Sweeney Todd, Valjean, and American Justice

Yesterday, Sondheim and music lovers in the USA got the happy news that that NY Phil's Sweeney Todd will be broadcast "Live from Lincoln Center" in September. It doesn't take much for me to get excited about when it comes to Stephen Sondheim's music, but this qualifies. On the same day, on Facebook and in our staff meeting, there is buzz about Pope Francis's praise of Cardinal Walter Kaspar's book on mercy, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life.  Of course, it also makes me start thinking about meaning and one thing leads to another...

OK, so here’s a discussion I’d like to see happen: Dick Cheney, Jimmy Carter, and Desmond Tutu, after an evening watching Sweeney Todd and Les Miserables, meet on the air with Bill Moyers. “Gentlemen,” says Bill, in his best “Li’l Abner Goes to Yale” voice, “you’ve just spent five hours watching some geniuses of musical theater create what you might call a public theology of revenge from material that's over a century old, and they have two quite different takes on it. Some of us think there are parallels to be drawn between these two shows and the current situation in the world. Discuss.”

Moyers would never dabble in such a pedestrian insight into popular culture. Cheney might not participate because Les Mis is of French origin. But it occurs to me that both it and the Sondheim musical are dealing with the problem of revenge, of the human response to evil, particularly evil perpetrated by those in authority upon those who are their constituency. Both stories spring from a different world; Les Mis from mid-19th century France and the wake of one of the French Revolutions, and Sweeney Todd from the Dickensian England of workhouses, overpopulation, and the severely overspent economy of an outdated class system and empire. 

Of course, there are significant differences. The protagonist of Les Mis, Jean Valjean, is not completely innocent, he did in fact steal bread in order to feed his starving family. Escaping from prison, he is befriended by a curate who shows him a kindness by inviting him for dinner. That night, Valjean robs the curate of some silver. When Valjean is caught by the policeman Javert, the curate lies for him, telling Javert that the stolen silver was a gift. On the strength of this kindness, Valjean builds a new life, becomes the mayor of a small town, and the narrative is truly launched. Javert, who has brought himself up from the slums on the strength of his career, continues to look for the escaped prisoner that is Valjean. Javert represents what Americans generally think of as justice; Valjean has committed a crime, and he has to pay for it. Into the scenario, though, the free mercy of God appears in the action of the cleric. Valjean is allowed to see the bishop’s act as redemption; he feels his life now has a new and higher purpose. He leaves his crime and his life in the past; Javert does not think this is “fair,” and continues to seek “justice” upon him. Of course, anyone familiar with the story knows this highly oversimplifies the plot into just one of several streams. But follow this stream out is exactly what Hugo (and the adapters) do: in the end, there is an apotheosis of Valjean as he joins the martyrs and his loved ones in heaven, while Javert, unable to forgive or find forgiveness even after his life is spared twice by Valjean, commits suicide by plunging into the Seine. We feel relief at the death of Javert, relief for him, even as we keep hoping that this time, this performance, he’ll relent before his fall. The question is, has justice been done? Well, that's one question. The other might be, does it matter?

Sweeney Todd, known before his imprisonment as Benjamin Barker, is different from Valjean in that he is a genuine innocent, even a naïf, the victim of the abuse of power by a powerful judge who has him sent away on a trumped up charge in order to seduce Barker’s wife, Lucy. We only know Barker’s life in flashback and shadow, in his memory and that of a neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, who is now his landlord and who has kept the tools of his trade, his barber’s razors, while he was in prison. (Note - if you don’t know the show, do not let your first exposure to it be the crazy Johnny Depp/Helena Bonham Carter rivers-of-blood vehicle. Go for the vintage Hearn/Lansbury stage version, which at least contains the Ballad of Sweeney Todd, which is only heard instrumentally in the movie. Otherwise you’ll never know that the play is about “to seek revenge may lead to hell, / But everyone does it, and seldom as well / As Sweeney, as Sweeney Todd...”) Having escaped from a prison ship, Barker returns to London as Todd. Discovering from Mrs. Lovett that his wife was raped by the judge and then took poison, and that his daughter Joanna is now his ward and soon-to-be bride, Todd lays in wait, planning his revenge on the judge and his beadle. When the judge eludes his grasp the first time, Todd, mad with rage, chooses to “practice on less honorable throats,” and the bloodbath begins, with Mrs. Lovett taking the bodies to turn them into a profitable business selling “the best (meat) pies in London.” In this show, Joanna does indeed escape, but only after the horror of discovering the secrets of the barber and the pie shop. But Todd’s vengeance backfires in a way: a bawdy beggarwoman who has nipped at the heels of many who cross her path during the show turns out to be his wife, Lucy, and in a moment of panic and unknowing Todd kills her as he waits for the judge to arrive for his shave. By the end of the musical, Todd’s rage and revenge have taken dozens of lives including his own and Mrs. Lovett’s. The musical, already dark and only blackly humorous, lost what little humor and light it had in the transition to the screen. But here, I’m mostly concerned with the aspects of justice and revenge, and how they provide templates and paradigms for the way that we think life ought to be fair.

So, in a 9/11 world, in an Auschwitz-Birkenau world, in a Hiroshima-apartheid-Khmer Rouge-Idi Amin-Bosnia-Darfur-Abu Ghraib-Boko Haram world, what do we mean by justice? Which paradigm can we lay over our actions and feel like we’re doing something worthwhile to move evolution along from the Hammurabian equity of the talion law toward something that might remotely resemble agape, the love that God is, the God in whom this “Christian” nation purportedly believes? Talion serves well to stop unbridled retribution; as many point out, it’s a huge moral step forward from murderous revenge that multiplies retribution. But Jesus has put forward a different God, one who identifies with the victim; one who “lets the sun shine and rain fall on good and bad alike.” Jesus posits a God who is not to be known a judge or emperor, but Father. Jesus shows us a God whose forgiveness is truly that, given before the crime, so that there is never any distance between us and God. 

And yet, the public rhetoric goes on about others being evildoers, while we publicly admit waterboarding and other forms of torture, and the humiliation, beating, and even murder of prisoners under our guard. We still end every speech with “God bless America” and we’re scandalized when a preacher takes the government to task for it. And there’s rarely a word from the high priests of American public religion that we ought to ask forgiveness from God for this evildoing of our own; it’s somehow endorsed by God because it’s being used on evildoers in retaliation for something which they, ostensibly, have done to us. 

Our hearts do bleed for Sweeney Todd, however bizarre and reprehensible his crimes, because he has been hurt so deeply. But once he begins lashing out with his razor on the throats of people unconnected to the crime done to him, we’re made to see that maybe our pity is misplaced, and really, he ought to be stopped! Our hearts go out to Javert, the ever watchful guardian of law, for his sense of honor and duty, but once his life has been given back to him by Valjean, and he chooses to “throw his pity right back in his face,” we lose some of our hope of saving him. He has not learned the lesson of mercy, that all have sinned, and that all have been forgiven, and he will not join in the great song of thanksgiving that is part of the music of the conscious universe. 

Be Perfect - Christ the Icon (iTunes link)

So, which way, America? Todd, or Valjean? Messrs. Cheney, Carter, and Bishop Tutu, discuss. For your further consideration, I have lifted some text from Jean Anouilh (via Louis Evely) and St. Isaac of Ninevah, quoted in an essay on "The Injustice of Grace" by Fr. Alvin Kimel.

In his book That Man is You, Fr Louis Evely describes a scene from a play by Jean Anouilh:

The good are densely clustered at the gate of heaven, eager to march in, sure of their reserved seats, keyed up and bursting with impatience.
All at once, a rumor starts spreading: “It seems He’s going to forgive those others, too!”
For a minute, everybody’s dumbfounded. They look at one another in disbelief, gasping and sputtering, “After all the trouble I went through!” “If only I’d known this …” “I just cannot get over it!”
Exasperated, they work themselves into a fury and start cursing God; and at that very instant they’re damned. That was the final judgment. 

What is the kingdom of God like? It is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard … So the last will be first and the first last (Matt 20:1-16).

We are scandalized by the injustice of grace. It’s quite one thing for God to forgive me, but I still want him to mete out justice to everyone else. 

The seventh century ascetical master, St Isaac the Syrian, boldly challenged the portrayal of God as one who rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked: 

Do not call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. And if David calls Him just and upright, His Son revealed to us that He is good and kind. “He is good,” He says, “to the evil and to the impious.” How can you call God just when you come across the Scriptural passage on the wage given to the workers? “Friend, I do thee no wrong I will give unto this last even as unto thee. Is thine eye evil because I am good?” How can a man call God just when he comes across the passage on the prodigal son who wasted his wealth with riotous living, how for the compunction alone which he showed, the father ran and fell upon his neck and gave him authority over all his wealth? None other but His very Son said these things concerning Him, lest we doubt it; and thus He bare witness concerning Him. Where, then, is God’s justice, for whilst we are sinners Christ died for us! But if here He is merciful, we may believe that He will not change. (Homily 60) 

The gospel dramatically turns upside down conventional, and even biblical, understandings of divine justice. “God is not One who requites evil,” declares St Isaac, “but who sets evil right.” Indeed, Isaac goes even so far as to assert that “mercy is opposed to justice.” Even when God punishes, he does so only for our good:
God chastises with love, not for the sake of revenge—far be it!—but in seeking to make whole his image. And he does not harbour wrath until such time as correction is no longer possible, for he does not seek vengeance for himself. This is the aim of love. Love’s chastisement is for correction, but does not aim at retribution. … The man who chooses to consider God as avenger, presuming that in this manner he bears witness to His justice, the same accuses Him of being bereft of goodness. Far be it that vengeance could ever be found in that Fountain of love and Ocean brimming with goodness! 

The Holy Trinity wills only the good of the sinner, even at the cost of justice.

So, yes, attend the tale of Sweeney Todd. But we've got a better story. And that final scene of the film version of Les Miserables, the apotheosis at the barricades: it would have been better to have seen Javert there as well, caught in the embrace of Gavroche and Valjean, echoing that wonderful scene at the Eucharist in the unforgettable Places in the Heart. But that might just demonstrate the limits of American justice vis-a-vis the gospel. Like the crowd in Anouilh's play, even in our imagination, it is rare that we can love our enemies and wish them the eternal happiness we imagine is reserved for ourselves.

Songstories 31: "Yours Today" from You Alone (1984, NALR) and "Change Our Hearts" (OCP, 2000)

No one will ever accuse me of being a master of counterpoint, but one song that I wrote back in the 1980s which we use on occasion (and, I'm happy to say, others do too) employs a certain type of counterpoint heard in popular music, particularly in theater music, sometimes called non-imitative polyphony. It sounds complicated, but it's really just two melodies sung at the same time to the same harmonic accompaniment.

There are a lot of examples of this in musical theater, which is probably why I wanted to try to write something like it myself. Think of Godspell, and the song "It's All for the Best," where Jesus and John sing the two parts separately, then at the same time, or The Sound of Music, when the organ march for Maria and the The Captain's wedding is suddenly joined by the choir of nuns singing "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" There's the famous "Pick a Little, Talk a Little" into which Harold Hill distracts a barbershop quartet into adding a chorus of "Good Night, Ladies" in The Music Man. Stephen Sondheim, of course, takes the form to operatic heights with "Soon/Now/Later" in A Little Night Music, and there are elements of the form in the song "One Day More" from Les Miserables, as the first act reaches its climax on the evening before the battle at the barricades.


My song is called "Yours Today," and we included it on our first album, You Alone, which was released in 1984, though I'm certain that I had written it a few years before, maybe as early as 1980. It first appeared in Assemblybook in 1986 or 1987, but then appeared in Glory and Praise Comprehensive in its first edition in 1989, simultaneously with Glory and Praise, Volume 4. The octavo has been one of the best-selling octavos of my OCP music, along with "Change Our Hearts" and "Bread of Life."

In "Yours Today," there are two parts. In the first, the assembly sings to Christ, joyfully praising the resurrection and thankful for the gift of the Spirit that makes us sharers in Christ, sent by him, as the Father sent him:

I. Let your people rejoice: you are risen from death.
Now we are your voice, your hands, and your breath.
Not for you the tomb,
Not for you death's decay,
Risen Lord.
We are you, we are yours,
Yours today.

In the second part of the song, the voice of Christ reminds the church of its calling to be present to the world by our loving service to all people:

II. You shall be my hands, you shall be my feet,
You must feed my lambs, pasture my sheep.
You are light to the world, form to the clay,
And you must be rising with me,
Dying and rising with me.
You are my flesh and blood today.

Then both parts are sung simultaneously. My intent was to create a song that could be "instant music," that would give an assembly of non-singers (in the professional sense) the opportunity to experience the joy of singing in harmony that we singers experience all the time, that wonderful sense that we are part of something greater than ourselves, a whole greater than the sum of its (in this case, two) parts. In my previous parish, where we had more ready access to the song in Assemblybook and in our GPC hymnal starting in 2009, this really, really worked, and I was always thrilled with the sound coming from the congregation enthusiastically joining into both parts of the song. Now, when I have to rely on including it in a worship aid, I am inclined to use it less, and consequently the assembly part is a little more limited to part one, which is easier to sing on first hearing. My choir though is very supportive, insistent even, that we include this annually during the Easter season, at least.

I hope that, if you haven't heard the song before, you might give it a try. Though I wrote it for adult congregations and choirs, I have found that it works well with older children's choirs and youth choirs looking for an Easter anthem in parts that gives kind of a big "pay off" with just a little less rehearsal time. In the tight time economy of the paschal season, this could be a big plus for a lot of choir directors, don't you think? And there are still four weeks of the Easter season left!

Thanks for reading!

"Yours Today" page at the publisher's website, ocp.org.

Yours Today - Change Our Hearts iTunes link (this version is different from the above. It was re-recorded in 2000).

"He handed himself over" - Traditio

When he was insulted, he returned no insult;
when he suffered, he did not threaten;
instead, he handed himself over to the one who judges justly. (1 Pt 2: 22)





I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly. (Jn. 10:10)


Just one little thing struck me yesterday as I listened to the readings over and over. Even with some background, the whole “shepherd” thing sort of misses me emotionally. The main issue I have with it as a 21st-century Christian is that, in America at least, we get too much of the “called by name” stuff (individualism) and we miss the fact that the whole metaphor of the shepherd is based on the presence of the flock, and that for the first century it was a flock of disparate ownership: shepherds were in the service of extended families and villages, not simply of individuals. The gospel is about Jesus; in a way, it sets the stage for “way, truth, and life” talk, as it makes of Jesus both the good shepherd and the sheep gate. I wish our preachers spoke more about the flock, and less about how Jesus cares about each and every sheep, but you can only preach what you believe, I guess.

I certainly don't object to the personal element. But in the gospel, the shepherd’s concern for the one isn’t for anything other than returning to the flock. Sheep are sheep, they’re stupid, they wander off and that’s just what they do. That’s comforting, in a way. But the issue for the gospel is nothing other than the flock belongs to the commonwealth, and the flock belongs together. It’s also important that the shepherd be the right one: the one who lays down his life for the sheep. That’s the other thing that didn’t come up in the homilies I heard: how often “shepherds” in scripture is a pejorative term for religious leaders. Generally, it’s bad shepherds who are leading the flock of Israel astray. Most memorably, perhaps, aside from the beloved 23rd Psalm, remember that passage in Psalm 80 which finally calls out to God: Shepherd of Israel, listen! Look down and see! Ezekiel 34 is a good example of an extended metaphor about bad shepherds, but the metaphor also appears in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and elsewhere.

Anyway, rather than keep going on all that (which I didn’t intend to do), I just wanted to say that the sentence quoted above, in the second reading from First Peter, blew across my consciousness like a spring wind: “When (Jesus) was insulted, he returned no insult; when he suffered, he did not threaten; instead, he handed himself over to the one who judges justly.” It was no huge moment of insight; it was just those words, “he handed himself over.” This kind of language is behind the language of the Eucharist, “handed over,” and the language of the betrayal of Jesus. For me, it describes agape, which, as I’ve said before, is a way of talking about the paschal mystery of God. It is the very nature of God to give the divine Self away. “God is love,” as John says, and John isn’t talking about any kind of human love, he’s talking about self-immolating agape, which, ironically, is not destructive at all, but is creation, the source of life and destiny. As Jesus the Gate puts it at the end of the gospel Sunday, “I came that they might have life, and have it to the full.” This is the very definition of agape, that is, on the one hand, to hand oneself over, completely, for the good of others, and on the other hand, to know that that handing over is imitating and is empowered by the very life of God, and therefore is a source of abundant life and not death at all!

In the gospels, at his meals, whether on the road or at the last supper or in the post-resurrection appearances, Jesus is always breaking bread, “handing it over,” and giving life to those who share his table. At the Last Supper he explicitly identifies his life with the bread broken, and later with the shared cup, to say that his life, and therefore the life of all who follow him, is like that, broken as food for others, and handed over not to be lost but to be multiplied and to burst into abundant life for the cosmos. Sometimes we use the highly connotative word sacrifice to talk about this phenomenon, giving ourselves away for the good of others; it has overtones of pain and redemption, as well as anthropological meanings soaked in blood and appeasement of monstrous deities. But the word “sacrifice” itself comes from two Latin words, sacrum and facere, which mean “to do a holy thing,” or “to make holy.” If we can start thinking of Jesus’s “handing over” of himself, either serving other people, or symbolically in bread and wine, or par excellence in his handing himself over on the cross, we can maybe get a better idea of a more rounded idea of sacrifice: that acting like God, acting in agape, is doing a holy thing, is sacrifice.

Finally, what the first letter of Peter is getting at is that Jesus, in his death on the cross, “handed himself over” to life, to the one who could, and did, save him from death, because this God is life itself. And this is put in contrast to revenge and retribution, saying that the one to whom Jesus hands himself over is will judge justly, that is, will know all the forces of sin over which we have little power which drive us toward sinful and destructive behaviors. To think of God and retribution and revenge at once is impossible: God’s nature is to hand self over, which is the opposite of revenge. God’s justice is not retributive, but distributive. God gives away, God does not get even.

The Latin verb for “to hand over” is “tradere,” which is a compound from the root preposition trans and the verb dare, which, taken together mean “to give across”, or to hand over. One of the words we get from this verb and its cognates is "tradition," which describes what is “handed over” from one generation of people, let’s say, of Christians, to another. And it seemed to me, yesterday, an Easter Sunday annually complicated by Mother's Day and all the cringeworthy romantic "adaptations" that Hallmark culture imposes on liturgy, that it would be a great tradition if we, mothers and all, could hand over to our children the idea of handing ourselves over, the act and practice and discipline of agape, knowing that, every time we can selflessly do for others, we are doing exactly what God does, and when we do that, we act as Christ acts, and the reign of God comes closer, and the light shines a little more boldly in the darkness.

Yeast, Shepherds, and Demons (A4E)

Therefore, let us celebrate the feast,
 not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness,
 

but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Cor. 5:8)
 

The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want. (Psalm 23, 2)
 

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch was leavened. (Mt 13:33)


Preparing for this fourth Sunday of Easter, I was thinking about this whole shepherd thing again, and remembering the 2nd reading on Easter Sunday about leaven (see quote 1 above), and a talk my brother-in-law sent me from a priest at St. Louis University, a homily on the gospel of John on Easter 2, the Thomas story. All of these point me in this appealing direction about God, since it always seems to me that God and God’s way are so far beyond us that sometimes they seem like evil, or subversion. The question is, subversion of what? If the status quo, inside me and my life, or in my country, or in the cosmos, is unjust or going in the wrong direction, subversion is just what we need.

There’s a thread that goes through all of the teachings of Jesus about this: it is the thread of the parables. The parables peer around corners at the kingdom of God, they look under the tablecloth of the ordinary at the richly laden table God’s reign. They are as though O. Henry or M. Night Shmalayan tell the story of the human heart, and twist the knife of fiction to reveal the truth of life, and not its strange shadows that are so much more “apparent” to us, and masquerade as truth.

“Leaven” or “yeast” is always a corrupting agent in Jewish literature, including the scriptures. Yeast is a fungus, it renders food impure. It is unleavened bread that is pure, that is the food of the Jews. When Jesus compares the kingdom to a woman (already, we’re in the realm of the unclean here, or at least of the second-class being) kneading leaven into “three measures of flour” (a huge amount, enough to feed a hundred people) he’s both alluding to the fact that a little bit of yeast makes the bread rise, but it also corrupts the flour. If the bread she is baking is the bread of Caesar’s kingdom, then a corrupting agent (leaven) offers the possibility of change, of a new world.

And what is true of leaven is true of shepherds. “Good shepherd,” in the thinking of the pious Jew of Jesus’s time, is an oxymoron. It’s like saying, “nice gangster,” or “honest thief.” In this Sunday’s gospel, the way to Jesus’s being the good shepherd is roundabout, he is “the gate” through which the real shepherds (here, the twelve) lead the sheep. Jesus announces, “I am the good shepherd” in the verse immediately following the end of the gospel this week, which ends at John 10:10. But we’ve heard the whole story before, and the church is sure we won’t miss it because we sing Psalm 23 and hear in the second reading that “you had all gone astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.” Again, if the world of leadership in that or this or any church is to be left to the devious folk known as “shepherds,” Jesus wants us to be sure to follow a good one, one whose voice we recognize as true, one who “lays down his life for his sheep.”

Father Coutinho of SLU, in his homily mentioned above, points to the fact that, when we want to see who actually recognizes who Jesus is in the New Testament, the only ones who reliably recognize him in the scriptures are the demons. “We know who you are, Holy One of God!” (Mk. 1:24) Miracle after miracle, truth after truth, the apostles and crowds get it wrong, and identify a miracle-worker and possible king or at least a general. The demons see Jesus for who he is. Fr. Coutinho’s ultimate lesson is to look into the darkness, to hold onto our chaos, our doubts, our demons, our sin, to be sure we know that we are in touch with the very place God dwells, our point of sure grace. It’s a good story to hear, for those few of us who can’t seem to shake any demons off, for whom the darkness has become our light!


What to make of all this apparent flimflammery, this subversion of what appears to be authentic and reliable, our status quo? For one thing, if you are not a member of the bourgeois church who can take or leave a God of freedom and agape and who makes the rain fall and sun shine on the good and bad alike, if you’re one of the eighty percent or so people in the world who qualify as “have-nots,” then the reversal, the yeast, the shepherd, and the demons look pretty good to you. They are demons in the church of Caesar, of war, violence, and economic manipulation.

For another, for me, it’s always good to recall that God triumphs in our weakness, and to be reminded that we can’t make ourselves good enough for God. What is bad and dark in me, sinful and vulnerable, is the most reliable place of encounter with the vulnerable invulnerable Light.

Best movie about a good (yummy) shepherd(ess): Manon of the Spring (Manon des Sources). Run, don’t walk, to rent it. But you have to watch its prequel first, Jean de Florette. Amazing little parables of movies that will stay with you as long as you live. Life, love, revenge, redemption are all there; these two movies find their spiritual center at the place where Les Miserables and Sweeney Todd intersect. But that’s all just my romantic side; Manon herself is the shepherdess, and all I have to say is, “Baaaaa, baby.” OK, OK, so technically, she's a goatherd, don't argue. I think that Jean de Florette was my introduction to the work of Gerard Depardieu, but you will also see Yves Montand, and Daniel Auteuil in one of his first roles, and he has gone on to become one of France’s best and most sought-after actors. Manon is a dish of yummy shepherd's pie.

Exactly what that has to do with Good Shepherd Sunday suddenly eludes me, but at least I didn’t recommend that God Is Not Dead flick, which was a different kind of quadruped.

Gathering: "All the Earth (the late, lovely Lucien Deiss’s version of Psalm 100 from 1965 or so, singable and fresh as ever, even in translation. The reason is the reference to “we are the sheep of his green pasture,” though you don’t really need a reason to sing this wonderful song.)

Glory to God: Mass of St. Ann, by Ed Bolduc

Preparation of Gifts: "Yours Today," or Liam Lawton's "I Shall Be the Vine."

Mass of Creation

Lamb of God based on "Gift of Finest Wheat" (WLP)

Communion: "Gift of Finest Wheat" (Kreutz/Westendorf classic written for the 1976 Eucharistic Congress)

Recessional: "On Holy Ground" (Peña) or "Lift Up Your Hearts" (O'Connor)

TBT - Mystagogy from the early 1990s

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

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

"Still Doubting," John Granville Gregory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Songstories 30: "You in Our Day" (1987, Mystery)

We have not seen you, but we love you.

We have not seen you, but we believe you.

We have not seen you, but we hope in you,

For we have met you in our day,

We have met you on the way.

1. In the garden of despair, 

Bowed by grief too great to bear,

Love is gone, and we've nothing left to give.

Then we hear you speak our name,

Ashen hearts burst into flame,

For your tomb is empty, and you live. We have not seen you...

2. When our doubting drives us home,

And we think we walk alone,

As we speak of the cross, a third appears.

When we offer hearth and bed,

Then the stranger breaks our bread,

And our eyes are open, you are here. We have not seen you...

3. Day to day we see you plead

From the eyes of those in need:

Human pain spreads before us like a sea.

And we hunger for the day

When at last we hear you say

"What you did for these you did for me."

When I left the seminary in 1973, I had finished 3+ years of college, plus two summer schools. I had over 110 hours toward  my BA in liberal studies, but never finished with a degree.

In the late 1970s, I met John Gallen, SJ, in Phoenix, and later, in 1985 or so when he began interviewing potential students for his Corpus Christi Center for Advanced Liturgical Study, he asked me about what happened with college. I explained to him that they had finally disclosed what "celibacy" was, and I thought I should leave. (Not really.) But John told me I should contact the school and see if they would take some of my intervening years as life experience, and perhaps with a project or two, I could receive the BA for which I had almost enough credit hours. 

I made the appropriate contact with St. Mary's of the Barrens Seminary in Perryville, MO, just in the nick of time. They were in a process of streamlining their operations, closing the college and moving students to a house of formation at DePaul University, and converting the beautiful southeast Missouri campus into a retirement and care facility for older Vincentians. As a project, the dean assigned me the task of writing a song for the liturgy that would formally close the institution as a school.

As I recall, that liturgy was an Easter liturgy, and it may in fact have been on the second or third Sunday of Easter. When I heard today's second reading, it brought that memory back to me.

"Although you have not seen him you love him;
even though you do not see him now yet believe in him,
you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy..."

I thought at the time how Easter is celebrated in all kinds of situations by a lot of people who don't feel they have much to rejoice about. Easter is always in the shadow of the cross. Those who would be singing this song would be in a kind of mourning, letting go of an institution that had flourished for decades and produced priests and bishops who had founded seminaries to train other priests, built parishes, served as professors, missionaries, and even periti at the Second Vatican Council. They were doing the right thing, but it still stung. So I wanted to write a hopeful Easter song that acknowledged the pain of the present while leaning toward a promise and a future of unexpected joy. 

"You in Our Day" appeared in the first edition (maroon binding) of Glory and Praise Comprehensive as well as in Glory and Praise Volume 4. It was recorded on our CD Mystery in 1987. I think it did well what I intended, that is, served as an Easter song of a more restrained joy, one that waits at the empty tomb with hope while still torn by anguish and disbelief. 

(TBT) Ninety Days - in 2000, when we dedicated our new church

This Sunday, the Second Sunday of Easter, is the liturgical anniversary of the dedication of St. Anne Church in Barrington. Our first mass was celebrated there on Ash Wednesday, and the church was dedicated by Cardinal George on April 30, 2000, the Second Sunday of Easter. This is an article I wrote for the bulletin about preparing for that Easter and then celebrating it in that wonderful year.

The 90 Days

by Rory Cooney

Copyright © 2000

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone?
They pave paradise, put up a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell, "Big Yellow Taxi")

Whether it's the natural beauty of the world that you're missing, or the lover that just left in the '"big

yellow taxi," sometimes it takes a shakeup of our comfort zone to make us see the truth about our lives. Sometimes, as was the case with Israel during the time of the captivity, a disaster can give us a new perspective things. Sometimes we get off easier, like when our community outgrows its church, and we have to learn to pray in a gymnasium for ten years. There is a great loss, but another reality emerges. Israel learned that the presence of God didn't require a temple, and that solidarity and faith, not monarchy, made them a people. What did St. Anne's learn in the cavernous anti-ritual space of the gym? Maybe that a "church" doesn't necessarily have marble and statues and high art, but is a building made of living stones, and that those living stones are more like a tent that is borne along on a journey.

The Church's springtime ritual of the Ninety Days of Lent and Easter is about those living stones. Here and now, thousands of years after God called Abram and Sarai out of their 'comfort zone' and pointed them toward an impossible promise, God still calls individuals, life by life, family by family, to make a New People. We see every week at 10:45 mass the witness of God's call as our catechumens gather with us, then leave with our blessing. Now their time of Christian apprenticeship is drawing to a close, and in the wonderful womb of the church, from a virgin font that has never before been used for this purpose, they will, on that "night truly blessed," the Vigil of Easter, be plunged into the death of Christ, and be reborn a new creation. All around them and us on that night, a new building that we will call "church" will give us a home and shelter for our prayer. But it is the church within that is the focus of all of this divine energy. A few moments after they arise from those waters and are anointed (Christ-ed) with the oil of confirmation and thus sealed with the Holy Spirit, we will all be called to renew the promises of our baptism, to reject sin and put our faith in God and the Christ, surrendering to their Holy Spirit. Then we shall lead them to the table, and share with them the meal that we are commanded to take in memory of Jesus, and we shall be challenged again to remember who Jesus is, and carry on his mission.

How shall we go about preparing for that Easter day, when we will promise again most solemnly to live as Christ, to live our baptismal identity, not for ourselves, but for the God to whom we belong? What, in fact, does it mean to live as Christ, called, consecrated, and sent? On the morning after the resurrection, John records, Jesus appears to the apostles and breathes on them, saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit. As the Father sent me, so I send you." These words are meant to recall the act of creation: God's breath makes a new world, makes life. In that moment, the Church was born. The  Spirit that made Jesus messiah, the anointed one or Christ, is now passed over to the Church, giving it messianic anointing. The church receives its mission in the same moment: "as the Father sent me, so I send you." How did the Father send Jesus? What is that mission? It is to announce that the reign of God is here. It was to start a new way of living, so "that all might be one." The mission is to undo the effects of sin, to uncover the lies that separate peoples and make enemies, to remove all the structures that promote division and keep people in any kind of bondage, hunger, or dis-integration.


Unfortunately, we're all born into a world in which the structures of sin are so ancient and inbred that we often aren't even aware that we are participating in those structures. Some of our daily habits of relating, buying and selling, are the very things that keep millions of others from experiencing the fullness of life. Sometimes we have bought our own freedom with the freedom of others. Lent is a time of praying for light and fire. As in the Scrutinies we pray that the Spirit of God will throw light upon the lives of the elect and let them see the structures of sin for what they are that they might be exorcised, we ask God with them that we might see together in a new way that is not prejudiced by our addiction to old structures. Lent is for learning to reject sin and believe in the gospel, and part of that effort is seeing sin for what it is, and learning just what the gospel is all about! Our hope is that this time, the Spirit will help us cut through the familiarity of scripture and ritual and begin to see concrete ways of rejecting the structures of sin and building up structures of grace.

One of those structures is the one built by God of living stones, the temple of spirit and truth that is our Church. Thanks be to God, we have a beautiful new house for the living Church. As we enter those doors on Ash Wednesday, let us pray that we have learned the lesson of the Babylonian Captivity and the "Big Yellow Taxi." When we didn't have a building, we learned what it was that we did have, and what a Church is really made of. Now that we have a building, let's hold on to that knowledge, and pray for a new infusion of light and grace. Then, however beautiful and permanent the building is, it will be a tent that we, the living, take with us wherever we go.

iTunes link:
You Have Built Your House - Christ the Icon