Music Notes for January 15

       “Here I Am, Lord” is one of those songs which came into their own in the 80s and which are now part of the repertoire frequently chosen for funerals.  Apparently the song carries some emotional weight for those who sang it when it was “new wine,” since, if the Lord calling in the night is symbolic of death, then death becomes a vocation!  The song is actually based on today’s story of God calling the young Samuel, and on Psalm 40.

      Perhaps as we consider once more our response to Jesus’ strategic question, “What are you looking for?” and his coy invitation to “Come and see,” we might also imagine how Martin Luther King, Jr. responded to the call in the night. His birthday falls on Sunday this year, as did Christmas and the solemnities of Mary and Epiphany. He was a talented, scholarly young preacher in Montgomery in 1954 who could have led a comfortable life by simply delivering eloquent sermons and not rocking the boat.  But the bus boycott needed a leader.  To heighten our awareness of the events of the late 50s and early 60s, it may be helpful to read the book The Help, or to watch the DVD.                      

       Psalm 40 is the prayer of someone suffering a crisis of faith. We might imagine Dr. King praying this psalm in the days when it seemed the legal system was immoveable and his house was bombed.  Since the lectionary only appoints selected verses to be sung at worship, one should read the entire psalm from the Bible to experience its drama. Verses 10 and 11 read: “I announced your justice in the vast assembly . . . Your justice I kept not hid within my heart . . . I have made no secret of your kindness and your truth . . .” So the theme of justice which began in the psalms of Advent continues into the Epiphany season. Robert Christian, of Catholic University, has elaborated on Dr. King’s notion of justice in an essay, “Dr. King and Catholic Social Teaching,” available on the website of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, http://catholicsinalliance.org.  He emphasized the importance of community if human beings were to realize their full potential. As members of the body of the risen Christ, the sin of any one member harms the rest of the body, as our I Corinthians passage points out. This is especially true if one person treats another unjustly. The corollary is that we must respect life in all its forms.

       Music this weekend includes spirituals, “This Little Light of Mine” in a beautiful setting not often heard, “I Told Jesus It Would Be All Right If He Changed My Name,” from the gospel story, and “Hush! Hush! Somebody’s Callin’ My Name,” the theme of listening which will reappear for the next few weeks. “Spirit of God Within Me” is an elaboration on St. Paul’s image of the temple of the Holy Spirit, as is Matt Maher’s contemporary song, “Just Like You.”  “The Summons” has, in the last 25 years, become the classic musical meditation on the implications of listening to Jesus’ overtures.

Music Notes - 18 September 2011

       “Seek the Lord while he may found; call on him while he is near.” When is the opportune time to seek the Lord? When is he near?  Psalm 145 tells us, “The Lord is near to all who call on him,” so the Lord is certainly “near” in prayer and worship. But is he closer in times of stress, when our security blankets have been pulled out from under us, or our assumptions are challenged, or we’re up against a wall, or at a “teachable moment”? Our meditation hymn, by John Bell of Iona Abbey, goes:

    The peace of God comes close to those caught in the storm,
       foregoing lives of ease to ease the lives forlorn. . . .
    The joy of God comes close where faith encounters fears,
       where heights and depths of life are found through smiles and tears. . . .
    The grace of God comes close to those whose grace is spent,
       when hearts are tired or sore, and hope is bruised and bent. . . .
    The Son of God comes close where people praise his name,
       where bread and wine are blest and shared as when he came.
    The Son of God is here to stay, embracing those who walk his way.

Our passage from Isaiah mirrors last week’s psalm (103), challenging us to love creation as God who created it, and that thought is carried out in Psalm 145 as well. In the gospel, Jesus ups the ante: while we might conceivably manage to forgive a horrific wrong (last week), the thought of someone working an hour and getting the same eternal wage as one who toiled for a lifetime is just not “right and just.”  Too often we try to play God.  We need to let God be God, minding our own spiritual business, keeping busy as Paul says, for whom “Christ means life.” We might imagine Paul singing the spiritual, “Been so busy praising my Jesus, I ain’t got time to die.” He could also sing along with Mighty to Save: “I give my life to follow/ everything I believe in; now I surrender.” The compassion, mercy and kindness mentioned in this song are also the themes of Isaiah and the psalmist. These same ideas are also found in O Bless the Lord, My Soul, a paraphrase of Psalm 103 written by Isaac Watts in 1719, and Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven. During the summer, we heard passages from Romans 8, and we will sing Grayson Brown’s setting of If God Is For Us. Finally, God’s forgiveness is reason for a Song for Hope: “All things new, I can start again; Creator God, calling me Your friend. . . .”

- Glenn Hufnagel

Music Notes - 11 September

MUSIC NOTES FOR SEPT. 11

       The author of our Sirach reading this weekend had a keen understanding of the human heart. Something in us loves to feel sorry for ourselves, to nurse a grudge, to nurture revenge.  The anniversary of 9/11 looms large, but it ought not to obscure our memory of equally horrific events. In 1995, our own Timothy McVeigh, veteran of the first Gulf War and disgruntled by the events at Waco, bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City and was executed on June 11, 2001. Before and since, the genocides at Srebernica and in Rwanda, sectarian massacres in Sudan and India, repeated incidents of terrorism, and the helplessness of the international community to address them. Closer to home, aggressive driving fuels road rage, or a perceived “diss” is an excuse to get even. How to break the vicious circle of hurt?  Sirach, our psalmist and St. Paul suggest that we let go of our own hurt and turn outward toward others, and further, that we strive for a God’s-eye view of the situation.

       In writing his Rule, St. Benedict “sketched out a blueprint for world peace.” Joan Chittister describes Benedictine peace as “the presence of a lifestyle that makes war unacceptable and violence unnecessary. . . . The armies of the world simply demonstrate the war that is going on in our own souls, the restlessness of the enemy within us. . . .” Benedict’s plan is well-expressed in the prayer of St. Francis, “Make Me A Channel of Your Peace,” and in the song “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” The mission is carried further in Michael Joncas’ setting of John 15, “No Greater Love,” with its exhortation to “lay down your life for a friend.” “Be Still, My Soul,” set to Sibelius’ Finlandia theme, is a powerful affirmation that God is still in charge. Our meditation mantra is Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s affirmation, “Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate; light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death.”

       Music at 10:00 begins with an invitation to let Jesus come in for a visit, “Somebody’s Knockin’ At Your Door.” The communion song is based on the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” continuing, “to go from here and share this love you gave to me.” Mass concludes with “Blessed Be Your Name,” an assurance that God is with us both in adundance and want, in sunshine and in suffering.

-Glenn Hufnagel

Music Notes for September 4

This weekend’s readings begin a 4-week exploration of the dimensions of mercy and forgiveness. As people get to know each other, they become aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Thus, being in community implies a constant call to forgive each other. The power of the keys we heard about two weeks ago is always exercised on behalf of and in the name of the Body of Christ. Our music in worship this weekend reflects this call, based on the gospel text that Christ is found wherever two or three are gathered in his name. The setting for this text is a round I learned in Germany when St. Benedict’s established a sister-parish program with St. Mary’s Church in Dortmund in 1984. (There is a plaque commemorating this relationship in the front vestibule. Some parishioners are still in touch with their host families.) This theme is also expressed with the text from I Cor.13, “Where Charity and Love Prevail,” in a chant-like setting from the early days of the liturgy in English. Our gathering hymn, “I come with joy, a child of God, forgiven, loved and free,” is set to the early-American hymn tune LAND OF REST, which we used for the Holy, Holy and acclamations earlier this summer. The hymn “Forgive our sins as we forgive” is of course based on the central line from the Our Father. Our communion song, “Loving and Forgiving,” is a setting of Psalm 103, the great psalm of God’s mercy. Psalm 103 will also be next week’s responsorial psalm.
Music at 10:00 includes “Come, Now Is the Time to Worship,” a line from today’s responsorial Psalm 95. This psalm also provides the text for our offering song, “If Today You Hear His Voice,” with music by Rawn Harbor, an African-American musician from Berkeley, Calif., some of whose psalm settings will be in our new Breaking Bread hymnal this fall. We go out of church to “Your Grace Is Enough,” which reminds us that God “wrestles with the sinner’s restless heart” and “uses the weak to lead the strong.” The composer is Matt Maher, a native of Newfoundland now living in Tempe, Ariz. with his young family.

by Glenn Hufnagel

Stewards of the Mysteries of God

We began this essay last summer (in the archives for August 2010 and November 2010) with a consideration of mystery as manifested in the Trinity. This year’s unusually-long pre-Lenten season presented us with St. Paul’s reflections on “God’s secret plan.” On the feast of the Epiphany, we heard a reading from Ephesians 3, in which Paul discovers that the mystery of Christ is that all people of whatever origin share equally in the promise of salvation.

This mystery is obviously still working itself out today. Does it open our eyes to the gifts that every race, culture and language bring to our worship? And we worshipers are “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4). We wait as God “brings to light what is hidden in darkness,” because “God’s folly is wiser than all of us, and his weakness more powerful.” God demands time: there are no instant answers. Sr. Joan Chittister writes: “So mystery, the notion that something wonderful can happen at any time if we will only allow space for it, takes us into a whole new awareness of the immanence of God in time. God comes, we learn now, when we least expect it. Maybe most likely of all when we least expect it.” Can God surprise us during worship? Can we freely give him the time and space to? Or do we hold worship prisoner to our preconceived notions of how long worship should be? Or what Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter are all about? Do we need to keep liturgy on a leash, lest it lead someplace we haven’t been before?

So we come to another celebration of the Trinity, our gateway into the parables of the kingdom as recounted in Matthew’s gospel. In Matthew 13, Jesus quotes Psalm 78: “I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation of the world.” He uses imagery to appeal directly to our imagination and get around our hard-hearted obstinacy and left-brain cynicism. Alluding to Isaiah, Jesus says of his audience that they “hardly hear with their ears,” they “close their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn back to God, and be healed” (Isaiah 6:9). In the words of Psalm 95, which we will hear on September 4: “If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.” Worship in Spirit and in truth requires unstopped ears, open eyes and an eager heart. Attentive listening trumps “seeing is believing.” As Thomas Aquinas wrote of the Blessed Sacrament in the hymn Adoro te devote, “Sight, touch and taste are each deceived; the ear alone most safely is believed.” Perhaps Aquinas was conscious of his namesake apostle when he wrote those words. Faith is more a matter of listening than reading.

What does it mean to be “stewards of the mysteries of God”? James exhorts us: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1: 22) We enflesh the Word by our action, in our worship and in the world. Recall that one sense of mysterion was sacramentum, the outward sign of an inner reality. As the doers of liturgy, we will have an opportunity to grow when changes to the text of the Mass take effect this Advent. We might see this opportunity, to use another parable (Luke 13), as a fig tree being cultivated in an effort to stimulate it to bear fruit. Practically speaking, the changes to the sung refrain of the Gloria and Holy, Holy are minor. The verses of the Gloria are structured differently from what we have become accustomed to, so these will require more attention on the part of the choir and cantors, and from the congregation when the Gloria is recited. There is some debate among liturgists over whether it will be easier to use a familiar musical setting which has been revised, or a setting which has been expressly composed for the new text. We will begin practicing a new memorial acclamation in November. On occasions when worshippers from many communities may be present, such as funerals and weddings, the music will need to be familiar and as intuitive as possible. A call-and-response form of the memorial acclamation might be the most natural approach to this situation.

A greater challenge is presented by the vision of liturgy laid out in Sing to the Lord, the American bishops’ document on music in worship, and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM), which is the preface to the Missal. These documents place great importance on the singing of the dialogues, particularly before the Preface (“The Lord be with you . . . ”); the penitential rite, which Deacon Bill often does; and the opening and closing prayers. The new Missal also emphasizes singing the Lord’s Prayer. This places the ball squarely in our court. How much energy and time are we willing to invest to lend a sense of mystery to our worship? Undoubtedly part of the attraction of the Tridentine rite (sometimes called “extraordinary form”) is the chanted prayers and responses. There is no reason that these sung dialogues cannot be part of our regular worship. It certainly takes no more time to sing them than to recite them. It just takes that little push of energy to elevate a spoken acclamation to a sung one. Again, it’s a matter of attitude: are we always looking for the easy way out, the short form, “liturgy-express”?

The GIRM has this to say about our stewardship of the mysteries of God: “In the celebration of Mass the faithful form a holy people, a people whom God has made his own, a royal priesthood, so that they may give thanks to God and offer the spotless Victim not only through the hands of the priest but also together with him, and so that they may learn to offer themselves. They should, moreover, endeavor to make this clear by their deep religious sense and their charity toward brothers and sisters who participate with them in the same celebration. Thus, they are to shun any appearance of individualism or division, keeping before their eyes that they have only one Father in heaven and accordingly are all brothers and sisters to each other. Indeed, they form one body, whether by hearing the word of God, or by joining in the prayers and the singing, or above all by the common offering of sacrifice and by a common partaking at the Lord’s table. This unity is beautifully apparent from the gestures and postures observed in common by the faithful. The faithful, moreover, should not refuse to serve the People of God gladly whenever they are asked to perform some particular ministry or function in the celebration.”

Our stewardship might be seen in terms of the parables of the sower and the seed growing by itself. The energy and time we invest now are the seeds of the church of the future. Our children will reap the harvest of what we sow today (John 4: 37–38). And, once the crop has been planted, the fate of the harvest is in God’s hands (Mark 4: 26–29). We have no way of knowing if the seed has landed on good soil, on the rocks, among the thorns or will become food for the birds. Time will tell, the ultimate mystery. One of the lessons of life is the wisdom of letting go. When children grow up, parents must allow them to find their own way. When relatives or friends become old and die, we must let go of them. When we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel, it is time to let go of “stuff” and have a garage sale. The same lesson applies to music. “Sons of God” and “Here We Are,” so meaningful when Mass was first celebrated in English, were supplanted by the scripture-based music of the 70s. The music of Weston Priory seemed fresh and reminded many of the experiences they had at retreats in Vermont, but the texts did not age well (“All I Ask of You”) and often did not respect the natural rhythm of English (“Bread That Was Sown”). Composers like Joe Wise, Ray Repp, Jack Miffleton, Carey Landry, and Tom Conry all had their moment, and many of the songs we hold precious today may no longer adequately express the faith of the mid-21st century.

One approach to music claims it doesn’t matter what we sing as long as we sing. Another theory is that whatever we sing should connect with the themes of the readings for that day. The former usually leads to singing “what we know” and the latter demands time spent with the scripture to discern what God’s message for this parish is today. That message evolves over time, and taking it home in music demands growth. Everyone who has taken biology knows that whatever isn’t growing is dead. In Bob Dylan’s words, “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” We can never rest on our laurels. There is no end to the search for the pearl of great price, the field with the hidden treasure, sorting out the treasure from the trash or weeding out the garden (Matthew 13). As long as we have the leaven of the Spirit, the dough keeps rising and the bread is fresh.

Glenn Hufnagel

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this is the third part of an essay

see Part I

see Part II