"Simon, I have something to say to you..." (C11O)

Note to self - if, at the final judgment, Jesus begins by putting his arm over my shoulder and saying, “Rory, I have something to say to you,” it will be my cue to take off running in a southerly direction, since I will surely be headed there anyway.

"Master, Say On" by Angela Johnson

Sunday's gospel from Luke 7, the story of the the meal at the house of Simon the Pharisee, with its famous story of the woman with a bad reputation washing Jesus’s feet with her tears. The story of the meal at Simon’s house goes something like this. Jesus is invited to dine, but the man who invites him doesn’t really like him, he just wants to keep an eye on him for his buddies. So when Jesus arrives, he ignores the normal hospitality shown to diners, and offers neither a foot bath nor a ritual anointing, amounting to an insult before the dinner even starts. Enter the woman with a bad name. She enters weeping, sits at Jesus feet as they recline at table, lets down her hair, and washes his feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and anoints them with precious nard from an alabaster jar. The Pharisee, seeing an opportunity to further slight Jesus, notes that if he were a prophet he’d know what kind of woman was touching him.

"Master, Say On" sculpture, detail

This is where Jesus replies, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” Simon should have left while he had the chance. Jesus tells him a little story about two debtors, one who owes two years’ wages, another who owes a couple of months’. Both debts are forgiven by the creditor. Jesus asks Simon, “which, do you think, will love him more?” Simon replies, “Obviously, the one who was forgiven the higher amount.” This is where Jesus lets him have it, recounting the slights he has received since walking in the door, and comparing the reprehensible behavior of Simon, a religious leader, to that of this woman with a bad reputation, showing her behavior to be more in line with acceptable Jewish practice than his. 

This is where the essential part of the story, the “punchline,” comes: Luke records Jesus

"Master, Say On" sculpture, detail

as saying:

“I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven; hence, she has shown such great love.”

Before the original sense of the scripture was corrected for us, the translation said:

“I tell you her many sins were forgiven because she has shown such great love."** (see endnote)

See, the difference is that they mean the exact opposite. In the first case, following the logic of the parable, the forgiveness precedes and enables her act of love, which is why Jesus is able to tell that her sins have been forgiven. The second rendering, following the logic of a mistranslation that has been replaced for at least 20 years, suggests that forgiveness follows her act of love, that somehow she has “earned” it by her actions and repentance. This is neither the fact, nor our experience, nor church teaching about grace! Grace precedes and enables repentance. Jesus sees her actions, her love, her tears, her atonement for Simon’s lack of hospitality, and knows that her sins are forgiven. He knew that anyway; his intimacy with God has already taught him that God’s love is infinite and forgiving and not dependent on human religious calisthenics of any kind. It is God’s love that makes repentance possible. God loves us when we are still sinners, and forgives us and dies (pours self out) for us. God is not like us. God is not vindictive, jealous, or hurt by our stupid self-destructiveness. 

The story was told wrong for a long time. It was the New Jerusalem Bible that finally got it right, and other translations have come along as well. The translation that imagines that the woman's good works were the cause of her forgiveness misses the point of the parable! Jesus just got finished with a story about forgiveness enabling love, and the translators, as full of our phony sense of "justice" as we are, don't even see the disconnect. We want to believe that we can make ourselves all better and that God gives us the medals at our spiritual Olympics by finally forgiving and loving us once we’ve run the course, jumped the hurdles, and made ourselves squeaky clean. 

But if we can do that, make ourselves squeaky clean, we don’t need God. We need someone to emulate, someone who loves without waiting for a return of love, someone whose love is irrational and doesn’t care what we look like when we get up in the morning. Any of us who is lucky has had that experience more than once in our lives, the experience of a friend or lover who sees past all the junk that blocks our being able to see ourselves as God sees us, someone who loves us with surprising ferocity no matter what we think of ourselves. Their love enables us to make changes in our behavior or our appearance or whatever, but never requires that change as a condition for love. There’s nothing we can do to make the other person love us - love is a gift, it wakes us up and empowers us to be something even greater than we thought was possible.

How sad that, for so long, instead of hearing the scripture message, we get the Pelagian opposite. Instead of grace and wonder, we get the pragmatic Bauhaus dullness of self-

important human exertion. Instead of forgiveness, barter. Instead of love, stoicism. Sorry, but that God is too small for me.

We don’t know anything more about this woman or Simon. I’d love to think that Simon’s heart was changed, and that drawn toward the same flame, the two of them found their way to dance together in the newfound exhilaration of freedom and love. Maybe at the same time next year they both enjoyed a bad reputation and couldn’t have been happier about it, eating and drinking with their friends of ill repute, breaking bread, washing feet, and telling the story over and over again of that supper. Their sins, many though they are, must have been forgiven; hence, they’ve shown such great love. May it be so for all of us sinners.

****************
Endnote: (NB: One can barely make the case that the second version, using the conjunction "because," means the same as the first translation. The sense of the phrase to the translator might have been, 'I can tell that her sins have already been forgiven because (I can see that) she has shown...." But I don't think that's what any of us hears when we hear "because." We think of causality between the closer verbs, "forgiven and shown," rather than between the more separated "I tell you" and "shown.")

Wishing for a "boring" summer

 These last couple of weeks have been such a blur I really haven’t been able to keep up with this the way I should! Even now, I feel like I’m stealing time from several other things I should be doing just to write down a few notes. Last week I was in Pittsburgh working on an institute. This week was strange, too, beginning an intense writing project yesterday, and taking time off work for the rest of this month (except for Tuesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays) to complete it. Doing some morning masses for Jesuit retreat house; taking Desi to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln next week for orientation next Tuesday. July should slow down a wee bit, if the writing project is done on time, but we have all this music waiting to be recorded if I can just find the right venue for it, the best way to present it to the public. August will be ramping up for fall at the parish, but not before the dreaded journey to Lincoln again to deposit Desi into Cornhusker Central, hoping for an academic and social university experience that will fit with his hopes and desires and "fit him for life," in Ruskin's memorable phrase. (I think it was Ruskin - I learned it in college, and crippled those brain cells shortly afterward.)

It all conjures memories of Desi and the other children, long ago, at loose ends trying to figure out what to do with all the time they suddenly had, school being out and all. I slip back to my own childhood in Arizona, when I was between 7th and 8th grades. Summer in Arizona was hot. Not the wussy hot of Chicago, when it gets up to 90 for a few days, then melts away in a summer shower and stays in the 70s for a week, but the reclaimed-desert hot of Mojave southwest, where the temperatures are in the 100s before school is out, and are still there without respite for the first month school is back in session. Sometimes, the temperature dips below 90 at night. Not always. What in the world did we do back then during the summer, before PS3, HBO, and the internet?

I do remember riding my bike a lot, going to friends’ houses. I had a couple of guys a few streets away with whom I remained friends through seminary high school, and we used to clown around together a lot. Paul and Leonard were the kind of friends that you just hang with; I’m sure we did interesting things, I just can’t remember any of them. Maybe the heat destroyed those brain cells. Another kid named Vincent I had known from my years in public school, we still visited, and I remember that what we had in common was scouts (when I did that, never graduating above “Webelos”) and stamp collecting (which I still do in a casual way.) 

When it got to be evening, my brothers and sisters and the dozen or so other kids on the block would start to come out onto the hot cul-de-sac, crepuscular desert dwellers hungry for fun. (You still had to wear flippies, what we called “thongs” back then, because the streets were so hot - imagine if your neighbors wore their thongs out on the street now - woohoo! Ugh, or not, in my case. I would be like Homer Simpson in a Speedo on Copacabana beach — but I digress...) The favorite games were whiffle ball, of course, and kick the can. Honestly, does anyone remember kick the can any more? Like a game of hide-and-seek, where the “base” was a can. Whoever was “it” counted at the can, people scattered and hid, and then it was a matter of pursue and capture. But if someone kicked the can, everyone was free. Ah, the good old days.

There was no such thing as cable, so TV watching was limited. We had no library, no really "local" movie house (even if we’d had money to go to the movies more often), and no indoor malls in which to hang out. Sometimes we’d get so bored we’d fish in the canal, where there was famously nothing to catch but small bottom-dwelling carp, and not a bit of shade along the banks of its dangerously swift current. There was just nothing much to do during the day but visit with someone (and no one that I knew, by the way, had air conditioning in that Phoenix heat, just evaporative cooling, which kept the temperature down except during August and the monsoon) and maybe eat popsicles, lying in wait for the liberating music of the ice cream man. 

One got hot and bored. For me, eventually, there came a solution—the Bookmobile! The Bookmobile came to a parking lot near the pool, about half a mile or so away. Its walls were lined with books, and best of all, it was air-conditioned. A bike ride would bring both the opportunity to find something to read (I was partial to baseball books and biographies) and a few minutes in blessed air conditioning. I was happy, of course, when there was finally a full branch of the public library built a few steps from where the bookmobile used to park once or twice a week, but there was magic in that van for a boy’s spirit beside itself with summer ennui.

I wonder whether children have the opportunity to get bored any more, the kind of bored where your imagination has to take over and you have to find a tree to climb, or a hobby, or a friend to ride a bike with or play kick the can. There are so many little distractions, so many more opportunities to occupy oneself with the computer, video games, DVDs, cable television, etc. I regret that I never feel bored any more, that there’s always more to do than time to do it in, and maybe I projected my own longing onto Desi for that place of pregnant liminality that felt like a heavy void but was in fact the womb of creativity and a matrix of community.


Well, soon enough he'll be immersed in college life, navigating currents of duty, rote, self-motivation, unwanted alarm clocks, and opportunity. My own personal bookmobile today is to finish another chapter in a required-reading book about the "heroic leadership" model of the Jesuits. But on my morning runs, audiobooks take me wherever I want to go, with Nellie Bly around the world, or into World War II Paris to pursue a serial killer, or, as now, with Michael Pollan, exploring the anthropological, gustatory, and healthy aspects of Cooked food. Here, on the brink of summer, I wish you nothing more or less pleasant than a little boredom, so that you might walk through its dark curtain into some unexpected wonderland of imagination, friendship, and self-awareness.

"You have rescued me" (C10O)

Back from Pittsburgh and our penultimate Forum institute on the RCIA. Feeling both recharged and vulnerable. Nothing makes you more aware of the possibilities of Christianity than interacting intentionally with Christians, and certainly nothing reveals your own sinfulness and shortcomings to you better than being in a position where the gospel is on your lips and your life is right before your eyes. Sigh. Better than living in the darkness, I guess. (Insert "fleshpots of Egypt" quote here.)

Since I worked with today's readings during the institute, I had had a better chance than usual to reflect on them, and even to hear Andy Varga, another team member and priest from the diocese of Bridgeport, CT, preach on it. But as usual, it's another matter entirely to hear scripture at Sunday worship with one's community, and a few things struck me more strongly than before as I listened today.

Now, this would be anything but exegesis, but one thing that struck me was the attention Jesus paid to

Mongbwalu, democratic Republic of Congo, October 2004.
A mother holds her child who recently died of malaria.
Roger LeMoyne/Alexia Foundation

the plight of a widow who had lost her son. Not to get proleptic here, but from the perspective of the gospel writer in the 70s or 80s, it's certainly a possibility that Jesus's own mother was a widow who had lost her son, who was also raised from the dead. But just within the boundaries of the story itself, it is not hard for me to imagine that, with Joseph apparently missing from the narrative of the gospel after then scene from the "overture" infancy narrative of chapter 2, perhaps Jesus was keenly aware of the plight of widows in his culture. Not bad enough that in the Jewish society wives were property of husbands and part of the husband's family, so that with the husband's death, there was no fixed support system unless her sons were old enough to take her in (and wanted to). But that Jewish society operated on a survival basis, conquered and subsisting as a vassal state of the Roman empire. I remember that in one of Crossan's books, he spoke of Roman squads dispatched frequently from their fortresses to put down insurrections in Galilee and Judea, and that in their brutal forays they might murder and rape their way through the countryside, and it wasn't hard to imagine that Joseph might have been a victim of one of those events. Purely conjecture, of course, but within the boundaries of possibility. And no matter the cause of Mary's ostensible widowhood, Jesus might have been particularly sensitive to their plight both from his attending to the Torah and from his own experience. He wasn't, as our pastor said in his homily, apparently attuned to reviving the son for the son's sake, i.e., for restoring his life to him, but for his mother's sake! So a poet might even conceive of the mercy of Jesus in this case reflecting the compassion of God for widows, since God, too, is understood in Christian faith to be a parent who has lost a son.

However, taken together with the first reading today from 1 Kings (Elijah and the widow of Zarephath), the echo I heard more strongly still was with Luke 4, the "inaugural homily" of Jesus at the synagogue in Nazareth which the church inexplicably splits into two successive weeks' gospels early in Year C. There, Jesus reads from Isaiah 61, announcing his mission as being defined by the jubilee action of God, which at first causes the assembly to assent and approve. Then, Jesus goes on to remind them that "there were many widows in Israel at the time of Elijah, but the prophet was sent to none of them," but to a widow of Sidon, a foreigner. He makes a parallel case about lepers and the prophet Elisha, sent to Naaman, who was a Syrian. God's preference, then as now, is to show no preference, but to heal whoever needs healing, good, bad, or ugly, homie or foreigner, taxpayer or "illegal alien," one might say.

When the folks say "A great prophet has arisen among us," it is this prophet that they are getting: one who relentlessly preaches and practices the compassion of God for all people, even the Romans, as the healing of the centurion's "boy" in the gospel of Luke has it, immediately before today's pericope. God's compassion is not defined by our idea of worthiness or even fairness. God makes the sun shine and the rain fall on everyone the same. God invites. Everything depends on how we respond. That's what conversion is about.

It is conversion to which Jesus is inviting those listeners in the Nazareth synagogue just as he invites us today. "Turn away from sin, and believe in the gospel." There are two claimants to your allegiance, he says: Caesar, who claims to be god, the God who brought you out of Egypt and made you a nation. You can't serve them both. In order to serve God, you need to turn your back on the god Caesar. Take up the cross that will inevitably come, and follow me, says Jesus. Put away your sword. Love one another—feed each other—as I have loved you.

St. Paul in the letter to the Galatians speaks of his own conversion to the Way, how different it was from that of the other apostles, and his journey gives us some food for thought about the future for us in a church and world of changed orientation. When we think about Saul/Paul before and after the Damascus road, we see in both cases an evangelist, an apostle, and a zealot: and a servant of the same God! But what changed in Paul? He became like Christ. He put down the sword, the threats, the summons to court, and took to invitation, exhortation, and persuasion. He came to know Christ crucified and risen, and saw that his previous strategies of violence and rigid orthodoxy were the strategies of the wrong god, the strategies of Caesar. Paul took up the breaking of the bread, the sharing of story and meal with those who might listen, as the strategy of transformation in the reign of God. Roman citizen that he was, he was not led to the cross and tradition says Peter and Andrew, at least, were, but was beheaded in the Coliseum when he finally came to Rome. Nevertheless, he took up the cross, and received the reward of the enemies of the god Caesar.

These thoughts seemed all connected to me in some esoteric way, the resurrection of the widow's son, the homily in Nazareth, the conversion of St. Paul, the Forum's next-to-last institute. I couldn't put my finger on it until I went back to mass tonight for the evening service, when it dawned on me like a familiar refrain, because, well, it is a familiar refrain.

If I'm friendless and bereft like the Phoenician widow, and a stranger from another country raises my son from death, let me sing, "I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me."

If my life is occupied by hostile people, if at every turn life deals with me harshly, and even my son, my last hope, lies dead at my feet, and a stranger sees my pain and restores my world to me, let me sing, "I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me."

If I think of myself as a sword in the hand of God, breathing fire on his enemies, cursing infidels and backsliders and the lukewarm and revisionists, and peaceful light knocks me off my high horse and asks me with love, "What the hell are you doing to me?", let me sing, "I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me."

When I think that God hasn't noticed the service of my friends and colleagues and mentors in the Forum, has forgotten their devotion to God's word and the mission of Jesus, and let our mission dissolve in front of some who wished for its demise, and then I find myself in a room of people from parishes from Seattle to Boston who are hungry for formation and on fire for that same mission, let me sing, "I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me."

And wondrously, without even knowing what I was singing, I did sing those exact words with them just Friday morning. Things are going to be all right by and by. God, in the Lord Jesus, "who from (our) mother’s womb had set (us) apart and called (us) through his grace" is passing by to utter a word: "I say to you, arise!" No servant of Caesar, no hopelessness, or subjugation, or death, can resist the exhilaration of that summons.

Lord, I will praise you, God of my rescue.
See how my foes are struck dumb and amazed!
When death was my doom, you shattered my tomb.
Your love drew me clear of the grasp of the grave.

God has come near me with mercy to hear me,
With loving compassion her child to defend.
My mourning has fled, and dancing instead,
I thank you forever, my maker and friend.  

I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.
(Psalm 30, "I Will Praise You, Lord," by Rory Cooney © 1989. Music by Gary Daigle.)

Turning conversion into advertising

"It was an age when American companies were beginning to understand that the image of a famous person could be used to sell products; through advertising, the traits generally associated with the person —in Nellie Bly's case, these included pluck, vitality, courage, patriotism, and, most important, success—seemed to be transferred to the product an, by extension, to the person using it." (Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland's History-Making Race Around the World, by Matthew Goodman, Ballantine Books, 2013)

"It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me." (Gal. 2:20)

_______________________

I'm in the diocese of Pittsburgh through Saturday, working on my last ever institute for the North American Forum on the Catechumenate. Of course, it's a great privilege to do this kind of work under any circumstances, but the fact that this is the next-to-last official Forum institute makes it all the more momentous for me. I'm lucky to be working with a great local coordinator, and with Forum colleagues Fr. Andy Varga and Linda Licata. I hope we can make this an institute to remember for the 100+ folks who have come from as far away as Seattle to attend.

Over the last few weeks, I've been listening to the audiobook Eighty Days cited above while I do my little run three times a week or so. I'm in the epilogue now, nearly done with it, but as happens when one is reading a book, sometimes you come across a passage that leads you down pathways you didn't think were connected to the subject. That's what happened when I heard that paragraph above.

It got me to thinking about the etymology of "advertising," which comes from the Latin verb vertere which means "to turn." Advertising is thus to turn someone's attention toward something else, to draw the gaze away. The same verb is at the root of the word "conversion," which also suggests turning around, and which in its Christian context translates the Greek metanoia, which conveys a changeover of thinking or of personal orientation. 

The work we are discussing this week in Pittsburgh is the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, which is a complex of rites, ministries, and processes in the church that gather in people who are interested in following Christ by joining the Catholic Church in a kind of apprenticeship that leads to the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and eucharist and thus to the life of witness to the gospel for which the church lives and which the Holy Spirit makes possible. This is accomplished by incorporation into the body of Christ, sacramentally in the initiation sacraments, and fundamentally by apprenticeship in Church life during the RCIA process, focused around the pillars of church life articulated in Acts: prayer, common life, witness to the gospel, and service, especially to the poor.

Hearing the author of Eighty Days speak of the precursors to commercial advertising in the late 19th century made me sort of muse about the connections between advertising and conversion, particularly as it impacts the RCIA. Tertullian reported that in Antioch people would see the community of believers and remark, "See how these christians love one another!" What on earth would possess people in this day and age, with all the issues the church has had over the last 25 to 30 years especially, to want to come to be a part of this group in such remarkable numbers? Certainly some of the data shows that a good number want to join because of family life influences: a marriage, a baby, or some other pressure to come to a kind of unity of faith for purposes of a common future. But for many others, it is the "advertising," the witness, of the church, whether on the micro scale, an encounter with a parishioner, some friend's outreach or invitation, or on a macro scale, wherein an inquirer might see the greater good accomplished by the church in our witness to justice in the world, feeding the hungry, defending life, educating, providing health care, or any of the other countless ministries in which the church is engaged. It might be a case of being drawn by the personality or teaching of the pope, or Sister Helen Prejean, or some other Christian who lives the gospel in a highly visible way.

You have heard me say that the core message of Jesus was one of turning. "Repent and believe the good news" is another way of saying, "Turn away from the god who brings death, violence, poverty, and fear (Caesar), and give your heart to the God who brings peace, justice, and joy." Jesus spelled that out in parables and in his open table, shared with all kinds of people in all walks of life, regardless of their reputation and standing among the religious elite. Jesus paid the price for this peaceable treason with his death on the cross, and invites us also to "take up the cross and follow." The cross is the logo of this strange advertisement. The Christian life is, or ought to be, the ongoing advertisement for throwing off the loneliness and violent dead end of what is commonly thought of as "civilization" and turning toward one another in self-gift, mutuality, and kindness. "Not me, but Christ living in me," St. Paul said of his life. See the Spirit of the Savior in my actions, words, and attitudes, and come to Christ. Change your mind, heart, and the way your spend your days and hours and years.

That's what we're doing in the Church. That's what we've been doing in Forum, and what we do in the RCIA in our parishes: advertising for conversion. Turn away from sin, and believe the good news. Wear the logo of the cross on every aspect of your life. There is a life that goes deeper here and now than we imagined, it is life shared together, and it goes on forever. 

If we could grasp that, discern meaningful common life that offered a genuine alternative to business as usual in the violent world of counterfeit peace, belonging, and well-being, well, could the world be about to turn?

Real Presence, again - kids, church deportment, and all that non-PC stuff

I was recently playing a service in our chapel at St. Anne's. This beautiful room is where the church tabernacle is, high ceiling, stone walls, iron grating and gates, stained glass. It pretty much invites awe, calls one to a hushed spirit, to the kind of quiet that can be the meeting-place with the divine—at least, a certain aspect of it. On this day, and it has happened before, of course, but I happened to know this family and was mildly surprised, the grandchildren were running around unchecked, parents talking in the aisles, little ones grabbing and knocking into whatever wasn't nailed down. It was as though no one had ever explained to them what a chapel is, or the difference between a place like this and a gathering area. There were only twenty-five or thirty people there, so sight lines or contact weren't the issue. The kids were acting like kids, but in a way (which I perceived to be) inappropriate to their surroundings, and the parents either didn't notice or didn't care. No instructions to the contrary were given. And this is in a family in its third generation of graduates from a well-known Catholic University in the midwest.

When we Catholics started to understand the value of hospitality and became more aware, through the grace of scripture and the Eucharist, of the presence of Christ in our assembly and in the presence of the other, things changed in our churches. We saw the value of some pre-Mass welcomes, conversations, connecting, right in our Church buildings. Those of us old enough to remember the Previous Dispensation in the Church, what you might call the "Happy Days" era in the ecclesial nostalgia, can remember a time when any breach of a strict silence in the Church might bring anything upon one from the stern, disciplinary eye of a parent which promised a later retaliation to a more immediate whap! from one of God's winged messengers, like Sister Pius Jambe du Trebuchet, who only looked too small to reach forward three pews to deliver a right hook to the occipital lobe. 

Happily things are different now. But I can't help but feel we could use a little nudge back in the other direction, a mild corrective that would help us be aware both of the immanent presence of Christ in the neighbor but of the transcendent presence that suffuses creation and is intentionally and communally  present, present-on-behalf-of-all, in the church building. What this means, to me, is that we need to make clear that God's presence is communicated to us in varied ways, yes, in our welcome, in our gathering, in our ministers, in our liturgy, but also in the shared silence and intentional awareness within the house of the Church. 

A solemnity and respect for a place's shared meaning points toward a sense that there is more to a thing that the sum of us, its parts. In other words, it's wonderful that we are a Church, but we didn't make ourselves a church. It was God who "called us out of darkness into marvelous light," Christ who loved us when we were still sinners. There is a "head" to the mystical body, and a Holy Spirit which is its life. These realizations and realities are not immediate; we have to have time to let them sink in, to be reminded of them by shared silence and colored light, music, movement, and prayer. We have to have a place and time in which to connect with the person of Jesus Christ. This is not something we can conjure by incantations and our own volition. We can only wait, prepare an open heart. One of the ways we can do this is to have a consecrated place and time, a spot "where heaven meets earth," where we gather, wait, sing, listen, shout, give thanks, break bread, eat, drink, and are sent and have space to appreciate in some small way what is happening to us.

Militating against all this is the kind of permissiveness that feels that "letting kids be kids" means letting them do what they want wherever and whenever they want to do it. There's also a sense of entitlement, that my envelope or my pledge buys me a seat in this house, and I can do whatever the hell I want in here. Probably there's some vestigial fear and loathing of the Happy Days church, the repressed Mass of our younger days, and the throbbing ears, butts, and mild concussions of humanly mediated divine retribution. 

And, in a great example of what Fr. Richard Fragomeni calls "anti-ritual ritual," we have the scriptural stories in which Jesus lets the presumably noisy and irksome children to "come to me, and do not hinder them." I don't hear that as saying that their parents should let them disrupt temple services, but some do. And they might be right, what do I know?

Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky. It doesn't seem too much to ask that people use common courtesy and restrain their children from horseplay in church, and for reasons that are both the same and different that they restrain them in courtrooms, theaters, restaurants, and other public forums. It's good for the children, too, in the long run, to understand that they are part of something larger than themselves, that the world may be their playground but it doesn't belong to each of them but to all of them together, and that that requires some ground rules. It's a good discipline to know that there are places where we are asked to surrender some of our personal freedom for the good of all, rather than claiming it and demanding it all the time. 

Ultimately, it's about reclaiming community, a sense of a corporate identity that precedes and transcends my personal identity, a community that is the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, and whose head is the Son of God, Jesus Christ. That kind of awareness requires, sometimes, that we slow down and shut up, whether we're kids or adults. The Church building, in the five minutes or so before a service starts and until it's over, seems like a good place to start.

Writing this made me think of this old Peter, Paul, and Mary song that makes me cry, ma. It's called "Hymn." Here's an iTunes link.

Hymn - Peter, Paul & Mary

SongStories 10: Walk in the Reign (1989)

"Tank man" in Tiananmen Square

Today is the 24th anniversary of the standoff at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The protests in China
were already a couple of months old, and with the violence of 3-4 June at Tiananmen ("Gate of Heaven") square, the protests largely came to an end with hundreds, maybe thousands, of civilians dead. It seems to be a good time to remember a song I wrote in that year that was quite aware of the events in China, and which tried to see, with hopeful if naive heart, those largely peaceful demonstrations as a sign of the inbreaking reign of God.

We were approaching Advent in 1989. I’d been in my job at St. Jerome for 6 years, and felt like things there were going well. We were done with our two year certification program at the Corpus Christi Center; in fact, I taught the music piece at the branch school in Las Vegas. I had written the musical Lost and Found and it had been performed professionally at the National Association of Pastoral Musicians that summer in Long Beach at a theater, and would be performed again at the Los Angeles Religious Education Conference in a year. We had a new publisher. After years of languishing in the failing financial environment of the local but mismanaged North American Liturgy Resources, Gary and Terry and I had decided to try another route, and so we decided to take our next project to GIA Publications in Chicago. That decision would be finalized in late autumn of 1989 when the three of us made our first trip to Hawaii for the Big Island Liturgical Arts Conference.

I had decided that I wanted to write an Advent song that year, with the themes of the advent Sundays in the verses. Earlier that same year, I had done this with the Lenten gospels in the song “Jerusalem, My Destiny,” and it seemed to have been really successful. Since it was a Matthew year, I decided I wanted it to have as a theme the idea of “Emmanuel,” God-with-us, since one of the motifs of the first gospel is that of the presence of the risen one with the church, even though he had passed to resurrection life with the Father. So, I started reading the readings for Advent A, and thinking about stuff.


Lech Walesa and the dockworkers

What a time it was! Do you remember? The fall of the Berlin Wall, the students standing up to the tanks in Tienanmen Square, the gradual dissolution of apartheid and the pending release of Mandela, glasnost and the incipient disintegration of the Soviet Union, when only  two decades before the popular opinion was that there would be two nuclear superpowers until there was only one standing after a nuclear war. They were heady times, and the words of the prophet Isaiah seemed as fresh as if they had been written that week. And there was a more personal version of the story for Gary and me as well. Our friend and mentor, Fr. John Gallen, the Jesuit liturgist, had had a heart attack and undergone heart surgery from which he emerged healthy and as focused and energetic as ever.

As I started to write “Walk in the Reign,” some of these things worked their way into the lyric:

Walk in the Reign  © 1989 GIA Publications, Inc.

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. 


In  the refrain, above, the great “theme” of Advent, the approach of the reign of God which is “at hand,” or “close as tomorrow.” Freedom and healing are two signs of the reign, and right before our eyes were the nations of Eastern Europe and South Africa. If I needed anything else, there was the recovery of our friend John.

In days to come, the desert shall bloom.

Rivers will run there, soon, very soon.

So what shall we fear though death do its worst?

The word of our God is the last shall be first, the last shall be first.


See especially the first reading on Advent 3 for this imagery. “Be strong, fear not!” is the exhortation from Isaiah.

O 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.”


Some of this language comes from Isaiah 40, but some also comes from Isaiah 11, which is the reading for Advent 2 of year A, and also Isaiah 35, Advent 3.

A curtain of fear is being torn down,

Prisons are open, the lost have been found.

So go tell the seeker what we’ve seen and heard:

The name of our God is the keeper of word, the keeper of word.


Here I was thinking of the Iron Curtain, and Mandela. The third line, echoing the words of Jesus to the disciples of John, refers to the gospel of Advent 3 and the exhortation to believe what you see and hear about signs of the reign of God around you.

Bethlehem!
You think you’re so small that God doesn’t notice your children at all!

This little 8 bar bridge is a reference to Micah 5, that the village of Bethlehem (probably not the same Bethlehem, but if it didn’t matter to Matthew it doesn’t matter to me) does not escape God’s notice, and in spite of its inferiority complex it will give birth to a ruler for Israel.


Death in Soweto

The streets of Soweto, the docks at Gdansk,

Tienanmen Square, the slums of the Bronx:

When we stand together to stand against hell,

The name of his people is Emmanuel, is Emmanuel.


Here, I just let it all become explicit, with the last couplet expressing the christological reality of the ekklesia, the community of those called out by God, and marked with the cross in baptism, to be the presence of God in the world (Emmanuel.) It is through our surrender to the liberating, healing Spirit of God that the world comes to see the reign of God emerging right before its eyes.

Later that year, I wrote two less topical verses for use during the series of Sundays in Matthew where some of the parables are read. These, too, encourage us to walk in the reign of God:

A sower in 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.


Oh, one day we’ll know them, the treasure, the pearl,

That capture our spirits and brighten our world.

We ache to possess them, the burden that frees:

The treasure of justice, the pearl of God’s peace, the pearl of God’s peace.


Finally, after 9/11, I wrote another final verse that we use sometimes in concert. Borrowing its language from Isaiah 9 (the first reading on Advent 4), it turns us to a hope for the future based on something started in the present, God present here among us in our very humanity.

That morning of madness - Manhattan in flame.

In Gaza and Baghdad (or 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.


I think “Walk in the Reign” came out really well. I’ve taken a little heat over the years for the “cutesy” play on words between “rain” and “reign,” but sometimes you just try something even though it’s not high art. There are certainly a lot of plays on words throughout the scripture, so it’s not like I’m not in reputable, if not high class, company. ☺ I feel like the suggestive imagery (“close as tomorrow”) and the gentle, singable tune work together to make an anthem of hope. Now that some years have passed and all the promise may not seem to have come to full stature the way we had dreamed, we need the hope all the more. And in an ever more isolated nation whose values seem more and more to degenerate into individualism and personal liberty, we need the reassurance more than ever of hearing one another sing, “I shall be with you.”

DOWNLOAD LINKS:
PDF of "Walk in the Reign" chord chart for summer verses and optional bridge and optional new (post-9/11) final verse.
TIFF graphics file of reprint box for summer verses and refrain. REPRINT LICENSE REQUIRED FROM onelicense.net

iTunes link: Walk in the Reign - Rory Cooney, Gary Daigle & Theresa Donohoo

Looking for rite in all the wrong places

It is a never-ending struggle for a liturgist - how on earth do you convince priests, who

are charged with presiding over the Church’s liturgy, that they have no authority to change the language or the ritual willy-nilly to suit their “style” or mood? This is not the same as saying that the mass has to be the same on every day or every week. There are plenty of places in the liturgy for “improvising” or personal touches. It’s just that, in general, priests tend to improvise and put personal touches where they shouldn’t.

Ritual is the “property” of the whole group, in our case, the Church. One of our problems may be that, in the USA at least, we’ve lost what it means to be a group, or at least ceded our solidarity to occasional shows of "patriotism." Rather than thinking of the church—us—as a community, we think of ourselves as, at best, an amalgam of individuals. The difference is the difference between consensus and majority rule, or between independence and interdependence. Ritual makes equals of us, or at least delineates our roles with equality—in the case of the mass, for instance, the priest says “The Lord be with you,” and we say, “And with your spirit.” That’s just the way it is. But if the priest decides on a Sunday morning to riff on that and make it groovier, he might say, “God is here among you.” What do we say to that? By putting himself above the rules of ritual, the presider has put him himself above us. He is subtly saying, “Look at me, how keen I am! I get it!” But he doesn’t, because it’s not a dialogue any more, it’s a monologue. This is an obvious example, generally the differences are subtler. But I have encountered priests in my ministry who not only don’t say the ritual words, they berate the assembly for not answering them back properly. How much sense does that make? He isn’t doing the ritual right, and is castigating the assembly for being confused by his deviance. I have known presiders during my years of working in liturgy with whom, if I only respond to the priest when he uses the actual words of the rite, the only words I’ll ever say are, “we lift them up to the Lord” and “it is right and just.” If I can remember the words. Sigh.

RItual passes down the tradition of the group. This is another reason that it is dangerous to change ritual language. Even a well-intentioned presider can alter meaning by changing words he says at mass. And whether or not his new words are “correct” or not doesn’t matter: what matters is, they aren’t “our” words, “our” faith. They’re his. And that’s just not good enough for liturgical prayer, which is by its nature corporate, belonging to the whole group. This is not even about the group that is present, it’s about the whole church, everywhere, and its past and future. So I’m saying that not even a bishop or theologian (who should know better anyway) ought to take liberties with liturgical texts. The orations (prayers) of the mass and the Eucharistic prayers transmit sacred traditions, and we are expected to give our assent by means of Amens and other acclamations. But if the priest isn’t praying the words of the tradition, of the whole-capital-C-Church, then how can we be expected to say an authentic “amen,” or “give thanks and praise” for things that sound more like Dr. Phil or Dear Abby than Hippolytus or Athanasius?

No sense in my cataloguing every example of this I can think of here - there is only so much bandwidth and you only have so much time. You can think of your own. Honestly, the whole reason I started on this idea was that it occurred to me that the irony of this ritual void that is being created by the erosion of normative texts through the casual disregard of priests is that most of the presiders I hear most often are, in fact, not riffing or improvising but living in their own ritual world. They’re not making it up as they go along, usually, they’re substituting their own rituals for the ritual of the Church. The priest will, for instance, always say, “The Lord be with each and every one of you,” or will always say, “And this, my brothers and sisters, is the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, “ or will always substitute a meaningless “we pray one God forever and ever” for the doxology at the end of an oration! You see? It’s not an aversion to ritual. In fact, it’s a substitution of personal ritual for the communal ritual, of the individualistic for the authentic. It’s not ritual, apparently, to which these fellows are averse, it’s submission to normative ritual. They’re giving us ritual aplenty; it’s just the Smithian rite by Fr. Smith, or the O’Learian rite by Fr. O’Leary.

Ritual is doxology. We learn the truth of faith by repeated sacramental behaviors that rehearse us, in a way, for the way we live when we’re not doing sacramental ritual. If we’re constantly exposed to bad ritual practice, then one can only conclude that in the long run it is faith itself that suffers. If we act like the priest is allowed to manipulate rite in any way he wants, then no amount of preaching about the priesthood of the laity or the equality of all people in the reign of God can undo that damage. We can't preach community and solidarity and then ritualize individuality and unrestrained creativity. Ritual means something. I have heard a priest say, in the epiclesis of the Eucharistic prayer, “Let your spirit come upon these gifts. Let them live!” Let them live? Let bread and wine live? It’s a sacramental Frankenstein. I think what we’re praying for is that the spirit transform the gifts into the living presence of Christ, which is quite different from letting the gifts live! But that is beside the point. Even if it were true, it's not the way the church expresses its faith. It's an individual creed.

The American document Music in Catholic Worship may have been getting at this when it declared, all the way back in 1972, that “good celebrations foster and nourish faith. Poor celebrations may weaken and destroy it” (paragraph 6). In those heady days, we were concerned that slavish adherence to an older version of the rite might never unleash the potential of the new order of Mass. Now, thirty-five years later, having sown what we thought was holy wind, we may be reaping a bit of the cyclone as some of the priests who dragged the church kicking and screaming through those changes following Vatican II remain unreflectively trapped in the license which they took back in those days. 

All I’m asking for is for all of us to revisit the rite as we actually have it. Priests will say, “People like the way I say Mass, even if it isn’t what’s in the book,” but I say, people need you to say mass as it is in the book, and, if it really matters to you, they will still like you. That, and you’ll finally be doing your job, and not making us all the bullied prisoners of your shamanistic malpractice. There is plenty of room for your insight and personality to come through; just give us a break, and train yourself and restrain yourself to do your personal thing at the times when it is appropriate. Don’t you think you owe us that much? Then, when you say, “the Lord be with you,” boy, we’ll be right there with “and with your spirit,” or, because anamnesis is such a fragile thing, "and with your spirit." ☺