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

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!