Old friends

So, Gary Daigle just had another birthday. We don't usually make a big deal of these rapidly accelerating birthdays, but we managed to get together for lunch at our local pub and hash out the mediocrities of life, commiserate over work, brag about kids, wonder about the future, and have a few laughs. There would have been more laughs if it weren't the middle of a work day and we had imbibed in some of actual beer available in a pub that has Guinness, Harp, and Smithwick's on tap, but that was ruefully out of the question with the day's schedule. Shoot, with a few black and tans we probably could have solved the Syria situation, reformed the reform of the reform, and finished an album we don't have an offer to start yet. 

It just made me think again, though, about what a great life we've had since we met on that auspicious evening in 1985 when he and Maria, newlyweds, first moved to Arizona and he took up residency as the music director at the Franciscan Renewal Center (Casa de Paz y Bien) on Lincoln Boulevard. I had been at St. Jerome's for a couple of years before that, but Jack Gallen's presence and influence and our collaboration would change both of our lives for the next (almost) thirty years.


Memorable Gary Daigle moments:

1. Meeting in John Gallen’s class, and my not believing how young you were (1985; you were 28, I was 33). I had already been a fan for seven years.
2. First time playing together, the Casa, 1985 Diocese of Phoenix priest’s retreat. Had we been drinking? We had all the music ready, sound system blaring. We had not tuned the guitar to the piano, and the first “G” chord of “Here I Am, Lord,” frightened coyotes all over Maricopa County. 
3. Saranac Lake, 1989 (?)...the remnants of Hurricane Hugo blowing the crap out of upstate NY, alone in the Guggenheim cabin with Donohoo, and the power is out. A knock at the door in the gale, fearsome as a ghost story, turned out to be our host from town, bearing Jameson’s. It is for moments like these one is born.
4. Working in London for Forum (1987?), and sneaking out from Strawberry Hill to get pub food, otherwise, the image of fish and milk stew with cheese would never get out of our heads.
5. Sneaking out from Trinity College in Dublin to get pub food a week later for similar reasons.
6. Singing Beatles songs to stay awake driving from Galway to Dublin. Two cars, you and Sita driving them, because I would have gotten us all killed. Had we been drinking? Or was that just you?
7. Concert with the Dameans in Gonzales after one of the Hoffinger concerts one year. Buddy, Gary, and Darryl were there - really, one of the really best concerts we’ve ever been part of.
8. Too many East Coast, LAREC, and Hoffinger concerts to name or remember, but you always look like y

   

   Gary's 50th birthday (2007)

   ou’re as high as a person ought to be able to be without pharmaceutical enhancement.
9. Flying over the glaciers in Anchorage in a three-seater Cessna with Joe’s wife piloting the plane; later, walking along the boardwalk with beluga whales just a few feet away, and damage from the earthquake back in the 60s still visible.
10. Hawaii, 1989 - for all the obvious reasons. Just being there.
11. My 50th birthday.
12. Your 50th birthday.
13. My 60th birthday. (We've got to stop meeting like this. Our lives are nearly half over!)
14. Making the album Keep Awake, when you lived in Louisiana in your new house-with-a-studio and we lived in Barrington. You sat with your tape recorder listening to me play through the songs and making notes. Next think I knew, we had a record. This arrangement worked so well for us that I never went back to the studio. I was saved from the agonizing gruntwork epitomized by your constant "can we listen to that snare for another hour", and you saved from me bitching about your meticulous care for detail.
15. You living with us on your commutes from Louisiana to Chicago when you were doing studio work here for GIA, and sleeping in Claire's "bed of dreams," waking up with a stunned look every day at the vivid nocturnal realities conjured in her proto-wiccan lair.
16. Unfulfilled bucket list item: performing Randy Newman's "I Love LA" with altered lyrics at the Religious Education Conference.
17. Prescott woods twice, writing the music that would become Vision and Praise the Maker's Love. Singing "I Am for You" to Donohoo over the phone, and "Covenant Hymn" too, with Ginny and Gallen in the room. Well, also seeing Basic Instinct at the movies when we'd had enough of the liturgical music.
18. Hating you say the words, "It needs a C section," when 90% of the time you're right. In the world of song crafting, you're a creepy obstetrician.
19. Telling people he's a the most generous and professional musician and collaborator they'd ever want to meet, and having them say, "I know," and telling me why.
20. Cubs, behind the dugout, with Desi and Grant at about 7 or 8, or as I like to call it, "the birth of the blues."

Well, enough nostalgia. Happy birthday again, bro. When we get a taker and figure out how to make this new recording, come over and I'll show you how the songs go. Bring your iPhone. Then don't call me until you've finished the damn thing.

The new "non-denominational"

Terry and I had the joy and privilege of singing for a service last night sponsored by Northwest Hospice, a memorial service sponsored and created by their chaplaincy for people who had experienced the loss of a family member or friend during the past year. The folks who ran it did so with grace and compassion, making a safe and inviting place to express loss and grief together.

They had asked me, probably as a professional courtesy since I'm the music director at the parish, to provide music for the service, and I said yes, of course. They said that it would be a non-denominational service, so could I please pick some music that would be non-denominational. When I hear that word, I think, "OK, avoid specifically 'Catholic' sounding hymns. Eucharistic hymns, "On This Day, O Beautiful Mother," "Long Live the Pope," things like that. Then I think, well, it would also probably apply to Jewish attendees, so maybe stick with the psalms and more unitarian songs about God. I think I suggested "New Jerusalem," a song I wrote based on Rev. 21, "The Cloud's Veil," the Liam Lawton piece, Janét Whitaker's "In Every Age," and "We Will Want No More," by Tom Kendzia.

The reply from the chaplain was kind, but I felt like I was a clueless child on reading it. The songs I had chosen were "more religious in nature" and what they wanted we "non-denominational" songs like "Turn, Turn, Turn", "Wonderful World", and "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

I was stunned, as you can imagine. Clearly, the meaning of "non-denominational" changed. I told them that of course I would be happy to play, but maybe they should pick the songs, and then I would play them, since I had a shaky idea about what "non-denominational" meant. If they picked the songs, Terry and I could sing them, and everybody would be happy and, hopefully, not offended.

Reflecting on this, I thought that part of my problem is that, as a Christian, I don't really know what I have to say to a non-believer about death if I cut Christ out of the vocabulary, cut God out of the vocabulary. It's not at all that I think that afterlife is the whole deal, but the meaning of life and death for me is so caught up in the love and memory of God and the gift of Christ that I guess I'm sort of speechless. In fact, I'm speechless even with Christ in the face of death, without Christ, I'm bewildered. But I began to see that music does give a way in, and how nature ("Wonderful World") and solidarity ("Bridge over Troubled Water") can both offer some comfort and suggest a way in for the lived gospel without what is for some the "baggage" of religion poorly preached and experienced. (My issue with "Turn, Turn, Turn," in spite of my almost adoring regard for the life and work of Pete Seeger, is that it helps us miss the point of Ecclesiastes, sugar-coating what Qoheleth (the teacher, or seeker, or quester) said about life, that with or without God, it's essentially "vanity," in the sense of "in vain" — meaningless, useless, pointless, ephemeral, "dust in the wind.")

The whole experience taught me something about compassion, about music, and about evangelization, I think. But interestingly, after I left the decision-making to them about the music we should sing at the service, what do you think they chose for the music?

• Be Not Afraid
• Covenant Hymn
• Over the Rainbow

Let me just say I had not even mentioned Covenant Hymn, but there it was, right above the insanely great Harburg/Arlen classic, which swelled my head as much as having one of my songs arranged by John Ferguson and Hal Hopson. I got over it.

So, for future reference, what would you have done? What songs would you have done for a memorial service, using the "new non-denominational" moniker and algorithm? Just in case, you know, they ask us back?

By the way, during the instrumental interludes, I wove in a quiet medley of Paul Simon's "Bookends" theme, with "You've Got a Friend" and "Bridge Over Troubled Water." And before the service, Terry sang "Safety Harbor" and "You Raise Me Up." But I'm sure you have a lot of other ideas. I'm still learning about this whole life and death thing, I guess. And learning to play some new songs, too.

What Dad wants: getting ready to hear Luke 15 again (C24O)

This will be the second time this year (or third, for daily mass attendees) that many of us will hear the parable of the two lost sons (or the "prodigal son") in this year. It comes up in Year C on the fourth Sunday of Lent, and again on a Lenten weekday, and it comes up in late Ordinary Time, the 24th Sunday, which is coming up this Sunday.

And I thought that, in order to get ready to hear it, some people who read this might not have caught my post in March, which borrows heavily from the research of Kenneth Bailey in Poet and Peasant and his work on this parable, as well as the accompanying parables of the lost sheep and the lost coins.

Rather than write it all out again, I'm going to link to it here, so that those who wish to can take another look. I go back to it all the time because its fascinating, situating Jesus as an Eastern story teller who is a master of parabolic form, and revealing details of the form that we didn't even know existed.

The article is called "Ambassadors of 'love in humiliation'", and you can read it here.

That same week, I wrote a post about a musical I wrote based on the parable of the two lost sons, a musical entitled Lost and Found. I've been thinking about this a lot, because there are two productions of the show ramping up, one this fall at Bishop McNamara High School in Kankakee with performances next month (October 18-19), and one in Hermitage, Pennsylvania at Notre Dame Church, during Lent of 2014. It's thrilling to me that interest in this little show persists after almost 25 years, considering that it is entirely self-published and has never been picked up by any publisher. It still must speak to someone! 

The blog post is entitled "All your children, Lost and Found," and you can read it here.

A synopsis of the show, with soundclips for each of the songs as they occur in the story, is on my website. You can check it out by clicking here. 

Thanks for reading. I hope some of this helps you get ready for Sunday's gospel, and then for living it more fully going forward.

Going the kingdom road alone (C23O)

If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,

wife and children, 
brothers and sisters,

and even his own life,

he cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me

cannot be my disciple.

Which of you wishing to construct a tower

does not first sit down and calculate the cost

to see if there is enough for its completion? 

Otherwise, after laying the foundation

and finding himself unable to finish the work

the onlookers should laugh at him and say,

‘This one began to build but did not have the resources to finish.’

Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down

and decide whether with ten thousand troops

he can successfully oppose another king

advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops? 

But if not, while he is still far away,

he will send a delegation to ask for peace terms. 

In the same way, anyone of you
 who does not renounce all his possessions

cannot be my disciple.


Do you have those times in your life when the same thoughts come to you over and over, as though some mystical paradigm were trying to transform your whole vision, and make sense of things in new ways that didn’t occur to you previously? I know that I must seem like a Johnny One-Note sometimes. I can’t shake this image-of-God thing, the peculiarly unoriginal idea that Christ reveals God, and that what we seem to have done is opt for something else revealing God. Charlemagne? Donald Trump? Darth Vader? Stephen Hawking? Oprah Winfrey? Bill Gates? I’m not sure. 

One element of this whole thing seems clear to me: God must be inviting, rather than

coercive. Christ is always inviting. “Follow me.” “Come and see.” That kind of thing. You don’t see Jesus setting up a kingdom and a draft. Even in the Hebrew scriptures, you get the idea that people get a choice. One interesting aspect of this, to me, is that one way that God seems to get enthusiastic supporters is by choosing losers, second, third, fourth, and eighth-borns, for instance. People with speech impediments, cowards, bigots, courtesans, widows, children. I mean, Moses might be seen to some extent as “bullied” into service, but the guy was a murderer. Maybe it was like he owed back taxes or something. No, that can’t be it; not in this scenario. He might have been surprised by God’s instructions, reluctant to go back to the place of power in the light of his status as a wanted man, but he wasn’t forced.

In the Christian scriptures, of course, there’s Paul. His “conversion” looks suspiciously at first glance like the “conversions” the conquistadores, or possibly Saul himself, forced upon infidels and apostates, deprogramming followers of The Way at the point of the sword. But in reality, wasn't Paul as a thoughtful and pious Pharisee, whose encounter with Stephen and other Christians might already have been working on him, so that the famous blinding light that knocked him off of his horse came as much from within as from the skies? And after all is said and done, a question (“Saul, why do you persecute me?”) is not a coercion.

I feel fairly certain that, whatever it might mean in its fullness in this time and place, that the core of Jesus’s message continues to be, “Turn away from sin, and believe in the good news: the empire of God is near.” Furthermore, I think that the core of that proclamation is for the earth here and now, and not merely a promise that if we are good and suffer long enough, we’ll have it better in the next life. The “empire of God” is an alternative to the empire of Wall Street, bin Laden, Bechtel, and the rest of them. The choice is clear, but we’ve made peace with such counterfeits of the God of Jesus for the last eighteen centuries (millennia?) that we are, even in our churches, confused about whom it is that we worship. We worship a God who is “all powerful” and omnipotent, yet, rather than defining power as service by the example of Jesus, we define power as conquest and victory, we define power as messianism in the very way that Jesus rejected it, rebuking Peter to say, “Get behind me! Follow me, you satan!” Peter was looking down the road to an empire like that of the Pax Romana. Jesus was seeing the empire of God, the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah, where the lion and lamb browse together, where rivers flow in the desert, and there is a feast spread for all nations together.

What Jesus did, it appears to me, is just start living in God’s reign, and so was able to demonstrate some signs of its presence, healing, reconciling, casting out demons, feeding all kinds of people. He kept inviting even when criticized for his actions, as happens at the start of Luke 15 in next Sunday’s gospel. “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus lives in the empire of God as the host of a meal, washing feet, bringing together enemies, like Levi the tax collector (a Roman collaborator) and Simon the Zealot (a Jewish armed radical), and possibly even Judas of the Iscarioth, a group of street assassins who murdered collaborators in public acts of terrorism. For Jesus, his meals surrounded by the lions and lambs of first century Palestine, feeding the multitudes, and the healings and exorcisms were all signs of the arrival of God’s empire, and that Jesus had begun to live there, inviting others into the new world to see for themselves.

But when the hammer fell, he couldn’t ask them to come with him. Why not? Because he was caught up in God’s agape, and that is a place and way of being that is a place of complete self-gift, and there’s a sense in which one can only choose to go there. Whereas it seems, from the gospel, that Jesus had clearly begun to see that his road was leading to the Pilate's version of the firing squad, and that, in fact, he had begun to plan for it with covert signals among his allies (like the tethered donkey for the Jerusalem procession, and the prepared “upper room” for the Passover), the disciples seemed to be oblivious to the mortal danger right up to the moment of his arrest. The solidarity of the little band is dissolved in the face of Caesar’s empire’s savage peacemaking, at least for the moment. 

I feel like that sometimes. That I want the church to be in solidarity, like the community of disciples, that we could make a difference if we listened to each other, discerned the needs of our communities and world, and discerned our abilities to serve them. I feel that we could make a difference by sticking together, we could change things, cure poverty, homelessness, disease, hunger, all kinds of things. But there comes a time when you can’t say, “you have to do this, we have to stick together,” because there’s mortal danger involved. Sometimes you have to go it alone, in trust, and see what happens. You really can’t take anyone anywhere you won’t go yourself, and you can’t even ask them to go first, and lead you there. This is really where the crisis of faith happens. There’s a threshold we have to cross, together or alone, and it’s only on the other side of it that the line between life and death starts to blur.

Honestly, I think that there’s something about gift in that moment, like the voice at the Jordan, or the transfiguration moment, a moment of clarity and insight and vision. We can’t get to that moment at all - we can only be aware that someone is calling us “beloved” and that we have a destiny to live in an empire that is without violence or coercion. For anyone who gets that gift, it’s important to keep inviting, and not to use too many words like “must” and “should”, especially in the second person. The other side of those moments is the realm of parable and street theater - Good Samaritans, recalcitrant sons, and laughing over a pint of draught with the scum of the earth.

In some ways, I think I’ve been given some of that insight, and I’m afraid to admit that because I’m not ready to be that bold and certain. Maybe my faith is weak, or maybe I’m afraid of something else. I keep pushing for some sense of solidarity with people who see things similarly to me. There keeps arising this place to which I want to be led, but I don’t think I can lead anyone there right now. Maybe I don’t “hate my father, mother, sister and brother” and the rest of my family and friends yet, or rather, I don’t love Christ or have enough confidence and faith that I can cast the twin mountains of my self-doubt and the reign of Caesar into the sea. Or, maybe it’s all right for me to be calculating the outlay, as the gospel says. I’m fairly sure, though, that a homilist I recently heard was just crazy when he told the congregation that Jesus didn’t really mean “take up your cross” when he said it, because he himself hadn’t gone to the cross yet. What? Like people would just throw around a phrase like that about the most hated and feared form of capital punishment known to them! I think Jesus knew that only one of the empires vying for peoples’ hearts in the first century used the cross, and it wasn’t God’s. And that path is as surely for the disciple as it is for the master, though it has to be chosen freely when one opts for the empire of God and its justice.

Meanwhile, these timid thoughts continue to percolate in my head. Invite, invite, invite. Be together, form working groups and coalitions and conspiracies of grace. Form a strategy for resisting missile strikes and other violence, class oppression, and consumption. But let the heart of it be a God who lets the sun shine and the rain fall upon the good and the bad alike, so that we choose compassion on the journey, so that we, all of us, can choose to live together in the freedom of God’s children, in this world, but God's empire. Then, the guns, turrets, and walls of Caesar’s empire will not even crumble; they will just evaporate.

Albums 10 — Stony Landscapes (1994-GIA)

You

You 
You visit the earth
You make it fruitful
You make it bloom
You
Your rivers overflow
Spilling to earth in the rain
You call forth the grain.

To you belong the sowing and the harvest,
To you alone the rainfall and the sun
We will praise your name
You have staked your claim
On the fierce and stony landscape of the human heart.

("Psalm 65: You" by Rory Cooney © 1994 GIA Publications)

(Note: excerpts of all the songs can be heard in the iTunes window at the bottom of the page.)

Stony Landscapes was the last recording we made in Phoenix. Lots of things in life were in transition. It was late summer and fall of 1993, and in January of 1994 I left Phoenix to take the job I currently hold at St. Anne's in Barrington. 

As a collection, there's not much that holds Stony Landscapes together, but on listening to it again recently, I am struck by the beauty of it, if I can be permitted what sounds like self-praise. Those of you who know the process, though, know that the beauty of the recording is less the work of the songwriter than of the producer and performers, who take the music from the page and turn it from an idea into sound waves, something that we can experience as human beings in a meaningful way. Gary's selection of instruments and voices and microphones all work together to provide a really engaging listening experience. Terry's warm vocals and the choir's enthusiastic interpretations of the songs make the ancient feelings of psalms, canticles, and the Exodus reading stir the listening heart. When I listen to the recording, over which I had very little influence, I'm proud to have written and/or arranged the music that washes over me.

Looking over the liner notes, I notice again that the choir reads like a Who's Who of the pastoral music field — Jeff Honoré, Jaime Cortez, Paul Hillebrand, Mike Wieser, John Flaherty — among others, sang on the recording. The same amazing string section that played on Vision played on SL, the string faculty of ASU including the longtime conductor and concertmaster, Eugene Lombardi. Paula Wolak, Tom Kendzia's sister-in-law and a brilliant engineer, engineered the recording, and her friend Tom "Blue" Mortenson played pedal steel on "You". My friends Mark and Carol Mellis played woodwinds, including Mark's soprano sax playing on the Exodus reading, and the great Frank Smith played tenor "Litany of Deliverance." The rhythm section was Beth Lederman, Tim Downs, and Jon Murray, aided by Todd Chuba on percussion and Gary Daigle on guitars.

The songs

You/Psalm 65. Psalm 65 just comes around once every three years on Sunday, on the day when the parable of the sower comes up as the gospel. I wanted to write a psalm setting that drew attention to the sower in the parable, hence, the simple title "You," and the repetition of the word throughout the paraphrase of the psalm. The antiphon given in the lectionary, "The seed that falls on good ground will yield a fruitful harvest," in my view hides the central truth of the parable, which is that the Sower is so abundant with the sowing. The sower throws that seed everywhere! That the gospel writer goes on to give an allegorical interpretation to the parable is undeniable, but its quite likely that the interpretation is not the point that Jesus tried to make in the telling. The lyric quote at the beginning of this blog entry is the first stanza and refrain of "You." Aside from its use again on Terry's 2003 album Family Resemblance, this was the only time we've used pedal steel guitar on one of our recordings.

Live the Promise. I was asked to write the theme song for the 1994 Religious Education Congress in Los Angeles. The congress that year was held on the first Sunday of Lent in a B (Mark) year, with a first reading about the covenant with Noah and the flood (Gen. 9: 8-17). The theme of the conference was "Live the Promise/Viva la Promesa," and they wanted the theme in the song lyrics. It is a huge privilege to be able to write the theme for this conference, when 20,000 people or more will be singing and praying this song for a whole weekend and beyond. There's hardly a better experience for a songwriter than to hear a great orchestra and an enthusiastic assembly filling the Anaheim Ducks arena praying your song with such fervor!

I chose the style of a spiritual to write in, with a lot of repetition in the lyric for easy of memorization. I also tried to use imagery that was evocative, since the imagery of the rainbow implied "looking up to the sky," and the theme of promise urged a "looking beyond" the trials of the present toward a better world in the reign of God. Hence the invitation to see the covenant as God, too, taking a new path:

• "O God, you were a warrior, but you set your bow in the sky..."
• "Wandering in the desert when your cloud appeared in the sky..."
• "Searching for a savior when your star appeared in the sky..."
• "There's a battle in the family, there's a hole of death in the sky..."

Whatever the difficulty, however impossible the situation, past, present, or future, there is hope in solidarity around God's promise.

Psalm 34 for Weddings: Every Morning in Your Eyes. I wrote this for our friends' Mary Beth and Mike Hirte's wedding, on my birthday, in May of 1993. It's been used at a lot of weddings since then. In the publication notes, I gave some background on my paraphrase of Psalm 34 that was suggested by my friend and mentor John Gallen's (S.J.) insights on Psalm 34 and the Eucharist. He taught that for the Jewish imagination, "the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord," literally, because everything is made from God's self. While this notion sparkles around in the psalms, it is probably nowhere clearer than when the psalmist says in Psalm 34, "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord," that is, dive into the experience of God by means of your senses. To experience creation is to experience the Creator.

Now, bring that insight into the wedding liturgy, into the union of lovers. It's not a surprise, really. We just didn't know what we were experiencing before we were told!

Every morning in your eyes, all my life,
I will bless God always, ever near,
Near as you, my friend.
Taste and see, touch and hear,
The faithful love of God.

Vespers Triptych

• Lively Light (Phos Hilaron)
• Psalm 141: Only Empty Hands
• "Winter" Magnificat* (Morning Song)

Probably the previous year at the LAREC Gary, Terry, and I were asked to do Evening Prayer one night, which is simultaneous to some of the eucharistic liturgies to give people an option. These three little pieces I wrote or arranged for that event. "Lively Light" is an adaptation of the Phos Hilaron, an ancient hymn for the beginning of Vespers for the lamplighting. I wanted to suggest a slightly modern take on the hymn, that even though we are beginning evening prayer, there are other people in the world just waking up. Light is indeed lively!

Lively light, light to cheer,
Sign of God-among-us here,
Light from ageless glory poured,
Radiant, splendid, Christ the Lord.
Daylight dims, reddens, fades;
Light we lights that hands have made.
Other voices greet the dawn,
Mingling morn and evensong.
Evening star, forge of days,
Worthy of the purest praise,
Timeless word and deathless flame,
All the worlds must know your name. 
(©1995 GIA Publications)

"Psalm 141: Only Empty Hands" is a darker take (no pun intended) on the traditional vespers psalm. In the reading that I did in preparation, what seemed clearer to me than anything was that there is a lot in the ancient versions of the psalm that is unknown, untranslatable bits and fragments that translators have just had to guess at. Another thing I thought was that other settings seemed to miss the literal darkness within the psalmist: this is a person in trouble. I thought of Elijah in the wilderness, sought by Jezebel, or David when he was being hunted by Saul. The singer wants to pray in the temple but can't, is unable to show his face. He wants to offer incense, but can't. It's not just a wish to "let my prayer rise like incense," it's a matter of necessity. So that's what I tried to capture in the music.

I also experimented with form. Rather than use verse-refrain form like most versions I know of the psalm, the antiphon here is sung just at the beginning and end. The verses are call-and-response, with simple melodic ideas that mostly repeat melodically what the cantor has sung, or, as in the second half, the assembly leads the cantor after hearing the melody of its lines intoned by the accompaniment. I really wish this version had gotten a better hearing, but I suspect that the fact that it is a metric paraphrase and not an authorized translation is an impediment to wider usage, especially where people actually sing vespers!

Finally there is Sister Miriam Therese Winter's bold Magnificat, "My soul gives glory to my God," which springs from her feminist heart with the proclamation, "My God has done great things for me, Holy is her name!" I used the tune MORNING SONG, often used with the Advent hymn "The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns," to set her text, and did a simple choral arrangement with piano and flute accompaniment.

Building a City is a song I wrote for my eldest son Joel's graduation. It's just a pop song with as much love and hope as I could write into it, using his class's graduation theme as the starting point.

Exodus Reading for the Great Vigil. I wrote about this in a blog entry about my various musical contributions for the Easter Vigil. You can see more about that by reading here. I'm grateful for those of you who have tried this over the years. My work in the North American Forum on the Catechumenate let me offer this as a workshop piece around the country and in Canada, and it was generally received with great enthusiasm. This is possibly the best known song of mine on this recording, though it only gets used (at most) once a year!

Carol of the Stranger. I wrote this song at Terry's house in St. Louis one day when she was at work. This was the first time we recorded it, and we re-recorded it on Terry's 1998 Christmas CD, On Christmas Day in the Morning. On this recording, the first and last stanzas were sung by my eleven-year-old (then) daughter, Claire. It's twenty years hence; you can do the math! The text exploits the surprising presence of Christ in the stranger: a newborn child, a lover, the needy, catechumens, and its final stanza focuses on the word "welcome," as if to say, "Whoever you are, we are here. It's a tough life, but we'll help you become who you were meant to be."

Welcome, tiny stranger, to hunger and frost,
To armored invaders, to paradise lost.
Come join in the vigil for which you were born:
Keep watch through the darkness, and welcome the morn.
Welcome, welcome, welcome! (© 1995 GIA Publications)

Litany of Deliverance was intended by me as an option for the prayer of scrutiny during Lent, on those Sundays when the scrutinies are celebrated with the elect. The setting is in a blues style, a departure for me and certainly for the liturgy most of time! I tried not to pull any punches in the litany of sins from which we are all longing to be rescued, and the refrain "Deliver us, O God! Listen to your people! Deliver us, O God" is repeated more and more insistently through the song. 

I do see that it would be more appropriate if there were some intercession for enlightenment in the invocations as well, a lack which I remedied in a later Litany for the Scrutinies that appeared in our 2006 collection, Today. However, the shortcomings of the text can easily be remedied by creative music directors working with their RCIA teams. It was meant to be a flexible form, after all!

Hard Times, Come Again No More** This is the famous Stephen Foster song, which I arranged for our trio to be able to sing for concerts a capella. Nothing too fancy, just an homage to a great songwriter and a song that we all have in our hearts at one time or another. It has always been a great pleasure, not to mention a privilege, to be able to make music with Terry and Gary before audiences and congregations here as well as in England and Ireland. When we can sing a song like this, whose words and music express so touchingly the human condition, it feels like being a part of a great river of song whose source is the creation, and to which David, and Homer, and rhapsodes and bards of every age have contributed. Thanks be to God, that has been part of our calling as well. And it feels like we have a few more years left in us.

I sure hope so! (Stony Landscapes page on the GIA website, for sheet music and CDs.)

*Text by Sr. Miriam Therese Winter, MMS
**Music and lyrics by Stephen Foster, arranged by RC

The i(Pad) doesn't lie - funeral music

Being a parish musician is not, in terms of physical labor, a difficult job. Most of us who do it have chosen it freely, we do it because it's the kind of work we love. But that is not to say that it's always easy. For one thing, the concept of "weekend" that guides the rest of the free world like a commercial Polaris is a fiction. The worst kind of fiction: the kind that stands in the corner and laughs at you for imagining it. The universe's weekend is the parish musician's Monday. Parish musicians' weekend is whenever you can make it. Sure, we say "I'll take Monday and Thursday off this week," but if there is a funeral or two on Monday or Thursday, well, somebody's got to play it, and it is us.

Most weeks things work out OK, but it can be hard to stay sharp and "on" when, as happened yesterday, you have a funeral, two weddings, and a regularly scheduled evening mass to play. It can seem like you're never out of church, like this past week, when there was only one day that did not have a funeral come up, and with the holiday mass on Monday morning, the liturgical beat goes on. As the old Irish priest used to say, "It's a fine life if you don't weaken."

This can give the devil's workshop between the ears time to consider things like the possible number of times one has played "On Eagle's Wings" in thirty years of full-time music ministry. (Over a thousand, and I would be happy to play it another thousand, if I can remember the chords at 90.)

I was thinking the other day about the way that the iPad app ForScore keeps playlists might say something mildly interesting about funeral repertoire. Now, one can keep a playlist with only the music for today's mass, or today's wedding or funeral or concert. But the way I chose to do funeral and wedding playlists when I started with the iPad (on approximately the day after the ForScore app was released) was to keep all the funeral music in a single playlist, and just move the songs to the top that I am using for today's liturgy. It struck me that, over time, the list would sort itself in such a way that the top twenty or so songs that are most consistently used would remain near the top, allowing for occasional anomalies where a family asks for a less-often used piece. After a few more funerals, that piece would be pushed down the playlist, and replaced with (mostly) more frequently used songs. 

The way we choose funeral music is probably very much like you do in your parish. I prepared a list of songs, both songs in our hymnal and songs from other liturgical resources, since the assemblies that gather for funerals are anything but homogeneous, which our bereavement ministers use when they sit with families and choose readings and songs, and collect notes for the homilist. This is done for every funeral. Our bereavement ministers know from me that the list, which has a hundred or so titles, is not meant to be exhaustive but might help people think about how to pray in their loss. People may, and often do, ask for songs that aren't on the list. As best we can, within the bounds of propriety to the extent that I'm able to discern them, we accommodate them.

So the photo to the right is a picture of the top of my funeral playlist after the funeral Saturday morning. What won't appear on the list are songs that I haven't scanned or purchased for the iPad, some of which we do with some frequency, like Thomas Dorsey's old standard, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." But so that you can compare my list with what you do, here are the top 25 songs on the list.

How Great Thou Art
Shepherd Me, O God
Celtic Alleluia
Hosea
(Mass of Creation 2011)
On Eagle's Wings
Amazing Grace
Hold Me In Life
Ave Maria (Schubert)
Prayer of St. Francis
Here I Am, Lord (Schutte)
May the Angels Lead You into Paradise (Joncas)
Morning Has Broken
I Will Walk in the Presence of God (Ps. 116, Daigle)
New Jerusalem
Be Not Afraid
Taste and See (Moore)
I Am for You
Let There Be Peace on Earth
You Are Mine
We Remember
One Bread, One body
Sing with All the Saints in Glory (Ode to Joy)
Psalm 23 (Gelineau)
Just a Closer Walk with Thee
I Am the Bread of Life (Toolan)

I put the Celtic Alleluia in italics because I almost never do it at funerals. We usually do the Alleluia from O Filii et Filiae, to keep things in an Easter motif. But the most recent funeral requested the Celtic, and I knew that the cantors were altos, so I put it on my list in the key of G, because I only have it memorized in A. "I Will Walk (Ps. 116)" and "I Am for You" are in italics because they are anomalies, not generally used at funerals, but they have been used within the last couple of weeks, and so they appear on the list, not having been moved down far enough by "normal" songs yet.

Factoid: "Ave Maria" by Schubert actually appears on my iPad three times in the top 25, because I play it in different keys for different cantors. That says a little something about its popularity, I suppose!

There are another 30 or so songs in the iPad list that get played with some frequency, and another 10 or so at the bottom that I've used once or twice. "Danny Boy" is on there, and "You Raise Me Up" "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen" and "What a Wonderful World." I take it as a sign that, because church "rules" about music can be bent for the rich and famous (for instance, when at the cathedral "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" was played at Harry Carey's funeral during the final procession), they can be bent for the not-so-rich and otherwise-unknown when grief enters their houses as well. I resist, I expect that the funeral liturgy will proclaim the resurrection. Since the resurrection is such a surprise, and I have no idea what that means as well, I've had to decide that assuaging a family's grief by (rarely) playing a song "sacred" only to the memory of the deceased won't keep me or them out of heaven. And if it did, who needs a god like that?

Do. Be. Do. Be. Do. The Labor Day song.

Here I go again, playing the opening hymn for mass on Labor Day (Morning Has Broken) and pondering the irony of being one of two people on the parish payroll who were in fact “called in to work” on a national (and diocesan) holiday.

Off topic: I wonder what Eleanor Farjeon was thinking with verse 3 of “Morning Has Broken.” Many hymnals seem to have, as the last line of the stanza, 

“Praise with elation,
Praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.” 

To me, “recreation of the new day” seems tautological; one can recreate the first day, or create a new day, but I’m not so sure about recreating the new day; it doesn’t reveal anything new. I wonder whether she meant “Gods recreation on the new day,” as though God’s rest, God’s play (recreation) were perceived in creation as she is experiencing it? IOW, is it re-creation or recreation? I guess it’s quite possible she meant the former, that this day, with its blackbirds, singing, new fall of rain and dewfall on grass, is a re-creation of the “new day” of creation. Thinking about this, it’s no wonder that I can’t remember how to play the song and lose my place in the middle of the second stanza.

Back on topic, such as it is: Labor Day. Was there ever a holiday so out of favor since the great Catholic working class of the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries became the dominant class in USA, and the labor unions which had been reluctantly but solidly championed by Leo XIII fell into disfavor because of their greed, corruption, and often violently monopolistic tactics? And I say that with love, because I’m a guy who would like to see the labor unions reemerge in this country as a force that Wall Street has to reckon with. Labor Day is a working day for the retail workers of the USA, and almost no one pauses to reflect on the dignity of labor, the meaning of work in the life of the country (and, to us, the church), or to celebrate the corrective solidarity of labor unions, which was the origin of this great holiday in the first place. We like having a Monday off, of course. We don't really talk much about why labor unions were (are) needed, how much blood was spilt in the rise of the labor movement, most of it the blood of working people, and how the fattening of the 1% happened simultaneously with the mostly self-inflicted debilitation of the solidarity of the labor movement.

We hear part of the creation story in Genesis, the creation of people “in God’s own image, male and female,” with the subsequent command to have a lot of babies and fill the earth and “subdue” it, followed by God’s sitting back on day seven in the cosmic La-Z-Boy and seeing that “it was very good,” and sitting back with a Godweiser and taking a nap. But hearing that story on Labor Day leads me to recall that I learned long ago that it was not the creation story that is the foundational myth of Israel, but the story of the Exodus. It was the story of the freeing of their ancestors from slavery that formed Israel and thus informed the creation myth. God rests on the seventh day and makes it holy to set a pattern for people forever. This nation of former slaves writes into its cultural constitution that no one, not even a slave, is to work seven days. Everyone gets a day of rest, because God rests. The corporate memory of the experience of slavery is transformed into the principle of sabbath, and by extension, jubilee.

Doing what we love to do makes work not seem like work, at least most of the time. This is a divine gift, what anthropologist Joseph Campbell used to call “following your bliss.” And it struck me that this is exactly what God does, if we just add “for the Other” to the formula: Do what you love to do...for the Other. Since it is God’s nature to be/do-for-others, God’s self-giving in creation is a manifestation of who God is. “Do” and “be” in God is one and the same. To the extent that we are able to “do” and “be” for others, so that our work and play are for the good and life of others, our work and play, all of our life, participates in agape, the divine nature of God-is-love.

So this is now yet another thing I shall add to my list of things to pray for for my children: that they will always find work that is more than just a paycheck, more than just a way to kill time. That they will always look for and find work that is both their bliss, something they love to do, and life-giving for others, whether it’s helping other people live happier and more productive lives, or writing a poem or story or song to edify them, or whatever it may be. That, and finding a partner and/or good friends to help see them through life, discern its mysteries and negotiate its bends and turns. 

Anyway, nothing too deep there, just a sigh from a Catholic boy who doesn’t quite see the move from working class to upper middle class for the great-grandchildren of Catholic immigrants in America to have been a universally good thing. Seeing Labor Day go from a celebration of solidarity to a placid threshold between summer and fall doesn’t seem like a step forward. The day is not without its lessons to anyone with ears to hear, even if you are, like me, one of the ironic class summoned from sleep to the chapel office before the malls open or the grills are fired up in summer’s ninth inning.

Labor Day: Do. Be. Do. Be. Do.    (Be!)