Albums (6) - Cries of the Spirit, Volume 1 (1991, NALR)

My sixth recording was Cries of the Spirit, Volume 1, which was released in 1991. We had finished our first CD with GIA. The situation, as I saw it at least, was that I was now musically "bi-ritual," and had published with two publishers, finally getting out of the "right of first refusal" clauses that had kept me tied to North American Liturgy Resources (NALR) for so long. To my way of thinking, every publisher always has the right of first refusal. It's just that I have the right to decide, song by song or album by album, who gets to exercise that right!

Now, there are some good reasons to stay with a single publisher, especially if they treat you well, and possibly open new doors to you as a reward of loyalty. For instance, raising the royalty rate from 10% to something higher. Let me just be clear that, to this day, no publisher has ever done this for me, except for OCP, who raises the royalty rate on pieces once they cross a sales threshold. Since octavos were not "grandfathered" in from the NALR days, I only have one song, "Yours Today," which has crossed this threshold to the higher (15%) level. But if you stay with a single publisher, people always know where to look for your music. When you have two or three, you have to go on a song by song basis, which is easy enough for you, but try briefing the wonderful parish volunteers at places where you do a concert. Not easy! Still, as the old song goes, "freedom isn't free," and one learns to be grateful for the various relationships forged with different publishers, different philosophies, business models, and points of view. My vision of church music also develops over time. As I mentioned in a recent post, the freedom I enjoy, while it can seem paralyzing at times, allows me to think through the best venue to get my music out, targeted to an appropriate audience, by being able to work through any publisher. These days, a number of composers have used several publishers. Not so much 20 years ago.

I found myself in a situation in which a number of my psalms had been used in NALR's short-lived yearly worship aid, AssemblyBook, during the four or five years it had been in existence. Some had been written specifically for the book, some were pieces of mine that had not been published before, or had been published or recorded by Bill Fosterr at Resource Publications in the late 1970s, but they were all in jeopardy of being lost if we didn't do something fast. So I asked Ray Bruno at NALR, through Tom Kendzia, if we might salvage some of those psalms, at least, by publishing a collection of them. In 1990 we signed a contract.

Tom and his family had moved back to his native Rhode Island, and he was producing this recording. He had also started working with music software made by a company called "Mark of the Unicorn," a suite called "Performer" for sequencing and "Professional Composer" for importing sequences and turning them into notes on a page. This was my first experience recording in this way. By obtaining a copy of "Composer," I was able to take the tracks and develop the printed music on a computer for the first time. 

We had a tight budget. Tom tended at the time to do a lot of live studio work, improvising parts and using musicians who were good improvisers, in addition to his arranging work. My tendency was to write everything out in advance so that I knew how the song was going to sound. I know this isn't the most creative way to do music, and I've reformed under the influence of all my fantastic musician friends, but in these days I wrote out nearly everything. So when you hear the string parts on Psalm 40 (Here I Am), for instance, or Psalm 72 (Justice Shall Flourish) on this CD, you are hearing me play each string line onto a different track using some synthesizer or other in Tom's studio lab. We  used real woodwind players—the awesome Mark and Carol Mellis—occasionally to trick the ear into listening to the "real" music, as well as percussion by the late Bob Warren and guitar by Mr. Daigle. But a lot of the string tracks weren't just "pads," they were note-by-note reproductions of my scores.


The songs on Cries of the Spirit were written between 1971 and about 1987. The earliest ones were written when I was still in the college seminary, and wasn't even twenty years old! I can't believe how long ago that was, over forty years. I'll tell you below what I remember about the couple of them that I have memories of. Two of the psalms appeared in a collection that was a suite of songs and mass parts called Missa America, which was published in a comb-bound edition, but never really caught on except, in a small way, for the Glory to God. The rest were written for, or appeared in, AssemblyBook. The greater number of the songs actually composed for AssemblyBook appeared in Volume 2, along with the psalm settings orphaned from the first two NALR collections when they went out of print.


Tracks 1, 3, 8,10, 11, 12, and 13 date from my years at St. Mary's Seminary in Perryville, Missouri, from 1971-1973. I remember, as I believe I have mentioned before, writing the music for "Here I Am" in my head one January morning as I walked toward the village cemetery through the snow during meditation time. It wasn't much, just a tune for a refrain to play on the guitar, and then the verses came later. Over the years, as I worked with mixed voices and other instruments, it grew into the SATB arrangement with strings and flute you may know from OCP books and even from GIA's Gather hymnals, since 1993's original Gather Comprehensive book.

Other tracks also developed over time. I'm sure I wrote the string parts for "Justice Shall Flourish" and "Send Out Your Spirit" just for the album, but the woodwind parts were already in use. One of my mentors in the seminary, an amazing pianist (or organist) by the name of Mike Javor, encouraged me in the writing of "Song of Longing," Psalm 41-42. Mike was 3 years older than I, which in seminary language means that I was crap in his eyes. Seminary life had it benefits, of course, and most of it was wonderful, but "vocational order" and the brutality of upperclassmen over freshmen especially was something best forgotten by everybody. Later in the year, Mike must have seen something worth encouraging in me. He loved jazz, and even though I didn't particularly think of "Song of Longing" as a jazzy piece, he told me that he thought it was "the book of psalms meets MJQ (Modern Jazz Quartet)," and he had the keyboard skills to really make it come alive.

I'll just say here that most of these songs are workhorses. They're not flashy, but they're solid enough, and melodically carry the meaning of the texts as well as I could do that as a young man who had just discovered that I had "permission" to write settings of psalms. The psalms were where I started, thanks to the breviary and daily mass, and where I still love to be. In fact, just last month, I finished my second setting of Psalm 104 for Pentecost, probably 42 years after I wrote my first one. And I'm still learning. 

Psalm 100, "Come to the House," was a new refrain I had written for verses to an older psalm with the traditional refrain, "We are his people, the sheep of his flock." The new refrain captures better the elation in the original verses, possibly because I felt less fettered by the ovine language of the predecessor. 

All the earth, all you peoples,
Lift your voices as one.
Come to the house of God: this is your home.

Father Lucien Deiss, with whom I had the pleasure to work many times when we were in Phoenix, dropped in on the recording session for the choir, and said, "I like this music very much. I believe that I wrote it." I always hoped it was his broken English way of saying, "I also set Psalm 100 - you may have heard of my little ditty, 'All the Earth.'" I would hate to think that he thought I had plagiarized it! No, he was too kind of a man. I believe that, even if it were note for note a steal, he would have said nothing in that case. The Missa America Psalm 24 was my attempt to write a more American-sounding Taizé style ostinato, which began in the key of E and rose, each verse, through F and then F# major. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. When the soloist asks, "Who can ascend the mountain of God," on her way to the F# on the second syllable of "ascend," she probably thought the music was an allegory of the text. The setting of Isaiah 12 was in 7/8 time, like a couple of other movements of Missa America, an homage to Leonard Bernstein and Dave Brubeck, among others. All I can say is, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp." It certainly pertains to my compositional acumen, at least sometimes.



The setting of Psalm 121, "Our Help," was written specifically for AssemblyBook. David Serey used some algorithm (eeny-meeny-miney-mo?) to allocate settings for publication each year as the book needed psalm settings for each Sunday. I drew a few of those assignments, and think I did a good job for the most part. This one I set in what I imagined, at least, to be the style of Tom Conry: rhythmically bold, declamatory, bracing. 



I would be remiss if I didn't mention the digital art cover of "Cries" that my brother-in-law, Gary Palmatier, came up with. He designed a number of color schemes so that we could do a whole bunch of volumes with equally striking covers. Sad to say, I guess, we only needed two. But he certainly did an incredible job.

I will post a few of this on SoundCloud so you can hear them. To hear samples of each track, visit the Cries of the Spirit, Volume 1 page at OCP, here. A few endure in OCP's missalette psalms, and at least Psalm 40, "Here I Am," also still lives in Gather. In my life, God has been good a long time. Almost 61 years, in fact!

Well, a little more than that, I guess. 

Track List

1. Psalm 40: Here I Am
2. Psalm 24: This Is the People (responsorial psalm from Missa America)
3. Psalm 116: Our Blessing Cup
4. Psalm 19: Your Words, O God
5. Psalm 34: Taste and See
6. Isaiah 12: You Will Draw Water (sprinkling rite from Missa America)
7. Psalm 100: Come to the House of God
8. Psalm 41-42: Song of Longing
9. Psalm 121: Our Help
10. Psalm 72: Justice Shall Flourish
11. Psalm 25: Remember Your Mercies
12. Psalm 104: Send Out Your Spirit
13. Psalm 98: Forever I Will Sing

Urban renewal in the city of God

"Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth."

I used to be fond of thinking and saying that that line from Psalm 104, like many other lines we quickly fire off in our prayer, is a mouthful. "Renew the face of the earth," we say. To me, it seems that when we pray those words we're implying that the structures that are standing, the most powerful of which (in my sphere) may be Western capitalism, nationalism, and manifest destiny, need to be replaced. If the Holy Spirit is going to renew the face of the earth, then certain structures, structures that institutionalize ungodly strategies of inequality, need to be "cast down from their thrones" so that the new city of God with its graceful structures of equality, harmony, and healing can rise from their ashes. Like all wild-eyed revolutionaries and (knee)jerk liberals, I thought of this happening when the right hand of God strikes with power, and the Senatus Populusque Americanus and the gates of Halliburton shall not prevail against him.

But then as I was looking over the Sunday's readings again, I was thinking, Look at how the Holy Spirit worked at Pentecost. True, you have in the Acts version of Pentecost something of a marvel: a theophany of wind and fire, and the strange report of many hearing the proclamation of the apostles in their own language. But really, how long did that moment take to develop into the movement that would sweep the empire? Two hundred years? And by then, how much of the original non-violent message of reconciliation and healing had disappeared into the edge of the sword, merely turning the vanquished into the vanquisher? And even after twenty centuries, aren't there as  many "Christians" who embrace murder and violence and greed as a way of life, as a way of hoarding life and denying it to billions of unseen others, as there are Christians who even see there's something wrong?

Look at the Gospel, an even more quiet Pentecost being described by John. Jesus "breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit. As the Father sent me, so I send you.'" John sees the "birthday of the Church" as happening on the cross, when the blood and water of childbirth flowed from the side of Christ, and when, as our newest translation of the Gospel has it, "seeing that all had been accomplished, Jesus handed over the Spirit." Pentecost with the last expiration of Christ. I think that also might be John's "Ascension," as John has made it clear that only when Jesus returns to the Father can the Holy Spirit be handed over. For John, the Paschal Mystery is accomplished in the death and resurrection of the Lord.

Perhaps the mighty wind of the Holy Spirit heard at Pentecost is much more often a quiet breeze, something  heard and experienced in prayer and or even solitude, like the moment of the annunciation, or the baptism of the Lord. One of the lovely men who are our presbyters at St. Anne never tires of using the word "power" in his homilies: the power of love, the power of the Spirit, the power of the gift, &c &c. But just what kind of power is this that gets expressed in the death of an innocent man, that takes two hundred or twenty thousand years to "work," that seems to yield little more than a human institution with all its concomitant sin, bickering, and subterfuge?

Adam and the breath of God, by Nadine Rippelmeyer

I think it must go back to the image of what kind of God we have, just what this Spirit is that is sent among us. The life of the God whom we celebrate is the Spirit of Love. It is the spirit of self-gift and dialogue, a spirit of shared power and creativity. In the final analysis, it is certainly not a power like human power, grasping, violent, judgmental, self-preserving. It's the opposite of all that. It's the "power" of love, the power that comes from completely giving the self away to the point of death for the creation of the other. Love that is willing risk on the other, even fatally. It's God breathing upon the chaos and making light, bending over the clay and breathing out into adama, and making a human person. It's love breathing its last breath, and birth happening in the same instant.

That's what I'm thinking going into the feast of Pentecost, and, I guess, Trinity Sunday, and (maybe the Ascension) for this year. I wonder what you think of all that?

Support Forum! "Putting on Christ" webinar

If there is a way to post a PDF to this blog, I can't figure it out.

I've been really busy trying to get ready for my first webinar, and the second-to-last webinar offered by the North American Forum on the Catechumenate. So I've had to let this blog go for a few days, even the "mystagogy for dummies" piece that I promised to do. First minutes I have, I will enter something.

But I hope that, if you have any interest at all, or know someone who might benefit from an introduction to the dynamics and rites of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, you will consider signing up NOW for the webinar that will take place at 2:00 p.m. EDT this Thursday, May 16. And if you can't make the webinar, maybe you can order the DVD for your parish library. Every little bit helps as we try to make a smooth departure for the home office of Forum in Washington, DC.

The webinar is called "Putting on Christ," and it's not specifically musical at all. What I hope to do is to begin from where we are in the liturgical year, so fortunately for me, right between Ascension and Pentecost, and looking back through our experience of the last  50 days as well as forward to Sunday's feast, to try to make sense of Christian initiation from the outcome of it, that is, of a Pentecost people, a church in mission. I've worked for a long time on the presentation, not on the slides, so much (there aren't any pictures!) but on the meaning and the ideas. 

At any rate, I thought you might be able to help me/us spread the word. I won't make any more for my presentation if there are a hundred people than a dozen, but Forum will, and we all know that dissolving the corporation will be a time-consuming and expensive process. Your presence will help make that easier.

In case you need it, here is a link to the site where you can sign in. Thanks for your consideration. And we need you! My mom can only sign up so many times!

Thanks to VICKIE for the idea on this - don't use mail! Log onto www.naforum.org and click the webinars tab.

Viri Galilaei (part two)

Yesterday morning, I felt myself spiraling downward. Spectacularly unmotivated, I could barely get through a morning of paper-pushing in my home office. A de rigueur wet and blustery faux autumn day. Of course, a funeral. Afterwards, made lethargic by this cocktail of bad juju, I settle into my office chair. A Facebook message posted 25 minutes earlier: checkin for lunch - with me - at McGonagill's, across the street. Only I wasn't there. Who was trying to rouse me from this torpor?

 ...You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,
 and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
 throughout Judea and Samaria,
 and to the ends of the earth.”
 When he had said this, as they were looking on,
 he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight.
While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going,
 suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them.
 They said, “Men of Galilee,
 why are you standing there looking up at the sky?

Waiting over at McGonagill's was Terri Lenz, a musician whom I'd met on Facebook. She is a Notre Dame grad (liturgy) and a former choir member at Old St. Pat's in Chicago, where my old friend Bill Fraher is director. She herself works at St. Emeric's in Country Club Hills, and is also a choral director at Marist high school in Chicago. Somehow she decided to ask me to write a song for the 50th anniversary of the school next September. The song was finished, made better by a stunning band arrangement (yes, as in high school concert band!) by no one less than the awesome Bob Moore, a fellow composer and real musician from Jacksonville, Florida. To my mere seven staves of music Bob added an astounding twenty more or so, creating a score with more notes than most of my albums in the past. She came from the south side, bearing checks, and buying lunch, with plenty of cheery and affirming conversation on her lips. 

Back at the shop, my delightful assistant G had the usual behind-the-scenes tales of the funeral to tell, and questions and strategies for the weekend and up and coming confirmation liturgies. A bride calls. Books of music need to be assembled for Sunday. Set lists arranged for iPad for wedding and weekend liturgies. No time for self-pity even if I had deserved it. A couple of friends mentioned reading this dumb blog, and in a very supportive way, which really got me to thinking about my lethargy, and how much of this self-doubt was self-induced and really just pessimistic narcissism. And it’s not just them, either, some of my friends in the choir and at the parish are very consistent about their support for me, my music, and my writing here. Exactly what else was I expecting? What is it exactly that I do? 

Why stand staring at what has gone before?
Don’t get lost in things of the past!
I, says he, will begin something new.
It’s beginning already. Haven’t you heard? (Huub Oosterhuis, “Why Stand Staring”)

In the same hour I received an email from the North American Forum on the Catechumenate reminding me to calendar (again) my webinar next Thursday, as if I'd stopped thinking about it for a second, since I'm nervous as hell about it. I guess if I’m supposed to be preaching eucharistic life, I ought to keep trying to live it. If I’m going to be asking people to stop staring into heaven and get busy with the work of the reign of God in their church and neighborhood, I ought to be doing it myself and not feeling sorry for myself. Do what you can do, I tell myself, and try not to let what you can’t do, and what you do poorly or counterproductively, oppress you. I sat here, in this chair, tearfully writing down those words of Oosterhuis yesterday afternoon. It just struck me so hard that we’re at the end of the Easter season, in the home stretch at least, and that the feast of the Ascension is just days away, and here I am staring up into the heavens like the viri Galilaei of Acts, those first disciples waiting for, what? A quick fix? A happier, more permanent ending to the story? Some kind of sign, I guess. I wondered whether the phrase "men of Galilee" might even be a mildly, even humorously,  pejorative address, you know? Galilee was considered the hinterlands, the bush, hicksville, to the Jerusalem elite. Maybe the "men in white" were trying to get them to see themselves with a wider vision. "Hey, Hoosiers, what do you think you're gonna see up there?" Hey, townies! Hey, hillbillies! Hey, Cubs fans! No, God would not allow his angels to stoop that low.

And strangers in white garments (angels? neophytes? it doesn’t matter - strangers are just other people who are not looking at us the way we see ourselves) are at the next desk, on Facebook, waiting in a pub, telling me, WTF (in so many words) are you sitting around whining about? You’re surrounded by friends, you’re the recipient of great and powerful gifts, among which is the great gift of faith, so

Why stand staring at what has gone before?
Don’t get lost in things of the past!

I am a believer in signs from God. I’m not looking for whispers in my ear, or voices in my sleep. But this conjunction of friends, the confluence of their affirmation of my past, support for me in the present, and hope for my future, and the call from scripture and song to pay attention to these white-robed “strangers” and their alarm-clock voices, they were a breakthrough for me. I’m not saying I’m going to write a great song now, or that it’ll suddenly be easy to sit through mass again. I’m just saying that I’m resolved now to do what I do again, as well as I can do it, and not be consumed by self-pity and regret for alternative futures. My life isn't fixed, but God is waiting in the brokenness.

I have made a mess of a lot of things in my life, and still by grace have managed intervals of beauty and personal and musical collaborations of wondrous depth. The weight of ennui, the press of spring's parade of events, the impossible distance between the place I'm standing and the desire I have reach a place of being good news instead of being an obstacle and stumbling block, these all seem from day to day like insurmountable problems. Christ disappears from sight. The world as I know it seems to crumble apart, who I thought I was seems like a stranger to me. From the next desk, the pub, a college in Massachusetts, a publisher in Ohio, Forum "angels" in Toronto, that patient, laughing, scolding voice falls into my spirit's ear:

Viri Galilei...Hey, old man of Lake Zurich,
 why are you standing there looking up at the sky?

Viri Galilei (part one?)

I keep wondering why the North American Forum on the Catechumenate has been unable to sustain the kind of impetus and financial energy that would make growth and success possible. What, if anything, did we do wrong? Some see it as a symbol of the decline of participation in religion and therefore of the financial strain imposed on all kinds of non-profits. Money is also still short in the wake of the US financial crisis of the past few years.

"We are seeing national lay organizations close due to lack of funds, among other things," said Marti Jewell, assistant professor at the University of Dallas' School of Ministry. "This is a concern as we are in an era when lay ministry is the lifeblood of our dioceses."
Lay ministries are less valued than clerical ministries and receive less diocesan support, said Christopher Anderson, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Association for Lay Ministry. Formerly standalone parish offices such as lay formation, religious education and youth ministry are now being consolidated. Many parishes and dioceses have implemented no-travel rules, meaning lay leaders can no longer attend conferences that were once routine." (NCR Online, May 8, 2013, "Lack of Funding Causes Lay-Run RCIA Ministry Organization to Dissolve")

The ramped-up rhetoric to tax non-profits in the USA seems to be a direct result of the disfavor in which churches find ourselves in the wake of financial scandal and the sex abuse and cover-up scandal in the Catholic church. Church pundits blame such bogeymen as "creeping secularism" and anti-Catholic bias, but I would actually call it "health" or common sense. If religion presents a sense of entitlement to contributed funds for ministers' personal or political use, and abets the abuse of children and protection of their abusers by bishops and chancery personnel, then secularism, if not atheism, seems like a good choice. What claim does the gospel have upon the money of the church and wider community, money which in most cases represents (as wages) the little time people have to spend on earth, when it is used in such ungodly ways? How can people inside and outside the church trust us (the church) with great things (their vision, time, and hope) when we have made such a mess of smaller things (their money)? 

A piece on ABC news's website (A Plague on Both Their Houses) yesterday tried to think through the mess of decline in enrollment in churches with the growth of neo-pentecostal churches in the southern hemisphere. It noted that 

"the popularity of these churches is related to the way in which Christianity is linked to access to power. People are drawn to the neo-Pentecostal movement because they believe that their participation will result in some tangible results: financial success, health, successful marriage and so on."

If that is the message they (and, let's face it, we) are sending with our preaching, then it might be better if our numbers dwindled to nothing, because there is a sense that we have lost the gospel.

Another article described reaction to a Chicago government initiative to make larger non-profits pay for the use of city water, a move that would have been unthinkable a generation (or an election) ago. 

The majority of Chicago's non-profit organizations will have to start paying for water after Mayor Rahm Emanuel's revised legislation passed in city council Wednesday.
Churches and non-profits with assets under $1 million will remain exempt, but, groups with assets between $1 million and $10 million are eligible for 60-percent exemption. (Fox News Chicago, 5/8/13)

I have been reading Eighty Days, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World lately. What is apropos of my thoughts this morning is a sidebar to the story, about the attempt to get the money raised to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, which was to be a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States at the Centennial. An arm from the statue was on display at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, but for years, Congress refused to raise the money to have a pedestal build in the harbor. The arm of Liberty came to New York then, and was placed in Central Park, where it remained for seven years while public funds could not be raised. It was then, finally, that Joseph Pulitzer, the editor of the World, the New York newspaper for which Nellie Bly was working, "issued a personal appeal for funds in the pages of the World. From the paper's working-class readers, many of them immigrants, came pennies, nickels, sometimes dollars. Within five months the $100,000 was raised—80 percent of it from donations of less than a dollar..." 

In the church, we're supposed to know this already. We're supposed to know that big things are accomplished by little people who stick together. Solidarity and consensus isn't a shortcut to success. It's the only path that works for everybody.

Forum has always taught that the very nature of the church is rebirth in the Spirit of God, enabled by the Spirit's work in awakening hearts to a gospel message of conversion from self-preservation, greed, and violence, and toward a common life of mutual service. We are reborn through the sacraments of Christian initiation into a new person. We become Christ. Together. We live no more for ourselves, but for each other, and, in a particular way, for those who have not found their way yet, or who have (perceived) obstacles of poverty, disease, ignorance or stigma between them and gospel life. It occurs to me that maybe we're losing the North American Forum on the Catechumenate because we're saying the right things. The goal of church is not power, but service; not fortification but mission. Some of us don't really believe that. We still want the white-horsed Messiah-king who will make those not like us bend to his will. We don't want a church of sinners, struggling to make sense of paschal life serving one another. We want butts in the pews, especially butts with wallets in them.

How are we in the church to be saved from the impotence of shame, the isolation of fear, the paralysis of self-doubt? It seems to me that the very nature of who we are as church is the answer. This is not our mission, it is God's mission. This is not our life, it is the Spirit of God who breathes in us. It is no longer we who live, in fact, it is Christ who lives in us. The "we" is salvation. Whenever we are immobilized by our sinfulness there has clearly been a loss of vision, a looking-inward instead of moving-outward, a desire to build ourselves up, rather than, in the image of Christ and the paschal God, a reaching-down God who "does not cling to godliness," who washes feet, and does not accumulate riches or demand sacrifice and salaam.

What we might need is a two-pronged movement forward. One is of prayer, penitential prayer, prayer that laments our loss of vision, our sinful actions, and again proclaims "kyrie, eleison", that God is God, the Christ the servant is Lord, and that our ways are dust and ashes. Then a movement outward, without demand for remuneration or status, to serve the needy, to heal, to look for need and put our myriad gifts to its service, which is what we were born (again) to do. We need to stop looking for upward movement, and learn to be like God again, and bend down to give breath to, embrace, and rescue all who are "below."

Why stand staring at what has gone before?
Don't get lost in things of the past.
I, says he, will begin something new.
It's beginning already.
Haven't you heard?
(Huub Oosterhuis, "Why Stand Staring?" Gooi en Sticht, 1967, Netherlands)

SongStories 9 - Covenant Hymn (1992, Vision; 1994, Praise the Maker's Love, GIA)

I met Gary Daigle when he moved to Phoenix to take a job at the Franciscan Renewal Center (Casa de Paz y Bien) in Scottsdale in 1985. He wasn't a part of You Alone, but he was a force when we recorded Do Not Fear to Hope in 1985 with Tom Kendzia producing. Gary was enrolled with his "boss," Fr. John Gallen, at the Corpus Christi Center classes the same as I was. A few years younger than I, he was also a few more years younger than his colleagues in the musical quartet The Dameans, with whom he had begun collaborating and performing shortly before their important 1978 recording Remember Your Love. I was the biggest fan in the world of the songs on RYL, more so even than I had been of earlier Dameans' collections, and I admit to being a little giddy that we had just met in class and were already goofing off together. It really took about zero seconds for us to hit it off, our friendship and collegiality anticipated and probably orchestrated

Gary (far left) with the Dameans, c. 1980?

by Gallen, who had also taken a liking to my songs, and who not infrequently said mass at St. Jerome's where I was working.

We had already collaborated on a handful of songs. On the NALR album Mystery, for example, Gary contributed a contrasting melody for a B section of the title song. It was originally a hymn with seven stanzas, but Gary thought it would be more effective with two of the verses (3 and 6) set to a different tune, which he supplied. I'm always amazed at how musicians manage harmony and melody, and Gary's ability to wander through keys in a short passage without giving the singer any kind of anxiety about locating a pitch is a real gift. On the same record, he also wrote the music for a text of mine to create a song called "In Our Hands." A couple of years later, we collaborated on three songs for the Safety Harbor recording, two psalm settings (116, "I Will Walk in the Presence of God", and 30, "I Will Praise You, Lord") as well as on the hymn "Carol of the Word."

All of this is by way of saying that we were not strangers to collaborating when he gave me one evening at my house a half-sheet of manuscript paper on which he had written a simple melody in the key of F, with the words "wherever you go I will follow" (and, I think, "For Maria"). He said I could use or not use the text idea, but he thought the musical idea was good and had a lot of room for him to work with an arrangement. I said, Cool, and stuck it in a folder.

I would like to be able to tell you that my world was rocked by the melody, that I couldn't get it out of my head, that I sat down immediately that night and started cranking out a text for his tune, but alas, it didn't happen that way. In fact, days and weeks went by, and even with reminders and inquiries from Gary, it didn't move to the front burner. Weeks turned into months, and he started realizing we were going nowhere fast. In the meantime, I decided one way to pay attention to this aspect of my creative life was to get away, so I went to (I think?) my mother-in-law's house in Prescott Valley, a scenic and somewhat remote setting, where I only had a notebook, a guitar, and a bible for company. I started writing a few lyrics that became some of the songs on Vision, "Create Me Again" from Psalm 51, All Things New, Spirits Seeking Light and Beauty, "Roots in the Earth" from Psalm 1, and "One Is," a eucharistic anthem I had been wanting to write that united some images in my mind from scripture with insights from Thomas Merton and the Gospel of Thomas about radical unity amid the diversity of creation. (Aside: I dream about that notebook, that I have a lot of lyrics in it that I haven't set to music, and I dream that I can't find it. I know that there are a couple of dozen songs in there, but I can't find it. Ack! Who needs dreams like that?)

But nothing for Gary's little tune on the manuscript paper.

Not to be deterred, Gary thought if it worked once, maybe it would work again, so we got a cabin somewhere in Prescott a couple of months later, and worked on some things together. What came out of that two-or-three day session was our collaboration "May We Be One," which ended up on Gary's 1994 album Praise the Maker's Love, and, thanks be to God, a text for his melody. I'm not sure what catalyzed it. It might have been rethinking the famous text from Ruth about her mother-in-law, a text that is surely more about

Rory, Terry, and Gary in St. Louis, November 1992

solidarity than it is about marriage, which is how it has so often been used, as a text for the RCIA. When I was writing it, I tried to keep solidarity as the key dynamic in mind, so that the song could be sung about all different kinds of relationships. But the primary one that we had in mind was that of a community singing to its catechumens the "new song" of a solidarity unto death. In fact, we insisted, when GIA informed us that they were going to put "Covenant Hymn" into their new edition of Gather, that they place it in the "Initiation" section of the book, rather than "marriage" or some other place, which they happily obliged.

There are two versions recorded. On Vision, we did a simple version with guitar, cello, and oboe, and just Gary and Terry singing. Later, when Gary recorded a CD under his own name called Praise the Maker's Love, he did an orchestration for strings and oboe, and set the melody for SATB.

"Covenant Hymn" remains one of our most requested concert songs, and invariably calls forth stories from people about situations in which the words and music helped them through difficult times. Funny how that "solidarity" thing works in church, isn't it, when it's so strong, and so out of our control, that it connects us and strengthens us even when we don't know each other. It consistently leads the songs from Vision in iTunes sales, and is one of our top five overall most-downloaded songs. 

Thank you for your support, and for reading the little story about the creation of "Covenant Hymn."

Covenant Hymn (Wherever You Go) - Vision (iTunes ® link)

Covenant Hymn

lyrics by Rory Cooney

Wherever you go, I will follow,

Wherever you live is my home.

Though days be of blessing or sorrow,

Though house be of canvas or stone,

Though Eden be lost to the past,

Though mountains before us be vast,

Wherever you go, I am with you.

I will never leave you alone.

Whatever you dream, I am with you,

When stars call your name in the night.

Though shadows and mist cloud the future,

Together we bear there a light.

Like Abram and Sarah we stand, 

With only a promise in hand.

But lead where you dream: I will follow.

To dream with you is my delight.

And though you should fall, you will find me,

When no other friend can you claim,

When foes beat you down or betray you,

And others desert you in shame.

When home and dreams aren’t enough,

And you run away from my love,

I’ll raise you from where you have fallen.

"Faithful to you" is my name.

Wherever you die, I will be there

To sing you to sleep with a psalm,

To soothe you with tales of our journey,

Your fears and doubts I will calm.

We’ll live when journeys are done

Forever in mem’ry as one.

And we will be buried together,

And waken to greet a new dawn.

Wherever you go, I will follow.

Behold! The horizon shines clear.

The possible gleams like a city:

Together we’ve nothing to fear.

So speak with words bold and true

The message my heart speaks to you.

You won’t be alone, I have promised.

Wherever you go, I am here.

Copyright © 1992 GIA Publications. All rights reserved.

It's May

...which is one of the reasons I haven't been writing the last couple of days. I'm still here, but there's a lot going on. I suspect for you too.

I'm trying especially to get things ready for my webinar for the North American Forum on the Catechumenate, which will take place a week from Thursday (May 16). If you can join us then, as you know, Forum can use the support. Their decision to close their doors at the end of June was based on a desire to be able to pay all their bills without declaring bankruptcy, i.e., making a responsible disappearance without unpaid bills. Knowing the people on the board, and the people who work in the DC offices, I'm sure that they have worked hard to make this happen.

Well, in this busy month, I ask you for your prayers, and keep you in mine. I have a "SongStories" post coming on Thursday. We'll see what else comes up. Meanwhile, "rejoice in the Lord always, never stop praying, and offer constant thanks to God."