Gaudete in Tenebris - Advent in 2012

I uncovered a few notes from Gaudete Sunday in 2012. In that year, you may recall, a young man named Adam Lanza shot over two dozen people to death, including twenty children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was a Friday morning. That Sunday would be the third Sunday of Advent, "Rejoice" Sunday. This year, Gaudete Sunday marks the 2nd anniversary of that tragedy.

I'm posting these notes and bringing all this up again because nothing really changes. Life is hard and people are dying senselessly in 2014, and to voters in this country it's almost as though nothing happened. To Christians in this country, it seems to be more guns, and more people having access to guns, that will save us, and not Christ and the Sermon on the Mount instructions to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, and the whole trajectory of non-violence that is in the gospels.

But life was hard in biblical times, too. The advent texts in Isaiah and the prophets that we love so much were conceived in times of treacherous leadership in Israel and Judah, in the crucible of siege and war, and in the disconnected horror that was the Babylonian exile. Life was violent and unpredictable then, too, and yet out of those days and times arose these texts we love and pray and sing two and a half millennia later, words about lions and lambs playing together, people beating swords into plow blades, and never again learning the art of killing each other.

Anyway, my pastor asked me, between the morning of the tragedy and Sunday, to write down any thoughts I had to see if any of it would help our homilists that weekend, so I did, and I uncovered those notes. I read them in the context of the violence in Africa, the kidnappings by Boko Naram in Nigeria, the torture report in the Senate, the beheadings of western charity workers, teachers, and journalists by Islamists in and around Syria, and the violence on the streets of the United States visited upon people of color by police agencies, and the resulting explosion of senseless violence, looting, and the destruction of property that has ensued.

I don't want to pretend I know anything more than anyone else, so I'm not going to edit my comments from 2012. I would probably nuance language here and there and it might make me sound more "together" or some other artificial thing, but instead, this is just what I wrote to him. Mostly, it's still what I think, and it seems really just as fitting today as it was in 2012, mutatis mutandis.

Here are a few random thoughts I've had, if any of it helps. I need to start by saying what I'll end by saying - I don't see any meaning in this tragedy. But it's not an isolated event. People aren't helpless against this. We all have choices to make about violence and the way we live. The gospel and liturgy are all about this. We can't have it both ways, though, choosing violence AND "merry Christmas." At least we in the church can't.  

1. Advent - the central question, the heart of advent, it seems to me, is always the unfinished business down here. If Jesus came to bring the reign of God, why isn't it here yet? If God is God, why the inequality and suffering? In all the scriptures today, the world was a mess, especially for the people doing the writing. We need to keep that in mind. It wasn't better for any of them - it was worse. And yet our hope derives from their hope. Look at the words of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" - they express lamentation, exile, disunity, and yet the refrain repeats "rejoice, rejoice" - because hope -meaning- will come. We just can't predict when or how. We can just be faithful. 

2. The Christmas story is the Easter story - the paschal mystery - as prelude to the rest of the gospel. To me, it's dealing with the fundamental choice between the reign of God and the reign of "this world," of emperors and kings and constitutions. This world organizes itself by violence and threats of violence. The reign of God is organized by the Holy Spirit, by addressing needs with gifts, the sharing of life. The gospel never says that Augustus or Tiberias or Pilate or Herod don't have power. It challenges who they say they are - god, son of god, prince of peace, by offering Jesus as a different king not like the kings of this world. In the nativity story, the power of the empire to do violence is seen in the story of the holy innocents, and the power of God to save in the story of the flight into Egypt. Modern people eventually have to choose between the empires, too. For instance, between the power of the constitution to protect them and give them real life, and the power of God to give them real life. It's always about real death and real life. Can we have real life by violence and threats of violence? Or is it only by peace, self-gift, and vulnerability that fullness of life for everyone can be attained? 

3. So the liturgy is already about meaning, death, and resurrection. The eucharist is about solidarity and life-sharing around the table that is a sign of solidarity and life-sharing in the world. It's a sign that people are at least making the effort to turn away from sin (the kingdoms of "this world") and believe in the good news (the reign of God, in this world.) My sense is that, if the liturgy fails to be about this for people and for us, it's because we've trivialized and spiritualized it for so long that it doesn't have the power it should have.  

4. After all is said and done, we're left with this meaningless slaughter and mired in grief and bewilderment on a Sunday called Gaudete. But no believer ever had it easy. Belief for the prophets, apostles, and faithful of Israel and the apostolic community was never a party. It was always about hope in the midst of darkness and the possibility of despair. Zephaniah, Paul, and the Luke community all had to deal with God's absence, persecution, rejection, and danger. But their hope was in either the God of the exodus or the God who raised Jesus from the dead that being a people ultimately was stronger and more meaningful than the persecutor or occupying empire. 

5. I don't think we can make sense of this now. Those murdered children aren't "angels" that God needed (ugh), but we trust that God somehow surrounds them and has a plan for them and for us that he will attain not by revenge and violence but through peace and invitation. The mantra in the gospel today is "what can we do (to prepare for the Messiah)?" The answer is always to act with patience, charity, and God's justice. Be our best selves, look out for the other person. Meaning will start to emerge from the chaos as we do these things. But society/empire will always fight back, as it did against Jesus. We have to be aware of that. That's what "take up your cross" means. 

I will write a better, longer (but not long) concluding prayer for the intercessions. I'm not going to do it now, I want to have the OCF as a resource. I think you should mention the children and teachers who were murdered in the eucharistic prayer when the dead are mentioned. It will also give me the morning to consult with a few colleagues and see if any of them have better insight about this than I do. I hope they do.
I wish I could do better for you and for everyone at St Anne's. I don't think I can serve them better by not telling them the truth. Since I don't know the truth beyond my experience and modest faith, I feel fewer words are better, avoiding platitudes, false comfort, scapegoating, and all the strategies of false religion.

Here's the introduction I wrote to the mass for Gaudete Sunday that year, or to the penitential rite:

How difficult it is today to hear Paul’s words: Rejoice in the Lord, always, I say it again, Rejoice! What joy can come to us on this day, so near the tragedy in Newtown? Yet, rejoice we must, because hope insists on the advent message: the Lord is near. What puts the “good” in “good news” is the presence of God, especially with those most in need of God’s appearance. Let us be grateful for this good news on this “Gaudete” Sunday, and rejoice in the Lord’s mercy, which is ever near.  

Here is a prayer for the end of the intercessions (prayer of the faithful), based on 399:1 and 398:43 in the Order of Christian Funerals.

Father of mercies and God of all consolation,
You dispel the shadow of death with the bright dawn of life.
Comfort your people in our loss and sorrow,
lift us from our grief into the peace and light of your presence.
So many this week were taken quickly and violently from us, young and unguarded,
they are suddenly gone from our sight, and from their homes and families.
Come swiftly to their aid, bring them to you,
and flood their families with comfort and signs of your presence.
By dying, Jesus destroyed our death,
by rising, he restored our life.
Enable us to press on toward the celebration of his birth in joyful hope,
that one day we may gather with all whom you love,
where every tear will be wiped away, and death will be no more.
May your kingdom come.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.

I guess there's no end to this post. It's just a question. Where do we get the heart to rejoice in the face of such horror, day in and day out?

The liturgy seems to say, Rejoice because God is doing it. God is making something happen. "The one who calls you is faithful, and he will also accomplish it," says St. Paul. Isaiah rejoices in the mission God gives to bring joy where there is none, because "as the earth brings forth its plants, and a garden makes its growth spring up, so will the Lord GOD make justice and praise spring up before all the nations." It's not us, it's God's work, and we need to figure out a way to get with it. As Dominic Crossan says, and I love to remember this, "We can't do it without God, and God won't do it without us." Salvation, whatever that means, is by participation. That's the meaning of Matthew 25: 31-48 too.

Pete Seeger had a similar insight, and being a performing musician, that was the metaphor he keyed in on: "I've never sung anywhere without giving the people listening to me a chance to join in. As a kid, as a lefty, as a man touring the U.S.A. and the world, as an oldster. I guess it's kind of a religion with me. Participation. That's what's going to save the human race."

God's Unfinished House

In Advent 1999, another lectionary year B, St. Anne was at the end of a process of consultation, revision, fundraising, and building that reshaped the entire campus. We built an entire new church building, with all original artwork and statuary, incorporating some design and material elements from pre-existing structures, rebuilding the school, and transforming the 50-year-old church into a beautiful daily mass chapel. We expected to celebrate Christmas in the new building, but unforeseen delays prevented that from happening, and we settled for first masses in the new space on Ash Wednesday, 2000, with dedication on the 2nd Sunday of Easter, which was on April 30 that year. 

I wrote this article for the bulletin, trying to bring Advent insight into what was happening for all of us. I think it reads pretty well today, too, even if we are still paying for the building! Or, even if your building is already paid for.

******
It seemed perfect, didn’t it? We would walk into our new church on Christmas eve, and begin a new era in the story of St. Anne Parish on this holy evening. It would be God’s Christmas present to us, just the right size, just what we asked for. Just what we thought we needed.

Then, right in the face of all our expectation and excitement, came the awful news that finishing the construction would take a few more weeks than expected, and coming into the new space would be delayed into the new year. Coal in our karmic stocking, as it were. Bummer. Another Christmas in the gym.

As I was reflecting on all this, I was re-reading the readings for Advent and for Christmas, the season for which Advent prepares us. Those Christmas readings speak of sentinels shouting for joy because “directly before their eyes, the Lord (is) restoring Zion.…All the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God.” Now, prior to that restoration came a lot of suffering. What is our Zion, our Jerusalem, that is in ruins and awaiting God’s arrival? Might it not be our dream of a peaceful world, a world of equality and justice and security for all people, and for all children, where want and fear and violence are neither known nor remembered? Isn’t our hope for the new millennium fired by our desire for a world that knows God together, for an earth that is a new Eden, where we walk as sisters and brothers in the cool of evening with one God?

We wonder, with Isaiah, why God lets us wander from the Torah, the way. Can it be that God has left us here and forgotten us, we ask? Surely, if God remembers us, then we will act like we ought to. God must be hiding, or things wouldn’t be so bleak in the world. 

Advent offers us this reason to hope: God will do what God has promised. Christ is already born. Jesus lived, taught, gave an example, died and was raised from the dead. The Holy Spirit has been poured out upon the world in the Church and in a myriad of other unknown ways. While we wait for the fullness of the arrival of God’s revelation, we “are not lacking any spiritual gift” that we need in life. If God seems to delay, Paul says, it is really God being patient with us until we “get it,” until we change our hearts and live the mission of Jesus.

Instead of changing, though, we tend to make Advent a kind of historical pretending. We pretend for four weeks that Jesus isn’t born, and then pretend that he is born on December 25. Or we try kind of theological pretending that we’re waiting for Jesus to come again in glory, but since he doesn’t, we settle on his arrival on Christmas as a baby (again!). But faith can’t be about pretending, can it? We need Advent as a time of honesty, a time to see where Christ is (and he told us where to look) and where Christ isn’t. We’re not so adept at looking for the places where Jesus promised to be present, here and now, and looking for signs of our absence from him. How is our sight impaired so that we don’t see Christ in the hungry, the prisoner, the naked poor? How is our hearing impaired so that we don’t hear the cry of so many for food, water, justice? How is it that we can’t get these sin-hobbled legs of ours to respond to those so near who need our help?

In God’s day, when salvation arrives, those un-Christ-ed places will be completely healed. Isaiah announces that that day is coming, and his proclamation of a new heaven and new earth rings down the ages every Advent, every Christmas. John the Baptizer comes to announce that the day to decide for God is today. One hearer who heard John preach and believed and acted on his preaching was his cousin Jesus, and what a difference his decision made! Mark proclaims the beginning of a gospel, literally, a proclamation of a victory in a military campaign. In the wilderness, at the border between the known and the unknown, between civilization and chaos, the evangelist announces that the victory over oppression, false religion, and inequality is already won. Is it possible for us to believe it, and start living that way?

On the 4th Sunday of Advent in the first reading, David, from the comfort of his new palace, feels guilty that he has a beautiful house to live in, while the ark of God, symbol of the presence of God in Israel, dwells in a tent. David resolves to build a house for God. But God tells David that he’s got it all backwards: it is God who built David’s house, and only God can keep David’s house intact through the generations. God will build God’s house in God’s time. That house will be built one baby at a time, beginning with a royal heir for David. We have come to believe that, baby by baby, through famine and plenty, exile and restoration, war and peace, God kept the house of David alive right through Mary and Joseph and Jesus, and continues to build that house today in us, the people of God. 

So we don’t have a house for a few more weeks. That’s all right. It gives us time to remember that we are that house. God’s unfinished temple. Apparently, God will build the building in God’s own time. In the meanwhile, we await the Light that will awaken us to the beauty that already resides in us. We await a dawn when Light will gleam off the golden cross of us, the copper trim of us, and pour like wine and honey and seawater through the stained glass of us and we will be the house that God intends us to be. Then we the blind will see Christ as Christ is, and feed the hungry and visit the prisoner. Then we the deaf will hear the voice of Christ, and offer the drink, and clothe the body. Then we the lame will leap and dance, and run to the aid of the sick and the lonely. We await the Light, and the prophets and the liturgy tell us that the Light is already here. This Advent, while we wait for the doors of a new church to open for us, let us pray together for the grace to open our eyes, and let the light in.

“Christ, be our light.

Shine in our hearts, shine in the darkness.

Christ, be our light.

Shine on your church gathered today.” (Bernadette Farrell, “Christ Be Our Light”)

For Ray East, my brother (November 1992)

I've known Fr. Ray East for a long time, thanks to the conference circuit to which I was occasionally attached from the mid-1980s for 25 years or so. Ray is still a frequent speaker at major conferences, in fact, he was a plenum speaker at this summer's NPM in St. Louis. Ray touched Terry's and my heart forever when he came to our hotel room in the summer of 1995 after another NPM (Cincinnati?) just a month or so after Desi had been born, and sat on the bed with Terry and blessed Desi in that way that Ray has that makes you know that that baby was really blessed, and things would be good for him.

Ray was also a passenger on the famous Big Island Bus Ride of 1992, and he and I stayed together, with the late Fr. Jim Dunning, at the house of some Malia Puka o Kalani parishioners. My most persistent memory of Ray that year was that somehow he loved to eat breadfruit, which I found puzzling to the point of incredulity. That is some nasty food, at least it was to my then-carnivorous taste buds, and I could only shake my head in amazement at his apparently bottomless appetite for the stuff.

Anyway, in the subsequent weeks to that trip, I wrote this poem about him, which still resonates with me a little bit, the ideas helping me to overlook the shortcomings of my poetic style. Without any further self-pity, here's the poem.

For Ray East, my brother

raymond lives
in the United States of America.
Not one of the fifty, but deep
in the City of Compromises.
He rejoices when a man’s years
exceed his ability to live them,
for he has spent too many nights
like this, tracing oily crosses
on the bloodied brows of boys,
watching the foamy convulsions
of girls whose innocence did not dim
when they opened themselves to strangers
to buy, from a looking-glass Moses
escape or orgasm from a rock. 

raymond sings
when he drives, sings 'Been So Busy,’
or Paul Simon, Jacques Brel.
Saturday night in the District
crouches around him,
lies and broken promises roam freely here,
they resent the rich baritone with tears in it,
hold their ears until hell
can silence him with sorrow, sirens, street beat. 

raymond is
a small man who lives on his smile
he takes his bread
at the table which invites him.
raymond remembers
Moses, and says, Yes, my brother,
raymond worships
Jesus and says, Yes, my brother,
raymond believes
in Sojourner and Harriet and Rosa, says, Yes, my sister,
raymond knows
Martin and Malcolm X, Desmond and Biko, says, Yes, my brothers.
raymond parks
and wonders why the children don’t cry
why the police don’t cry
where are the mothers, fathers,
and why doesn’t the city stop?
Hasn’t a piece of the continent
been washed away? 

raymond weeps
for this boy whose heart has a steelblown hole,
this girl whose dead black eyes need more
this baby whose screams burst her lungs,
(crack convulsions)
raymond leaves
the scene in silence.
darkness is cocked like a gun. Then 

raymond sings.
It is Sunday, raymond thinks,
today I will tell them a story.
Today the ancient Spirit
will enter raymond, a zebra
Spirit, Bantu Spirit, gazelle.
raymond’s people will remind him,
—God is good ALL THE TIME—
sirens. a baby cries. someone
says, Amen, amen. Fat flies
circle over wine like blood.
When the heaven’s black light turns him
to a river of obsidian fire
where his people can swim,
we hear (sirens) drums and music
hammer on spike, a stone rolls.
Raymond dances.

Rory Cooney, © 1992

The end of Year A (from Hosanna! magazine, 1993)

              "Lestat," she said, "it is the larger scheme which means nothing...It is the small act which means all...There are many nights when I lie awake, fully aware that there may be no personal God, and that the suffering of the children I see every day in our hospitals will never be balanced or redeemed. I think of those old arguments — you know, how can God justify the suffering of a child?...But it doesn't ultimately matter.
               "God may or may not exist. But misery is real. It is absolutely real, and utterly undeniable. And in that reality lies my commitment—the core of my faith. I have to do something about it!"
               "At at the hour of your death, if there is no God..."
               "So be it. I will know that I did what I could. The hour of my death could be now." She gave a little shrug. "I wouldn't feel any different."

                                                                                    from Tale of the Body Thief
                                                                                    by Anne Rice [Knopf, New York, 1992]
                        Born now in stillness, distant cry,
                        If you exist, if you pass by,
                        Be life within their longing.
                        If you are not and cannot be,
                        Unspoken word, resound in me:
                        No God for our adoring.
                        You know me well, you bind me tight.
                        I cry out "You" both day and night.
                        Could I forget your presence?
                        Could we be one yet still alone,
                        Be homeless, nameless, still unknown,
                        And not behold each other?
                                                Huub Oosterhuis, tr. Tom Conry
                                                "Song at the Foot of the Mountain"
                                                © 1987 TEAM Publications

            As we approach the end of Year A, what new insights have we come to regarding Christ's continuing presence in the world? "They shall call him, 'Emmanuel,' a name which means, 'God-with-us.'" These words were spoken on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, back in December 1992. Then at the end of the Easter season, we heard on the feast of the Ascension, "And know that I am with you always, until the end of the world."On the 22nd Sunday, there were these words from Jesus, taken again from Matthew's gospel: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst.." Finally, coming up on the feast of Christ the King, we hear: "'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or see you thirsty and give you drink?'....The king will answer them, 'I assure you, as often as you did it for one of my least (ones), you did it for me.'" The year stretches from one end to the other as a meditation on the great Easter question: how is Christ alive? What does "to rise from the dead" mean? In whom or in what have we discovered the real, living presence of the Christ of God?

            There have been other recurring themes this year: the parables of the reign of God have been heard on many Sundays since July. Have they opened our imagining to any new hope, any new joys? Have we had any insight into the great love and trust Jesus had for his Abba? Have his teachings that flow from that profound faith, teachings about living together peaceably, with forgiveness, and open to the great diversity of humankind, led us to any new behaviors as a community? How have we tried to sing that community into being?

            One great danger is that we have been "just praising the Lord" for the way things are, satisfied with our status quo, and not allowed the axe of God's word to strike at the roots of our complacency. The din of our merrymaking blots out the word. I suppose that we thus tempt God to leave us to our own devices ("Turn back, O Man, forswear thy foolish ways!") or to try a less subtle approach, something in the fire-and-brimstone department. (As I reconsider these words, it seems more likely that we simply are reveling too much to hear the sound of God's axe hacking at the root, since the word does not go forth without accomplishing what it was sent to do!)

            The last Sundays are sombre, but there is a great energy underlying them. It is the energy of something-about-to-happen. Beginning with the parable of the vineyard owner and going through the Solemnity of Christ the King, the gospels are largely calls to immediate action: to respond to the son, to render to God, to come to the banquet, to serve the rest, to stay awake, to live up to our abilities, to do unto the least ones. In each case, one of God's options is spelled out in the parable: destroying their city, weeping and grinding of teeth, letting in the bystanders, locking out in the cold, committing to the fire. These are not meant to be prophecies or predictions of an exact reality, but calls to action. Jesus does not expect the listener to fall asleep or ignore the needs of the little ones or refuse to come to the feast! As he did among listeners two millenia ago in the Bronze Age, Christ looks for a new way of living from those who hear in the age of silicon.

(For Hosanna! magazine, by Rory Cooney. Excerpt.)

Triaging the Translation Wars

(This article was originally written for Pastoral Music, written in November 2009. I forgot which issue, but let's say early 2010!)

Those who wish to meaningfully assist after a disaster apply a strategy defined during the Great War by French battlefield physicians called triage. As many know, especially fans of the 70s sitcom M*A*S*H, medics group the wounded into three categories: those who will die with or without treatment, those who will survive with or without treatment, and those for whom treatment will matter the most in creating a positive outcome for survival and health. It is these who are attended to immediately, and whom doctors and other medical personnel attempt to evaluate in expeditious ways.

For anyone who, like me, thinks that the all-but-approved new translation of the liturgy is a disaster, this analog offers a compass for the next steps we should take, if we want to be helpful. A disciplined silence under the rubric primum non nocere, energized by life-giving principle of kenosis will be a good first step, and clearly not an easy one as we deal with the indignation of the unconsulted millions of priestly people who make new translations financially possible by the irrevocable placement of an hour or two of their lives in the collection plate and appeal envelopes every week or so. Maybe the furor will end with a whimper, but that doesn’t seem likely.

Much ink has already been spilled both in defense of Vox Clara and ICEL and in repudiation of their work. If Comme le prevoit, Paul VI’s translation mandate that with cultural respect authorized dynamic equivalence with the Latin editio typica as the model for vernacular versions, was the document of entente that put flesh on the spirit of aggiornamento and global Catholicism, then LIturgiam Authenticam, demanding formal equivalence with the Latin edition, was the ecclesiastical equivalent of eminent domain, a taking back of land once ceded to and owned by the people, and a pious declaration of war on  our pathetically perceived ability to pray in our own language. The suggestion that the English translation had to be reined in because it is the de facto international language used to translate the Roman rite into other languages has been countered by the sane suggestion that a scholarly formal translation be used for such cases, and that a pastorally sensitive, poetic and musical, dynamic equivalent translation be used for Anglophone worship. The suggestion has fallen on the mitered deaf ears of the plenipotentiaries of the appropriate dicastery. The run-on sentence and embedded conditional clause are about to make a big comeback in American worship.

As I see it, the issue that remains to be resolved in the United States, however, is not whether the folks in the pews, us folks, will adapt to the elephantine lilt of the new old English, but whether bishops and priests will. Let’s just say “priests,” because, let’s face it, bishops can do whatever they want, for better or worse, in their own dioceses. But this submission to the rite, however ill-conceived the new transliteration is, by those specifically charged with its implementation, is an important issue of justice. Let me just make a few observations about the liturgical dialogues under the ancien régime of the 1973 version, the catechetical and therefore ecclesiological repercussions of those, and let you draw your own conclusions. Luckily, blessedly for us, there is also good news, because we’re neither the beginning nor the end of the story. I’ll finish up, briefly, with an appeal both to Sacrosanctum Concilium and the New Testament, which, again, luckily, blessedly, are not covered by any anathemas or those chilling words, “anything prior to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Among the functions of ritual, particularly those of important initiation rituals like the Eucharist, two important ones for this discussion are that ritual defines the boundaries of a group’s identity and that it establishes relationships among the group’s members. My last parish, St. Jerome’s in Phoenix, was among the top 5% of Boy Scout troops in the United States in producing Eagle Scouts, and during my years there, I attended dozens of courts of honor. Within those evening celebrations, one witnessed the core values of scouting made visible: love of the outdoors, good citizenship, respect for elders, what one might call civil virtue. At the same time, all the various rankings of scouts were present in the emblems of their rank and participation, including many adult Eagle Scouts who had long before added that status, and all that it represents, to their résumé. The ritual of becoming an Eagle Scout vividly and robustly demonstrates the values of scouting and the relationships among its leaders, members, and their families.

The Eucharist, and really, all the sacraments, being of the anthropological genus “rite,” have analogous dynamics of identity and relationship. Both in what we do and in how we do it, we express our nature as baptized children of God, resident aliens in another empire, incorporated by the gift of the Holy Spirit into the living Christ who, in pouring self out for the life of the world, offers a perfect sacrifice of agape that adoringly, mimetically, mirrors the nature of Abba, the One from whom he is sent. At the same time, the liturgy incarnates the diversity of the Holy Spirit’s gifts and the myriad ways we are sent into the world as its foot-washers and meal hosts. There are church orders within the liturgy: bishops, priests and deacons, the faithful, and catechumens. There are different ministries among the faithful. We interact with one another in the act of worship in which we are caught up with Jesus in offering praise and thanksgiving to God.

But among these orders and ministries, within the carrying out of our rites, certain aspects of our faith are never forgotten or misrepresented. Primarily, there is the faith that God is God and we are not; that Jesus, dead and risen, has handed his Spirit over to us from the cross so that the messianic mission might continue; that God is agape, “world-making love” that is at once the fullness of life and the complete giving-away of it, the paschal mystery. Also among these is the conviction that “poder es servir,” or as Scripture has it, “those who would be first among you must serve the rest.” Another is that, among the children of God, “there is no Greek nor Jew, servant or free, woman or man,” that there is a universal equality in the human race that is ontological, by virtue of creation, but explicitly embraced by the baptized.

Because this equality shines through the rite in the important dialogues between the presider and the assembly, it matters that the priest sings, “The Lord be with you,” and we respond, “And with your spirit” (or “And also with you,” or “Back atcha,” or whatever ICEL concocts in the future.) While the language matters, it is more important that the dialogue be exchanged with ritual integrity. When we make that exchange of faith  which proclaims the Lord’s presence, we are acting as equals, as partners, all of us equally submitting to the discipline of the rite as a means of acknowledging our common bond as the children of God.  No one is free to fudge the syntax (for instance, for the priest to change the subjunctive verb in his greeting to an indicative one, “The Lord is with you.”) Nor are we free to improvise or riff on the text: “The Lord be with each and every one of you”. This is not because one or the other is truer to the Latin, however, which is verbless and of unknown origin. It is because the rite interprets us, and not the other way around. We submit to the rite’s discipline so that we learn its relentless incarnate message of equality. If Father can improvise, we can all improvise, and instead of a body, we have a mob. What is the right response to, “ The God of Jesus is with each one of you”? Those who have experienced this at Sunday worship, and we are legion, know the kind of ritual confusion this improvisation begets. Change the scene to a mixed congregation at a funeral or wedding of people from various communities unaccustomed to the personal quirks of the parish’s priest, and the simplest of responses (“Amen?” “Glory to you, O Lord?”) become anemic and inaudible. We don’t know, in fact, whether we should say Amen! It is quite possible, in the archdiocese in which I live, at least, to attend a mass where hardly a sentence of the rite is delivered integrally until well into the Eucharistic prayer. Everything is riffed. Prayers, even the Eucharistic prayers, are fudged to reflect the homiletic bons mots of the priest. If the priest can take these kinds of liberties, why shouldn’t everyone else? And the real question is, if priests don’t take the current translation and its connection to authentic ecclesial rite seriously, why on earth will they do so with a more arcane, Harry-Potteresque semantic field?

Only if everyone submits to the new rite will it demonstrate the ecclesial equality of the children of God. The ritual of the Eucharist is a roadmap and rehearsal script of service and gospel life, in which all receive the life of the Spirit as God's gift and, as the body of Christ, render back to God the "perfect sacrifice of praise" (or however the groovy new translations puts it.) But in order for the equality to be apparent in the ritual, everyone has to play by the rules. If one person (the presider) is improvising, riffing on the texts as so many are doing with the 1973 text, being less formal, and not more so, as one would expect from the structuralist rhetoric of the formalists, then we're not equal. If I'm stuck with, "and with your spirit", but the priest can say, "the Lord is with you" or "the Lord be with each and every one of you" or "good morning," and then says "thank you" when we reply, well, we don't have ritual equality. That very priest might imagine himself to be a champion of lay leadership and collegiality, but in fact every ritual word he speaks undermines the foundation of the ecclesia.

The new translation itself is a problem because it confuses archaism with reverence and  opacity with mystery. The Sacramentary and its General Instruction are overweighted toward maleness, toward the sanctifying (rather than diaconal) role of the priest, and emphasize courtly-imperial obeisance (rather than diakonia) as reverence. But it is the fact that priests aren't going to submit to it any more than they are to the current translation that is the greater problem.

My only entry point into this new translation, which goes against every instinct I have and my religious and catechetical experience of being a Catholic for nearly six decades, is that when all is said and done, it’s only liturgy. As important as liturgy is for keeping us together and focused on the truths mentioned above (God is God, we are not, the Holy Spirit dwelling in the Church, &c),”the sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church.” (SC, 9). This salvific sentence at the very source of liturgical renewal hearkens back to the language of the prophets, serving to remind us that sacraments, even the Eucharist, even the meals of Jesus himself, are symbols of the rest of life, and for there to be truth in the symbols, life has to be lived well. As Sing to the Lord further explains, “The Paschal hymn, of course, does not cease when a liturgical celebration ends. Christ, whose praises we have sung, remains with us and leads us through church doors to the whole world, with its joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties...Charity, justice, and evangelization are thus the normal consequences of liturgical celebration.” (SttL, 8-9) It will thus continue to be true that the quality of the translation, as well as the efficacy of the liturgy itself, will be judged not on how well we sing it, say it, or abuse it, but how the neighborhoods are being changed, how we are voting, and whether or not the “poor are filled with good things.” Neither we, nor this new translation, are God’s last chance.

Here’s how the triage metaphor plays out, then: the old translation, and all the music and authentic worship it engendered, is going to die. For it to survive will take an act of God, so I’m out of that picture. The Church is going to survive no matter what, especially that vast majority of folks who don’t really care whose side wins the translation war, or even know that there was a battle on, or that there was anything at stake worth fighting about. God will see that that Church survives, thrives, in fact, so I’m out of that picture, except, fortunately, to be on the receiving end of grace. What I have some control over, what I can attend to, is the making explicit of this link between submitting to the rite and the ecclesiology that underlies it. “The word of God is not chained,” writes St. Paul to Timothy, and it is not chained even in the golden prison of the liturgy. The only true orthodoxy is unity; unity comes from understanding, dialogue, and finally the service of the other, especially the stranger, especially enemies, that flows from agape. Everything else is ideology.

Over the years, as I’ve reflected on my life as a human being, husband, father, and Catholic, I’ve come to the gradual conclusion that “being right”, that most prized of Catholic virtues, is overrated. I have learned this from Jesus Christ, who “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.” You can’t be more “right” than being God, and yet Christ laid all that aside, and “became sin” for us (2 Cor. 5: 21). What matters most is not being right, but being one. When we get to the place where conscience conflicts with the prevailing wind, where “rights” begin to clash, the Christian must try to act in agape like the Master. Focus on the gospel. Change the neighborhood. When the Latinate syntax swirls in incomprehensible churchspeak, it will be of some comfort to know that our actions speak louder than words, more beautifully and convincingly than our music. At least, that is, until the parousia, when word and deed will be reconciled, and all will be one.

A fiction of Holy Thursday

I have a number of files on my hard drive that are so old and from such diverse programs (AppleWorks) and OSs and held together by such tired electrons that they would be the modern version of Dead Sea Scrolls, paragraphs of text degenerating into digital gibberish, unrecoverable. This is part of an article I wrote about Holy Thursday around 1991. I have no idea how it ends, but it began with this fiction, preceded by the word "Remember."

“What makes this night different from all other nights?”

Simon Peter lay curled on the damp, sour straw of his cell. The words of his young visitor, John Mark, invaded the tedious half-light of the Roman spring evening like a voice from another time. Pesach, he thought, remembering his wife, parents, children, and neighbors gathering around the table in Capernaum, year after circling year. New faces and old, now this one appears, that one gone since the last time. A lifetime ago it was, before we met Yeshua at the lake that day. “Jesus,” he tried again, the foreign sound of it still confounding his tongue, reminding him of his own captors, and of the events that had transpired during the spring festival so many years ago.

The night had begun like so many others, but in Jesus there was a foreboding. Every word, every gesture was a like a farewell. “Remember” was a word that had stuck with Simon from that night, and a word he had repeated a thousand times in telling the story of what had happened. Every meal that the little band had taken together was a story to be told. Sometimes the eating itself had been illegal, made him a little uneasy even, the conscience of the little Jewish boy within sternly reprimanded by the teachers of his childhood. Sometimes they had eaten with local synagogue leaders, and others who wanted to hear from the master’s mouth the words that had excited the countryside. Jesus would invite to table anyone he met, women and men, healed and healthy, sinner and saint. Evening after evening the feast went on: they had gotten a reputation of being gluttons and drunkards. Peter smiled at that, thinking about the filthy fare of his latter days. Things have changed.

He still could not think of what had happened in those hours without a wincing prayer: the master disrobing, washing their feet like a slave, telling them to remember. Always “remember.” Then the arrest, the trial. The bloody day he had watched from great distances of grief and cowardice, jealous of the women who had abandoned all self-concern to lavish their presence on his brutal isolation from whatever closeness they were allowed. The darkness, the storm. And running, running, running...

And the wonder of the days that followed. The women again, and their report of his empty tomb, a report he had verified himself. The real adventure had begun then. Every time they had reached for bread, eyes would meet and they would...remember. Reports from here and there, Emmaus, the lake shore in Galilee, right there in Jerusalem. The fire that began to blaze in us when we realized what was happening, when first the upper room and then the whole city, the whole world seemed too small to contain it. More days, more broken bread, more poured out wine—poured out blood. So much blood into the ground since then, and so many of the sisters and brothers who knew him are gone now; and now, they are saying, Jerusalem is to be sieged.

The Romans seem bloodthirsty, but their quest for power was really sprung from a yearning for the same thing Yeshua had wanted: “that they all be one.” Rome wants to make the world one by force, Peter thought. Yeshua had a different way: he wants the world to be one by surrender. Surrender to gratitude, mostly. Surrender to forgiveness. Surrender to healing. The Romans are ripe for the words of the Master, Peter muses. Already, many have come to the Way. It is really so simple. Let us sit down and eat together. Let us give thanks that we are alive in a world full of the Spirit of God, and remember who is the Creator, our light and our freedom. It is a harder message for the powerful to embrace, but to the lowly, it sings! For my ancestors in Egypt as for my little flock here in Rome, this is a day to keep festival and remember these things. What was that, John Mark?

“Why is this night different from all other nights?”

In the darkness of the cell, Peter raised himself and spoke aloud to his visitor: “It is the Passover of the Lord.”

TBT - An Unbegun Book, Chapter 1: Pastoral Musician and Disciple (1992)

I will praise the Lord all my life,
Make music to my God while I live. (Psalm 146)

I am forty years old, and I don't know anything. My car is a mystery to me. The simplest tasks of putting nails into boards or attaching wire A to post B make me sweat nervously. In the matter of human relationships, I have played a guessing-game for as long as I can remember, and have not been above cheating. It is a wonder that I have any friends at all, or that my family has survived knowing me. For eight years I was a travel agent, directing people to cities and airports and hotels to which I had never been, sharpening my skills as a poseur with crafty telephone bravado that made me modestly successful at my work.

What I know the least about is God. And yet my life's work (I have now been longer at my parish in Phoenix than at any other consistent work since grammar school) has been in a service of trying to enable thousands of good people with lives, I surmise, far more honest than my own, to experience the touch of the Holy One through the experience of communal worship.

Many of these people, as far as I can tell, have had much more intimate experiences of God's presence than I have. This arouses in me not jealousy, but curiosity. Some of these people cannot describe moments and days of their lives without tears of joy and gratitude. Many are able to describe moments of knowing God's presence with no doubt in their hearts at all. To me, these heart-held truths are a wonder. My friends at St. Jerome's are describing to me a land to which I have never been, or been invited. And yet, they accept me, and expect me to continue in my work among them. Another mystery.

I have come to suspect that my ministry, and perhaps therefore yours, is valid not because I have been somewhere, but because I sense that we are all going somewhere together. Furthermore, it seems to me that there is a sense that what we all do together especially on Sunday is something that we need each other for: I need the gift of their faith, they need the gift of my music. And what we need each other for is not what we do on Sunday so much as what it stands for: the continuing search for meaning in the turmoil of life, for signs of God's presence, and for the courage to be healing, forgiving, reconciling disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.

Being a disciple means following in the footsteps of a teacher, and for disciples of Jesus it invariably means following in those footsteps together. Discipleship, like my ministry as I have begun to understand it, is less a matter of being something than of going somewhere, of doing a discipline. The teaching of Jesus is not that we must experience God's presence in our lives, for that presence is never anything but God's gift. It comes to us in God's time and in God's ways. The teaching of Jesus is rather that we must behave or act as though we were living in that presence at all times and with all other persons. Jesus called that presence the reign of God or the kingdom. His Jewish heritage describes its relationships as justice, that is, the way that creation (including people) acts when God is around. Those who have followed, from the very beginning, knew that the only way to hold to the teaching of Jesus was to hold to it together, and so they met around each others tables and told the stories that kept him faithful, and they told stories about him.

Christian liturgy is the discipline of acting out the relationships of the reign of God as proclaimed by Jesus and understood by the apostles, the first disciples. Christian liturgy presumes relationships of equality but not identity, unity but not uniformity, diversity and harmony. It presumes the acknowledgment of those present that God is God, and that we are not. It assumes that we are all aware both of our chosen patterns of darkness and those which are our inheritance from our equally imperfect ancestors, and it further assumes that that sin will not have the last word. Our worship assumes that God is not hidden but is jubilantly, even scandalously self-revealing, a betrothed spouse who can hardly wait to consummate the marriage. Our worship makes us aware, week by week, year by year, that God is not a concept to learn or a set of equations that can be memorized, but is reachable through repeated, metaphorical actions using the most ordinary of human things. God is something like bread and wine shared at a table; God is something like being drowned, or bathed, in water, and being rubbed with scented oil; God is like stripping naked and putting on new clothes. God is something like an embrace, a kiss, a vow, or gathering around a sick person with song and prayer and oil. God is to be found in the very urge to assemble, to sing together, to repeat the stories of Jesus, to serve one another with gifts that come from we know not where. And certainly God is like scattering again to be a word of hope and forgiveness, and a bite of bread, to everyone in need of that good news.

In liturgy, we practice being the people whom God has called us to be. The real living of it will come in our homes, at work, in school, while raising our children and voting and being of the political, economic, and social relationships that make up our lives. But the rehearsal is extremely important. It keeps us true to the path of Jesus, and helps us to look with honesty at our patterns of behavior. In learning to be a thankful people we learn to be better stewards. In welcoming each others presence and reverencing strangers, we discover our radical equalizing unity in Christ and, a priori, in creation. I begin to love not only my neighbor as myself, but I begin to see my enemy as my neighbor, and the great-grandchildren of my enemy as the neighbor of my own descendants. The earth herself becomes more precious to me, for we were forged with the same fire, we are made of the same stuff, and all her creatures breathe with the same breath, the same holy Wind, the very Spirit of God. Ritual behavior keeps us true to these course-correcting insights.

We do not tolerate, for instance, places of honor in our liturgical assemblies for the rich or the powerful. No presiding presbyter may extemporize greetings: the ritual relationship requires that we meet as equals, so that communal responses may not be jeopardized by even well-intentioned spurts of spontaneity. "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" has a place in our memory and a special rhythm to it to which even small children respond,"Amen." As a prayer, it may need revision based upon the just critique of feminist theology, but it must be revised by the Church, not by an individual, and certainly not first thing Sunday morning! In our gatherings, we all share one cup and one bread (although for most of our churches, this is a charitable euphemism), no one gets more than anyone else. We listen to the word of God and not, for instance, to the latest spiritual tome by this or that writer (although many of us tried that one in the late sixties as well.)

What are the repercussions of this for the pastoral liturgist and musician? First of all, we ourselves need to be disciples, which means not that we have arrived anywhere but that we are one the road, together, following in the footsteps of Jesus. This means we ourselves must be people of the word. We need to study the scripture, and that means reading books about the scripture, and taking classes, as well as knowing the lectionary and its principles. It means reading a gospel, for instance, and not just the fragments we get Sunday to Sunday through the year. And of course, it means being part of a community's life, and living a lifestyle that is oriented toward love, reconciliation, and healing.

A second repercussion is that we have to know the liturgy, and take its demands seriously. It is important to realize the liturgy's value relative to the rest of the community's life, and to make it a servant of the community's needs. It is always painfully obvious when a community's worship is out of touch with its real life. The singing is lackluster, maybe co-opted by professionals alone, responses are perfunctory, attention is lacking, and people leave early. But good celebrations nurture and strengthen faith. The events of people's lives, the economy, the state of war or peace, the condition of the neighborhood, the struggle to live in wholesome relationships, all of these matters must not be ignored by the liturgy. When the liturgy's power is taken seriously, when rite and preaching and music and prayer confront and embrace the world of real experience, we have the sign of a transforming community of conversion. But when there is fire in a community, there is certainly going to be heat, and such a parish may find often find itself in intense self-evaluation, as well as finding itself occasionally out of step with the local powers in order to stay in step with the gospel. Parishes which have opened the doors to women in their ministries, particularly serving at the altar and preaching, will know the pain of which I have spoken.

Being a disciple and a minister means, then, following Jesus through the discipline of the scriptures, respecting the traditions that are delivered to us in the sacred liturgy and enculturating them for the people among whom we minister. Therefore, we must be an active part of that community's life. We share with the rest of the pastoral team the role of transforming our parish, including ourselves, into a more obvious sign that the reign of God is at hand. That means calling forth peoples gifts and empowering them to use those gifts for service of one another, both inside and outside of the liturgical assembly. Ultimately, our destiny is to take our gospel daily to the streets, to invite in all who have been pushed to the outside by whoever or whatever is stronger, and bring them to the wedding feast of the Lamb. Our task is to empower the community to be its best self which is a self for others; to be, in fact, Christ.

The above was written as the opening chapter of an "unbegun book," Amateurs Only Need Apply, in 1992.

TBT - Mystagogy from the early 1990s

I wrote this for the parish bulletin on the 2nd Sunday of Easter at St. Jerome's in Phoenix, no later than 1992 or 1993. It's slightly edited to remove some proper names. Don't miss the little (rare!) clip of Timmie Rogers linked below, probably from Ed Sullivan or Jackie Gleason. Took me forever to find it.

I remember so vividly from my childhood a black comedian named Timmie Rogers whose humor would make my father howl. He had a regular “schtick” in the course of which he would sing a little song that had the words, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die, oh yeah.” This witticism from Rogers whose name I don’t even remember now strikes me as a particularly deep theological insight.

"Still Doubting," John Granville Gregory

         Of all the oppressors that confound our sense of justice, death is the most relentless, the one that makes the least sense. The young and healthy can romanticize about the “good death” of one who has lived a “long and useful life,” but I suspect that for most of the elderly death is an unacceptable alternative to life. That doesn’t even begin to discuss the problem we have with death overtaking the young, the unborn, the innocent, the healthy, mothers, children, families, nations, and even whole races.

         In church talk at this time of year, we want to hear about being “rescued from death.” We hear this in homilies, read it in literature, and sing it in songs. Sometimes I think that what we mean by that phrase is that we expect to be rescued before death, that is, saved from the experience of losing life completely. Life is the thing that we cling to most tenaciously. Some psycholo­gists testify that the instinct to preserve one’s own life is the strongest in­stinct in the animal kingdom.

         Thomas encounters a Jesus today who was killed and is now alive. He was not “rescued from death” by the Father. Death had him with both hands, had begun to devour him, when God reached into this tomb and pulled him out. God transformed his death into something else: into resurrection life. Jesus wants Thomas and all of us to be very clear about it, asking Thomas to touch the wounds that he has so that he might believe that he is the same Jesus, once dead, now alive.

         We, however, frail in life and suspicious of God, want to rush to resurrection, bypassing death like a dark and ominous alley. We want “cheap grace,” with all the gain, and none of the pain. We speak of death romantically, as a mys­tical doorway through which we might pass to a new and better life. The truth is the death is death. It is the wrenching separation from all that is familiar and intimate to us, separation from our consciousness. And God will not “save us” from that experience. God shows up to “save us” from death three days late, like God did with Jesus, and like Jesus did with Lazarus.

         There is a lot of dying go­ing on. We’ve lost some friends and family to the big Death this year. And there is the other death of losing good friends as jobs, homes, and relationships shift and change. We can’t explain it. Death is death. Life is terminal. In the most cosmic sense, death is unfair. Generally, so is life.

         Today, Jesus invites us to touch his wounds and believe. Jesus, the victim of brutal regime well-practiced in the grisly business of capital punish­ment, is not dead, but alive. To go to heaven, I guess, we have to die. Real death. Real wounds. We can take home with us the comfort of neophytes’ smiles, a vision of white first communion dresses, and maybe the memory of a song. Scared, gathered in darkness, surrounded by the of imagined security of our locked doors, we hear again the voice of one who we thought was gone forever: “Peace be with you,” are his first words to us.

         Those who believe the man, let’s touch those real wounds and forget our imagined ones. Someone get busy and get the fellow something to eat.