal shorthand (which I recommend to you), C06O.

Since the beginning of Luke's narrative of the Galilean ministry of Jesus in chapter 3 of his gospel, beginning with his baptism in the Jordan and his desert retreat, but for our purposes from the sermon in the synagogue in Nazareth (Lk. 4:16-13), the author of the third gospel is spelling out in story after story exactly what Jesus believes the mission of God to be. In the simplest terms, the care of God is showered upon all, every person is beloved, the blessings of jubilee are meant for the whole world. But this is an "opt in" jubilee, and those who have experienced bounty in their lives, or some other manifestation of jubilee economics, are bound by gratitude and family-love to share that with others. We are not to see this jubilee as meant for ourselves, or our family, or our nation alone, but for the whole human family. Jesus, soon along with the disciples, moves about the region, preaching the "good news to the poor," exorcising demons (a liberating practice which we would come to spiritualize as "redemption"), and healing (which we would come to term "salvation"). The fragment of Isaiah 61 upon which his sermon was based was meant to call to mind the whole sweep of sabbath and jubilee economics (Lev. 25: 8-24) as the intent of the "kingdom of heaven," which we, again, came to think of as a place other than where-we-are, a place where God lives. It took a while for us to start to understand that things are just fine in heaven: it's here, on earth, now, where we need to do the work of Christ. Earth too is the realm, or kingdom, or empire of God as well, only God is less like an emperor or king than the head of a family, Jesus tells us. Jesus will show the way. "Follow me," he says, to get inside this new thing God is doing. We'll bring the others along too.

Unlike Matthew who, for his more Jewish audience, edited his narrative to show Jesus as a new Moses and his followers as a new Israel (and think of "new" here as "new creation," rather than as a retread of the old), Luke wants to show Jesus as a new (different, not rivalrous or a retread) Caesar, using the infancy narrative to situate him in the Roman empire, using vocabulary ("gospel" and "peace") that was the provenance of Caesar Augustus to describe the birth of Christ, along with the ancestry of David to place him within the mythology of Israel's "once and future king." (Crossan & Borg, The First Christmas.) Luke, whose gospel continues into the second book that we know as Acts, has already seen the outcome of story of Jesus, the crucifixion and resurrection, Pentecost, the conversion of Saul, and the spread of the Way from Damascus to Rome and beyond. Among those claiming the name Christ, the titles of the emperor have been turned over to Jesus: Lord, Son of God, Prince of Peace, Light of the World. But Luke also knows that Jesus is a radically different "emperor" and radically different "God" from the emperor in Rome. Luke in his lifetime has already seen the world turned upside down, or as he puts it in the "Magnificat" overture to his gospel, "(God) has torn the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."

Our gospel this Sunday begins the "sermon on the plain." Where Matthew has Jesus do this earliest bit of teaching in an extended "sermon on the mount," pointing to the story of Moses giving to Israel the book of the law from God, Luke has the sermon take place on "level ground," a different way of seeing God and people together more in line with Jesus's egalitarian proclamation of the jubilee. These first few verses of the sermon on the plain are made up of Luke's four beatitudes, followed by four woes.

When John Kyler called me late last year to take part in the PrayTell blog's new series, "60 Second Sermons" for C year that began this past Advent, he asked me to do the sermon for this Sunday, and when I saw the gospel, I thought it was worth spending the minute tying in Luke's beatitudes with the "reversal of worlds" theme of the gospel, and also saying a word about the influence of the Deuteronomist on much of the Septuagint and therefore on the evangelists. I think we need to be careful reading these texts that we read them with the heart of Jesus, who had no problem casting aside texts and traditions that he felt did not adequately or fully represent the God whom he represented. Soon after today's gospel pericope in Luke comes the parable of the new wine and old wineskins: Jesus knows that a new proclamation of God's favor will require a new attitude about old presumptions garnered from the law and the prophets. This is not to say that it all has to be cast aside. Rather, we need to acknowledge that the counteroffensive mounted by human culture against the ideas of mutual love, hospitality to all, share resources, not to mention enemy love, will make its appearance in the Bible, right in the very place where the countercultural jubilee is announced. We want walls. We want a god who hates the same people we do. The violent god of the Caesars makes his appearance in the Bible, all the way to the book of Revelation, where he is made up to look like Jesus. But we need to keep in mind as we read that that Jesus was clear that violence is not the answer, that the sword must be put away, that service is the mark of leadership, not coercion.

The language of relationship between the god-emperors of Mesopotamia, the Assyrians, Babylonians, possibly the Sumerians before them, and kings and peoples they conquered, is found in covenants that still exist and can be read in various references. As we read them, we see how they are imitated by the covenant language of Deuteronomy. "If you do as I command," the Assyrian god-king will proclaim, that is, pay the tributes, work the land, obey the occupying forces, then your harvests will be plenty, your children happy, your barns full, your wives and daughters your joy. But if you do not do as I command, then fire will rain down on your fields, the armies of Assyria will devour you like locusts, your children split open on the rocks, your wives and daughters will be our slaves. You get the idea. Compare this to, for instance, the language in Deuteronomy 28 and 29 (and other places.) Dead ringer.

The thing is, the Bible, with the influence of the Deuteronomist front and center, is how we learned what God is like. Do good, God loves you. Do bad, you go to hell. Simple as that. Blessings for those who love God, curses for those who don't. We then started looking at the world as it is, and started making judgments on ourselves and others about who was blessed. That person has money, status, good trajectory. That person must be blessed by God. That person is sick, lost a family, had her house burned down, had a child run away. That person must have done something to deserve it. Even though that kind of judgement doesn't jibe with the teachings of Jesus about who God is, we clung to it. It works for us: we're blessed for doing good, cursed for doing evil.

There's a huge hole in the logic, though, the more we look at the world. The author of the book of Job points it out clearly. As one theologian put it, after Job, the Deuteronomist should have been erased once and for all, but it didn't happen. In fact, not even Jesus could put the Deuteronomist to bed, because the Deuteronomist is what we want to believe. But God is not like that. "Blessed are the poor," Jesus says. "Blessed are those who mourn." Jesus turns our idea of who's blessed upside down. In Luke he even makes sure we get the point by stating the other side of the coin: "Woe to the rich!" They're not blessed after all, it appears. "Woe to those who have enough to eat." However it appears, God is not on the side of those with more than their share, as long as there are those who are underserved, hungry, unhappy. God is with those people. That is what "blessed" means. (Woody Allen, I think, also struggled with this reality in his brilliant and underrated movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, which asks the question "Why do good things happen to bad people, and vice versa, and is there any punishment in this life for the most heinous of crimes (murder)?"

Jesus turns our view of who is blessed (to whom God is near and present) upside down. It has nothing to do with status, well-being, or the luck of the draw. Our psalm and first reading today, like the gospel, present what seems to be a dualistic view of life: good people prosper, bad people are ruined. But maybe it's possible to see the dualism not as a reflection of God, but as a reflection of bad choices we make. It's not God who does the cursing, who makes life woe for those who choose wealth, power, comfort, and influence, but rather it is a result of the choices they make. The thing is, this seems to go against our experience as well, if we are looking through the lens of the reign of the world (as Ezekiel puts it, the one "whose heart turns away from the Lord,"), and not of the reign of God, (the one who "who trusts in the Lord.") We don't see, in the first case, the influence we have upon the whole human family, the damage we cause by our self-interest. In the reign of God, it is always the other upon whom the gaze of our concern lies because we imitate God in loving all people, in wanting the good of all people, not just of ourselves, our family, our country.

This was the lesson of the Nazareth sermon, when Jesus's explication Isaiah savaged the expectations of his listeners, people who up to that moment had been enthralled with his preaching. They wanted confirmation bias, what they got was the gospel: the announcement of a new empire, a new king in town, who not only wasn't going to do what was expected, he wasn't even going to be a king in any recognizable way. These good citizens of Judea (and Rome) wanted nothing to do with Jesus's global view of God. They showed him to the door and then to a precipice in what seems to be a literary rehearsal of a scapegoat ritual (from the rite of atonement). Literary, because we know that there weren't any cliffs in Nazareth. Rehearsal, because we know, with Luke, that even though Jesus "passed through their midst" unharmed, there was going to come a day when he would not, and for the same reasons.

What's the lesson for us? Well, we could start by not thinking of people who are rich, well fed, happy, and unharmed as "blessed." People like most of us. We might be lucky, but blessed has nothing to do with it. "Blessed" has a different role call. The rich, well fed, and happy might be blessed when they learn to share their bounty in significant ways with those who are poor, hungry, and sorrowful. Otherwise, they're not blessed at all, at least not in those qualities. Jesus has introduced us to a world turned upside-down, where the greatest among us serve the rest, where power serves, where God, who is holy, goes to dine with sinners. We need to stop thinking like they want us to think, that we are nothing more than what we can produce and purchase, that we need to buy more things and better things to have self-esteem, that our value resides in where we were born, the color of our skin, the things we own, who our friends are. We need to stop thinking that might makes right, that "he who has the gold makes the rules," that "God is on our side," and not on the other side.

Jesus says that God is for everybody. God is like a Father, and we are all related and need to take care of each other. Jesus shows up our gods for what they are: images of ourselves, the petty despots and vengeful judges that we want to be, vested with the guns-blazing, golden-armored authority of the divine. "Blessed are the poor" means, "Think different, my friends. Follow me. We're going in the other direction. Don't be afraid, I'll go first. It's going to be better than you can imagine."

I'll leave you with the video clip of my "Sixty-second sermon." I would have started with it, but then why would you take six thousand seconds to read the rest of this stuff?

Here's what we're singing at St. Anne this week, if, for the first time in a month, crappy weather doesn't 86 rehearsal for the choir:

Entrance: How Can I Keep from Singing Part of the struggle is just to keep remembering who we are, the children of God, all of us beloved together. What makes it good news is hearing in some broken part of our lives that the doctor is in the house. We're all broken, and God is faithful, and in Christ, God in present to us in each other.

Psalm 1: Roots in the Earth more on the psalm paraphrase here, in another blog post.

Celtic Alleluia

Preparation of Gifts: There Is a River (Manion) Tim's great gospel song of divine solidarity with human beings turns Psalm 46 is a musical post-it note that reminds us that we have nothing to fear when we stick together in our quest for peace and the promise of new world right here, on this planet.

Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)

Communion: Do Not Fear to Hope more here in another blog post

Recessional: Canticle of the Turning ...because the Magnificat is part of the Lucan overture to the whole gospel, and nothing says "the emperor is a liar and a phony" like the song of an unmarried, pregnant teenage girl who teaches her son what power and glory really look like at the hearth of a little house in a backwater town in a third-rate province of the Roman Empire. More here in another blog post.

Advent, Year C -- Selected blog posts

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 20:13:00 +0000

Advent Year C

First Sunday: For you I wait all the day (C1A)

Second Sunday: The Advent joy of the gospel (C2A)
Second Sunday 2: Second thoughts—(C2A) Baruch, God's mercy, and the dreary curse of a Pelagian Advent

Third Sunday: What Should We Do? (C3A)
Third Sunday 2: Second thoughts: Dancing in the darkness with God

Fourth Sunday: Bethlehem, you think you're so small? (C4A)
Fourth Sunday 2: Joseph as "primary catechist" of the Word

General posts about the season

Advent 101: Waiting (these first four essays explore a key dynamic of each Sunday)

Advent 102: Preparing

Advent 103: Rejoicing

Advent 104: Solidarity

Gaudete in Tenebris - Advent in 2012 (rejoicing in the darkness; Advent after Sandy Hook, but this year there was Thousand Oaks, and Pittsburgh, and Florida, and a million other places.)

Advent reading - homework for the snowbound

Interlude (a little poem about being between things, unfinished)

Songs for Advent

SongStories 10: Walk in the Reign (1989)

SongStories 14: The Wilderness Awaits You (2005, GIA)

Songstories 15: Thy Kingdom Come (NALR, 1984)

Songstories 19 - Sing We Maranatha (1989, GIA)

SongStories 24: "You Alone" (NALR, 1984)

SongStories 35: Your Mercy Like Rain (Vision, GIA, 1992)

SongStories 36: Canticle of the Turning (GIA, 1989)

SongStories 48: Keep Awake (from Keep Awake, 2001, WLP)

Albums 14 - On Christmas Day in the Morning (1998, GIA)

Albums 19: Like No God We Had Imagined (2015, GIA)

Not far (B31O)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Sat, 03 Nov 2018 12:22:00 +0000

Back in January, when we first met Jesus at the beginning of Mark after his baptism, desert retreat, and the arrest of John, his first words declared the heart of his mission: "Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message." (1:15, The Message) The "kingdom," the reign of God, is the first thing on his mind. In those three terse sentences, the urgency of his mission and the sea change of loyalties that it represents pops out at us. In Sunday's gospel (31st Sunday in Ordinary Time) Jesus tells a scribe, a member of a class or guild with which he is often at odds, that he is "not far from the reign of God." What did he mean? I think, to begin with, we need to revisit the motto of that first campaign and consider what Jesus is doing, and maybe discover what it has to do with us.

Jesus knew John had been onto something, and he had undergone the baptism of John in solidarity with John's insight. It seems to me that John and Jesus were in touch with a feeling in the populace, now under Roman rule after laboring under a succession of conquerors over the last three centuries or so, that things shouldn't be like this. Something's wrong. People had an instinct that what God had promised them as a people had to be more than being another revenue source for another conquering emperor. Their story was a story of freedom. The Jordan River was a symbol of the boundary between slavery, nationlessness, and freedom. God had brought them here. What was this new hell?

John had felt it strongly, and preached the arrival of "another" who would put things right on God's behalf. "His winnowing fan is in his hand," John preached, "and his ax is at the root of the tree." John’s cry of “Repent” was picked up by Jesus with perhaps a playfully seditious hashtag: “Believe the gospel,” that is, the good news of the god-emperor’s victory—only Jesus meant an emperor quite different from Tiberius. Their riverside exhortation to “repent” was a shout almost of imminent danger: you’re going the wrong way! No wonder you’re confused and unhappy. Turn around! Follow me! We’re going to the reign of (a different) God...and it’s where you belong.

Because of the way we experience the gospel liturgically, we might not be aware of where this story fits into the overall narrative of Mark. Like the gospel of the first Sunday of Advent last year, which we experienced before Christmas, the gospels from now through the end of the year happen near the end of Mark, between what we call Palm Sunday and Holy Thursday. After the entry into Jerusalem "cleansing of the Temple" in chapter 11, a series of confrontations happens as events during the lead up to Passover tumble toward the arrest and crucifixion. A delegation of party leaders question Jesus's authority to undertake these deeply symbolic political gestures and continue teaching. He silences them, and follows up with a thinly veiled allegory about their collusion in the conspiracy to kill him, at the same time putting to the lie their imagining that they, and not God, are in control of his life and death. Some Pharisees and representatives of the puppet king confront him about a legal matter, the payment of taxes, that could put him at odds with the agents of the empire, and again, he silences them with a reminder of their amnesia over their actual "lord/Lord." Sadduccees try to sink him with what they think is an hilarious rebuke of the idea of resurrection, and he reminds them that God has nothing to do with death, is not in rivalry with death at all, that God is the God of life and the living. Into this matrix of conflict and duplicity, a scribe enters the story with a question about the Torah: "What is the greatest commandment of the law?"

Unlike Luke's version of the story (chapter 10), the scribe is apparently not trying to outwit Jesus, but to engage him, as scholars do, on an important question of the law. What teachers (rabbis) do is interpret the law. They debate interpretations, size them up, weigh them against each other. From the conversation that ensues, it appears that in Mark's story, the scribe really wants to know, and has no agenda other than a rabbi-to-rabbi conversation.

When Jesus tells the scribe that he is "not far from the reign of God," the story harkens back to the choice between emperors, between Caesar and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. "You're seeing the choice clearly," Jesus seems to be saying. "You're not framing it, like some of the rest of the leaders of the people, in terms of law, or ritual, or birth, or status in the world. You understand that love of God and love of people are divine attributes, aspects of Godself, inseparable. The proof of the one is the authenticity of the other.

In Luke 10, where the third evangelist tells the version of the story he knows and wants to record, the scribe is trying to justify himself after Jesus’s response, so he goes on with a follow up question: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ response is the parable of the Good Samaritan. Refusing to quantify what constitutes a neighbor in legalistic terms (how many people can I get away with excluding?), Jesus leaves the scribe and his other listeners with the familiar parable, and says, “So, which of these was neighbor to the man?” Unable to even spit out the word “Samaritan,” the unlucky scribe says, “I suppose it was the one who stopped and took care of him.”

Jesus’s response, “Go and do likewise,” rings down the ages to say that we become neighbors by acting like neighbors, and nothing else: citizenship, ethnic group, kinship, no other criterion other than compassionate action on behalf of the other makes a neighbor. Jesus’s reimagining of the Law as a binary “Love God entirely, and love your neighbor like you love yourself,” infuses the whole of Christian scripture with its vitality. Matthew recasts the second part as part of the Sermon on the Mount when he states in an axiom as old already as Hammurabi that one should “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This ethic’s universality among world religions and even secular ethics is remarkable, and even so is not without its critics. (“You should do unto others the way that they would like to be done to,” or “It would be better cast in the negative, ‘Do to no one what you would not want done to yourself.’” Taking issue is clearly easier than taking a chance and opting in.)

“Love God, love your neighbor” also echoes the double chiasmus of the familiar song of the angels at the birth of the Messiah, remembered each time we sing the “Glory to God” on Sunday, that is, that

GLORIA —> IN EXCELSIS —> DEO
PAX —> IN TERRA —> HOMINIBUS (BONAE VOLUNTATIS)

or, GLORY —> IN THE HIGHEST —> TO GOD
(is) PEACE —> ON EARTH —> AMONG PEOPLE OF GOD’S FAVOR

which means everybody. The incarnation means that God’s boundless love for people has overflowed into the human flesh and blood of the Messiah, and the mission of making a world of people aware of their interrelatedness and belovedness to God is everyone’s task. In the song over Bethlehem, the angels tell the good news that the glory of God is made manifest by the mutual shalom of the human family.

In those tension filled and conflict-fraught days between the entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the temple, two rabbis confer over an opinion of interpretation of the Torah. In the scribe’s response to Jesus’s formulation of the greatest commandment of the law, by looking past cultural, ethnic, dietary, and even moral imperatives, we find Jesus relax for a moment, and put the war of words on hold. From within, Jesus reaches out with words of fraternity and affirmation: “You are not far from the reign of God.”
___________________

This Sunday also accomplished the extraordinary feat of getting me out of my musical inertia and writing a new song, an arranged ostinato that I have I in originally titled “The Greatest Commandment.” I just thought, after a long period of gestation, that there should be a simple musical setting of this important text like we have with other important texts: the Beatitudes, the Lord’s Prayer, and so many others. I have sent the music to over two dozen “beta-testers” around the country. Maybe during the week we’ll see how it played in Peoria, as they say.

The words 2.0: Tell me again that you love me

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 21:47:00 +0000

God, left, singing lullaby to humanity, right.

"First tell them what you’re going to tell them; then tell them; and then tell them that you’ve told them." (Rhetorical principle attributed variously to Aristotle, Henry van Dyke, Bennett Cerf, Dale Carnegie, etal.)

If you have the stomach for it, one can occasionally find threads on certain social media outlets in which wags with big mouths and small hearts try to outdo each other in putting down their least favorite liturgical songs. I regret to say that a good number of these are proponents of chant and/or organ music with no tolerance for anything not written on either four ledger lines or three staves, but there's no monopoly on cretinism in the style wars. Some of the favorite targets will be songs like S. Suzanne Toolan's "I Am the Bread of Life," or J. M. Joncas's "On Eagle's Wings" or Bob Dufford's "Be Not Afraid." It's kind of sickening to see this happen, when over a period of forty years or so (fifty, in the case of Toolan's song) one has intense, repeated personal experience of the joy and comfort experienced by people who have sung these songs in liturgical moments. But this, of course, is just empirical data, easily dismissed as anecdotal. The music is terrible, the lyrics are maudlin, and the songs should not, according to these experts, be used in Catholic worship.

I have the idea that when God wants us to get an idea, God keeps repeating it in a language we will understand, language we can experience. That what God does and who God is: God is self-gift, and God makes that goodness and comfort known to us over and over again in various ways so we don't miss it. Now of course this is all culturally dependent, language dependent, all kinds of variables are there. But the gospel is full of Jesus's admonition to his disciples and others, "Do not be afraid." The Christian scriptures overflow with a message of hope that can be summed up as in John 6, where we hear three times: "I will raise (you) up on the last day." (Note: see John 6:20 also!) The message of "On Eagle's Wings," a setting of Psalm 90, is also a message of both being "raised up" by God and "held in the palm of (God's) hand." The overwhelming message of the Christian scriptures is one of hope and divine love for everyone. Now, clearly, this has to be teased out for meaning, and we certainly can't stop there, imagining that God just wants us all to know that we are loved and relax for the rest of our lives. It's also clear that this message is meant for every person on the planet, every one, even those we consider enemies, strangers, outsiders, untouchables or undesirables. And it is part of everyone's job to see that every one can "be not afraid," and that the message of God's love goes out to everyone.

All anyone who hates "Be Not Afraid" has to do to get people to forget it is write something better. Write something as compassionate, as accessible to both musicians and assemblies, something that crosses the boundaries of the covenants and holds together hearts that are broken by sorrow or battered by life, and you'll never have to hear "Be Not Afraid" again. But you won't get there by putting down the song, or appealing to taste or musical rules or anything else from your personal ethic. Write something that can be played by anyone who can play a Beatles song like "Here, There, and Everywhere" on the guitar, and by sung by anyone who sing all the notes in "Happy Birthday," with words taken from and inspired by scripture and woven into a lyric that is completely memorable but doesn't rhyme. Add your own faith, and the faith of everyone who knows you. Maybe you can do it. It won't be easy. And supposing you do it in a way you think is perfect, remember that that perfection has to be received by the church for it to be effective. In short, it's out of your hands, I'm afraid.

But that's not what I want to talk about, really. I just want to say that if we look across the board at what are really the most popular songs we play and hear people singing, the message must be something of what God wants us to hear: Be not afraid; I will raise you up; All are welcome; How great thou art; the Lord is my shepherd; Here I am, Lord; and of course dozens and dozens, probably hundreds, of others that our assemblies can sing at least part of from memory. He walks with me, and he talks with me; Come to the water, Somos el cuerpo de Cristo, We are called to act with justice; Blessed are you, rejoice and be glad, yours is the kingdom of God; I say yes, my Lord; Stand by me; junto a ti buscaré otro mar; I'll cherish the old rugged cross; Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Our words are the gospel, are all of scripture, interpreted and distilled and crafted in song, and sometimes, they're just right so that, well, "how can I keep from singing?"

I confess that I write around the margins. I'm not as comfortable with the "affective" side of spirituality, which may be one of many reasons my songs don't resonate with great numbers of people like the above do. I feel that I'm called to write other parts of the gospel message, notably, around the call to conversion, to change, to move out of myself and do for others. This makes it possible, at least, for me to write authentically for me to worship! Turn around! Change our hearts! Serve the Lord! Be perfect! Come to us! Cripes, it's no wonder no one sings my songs, they're so bossy! Even my comfort song, "Do not fear to hope," is a little commandment.

That doesn't stop me from repeating myself. I am so grateful for all the fine women and men who are able to write the songs and lyrics that grab peoples' hearts and remind them of the gospel. I feel my little contribution may be to keep calling attention to the "rest of the story," the cross, call to change, the fact that God's love is universal and so ours needs to be, that "love your neighbor" means "feed your neighbor" and "don't drop bombs on your neighbor" and "don't put your desperate immigrant neighbor in jail and separate her from her children," and that God means all of that in the same way God means "be not afraid." In fact, it's the same word. "Be not afraid" by loving each other. I'm trying to help us put the "our" back in "our Father," and spell out the implications of the Sermon on the Mount and the cross in our worship music. I'm not the only one. We're all doing it. It's just that I'm not likely to write the next "Be Not Afraid," I'm afraid. (Wait...I may have just created a rhetorical Bermuda Triangle of prayer.)

Recently I've tried something in a couple of songs that I haven't tried before: I've pared down the text and music of one song and part of another to a musical mantra called an ostinato. Of course, in church music, I'm the last one on my block to try this. I am not a big proponent of the music of Taizé, another unique quality of my obnoxious personality, but not for musical reasons so much as architectural ones. I've never really worked in a church where that kind of music "works," that is, resonant stone spaces where lots of natural reverberation add a layer of nostalgic beauty to these versatile little choral pieces. I am FOR all kinds of music that work, and I know that Taizé music works wonderfully in a lot of places, even in our little stone daily mass chapel, where a "Kyrie" or "Jesus, Remember Me" has a little breathing room and can expand fill the space like incense.

But the reason I bring this up here is on the same thread of thought as the rest of this post: the thing about an ostinato, the musical equivalent of a mantra, is that it's meant to be repeated over and over again. This means that the text has to be able to bear the weight of repetition, and the music has to be substantial enough to be sung repeatedly without driving everyone nuts. I suspect that the tolerance for this kind of music varies, but the success that Taizé has had with it, with an international clientele, shows that it can be done successfully.

The first idea I had about this was the text that might be called the sh'ma of Jesus, because it is the sh'ma except with a wee addendum and the actual command sh'ma (Hear) is excluded from the text. It is the rabbi Jesus's interpretation of the law, to which we need to give ear. It must be what comes to us in what we call "the greatest commandment" and its yoked equal, to be found in the gospel this November 4, from Mark 12: 29-31.

"Which is the first of all the commandments?"
Jesus replied, "The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul,
with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these."

I first had the idea about setting this text about a year or so ago, and talked to a couple of other composers about it who chose not to work with it, so I figured I'd try it myself. I adapted the text a little bit, so that it would have a simple (soft) rhyme for mnemonics' sake, and a word substitution I'll explain in a second:

With your whole heart,
With your whole soul,
With your mind, your time, and your wealth,
Love the Lord your God who first loved you,
Love your neighbor as yourself.

The word in Dt. 6:5 and in Mk. 12:30 that is translated as "strength" translates an Aramaic word that means "wealth." The Greek word that usually translates it means "very"—it's an adverb. The sense of it seems to be "whatever is the source of one's influence," one's "very-ness" overflows into the world. Clearly the sense of the saying "with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength" is just to say "completely, inside and out." But I think concretizing "strength" as "wealth" may help expand the semantic field here, and begin to open up the implications of loving God, much as the Rabbi Hillel did on the parallel text when saying, "Whatever you hate for yourself, do not do to your neighbor."

When I think of a musical mantra, my mind immediately goes to the St. Crispian's Day scene after the Battle of Agincourt in the movie Henry V, the Branagh adaptation of the Shakespeare play. You might recall that after winning the battle in which they were on foreign soil and terribly outnumbered, the English soldiers and their king discover that their pages had been murdered behind the lines by the French. In that gut-wrenching scene, the bloodied Branagh and his bone-weary knights carry their pages across the battlefield to a small nearby church and graveyard. While this dolorous procession takes place in the shadow of the victory, the music being played is a choral ostinato for mens' voices with the text "Non nobis, Domine" from the first verse of Psalm 115, "Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory."

So when I went about to set this text to music, this was my model. I wanted it to be self teaching, have a choral element, and instrumental descants. So it begins instrumentally, has a cantor intone the tune, then some unison singing, terracing choral parts, a three-bar bridge, and a final stanza with trumpet in a new key. It's not as simple and tractable as "Jesus, Remember Me," but I think it carries the simple beauty of the text and allows our hearts to drink it in.

Some of my beta-testers suggested a deceptive cadence, but I couldn't figure out how to get both parts, "love God, love your neighbor as yourself" into a coda after the cadence, without turning into another verse that would, of course, be new musical material thus eliminating the assembly right at the best part. So I opted just to end it at the end of the phrase. (Write me for a copy of Greatest Commandment)

The other text was the second part (I see it as processional music) of the song I wrote for the Vincentians that I've bored you with before. (Writing about music that you can't really hear yet is so boring, so I'm trying to keep it trimmed to the essentials.) After four stanzas of a chant-like melody that praises God for being an exile and captive God-with-us, going into Babylon with the Israelites and into death with Jesus, and praising God as well for continuing to be present with hungry, thirsty, and naked of the world in a nod toward Matthew 25: 31-46, the ostinato begins, and we sing over and over again, "I was a stranger and you welcomed me." Again, here, the context of the ostinato in the whole text, its context in Matthew 25, its context in the liturgical procession, will I hope encourage us to consider that the stranger ("me") might be God, might be the person standing next to you, might be, finally, "me." Similarly, "you" could be any of those entities. The relationship between "I" and "others," "I" and "thou" or "Thou," is at the heart of that text, and making it into an ostinato helps give us the time to let that sink in, I hope. It certainly seemed to happen in St. Louis among the Vincentians, who have had that experience of God and neighbor on every continent (well, maybe excepting Antarctica.) (Write me for a copy of I Was a Stranger)

Well, to summarize, I suppose that my faith leads me to trust that God is in charge of God's own liturgy somehow. We gravitate to these comforting scriptural phrases and allusions in our music because mercy is the center of the gravity in the universe. Now, part of the truth of that is the implication that that mercy falls upon all equally somehow, and that for those who recognize God as its source, we have an obligation to live justly, to be the incarnation of that mercy as much as we possibly can. There is a lot of crushing pain in the world, so it seems to me that God's answer to that is a chorus of "Do not be afraid," "I will raise you up," "how great thou art," and "All are welcome." Singing those songs is part of our rehearsal for living. Where our words go, where our music and our hearts go, may our bodies follow. The presence of those songs, and the popularity of some over others, is the word of God alive in our worship today. I have to believe that.

Following the rhetorical lesson I quoted at the top of this article, the ostinato is a way of letting the message of scripture sink into our being as surrender to the text, God's word, telling us what it's going to tell us, telling us, and then telling us what it told us. God doesn't want us to miss the message, so there's a hunger in our hearts to know that we're loved, to know that there's shelter from the storm, to know there's a way out of hell, and it's all in singing together, especially as a first step toward actual solidarity among us.

As for me, my inability to communicate in the affective language of love, I nevertheless continue to try to sing and invite you to sing along some of the edges of the gospel that are open to the implications of love that mean changing ourselves, our structures, and our world, relying on other songs to help me remember to "be not afraid," that God will "stand by me," and that "all the love you've poured on us can hardly be believed." We need each other for that. Love is of a piece; we just need to be courageous enough to act on the implications of all that outpouring of divine devotion. So I think we need the songs that help us remember texts like "love your enemies" and how there's no road to resurrection that doesn't take the Cross-town bus.

As for popularity, well, "success is not the prize." And you never know. The world could be about to turn.

The words

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 21:24:00 +0000

I generally prepare the music for our Sunday worship 4-6 weeks in advance, not being like my show-off colleagues who have spread-sheeted their entire 2019 music lists and organized their choir rehearsals through the end of next November. Suum cuique, I reckon, but I don't do anything that far in advance. Last Sunday was the 27th Sunday Ordinary Time, year B, and the liturgy of the word brought us to the gospel about divorce and children that makes (and ought to make) homilists sweat their preparation and squirm their delivery. For the closing song (it could have been the opening song, but we went with something else) I chose to use Lori True's setting of Shirley Erena Murray's cogent hymn text, "A Place at the Table." I had chosen it for its first three stanzas in particular, the first of which announces a hope "for everyone born" there is a place with "clean water and bread,/ A shelter, a space, a safe place for growing," and stanzas two and three speak directly to the "place at the table" for women and men and then children and older people. See for yourself:

For everyone born, a place at the table,
for everyone born, clean water and bread,
a shelter, a space, a safe place for growing,
for everyone born, a star overhead,
and God will delight when we are creators
of justice and joy, compassion and peace:
yes, God will delight when we are creators
of justice, justice and joy!
For woman and man, a place at the table,
revising the roles, deciding the share,
with wisdom and grace, dividing the power,
for woman and man, a system that's fair,
and God will delight ...
For young and for old, a place at the table,
a voice to be heard, a part in the song,
the hands of a child in hands that are wrinkled,
for young and for old, the right to belong,
and God will delight ...

© 1998, Hope Publishing Co.

That, all by itself, was wonderful. We don't make a big deal of people staying for the final song. I can't bring myself to ask people to do something that's not part of the rite if they don't want to, but I also don't see any harm in going out singing for those who want to do that. We rarely sing all the verses of the closing song, because even our most avidly musical presiders only stay for a stanza or two, and their departure is a signal to everyone that breakfast (or lunch, or dinner) is just a few minutes away if we can just get to the parking lot and out of here before a stupid Canadian train blocks all the egresses.

But Sunday was also the day after the U.S. Senate voted to affirm the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice to the horror of many and certainly to everyone a source of immense unease after the televised hearings regarding his suitability. Everyone in that church was, in one way or another, impacted spiritually by what happened, and almost nothing was said about it. But what if we had sung verse four of "A Place at the Table," as it occurred to me Sunday morning?

For just and unjust, a place at the table,
abuser, abused, with need to forgive,
in anger, in hurt, a mindset of mercy,
for just and unjust, a new way to live,
and God will delight when we are creators
of justice and joy, compassion and peace...

Bob Batastini, one of the founding fathers of GIA, has often reminded us that the Roman liturgy is not really hymn-friendly. The liturgy has its own rhythm, perhaps can be envisioned as a series of processions, each of which (excepting the final one) is accompanied by a prescribed text from scripture, or lends itself to responsorial singing with flexible length to accommodate the vagaries of real life. Other music of the Mass is set to specific liturgical texts as well. We might almost say that, most of the time, the only accommodation the Mass makes to hymn singing might be at the entrance chant (i.e., song), and a closing song, if we choose to add one, or instead use a hymn of thanksgiving at the end of communion. Even in those cases, we music directors (and, let's face it, composers of hymn texts and hymns) find ourselves in, let's call it, "creative tension" with both presiders and our assemblies, some of whom, let's face it, are more concerned with the clock than with the logical flow of the hymn text, which may take all five or six verses to unfold. Or eight, say, in the case of "For All the Saints," or ten, in the case of "Hail Thee, Festival Day." I mean, even music-lover Pope Benedict XVI interceded for those who are unmoved spiritually by our musical virtuosity, no matter how moved we ourselves might be moved by it!

It can be hard to make cuts to hymn verses once a person has experienced the joy of the flow of the text composer's idea. But we learn to do it (or inure ourselves to doing it) as we do our job. As a songwriter myself, I have spent years not singing my song "I Am for You" at Mass because I just don't like singing it when it's not possible to sing all five verses. But more recently I've decided, "Well, maybe it's just me; and for crying out loud, I even cut out verses of 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear' when I have to."

It comes down to one of the adages which I have discerned later in life and which I have come to live by: nothing we do has to be perfect in order to be good. (The other is: don't think that just because it's the best I can do that it's good—or even that it isn't bad.) St. Augustine said something like this: "Don't let perfectionism get in the way of doing good." When we look at the bigger picture, we're not really capable of having a "perfect liturgy" anyway, and not least because not a soul in the worship space is perfect in any way. Our outside life isn't perfect. Our unchurched selves aren't full gospel lives. I guess it's good for us to want to do the best we can, and not cut corners for our own convenience, but hospitality and love actually should preclude us from forcing everyone to endure our own tolerance (or delight, or passion) for long hymns. Over time we can get all those verses in. We can keep encouraging people to read the whole text sometime, even pointing it out in the worship aid, but we don't really need to do all the verses all the time.

The example of last Sunday shows how this can happen. Even though the first three stanzas of "A Place at the Table" jump out at one in the light of the Gospel that was read, the fourth stanza, one that I didn't plan, jumps out at us in the light of what we might call the "word-made-flesh" in the happenings of our country during the preceding weeks. In this case, I decided not to follow my instinct. We didn't sing verse four. First of all, not many folks stay for even three verses at most masses, and second of all, I wasn't sure that anyone besides me would make the connection. So, my bad. If I were in a Presbyterian or Methodist church, I wouldn't have had to make any decision. We just sing all the verses, and nobody goes anywhere. We make choices, right?

I don't know the secret of writing a text that grips peoples' imagination with its ability to point us toward our out-of-church experience and gather it all in with our Sunday experience. I try. I've come at the liturgical music writing career through my love of words and theology. I only write a song when I think I have something to say that hasn't been said, or hasn't been said in a way that I think is important, or maybe hasn't been expressed musically in a certain way. Really, it's the words for me. Almost everyone I know can write musical circles around me. But then I get to the end of writing a song that I think I've done a really good job on, and release it into the world full of hope and good will. I come back to the same song a few years later, and I think, "Good heavens. It sounds just the same as every other religious song. I thought it was unique, but it's barely discernible from anything else out there." I'm not sure exactly how that happens, but happen it does.

Most recently, I wrote a song for the Vincentian (Congregation of the Mission) double centenary, sung at a Mass held at the Old Cathedral near the arch in St. Louis, with a lot of Vincentians from around the country, and some, like the current Superior General, from outside of the country. I had written the song for the entrance, which of course was sort of risky, since you really do want to start a liturgy with something that everyone can sink their teeth into. At the same time, I wanted to make it unique and fitting for the event itself (click back a couple of blog posts to see more on this in my post "The Vincentians and I" from about 9/13/18, or just click here.) As I mentioned there, the Vincentians I know and the Daughters of Charity are some really enthusiastic people, and they have been formed to love good liturgy and music, and they know their musical role. In this case, they were led by a wonderful blended choir from the two Vincentian parishes in the area, St. Vincent de Paul downtown, and St. Catherine Labouré, in Sappington (south county).

What happened was lovely. I had crafted the song so that there were four stanzas in a kind of hymn form that we just started singing, and people joined in as they got the tune. Again, with so homogeneous a congregation, this worked great and folks were really singing by the third or fourth stanza. But I had a failsafe: an eight bar ostinato that we saved for the procession itself. In order to prepare participation on this, I included the ostinato melody in an interlude between the hymn stanzas. By the time the cantor and choir intoned the ostinato, everyone knew exactly what was going on, and we were able to terrace in harmony, instruments, and descants until the gathering ended with an a cappella rendering of the ostinato: I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I hoped, the one who wrote the text, that by this time people would understand that "I" and "you" in the text was anybody, was Christ, was the God of the Jewish bible, was every one of us. We are all both "I" and "you" because we were created that way.

But it's just a song. I'm not even sure if anyone "got" what I was trying to do, or if the text just maybe rang true because it was full of scriptural and Vincentian references. Or not at all! But in the moment of the liturgy, it seemed to ring true. More importantly, the truth of it sprang from the lived experience of the people in that room. My Vincentian friends know that we go to the poor to find God. And when you start from the experience and then go to the song (rather than trying to craft a song or a liturgy to substitute for the experience), that's what happens. Whether the song survives the liturgical experience is pretty irrelevant, as terrible as that is to have to admit. What matters is that people are living I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

There's no question that a song is a thing of power. It can shape faith or shake faith. The words we use and the music we use have power in them, and what we have to keep remembering is that power in the community of Christ is something different from power as we're used to understanding it. Power in the Christian enclave is service. The strongest power is agape, complete self-gift. I have enough self-knowledge to know that I am not capable of that, and as far as I can tell, won't ever be. So I launch a song and hope that another wind, another breath, will carry it where it needs to go. I hope that ecclesia supplet, that Christ will take my weakness and make some strength out of it. Most of all, I hope that "the words" keep becoming flesh, and that my own flesh and breath will fashion worthy (and not just wordy) words! I want to cling to the conviction that, yes, liturgy, and liturgical music, are important. But the other 167 hours of the week are important too, and for liturgy to be a genuine sign of our lives it has to reflect the change we make in the world, in ourselves, for that outside-the-walls time. Life is important, sharing that life in love is most important of all.

I'm certainly grateful for all my colleagues who do this work, and also for all those who have gone before us and taught us how to write songs and lyrics by leaving some amazing work behind them through the centuries. Millennia, really. In the words of Sunday's responsorial psalm (Psalm 90):

"May the favor of the Lord our God be ours.

Prosper the work of our hands!

Prosper the work of our hands!"

Taking steps to relieve world hunger

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 18:04:00 +0000

Groovy choir members in CropWalk uniform bling.

When I came to St. Anne in 1994, it didn't take me long to appreciate the far-reaching ministries of social justice that have been part of this parish since at least the 1980s. Sister Lorraine Menheer, SSSF, the staff member spearheading what she called Hope Ministries, had begun a number of local efforts, including an inhouse food pantry, another one in the city of Chicago at St. Columbanus parish, and later in the 1990s began another in cooperation with the Northern Illinois Food Bank and Harvest Bible Chapel in Carpentersville. In the intervening years after Sr. Lorraine's death, the ministry has further expanded with a much-enlarged food pantry on the parish property. Sister Lorraine started an annual mega-bazaar called "Annie's Attic" at which people brought used clothing, furniture, toys, bikes, lawnmowers, computers etc. to the parish over a period of a couple of weeks, all of which was organized and sold in every room and open space on campus over the period of a long weekend, often having been refurbished by dozens of volunteers. The profit on this effort often came into the six-figure territory, all of which was earmarked for helping the poor. The parish supported a year-round resale shop in Barrington that a few years ago expanded and moved into Lake Zurich, continuing to generate through the efforts of dozens and dozens of volunteers over a million dollars year, funds which are earmarked for charitable work and grants to local organizations that directly impact those in financial distress.

Click to see CROPWALK 2019 DONATION PAGE

2015 walk, out near

It's really a privilege to work among so many people so committed to helping ease the crush of poverty in the Chicago area and even across the world. Projects in India, Mexico, and the Congo have also been part of the parish's ministry, along with Catholic Extension projects in south Texas and among migrant workers in Washington state.

It was not only Sister Lorraine who got me interested in the Carpentersville food pantry so many years ago (I think I started going before Des was in middle school, so sometime in the mid-2000s) but it was her energy and drive that got the parish and, finally, me interested and involved in the ecumenical project under the aegis of Church World Service called Crop Hunger Walk. A dozen or so of the churches in Barrington (I guess all of them, but I'm not sure exactly how many there are!) take part on the third Sunday in October. Walkers choose between the "Golden Mile," for those who need a shorter route, and a 10K walk through the streets of Barrington, raising money from friends and family to be part of this national effort to end hunger. According to 2017 CWS statistics, CropWalk raised $9,000,000 through over 100,000 participants in 900 walks around the nation.

Photo actually taken on CropWalk stroll thru Barrington

So our parish supports a few dozen walkers. Each year the choir and I get involved and try to support each other by raising awareness in our circles and asking for donations to the effort. This year, like every year, everyone is stretched thin by real ad hoc emergencies: Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas, Typhoon Mangkhut in southeast Asia, the fires in the western US and Canada, and now the earthquake and tsunami in Sulawesi and the surrounding area. But hunger is a systemic problem, and while some work politically to change the system, in the meantime, charities like Church World Service and others try to address the immediate needs of families and individuals in need.

So here is a link to my "Cropwalk" page for 2019. I hope you'll consider supporting the Barrington Crop Hunger Walk, just one in a growing number of communities doing something to relieve hunger. Thanks, as always, for reading.

My 2015 finish line video...

My 2017 starting line video...

The Vincentians and I

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 11:30:00 +0000

Faculty residence, St. Mary's in Perryville.
Photo by Mark Scott Abeln, 2007.

Many of my readers know that as high school and college student between 1965 and 1973 I was among the members of the Congregation of the Mission, commonly called the Vincentians. During that time, I went to high school in Montebello, California, novitiate in Santa Barbara in 1969-70, and then in college at Perryville, Missouri, until 1973. None of those institutions are still in existence as institutions of learning, so let that be a lesson to you. I also spent college summers in the weird and wonderful environs of a place called Camp St. Vincent near Cape Girardeau, which I only recall now as a cross between a M*A*S*H set and Meatballs (the Bill Murray movie), located in a Deliverance look-alike area on the St. Francis river in southeast Missouri. Fortunately, cutting into possible extended time in the Swamp, we also attended summer school at Southeast Missouri State (at that time) College, and then DePaul University in Chicago, where I first learned to desire life in the second city. For the seminary faculty, it was a dangerous gamble (gambol?), those six weeks of co-ed bliss among the belles of the Ozarks and the head shops of pre-yuppie Lincoln Park, and they hastily scrambled to explain to us again what "celibacy" was, but we had already stuffed our ears Zigzag paper and missed the warnings.

I had come to know the Vincentians early in life. When Mom and Dad moved to Arizona in 1958-9, there was no Catholic church per se in our area of Phoenix near 51st Ave and Osborn, but there was a quonset-style building used by the Byzantine Rite Catholics which they let us use on Sunday until the RCs could organize a building drive. The parish was given to the Vincentians, and was called St. Vincent de Paul Parish, occupying about 1/8 square mile of the area along 51st Avenue southwest of Osborn Road. The parish, unlike most institutions with which I've been affiliated, is still there, and now it's within easy walking distance of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball park, used for Spring Training. The ghosts of Montgomery Ward and Co., S. S. Kresge, and other retailers that once existed at the intersection of 51st and Indian School wonder, with me, what took baseball so long to get to Maryvale, and why it wasn't the Cubs instead of the cheating Brewers. My brothers and sisters and I attended the school at SVdP, where I was a choirboy, altar boy, sacristan, and ne'er-do-well, but I got straight As and my teachers loved me. And by "my teachers" I mean the Daughters of Charity, who, in those days, still wore the amazing white winged-hats they were famous for. And I still see, occasionally, two of my teachers from those years when I get to St. Louis where they live, and occasionally hear from another who is in Bloomfield MI. And yes, they really do love me.

All kidding aside, I owe the Vincentians so much for the quality of the education I received in Montebello, Santa Barbara, and Perryville, but also the spiritual formation in the theology of the Second Vatican Council, and the modicum of liberty we were given in which to make its word become flesh. It's also true that I have been shaped, from a very young age, to some degree, by the Vincentian charism of love for the poor, and have tried in my life to take seriously the call to receive the good news and share it. Without claiming anything like an exemplary life, I have tried to be generous with what I have been given and advocate for and work in different ways to promote a more just world and a more equal sharing of the goods of the earth. In addition to all the gifts I received as part of the community, even after leaving college early after three years and two summers, St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary conferred on me a college degree about a dozen years after I left there. The story of that is further down in this article.

I wanted to give a brief survey of the explicit musical inspiration that has come from my relationship with the Vincentians, because this year is a double centenary for them. In the global community, from last year, the Vincentian Family is celebrating the 400th Anniversary of the Vincentian Charism. This commemorates both St. Vincent’s preaching of the “first mission” on January 25, 1617 on the Di Gondi estate in Folleville, France; as well as the founding of the first Confraternities of Charity in Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne, France during the summer of 1617. The Congregation of the Mission is also celebrating 200 years in the United States, recognizing the journey of the first 13 Vincentians from Italy to France to Baltimore to Bardstown, KY to St. Louis & Perryville, MO over a two year period from 1816 to 1818.

Of course, my earliest compositions were done while I was with them in Perryville, MO. Early psalm settings like "Psalm 40: Here I Am" and "Psalm 72: Justice Shall Flourish" were written there; I wrote my versions of Psalm 89 ("Forever I Will Sing") and Psalm 126 ("I Had a Dream") at DePaul in the summer of 1972, all of which were published about 20 years later in the two Cries of the Spirit recordings I did with OCP, produced by Tom Kendzia. For the baccalaureate mass when my class graduated (without me, of course) in 1974, I wrote, in collaboration with my former English professor at St. Mary's, Sr. Josephine Burns, D.C., a song called "Kenosis Hymn" that appeared ten years later on my first NALR album, You Alone, both times with the great Bill Fraher (a year behind us in college) playing organ. Sr. Josephine paraphrased the kenosis hymn of Philippians using iambic hexameter, a form of heroic meter. I set it as a kind of musical gradient, beginning with unaccompanied pseudo-chant, adding a simple accompaniment, then moving into a strophic hymn section, and finally into a four-part canon with organ and timpani. I had only ever heard the piece in my head before the graduation mass, and i completely broke down during the singing of it and could barely compose myself by the Gloria. I'm sure there was more than just the joy of recognition going on there, but it has not been often I've been so out of control as (kind of) an adult.

Not my mss...too neat. Back in the day,
I was inspired by the fine organists we had.

While a student at St. Mary's of the Barrens, probably in 1971-2, I had also written a song based on some of the liturgical texts used for the feast of St. Vincent. More or less by default, it became the go-to song for Vincentian feast days. Cleverly and memorably called "Song of St. Vincent," it took for its refrain the verses from Isaiah 61 that include the Vincentian motto, "Evangelizare pauperibus misit me":

The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me,
He has sent me to bring tidings of joy to the poor,
To forgive all the contrite of heart.

Verses were taken from the mass of the day, both the psalm and the communion antiphon (Psalm 107: 8-9 and Psalm 112, 1, 8-9).

In 1985, at the suggestion of John Gallen, S.J., in conversations about my participation in the Corpus Christi Center for Advanced Liturgical Studies that he was working on opening in Phoenix, I wrote to Perryville about possibly getting my BA awarded with some possible "life credit" for the hours I had not finished, I guess for good behavior or time served. So I wrote about my work in Phoenix and my budding career as a songwriter for liturgy (at the time, we were working on our second album, Do Not Fear to Hope), knowing that there was some urgency because the seminary itself was closing its doors and all the students were being moved to a house of studies at DePaul University that fall. The Dean wrote back to me and said that the college would be delighted to do so, and, as part of my credit, would like me to write a song for the closing of the seminary.

The closing mass was going to be held in the Easter season, and so I had a quandary about how to write a song appropriate for the closing of such an important institution for the Vincentian community, a pantheon of mixed emotions, during the joyful Easter season. What I hit upon was the song "You in Our Day," which later appeared on our third album, Mystery. I give the long version of the story of its creation on my SongStories post that can be found here.

One other song that we have published that is directly a result of my Vincentian contacts is the "Mission Song," which can be heard on our Vision CD from 1992. My friends at the Vincentian parish in St. Louis, choir director and pastoral associate Dennis Wells and associate pastor (now pastor) and seminary chum Fr. Ed Murphy (classmate of Bill Fraher, seminary organist and one of the music directors for many years at Old St. Patrick's in Chicago) asked me if I'd write something for the 150th anniversary of their parish which was to take place in 1994. I looked up some of the writings of St. Vincent, again drawing on the spirit of Isaiah 61 as well with its words that became the motto of the Congregation of the Mission (evangelizare pauperibus misit me.) I don't think I could reconstruct all of the exact quotes from Vincent, but one that stuck with me was his saying that "It is not enough for me to love God if my neighbor does not love Him," and he goes on to say that the way the neighbor learns to love God is when we love our neighbor properly, i.e., as we love ourselves, as we would want to be loved ourselves. This helped to shape the lyric of the song, which was translated into Spanish by Frank Dominguez, a classmate at the Corpus Christi Center.

All of this brings us to the final song that I want to feature, which has yet to be performed. The Midwest Province Vincentians invited me to write something for the double centenary mentioned above, to be sung at a liturgy on the Feast of St. Vincent de Paul, September 27, at the old cathedral in St. Louis, which was built by Vincentians from whom came the first bishop of St. Louis, Italian-born Joseph Rosati, C.M. (Fun fact: Bishop Rosati also founded, presumably to the never-ending consternation of the Jesuits, St. Louis University. Second fun fact: the feast of St Vincent is also Terry Donohoo's birthday. Who says heaven isn't paying attention?)

The new piece is entitled "I Was a Stranger," which is the theme of the international Vincentian celebration. The American theme is "Walking with the Poor." Once again, I approached the text with more words of St. Vincent in my mind, particularly his famous dictum, "Go to the poor and you will find God." As I reflected on the background material I had been sent, thought about the journey that had brought the first Vincentians to the US, first to Bardstown, KY, then on to St. Louis, I remembered them as missionaries but as immigrants as well. I drew on insights I'd gotten from reading a Jewish author writing about Yiddish in the diaspora, and how exile, or more precisely, being "away from home," from the Holy Land and Jerusalem, was at the heart of Jewish spirituality. It led me to think about how God "left heaven," if you will, and emigrated to creation, at least in our imagination, to be among "the family," to be with us in the flesh.

In form, I think of the song as a processional in two parts: first, a hymn that could be sung as a prelude by choir and assembly, and then an extended ostinato on the text, "I was a stranger and you welcomed me." I hope that, as we sing the refrain over and over with various vocal and instrumental parts terracing in and out, we will come to experience somehow that in that gospel text, part of Matthew 25 in which Jesus identifies with outsiders and the poor, we are all the "I" and "me" in that sentence, and so is God. The song begins with two soloists singing, "Go to the poor and you will find God," and ends with those words being sung as a descant over the ostinato.

I'll let you know how it goes in St. Louis on the 27th, at least, if it goes well! One does what one can. To close this long blog post, I'm posting the text of "I Was a Stranger." To all my friends in the Daughters of Charity and in the Congregation of the Mission (C.M.s), I wish you a happy anniversary, with deep gratitude for your service everywhere in the world, especially in the little corners I've occupied for the last 66 years. Too many blessings to list, but greatest of them all are the friendships.

I Was a Stranger by Rory Cooney

You

Leaving unimagined realms

Like no other god before you,

Wandered with us in the Sinai,

Walked to Babylon in chains,

You,

Planted in us like a memory

Of a place still uncreated,

Walk among us unashamed

A god among the poor.

You

God’s most clearly spoken word,

Learned your mother’s song of freedom,

Learned to walk among the conquered,

With no place to lay your head.

You

With your parables of mercy

Touch of healing and forgiveness,

You, the glance and grasp of God,

A god among the poor.

You

From the cross’s cruel embrace

Breathe a final breath to hover

Over oceans of our sorrow

And create another world

You

As you vanish from our presence

Leave the ember of a vision

Of a people bound to you,

A god among the poor

You

In the hunger of the starved,

In craving of the thirsty,

In the loneliness of prisoners

In the fear of those in pain

You

In the powerless and naked

In the outcast and the beggar,

Still rejecting every throne,

A god among the poor.

I was a stranger and you welcomed me

Just past the silence (Second Thoughts on "Ephphatha" - B23O)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 02:56:00 +0000

Open up.

Break out.

Snap out of it.

Fly.

We’re here to help:

Ephphatha.

Say something.

Don't just sit there.

No one's stopping you now.

Take a stand, say it.

I'm listening. We're listening.

Don't be afraid.

Listen to me.

Listen to the earth.

Listen for the birdsong, the breeze.

Hear the beggar’s plea,

The baby’s cry,

The choir, the traffic.

Let it all in.

Don't cover your ears,

Snap out of it.

We’re with you.

Listen.

Unfold. Bend. Reach up.

Open up.

Break out.

Open a window, open a door.

Scale a wall,

Break down a wall.

Prophesy to the wall.

Connect.

Touch me, take the outstretched hands,

Hold on.

Ephphatha.

Stretch. Walk. Run. Reach.

Listen to the word,

then speak it.

We’re with you. Be the echo.

Don't be afraid.

Ephphatha.

Hear me. Say after me,

Open up.

Break out.

Come along, call the rest.

It's gonna be OK.

We're going somewhere new

Just

past

the silence. Let's go. Open up,

Listen. Say it.

Ephphatha.

(Allelu

"Simplify" - not as easy as I thought (revisiting We Will Serve the Lord, 1986)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 12:05:00 +0000

I started writing music in high school, but really practiced more and did better work when I was in college, of course. As a young man, even before high school, I had learned guitar next door at my grandfather's house. Grandpa Russ was a trumpet player in his youth, but as far as I know, hadn't taken his horn out of the closet since the time of the czars. But he was always a musical wannabe, and had an electronic chord organ in one corner of his living room, probably purchased from my grandmother's employer, Montgomery Ward & Company, and an inexpensive guitar that he tried to play as well. Probably the Beatles and the Beachboys got me interested, so I used to ask him to borrow his guitar and sat there trying to learn chords from charts. I had singing down well enough that I got the idea about what was supposed to happen with the guitar, but it took me some time, and the first song I learned to play was "Red River Valley," and I never looked back. I had all the chords I would need to play Kumbaya, Sons of God, and all the other church songs that got popular.

I would also play the old piano that my parents had bought so that my sister Cathy could take piano lessons. When Cathy wasn't practicing, which was most of the time, the books were still there, all those books that everyone learned to play from in the 60s (was it Schirmer?) and since I was beginning to understand the relationship between the dots on the paper and the scale notes and piano keys (I had already absorbed the basics of this on guitar as well), I started trying to play piano too. As you can guess from my playing today, I never practiced as much as I should have, but I didn't have a teacher or parent threatening me with extinction (or worse) if I didn't practice. So I kept loving music as a mystery instead of as a pile of rocks I had to carry up a mountain.

As I got into high school and then college (between 1965 and 1973) I was blessed, really blessed, to live in a time where music was everywhere, in the folk movement, the birth of rock and roll, the British invasion, the singer-songwriter era, and certainly in the renewed interest in liturgical music that the Second Vatican Council precipitated. Most of the time through those years I played guitar, but kept going back to the piano because I felt more at home trying to figure out songs I was hearing by using piano notes. I even remember the feeling one morning when I woke up in college—not the day, or time of year, but the feeling upon awakening—that I understood music in a way I had never understood before, that music moved horizontally rather than vertically. I guess I mean that I understood about how chords change and music is made by the forward movement of melodies rather than the vertical imposition of chords. It came to me in sleep, as the psalm says God's gifts often come. I'll never forget that "awakening."

Anyway, as I started writing more and more, especially the end of college and then into my new "real" life back home, I was trying to write like my colleagues and mentors and music heroes, Robert I. Blanchard, David Windsor C.M., Richard Proulx, and friends at school. To me, it seemed like "more complicated is better," so I worked hard on writing some not-very-good organ and keyboard pieces like "Kenosis Hymn" and other songs, and even my more "pop" style writing was more musically complex than many church musicians wanted to bother with. By the time my first album, You Alone, had been produced, I felt that maybe I was getting too far away from my guitar roots, where songs like "Psalm 40: Here I Am" and other pieces I'd written in school had touched hearts and become part of my friends' prayer life. So I decided to write something just for guitar, not needing anything more than a handful of chords, that was more like the folk style I'd grown up with, singing Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary songs in school.

What happened was "We Will Serve the Lord." (Link is to original SongStories post) I know it's not the first song ever to pick up on Joshua 24:15, but I am surprised it hasn't been done more. And the Joshua passage is read as the first reading on the fifth of the Bread of Life Sundays in Year B (August 26 in 2018). Having a Sunday with an anchor text like that doesn't hurt the shelf-life of a song, of course. Musically, my need to write a song in my older, folkier, "simpler" style was probably also influenced by the 1979 Dylan song "Serve Somebody" from Slow Train Coming. Either that, or Gary's imitation of Dylan singing it at every concert we've done for the last thirty years has made me paranoid. The song begins with a three-chord riff that, on the original album Do Not Fear to Hope, was played on a keyboard using an electric guitar patch. The same instrument played the solo in the middle of the song, played by producer Tom Kendzia's college friend Stacy Widelitz, who, as you may remember from my post on "Song of the Chosen," co-wrote the song "She's Like the Wind" from the multi-platinum Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

I remember, when writing the text, thinking about something I'd read in our Corpus Christi Center classes in Phoenix from a book called Money, Sex, and Power: The Challenge of a Disciplined Life, a 1985 publication by theologian Richard J. Foster. The one thing I can recall about the book now is that the title places the names of the challenges to a disciplined life that are meant to be tamed by the ascetic virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Somehow in my reflection on all that, I wrote the song as an anthem about the values conflict between American life and Christian life, phrased in language that suggests a sharp and clear black-and-white bipolarity rather than the rather more nuanced moral choices people are called to make, often without the compassionate evangelical guidance they ought to be able to expect.

The language of the lyric is more polemic and divisive than I would write today, and I wish I had the phrase "pagan horde" back. But two things about it: I was a lot younger then, more than half my lifetime ago, and knew even less than I know now. But also, I'm not so sure that with better evangelical guidance the song might not help people of a certain age and spiritual maturity voice some confidence and mutual affirmation in faith without necessarily setting group against group or feeling that one particular path of faith puts us "above the pagan horde" or any other horde. I'm for telling the truth these days, I guess, which is what I was for back then too. I just am not for defining ourselves in faith over and against others, because that kind of rivalry just makes everything worse, and breaks faith at the very place that faith tries to unite and reconcile.

I guess maybe you could say that I tried to simplify my style a bit thirty years ago, which was good, and then over the last thirty years I got more complicated, which might also be good. I know this: in the music department, since my soul-searching that led up to writing on guitar again with "We Will Serve the Lord," I've tried not to write "over my head," in the sense that I would be imitating some musical style that a thousand other songwriters can do better. I write what I write, and hope that it connects with both pastoral musicians and the people they serve. There are a lot of songs out there: maybe too many. People who don't like what I write have a lot of other options!

We've recorded the song twice, first in 1986 on Do Not Fear to Hope, and then in 2000 on our Change Our Hearts collection with OCP, that re-recorded the songs from our NALR albums that had been anthologized. My friend Tom Booth, an amazing performer, speaker, and songwriter himself, also recorded the song on his self-titled 1996 recording, his second record. You can hear a clip of his version here at OCP, by clicking on "view songs" and then the arrow next to "(We Will) Serve the Lord."

Somebody, I think it was Fr. Virgil Funk, probably distilled in the vocabulary of John Gallen, SJ, said that liturgical music needed to be artistically and expertly crafted so that sublime music about the deepest truths of the universe could be performed and sung by non-professional church musicians and parishioners. There is no particular matrix or sound or instrument that have a monopoly on that craft. It is ultimately driven by the word of God, but it is not an end in itself so much as a means to the end of changing the world. It's simplicity is to let the word shine through, and make it possible for everyone, and everyone's children, and everyone's grandparents, to participate as thoroughly as possible. Liturgical song does not aspire to be great art in the aesthetic sense. It aspires to make expression of the mysteries of grace, community, forgiveness, and sacrifice part of the emotional and spiritual vocabulary of the whole Church. So I think "simplifying," avoiding or cutting away everything that doesn't contribute to the success of any local congregation find its voice, is a good instinct for us songwriters. As Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Schwartz taught us in their performance piece, Mass, "Sing God a simple song, for God is the simplest of all."

SongStories 58: One Is the Body (GIA, Vision, 1992)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 17:02:00 +0000

"One is the breath of the star and the rose."

It is from this line of the lyric that the cover art was imagined by my brother-in-law, Gary Palmatier. Having worked in "Re-membering Church" institutes for so many years with lights like Jim LoPresti and Joe Favazza and others, the confluence of scriptural and ecclesial images of reconciliation took shape in this communion song. Yes, it has a long refrain (this has been its most persistent criticism), but I think that the short lines and rhyme scheme mitigate that issue, and make the refrain memorable. It's scriptural, trinitarian, and takes a fresh look (I think) at all of that in the light of the eucharist. And it should still be in Gather.

Of course, every songwriter thinks this about every song. But I just got my royalty report for 2017-18 from GIA and OneLicense. And you know what? Among my Catholic song reprints, "One Is the Body" is the third-highest in reporting, and it hasn't been in a hymnal since the 1989 edition of Gather Comprehensive. Speaking of comprehensive, it's beyond comprehension to me why it hasn't appeared in any subsequent edition.

The so-called priestly prayer of Jesus ("priestly" because it parallels the high priest's prayer of second-Temple Judaism at the Feast of Atonement, and "so-called" because it appears in the gospel of John as the words of Jesus, but not a record of his exact words that night) leads up to one great prayer to Abba: "that they may be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, that they also may be one in us." It is a prayer for unity and intimacy. The text of "One Is" starts with the eucharistic language about body, blood, bread, and cup, but it soon expands to "the living and dead," stars and flowers as symbols of all creation, with the unity of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. The song's three verses suggest that in gathering and forgiveness, in stewardship of the earth, in reflection on our place in world charged with God's presence, and in our care for the afflicted and needy, we are sure to encounter God among us, and, as the psalmist describes, actually "taste and see" the goodness of the Lord in our experience of life. Having sung about some of the many aspects of unity invoked by the celebration of the Eucharist, the refrain ends with the words, "To this I will say, 'Amen,'" referring to the word being spoken throughout the assembly at that very moment, ratifying again the new covenant in Christ's merciful love.

Things we love often develop a veneer of familiarity that obstructs our devotion from time to time. "One Is" tries, as we always do, I guess, to find a small way into a great mystery, a cluster of images and metaphors that might help us see old things newly again, maybe to transform the familiar into something fresher for the imagination. Here, scriptural images side-by-side with fragments from the Gospel of Thomas, Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the kind of language employed by mystics like Fr. Anthony diMello SJ, try to crack open that veneer for us so that we can see into the mystery a little more clearly for a few minutes.

As a listening experience for the heart and soul, Vision remains for me our best album from top to bottom until To You Who Bow, released 25 years later. I think it has aged really well, and it is really ingratiating to discover that, after that much time, so many parish music directors feel something of the same, and continue to program it in spite of its absence from hymnals for so long. Thanks to all of you.

One Is (the Body) by Rory Cooney

One is the body, one is the bread,
One are the living, the unborn, the dead.
One is the cup, one blood in us flows,
One is the breath of the star and the rose.
One are the Spirit, Creator, and Son,
Just as the source and the river are one.
One are the stranger, my foe and my friend.
To this I will say: “Amen.”

Gather, disciples, your Master to meet;
Learn to forgive from the bread that you eat.
Treasure the earth in the wine that is poured:
Taste and see the goodness, the love of the Lord.

Now split the timber, now turn the stone,
Look where you will: you are never alone.
High in the heavens, deep in the flood,
All things are charged with the presence of God.

I am the hungry, you are the poor,
God is the stranger who waits at the door.
Where any suffers, no one is free;
Whatever you do, then, you do it to me.

Copyright © 1993 GIA Publications, Inc.

SongStories 57: May We Be One (Communion Rite) [Praise the Maker's Love, GIA, 1993]

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 05:30:00 +0000

Writing a communion song ranks for me among the most difficult tasks liturgical composers have, especially if we hope to say anything original. The inaestimabile donum that is the Eucharist may be a mystery inexhaustible in its riches, but there's pretty little doubt that we keep saying the same things over and over again, and often without music musical innovation to balance off the overused texts.

It's not because we're not trying! I can't tell you how many times I start off thinking I'm writing something that genuinely feels new to me, but by the time I commit a text to paper and start singing it, all I hear are the similarities between what I've written and everything that has gone before. "Sing a new song," we're told, ostensibly because there's new stuff too be grateful for, for which to praise God. But the song doesn't sound new most of the time. Because it isn't. I hate when that happens!

"May We Be One" was the fruit of one of Gary's and my trips together to Prescott in the early 90s. Many of my songs from the Vision collection came from there. I remember writing "Covenant Hymn" with Gary there, and calling Terry to sing it to her over the phone; we were psyched. Gary had this idea for a communion song based on one of the old (1972) mass "memorial acclamations," now called the "mystery of faith." He had set the first half of a communion refrain to the text of the acclamation,

When we eat this bread and drink this cup,
We proclaim your death, Lord Jesus Christ...

...but I convinced him that even though his version followed the Huijbers-Oosterhuis guideline of "one syllable to a note," the refrain text would be stronger with two notes on the "Je-" syllable of Jesus, and letting the short U sound rhyme with the same sound in "cup" on the previous line. Then I went about writing the last two lines of the refrain:

So as we share this feast, may we become
Healing and light and peace. May we be one.

The text of the chorus is a trope on the acclamation, explicitly tying the act of communion (becoming one—with God and others) to the paschal mystery (dying to self in love). The entire communion rite that appeared in the collection included a harmonization of the Lord's Prayer chant with its embolism, a Fraction Rite with multiple verses, and a communion hymn. Musical material that Gary employed in the setting of the Glory to God and Fraction Rite is wedded to the response "Amen, amen," making the response both memorable and resonant with the action of communion, and the familiarity of the text (1 Cor. 10 and the Roman Missal) made the congregation's part a quick learn.

"May We Be One" uses a call-and-response form for the verses, with a refrain. There are thirteen verses for the cantor(s), too, making May We Be One a good choice for even the longest communion processions. The verses use images about bread, wine, and common life to give variety to the performance of the song.

This is the bread of Israel's wandering. (Amen, amen.)
The bread that strengthened Elijah. (Amen, amen.)...
Take and eat, this bread is the life of God.
This is the cup of Cana's amazement. (Amen, amen.)
The cup that would not pass from you. (Amen, amen.)
Take and drink, this cup is the life of God....
This is a people homeless and wandering. (Amen, amen.)
A people at home with each other. (Amen, amen.)
Drink warmth and hope from this winecup. (Amen, amen.)
May all creation meet at this table. (Amen, amen.)
And deep within all people the breath of God.

Maybe my way of trying to do something new with a communion song was to embrace the cascade of images, biblical, natural, and experiential, that is behind the liturgical action of taking up, blessing, dividing, and sharing bread and wine. The gift of the Eucharist is the work of God in the universe, always giving all of the divine creative energy to create strength for the weak, freedom for the unfree, unity where there is division, beautiful diversity amid chaos. Thirteen stanzas doesn't cover it all by any means, but at least it's an indication of the impossibility of the task!

And a word about the music: Gary did a really lovely job on this piece, especially when seen in the context of the other parts of the eucharistic suite he included on his recording. The refrain is in the key of F, and moves toward resolving at its conclusion to Dm, but Gary substituted the G major chord there for the relative minor, and so the verses were able to swing into Cm. This is the key and melodic material that the Lamb of God was built from, creating a lovely match between these related ritual pieces, and as I mentioned earlier, the descending melody of the response line of these call-and-response verses is based on the melody of the Glory to God, also used in the Alleluia. Gary handles all this in a way that is imitative but not slavishly so, and so each piece of the suite becomes a mnemonic for other parts without making us get sick of singing it before we've learned them all. (Go ye and do likewise!)

We dedicated "May We Be One" to Rev. Richard Fragomeni, a wonderful liturgist, mentor, and long-time friend whose dedication to the Eucharist has inspired us for over two decades. It was a homily, or a talk, or a story about a homily or a talk of his, that was the inspiration for this song so many years ago. Thank to Richard for his friendship and ministry over the years.

With "Covenant Hymn," the Lamb of God and May We Be One are the most enduring of the songs we wrote for Praise the Maker's Love. They have appeared in all the iterations of Gather so far through the Third Edition, as well as in RitualSong.

Repenting our inner heretic: modernist and Pelagian edition

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 15:32:00 +0000

So I was reading a talk given by one of my favorite Scripture scholars, Walter Brueggeman, who specializes in Old Testament prophets and their role in preaching the word of God to the kings and priests and people. In a video talk to the Sojourners “Summit for Change” last month, he spoke about church and state and what terrible bedfellows they are, and he started all the way back with Solomon and the narrative created by the kings of Israel, and how the prophetic tradition peppers the “official” narrative with a counter narrative. The whole thing is wonderful, and can be found by clicking here.

But there was one paragraph that really struck me, one that I think has some validity in our church and in our time, and with all the rancor and arguing in the public square about whether this is a “Christian” country, and who gets to use the name “Christian,” I thought that his insight was worth spreading around a little bit for consideration. Brueggeman says:

If you take the phrase “prophetic imagination,” the imagination part of that is that the prophets are able to imagine the world other than the way that is in front of them. The word prophetic alludes to the reality of God. And what the prophets believe deeply is that God is a lively character, and a real agent who acts in the world, who causes endings and who causes new beginnings. And that's worth thinking about, because that is not ordinary thinking among us — that God is a lively agent and a real character.

If you consider most conservative evangelicals, they do not believe that God is a lively character and a real agent, because they've got God all packaged up into sustained systematic explanations. And if you consider most theological progressives they don't believe that God is a real character and a lively agent, either, because they really believe that God has no hands but our hands.

When I read that the first time, I thought to myself, “ouch,” because I recognize the truth of what he’s saying. Obviously, his use of "most" is up for interpretation, and maybe you don't consider yourself part of that group, but I definitely think that I do, in some sense. Modern faith is not immune to scientific inquiry. We know, or assume we know, the difference between faith and magic. We know that the sun doesn’t rise and doesn’t set, but that we’re on a ball that spins every twenty-four hours and sometimes it faces the sun and sometimes it doesn’t. We’ve gotten comfortable with science, at least most of us in mainline churches have. We believe that the truth of faith and the facts of science are compatible, that truth, at its core, is one, and that answers that elude us are not God playing a game with us, but that we’re evolving, learning as we go. And faith is not only concerned with things unseen. It’s that we take for granted that not everything that is is part of the quantifiable universe. There are realities that are unverifiable by science. But verifiable and unverifiable realities are aspects of Truth (with a capital T), and there is more to reality and truth than facts and what can be proven.

So when it comes to faith, the temptation might be for us, following Brueggeman's groupings, either to leave God out of the equation because we believe that money, conflict, and power move history forward, generally through institutions of church and state (or both), or we believe that what is possible for good is entirely up to us, doing what we can in a community working to build a more just world. In neither case do we make a big enough place for God, who, in fact, is the prime mover, is the Reality underneath all reality, the “lively agent” in Brueggeman’s phrase, who has a distinctly different purpose in mind for the world than any of us do, a purpose that Jesus calls “the kingdom,” or the “reign of God.”

So all I want to say here is that among the many places we hope to assert divine activity in this world in our liturgy, one that stands out every week is the penitential litany that we call the Kyrie Eleison (or Lord, have mercy.) Of course, the entire liturgy asserts God’s primacy, but as a primacy not of force but one that empties itself into world through Jesus and then through the Holy Spirit. From creation to the end, God is where the loving, creative, exuberant action is, and it keeps manifesting itself in the unfolding cosmos. But we find ourselves in this world in a tough place: things are bad, and don’t seem to be getting better. Right at the beginning of the liturgy, we acknowledge that. We say we’ve made a mess of things, and frankly, we haven’t got a clue about how to fix it, except to keep coming back here on Sunday, doing what we’ve been told to do in memory of Jesus, and then trying to live it out day by day in the streets. At the beginning of Mass, we just say it: Lord, this is your world. You, not the president, not the bank, not the arms salesmen, not the UN, not the church, You are the Lord. We need you to be that for us. That’s what “have mercy” means: you have it, we don’t have it. Please, give it to us.

James Alison tries to get us inside of God's agency, which, if anything, he finds even more radically luminous and active than Brueggeman does, emphasizing that in fact we perceive everything wrongly until we surrender to God's invitation to relax into be loved by the Forgiving Victim, Jesus. He uses the image of a planet that is, unknown to its happy and complacent inhabitants, tipping toward the maw of a black hole. They notice in the distance of space at first a small star, but one which is growing larger and larger in their sky. At first, their ordered existence is thrown into chaos as they fear the approach of this rapidly moving star. But gradually they begin to notice that it is they, their planet, that is moving toward the new star, drawn there by a new gravity, and thus away from the black hole which they had not noticed was pulling them toward destruction. Alison summarizes his metaphor a few paragraphs later:

When we talk about what Jesus came to do, did and is doing in our midst, we are talking about what comes upon us as an alteration of the axis of Creation rather than as a resolution of a moral problem. Our being brought close into the life of God by Jesus living out being a forgiving victim in our midst has this as its effect: that we perceive simultaneously where we used to be heading, into an ever-shrinking world run by revenge, envy and death; and where we are instead finding ourselves drawn: into being forgiven, forgiving, and thus being opened up into true, insider knowledge of creation as it unfolds dynamically....

So, in fact, in our case, being forgiven is prior to being created.

Alison, James. Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults (p. 493-4). DOERS Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition.

So in addition to being a prayer of praise (“You are mighty God and prince of peace”), the Kyrie is an act of faith and surrender. We keep choosing false gods. We keep choosing pretender-lords. Or worse, we think somehow we have replaced God as the movers of history. Jesus thinks of it as a partnership. God won’t do it without us, we can’t do it without God. When we sing “Lord, have mercy” or “Kyrie eleison,” let’s try to hold that thought in our hearts, and make an act of faith with it, something like, “I’m listening, Lord; I’m trying to live up to the example of Christ in my world. But it's overwhelming sometimes. Everything seems to be moving the wrong way. But you’re the vine, I’m just a branch. Give me, give all of us, what we need to be able to live and bear fruit to bring a harvest of nourishment, justice, and peace to the world.”

"What will this child be?" [Nativity of John the Baptist (June 24)]

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 17:37:00 +0000

I confess that I don't know whether I can separate my head* and heart enough to write a coherent post, one that does what I insist we have to do, which is evaluate what we hear in the scriptures on a weekend and act on it. I'm really tired. The weight of the terrible news, the story of what citizens and leaders of this country are actually doing in the name of national security in a nation founded on the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We have families being split up at our borders, children separated from parents and placed in pens; we have removed ourselves from international agreements on human rights, after already denying climate change; we have congressional representatives moving to take away safety net programs and social security to pay for border walls and space warriors; we have leaders turning away from longtime allies and cozying up to tyrants with their own bloody histories of human rights violations. To top it all off, we have a government official quoting the bible to say that disagreeing with them or disobeying their orders goes against God's will, because God ordains the government.

In my own church, not a homiletic word about any of this. Not one. It's as though parish life is unaffected by the world we live in. The priests of the archdiocese are in a weeklong retreat together with Cardinal Cupich, a man whom I greatly admire. I wonder whether, John-like, they'll come roaring out of their desert "retreat experience" with something new to say. If not, I think retreats have lost their purpose and meaning.

As for me, like Paul Simon in his "American Tune" that pulled together his experience of political life and the aspirations of many of us in the 1960s and early 70s,

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it's all right, it's all right
We've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we're traveling on
I wonder what went wrong

I was briefly disappointed that we would not be celebrating the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, with its gospel about Christ calming the sea. It seemed to me that we need to be reminded that even though the waves are crashing over the side of the boat, and we're sinking, Christ is in the boat too. Even if it sinks, I guess, though sometimes he calms the seas. Then I remember that I'm supposed to be Christ in that story. I'm the person who's supposed to say to you, "Don't be afraid," and then to the sea, "STFU so we can get some sleep." I'm supposed to believe I can do that, and do it. But we don't get those readings this year.

Instead, we get to celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist. In the summertime. This is all pretty much because of some early (to us, late, to church historians) documents that posited the annunciation to Zechariah to have taken place while he was serving in the Temple during the festivals of Tishri, at the autumnal equinox, the same documents (De solstitiis et aequinoxiis, the argument summarized in Origins of the Liturgical Year, by Thomas Talley, pp. 93-99) that go on to surmise based on the scriptural witness that the annunciation to Mary happened when Elizabeth (John's mother... are you getting this?) was in her sixth month. I could go on, but you're getting the picture. The birth of the Messiah and his herald thus fit with cosmic precision into the scriptural witness that John said, "He must increase, and I must decrease," with even their birthdays cooperating as the (northern hemisphere) days increase in length after the winter solstice, and decrease after the summer solstice.

And it dawned on me that John the Baptist, the baby whose birthday we celebrate, is a good place look for light today. "What will this child be?" was the question the people of the hill country started asking when the boy's mother and deaf-mute father somehow decided in the same instant that his name should be John. What will this child be in our occupied nation of pop-up messiahs and bloody suppression with ruthless capital punishment by crucifixion? What will this child be in our nation where our occupiers insist that there is no separation of religion and government, where the emperor is god, and there are real limits to the worship we can offer to our own God? What will this child be as he grows in a world where violence is all around him, and the mighty lord it over the weak, and yet his father serves, quietly, faithfully, a God with an unfinished story of deliverance and liberation?

John's baptism announced the arrival of the reign of God. It was a call to metanoia, a change of life that amounted to a turning around from one field of vision to another, from a worldview that put the pretenders to God's place (I'm using "pretenders" rather than "enemies of God," because to be consistent, I have to believe that God has no enemies) behind the believer, and field of vision of God's reign, a world of liberation, opportunity, and enough for everyone, in the foreground. He invited people to the Jordan to come through and be washed of the old way of being and, by symbolically passing through the border river of the Promised Land, passing into the new world, which was, in fact, where they belonged. Away from the legions and spies and intrigues at the political centers of Judea, John's preaching and cleansing ritual offered people the chance to express what they all knew to be true, that something serious was wrong with the world, that power was turned upside down, that justice had disappeared from their experience, and it was time to reject, at least in a symbolic way that could offer an inner hope and memory, the status quo offered by the empire and its Herodian and temple collaborators.

Anybody seeing any parallels here?

John's demise came about when he spoke the truth to religious and civil power. Herod Antipas, the Jewish puppet king, had divorced his wife in order to marry his brother Philip's wife. Being a Jew, Herod was breaking the Torah. As king, he was occupying a place in the social order in which he stood as a localization of God's presence, much like the high priest did, though with more power due to his relationship with the Romans. For John, then, this was an abomination, a blasphemy, not just a little domestic drama. When Herod had enough of John's diatribes, he took him out. Maybe he got wasted first, maybe besotted with lust. Or maybe he just had had enough of the outsider, and separated his mouth (and the rest of his head) from his neck, where it belonged.

John's driving energy seemed to come from his conviction that God was about to show up and set things right in the world, and that it was going to happen with violence and retribution. "You poisonous snakes! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Show me evidence of your changed hearts, and don't tell me about how you're the chosen people. God can turn these stones into Jews. (my paraphrase, Lk 3:7-8)" He goes on to warn that the ax of God is already in the orchard, and if there's no proof of change (fruit on the tree), the ax will fall, and there's going to be a burning. The "one who is coming" will bring this about, and soon: "He's going to sweep the threshing floor, and the broom is already in his hands. He'll gather up the wheat, and the rest he'll throw into the fire. (3:17)"

But the thing is, John got it wrong. John's vision was obscured by a malformed sense of justice, one that depended on force and violence to punish, destroy, and impose its will. The one-who-is-coming, the Messiah, surprised everyone, including John, by not being that kind of God. He was "like no God we had imagined," and even imposed upon John to baptize him, not taking the spotlight, but joining up with the rest of us. Redactors may have later attributed to Jesus rhetoric that was insulting and derisive in response to events in their lifetimes, but the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount already had made non-abusive speech a sign of the fulfillment of Torah. The one who was silent in his trial and died with words of comfort, compassion, and forgiveness on his lips would not, I think, have been one to demonize his enemies. For Jesus, God's arrival would be made visible by the overflow of life, the bounty and abundance of the world when people turn toward one another in love, and begin to live by the simple discipline of doing unto others only what we would want others to do to us. This loving of neighbor as self is a visible sign of loving God. In fact, loving neighbor seems to be identity with loving God.

So I came to see, despite my wish for Christ in the boat and the boat in the storm, that John the Baptist, the baby, the promise, the world within, the child with a future, the baby born into a temple family in the regional capital who came to live in the wilderness and who came to rage against the machinations of the temple and the palace, is a good fit for the problems I'm having with the world I live in, with my perceived powerlessness, with my barely-cloaked desire for a political fix by someone with whom I agree on more issues, with my shameful demonization of my "enemies." I'm (badly) acting like John, and John was wrong. But he kept pointing to the Messiah he did not yet know: "I am not (the one). Behold, one is coming after me; I am not worthy to unfasten his sandals." Later, from prison, he sent a message to his cousin to ask him: Are you the one? And Jesus told them to report what they saw and heard, he told them to report on the "fruit": the healings, the new vision, the word of liberation to the poor. John, so close to the reign of God that he couldn't bear the trappings of the pretenders, surely got the news and knew the answer.

Question of the weekend:

What will this child be?

I'm going to try to find my inner "baby John," the one I didn't have any part in creating, the one of whom Psalm 139 says, "Truly you have formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother's womb." In my infantile Christianity, still immature and afraid after six and half decades of life, I want to wonder, "What will this child be?" Find something to do, and do it, without being an asshole and tearing down my perceived enemies and making all kinds of people I don't know even more upset and afraid and stressed out than they already are.

This fellow who takes up so much room with his needs and words and music, What will this child be?

Music for this weekend at St. Anne:

Entrance: For All the Saints Who've Shown Your Love (John Bell, THE WATER IS WIDE)
Kyrie: Kendzia (Lead Us to the Water)
Glory to God: Mass of St. Ann
Psalm 139: "O God, You Search Me" (Farrell, sung responsorially with cantor)
Alleluia and Intercessions: Mass of St. Aidan
Preparation of Gifts: Blessed Be the Lord (Canticle of Zachary) (Darryl Ducote & Gary Daigle)
Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)
Communion: Christ Be Our Light (Bernadette Farrell)
Sending Forth: Canticle of the Turning

* no pun intended. really.

SongStories 56: Psalm 1—Roots in the Earth (Vision, 1992, GIA)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 18:12:00 +0000

For desert folks, a permanent, flowing stream is a great symbol of divine love and protection, and if there’s a tree growing beside it, or an entire oasis, even more so. The image appears in a couple of psalms and in the book of Jeremiah. Today’s responsorial psalm, Psalm 1, is from the wisdom psalms, songs that describe the way that life should be lived by the people of God in an idealized way. When the psalm, describing the “just man (sic)” gets to verse 3, the psalmist declares:

He is like a tree
planted near streams of water,
that yields its fruit in season;
Its leaves never wither;
whatever he does prospers.

I wrote my musical version of Psalm 1 in my occasional sojourns to northern Arizona, sometimes with Gary, sometimes alone, in 1990-91. The music we wrote together in those trips were recorded on our third trio album, Vision, and some were on Gary’s 1993 recording, Praise the Maker’s Love. I honestly can’t remember why I decided to set Psalm 1, though I associate it with using on the 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, year C (1992), and that my friends at the Franciscan Renewal Center (where Gary worked) wanted to do sacred dance with it. This is probably why it's dedicated to Ginny McKinley, who was part of that ministry. Using the psalm this week, I substituted it for another psalm, because I think it fits the imagery in the first reading and gospel, which is all very agricultural. The cut-time feel and modal music lends themselves to dance, and the short musical interludes also give opportunities for expression. The song ends with a round on the refrain, so that there is a sense of a vocal dance in the whole assembly, with people and choir singing the chorus, “Roots in the earth…” in three or four parts at the interval of one measure. The air itself can seem to dance when the mood is right!

In adapting the song, I wanted to stretch the language toward more a inclusive reading, so the refrain uses the plural pronoun “they” to reflect all of God’s children, and the verses alternate between “he” and “she” for the same reason. The words of the refrain take up the “wisdom” theme echoing that third verse of the psalm, summarizing the psalm in four lines.

Roots in the Earth (Psalm 1) by Rory Cooney

REFRAIN: Roots in the earth,
Branches stretched to the skies,
Those who hope in God
Are happy and wise.

Happy is he who rejects bad advice,
Who knows that integrity and justice have no price.
Happy is she who in good finds delight,
The law her companion through the day and through the night.

Just like a tree near a stream given root,
Season to season richly yielding its fruit.
See how they soar, how their leaves never fade!
Broad are their branches, and abundant is their shade.

Not so for those who rejoice in their sin:
Like chaff on the floor they shall be driven by the wind.
God guards the road for the just night and day,
But death lays an ambush for the wicked on their way.

Copyright © 1992, GIA Publications. All rights reserved.

Psalm 1 (New American Bible, Revised Edition [NABRE]) vv 1a, 2-4, 6.

Blessed is the man who does not walk
in the counsel of the wicked…
Rather, the law of the LORD is his joy;
and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree
planted near streams of water,
that yields its fruit in season;
Its leaves never wither;
whatever he does prospers.

But not so are the wicked, not so!
They are like chaff driven by the wind….
Because the LORD knows the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.

Here you can get an idea of how I might approach the adaptation of a scriptural text. In the days of Comme le prevoit (1969), the philosophy of translation that Pope Paul VI promulgated after the Second Vatican Council and that was in effect until 2001, the rule was called “dynamic equivalence,” based loosely on the work of linguists like Noam Chomsky and stating that translations should “take into account not only the message to be conveyed, but also the speaker, the audience, and the style. (6)” For Comme le prevoit, the essential act is communication. But late in the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, it was superseded by the philosophy of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and others. The 2001 instruction Liturgiam Authenticam took the position that it is the words themselves, not their meaning, that “express truths that transcend the limits of time and space.” Thus, the Latin (Vulgate) bible and other sacred texts needed to be translated not only by precise translations of the words, but the word order, syntax, also had to be “translated” into modern languages. In other words, the words themselves, not their meaning, is what needed to be translated. Homilists and catechists were charged with explaining the liturgy, so that people weren’t confused, for instance, by new translations that the covenant in Jesus’s blood, expressed in the consecration of the mass, was for all, and not for the many, though the priest has to say “for the many” because that’s what the exact words say.

To a songwriter and I think to many, many liturgists and scholars, both things are necessary. But psalms are songs, for one thing, and ought to convey not just words but emotions, and carry the weight of the human experience of God over the millennia. Precision is important, as is study, but when the bible is used in liturgical assembly, along with liturgical prayers, we think that intelligibility matters, and that we shouldn’t say “many” when we mean “all,” because one is exclusive and another inclusive.

So in rendering Psalm 1 in this way, even though the NABRE translation says “Blessed is the man,” we know that even though the Latin uses the word vir it doesn’t mean simply “man” in the gender sense. Its deeper meaning is that everyone who stays away from evil people is blessed.

Production notes: The percussionist on this track was Dom Moio, if I recall correctly. He employed multiple percussion toys in his arsenal, and I'm not sure what the overdub drum was, maybe a talking drum or djembe, but Gary wanted a really low "boom" on the downbeat of the chorus, and the sound of that drum was so elastic and deep that when we were mixing I kept saying that it sounded like the choir was singing "boots in the earth." Not helpful. Also, about doing the canon (round) at the end of the song with the choir: this was very near the time when I swore off being anywhere near the studio for making records. I think of a round as about the simplest kind of counterpoint one can write or sing, but the studio makes even that into an endurance test, as all kinds of extra dynamics are required for the round not to sound like everyonetalkingatthesametime at a cocktail party in a very resonant cave. I don't have the patience for that kind of thing: thank God Gary does, and Terry does. Me, I'm good for going out to Starbucks or a liquor store, depending on the time of day.

Creating singable psalm texts was a huge part of my ministry when I started out as long ago as the early 1970s. Before I had been published or recorded, my friend Bill Foster recorded at least of my psalms in the late '70s to early 80s: Psalm 40 (Here I Am, Lord), Psalm 139 (Wings of Dawn), Psalm 137 (If I Forget You), all of which appeared in (wait for it....!) Folk Mass and Modern Liturgy magazine, published in San Jose, CA, back in the William Burns days, before the name change and before John Gallen was part of the operation. Our current album, To You Who Bow, includes several psalm settings like Psalm 104 ("Send Out, Send Out Your Spirit"), and in 1992’s Vision album, there were settings of Psalm 51 (“Create Me Again”) and Psalm 85 (“Your Mercy Like Rain”), along with “Roots in the Earth.” All of these songs tried to do the same thing: offer a modern take on the ancient texts we call psalms, and give us another reason to sing them again, and give us a window of emotion and rhetoric to connect us with the human experience of God, and what that has meant for our interactions with each other, for three thousand years.

Binding the Strong Man (B10O)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 15:56:00 +0000

I think most of us who are in the church music biz keep records going back several lectionary cycles so that, for instance, each time the 4th Sunday of Easter, Year A, comes up, we can see what music we've done in the past to get our creative juices flowing and to cut down on "reinventing the wheel." For me at least, liturgical music is kind of a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing. You've worked hard over many years to choose the best songs in the repertoire for your community for this particular Sunday, so if there's not some better ones (or a better one) that have come along since last time, I at least tend to go with some of those songs I used last time, or use the best of what I've done for over the last nine years, with an addition or two of something maybe new, or an older song I've discovered, that might fit the Sunday better than things I've used before.

I bring this up today because, as you'll notice from my doing a new "Sundays" post for the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, that I realized a few weeks ago that I don't have any records of music or liturgy texts that I've used before for this Sunday. That's because we haven't had a 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, in this century! The last one was in 1997, before our church was built. The year I started keeping all my files on my computer for each year was, you guessed it, 1998. Ergo, all the usual prayers and notes I keep for the parish will have to be written anew from scratch this weekend. This is why many people are atheists.

What I do have from The Last Year B archive is an article I wrote from a series of articles I was writing at that time for Today's Parish magazine, which I think was published by Twenty-third Publications. (If so, it goes into a long line of institutions for which association with me has brought ignominy and/or extinction. That list includes the high school seminary, novitiate, and college which I attended, the original Composers Forum for Catholic Worship, the Corpus Christi Center for Advanced Liturgical Study, Modern Liturgy magazine, the North American Forum on the Catechumenate, and possibly the United States of America, though the jury is still out on that one. And that list is by no means exhaustive.) This little article had a one paragraph reflection on the day, my usual dose, with a few music selections, but it pointed me again to Ched Meyers’ tome Binding the Strong Man, reminding me of how influential that book has been on my thinking about the first gospel. For Meyers, the passage we hear this Sunday is a central text for the whole gospel, hence his title. In it, he says, Jesus “declares ideological war” on the temple establishment, and I made the point in my notes that in the Genesis reading, God declares ideological war on Satan. Of course, it turns out to be the same war, but we need to be careful about underestimating and localizing “Satan,” lest we think this cosmic battle has little to do with us. More below on this.

For Girardian exegetes, the "Satan versus Satan" narrative is a core scripture. Satan in the earliest narratives is the Accuser, and only later becomes the Evil One. As Satan assumes both roles in the mythology, we begin to see how the Accuser is the one who accuses the Evil One, creating the Satan versus Satan scenario. This is a central theme of Rene Girard's The Scapegoat and certainly of his work, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. As one author puts it, "when Jesus asks, seemingly rhetorically, 'How can Satan cast out Satan?', Girard essentially answers, 'It happens all the time. In fact, that’s what human culture is founded on. Our anthropology can be summarized by the phrase Satan casting out Satan.'" The murderous blood sacrifice of the scapegoat is used to appease the desire of the murderous crowd. The only way out of this spiral of temporarily sating violence is the act of Christ, the Forgiving Victim, innocent, who comes back from death to rewrite the myth from the perspective of the victim. When God finally speaks definitively about sacrifice, the answer is, "Are you kidding? No thank you. Let's get on with building life."

It's good to get back to St. Mark's gospel, and dig into the great story that the author says is just "the beginning of the evangelion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." We're getting more accustomed to the vocabulary of Roman civil religion being used in the story of Jesus, starting with that word evangelion which has a specific meaning related to news of an imperial victory. We hear the stories of the entry into Jerusalem in that light, the name "Legion" given to the demons that are cast out and into a herd of swine that jump off a cliff into the sea, we might even hear an echo of a Roman imperial procession in the language of the story of Bartimaeus, and his "eleison" shouted from the roadside to the approaching king, here, however, a "son of David." And just this past Sunday, in the narrative of the Last Supper, we get reminders of the subterfuge and hints about the extent to which Jesus and the disciples have to go to keep under the radar, resorting to passwords and secret arrangements for the last supper. Sometimes, to be subversive and stay alive, you need to go underground. Or at least under whatever passed for the radar in the first century CE.

The message of Jesus has enemies in the imperial cult, but it also is at odds with the temple cult, both because of his message itself and because both depend on the maintenance of a status quo to keep the peace among the people. Have-nots mustn't try to become haves, people outside of the power circle mustn't try to usurp the power structure, and generally speaking, outsiders shouldn't try to become insiders. The story in Sunday's gospel is sandwiched between two mentions of one kind of insider-outsider groups: Jesus's family, who are outside his house and think he's crazy and want to stop him, and Jesus's discipleship group, his family of choice, who are "outside" the status quo group in his society of actual family, but are nevertheless inside his house, and are the ones to whom he offers his attention and allegiance. Between these two slices of narrative "bread," a meaty battle of wits goes on between Jesus and the scribes. While the inside-outside dialectic plays out in the "family-house" event, a more cosmic one is being addressed between Jesus and the scribes, and at stake is the honor of Jesus, the source of his authority and power, and the balance of authority between the status quo symbolized by the scribes and temple cult and the subversion of that status quo by the preaching and ministry of Jesus. Placed between the two pieces of the "in-out-family" narrative, the battle with the scribes become the core of the lesson, an inclusio, so we need to pay attention.

This is just chapter three of Mark. We've just heard of Jesus forming a band of disciples, a resistance group against the prevailing theologies of temple and state. The scribes in this story, agents of the temple rulers, do what ruling hegemonies always do to those who challenge their authority: they demonize him. Here, they do so literally, saying "it is by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that he casts out demons." He is possessed, they allege. Jesus's response will echo his (and even more certainly Mark's) audience's experience in watching the collapse of Herod's kingdom, first that of Herod the Great's being divided into a tetrarchy, then the complete collapse in the 60s with the war against Herod Antipas when he divorced the daughter of Nabatean king Aretas, who then defeated Antipas in war. "A house divided against itself will not stand." (3:25)

Jesus's parable about the strongman is another tactic of subversion, hiding truths in plain sight so that his followers might understand, but not the attackers. The "master of the house," the strong man, is Satan. In fact, the Aramaic name Beelzebul means "master of the house." Jesus has come, he says, to "bind the strong man," and take back what belongs to the reign of God, that is, the human race, starting with the Jewish race. His discipleship community, ministry of healing and exorcism, parables, and teaching are all oriented toward that: releasing those bound by the power of fear and murder, and sapping the strength of the myths that keep them bound. By myths here, I mean the structures of behavior and ways of thinking that keep oppressed people oppressed, the shrinking options that seem to be available to those under domination by others. Jesus is pretty clear in Mark that what he is about to do is "plunder the strong man's house," put an end to the rule of Satan by unleashing the reign of God upon the world. The scribes cannot see it, and yet they are God's agents, the ones whose role is supposed to be keeping the Torah alive in the community. As Ched Meyers puts it in Binding the Strong Man (page 167):

Imperial hermeneutics, ever on the side of law and order, will of course find this interpretation (i.e., the liberation and rescue of the captives of tyrants) strained, offensive, shocking. Yet Mark drew the image of breaking and entering from the most enduring of the primitive Christian eschatological traditions: the Lord's advent as a thief in the night.

Then Jesus announces that all kinds of sin will be forgiven except that of the ones who accused him of being empowered by Satan: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, that is to say, calling the actual work of liberation and wakening the children of God to who they are "demonic possession." If you can't see the work of God right before your eyes, he is saying, you've missed the bus to the reign of God. You're going nowhere, and you're already in hell.

Which leaves us with the inside family and the outside family in the gospel. We should be grateful that the lectionary compilers left this whole pericope intact when including it in the reading for Sunday, so that we get everything that's going on here. All the labels: family, believer, baptized, circumcised, Jew, white, straight, American, Christian—all the labels have to go. Being "inside" the reign of God isn't a matter of claiming to be there by some birthright or self-oriented entitlement. Being inside the reign of God is participating in Jesus's project of liberation with him, doing what he does, giving everything for the sake of others. The goal of the insider is to tell the outsiders that everyone is actually inside already, and there aren't any outsiders, unless one chooses to be out there.

Gee. Are you having as hard a time as I am trying to figure out what this has to do with us?

Maybe it's the damage we do by identifying law with actual morality, by not repenting nationalist euphemisms like "manifest destiny" and working to first acknowledge and then undo the horrific legacy of the Indian wars and treaties. Or maybe repenting the sin of slavery and its enabling mother-sin of racism, and working together to undo the systems of injustice and prejudice that flourish in our time, not to mention the enabling of racist and white supremacist rhetoric under the guise of "freedom of speech."

It's important to keep remembering that the tactics and strategy of the reign of God are peaceful and non-violent, but they are urgent. They require non-cooperation with evil, putting all of the danger and risk on us who believe with Jesus that death is meaningless to God, but that we are God's children, and he counts each of us, and all of us together, with unimaginable love that risks everything even before we do. We, disciples, are part of the confederacy of subversives for the new order, the reign of God. Let's be careful not to let ourselves be aligned with or sucked into the strategies of the status quo, blaming the victims of injustice rather than calling out the perpetrators. As in Mark's day, as in Jesus's day, there are two religions with competing altar calls. One is the voice of imperial religion, promising peace through force, naming insiders and outsiders, saying that it's always expedient that a few (or a lot of) others die so that we can keep things the way we want. The other is the voice of the reign of God, promising peace through justice, naming everyone as inside the circle of divine love, with a strategy of healing, equal protection, and table fellowship. The altars are on different horizons. To choose one, we need to turn our backs on the other.

What we're singing Sunday at St. Anne's:

Entrance: In Christ There Is No East or West (John Oxenham)
Kyrie: Kendzia ("Lead Us to the Water")
Psalm 130: With the Lord there is Mercy (Modlin)
Presentation of Gifts: Turn Around (GIA, Cooney) I chose this song because of one of the later stanzas, stanza 6, which uses the "break-in" imagery of the gospel:

Good news for he comes like a thief in the night
To take back his own from the enemy's might.
And like a small seed, or the yeast in the dough,
God's justice in silence will grow.

Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso) I'm trying this again after introducing it in winter OT. I'm trying it in the key of C for a while. When I switched it at daily mass, the singing improved by (literally) 100%. I think the tesitura is a little high on the "Hosanna" passage and the "Amen," and this seems to fix the issue. It's not that the mass isn't singable. And one size doesn't fit all. Just giving it a shot.
Communion: Faithful Family (Cooney) (link is to yesterday's blog post on this song)
Sending Forth: Lover of Us All (Schutte)

SongStories 55: Faithful Family (1986, 2000, OCP)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 15:22:00 +0000

One of the texts that is favored in the Roman Missal for the washing of feet at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday is an ancient chant song called “Ubi Caritas,” whose English refrain is rendered: “Where charity and love are, God is there.” In the Liber Usualis, the chant book used for Mass and the hours in previous years, it was listed last among the antiphons for the rite, but the rubric indicates that it is always to be sung, begun toward the end of the foot washing. The Latin text is terse: there is only one verb at the end of the antiphon, so, literally, what we see is “Where charity and love, God is there.” While the words caritas and amor are often used interchangeably for “love,” caritas often translates the Greek word agape, while amor renders the Greek philia or even eros. The tiny phrase covers a huge truth of the faith. All love flows from God, most clearly perhaps the agape love that gives with no hope or desire of return, the love that seeks first and only the good of the other. But nevertheless, all kinds of love—friendship, family love, affection, all of it—have their source as God who is love. God is the source and the ocean, and all rivers both flow from and lead back to the One.

The Holy Thursday liturgy, like the gospel of John which is proclaimed that evening, want us to be clear about what Jesus was doing with the Eucharist. As you’ve heard many times, St. John in the fourth gospel doesn’t say anything about the Last Supper itself. He has a long farewell discourse from Jesus after the supper (chapters 14-17), but about the supper, all he has to say is in chapter 13, that during the supper, Jesus took a towel, undressed, and took the role of a slave by washing the feet the disciples. After that, there are a few words about the betrayal by Judas with reference to eating from the same dish, and then the prediction of Peter’s denial, leading right to the farewell discourse. John doesn’t want us to focus on the food or the sharing of the meal without understanding what was at stake for Jesus in the meal. With important overtones throughout the passage recalling the atonement rituals of the temple, we are meant to see that the meal of Jesus is a sign of service to the world, a sign of willingness to “take on the form of a slave” in order to bring about the reconciliation of God and people, and that “do this in memory of me” is as much about imitating the self-emptying of God in Christ (which we call kenosis) as it is about eating bread and sharing a cup together. After washing the feet, we mustn’t miss the mandatum (mandate, or command) of Jesus: “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” (13:15) Throughout this passage, whenever we read the word “love,” the Greek uses the noun or verb from the root agape, that other-love that transcends self-preservation and seeks the good of the other above one’s own.

In the middle of the 1980s, there were other versions of the Ubi Caritas chant hymn available, notably the hymn version “Where Charity and Love Prevail,” and a beautiful antiphonal version by Sr. Maria of the Cross, published by the Composers Forum for Catholic Worship. I wanted to write a version that, like “Where Charity and Love Prevail,” would be useful throughout the year, accessible by all kinds of people. So I started by writing a new metric translation of the Ubi Caritas that became the four verses of “Faithful Family.” Then I wrote a refrain based on Ephesians 4:32 - 5:2, words that urge the Christian community to forgive each other and live in love:

“…(B)e kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God…” Which became, in my refrain:

Be like our God, who chose to live and learn our ways
And die in deep unbounded love.
Forgive each other tenderly,
The faithful family of our God.

Most of “Faithful Family” I’m still very happy with. One little text flaw could probably have been fixed: there’s a line that goes, “The love of Christ has gathered us to one from island ways,” and I’m afraid that using the word “island” might have been ambiguous in a way I wasn’t expecting. I hope people understand that I was using “island” the way John Donne uses it in his “No man is an island…” sermon, or as Paul Simon used it in “I Am a Rock,” which continues, “I am an island.” Obviously, I intended "island ways" to suggest the false sense of self-dependence, that it is somehow noble to be alone, that isolation is a virtue, or the purest form of humanity. But I’m always afraid someone is going to think I mean “island” like Hawaii or Jamaica or Puerto Rico, and wonder why I’m dissing nice hospitable people like that. I don’t know that people get thrown by that, but every time I sing it, I wish I’d used another word!

I also think (sometimes) that it might be too high, and should have been published a step lower. I’ve tried it in F with the choir and it sounds muddy to me, but ending that third line of the chorus on a high D (“ten-der-LY” — yikes) wasn’t my smartest move, and maybe it would be better in F and having that note be a nice reasonable C.

Oh well. I think there’s still something very right about “Faithful Family,” and it’s definitely one of the songs of mine best received here at St. Anne and in my former parish. It continues to be published in the most recent version of the Glory and Praise hymnals (3rd edition), and appears on our 2000 CD Change Our Hearts. It originally was included on our 1986 record Do Not Fear to Hope.

Faithful Family

Music and lyrics by Rory Cooney

Be like our God, who chose to live and learn our ways

And die in deep unbounded love.

Forgive each other tenderly,

The faithful family of our God.

Wherever there is charity,

Selfless, giving care,

Surely our God is there.

The love of God has gathered us

To one from island ways:

Let us sing for joy all our days.

And let us love the living God,

Merciful and kind,

Body and heart and mind.

Let us love each other well,

Hold the stranger dear,

Reaching out to all without fear.

When we are together, let us act as one,

Ways of greed and conflict done.

Let there be no bitterness,

Quarreling, nor strife:

In our midst is Christ our life.

One day in the company of the saints in light,

May we see your face shine bright,

Bright upon your family,

Faithful, human, flawed.

Shine in glory, Christ, our God.

SongStories 54: What Is This Love? (OCP, 2016)

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Thu, 31 May 2018 15:10:00 +0000

St. Agnes Senior Choir. Founding members (of 50 years)
are standing for recognition at the anniversary mass.

About eleven years ago, Terry and I were invited by the music director at St. Agnes parish in Thunder Bay, Ontario, to come up and do a concert and workshop for them. It seemed like a great opportunity to see part of Ontario I hadn’t been to before, and so we said yes and went north and had a great time. Our hosts, Marcia Vaillant (the director) and her husband Ted, also a fine musician, trombone player, and big band arranger and conductor, showed us around, and had a son (Giorgio) about our son Desi’s age, so the time we spent not rehearsing or performing was relaxing and comfortable.

Marcia came to Music Ministry Alive in 2015, the year Terry and I helped out on the team, and later asked me if I’d consider coming back to Thunder Bay for another concert and workshop, but she also wanted to commission a piece for her choir for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the choir in their parish. We conversed about the kind of song she wanted, and settled on a communion processional. The mass was going to be held in June of 2016. The most fun part of all was that several of the members of the choir were actually members of the choir when it was founded fifty years earlier! Our time in Thunder Bay in 2016 was as much fun as nine years before, and Ted and Marcia have been to Barrington and Lake Zurich to visit us as well.

Through this particular time period, I was leading a two-year program of soup suppers, videos, and book discussions on James Alison’s wonderful “course on Christianity,” a look at the whole enterprise of Church, scripture, and faith through an almost entirely new lens, called Jesus, the Forgiving Victim. Though I had been a fan of Alison’s work for years, and before him, of his mentor, René Girard, Forgiving Victim really affected me, and helped me, much like Alison pictures Jesus doing on the road to Emmaus, to reinterpret my life as though I had never really understood it before, like it was happening around me, but not to me. The most important thing turned out to be that the interpretative key for my life is Christ himself, who Christ is, as he is, or as best we can understand who he is from the New Testament: the forever-presence of God made human in a specific person who is so much different from our expectation of what a god is like that, in Alison’s words, he is much more like no god at all than our expectations of a god.

I like to write what I’m passionate about at the time I’m writing. I want to write about whatever moves me inside, and try to communicate that passion in the song. So when I got down to writing this song, trying to say something, in a question, about who Jesus is, in the surprising way that he reveals who God is to us, and invites us to join in that wonderful, creative energy:

Who is this God who comes to dine,
Whose life is broken into pieces,
And shared with us like wine?
What is this love spread before us a feast?
Let us gather at God’s table,
And learn there the ways of peace.

The verses find different ways of expressing that: all are equal in God’s eyes; all are entitled to freedom and respect; and that the source of all this outpouring of accepting, generous love is God, giving us the Spirit of Jesus, the crucified Lord, risen and present among us. There's not really much "logic" to it, it's a cascade of images and exhortations under the impetus of the moment, when under the sign of shared food, this God "who is not like the other gods" comes to dine, and is consumed by us, empowering us to...what? Be consumed by others, if we dare to be like God, and give ourselves away, or rather, be given away by Christ's hand.

For friends and strangers,
One God, one Spirit.No foes nor rivals,
One crucified Lord.No wall nor borders,
One God, one Spirit.For all the lost:
One Christ risen, present with us here.

The song's introduction (and interlude) starts on the 7th note of the scale, a little unusual, but even more so against the subdominant bass, so a tritone. This was an accident, but as I reflected on the numerology of it, 7 being the "perfect" number, the tritone being the "devil's interval," dissonant, begging for resolution—but also 3, a number we use to describe the trinitarian nature of God, its dissonance may be alerting us to the insight that God is not what we imagined God to be. Where we want intervention, we get indwelling and cooperation. Where we want power, we get service. Where we want domination, we get community. Where we want victory, we get surrender. That's the paschal mystery. It's not just about Jesus, or even about us. It's the paschal nature of Godself.

“What Is This Love?” was picked up pretty quickly by OCP in Portland, Oregon, one of my publishers. I think it’s a nice addition to the communion repertoire, with a singable refrain, and verses that allow participation, along the lines of “May We Be One,” or Marty Haugen's "Within the Reign of God." Maybe you received a copy earlier this year in OCP's choral packet, and tabled it for later consideration? Please give it a listen and an audition, and see whether it might be right for your ensemble and choir. Thank you!

For Liturgical Composers Forum: Putting the "Sing" into "Fundraising"

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Wed, 23 May 2018 20:10:00 +0000

My awesome colleagues and friends, mostly from LCF,
now surround me in my office and bring me joy
and inspiration. I think that's what they bring me...

One possible downside of being a published composer is that it's never a secret how old you are. No matter how many times I ask them to change my birthday to, say, a decade or two later than it seems to be recorded as, my publishers, bless their hearts, keep writing 1952. My birthday is May 29, so on that day, I will be 39. Well, for the 27th time. 66, if you want to be all scientific about it.

On the upside, I still just have one date, as in (1952 - ). So things could be worse. Or maybe better, for you. (See my rant about "The Dash" here.)

With first communions and confirmation taking place almost entirely in April this year, Deo gratias, I've had a more reflective May than I expected to have, and that kind of leisure around one's birthday almost inexorably leads to thinking about one's blessings and the amazing good fortune life has brought me. Let me clarify: not a fortune, exactly, lucre-wise, but I've been able to live my life among wonderful friends and family, I've made something like a living doing what I really love, and I've been affirmed in my work over many years by the people whom it has been my pleasure to serve.

Music is a grand collaboration, a school of cooperation and surrender. I've said a million times, and I believe it, that there is a sense in which I am so aware that I have no business doing what I do, that almost everyone else I know in the ministry of music and liturgy knows more or is more gifted or practiced and studied more. In a room full of my colleagues, everyone is better than I am at some aspect of ministry. But I know also that I've been given enough, and that it's not about me anyway, but about the collaboration, about building musical communities, about reminding people that Christians were "born singing," in Pere Gelineau's wonderful phrase, that God is love, and that people in love make signs of love, like singing, even nonsense syllables like ahhhh❤️---lehhhh---loo❤️ooo----yaaaa😍ah, and so on. It takes a village to make a musician, and all the unselfish friends and mentors and teachers I have had since I was a child at St. Vincent de Paul School in Phoenix, with the wonderful Daughters of Charity for teachers and choir directors, have given me a high bar to stretch toward in music ministry, and a constant reminder that, again, it's not about me, it's about us, and it's about God-with-us.

The last time I wrote an article about the Liturgical Composers Forum (though I did post a set list of a concert in other years here and here), I mentioned that they had somehow miscounted the ballots and elected me to the steering committee, where I was able to work with Tom Kendzia, Carol Browning, Jaime Cortez, Feargal King, most recently Tony Ward and Christian Cosas, and the St. Louis executive committee members Betty Halley and Paul Hasser for four years, trying to envision our future as a group and shape it not just for survival but for growth. This past January, in what had to be some kind of lesson in both humility and the need for better communication, I was re-elected to the steering committee and made chairperson in absentia. I took this as you might expect, that it was a sign from God that no one else wanted to do it, and as a punishment for missing the meeting to have lunch with my local friends from St. Vincent's church. But I also took it seriously, in the sense that, something wonderful had been given to us all—to us composers and to the church—by the work that had been begun by John Foley, SJ, from the Center for Liturgy at St. Louis University, and then by all the team members who have served the Liturgical Composers Forum (LCF) since, under the various members of the steering committee, led by Roc O'Connor SJ, and then by Tom Kendzia.

The Forum's membership, from our point of view, has always been anyone and everyone who has a "significant body of work" published by a major publisher. After some discernment about this while we were writing up and discussing some bylaws a few years ago, the membership came up with a few wrinkles on that original idea. We're still working through some of these, but one that we did implement was that people whose goals and ministries align with ours are now admitted on a case-by-case basis as "associate members," with all the rights and privileges (such as they are) of full members except the right to vote. We welcomed some of our first associate members this past January, and we look for others in the future. We imagine that composition and liturgy students, text writers, publishers, and people who might liaise with other similar groups (NPM, AGO, FDLC, etc.) might also become associate members. We've consciously tried to recruit and welcome more Hispanic composers, and we are also quite conscious of trying to encourage more women composers to attend. We had our largest turnout so far this year of women composers, but certainly are looking for more parity as we grow.

Costs are always a concern. Four years ago, we added a concert to the last night of our meeting, an option for those members who are able to stay. We invite the friends of Composers Forum and the church of St. Louis to an evening of our compositions led and sung by the members. This has been of benefit both to us and to the Mercy Center, the conference and retreat center where we meet each year, run by the Sisters of Mercy. We manage to (at least) break even every year through a combination of (modest) dues and a conference fee. We did a book project, edited by John Foley and published by Liturgical Press, a three-volume series of essays by the membership on aspects of liturgical music and composition. Under the umbrella title The Heart of Our Music (link above), the three books explored various aspects of our craft:

The Heart of Our Music: Underpinning Our Thinking: Reflections on Music and Liturgy by Members of the Liturgical Composers Forum

The Heart of Our Music: Practical Considerations: Reflections on Music and Liturgy by Members of the Liturgical Composers Forum

The Heart of Our Music: Digging Deeper: Reflections on Music and Liturgy by Members of the Liturgical Composers Forum

The royalties from all three volumes were donated by the members to the LCF.

Two areas where we currently need funding are scholarships for composers unable to pay registration costs and stipends for our two hardworking executive committee members. In the latter case, we voted that a stipend for them is a matter of justice, and we're currently working on getting grants to help cover these costs. But guess who's trying to get the grants? You guessed it: our hardworking executive committee. We think that in a year or so we may have this under control. But we feel that underwriting worthy but needy members who can't afford to come to our meetings will be an ongoing ministry of the group. We need everyone's voice. The publishers really help underwrite our costs, we closely watch our budget and our yearly fees, but things happen. Each year we work toward better communication with each other, sharing ideas and strategies for writing and balancing the demands of family, work (most in parishes or academia), and faith, we work toward new ways of mentoring and helping each other make our work better.

This is why you may have noticed that I have a birthday fundraiser going for LCF this year. Already, less than a week into the two-week drive (and it's not even my birthday), we've far exceeded my expectations, making me wish I'd just asked everyone to send ME money, and I could have had a much better vacation this summer! But instead this has been put through the fundraising arm of Facebook, and over fifty people have already contributed.

If it's possible for you to contribute via Facebook (link here), please do. LCF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so your donations are tax deductible. If you aren't a Facebook user, you can make a donation directly to LCF by sending your donation to

Liturgical Composers Forum

c/o Betty Halley

1355 Kraft Street

St. Louis, MO 63139

You don't have to worry: this won't be a yearly event for me! I just wanted to try to give us a small financial cushion going into the 2019 meeting, when we hope to give a push for women composers, and make more inroads welcoming the wonderful Spanish-language composers working for the church.

Look, I just want to say "Thank you" to all of you who support your local church musicians and especially composers and text writers. I want thank everyone who teaches music and poetry and language and theology and inspires young(ish) people of faith to want to be songwriters. I am so very grateful to people like Rev. David Windsor, CM, and Sr. Georgianna and Sr. Thomas Anne DCs, of my first parish, SVdP in Phoenix, and to Bob Klimek, Bill Fraher, Mike Javor, the late Jim Mahoney, Sr. Anthony Poerio IBVM, who has also gone before us into glory, Cyprian (Daniel) Consiglio OSB Cam., the late John Gallen, SJ, Tom Kendzia, Gary Daigle, Tom Conry, every choir member or cantor or instrumentalist who ever worked with me, my mom, my grandfather, Terry Donohoo and everyone else who inspired me, encouraged me, taught me, helped me learn to be more generous and broader in my lyrical brush strokes. There are dozens, maybe hundreds more of you, of course.

At 66, I know that my life is nearly half over, and it's about time to pass the torch to the next generation of church musicians so that they, too, can know the special kind of anonymity that comes from writing songs, the joy of teaching a pew to sing. But to borrow a couple of phrases, "to you who bow," "we will make music to you while we breathe." It's so worth the effort. It's such a joyful, rewarding ministry. It is a great honor to be a part of the Liturgical Composers Forum, and I hope you will join me in making a gift this spring for the health and longevity of our ministry!

SongStories 53: Song of the Chosen (Psalm 33) - OCP, 1985 and 1998

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Mon, 21 May 2018 17:13:00 +0000

When we were working on our first trio album for North American Liturgy Resources in 1985, I was very excited because since my You Alone album the previous year, an album which had a lot of music I’d written over the previous 10-15 years, I had written a number of new songs that reflected some new insights I’d gotten in my classes with John Gallen SJ in Phoenix. I was “beta-testing” these songs at my "new" parish (since 1983) in Phoenix, St. Jerome Catholic Community. Gary Daigle, Terry and I were very excited about doing a recording together, and maybe starting to work together as a trio.

The album that eventually came out was called Do Not Fear to Hope, and in addition to the title song, there were several songs that were anthologized from the collection in hymnals and worship aids for many years: “Come to Us,” for instance, is still published in OCP’s Glory and Praise, Third Edition and in GIA’s Gather Third Edition three decades later, as is “We Will Serve the Lord. “Faithful Family” was on that recording, as were some of my responsorial psalms like “The Lord Is Kind (Psalm 103)” and “Psalm 98, Psalm for Christmas.”

Tom Kendzia was the producer. Tom and I had been friends for about five years since we'd first met when he came to work at NALR and invited me to help introduce his music at an NPM in Detroit. Tom brought in to the sessions a former college roommate of his from Manhattanville College in New York, a fellow named Stacy Widelitz. Tom wanted Stacy to play synthesizers in place of a lot of “real” instruments, and among his keyboards Stacy had brought a state-of-the-art synth called an Emulator, which boasted a wide range of beautifully sampled orchestral and rock instruments. I had written a setting of the 19th century text “Save the People,” or “The People’s Anthem” by Ebenezer Elliott, a contemporary of Charles Dickens, that had also been used in Godspell. I had imagined the accompaniment as a woodwind quartet. Stacy played the flute, bassoon, and oboe parts separately on the Synergy, and we were all amazed at the authenticity of the sound, especially when a "real" instrument or two was added into the mix. Stacy had played an Oberheim OB-8 during the sessions.

I was new to the whole synth scene, but like everyone else had been amazed by the use of the Mellotron by the Moody Blues and other bands since the 1970s. Wendy (nee Walter) Carlos had made synths mainstream with recordings like Switched On Bach, Vangelis had a huge pop hit with the soundtrack from Chariots of Fire that featured synth as well. Tom's interest in using computers to arrange and sequence music got me mildly interested for a while, but his expertise showed up in his use of sequencing in some of his liturgical music, which was always surprising and energetic to me. I went to a workshop on the Synergy system, that Carlos had used for his performances, but the price aside, the recording studio metaphor that computer recording was based on just eluded me, and I was happy to cede all that to Tom and later to Gary in our work together.

But this whole lead-in is oriented toward the first song on the record: “Song of the Chosen.” This was a setting of Psalm 33 I had written on a private retreat at my former high school seminary. It found its way into later editions Glory and Praise hymnals and is still in the 3rd Edition, and was in Gather Comprehensive, the 1989 reboot of the Gather series published by GIA. "Song of the Chosen" had an energetic refrain, “We are God’s chosen people, we are saints. We are God’s work of art, signed and set apart: let us sing!” Later, I added the refrain, “Happy the people you have chosen, chosen to be for you alone,” so that the psalm could be used on Trinity Sunday and the RCIA Rite of Acceptance. This later refrain was featured when we re-recorded the song with alternate verses on our 1996 recording, Cries of the Spirit, Volume 2.

Stacy was experimenting with synth pads on the song, and had an idea to start the music before the downbeat with an upward-moving “portamento,” an effect that slides the tone of a note or chord upward smoothly, to land on the opening piano chords as the rhythm starts. It sounds incredibly eighties, but makes me smile every time I listen back to it. (If you haven't already done so, listen to the beginning of the SoundCloud track above.)

We wouldn't be able to afford Stacy any more, I’m sure: he went on to co-write the song “She’s Like the Wind” with the late Patrick Swayze for the movie Dirty Dancing, and did music for Beverly Hills 90210 and other television and movie scores.

"Song of the Chosen (Psalm 33)" was, when I wrote it, an attempt to write a song that would help me and others to sing into being a belief in ourselves as God’s beloved children, God’s “work of art,” against the sometimes prevailing thought of ourselves as rejected and sinful. This may be less so now, but it was a strong current in popular pre-V2 Catholicism, and as a songwriter I just wanted to offer a way, out of scripture, that might present a way out of that mindset. The refrain comes from 1 Peter 2:9 and Ephesians 2:10, combining the ideas of the chosen and the saints (Peter) and God’s work of art (Ephesians), while the verses are a metric paraphrase of almost all of Psalm 33.

The record Do Not Fear to Hope was on cassette and vinyl, and was never digitized, but I did have a friend at St. Anne's, Mark Karney, at whose studio most of our albums since 1995 (including Cries of the Spirit Volume 2) were recorded, digitize the vinyl for me so I’d have a copy.The SoundCloud track above from “Song of the Chosen” was digitized that way.

In those days, I was using the Jerusalem Bible for most of my work, and it was an approved translation in the US, with its own lectionary. Admittedly too, I wasn't sensitized yet to the way the use of the divine name (Yahweh) being used in public prayer can be insensitive to some. As one friend of mine put it, "It's like repeating a joke you don't get." Over the years, I've changed the original text which used "Yahweh" like the Jerusalem Bible did to more generally acceptable terms.

Song of the Chosen (Psalm 33)

words and music by Rory Cooney

We are God's chosen people,
We are the saints.

We are God's work of art,

Signed and set apart:

Let us sing!

1. Rejoice, you saints, in God, for praise from you is right;
Music makers, sing by play, and play with all your might!
Sing God a new song, play well upon your strings,
For God loves truth and righteousness, God's word does wondrous things.

2. God's kindness fills the world, whose word the heaven forms,
Whose singing mouth, to north and south, as spoken stars and storms,
Whose might forbids the waves to trespass on the land,
And gathers all the oceans up to cup them in a hand,
Who gathers all the oceans up to cup them in a hand.

3. God speaks and it is done, whose word existence gives,
So let the world its God revere, and hear the One-Who-Lives.
Your wondrous plan, O God, is known to you alone,
And happy is the people you have chosen for your own.

4. From heaven, God looks down upon all humankind,
God knows the dwellers of our globe, and probes the heart and mind.
No, none escapes the glance of God who reigns on high:
No secret can creation keep on earth or sea or sky,
No secret can creation keep on earth of sea or sky.

5. No king is safe from death, though armies guard him well;
No warrior armed and mounted strong can long escape from hell.
But see! The eyes of God look earthward west and east
To snatch the poor from famine's thrall, and call them to the feast.

6. So wait upon the one who is our help and shield.
Rejoice, you saints, to sing the Name. Proclaim God's might revealed.
May your blessings fall upon us all our days.
We hope in you, we trust in you. To you be endless praise.
We hope in you, we trust in you. To you be endless praise.

Copyright © 1985, 1989, 1996 OCP, Portland Oregon. All rights reserved.

Alternate refrains:
1. Happy the people you have chosen, chosen to be for you alone.
2. Lord, let your mercy be upon us; we place our trust in you.
Lord, let your mercy be upon us; we place our trust in you.

SongStories 52: This Very Morning (GIA, 1998, "This Very Morning")

noreply@blogger.com (Rorycooney) — Sat, 12 May 2018 20:24:00 +0000

Sometimes people ask me what my favorite song I've written is. There are a lot of answers to that question. My favorite answer is, "the next one." The truest answer is, "whichever one I hear people singing really well." But another answer is that there are a few songs where I think the words and music fit together really, really, well, and both words and music represent about the best that I can do. One song like that is "The Wilderness Awaits You," which was on our Today album. Another is "Let Us Go to the Altar of God," from Christ the Icon, and I think I'd include the title song of that album too. "To You Who Bow" is another, and there are others. I never publish anything that I think is less than the best I can do at the time, but some just stand out for me. This may sound weird, but I sometimes will be singing it, or hearing people sing it with me, and I'll think, "I don't know how I did this. I don't know where this came from. How did it happen?" There's a sense, and by no means do I mean this is infallible or not completely subjective, that it's better than I am, that I literally "outdid myself," because I can't trace its origin.

One song like that is "This Very Morning," which is a song we use in the Easter season, especially as we approach the feast of Pentecost. The song was commissioned by Fr. Stanley Szcapa, a priest friend of mine from my years working on Remembering Church institutes (or "The Reconciling Community") with the North American Forum on the Catechumenate, for his 25th anniversary of ordination in 1996. (Wow! Stan, that means you're just 3 years away from 50 now! I guess the "ad multos annos" superscription worked!) The date of his anniversary was on Pentecost, so I wanted to pull together the Easter season with some Pentecost imagery that would embody what in the Forum we used to call the "Pentecost perspective," a way of looking at the paschal mystery from the perspective of mission, the outward impetus of the Holy Spirit.

The paschal mystery calls us to see everything through Easter eyes. Everything that ever was is present to God right now, and so the story of God told through us, told through the revelation of scripture, told through creation, is all one story that helps us understand who we are and give us hope and momentum as we struggle to learn to love better in a world that is often nothing less than hostile to love. The presence of God, the reign of God, is here right now, this very day, this very morning. God made this day, this moment, as God made every day and moment. Here's how I did that, in stanza one, for instance:

As though this breeze were born of hovering wings,
As though this singing were the breath of God,
As though this world were wet from recent birth,
As though these thankful tongues were all the tongues of earth,
As though our eyes were lit by tongues of fire,
As though on clover paths God spoke our name,
As though a slave awoke in freedom's light,
As though from death a dream might leap as day from night,
Let us rejoice! This very morning,
This is the day that God has made: Let us rejoice now! (1)

I wanted to express this in a way that suggested the past, the present and the future were all in one moment, so I used the phrase "as though" at the beginning of each image that suggests a scriptural moment, so that each verse is constructed, "As though..., as though..., as though..., Let us rejoice! This very morning, this is the day that God has made. Let us rejoice now!" So the first line of the stanza above suggests that "this breeze" that we feel now might come from the wings of Pentecost; this singing might be God's breath, and this singing might somehow be all people everywhere. Each line refers to a reality that has been, or might be possible, carried with us in this present moment.

As though all chaos hushed at God's command,
As though earth's bounty might be shared by all,
As though from human sin a promise bloomed,
As though we wept, and saw though tears an empty tomb,
As though no power might hold God's own in thrall,
As though no human grip could grasp and hold,
As though a king could fear a baby's cry,
As though a god might hang a strongbow in the sky,
Let us rejoice! This very morning,This is the day that God has made: Let us be glad now!
As though a God might kneel to wash our feet,
As though new wind and flame might rout our fear,
As though a gift were given for every need,
As though this bread we break might all creation feed,
Let us rejoice! This very morning,This is the day that God has made: Let us be glad now! (1)

I set the music of "This Very Morning" to a simple hymn tune, with just unison choir with a soprano descant, in order to make participation as immediate as possible. Each four-line stanza has the same tune, with the eight-bar refrain happening three times. Lifting the final half-stanza by a half tone would, I hope, inspire some to take up the strain with a little more gusto. In a sense, you'd better, because the refrain ends on the highest note in the song, so unless you're going to cheat, you'd better belt.

Just because these songs make me, in a way, feel like a stranger to my own work, doesn't mean that I'm not grateful for the opportunity and the task of creating them. So many influences on my life over a lot of years made songwriting possible for me: certainly the music and poetry of others, the love I've experienced in family and friends, the expertise of teachers and mentors, the gifts and opportunities I've been given and the impetus and urgency to share them. I feel like I must be doing what I'm supposed to be doing, for better or worse, because so often it's as though these things happen not because of me, but through me. The good they are comes from above, any weakness or flaws or unworthiness are my own. I'm surprised, humbled, and delighted by the mystery of it. And I'm grateful for those who have taken risks to support me, publish and distribute my songs, and especially grateful for the affirmation and love of those who sing them, especially Gary Daigle and my wife Terry Donohoo, and my wonderful choir friends now and through the years. Thank you all. What a wondrous journey it has been, and continues to be.

This Very Morning. More information at GIA Publications.

(1) Copyright © 1998 GIA Publications, Inc. 7404 South Mason Avenue, Chicago IL 60638.
All rights reserved. Used with permission.