Election and baptism

There is so much richness in the liturgy of Lent. Even for us at St. Anne, where for only the second time in my nineteen year tenure we don't have catechumens this year, it's still a good experience for the candidates and us.The origin of Lent is in the final  preparation of the catechumenal community for baptism at the Easter Vigil. Lent developed as a time of spiritual purification and enlightenment within the community, so as the catechumens prepared to be initiated into the Paschal Mystery through baptism, confirmation, and eucharist at the vigil, the rest of the community prayed for them as they themselves prepared to renew their baptismal vows at Easter. Years like this one, where we're without catechumens, maybe help us see what we're missing, focus on the other aspects of community transformation, and widen our perspective.

This first Sunday of Lent is the proper day to celebrate the Rite of Election. In this rite, celebrated with the diocesan bishop, the catechumens are brought by their godparents, who are publicly part of the initiation rites for the first time. Their godparents are questioned about the catechumens' readiness for initiation, based on the four charisms of the community found in Acts (do they pray, do they associate with other Christians, do they know and preach the gospel in their lives, and do they do works of mercy). Having heard the testimony of godparents and the rest of the assembled diocesan community, the bishop declares them to be "chosen by God" for the Easter sacraments. So, contrary to what we sometimes hear election means, the heart of the Rite of Election is not a matter of catechumens choosing to be baptized, but a matter of the bishop announcing, publicly, formally as bishop, that God has chosen them to be baptized.

It was always kind of a mystery to me how the readings of the first Sunday in Lent, in which the gospel is one of the three synoptic accounts of Jesus' temptation in the desert (in Year A, it is coupled with the story of the Fall, from Genesis, and a homiletic passage from Romans), had to do with Election. It was actually reading Rita Ferrone's great little book on the Rite of Election, On the Rite of Election: Forum Essay #3 (Forum Essays), that I came to a new appreciation of the breadth of the liturgy's vision on this day, and how really rich the tradition is.

The thing is, God has always chosen the human race to be his own, right from Eden. In several stories that cascade through the first part of Genesis, the imagination of Israel grapples with the question of sin, and how it is that things have gotten so bad in a world that was created good by God. The tree in the garden, Cain and Abel, the flood, Abram and Lot: in each case, people sin against God, God gets angry and punishes, then God relents with some kind of restoration, making clothes for the first parents, giving Cain a protective mark, saving Lot's family from Sodom and Gomorrah, and Noah's in the flood. But in the final episode, the story of Babel, people again want to be "like God" building their tower, and God confuses their language and scatters them. God does not abate his punishment in this last story as God did in the others. Or, according to some rabbinic interpretation, the entire story of the covenant with Abraham and the creation of the people of Israel is God's amelioration of the Babel disaster. For Christians, the culmination of that story is Jesus Christ, and ultimately, in the Paschal Mystery, the reversal of Babel at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit comes upon the Church, and people from all over the world hear the gospel in their own languages.

It is this God, this God whose project among the beloved is to save us from ourselves and teach us to be equal and happy, this God who chooses the catechumens for the baptismal waters. 

After the baptism by John in the Jordan, the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert, where he was tested by God for forty days. This story reminds us of the years Israel was tested in the desert, Israel who is God's beloved child. The scriptures remind us that Israel, a symbol of the human race, worries and complains, testing God in the desert, failing to trust in the One who called them out of slavery into freedom. But Jesus, fresh out of the Jordan River where he heard the voice of God call him "beloved," remembers that voice and is faithful when tested by the tempter. Israel cried out for manna; Jesus believed that God would see to his needs in God's own way and time. Jesus remembered that he belonged to God, and relied on God's love for his life and sustenance. Furthermore, he remembered who this God has been for Israel, the God of the covenant, the God of the exodus, the God of the prophets. He learned the ways of God, and returned to Galilee healing, forgiving, preaching good news to the poor, driving out demons. Living in the reign of the invisible God, he lived peace and equality in his word and at his table, a path the led him finally to pour himself out utterly, dying a criminal's death.

Today, I'm trying to realize that I am, in fact, in a desert, which is probably why I feel so dried up inside. Lots of things out there offer the quick fix, the willingness to turn carbohydrates into glycemic happiness, for instance. I'm trying to remember the music of my name when it is said by the Holy One, to turn away from my doubt and be healed of my paralysis by the Spirit of Christ, offered to me in my baptism and in the Eucharist, offered to me in my friends in the church, and everywhere I turn when I remember to look with my faith-eyes. I need to learn to expect something new, not to just keep on keeping on.

But "at my back I always hear/ Time's wingéd chariot hurrying near." I have less time for all this than I used to. Is God worth waiting for, this God who always seems to show up after the enemy has wiped us out, carried us into exile, flogged us and nailed us to a cross? To appropriate Tevye's prayer, "I know we're your chosen people, but once in a while, couldn't you choose somebody else?" But it's that fire inside that provokes me, that good news that is so very good, that promise that if we just start acting like it, the world can be a banquet where everyone can eat and drink as equals, and justice and peace will reach from earth to heaven and kiss. Success is not the prize. The journey is the destiny. 

So I need to remember that I was elected. I didn't choose God first, I was chosen. And, apparently, in part, to provide some traveling music for this peculiar, upstream journey. I thank God we have something to sing about, and I thank God for calling me into this chosen people who, at the Red Sea, were born singing.

You will be like gods (First Sunday of Lent, Year C)

It’s always a temptation for people like me to overintellectualize Lent. It’s easier, for instance, to talk about fasting than to fast, or to extol the value of almsgiving over actually parting with lucre. Similarly, it’s easier for people like me to be in love with love rather than to actually love, which involves self-denial and radical other-centeredness, which, intellectually speaking, I understand to be the real meaning of ecstasy. I'll have to take your word for it.

The gospel for Lent 1, and more obliquely that of Ash Wednesday, referring as they do the foundational stories of the Exodus (and therefore of creation), demonstrates to me again that love is more a matter of choosing than of feeling, and exposes again the shining insight of Paul in 1 Colossians that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. 

Temptation in the light industrial Garden of Eden,
by Australian artist Reg Mombassa

The serpent has gotten a bad rap since the days of Genesis. As you probably know, in Hebrew mythology, Satan is one of God’s servants. It seems to me that the conflation of the modern idea of Satan with the serpent of Genesis is a Christian addition to the story. To the writer of Genesis, it was just a snake (probably with legs, living in a tree) that was tempting Eve, telling her to try the tree in the center of the garden, because if they did, she and Adam would be like gods. I say “probably with legs” because there would otherwise be no reason for the curse that would leave the snake crawling on its belly. If it were already crawling on its belly, what kind of a curse would that be? “(Eve’s children) shall stomp on your head, and all you’ll be able to do is strike at their heel.” It’s a whimsical scenario, really, both the sadness of the way we blew it in Eden (which is to say, the way we blow it all the time, as Joni Mitchell says, we “don’t know whatcha got ‘til its gone,”) trading away everything we need that makes us truly happy for what we think will give us more. 

We’re such creatures of desire, aren’t we? Look at those game shows that tempt people to trade huge amounts of money or prizes for the possibility that they might get something better, even when the alternative is to leave empty-handed. Look at the way I buy lottery tickets week after week, even after reading The Drunkard's Walk and knowing full well what folly the lottery is in the light of the laws of probability. It’s part of why Rene Girard’s anthropology of mimetic desire is so cogent to me: it just feels right, like he’s been reading my email (particularly the ones from the Illinois Lottery). We seem to be oriented toward wanting more all the time, and the only salvation from that is love, love-in-action, that is, to give away what we have on behalf of the other. All of that is just to say that trial and temptation, which is the central issue of the gospel of the first Sunday in Lent, is not the work of Satan, but if we are to believe both Genesis and Job, the work of God. It’s sort of God’s way of sorting things out. People get tried, people mess up, even run away, but God stays with us. I tend to think more and more that it's not even so much God testing us, but the universe just going by randomly as it does, and our gradual awakening to God's presence with us in the chaos.

What does all this have to do with today's gospel? Well, it’s more explicit in Year A of the lectionary, when the first reading is literally the story of the fall, coupled with Matthew’s version of the desert temptation of Jesus. Today's Lucan narrative is joined to a reading from Deuteronomy that recounts the heart of the exodus. Though it is the Exodus story that is behind the words of Moses in today's first reading, Genesis isn’t ever far away, as there is a way of reading Genesis’s creation myth as a projection of the Exodus narrative into the deeper past. In Exodus, God brought order out of the chaos of history for Israel. God made a people from nothing, from a gaggle of Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Having made them into a people, they are tempted in the desert, and throw off their allegiance, testing God, worshipping other gods, and looking for a king. The Genesis story echoes Exodus, not the other way around. Genesis is the five-fold telling of the betrayal of divine favor (the fruit, the slaying of Abel by Cain, the destruction of Sodom, the flood, and the tower of Babel), leaving the final punishment of humanity singularly unabated, except by the story of Abraham, which begins the long journey of the covenant.

Eve and Adam, human beings sprung “fresh from the Word,” walk with God in the garden, know God’s voice, share divine friendship. Yet when the temptation is there to “be like gods,” they disobey the divine command, and lose everything. Jesus, fresh from his baptism in the Jordan where he had some kind of experience of hearing the divine voice calling him “beloved,” is tempted like Israel in the desert to make manna, to listen to the empty promises of other gods “courting him with lies,” to take a place among the mighty nations, chooses instead the voice he recognizes from the Jordan, even in the silence of the wilderness, and casts his lot with the Beloved. Jesus thus keeps the covenant that has been broken over and over between God and people. Rejecting the lures of power, comfort, and security, he chooses to be like a human being, rather than to be “like god.” 

The irony, of course, is that this is what God is like! We’ve gone so long building God into our own image and likeness that it seems impossible to us that God would not be all-powerful in the way we imagine power. Instead, God’s “power” comes from self-emptying for the other, an act which God accomplishes utterly and completely in every non-moment of “existence.” And rather than being diminished, God’s life is perfect, creatively teeming life. Jesus knows that the Beloved is calling him to fuller humanity. The kind of messiah Jesus is will be an image of the God who calls him, not a wonder-worker, but one who is solidarity with us, Emmanuel, I-am-for-you. Ultimately, Jesus will lay his life down rather than clinging to it. He goes the way of human beings trusting that God will still be in solidarity with him in the chaos of death and the grave. “Therefore, God has raised him on high, and given him the name above every other name.”

It occurs to me that as I begin Lent, the disciplines of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving are ways of changing my habits of self-preservation and aggrandizement into habits of other-centeredness, whether that other be God (in prayer) or neighbor (in almsgiving), for these are the same, according to the gospel. Fasting is another way of giving myself away, of not clinging to habits of self-preservation as a higher good than self gift. Of course, all of these things can be crazy, too, they have to be done with the right attitude (see Ash Wednesday’s gospel) and with an attitude like that of Christ, which upholds the value of life as manifestation of divine being. All fasting, almsgiving, and prayer is governed by the law of love, including the healthy love of oneself, appreciating one’s existence as a divine gift. Fasting will help me not to ask for stones to be turned to bread. Prayer will help me to remember who loves me, who is with me, who calls me, and not to worship lesser gods. Almsgiving will help me not cling to what I possess as my savior, and teach me better to trust my baptismal connection to other people, and not miraculous divine intervention, as the salvation of the world.

To be chosen by God, to know the voice and call of the one to whom I am beloved, what a gift that would be to discover again this Lent! To finally realize that embracing humanity fully, and not some counterfeit of it based on desire gone awry with accumulation of goods and power, is the path to the divine. To know that I am like God when I am giving myself away rather than becoming greater, to feel that in my heart and in my bones, what a surprise that would be. To consciously habituate that, to rehearse it, by fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, that would be a new thing for me. Maybe this year it can be more than an idea, or a nice thought? I’ll keep at it, knowing that nothing I do will, of itself, help me arrive in the dominion of God. I can only start acting like I’m already there, because, if God exists, I guess I am. The reign of God is actually at hand, I just have to turn around and believe the gospel instead of the Lie.

I told Jesus it would be all right if he changed my name...

Simon, Levi, and Saul (at least) all got new names when they embarked down the Jerusalem road, literally or figuratively, with Jesus. So, why not a Lenten name for all of us? I thought of three as I reflected for the millionth (or so) time on the Ash Wednesday gospel. First, two quick thoughts...

One thing that strikes me is that because of our (relative) success is isolating church and state in this country we miss the political implications of all scriptural writing. When we read religious imagery, we’re able to intellectually isolate it to the sphere of religion in our society. But for the ancients, from whose cultures all of these writings emerged, there was no such separation. The church and state were one. In some cultures, notably among the Egyptians of the pharaonic age and Rome of the Caesars, the identification of god and the pharaoh/emperor was complete. A critique of one was a critique of the other. Since we have separated our lives into secular and religious compartments, or maybe physical and metaphysical, we feel that, for instance, the call to conversion is a call to change our religious hearts. Our political hearts and economic hearts, we feel, can stay where they are. When we hear, “turn away from sin and believe in the gospel,” we something like “be nice, be fair, and go to church,” instead of the more radical call to turn away from one kingdom and one king and toward another, and to believe in the other king’s way. But "gospel" is a political word. It’s political good news about an emperor, or a military victory. It’s not a Time-Life biography of a messiah.

I also reflected on the word “hypocrites” which recurs in the gospel, and the fact that the word is so weighted in our vocabulary, possibly precisely because of its usage in the Sermon on the Mount. Among the ancients, though, it meant, pretty much literally, “an actor on the stage.” I remember reading that artisans like the Jesus's father Joseph, and presumably Jesus himself, would have been involved in building theaters and stages of Galilee, in places like Capernaum and Herod’s great city Caesarea Maritima, and probably knew actors in their towns. Thus the references to make-up and emotive public kvetching mentioned in the gospel today could be thought even funnier if one imagines Jesus pantomiming the antics of religious zealots acting holy. Jesus’s point seems to be less about the privacy of deeds than about their authenticity; or perhaps, letting their secrecy seal their authenticity. Truly loving deeds, deeds that proceed from agape, are not interested in being noticed or in reward or even affirmation. They’re done from a surfeit of love or habit of grace, a way of life that wants to give life away.

And this is, of course, Clay Achin'.

Back to “change my name” now. Take your pick of these three stunning Lenten appellations, sadly somewhat taken already, but certainly could be shared for forty days:

Clay Achin': The apostrophe is kind of lame, I know, but I like the theology of it. We are clay (made of stardust, thank you, Carl Sagan.) We are clay aching for creation, an ache that St. Paul in Romans 8 attributes to the Holy Spirit crying out from within us. We know we are broken, we want to turn around and believe in a different God, but we just don't think we can do it. If my name were Clay Achin', God could more quickly identify me as someone who is waiting for the Spirit to create me again.

Dusty Baker: I like this choice for both aspects of the nomenclature. “Dusty” evokes the “remember you are dust” admonition of the ash minister. This phrase comes from the story of the fall in the book of Genesis. It’s meant to evoke the curse of death, of course. But the curse is evoked in the context of creation: what God can do with dust is, of course, create a new person. So while it is an admonition to be aware of one’s mortality as inescapable, and to use that information as an aid to better living, it is also an act of faith in the God who breathes into the dust of the earth and creates us again, as Psalm 51 says.

Then, of course, there’s the “Baker” aspect of the name, which evokes the work of Christian in feeding the world, specifically with bread, and precisely, with the bread of life, Christ, a part of whose mystical body each of us is by reason of our baptism. The bread that we bake and break and share is Christ, head and members. Christ gives us away for the life of the world.

Left, "Muddy Waters," the great blues guitarist. Right, "Dusty Baker," the great Reds baseball coach.
Blues and Reds. Coincidence? I think not.

Muddy Waters. “Waters” of course evokes the baptismal aspects of the Lenten season. Lent is for catechumens a 40-day retreat to prepare for baptism. For the baptized, it’s a season of preparing to renew our baptismal promises more authentically, to consider the ways we’ve been co-opted by the kingdom of Caesar and not fully turned toward the reign of God. The echo of splashing waters of life pervades the season, no more so than on the third Sunday of Lent with its story of Meribah in the desert, and the Samaritan woman and Jesus at the well of Shechem. “Muddy” suggests that in all of us the baptismal waters don’t run as clean and clear as they should, on the one hand. On the other, “muddy” suggests the clay in the hand of God that is sculpted into the human being adama, and into which God breathes the breath of life to make a world.

Dusty Bakers of the world, Muddy Waters, even you Clay Achin’s, let’s keep walking, turning, moving together, and hope that when the Lord changes our name, it’ll have enough power in it to change the rest of us as well.

And so that you have a song to sing as you wear your Lenten name, you can listen to some of Tom Kendzia's brilliant song "Changed My Name," from his CD Clothed in Love, by clicking on the song title or the button below for its iTunes link. 

The shadow on the mountain

I have notes to myself from years past that the following words were not heard in the homily on Ash Wednesday: baptism, cross, Christ, Easter, resurrection, fasting, almsgiving, prayer. One year, we were exhorted to make amends to people we’ve offended and to read the bible. I'm good with that! Then we were told not to fast, because no one cares about that, quote: “Read the Bible and eat your chocolates.” I’m sure that this is somewhere in our tradition, but the exact place where it shows up in the Fathers escapes me. Lent is a time of reflection, of turning inward, we were told. Really? Inward is where I am all the time. I guess I don’t have to change. Homilists, may I suggest what you already know: to ignore baptism in Lent is about like ignoring Christ at Christmas. According to our best sources, it's the reason for the season.

Another aspect of Lenten preaching that gets ignored is the communal and political nature of repentance. This can be seen in the context of the first reading from the prophet Joel, about sounding the trumpet in Zion, &c &c. You can read the passage again here. What precipitates the call to repentance, fasting, and change is a disaster that befalls the community. It might be a plague of crop-devouring locusts so virulent that it is compared to an invading army with the power to decimate the population, causing havoc and ruin. Or I suppose it might be an invading army as numerous as a plague of locusts, too. In either case, it is a "shadow on the mountain," and the call to fast is not to address some internal psychological issue. Read the beginning of Joel 2 here. This is a ritual fast being proclaimed in the nation to beseech heaven to intervene in the case of a natural and political disaster. 

Like blackness spread upon the mountains
 a great and powerful army comes;
 their like has never been from of old,
 nor will be again after them
 in ages to come. (Jl 2:2, NRSV)

We moderns don't believe than there’s any connection between natural disaster and divine disfavor, in fact, the New Testament witness goes against the idea that God would in any way be responsible for such disasters, since God makes the sun shine and rain fall alike on the good and the bad. Good things happen to good and bad people, and bad things do too. The cosmos doesn’t really care where the asteroid hits, where the tsunami floods or the tornado destroys. That will, in fact, come up for our reflection on the Third Sunday of Lent this year, at least in parishes not doing the scrutinies with catechumens. 

But the people who suffer the most from these things are those who have the least protection from their ravages and who have the last ability to recover financially from their losses. The natural response can be “every ‘man’ for himself,” so that the poorest of the poor are left not only without means, but without hope. What baptism brings to this situation is an outward sign of the reality that all people are equals and the children of God. All people are called to share equally and eternally in the goodness of the earth and to live in the freedom and mutuality of the dominion of God. What Lent does is try to give us an opportunity, with those who are waiting for baptism right in front of us, to remember the calling we have already received, and to lead us, not inward, but outward, to other people. Lent comes yearly to lead us to the awareness that we might have too much, and that much needs to be cut away so that we can reach others (fasting). Lent calls us to center upon the One whose loving generativity is the origin of our communion (prayer). It gives us the opportunity to develop and practice new habits of generosity so that our goods, however meager or lavish, might be shared with the human family, particularly those who have been less enriched by the cosmos (almsgiving).

The path to this way of solidarity and equality under God is the path to the cross. The way of the world is to desire and obtain, not to be generous and surrender. Our Lenten practices preach by word and example that the riches that we have accumulated really belong to everyone equally, and that our petty ways of separating people into the deserving and undeserving, the in and the out, red and blue, sinners and just, these are all illusions of ego-driven and misguided desire. Those who follow the gospel will be no less vulnerable to the lash and cross than was Jesus who, as the icon of the invisible God, preached the word of justice and equality on earth, the jubilee made human. The way to Easter leads through Good Friday, for Jesus, and for everybody. 

Maybe you can see a little bit why it bothers me when words like “baptism,” “cross,” “Christ,” “fasting,” “prayer,” and “almsgiving” aren’t used in the Ash Wednesday homily. Instead of looking for a "theme" for Lent, we need to mine the tradition of Lent, and remember what it means to renew our baptismal promises. What sin is it, as a community, that we are called to reject? What kind of actions might we discern we would be taking if we really believed in God, Christ, the holy spirit, the church? Questions like these can help us to trust in Pentecost, trust in Easter, trust in the God of Jesus to break through our sinfulness and rampaging desire and keep saving the world. 

We know that the shadow is on the mountain; God give us strength to blow the trumpet, call the assembly, proclaim the fast.

Valentine's Day! Songstories 2 - Psalm 34 "Every Morning in Your Eyes"

So it's Valentine's Day on Ash Thursday this year. Um, awkward for lovers of chocolates and other confections of seduction. There should be a general dispensation from Lenten resolutions, right?, for St. Valentine's day, the way the Irish clergy do so willy-nilly with St. Patrick's when it falls, say, on a Friday of Lent. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I think, what can I say about VD (pardon the unhappy acronym...let's make it SVD. Starting over.) What can I say about SVD that won't encourage misbehavior in re Lenten resolve, nor arouse the ire of my Significant Other, about whom bupkes is to be said nor whose visage is to be viewed online, She-Who-May-Not-Be-Tweeted? Music, I think. Music hath charms to soothe the savagely beaten quadregisimal breast.

I'm one of those people who have a hard time switching between the right and left side of my brains unless someone instructs me to do so. I don't quickly see symbolism in books and movies until someone says, "Look for the symbolism," and then I'm all over it. Same with scripture. I had to be trained, I need to keep retraining my postmodern mind, to look beyond the text to the matrix, to look with a form-critical, historical-critical, literary-critical eye at texts that were always just classroom texts to me. 

A good example of this is Psalm 34. One could, with me, be baffled, I think, if one approached matrimony with a courtly romantic mind, and wonder, "Who on earth thought of Psalm 34 as a responsorial psalm for weddings?" It is a lament, after all, and besides the too-easy riffing on the wedding psalm as a lament, why? (Imagine Nathan singing to David with the trouble in the harem, "Who's sorry now?") Here is the normative text of the psalm:

R. I will bless the Lord at all times.
I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
Let my soul glory in the Lord; the lowly will hear me and be glad.
R. I will bless the Lord at all times.
Glorify the Lord with me, let us together extol his name.
I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.
R. I will bless the Lord at all times.
Look to him that you may be radiant with joy, and your faces may not blush with shame.
When the poor one called out, the Lord heard, and from all his distress he saved him.
R. I will bless the Lord at all times.
The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.
Taste and see how good the Lord is; blessed the man who takes refuge in him.
R. I will bless the Lord at all times.

Anyway, into my life, as I have said before, came John Gallen, SJ, with all his gifts and faults, but there is no denying he was a gifted teacher. And I can never forget him talking about this one night, or several times more likely, and possibly preaching on it in context. Speaking about the Jewish vision of reality, he began by citing the many passages of the Jewish scriptures in which it is proclaimed that God's presence indwells in creation, that God has made all things by his own hand, and where God has been, goodness exists. "The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord," says Psalm 33. There is a sense that, fallen as human persons are, creation itself is holy, touched by God, and alive with the divine presence. Psalm 8 marvels at God's presence in the world, "How awesome is your name over all the earth!" The Hallels call the rivers to clap their hands and the hills to ring out at God's presence. 

John said, now think about what Psalm 34 is saying. "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord." In other words, the psalmist is making a declaration about the senses, that the goodness of God can be experienced through the senses - not just by intuition or cognition, as though it were only accessible by thought or special revelation, but immediately accessed through sensibility. What a thought!

Now, in the context of the wedding liturgy, we have a multi-faceted diamond of a text. For not only does Psalm 34 allow us to imagine that in the experience of human love (taste and see) God's presence is accessible, it also suggests that through the new creation of married love the cry of the poor is heard, and fear and shame are cast out. Suddenly, I began not only to grasp the appropriateness of the psalm, but began to wonder how another psalm could be any more appropriate at all!

So, when Terry's St. Louis friend and my choir buddy Mary Beth Nolte was going to be married to Mike Hirte on my birthday in 1993, I decided that for a little wedding present I'd write them a song, and I used as the text Psalm 34. I expanded the refrain from the verse "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord," and did a metric paraphrase of the verse thus:

Every morning in your eyes, all my life,I will bless God always, ever near,Near as you, my friend.Taste and see, touch and hear The goodness of the Lord.
1. Glad thanksgiving my constant song, the praise of God I sing. Hearts now broken will hear my voice, and rise on joyful wing. 
2. Sing with glory the holy name, O join the song with me. In my worry, I sought that strength, and God has set me free. 
3. Face that radiance, the holy light where shame no shadow abide.Those in trouble will cry aloud to find God at their side.
4. God's own angels will pitch their tents around the faithful home. Look around you; O taste and see the blessings of God's own.

copyright © 1993 GIA Publications. All rights reserved. www.giamusic.com 

That's all there is to tell. We recorded "Every Morning in Your Eyes" on our 1993 CD Stony Landscapes.

Psalm for Weddings" on iTunes.

Happy Valentine's Day, church! A special one to Ms. Donohoo, and to Mike and Maribeth - it will be 20 this year, if my slide-rule is correct. And to all my kids and delicious granddaughters, a happy day, full of love and laughter. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord! Use chocolates if necessary.

My name is mud...That's not so bad

Remember that you are dust, and into dust you shall return. 

 I can remember resisting these words from today's liturgy, opting for the more positive-sounding "Turn away from sin, and believe in the gospel." Somewhere along the line, though, I realized the wisdom and joy that are actually contained in that admonition from Genesis. At first glance, remembering that I am dust might not be a particularly life-giving premise. But then I am happy to recall that I am not in charge of the universe, God is. And God, Genesis reports, does some wonderful things with dust. So with David today, I cry out, "Create me again." All the false starts, the hunger, the loss, the devastation I've caused, take them all like the dust of the earth, make clay, breathe your mighty spirit into them, and make me a new creation. You've got forty days, Lord. Better get on it. Until then, you can call me "Dusty."

I recall today that the genuine meaning of penance is the confession that God is great. Specifically, God's mercy is greater than sin, and has already reached out in Christ to crush it. The focus of penance is on God's goodness, not on my goofiness. "Fore-giveness" was "given before" our guilt. What I need to do is get my relationships straight: God is God, I'm not. But God's power is exercised through the bowing down, through service, through the cross, through life, not through destruction. The way to get out of the pattern of sin must be somehow through the cross, through giving my life so that others can live more abundantly. What the paschal mystery reveals about this is that there is no "loss of life" through love, rather, there is creation. It's the story of the grain of wheat. 

So this is what I'm going to try to consider this Lent. If God did not "grasp onto divinity" in saving the world through Christ, what is it that I am clinging to so tenaciously that keeps me from loving better? Sometimes, I think it's something as simple as needing to be right all the time, the great Catholic intellectual sin. 

All of this is oriented toward the renewal of baptismal promises at Easter, accepting again my role in the mission of Christ to reverse the effects of sin through the power of the Holy Spirit and bring people together instead of driving them apart. I really like these ninety days...I just wish they weren't so full of work. Honestly, though, I'm grateful to be ministering in the Church, because I think I'm too weak to spend much time thinking about all this stuff if I had to be motivated from within.

On our CD Vision (GIA, 1992), we recorded and published a setting of Psalm 51, the famous Miserere psalm. In paraphrasing the refrain, I tried to bring out some of these aspects that can be hidden in the too-familiar language of scripture. For instance, did you know that in Hebrew, the verb "create" is never used unless the subject is "God"? So when the psalmist says, "Create a new heart in me," he's actually acknowledging that only God can do this. So my paraphrase, since "heart" really means "the deepest reality of me", says "Create me again." Acknowledging that I am dust is a good first step. As Genesis says, God creates adama, the human being, out of the dust of the earth, by breathing ruah (breath or spirit) into it. So creation is dust plus God's breath. Being dust is good. "Create me again." (Link will take you to iTunes, where you can hear a minute and a half of the song.)

More on Friday, about that first reading, which gets stripped all too often of its context. Tomorrow, a little diversion for Valentine's Day.

PS - thank you to everyone who is reading this blog! I went over 3000 visitors in just three weeks yesterday. It's good to know we're not alone as we're going through life. I genuinely appreciate your feedback, too. More thoughts tomorrow. Happy Lent, all!

Why liturgical song matters: a fiction

One of the lesser southern kings is about to ascend the throne in Jerusalem. His father was no great shakes. Higher taxes. Conscription into civil service. The entertaining of foreign regents and ambassadors, with the attendant syncretism and assimilation of their talismans and demigods. Now the young offspring is about to ascend the throne. Showing no more imagination, fidelity, or promise than his late father, he is about to be legitimized by the Temple priesthood as the agent of the Lord in Judah. Rumors certainly abound about the disappearance of some of the non-guild prophets, and word has gone out from the military that dissent from the current policy of accommodation would be looked upon harshly.
Just your luck. Your number is drawn to lead the gathered assembly in the key psalm of the coronation rite, and the words that were written on your heart as an apprentice in the Temple rise up in you as you face the throng amid the clamor and the haze of incense and burning offerings:

God, give this king your own judgment,
Your justice bestow on this prince.
Let him govern your people with justice
The afflicted ones with honor.

Claire proclaiming the psalm, once upon a time...

From your heart, the chanted words bubble up into your throat, imbued with hope and intention. The ancient memories stir. The people gathered in front of you were snatched by the hand of Adonai, torn from Pharaoh's grasp, in the Exodus. God is their true monarch. This one must be like God. It is your task to remind him that it is God’s power that brought him to this day, God whose power sustains the family line, and who alone rules the hostile gods of the surrounding superpowers. Your voice gathers strength from memory. No, it is no longer your voice, but the voice of Jacob, possessed and made righteous by the covenant gift of the Holy One, and your nation’s fidelity to Torah: You are emboldened to take the court into your glance. While the guard stirs suspiciously, you catch the eye of the one who pretends to the throne of Grace:

Yes, may justice flower while he rules,
Your own peace as long as he lives....
May he rescue the poor when they cry out
May he hear the cries of those with no champion…
Then, his name will be blessed forever,
Remembered as long as the sun shines.

Trembling with the unforeseen power of the moment, you leave the place assigned the cantor while the throng sways with chants of ‘Amen.’ The word of God is alive in the room. The king and his wife look at the inlaid floor. The guild prophets are nearby, chanting gibberish that could be alleluias. The captain of the guard is memorizing your face.
•••••

So, friends. Do you feel like a hypocrite when you sing the psalm? Does it seem, as you read scripture, that God has been reading your email, and is listening to you speak or sing the word? Wonder what business we have proclaiming it? 

Start here: it's God’s word, not ours. And God's spirit filled us in baptism, confirmation, and at every Eucharist to do this task: not just to speak the Word, but to be the living Word of God. It is a fire burning in us that will raze the world so that it can be rebuilt anew in Christ. We might shy away from explicitly prophetic texts, for fear of being branded ‘hypocrites.’ Worse, we might imagine, if don’t adequately prepare ourselves, that these texts are historical documents and not ritual ones, and that the scriptural demands placed upon the leaders of Israel and Juda are not applicable to the demands that God puts upon presidents, chairpersons of the board, principals, popes and bishops and pastors, senators, governors, and parents.

Integrity, the gift of being made a worthy instrument, living the word we sing, is what we seek. It's why we have Lent, it's why we have Eucharist, scripture, personal prayer, and retreats. God is writing the Word on the heart of us as we sing it. God's word shapes us into Christ as we proclaim it. Political and economic activism, as well as pushing for justice within the community, inevitably follow. I see it in my community all the time. We're at the beginning of something: we need to be faithful. And patient. It is, after all, God's mission, not ours. The words we sing change us.