From "I" to "thou" to "we"

One of the foundational books for me in discovering a meaning of sacrament that I both could understand and give my life to was Edward Schillebeeckx’s book from the 1970s, Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God. It is my understanding that it was Schillebeeckx’s theology, along with that of Rahner and Fischer and other European liturgical theologians, that really underpinned the Vatican Council’s view of the sacred liturgy. A brief summary of his thesis goes something like this: Jesus Christ is the sacrament, that is, the “visible sign of an invisible reality,” of God, and his presence in the world of history and of faith is God’s work at reconciling the universe. God reaches out, as it were, in the incarnation, to bring humanity close; so close, in fact, that we can say that we share, by virtue of the indwelling Holy Spirit of God, in the actual life of God. Schillebeeckx goes on to say that, by virtue of the indwelling spirit in the life of the Christian, the Church is the sacrament of Christ (and a priori of God), and the sacraments of the church are sacraments precisely because in them we experience the healing, reconciling, creative energy of God.

What never occurred to me was that the very word “encounter,” when used in a theological context, was already loaded in Schillebeeckx’s generation of writers and theologians by the work of Martin Buber, for whom “encounter” summarized the energy of all relationship. Buber’s dictum was that "All actual life is encounter,” and he described all relationship in terms of “I-it” encounters, mediated by thought, judgment, value, etc., and “I-Thou” encounters, in which person encounter other persons and things in their otherness without preconception or judgment. Encounters with God are all of the I-Thou variety, because it is the only way in which God, who is infinite, can be experienced. In fact, Buber would suggest that a rare I-Thou encounter with anything, a place, a thing, or a person, would also be an encounter with the infinite, suggesting that all things are bound in being in oneness with the Creator. We “oscillate” in our encounters along a continuum between the more common I-it relationship of objectification and the I-Thou between subjects. The whole theory of encounter, though, underpins the sacramental theology of Schillebeeckx, or so it seems to me.

I don’t even know why all of this occurred to me, but I was thinking about it the context of the Eucharist, for better or worse. As a church, as Christ, in the Eucharist we set out to experience God’s  presence in certain created things: bread and wine, spoken words, priests, and one another. On rare occasions, we are stunned by the encounter, though generally I’m with Annie Dillard that it’s probably safer for us to stay asleep to God’s presence, or perhaps to let God sleep so we can go about our merry business of ignoring her. ☺ But week after week, the liturgy leads us along a way in which we are gently wakened to who we are and to what or whom we might become, and the way begins with I, leading us to the “Thou” of divine presence, and ultimately leaving us there surrounded by a family we forgot we had, a sometimes-wonderful “we” that is God’s answer to our sin and alienation. It is exactly as the second Eucharistic prayer for reconciliation puts it, about the gift of Jesus and the paschal mystery: “You gave him up to death so that we might turn again to you and find our way to one another.” (Old translation, of course, because the new one isn't worth remembering.) By turning toward God and away from our own “way” of isolation and sin (this is the turning implied in the Greek metanoia, an inward change of direction), we find ourselves looking at one another, and finding our way to community. I hate to say this, but I think this drives liturgical fundamentalists crazy, because they seem to think the journey ends with praise of God. 

So we get up on Sunday, maybe eat a little breakfast, have the first of several tiffs with one of the children, an exasperated exchange with the spouse. It takes a major act of self-denial and an angelic apparition to prevent us from giving the deacon the Universal Gesture of Ill Will when he cuts us off heading into the church parking lot. Another tiff on the way into church when Junior gets oil, a grass stain, and jelly from a doughnut all on the same pants on the walk from the car to the church door. You see people you like, and people you like less. Maybe it’s noisy and you like it quiet, maybe it’s hushed and you wish someone would say “hello.” But then, the music starts, and someone encourages us to take out a book and start singing a song that’s both familiar and yet not completely interiorized. There’s a splash of color, a cross, a book, people moving. The song progresses and we begin to be caught up in its logic of love. Then several hundred of us, all at once, mark ourselves with the sign of our baptism, repeating words of the gospel that are nearly two millennia old, words that were spoken by the likes of Peter, Paul, Andrew, James and John, Agnes, Cecilia, Benedict and Scholastica, Francis and Claire, Thomas More, Cromwell, and Henry, Martin Luther and Robert Bellarmine, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Gregor Mendel, Asa Gray, Lord Kelvin, Oscar Wilde, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kerouac. 

We cry out in ancient Greek (!) for God to have mercy on the planet, to shower on us the alms of divinity, to be God for us in the wretchedness of our complicity with sin and betrayal. We sing that the glory of God in heaven is the same as peace on earth among people of good will, and praise the God who is three-and-yet-one for making it so. We pray. We process. We listen to scripture and sing psalms and songs, until finally we turn together to face the God who has given us everything, including Christ whose body we have once again discovered that we are, and together we offer ourselves in Christ even as God’s spirit makes it possible for this I-Thou encounter between Christ and Abba to include us. Feeding on the food that is now the presence of the living Christ, we are sent like him, with him, by the Spirit to serve the needs of the world. From the hundreds of “I” who entered into the sacred space an hour ago, there is but one “I” who emerges, and that is Christ. Or better, the illusion of “I” has begun to evaporate, and the reality of Christ has become clearer. 

From “I” to “Thou” to “We.” Does it happen every Sunday? To use the vernacular, “Hell, no.” And it’s largely our own fault, and the fault of well-meaning but ill-trained or just cavalier presiders who screw around with the ritual and with a casualness that approaches reckless negligence. Rather than submit to the rite, and try to get inside of it, figure out what it means, they manipulate it, add to it, change its texts, and make it mean what they want. Is it any wonder that for so many of us involved in Church work that Sunday can be the most depressing day of the week? 

One keeps hoping that, for all our arrogance and messing around with the rite, God will still be God, and somehow make something beautiful from our garbage. Maybe, by not abandoning the struggle, by not abandoning each other, we can still be a part of the encounter with God that saves the world, a part of Christ, the sacrament of the encounter with God.

Learning to "judge not"

Yesterday, a friend on Facebook (and I'm very sorry that I didn't write it down, so I don't know who it was) was writing about how people in his parish frequently complain that the priests don't preach about sin enough. His response was that they preach about sin all the time: economic injustice, racism, selfishness and hatred. The retort from the dissatisfied was that they never preach about abortion or homosexuality.The friend said, "Oh, you mean we don't preach about other people's sins?"

This brought back to mind a novel I read about five years ago called Be Near Me, about the time we watched the chilling and heartrendingly sad documentary Deliver Us from Evil. Both of them deal with the issue of pedophilia in the church, though the novel uses an episode of accusation as an opportunity to explore the humanity of the protagonist more sympathetically. I've written about this before, I know, and nothing I say satisfies me and certainly won't begin to answer for the horrors of the past or the repercussions of these actions in the present and future. Generally I skirt around my own thought, like I did in this post about the mystery of sin. But the more I think about this and about my own sinfulness, the more I think I begin to see that all the evil that people do is connected, and that social sin, which is the amalgamation of personal sins as they accumulate into structures and strategies of oppression, abuse, inequality, poverty, and all the “isms” over which we seem to have no power (racism, consumerism, sexism, etc.), is the thousand pound gorilla in the room of the Church. Almost no one is talking about it, and we have so domesticated our sacramental system that it doesn’t appear that the Church even addresses social sin. All of our efforts are focused on the individual (at least in this country), and what is done about social sin is left to individual bishops and the group of bishops to address with circular letters, and to lay folk to address with their time and talent. When was the last time you heard a cathedral, for instance, celebrate a penitential ritual about war, or hunger, or racism?

Deliver Us from Evil is Amy Berg’s disturbing 2006 documentary on the story of one abuser, Father Oliver O’Grady, an Irish priest shuttled from parish to parish in the 1970s in central California, abusing dozens, possibly hundreds, of children along the way. The movie looks at the case through the eyes of three of his victims and their families, with commentary from attorneys, canon lawyers, and clerics as the story unfolds. It is this case, among others, that is at the center of the controversy surrounding the former cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles, Roger Mahony, at whose annual religious education conference about 25,000 Catholics a year, from a hundred different dioceses around the world, congregate every year. I’ve been to this conference many times over the last twenty-five years, and seen Mahony in action, and seen the love people had for him. I’ve also seen how this case gradually eroded that support, especially in the people immediately around him, as more effort seemed to be put into defending the cardinal from legal action than into uncovering the truth of what occurred and addressing the wrongs that were done in the name of God and the Church by priests.

What’s troubling about a case like the one that this movie documents, and it is far from unique, is not that an individual has a sickness and preys upon children. That is certainly bad enough, and the heartbreak of his victims and their families is amply evident in the film. Having lived for eight years in the culture that bred this kind of individual, the minor seminary system that brought children out of the eighth grade and put them into a one-sex system for the next twelve or thirteen years, I can even say that there is a sense in which the system itself engendered ephebophilia by not providing adequate sexual socialization opportunities during adolescence. This is not to say that most men did not emerge from the seminary able to live holy and celibate lives. By the time I reached the seminary system, it was already starting to unravel, and by the time I had nearly finished by seminary experience in the early 1970s the minor seminaries were beginning to fail, first being consolidated and later closed. At the college and theology level, social, financial, and educational pressures began to integrate seminary students onto coed campuses, and the lid was off the pressure cooker, so to speak. But the real problem really went unaddressed right up to the present day, and was only exposed by the media over the last ten years or so as the pedophilia scandal burgeoned. The real problem was less with the offenders than with the ignorance, arrogance, and lack of accountability in the episcopacy. Even at the height of the scandal, the “official” church lashed out at the media for “priest-bashing” and “bishop-bashing,” rather than taking responsibility, swiftly and clearly, for the tragedy that had unfolded in so many lives over so many years. It is this “papal sin,” if you will, of lack of accountability, of entitlement and imagining that one lives above civil and criminal law in such cases, that is the continuing and unrepented sin exposed by Deliver Us from Evil and the tenacious advocacy of SNAP, the Boston Globe, and similar entities.

Bringing some further wisdom into this whole area for me was the beautiful, gentle novel called Be Near Me, by Andrew O’Hagan. The novel is the story of Father David Anderton, a Scot raised and educated in England, who has come back to Scotland a kind of outsider to the less than cosmopolitan life of his small parish. He is attracted in his middle age to a group of bored and dreamless teenagers, a relationship that wakens in him memories of the one real love of his life, a young man with whom he had had a relationship and who had perished while they were in college. The dangerous cocktail of middle age, intoxicants, and the “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” lead him into a situation that results in his being accused of assaulting the teen boy he has befriended. It is the way the novelist handles the confluence of the past and present, courage and naiveté, wisdom and insouciance, that makes this story unforgettable, and begins to actually help us understand some of these kinds of crimes without condoning them. In a way, it helps us get to a place of compassion and the suspension of judgment, because we see in the trajectory of memory, ambition, and events an image of ourselves as though in a mirror, and we realize how close we have come in our lives, and how often, to making life-changing mistakes that are not retractable. 

There isn’t much more I wanted to say about all this, just that suspending judgment and trying to appreciate the complexity of the human person and the influences upon all of us from before the time we were born might help us be less quick to judge each other. This isn’t to say that we don’t need to protect our children, have safeties in place to try to prevent the recurrence of the pedophilia problem, and to seek compensatory justice and satisfaction for the crimes that have already been committed. Father Anderton’s mother, who, in the novel, is a successful if quirky romance novelist who finds her son’s religious faith odd and uncharacteristic of him, often speaks pithily and wisely as one hopes a mother will do. During the denouement of the story, as the trial is ending and they are driving away from the courtroom, there happens this interesting exchange:

The taxi drove away and the shops of Kilmarnock seemed to blur into each other as we passed the lights and streets grew empty of people. The driver kept looking into his mirror and the journey seemed unending. After a minute or two, my mother twined her fingers into mine on the seat between us and tears came down my face.

‘Don’t hate me,’ I said.

‘That’s not possible,’ she said. ‘Unless you allow that carnival back there to make you stupid.’

‘But I am stupid, Mother.’

‘Nice people don’t always get it right,’ she said, and as she said this I could feel a certain resolve enter her frail hand. (p. 259)




“Nice people don’t always get it right.” That’s one of the most comforting phrases I’ve heard in a long time. It’s not a license to sin, but it goes a long way in helping us forgive ourselves for the messiness of our lives, and give us the courage to make amends and try to forge new relationships beyond the breach. Yes, the priest did a bad thing, made bad decisions, acted reprehensibly. But any more so than the religious and national prejudices and vindictive behavior that turns us from citizens into an avenging mob? It is certainly true that we can spot the splinter in the eye of the other when there’s a log in our own eye. But “nice people don’t always get it right.” I like that. I think that might be what Jesus was thinking as he walked among us, warning us, gently, to judge not lest we be judged, to do good to those who hate us, and to love our enemies, even the most reprehensible of them, even when they wear Roman collars or miters, and sin against children.

My Life in Macintosh • An Appreciation

Just a little goofiness for the midweek. I know that some of you will just not get this. You will think to yourself, "He's insane, he's a fanatic, he's weirder than I thought." And it's true, I guess. I can't help myself. I love my computer. And I love the little apple with the bite out of the right side that has adorned its casing all these years. Yes, I am a Mac addict.

Today I'm using a late 2012 iMac that was a gift from my choir for my 60th birthday, when

they commissioned a song from me for them. I used their gracious gift to buy this computer after I completed the song, and have been able to write a couple more since then, using this baby's facilities. Yum.

I'm not even in the closet about my addiction. Fifteen years ago I was an even more aggressive proponent of the Mac, even while the idiot who used to sell sugar water was paid millions of dollars and nearly ran the company into the ground. I was crazy about an OS that crashed several times a day, that didn't have protected memory until its third decade of life, and which frittered away market share and good will until barely a trickle was left because of greed and obstinacy. Three and a half decades later, here we are, together still, and we're both happier than ever.

This year Apple Computer of Cupertino, California, celebrated its thirtieth-seventh birthday. Steve Jobs, the bête noir of the industry, died two years ago, and has experienced an apotheosis as the patron saint, if not demi-god, of the tech world. Our beloved Macs have become home to Intel processors. Apple itself has created the pathway for Wintel users to be able at last to boot their once hated operating system on our hardware. Hell has, as I told everyone of my friends and family who is still talking to me, frozen over.

We bought our first Apple computer before the Macintosh was invented. For some reason that I cannot remember, my ex and I bought an Apple IIe as our first venture into the computer thing. I thought that with a simple database building program I could create a way to store all my song ideas and library and cross reference them, for God knows what reason. I bought an early version of Filemaker, and within six months gave up on the idea AND the computer. We sold it to a choir member at a huge loss, and considered ourselves better for it. (Years later, in the Mac years, I did retool that database in the Mac version of Filemaker, and I still use it when doing my work with church music preparation.)

But Therese Marie (my ex) worked for a company that sold computers, and did bookkeeping for them. They gave her a newfangled Mac SE30 to take home, so she could work from the home. It was there that she began to teach me the wonders of Microsoft Word on the Mac, and I was hooked. We kept that SE30 as long as we could, and I'm sure I used it for as much monkey business as real work. Remember, for most of us there was no internet as yet, so whatever the computer could do, it had to do all by itself, and on a few megabytes (the gigabyte had not been invented yet) of memory.

Eventually we saved enough money to buy our own computer, and we couldn't afford the classier SE30, so we bought a Mac Classic; I bought another on for the job I had at St. Jerome Church. It was during this period I was introduced to Finale, a music engraving program in its early incarnation, and the hooks were further into my soul. Even though the SE30 chugged along at a ridiculous pace, and printing music to an early inkjet printer was a painful process. I recall with panic one particular Holy Thursday upon which I had begun printing some string parts in the middle of the afternoon, and they were still printing off during the homily of the evening mass. It would print a line of music - not a staff, a line - then think for a while, then print the next line. It was insane. Tom Kendzia had begun working with Mark of the Unicorn software, and introduced me to Professional Composer and Performer, but I never really got into the whole midi scene, and settled for Finale's page-layout approach to music making. Finale and I have grown up together, and after using it for twenty-five years, I still find out something new almost every time I open the program up.

Therese Marie and I had worked in the travel business at a large commercial agency for ten years before I became a full-time church musician. At the Phoenix company, at first called Cahill-Edmund and later renamed Woodside Corporate Travel, we learned the airline computer system, which had not been used in travel agencies up until that time, from the ground up. I started learning Telex and Holidex computers first; later, when our company became one of the first installations in the nation of American Airlines' SABRE computer system, we learned that system inside and out as well. It was a grand sense of being connected to places and people all over the world, messages racing around on phone lines, changing requests to confirmations, asking for seats on airplanes in Moscow and hotel rooms in Osaka. Good times! Those old airline systems were one-trick ponies, though, and it always felt good to get home to the Mac. These days, we all have much more access to travel information and reservations of all kinds in our homes through the internet. It's amazing how things change!

When I moved to Illinois in 1994, my first work computer was a Quadra 610. This was in the first generations of the Motorola 68040 chip, which clocked at 25Mh! The computer had a 40mb hard drive (yes, that's right) and a floppy drive (anyone remember those?) The 12" Apple monitor that came with the computer was, however, my first color monitor, and I have to say, it was awesome. About this time computers started sporting modems, too. In our first house in Elgin, we purchased a new Mac Performa, Apple's utility brand that was sold through Sears and other outlets stores. It was an all-in-one, the sequel to the SE30 and Classic, working for a couple of years, but eventually succumbing to corporate decisions that left it out in the cold. Following that, I ventured into the world of Mac clones by purchasing a PowerComputing PowerCenter Pro at home and a Motorola UMax computer

at the office. These computers were terrific, especially the Power Computing model, and got us through the lean years without Steve Jobs running the business in Cupertino. These were the years that Guy Kawasaki ran the Mac Evangelista group out of Northern California, "fighting back for the Mac" he would say, rallying the troops around the Apple ideology and holding the line against the juggernaut Wintel advances in computing and market share. Those were lean days, my hearties, but we had each other. Suddenly, Steve Jobs was back in the saddle at Apple, and things started popping. One of the first was the iMac, the candy-colored all-in-one that took the world by storm. We bought an iMac DV, which was a great little computer (G3) that introduced us to the world of digital photography. I finally replaced my Power Computing unit with the new

Cube, Apple's first attempt at miniaturization. The Cube is about 10 inches high, and 7 inches deep and wide, with a CD/DVD drive and 2 USB and 2 FW ports. I used that Cube for five or six years, though I changed the CD drive, monitor, hard drive, and added a full 1GB of memory to it over the years. It had a 450mh G4 processor, and it ran OS 10.4 like a charm. It drives a 120gb backup Firewire drive, Apple mouse, KB, and speakers, a 17" LG flat-panel monitor, and a Yamaha CD burner. That was followed by

a G4 iMac, the kind that has the swiveling monitor mounted on what looks like half a cantaloupe. It clocks at 1.25Gh, and did a  great job with movies and digital video, and computer games, so Desi used it most of the time.

Along the way, I owned a "Wall Street" G3 Powerbook, which I sold on eBay and bought a G3 iBook that Terry used for school and that we traveled with to stay in touch via email.
You know what? I think I missed a couple! I’ve used a G4 Tower, Dual G4 (Mirrored drive door), and now a Mac Mini at the office, and bought a few clamshell iBooks and a blueberry iMac for the kids.

This page has pictures of many of the Macs I've owned over the 30+ years of Apple and 28 years of Macintosh. It also sports some of the Mac Evangelist propaganda I used to put on websites to be part of the OS pissing contest.

Here's what's still great about Apple computers: they just work, They're intuitive. You

Terry's 2009 iMac

don't have to be a geek to fix them. They have imagination, beauty, and charisma. And while both we Mac fanatics and Windows users are playing with our iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs, some cool people in California are cooking up the hardware or application that will be the next insanely great thing.

I know a computer is just a tool. But we spend a lot of time together, and my time is important to me. My Mac is a colleague, and as colleagues go, she's a fox.

It's been a great ride, Apple. Now we're sending Desi off to the University of Nebraska

with a MacBook Pro. Probably by the time he graduates, he'll be wearing all the computer he needs like some bling on his forearm, streaming the latest body-building information to his Joe Cool Raybans. I'll be sitting here in this desk, on this computer, probably, so he can call me a Luddite. St. Steven of Cupertino, pray for me.

Transfiguration: Subverting Apocalypse

It's the Christian version of The Great Escape. Earth is turned into a living hell for a thousand years, and believers are airlifted out by the hair in the Rapture. Makes a good fantasy, makes a lot of money for the authors of the Left Behind series, but it's so different from the gospel, and in today’s feast, the feast of the Transfiguration, we begin to grasp the vision of a world saved by a God who is incarnate, who empowers human beings and makes us sacraments, who delivers us from hell by living among us, making a heaven.

Today's first reading from the Book of Daniel dates from the Hasmonean persecution of Israel under Antiochus Epiphanes, a tyrant whose brutality has been repeated down the ages in his infectious sadism inflicted by his occupying armies upon the local people, terrorizing them through assaults on their humanity, their beliefs, and their icons. In response to this kind of lengthy assault on the values of the culture (Maccabees reports, for instance, that the king rededicated the Temple to Zeus, and sacrificed pigs on the altar; women who were among the dissidents were slaughtered, and their babies hung around their necks – this was not a nice guy), literature arose that we call "apocalyptic," a kind of coded story of deliverance in which the bad guys were named and given their comeuppance by God. After the siege and destruction of Jerusalem and other Jewish sites in 70 CE or so, and when the Roman persecutions of the church were in full blossom, more such literature arose in the guise of the Book of Revelation, purportedly by John the Divine, in which Rome is thinly disguised as a beast with seven heads in service of the (demonic) dragon.

What is important for us is that Daniel sees deliverance in his vision as beginning with a servant of the Ancient One whom he says is like a "son of man." This phrase sounds striking and important in English, but it is really just a hebrewism that simply means "a human being," that is, the one whom Daniel sees appears to be just like him, a mortal. 
It is significant that Jesus takes this name upon himself (or that the gospel writers give it to him) and in today's gospel he "he charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead." Reflecting this practice, the passage refers to the Jesus of the Transfiguration as the Son of Man, a phrase that is intended to draw us back into the book of Daniel and his vision of a world saved from desecration and chaos.

The story of the Transfiguration in today's liturgy is from chapter 9 of Luke's gospel. Interestingly and pointedly, it is sandwiched between predictions of the passion and death of Christ, including the rebuke of Peter's identification of him as "the Christ." Following this episode is a warning about the cost of following him, and then today's gospel.

How does Jesus subvert the apocalypse, and therefore, how are we called to follow him in doing so? I think that I have found this articulated most clearly in James Allison's book Raising Abel: The Recovery of Eschatological Imagination. Jesus is, of course, born into a culture ripe with apocalyptic expectation. The Judeans, having lived as a vassal state for about two centuries, were tired of being the doormat of the Mediterranean. Even though Rome had been tolerant of their religion and relatively generous in their governance, giving them an "ethnarch," in Herod, someone at least in name from their own race to lead them, they awaited a Messiah who would lead a rebellion and restore the golden age of the Davidic dynasty. 


After the miracle of the loaves, the people wanted to take Jesus by force and make him king. He seemed to disappear from their midst. In the story of the Transfiguration, too, though the three apostles had apparently witnessed the theophany (in 2nd Peter today, Simon again testifies to what he saw) Jesus warns them (in Mt and Mk) to keep it a secret until "after the Son of Man has risen from the dead." In Luke, the witnesses are silent, but without Jesus's warning. Before Pilate, in John's version of the Passion, Jesus tells the Roman governor that his "kingdom is not like those of this world," and that even though legions of angels might be available to intervene on his behalf, it would not happen. What are we to understand from this restraint of power?

Jesus will not participate in the apocalyptic imagination of Israel because it seeks to replace a violent and dreadful governance by the use of counterforce and violence, and this is something of which God will have no part. Jesus knows that the Son of Man in the vision of Daniel is seen to be a messiah and a military one at that, but rather than invest that vision with any reality that would fortify that understanding, he chooses instead to align himself with a more Isaian image, that of the suffering servant, the one who endures the rejection and revulsion of people in obedience to the will of God. Trusting in God's strength and history to save him, he throws his lot in with the history of his nation, whatever the outcome may be for his personal safety. It is God who is Lord of the earth, not Caesar, and God's kingdom is not like Caesar's. The reign of God is seen when swords are beaten into plowshares, and lamb and lion, leopard and kid graze together in the pasture.

Jesus hears the voice on Tabor that he heard at the Jordan, once again testified to by the eyewitnesses, "This my son (servant), who is my beloved. Listen to him." For Jesus, God's reign is truly "at hand," close enough that he can be strengthened by the moment for the journey to Jerusalem and the cross. Moses and Elijah, also political renegades from Israel's past, are there to offer their witness to God's faithfulness. He stakes his honor on obedience to one who calls him "beloved." That call has resonated down the ages, inspiring generation after generation of his followers to listen for the same voice in our own lives. 

When has God called me beloved? Where has heaven bent toward earth in my life and rescued me from abandoning my vocation? I thought of the heavens opening at times when I hear singing in the church that reminds me of why I chose to take the path that was shown me as a young man, why I chose to become a church musician, even though the future appeared less secure for me and my family. The sound of this singing a music has carried me past the personal abuse I've had to put up with over the years from some of my church "bosses," and when criticism from other musicians and occasionally parishioners has been harsh. It is the voice of God singing in the hearts of the assembly that strengthens me, sometimes it has driven me to tears of joy or wonder or gratitude, but it gives me resolve to continue in this life until another road becomes clear.

Jesus is the road, the "way, the truth, and the life." "No one comes to the Father but through me," John says in chapter 6 of his gospel. Christ is the road to heaven, not through a Rapture, not through a revolution or some other violence, not through a dramatic deus ex machina kind of salvation that doesn't lead through the cross. Jesus is the road, a human being, a person like us. He saves the world by giving his life away, and in the resurrection, is revealed to be the innocent Son of God while still the "son of man," the human one. Receivers of his Spirit in our common baptismal vocation, in confirmation, and in the Eucharist, we are made into a people, "children of men and women," who are being made divine by the Spirit's action among us. "As the Father sent me, so I send you" are words that continue to ring in our ears and call us to subvert the apocalyptic babble around us. The future is now: "when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or naked or in prison, and not minister to you? And he will tell them, 'Whenever you did not do it for one of these, the least of my brothers and sisters, you did not do it for me.'" 

Christ may or may not be "coming again" in some visible historical way. What we do know is that Christ is here now, in the everyday need of people on this planet, and in the gifts of the Church when put to their service. Let's embrace our humanity, embrace all of humanity, for the divine presence within. When that divinity flares out in moments of transfiguring grace, let us hold on to those as well, and cling to them when the Beast raises any of his many fearsome heads.

Kingdom floccinaucinihilipilification (C18O)

Let's just get this out of the way: yes, it's a word. Floccinaucinihilipilification. 

One of the funniest jokes I ever heard came out of the mouth of Fr. Richard Fragomeni at the LAREC probably ten years ago, and I’ve used it ever since, and without attribution (for fear of giving scandal ☺). This is how it goes: Three fathers die and go to the pearly gates. St. Peter comes out and looks mightily perturbed, and says to the first father, “You! What are you doing here? All you ever cared about in your life was money! You never did anything for anyone else; you hoarded money that your family and friends needed. Even now, I can see your wife struggling to make ends meet while you have so much money stashed that no one knows how much or where it is. Why, you love money so much you named your daughter ‘Penny.’ You go to hell!” The second father comes up, and St. Peter says, “You! What are you doing here? All you cared about in life was booze! You’ve been drinking since you were in college; you’ve lost everything you ever gained. There are booze bottles hidden in your home and office; you died in an accident because you passed out from drinking. Why, you loved booze so much you named your daughter ‘Brandy.’ Go to hell!” The third father is shaking nervously, and whispers a silent goodbye to his daughter, “I gotta get out of here, Fanny, I haven’t got a chance.”

The things we care about are the subject of the first reading, psalm, and gospel today, and even the letter to the Colossians had some of that in it. We were assured today that it was all right to have a lot of money as long as we weren’t attached to it. I don’t know — that seems like a rather blasé reading of the gospel of Luke, which says that it’s harder for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than it is for a rich man to enter the reign of God. And one of the woes in the sermon on the plain is reserved for the rich. While it’s true that “God shows no favorites,” loving the bad and the good as well as rich and poor, it does not mean that God doesn’t expect justice of people, and part of that means redistribution of wealth, a change of heart that leads to a change in life. “Heart” doesn’t mean just “feelings,” it means a change in perception that leads to a change of being.

Values as we live our lives, reflectively or unreflectively, are a major theme in art, which tries to get us to look in the mirror and see ourselves for who we really are and not what we perceive ourselves to be. I can’t help but think of that perennial favorite among Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, in which the Jimmy Stewart character gets to experience, in his hour of despair, a world as it might have been without his presence, leading him to a different set of choices. I remember in Manhattan, Woody Allen’s hilarious send-up of New York and its mores (was it a send-up or a love song? or both? Who knows?) But when he’s asked about what makes life worth living, he comes up with a great personal list of human achievements (Groucho Marx, Cezanne’s still life paintings, Willie Mays) that seemed to resound with everyone who ever saw the movie. 

About all of that, Ecclesiastes says, “Vanity of vanities.” That first line of the reading can be translated something like this: “Tell this to the assembly: Utter futility! Everything about human life is completely useless and futile.” Why is it futile? It ultimately leads to unhappiness for individuals and injustice for the tribe. What can be done about that?

Jesus’s answer is conversion to the reign of God. Our values diverge completely from those of God’s kingdom. The values of this world are tied to economic and political domination in one form or another; the values of God’s dominion are equality, service, and consensus. (Actually, I find it hard to say “values of this world” as though this world were not God’s world. What I mean, and I hope this is clear, is that there are value systems in God’s world that are opposed to or ignorant of the values incarnate in the scriptures. It is not that we have another world to which we own allegiance; it is that, in this world, we generally serve a different deity, or deities, than Jesus Christ and his Abba.)

Sunday’s gospel, on its way to the parable about the foolish man with a bountiful harvest, describes a man coming up to Jesus and asking him to arbitrate with his brother over an inheritance. This is a matter of justice and law; one might say, why shouldn’t Jesus intervene here? But the answer to that question is the same one we might give in our own day about a thousand other questions. The problem is not the law, and a forced or arbitrated solution doesn’t change the underlying problem, which is the greedy heart of all of us who want more. The issue is not whether the reign of God is a political reality, or whether the church ought to try to be a political influence. The issue, it seems to me, is the way in which that happens. Because the reign of God, and therefore God’s power, is based not on force but upon agape, not on conquest but surrender, we cannot legislate our way into it. The only way to create a just society is to invite everyone into just relationship, one at a time, heart by stony heart. Jesus cannot arbitrate the fellow’s issue; his dream is to invite both parties into relationship with him, to open their eyes to the reign of God, and then the solution to their issue will become clear to both of them.

The charming film Sweet Land (2005, USA) dealt with some of these issues in the way that art does. It’s the story of a “mail-order bride” who comes to post-WWI Minnesota from Norway. The problem is that she is German, and this creates all kinds of problems for her and her would-be husband Olaf both in her quest for citizenship, their desire for marriage, and their relationships with their neighbors and fellow Lutherans, who regard her as an outlander and possible spy with suspicion. Even the pastor cannot rise above his distaste for Germans and outsiders, and the couple are eventually shunned by the community. When his former friend, a father of ten or so children, is faced with eviction by the (greedy) banker, Olaf buys his farm at the auction even though he doesn’t have the cash to pay the bank, and so is doomed to lose his own farm to save his friend’s. It is this act of self-immolation, as it were, that ultimately breaks down the community’s shunning of the couple, and almost without a word, representatives of the church show up with their harvest money in hand to help Olaf pay the debt for his friend’s farm. Civil and religious law are thus displaced by relationship and genuine agape, which  are the undergirding authority of law anyway. Anyone who thinks that a society can endure without the authority of relationship and justice validating the legal system is in for a terrible surprise: it is weaving a fabric with defective thread, and predestined for the ragpile.

The parable of the foolish man with the bountiful harvest is about exposing the illusion of control that drives our bad decisions in life, and asking us to consider another option. The paschal mystery of God, that divine nature that emptied itself into Christ and offers its own life constantly to sustain the universe in all its parts, is the pattern for the reality that Jesus describes as God’s dominion. It is the pattern for the human life of Christ. It is the DNA of the Holy Spirit as it guides the growth of the church’s life. The roads diverge: the futility and uselessness of a life of greed driving self-focused labor, or the life-affirming and gratifying challenge of living in the shared riches of the reign of God. With the former, the life of ease strangles the spirit and demeans humanity as a whole; in the latter, the yoke is sweet and the burden, being shared, is light.

By our baptism, Paul tells the Colossians, “your life is hidden with Christ in God.” We already share the life of the paschal mystery. We have “put on the new self,” made “in the image of its Creator.” Little by little, I hope the gospel is waking me up to this reality, and reminding me to make all those fundamental decisions that enable us to live, right now, in this world, in the reign of God.

Collaborating

I watched with no little pride yesterday the live stream from OCP's music showcase from the annual convention of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians in Washington, D.C. With the huge hall full of robustly singing musicians, and a choir made up of composers and friends of OCP, the fourth or fifth song in the program was a song that Tom Kendzia and I wrote together last year, "Faithful Cross." Full disclosure: Tom wrote the tune for the normative text of Crux Fidelis, used on Good Friday. I sometimes do a little Finale work for him, and as I was setting the piece, I was blown away by the beauty of his melody, but appalled by the often clumsy and artless translation of the Latin hymn, and I told him that the text was unworthy of his melody. So he asked me to write something for it, and I did. I had been wanting to explore again some of the meaning of the cross (as I see it, of course, which is all I can do) and this provided a great opportunity for that. The reaction at NPM seemed very favorable. I'm very happy with the whole song, but of course have no control over how people receive it!

Coupled with my last blog entry about Gary Daigle's album Praise the Maker's Love, it seemed like a good idea to write a blog about my collaborations over the years, not just with Gary and Tom, but with other artists living and dead. So here we go.

No church songwriter is really non-collaborative. We all end up setting other people's words, other peoples' way of expressing faith, whether its the words of the liturgy itself or the words of psalms and other scripture. We're all cooperating in expressing and handing on a living faith that does not belong to us, any more than the ocean belongs to one who is swimming in it. Even our so-called original texts are just expressing faith that we've received from elsewhere, a turning of the jewel, so to speak, perhaps with a new glint that arises from our unique experience. But it's familiarity to others, their ability to align with it, is based on the common language and common experience of God that we express.

So it has been with my music, when in college I realized that I had "permission" to express the psalms and mass texts in my own musical idiom. I contributed a lyric called "Parade" to the extraordinary Michael Javor, a musician three years older than I, who paired it with a Carpenters melody called "Crescent Noon." That was probably my first liturgical collaboration, though I think that later there were a few others. 

When I left college, I wrote to one of my former professors, my English teacher, Sr. Josephine Burns, D.C., and asked her if she would write a text for me based on the Kenosis Hymn in Philippians. She did so, a beautiful text in heroic couplets no less, that I set to music and was actually on my first NALR album, You Alone. 

He was divine, with Godhead's light and majesty,

But he refused to hoard divinity.

He poured his godhead out, assumed the lowly form

Of slave. In human likeness he was born.

We watched him grow, we heard him speak and saw him cry.

Clearly a man, he even stooped to die. 

Still more, his death was suffered harshly on a cross.

He humbly embraced abandonment and loss.

Put on the mind and heart of Christ your Lord.

Kenosis Hymn - S. Josephine Burns, D.C. (© 1984 NALR)

I won't spend a lot of time on my collaboration with Gary, since I talk about him all the time in the album posts and the "SongStories" posts when they are collaboration stories. But our work has included songs on recordings beginning with 1987's Mystery, including the communion song "In Our Hands," and the title song. On Safety Harbor, we co-wrote "Psalm 116: I Will Walk in the Presence of God," as well as "Carol of the Word," and "Psalm 30: I Will Praise You, Lord." In the case of "I Will Walk," in addition to the metric paraphrase of the text, I contributed the idea for the resolution of the third verse when Gary hit a dead end, as well as the orchestration. It's a very organic collaboration, when generally we just divide our collaboration at the music/lyric border.

Other Cooney-Daigle works include "Covenant Hymn" (Vision); "Advent Gathering," and "May We Be One," "Penitential Litany," and "Hymn of Thanksgiving," as I mentioned in this week's "Albums" post on Praise the Maker's Love. In the late 1990s, we co-wrote the theme song for the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, "Way, Truth, and Life," which appeared on the GIA compilation CD Awaken Hope, Shout Jubilee.  

I also came to collaborate sideways with Gary's colleagues in the Dameans. For Terry's 2003 collection Family Resemblance, Gary Ault graciously allowed me to reshape the text of his 1971 song "Come In, Pilgrim," the musical style of which so perfectly fits Terry's vocal style. And for our collection This Very Morning, the Dameans let me add a couple of verses to, and let Gary and I compose a fraction rite around, their lovely litanic song "TablePrayer" from the beautiful Morning to Night album, rounding it out into a communion rite. It is always a privilege to work with such great material.

I have also set a Brian Wren text, "Welcome the Wild One" or "Advent Herald," which Terry sang with choir on her 1998 CD, On Christmas Day in the Morning. Brian Wren's lyrics are always challenging and have catch-in-the-throat clarity, their sharp brilliance inviting an ever-deeper plunge into gospel truth. For our second World Library recording, I set a text by Garrett Theological's wonderful professor Dr. Ruth Duck, called "New Families," which opens the singers heart and mind to the many shapes and sizes of families in the world, praying for creative light and action for all of us.

I will eventually be doing an "Albums" post on 2001's World Library collection Keep Awake (see iTunes window below), of which 10 of the 12 songs were collaborations with my daughter Claire. What a wonderful experience to write with my daughter, and see how she interacted with ancient texts as well as voiced her own hopes and dreams in original texts. Some of those songs appeared in the first Voices as One hymnal. We would sit in the gym-which-was-our-church at St. Anne's before the new church was built, and she would listen to me try to evoke the spirit of her lyrics in music. 

Finally, for today at least, there have been three collaborations with my longtime friend Tom Kendzia. First there was "Here With Us Now," a text I gave him for his birthday in the late 1980s. He did a beautiful job setting this lyric, which was an attempt to evoke the cosmic presence of God much as Psalm 150 does, though with a decidedly 20th century take. 

We have heard you in the whisper and in tempest's thund'ring rage,

In the sighing of the timber, in the call of age to age,

And everywhere we see you, in silent praise we bow.

You are near, you are here with us now.

We have seen you in the oceans and in star parades of night,

In your servant's life-devotion to the poor we see your light,

And everywhere we see you, in silent praise we bow.

You are near, you are here with us now...

You who see our global madness, come and touch us in our dread,

In our ecstasy and sadness, in the breaking of the bread,

In every way you touch us that our stony hearts allow,

O be near, be here with us now.

Tom's melody catches both the gratitude and resolute hope that I tried to put in to the words. Unfortunately, this song is not on iTunes, but it is available at OCP. In his latest release, Like a River, Tom included two recent collaborations of ours, "Faithful Cross" and "One in Love." We are very happy with how these two songs came out, and have been gratified by the response they have received from other pastoral musicians, so far, as well!

Most recently, a couple of unusual collaborations have been part of my work. I did a piece of music for Jack Jezreel's "justfaith.org" educational ministry, entitled "Announce the Good News", or Turn Around, as we call it at my place. The difference in titling is an example of what happens with collaboration. To work best with their overall project, the "good news" aspect needed to be featured, and the words appear in the text of the refrain, so that works fine for me. As a songwriter, though, I tend to try to put the words into the title most identifiable as the "hook," and I think "Turn Around" is just the more natural title, but no one cares much about that. The process of actually writing the lyric when the ministry and livelihood of the commissioning entity is at stake was a new experience for me, though, and we worked through a number of areas in the original text together until the final version became clear. There is a version of this song, or part of it, on my SoundCloud page (link here.)

I was asked earlier this year to write a song for the 50th anniversary mass celebration of Marist High School, on the south side of Chicago. The wonderful Therese Lenz gave me lots of information on the high school and the Marist founder, St. Marcelline Champagnat, from which I was able to construct the lyric for a song I entitled "Love Them All," which sums up the affirming philosophy of this energetic French saint. The music followed shortly thereafter. But what I was really up against was the performing audience here: a high school chorus, outdoors, on a Monday morning, accompanied by the school's concert band. I knew exactly what I had to do: find a real musician to do the orchestration. And the truly astonishing Bob Moore, a GIA colleague from Jacksonville, Florida, came to the rescue. I sent him my little 5-staff song (choir and piano score), and a few days later received back from him a score with more than 25 staves, including three percussion staves, and instruments which I didn't even know existed. He had, in fact, spoken to the band director at Marist, and scored the song for exactly the instruments that Marist had available in its orchestra! The debut of this piece is on September 9 at the high school, and I can't wait to hear how this liturgical Tusk collaboration with Bob comes out in the open air. 

Well, that's a little of my history as a collaborator in the world of liturgical music. There have been others, with poets from other times and places, both published (like the texts of "Save the People" and the metric paraphrase of Psalm 103, "The Lord Is Kind," which are on the recording Do Not Fear to Hope. Details on that "Albums" page) and unpublished (like my settings of "Turn Back, O Man" by Clifford Bax, and Vachel Lindsay's haunting "Who Can Surrender to Christ.) There will be more, I'm sure. But this is a good start. Thanks to everyone who has shared the experience of musical collaboration with me: Claire, Tom, Gary, Bob, all of you and all the rest. It's a way to make a gratifying and humbling experience more gratifying. And certainly more humbling!

Albums (9) - Praise the Maker's Love (1993, GIA)

The beautiful cover art for PTML was designed
by noted Gonzales, LA artist Douglas Bourgeois

After working on trio albums in one form or another for eight years, Gary Daigle decided he wanted to
have a recording under his own name. Lucky for me, he didn't go out looking for some other chowderhead to write lyrics for him, he was satisfied enough with the chowderhead with whom he was already collaborating. But what was so special about this ICEL guy? Why wouldn't he use his whole name? And who is this Brian Wren fellow, anyway? What do they have that I don't have? I was miffed, still am, but keep hoping he doesn't answer that last question.

So in 1993 he gathered his colleagues from the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, along with some of our studio regulars, and made Praise the Maker's Love. Tom Kendzia was also there, co-producing the recording. Gary was, with John Gallen, really committed to exploring ritual music, especially by employing music as a unifying factor in the entrance and communion rites. To be sure, other artists were doing the same, including Paul Inwood and Marty Haugen, but Gary's work at the FRC and our work with Gallen in workshops at conferences around the country was a model for a lot of folks in using music creatively to create unified-sounding rites within the eucharistic celebration. In fact, we wrote a book for Resource Publications in 1991 (John, at some point during this time, was also working for that publisher) called Promising Presence, Meaning and Music in the Gathering Rites or something like that. Frankly, I don't have a copy, and neither does any US publisher of used books. It is listed, however, in Amazon Canada, Germany, UK, and Zambia, if you're interested.

TRACK LIST

1. Advent Gathering. Gary's album starts off with this haunting litany-with-refrain in 7/8 time, carried off with bare-bones instrumentation of bass, percussion, and flute. He had given me the tune on a cassette, and asked for a lyric, so I sketched out a four-stanza text around the central Advent theme of incompleteness, darkness awaiting dawn. "We seek a sign that you are among us," the song prays, "Show us your face, O promise of dawn!"

Where is the peace you promised the widow?
Show us your face, O promise of dawn!
Where is the home you promised the orphan?
Show us your face! O Lord Jesus, come!
Come, O hope of your people,
Come among us and stay.
Lead us in mercy up from the shadows.
Shine in our darkness, be here today.

Gary fashioned an entire Advent gathering rite around this song, from the opening music to the collect. Haunting tune. The rhythm probably looks a little daunting on the page, but with steady percussion (claves) and choir support the hymn was not difficult for an assembly to sing. And its real strength is the wedding of tune to text, the stark, winter beauty of it, and its honest assessment of the reality of the world situation, calling for an advent of repentance and reform. This song appeared in the first edition of Gather Comprehensive, but was not in subsequent editions. It does appear in RitualSong.

2. Covenant Hymn. 
This choral arrangement of the song that first appeared on our album Vision moved the song out of the simpler folk arrangement for guitar, oboe, and cello, and into the world of SATB choir, with string quartet and oboe. Gary changed the harmony, and made a beautiful choral piece from our song. I already wrote about this song in one of my "SongStories" posts, and if you didn't see it and would like to read more about its composition, click here.

3. God Is One, Unique and Holy. (text by Brian Wren) Brian Wren is a British-born hymn writer, a text-writer's text-writer. He has several books of hymntexts, and is well-represented in every major U.S. hymnal. Gary's setting of his "God Is One" text was written for Trinity Sunday, its gentle, uncomplicated melody giving plenty of room for Wren's evocative text to blossom, while providing some accompaniment for that "endless dance of life and love" to which God is compared.

4. Penitential Litany (Hold Us in Your Mercy). In the late 1980s, Gary brought me into the work of the North American Forum on the Catechumenate's "Remembering Church" institutes. These workshops were designed to explore the dynamics of the Rite of Penance, and offer a way to renew that sacrament by extending it over time, applying the model of the RCIA to its celebration, and recovering its origins in the Order of Penitents. These practices took root in a few places in the country, but without the approbation of the Bishops' Conference and retrenchment around canonical auricular confession, the practice has all but died out. 

Still, in the day, it sparked a lot of creativity in some dioceses and parishes. At one institute, Gary and I were trying to choreograph a procession for which we wanted an a capella litany that would be immediately singable by the participants. In the service, we were already using Tom Conry's bold anthem "Hold Us in Your Mercy," the refrain of which is itself based on the ancient chant melody "Parce Domine." So we decided to take that line, "Hold us in your mercy," which has exactly the same musical syllables as "Parce", and use it as the response to a litany, sung a cappela. Later, when adapting it for use at the FRC in Scottsdale, Gary and his band added the syncopated accompaniment that appears on the recording, along with the choral harmonies that sparkle so achingly over and between the cantor's invocations. 

This song is also one of the anthologized pieces from Gary's album, along with "Advent Gathering," "Covenant Hymn," and "May We Be One." Four out of eight is a really good track record!

5. Introductory Rite: Glory to God from the Roman Missal. I told Gary when he wrote this that the world didn't need another Glory to God in 6/8 time. But I was wrong. Artfully crafted in C major but borrowing throughout from the relative minor, this setting is musically satisfying and a joy to sing from beginning to end. In addition, Gary provided a litanic center to be used with a sprinkling rite, based on the option in other sacramentaries that the Glory to God might be used for the Entrance Song at some times. In this case, the opening two stanzas and refrains were sung as the entrance song, and then the litany, with the refrain "Blessed be God, O blessed be God" was sung while the water was blessed and the assembly sprinkled with holy water, interspersed with other invocations to Christ ("You are the light of the world," "You are the shepherd of hearts.")

I think Gary has rewritten the Gloria for the new translation, but hasn't field tested it enough for publication. 

6. Gospel Acclamation (Alleluia) Based on genetic material from the Glory to God (which  is also used in the Lamb of God included with #7 below).

7. Communion Rite: May We Be One. The communion rite included a harmonization of the Lord's Prayer chant with its embolism, a Fraction Rite with multiple verses, and a communion hymn. With "Covenant Hymn," the Lamb of God and May We Be One are the most enduring of the songs we wrote for Praise the Maker's Love. The product of one of our escapes to the Prescott forest in the early 1990s, "May We Be One" uses a call-and-response form for the verses, with a refrain. The text of the chorus is a trope on one of the memorial acclamations, explicitly tying the act of communion (becoming one-with God and others) to the paschal mystery (dying to self in love). Musical material used in the Glory to God and Lamb is wedded to the response "Amen, amen," making the response both memorable and resonant with the action of communion, and the familiarity of the text (1 Cor. 10 and the Roman Missal) made the congregation's part a quick learn. There are thirteen verses for the cantor(s), too, making May We Be One a good choice for even the longest communion processions. The verses use images about bread, wine, and common life to give variety to the performance of the song.

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

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

8. Hymn of Thanksgiving (Praise the Maker's Love)
People who don't write songs (or for that matter, make their living by writing) might not believe this, but though I wrote the text for this song, I didn't remember a line of it until I picked up the booklet from the CD today. I think that because Gary scored this as a hymn, with organ, trumpet, flute, and SATB choir, I never really had an opportunity to use it in a parish where I was working. It's a good strong melody, too, but not that adaptable (by me) to a smaller choir and my meager keyboard skills. As usual for me, I just don't know when enough is enough, and there are five stanzas. Since you probably won't ever hear it otherwise, here is the text. Only the a capella choral verse is on the GIA website as a preview, and it doesn't really give a good feel for the whole song, so I've included a SoundCloud version. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Hymn of Thanksgiving (Praise the Maker's Love) 

music by Gary Daigle, text by Rory Cooney © 1993 GIA Publications.

A banquet for the powerless is spread from shore to plain,
A feast of peace and mercy we make from grape and grain,
That caste and class be leveled and despots put to flight,
No human power rules here. God's word alone our light.

A banquet for the searching soul is sown in ancient fields
And grows with fertile mystery to teeming golden yields.
As God sends rain and sunlight with unrestricted grace,
This banquet feeds the hungers of every time and place.

O taste and see the goodness of bounty without price,
Where no one is a stranger, and life is pledged to life.
Come singing to this table, let no one go unfed,
For hope flows from this winecup and God is shared like bread.

This cup of sweet forgiveness, the loaf of work and home,
Are sign to every human heart that none should be alone.
Let no one fear surrender to Christ, whose love would heal
The righteous and the sinner by sharing in a meal.

O wondrous gift! No word of ours would ever be enough.
O stand together, friends in Christ, to praise the Maker's love,
Praise Christ who walked among us, who died and lives again,
And in their Holy Spirit may all be one. Amen.

Regrettably, this particular CD was never released digitally on iTunes. MP3s of the songs are available from the GIA website, however, along with most of the music. The Glory to God/Sprinkling Rite, lovely and useful as it is, has not as of this writing been updated for the 2010 transliteration of the mass texts. If you'd like to hear brief cuts from the songs, or download individual tracks from GIA, click here.