"For all that has been, thanks."

I started this blog in mid-January of this year. Sometime today or tomorrow, the "page views" ticker is going to go over the 15,000 mark, which to me is just unbelievable. It's not "Whispers in the Loggia," but it does go to show the power of social media to unite people with common interests. Writing the musical and liturgical stories down has helped me articulate my heart better, allowed me an apologia pro vita mea musicali. 

Instead of writing about that, though, I thought today I'd just tell you what you seemed to like. These are the top ten posts since day one by the number of page views.

Pretending to play Frank Lloyd Wright's piano at
Taliesin West, before the cops caught me

1. "If You Can't Say Anything Nice" - the most popular entry was a post about the way we talk about each other and the music with which we choose to worship.

2. "Ten Songs that Made a Difference to Me: 1-5" - these were liturgical songs from the first decades after the Council (1965-1985). I wrote this reflecting on NPM's Pastoral Music survey article "Songs that Made a Difference." The second half of this piece didn't quite make the top ten, but it is here. Don't want it to be a cliffhanging source of consternation.

3. "The Privilege of Our Calling" - this was a reflection on life as a parish musician over a period of twenty years in a single parish.

4. "Ten Songs that Influenced Me: 1985-2005" - a follow-up to #2 above, this article was part one of two dealing with the second two decades after the Council.

5. "Ten Songs that Influenced Me: 1985-2005, Part Two" - unlike #2, you seemed to be just as interested in how this second top ten came out. I'm guessing because you didn't remember the older songs. :-)

6. "Who's in Charge Here?" This was some notes I'd written a few years ago about Holy Week in the parish, when serendipity (or the Holy Spirit) changed the outcome for the better from my plan.

7. "Believing Is Seeing 2 - the Dark Night of the Liturgical Soul" was the second of a series of reflections on the gospel of Lent 4 in year A, the story of the healing of the man born blind.

8. (tie) "Word of the Day: Triduum" - a public service announcement about a bit of our jargon.

9. (tie) "Anniversary - My Half-Life as Music Director" - my little "paschal mystery" story of how I got into this work thirty years ago, getting fired from my "real job" on Holy Thursday, 1983.

10. "Acknowledging Impostor's Syndrome" - confessing that nagging feeling that I don't know what I'm doing and have no business pretending that I do.

In addition, I've done a couple of series that I will be continuing. In case you haven't seen the entries yet, here's what I have so far in my "SongStories" and "Albums" postings.

SongStories - what kills me here is that there are 7 entries and 6 numbers because there are two #2. Math, at least ordinal numbering, is clearly not my strong suit.

Safety Harbor

Psalm 34: Every Morning in Your Eyes

Jerusalem, My Destiny

Precious Blood

Psalm 22 for Palm Sunday

Toward a Family-Friendly Easter Vigil

Heart of a Shepherd (Agape for Breakfast)

Albums

You Alone (1983)

Do Not Fear to Hope (1986)

Mystery (1987)

Lost and Found (1987)

Thanks to everyone who has read this blog over the last three months, and for all the affirmation, correction, reminiscence, and other kinds of feedback you've given me. More to come. See you in church.

Simple perfection 2 - Yesterday and Edelweiss

The songs I wanted to present as examples of the songwriter's art today are more in the traditional form of pop music than the gem "Moon River" that I mentioned yesterday. All of these are variations on the simple rondo form, which can be expressed as A-B-A or A-A-B-A or A-B-A-C-A or any number of variations. What is common to them is that there is a musical theme to which the melody continues to return. It might be a line in a melody, or a whole stanza that gets repeated.

I think what's going on here is a musical incarnation of the ancient artistic principle of repetition and variation. Art relies on both dynamics: repetition gives the pleasure of recognition and familiarity. We hear something and then hear it again, and we have a sense of inner joy from the recognition of it. Too much recognition and repetition can be boring, though, and so art also introduces the element of variation: a contrasting section in a related key, for instance, or just a different tune to break the monotony of a single melody.

Today's primary example is the great Beatles' song Yesterday, by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Again, like we had with "Moon River," we have a very condensed lyric with no repetition or additional stanzas after the first four have been exposed:

Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay.
O I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly
I'm not half the man I used to be.
There's a shadow hanging over me.
O yesterday came suddenly.

Why she had to go I don't know, she wouldn't say.
I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.

Yesterday
Love was such an easy game to play
Now I need a place to hide away,
O I believe in yesterday.

(c) 1965 Apple Corps Ltd.

Look at the simplicity of the form: AABA. All three "A" sections are exactly the same musically. Each starts and ends with the same word in they lyric, "yesterday" or "suddenly". Each starts on the second tone of the scale, an unusual, dissonant tone on which to begin, giving a sense of being unsettled right from the start. We don't know what's going on, only that something is different now from before, causing the plaintive tune (in F major, an interesting choice, in a song where one might expect a minor key) and the mournful cello accompaniment. The contrasting "B" section lets us in on the singers trouble: of course, it's a girl. It probably wasn't her fault, the final "A" section indicates that the singer thought love was a game, so she was probably smart to get out, and everyone is the wiser, and we have this lovely perfect little song to show for our new experience.

Writers of popular songs, including hymns, have long known that the formula of repetition and variation (surprise) is one that works with audiences, whether in the concert hall  or church assemblies. So many popular songs depend on "refrains," repeated sections that recur with some kind of musical or lyrical hook that make us want them to come back again and again. They're made for our memories, with built-in variations to help bear the weight of repetition. Think about any of your favorite church hymns. Following the lead of Luther and Wesley, look at their structure. Take the popular Welsh tune HYFRYDOL (Alleluia, Sing to Jesus). The first and second musical lines of every stanza are identical, the last two are different but related (similarly, DIX (For the Beauty of the Earth) and EIN FESTE BURG (A MIghty Fortress). Or the tune ODE TO JOY, by Beethoven: of the four musical lines, lines 2 and 4 are identical, line 1 is nearly identical, and 3 provides contrast from the dominant key (AA'BA). Or ELLACOMBE (The Day of Resurrection) or LLANFAIR (Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise) - same basic 4-line structure. Even melodies with slightly more complex form rely on imitation in the melody when they don't exactly duplicate it, like NICAEA (”Holy, Holy, Holy,” ABAC) and MENDELSSOHN (”Hark, the Herald Angels,” AA'BBCC’). Many others use refrains and other techniques, like inner repetition, to achieve the familiarity that singers and listeners desire.

Another perfect little song, “Edelweiss,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein from the musical The Sound of Music, demonstrates some of these techniques as well, as it imitates the folk melody and the wisdom of repetitive structure and a condensed lyric:

(A) Edelweiss, edelweiss, every morning you greet me.
(A') Small and white, clean and bright, you look happy to meet me.
(B) Blossom of snow may you bloom and grow, bloom and grow forever.
(A') Edelweiss, edelweiss, bless my homeland forever.

The simple elegance of this lyric, represented here in its entirety, represents well the small flower that the song honors, and the human virtues of honor and solidarity for

Edelweiss

which we are meant to see that it stands. It is as though the lyric grew out of the foothills of the Alps, the simple triple meter inviting immediate participation as much as any genuine folk song might do. In thirty-two bars, the elegance of musical immortality is achieved in a song about a little white flower, and people like me learn a little about economy, craft, and the art of music.

Simple perfection 1 - Moon River

Perfect little songs. I thought I'd share a couple of ideas about some little songs that I think are perfect in their construction. Why do some songs wear so well, and others are forgotten so quickly? Is it length? Words? Music? I ask myself that every year at Christmas. Why are some Christmas songs "immortal," and others so ephemeral? Is it even possible to write another "Silent Night" or "Joy to the World" or "Adeste Fideles"?

That's a question I'll have to look at another time. I think of taking songs like "Silent Night," "Amazing Grace", and "On Eagle's Wings" and try to figure out some of the reasons they are so beloved. But for today, I'll just look at one of my favorite modern popular songs and give some reasons I think it's so perfect.

Moon River by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer

I think this song is a marvel of musical and lyrical construction. Consider the lyric itself. There is just one stanza or chorus. No verses. And nothing more is needed: 

Moon river, wider than a mile,
I'm crossing you in style someday.
Old dreammaker, you heart-breaker,
Wherever you're going, I'm going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world,
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end,
waiting 'round the bend
My huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.

People of a certain age know that is song is the Oscar-winning movie theme from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Holly Golightly appears to sing it in the movie just with a simple classical guitar strumming. But you don't need to see Audrey Hepburn, or hear her wistful voice, to know the longing, memory, and ache for a different future "waitin' 'round the bend" that is all carried in the words and music of the song.

Musically, there's a uniqueness about "Moon River" in that there's no repetition or imitation of musical ideas between any of the lines or phrases. The melody of every two-line phrase is unique, logically following from what precedes it, but not imitating it in any obvious way. There is, however, some inner repetition. The notes of the phrase "wider than a mile" are repeated in "crossing you in style,"

Johnny Mercer's Savannah home was on the bank
of the Back River, now known as Moon River

heightening the inrhyme. Same with dream maker/heart breaker, and later "waiting 'round the bend/my huckleberry friend." The difference between this and the quasi-rondo or sonata form that is the standard form for much popular music is analogous to the difference between end-rhyme and inrhyme. The device here is compacted, allowing for a much shorter musical whole. Even in other short classics, there is long-line  imitation, as we shall see. This amazing tune does so much in just 9 or 10 lines!

But aside from the wonder of the tune-crafting, look at the lyric. Look how many words invite us into pondering the scene the singer is imagining. Just the first two words, the title of the song, invite us into a world of reverie: "Moon river". It's as though two great metaphors of poetry, myth, and song have been grafted here, and we can barely get out of the starting gate! We're slowly drifting on that river with the singer, dreaming, longing for a new start. Then Johnny Mercer pours another classic metaphor into the mix: the rainbow's end, and we're eddying again in a whirlpool of reverie. My favorite is "my huckleberry friend," conjuring Mark Twain's great adventure hero, his raft, and the Mississippi to be alongside us here in the boat.

(This might be a good place to think about the metaphor in Psalm 91 that became the central metaphor in "On Eagle's Wings." In that refrain, we are stunned by, even as we sing, the ancient words of the psalmist, "He will raise you up on eagle's wings, bear you on the breath of dawn." In the span of a single sentence, two metaphors of indeterminate depth sweep us into the mystery of God's beauty and strength. The role of metaphor in song lyrics, like those in "Moon River" and "On Eagle's Wings," could be explored further, and should be, in the case of liturgical song, because the human soul cries for the transcendence that metaphor can provide, while the voice of orthodoxy requires that metaphor be restrained to protect the gravitational field of truth. Another time, maybe!)

The whole of "Moon River" is certainly greater than the sum of these few parts I've demonstrated. The real magic is the blending of the melody and the lyric, a craft at which few have excelled to the degree that Henry Mancini has. Mancini's tune stands on its own in its evocative beauty, a "Moonlight Sonata" in 40 bars or so. Songwriters struggle for the kind of economy that Mercer and Mancini exercise in "Moon River," and it is rarely matched.

I hope to do the same with a few other songs I think are "perfect": The Beatles' "Yesterday," for instance, and Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Edelweiss." Maybe you have some ideas about that, too. But in case I never get around to the others, at least you know the songs which represent perfection to me, and to which I aspire as a writer.

You can throw in "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and "Happy Birthday," too. These things ought to be investigated!

I shall be with you

It's not like we have to have something to say about everything horrible that happens. Not everything

means something. It takes time to make meaning, and I suspect the time is as much about forgetting some aspects as it is making sense of horror.

People have written all kinds of things already about Boston, the bombing, the loss of life and limbs and joy. Others have truthfully written that this terrible thing is a daily occurrence in other countries, and that the only thing different about this was that the street was in Boston and not Baghdad or Basra. I hope we would think about his seriously, but I don't think we will.

None of it helps the mom and dad and sister of that little boy, or the family of the young woman who died, or the Chinese woman. To them, for them the day was a portal into another dimension, one that they never imagined having to walk into, never let their wildest fears approach.

For me, it's a prayer time. The prayer is just, "I don't get it. Get us through this without more blood, and without revenge. Help us staunch the flow of violence in ourselves and in the world. Show us that we can't stop violence with more violence. Be with us in this place of mistrust and fear, and teach us not to hate. Let your incarnation, your self-emptying, your death and resurrection do that for us, here and now."

We sift through the ashes, ball-bearings, and bone looking for some trace of meaning, some reason for hope. Instead, our eyes are drawn to those who ran toward the danger to help the wounded. There is light there. And with no clear response to the "Why?" prayer, faith remembers a God who does not need to be called down, but who suffers with us in the debris. Hope and memory hearten us, bestowing the courage to walk toward the pain, joined to One who has promised, "I shall be with you."

Here are a few lines that echo that prayer. Back on the block, as the song says, tomorrow.

Comfort each other for pain soon must end.

A day comes when lion and lamb shall be friends.

The sightless shall see then, the speechless sing songs,

The name of our God is the righter of wrongs,

The righter of wrongs.

A sower is planting in acres unseen

The seeds of the future, the field of God's dream.

Those meadows are humming, though none sees them rise.

The name of the sower is God of surprise,

The God of surprise.

Bethlehem! You think you're so small

That God doesn't notice your children at all?

Manhattan and Boston, the smoke and the flame.

In Gaza and Kabul the cry is the same:

"Has God turned against us, his people reviled?"

The same sign is given: a woman with child,

A woman with child.

Close as tomorrow the sun shall appear.

Freedom is coming, and healing is near.

And I shall be with you in laughter and pain

To stand in the wind, and walk in the reign,

To walk in the reign.

Close as tomorrow...

Walk In the Reign - Safety Harbor by Rory Cooney 

(© 1989 GIA Publications, additional text © 2001, 2013)

Death still stings; Life, where is your song?

If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. 
(Rom 6:8, Epistle at the Easter Vigil)

Dali, "Christ of St. John"

I’ve had four or five funerals so far since Easter (I'm sure that many of you have had more—I’m not looking for sympathy!). I can’t help but think that somehow we’ve failed people by not really believing and proclaiming our faith in a cogent way throughout the year.  I don’t see how we’ve helped people really connect with the meaning of their baptism, its relationship to both life and death, in our weekly celebration of the paschal mystery and most explicitly at Easter time. This is just a feeling, but it’s borne out in a few observations.

First, in none of these funeral liturgies was there a single Easter hymn, or hymn about resurrection, included in the mix, except in the one where I was asked to choose the closing hymn. One would imagine that, at least, having been part of the Easter celebrations, the Easter gospel of the Church would ring out in the song of the saints left behind. But that is not the case. It was the same usual mix of nostalgic and comforting hymns one might hear at a funeral at any time of year. In a sense, this is good: we give people what they need in hard times, a safe place of comfort. As a church musician, though, and someone who looks for signs of grains of wheat sprouting, I wonder whether our Easter repertoire might be anemic, or spiritually dissonant and disconnected from the rest of life. I wonder whether fifty-two Sundays a year are genuinely Easter written upon the week, so that there is clarity about the "great hope to which we are called" in the resurrection. 

Second, the church’s personal proclamation to the families of the deceased, in the priest’s homily, often is more eulogic than kerygmatic. We literally hear things said like, “We come to celebrate, not his/her death, but the gift that was his life (emphasis mine.)” Or, and this is worse, "Your beloved N. will not die as long as we remember her/him." Is that the sum of what we have to tell the families, Christian and non-Christian, of a deceased member of the baptized community? Does it all really boil down to memory, and if we just remember this person’s quirks and good humor, remember their life as a thing of the past they’ll never die? I hope not! 

We once had an associate at St. Anne who would without fail proclaim at every funeral that the deceased had died a long time ago, in baptism, and from that day had nothing ever to fear from death again. This is the beginning of the Christian proclamation about death. What is left for us to do, it seems to me, as ministers of the church in the hour death, is to remind everyone what God is doing in us by plunging us into the paschal mystery. We died to ourselves, that is, as isolated persons, at the moment of baptism. It had nothing to do with what we wanted, it was chosen for us by God. We were incorporated into Christ, who dies no more. We live no longer for ourselves, but for him. The homilist’s task, it seems to me, is to exhort the living to be more aware of this, to rejoice in hope that God, as Psalm 16 says, will “not allow his faithful to undergo corruption,” and that we ought to live day in and day out and sons and daughters of God, brothers and sisters of the Risen One. The family’s task, in the words of remembrance, is to witness to God’s work in the person’s life. Not to eulogize, but to say, "Here’s how my mother / friend / child made the love of God visible to people; here’s how I know that God lives, even now, in her." Isn’t this really what we need to be saying? Don’t “even the Gentiles” mourn their dead with fond memories and noble words? What difference does Christ make to us? What difference that we were baptized?

All of this is not the fault of the bereaved, who have enough on their plates with grief and the funerary business. But it tells me that we’re missing the mark somehow in our weekly proclamation of the meaning of Easter. We are intimately involved in the life of God who is the God of life. Baptism has incorporated us into Christ by pouring into us the Spirit that makes “messiah / Christ”, and that our daily lives are meant to be about singing a new song, turning away from the sin represented by the empires of this world, and believing in and living for a different world, the empire of God. It tells me that we ought to be more explicit in our weekly proclamation of the meaning of the gospel, clearer about our identity, positive and affirming about the truth of life-in-the-midst-of-death even as we do not deny the reality of death and the devastation it wreaks on our personal delusions of immortality.

It’s that brush I’d like to see applied to the funeral mass and its music, not in an artificial way, but organically, letting it be as natural to us as Christians as, well, attending mass on Sunday. It’s a dream, I know, but it doesn’t seem out of reach. We just have to believe it, and act like it matters.

Mystagogy for Dummies (like me) - Easter 3

So I posed this question last week as a way to think about the Sunday scriptures each week:

How did Sunday’s liturgy speak to me about the meaning of life in the light of the paschal mystery? What did the readings teach me about what it means to “rise from the dead”?

Needless to say, we all bring our own experience and knowledge with us to the liturgy each Sunday, and we all prepare in different ways. No matter how much I "prepare" to hear the word of God (what chutzpah to even write that clause!) or how many times I've read the readings on my own, in choosing music or writing this blog, some line or some image inevitably pops out at me on Sunday that didn't strike me before, or shines in a new way.

In addition to all the other layers of this week's dominical metaphor field, for us, it was a day for bidding farewell to Clem Aseron, my colleague in the liturgy office for the entire time I've been at St. Anne's, part of the team that hired me, and the Voice that I heard once, a million years ago, in St. Clement's at a "Jesus Day" gathering, and made my

Clem (right) in 2007, with Mark Karney and Georgene.

colleagues and I look at each other in disbelief as if to say, "I've never heard anyone read the scriptures like that before." Clem is an archdiocesan institution, a recent octogenarian (is that an oxymoron?), and one of the kindest, most grounded people you would ever want to meet. Which explains why Terry and I chose him to be one of Desi's godparents for his initiation in 2003.

It was something Clem said in his parting words to the assembly after communion that resonated with me, from the responsorial psalm. It had hit me before, and was one of the reasons I had opted to keep the psalm of the day (and not a seasonal psalm) in the liturgy. Clem focused in his remarks on the word rescue in the responsorial psalm, taken from Psalm 30: "I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me." Without giving a formal homily, Clem instinctively did what a good homilist does anyway: he echoes God's word, letting it speak in its own voice from the stories in the scripture, but then listening for its resonance in his own life and the life of the community.

Clem and Georgene with the neophyte,
Easter 2003

Rescue is easy to identify in the readings today. The apostles, called before the ruling body of the Jews in Jerusalem, are told not to continue preaching Jesus, lest people start believing them, and blaming the Sanhedrin for his death. In what is a most hostile and potentially punitive environment, the apostles announce that they can not stay silent because the word is not their own, their testimony and the need to share it is divine. Amazingly, they are released with a warning. It will not always go so well for the followers of Jesus in subsequent encounters. To sing, "I will praise you for you have rescued me" following this text from Acts was a deeply felt, genuine proclamation of God's word.

As I mentioned in Saturday's post about Revelation, the whole ethos of the book is an announcement of hope and perseverance in the midst of an ongoing persecution of the Church by Rome, as well as, as a reader pointed out, a warning to the complacent churches against being seduced by the surrounding culture into accommodating the empire whose violence and injustice are the cause of such terror and pain in the church. Faithfulness to Christ, to the gospel, and to the mission are rescue from Rome, and the heavenly witnesses to the Lamb testify to his victory over the enemies of life.

Finally, in the gospel, there is danger of losing the way of Christ in the traumatic wake of Calvary, as Peter leads an unsuccessful fishing expedition that gets a boost from a kibitzing landlubber. Peter, just days on from three times denying Jesus outside the kangaroo court that was trying him, is given the opportunity to three times affirm his love. Recommissioned with the rest of the gang to nurture the flock of Jesus, Peter is told, with all of us who have been rescued from our own pitiable attempts at self-preservation and self-direction, "Follow me."



Clem, in his words of parting, thanked the community for "rescuing" him twenty-five years ago from a life he considered unanchored, giving him a home and community life in which to grow and with whose inner life he has become tethered and interlaced in all the ways that happen in church ministry. It made me think of the hundreds of ministers of the word whom he has trained not just in elocution but in love of their ministry, of the hundreds of catechumens and candidates he has walked through rehearsals and rites
into the unseen portals of paradise, of the parents in whom he awakened a nascent awareness of the greatness of the baptismal calling they were about to realize in their newborns. Clem, rescued by Christ, who called forth a new creation from the chaos of whatever had gone before, got back where he belonged by going somewhere he had

Clem (right) and I, younger, discussing the finer points of
the Revised Roman Missal

never been, all by responding to the Master's call: "Follow me."

If you had been there, you wouldn't be looking for another mystagogue this afternoon, because we had him right before our eyes. I've had a few experiences of "rescue" myself, and the community of St. Anne's has been one of them over the years I've been there. But in a very, very real way, so has the self-deprecating, slight little man who took his leave of the parish, at least as a staff member and employee, today. The Zen of Clem has anchored our work in the liturgy office more than once, his steady, faithful presence a dependable sign of God-among-us. He rescued me, in those early years, too. When I needed God to make a deposit into my checking account, it was Clem Aseron who signed the check. 

The meaning of life in the paschal mystery today? The mission is God's, Christ shows the way. The way is not always clear, but there is rescue. The way is fraught with violence and danger, but there is rescue. The way always leads to the cross, but there is rescue. I need to remember that. I need to remember not to follow my own instincts, but to stay alert to the gospel and the call to "Follow me." And when the new guy needs help, even if we're least well off person in a wealthy community: sometimes we have to sign the check. 

I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me. Weird as it sounds, you did it through Clem. Thanks, both of you.

Five words Jesus never said

"Receive the Holy Spirit.
Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them.
Whose sins you shall retain, they are retained."

I've been speaking at our parish's GIFT (intergenerational faith formation) sessions this past week on the topic of the Holy Spirit, the last presentation on the Creed this year. As I spoke, I used the phrase, "here are five words Jesus never said," following up on the Easter 2 gospel. I was specifically thinking of these five: Your sins are not forgiven.

On the contrary, Jesus says several variations, several times, of “your sins are forgiven.” To me, this is a revelation of a different kind of God than the one often mediated through shamans and sacrifice. And good people and smarter ones than I think that Jesus said this to show that he was God, which would be a way of keeping the God of power and sacrifice in place, not to mention job security for the shaman. It may be possible that both points of view are right; that the concept of what God is like is fundamentally changed by Jesus's announcement unmediated by the priestly caste that “your sins are forgiven,” and that it is a statement of power, as long as we see that it is Jesus the servant who, as the self-revelation of Abba, reveals the unseen God to us. Thus, the statement "Your sins are forgiven" is a revelation of God’s agape. Rather than being interested in human justice (retribution and expiation), God unilaterally recognizes the human condition and offers love before any request for forgiveness. God puts the “fore” in “fore-giving.”

Seen this way, forgiveness is not a reward for a human activity, but is God's invitation, the God whose life-breath creates and sustains the universe, to participate in the life-giving activity that God is. Forgiveness is an act of divine love that enables and empowers human love. Human forgiveness, sharing in the divine agape through the incarnation and paschal mystery of Christ, does the same. Love follows upon love.

But we can’t respond if we don’t know. Forgiveness withheld or placed on the end of a retribution-stick isn’t forgiveness at all. Religion often wants to withhold forgiveness until certain criteria are met: is the person really sorry? Is there a firm purpose of amendment? Will restitution be made? There are no such conditions placed in the gospel proclamation. “Your sins are forgiven.” Jesus’s actions in the street, touching the unclean, eating with whores and collaborators, healing on the Sabbath, all of these and more are signs that God’s love and forgiveness of the human family are egalitarian and universal, there is free access to God throughout the world. This is good news to anyone who hasn’t heard it yet, or who thinks God and agape are only accessible through shamanism and sacrifice, through elitism and blood and wealth. It is bad news, of course, to the shamans and to the elite who are their managers and patrons. This begins to explain the outrage of the Pharisees and scribes and ultimately of the Romans, and the crossward trajectory of Jesus’s public ministry.

There is an ironic if tragic strain in Catholic preaching that goes something like this: if people would just start going to confession again, all would be well with the Catholic church. But the fact is that, as much as people are broken, the sacrament is broken as well. The church (meaning you and I) in the nearly fifty years since the Second Vatican Council, has rediscovered the world as a place of great diversity, of immense and diverse good as much as it is full of suffering and evil. It seems to me that there is a huge disconnect between the private world of the confessional and the world of the twenty-first century which is connected, communal, and self-aware. The teaspoon of sacramental sugar isn’t helping the medicine of global violence, neglect, and inequality to go down. What’s wrong with the sacrament of penance is that its God and its world are too small. No one is connecting the world of war, genocide, racial profiling, banking abuse, pollution, and economic exploitation of the world with the “sins of humanity.” The good undone, the evil overlooked, are part of the church’s complicity in the maintaining of the status quo. The huge opportunity for good, the invitation to respond to the forgiveness of God already showered upon the good and bad alike, is privatized, shrunken, and constricted into a sacrament too small for our own good.

Much has been made of the fact, too, that the Eucharist has been rediscovered as the “ordinary sacrament” of reconciliation, and I think that the empirical evidence of this is remarkably clear. The trouble is that many of those who are charged with liturgically preaching the gospel in the Catholic church, that is, the ordained, have forgotten to use the word “sin” in their preaching, and when they do it’s generally an anemic little blot and not the global elephant in the room of which we’re all aware. When was the last time anyone in church mentioned the economic crisis as a sinful situation, as the result of bad choices we all made for our own self-aggrandizement? When was the last time you heard a priest say “Kyrie eleison” about American involvement in Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo Bay, or Afghanistan? Pick your political poison, you don’t hear much about it. Modern life is somehow disconnected from the gospel, and no one is talking about it, except maybe Jim Wallis and the Sojourner community, and well, they’re Protestants. What do they know?

Finally, the sacrament of penance itself affirms that the reconciliation of God is mediated not solely through the priest, though he speaks the words of absolution in the sacrament, but through the ministry of the Church. That is, as St. Paul says in 2nd Corinthians, “the good news of reconciliation has been entrusted to us.” All of us: the Church. But to connect with that good news of reconciliation, we have to be aware that we need it. We have to call sin by its real name, even when murder masquerades as patriotism, or greed as prosperity, or slavery as investment.

In the famous story of Jesus at the house of Simon the Pharisee in Luke 7, Jesus explains to Simon that the woman “with a bad reputation” who has publicly demonstrated both her shame at Simon’s inhospitality and her immense love for Jesus, have been forgiven. "Do you see this woman? ...I tell you, her sins, many though they may be, have been forgiven. Hence she has shown such great love." Only the fore-giveness of agape can empower acts of great love. The awareness of God’s love and forgiveness overcomes our self-hatred and lack of self-esteem, and allows us to transcend our limitations and enter into the world-making love that is the God-agape. Our good is enabled by forgiveness, by the unconditional divine love.

It is this love that has to be preached and re-discovered by the Church, no doubt. But at the same time, we need our eyes opened again to our sins of negligence and omission, all the good we’re not doing because we choose not to look at the evil. As the forgiven woman in Luke 7 saw the inhospitality of Simon and took it upon herself to welcome Jesus to the meal with kisses and washing his feet, the Church today, simul justa et peccator, might see the hypocrisy in which we have too long participated, and learn to love the world again as it truly is, and wash its hot and painful feet.

So we hear the words of Jesus in the upper room now, "Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained," and hear them as an explication of what came immediately before it. "As the Father sent me, so I send you." The Father sent Jesus to "preach the forgiveness of sins," a task he handed on to the disciples. There is no record of him saying, "Your sins are not forgiven," with the possible exception of the implication in the story of the Man Born Blind that those who claim sight but cannot see God at work in the healing of the world are unable to accept the forgiveness being offered, "and so your sin remains." It's not that sin is not forgiven. It's that the sinner, in this case, doesn't recognize his own sin, so can't accept forgiveness! But back to the upper room, those words of his suggest to me that his meaning is would be carried better if we understood the implication like this:

Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them.
Whose sins you shall retain, they are retained."
Our mission is forgiveness, so for God's sake, forgive them!

What we say and do matters! The Holy Spirit has given us the Father's mission: to announce the forgiveness of sin. For most of us, that means preaching by our actions. We have the invocation of the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors," to remind us that Jesus is completely serious about this forgiveness business, that it's concrete, ordinary, day-to-day, and matters both to earth and to heaven.