Dr. Collins and the Children of Light

In my never-ending quest to confuse myself by reading up on all the things that don’t concern me, I read Dr. Francis Collins’s largely inspiring book, The Language of God. I bought both this work and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, despaired of ever getting time to read them, and then bought the audio books and have now finished them both. Thank you, iPod and Audible.com, for making my higher education possible.

This all started with the article that appeared in Time in 2006, with an almost genial debate between these two august and articulate scientists. Of course, I think that the “God vs. Science” title is bogus, but that’s my prejudice, being who I am. I can no more imagine a God opposed to science as I can imagine a chef who hates food. Religion vs. Science would be a better way of putting it, and actually, that’s the dichotomy that Collins wants to address. Dawkins, a much-published biologist from Oxford, is one of the world’s best-known apologists for atheism, and to him, the battle is probably more aptly described as  “Science vs. God.” Collins, an American geneticist and head of the Human Genome project, is a Christian who believes that science and faith are not and cannot be opposed. Both men are passionate advocates for their viewpoints.

My argument with Dr. Dawkins, and I’m sure he would quake in his sterile lab booties, is in two parts. First, he is very smart, and earned his credentials and his right to preach to the scientific choir. But why does his tone have to have the condescending ring of a putdown? Christians ought to be embarrassed, are embarrassed, over how little has apparently changed in the world due to our presence, and at the great harm, divisiveness, even murder that has been done in the name of the cross. We ought to be held accountable for it. But tossing out Christianity because people who believe in it don’t measure up to our own standards is making the baby-and-bathwater mistake. Collins adapts a metaphor used by others, and is seminally heard in Paul: the truth of God is pure spring water, but it is conveyed in some rusty buckets. We shouldn’t blame the water for the poverty and pollution in the leaky conveyance. “We hold a treasure in earthen vessels.” I’m quite sure that Dawkins has had to endure some awful attacks from believers of different ilks. Atheism is at least as reasonable an approach to truth as theism is, but that is because faith lays outside the realm of logic and the empirical and experimental domain of human science. I don’t blame Dawkins at all for this. Christians have anthropomorphized God much more than we admit to. Necessarily, in Christ, and by virtue of creation and our scripture itself, we attribute certain characteristics to the divine. But these attributions are, at best, shadows and metaphors for a reality that clearly lies outside our ability to know. To say that God is a “person,” or three “persons,” for instance, is to use a human attribute to describe something that lies completely outside human understanding. Nothing we say about God reveals more to us than it hides, and we have to be happy with that, and live as much in the “cloud of unknowing” than with any silly human gnosis about the divine.

There is much in Dr. Collins' book and its revelations that is cause for gratitude and awe from all of us non-scientists. My quibble with it is that it may need to understand that there are people who have put as much of their lives and work into the art and science of scriptural research and study as he has into genetics, biology, and physics. Let them do the work of exegesis, and then examine their hypotheses the way you do your own science. Don’t write off some theology as “liberal” simply because it doesn’t see with the same lens that you do. The synthesis of history, literature, anthropology, and faith that is the work of other experts has the same kind of validity that his does in the work of science. Use that information in the crucible of truth. It may be that a revised imagination about Christ and the nature of God will help, and not threaten, one's synthesis of science and faith.

To me, the most compelling quotation in either tome turns out to be this quotation from The Language of God. One thing to me is absolutely necessary in this whole endeavor of finding a “unified theory” that incorporates this double helix of science and faith: it is the conviction that truth is one, and that all genuine paths must lead in the same direction. For religious persons, God cannot be a deceiver who creates blind pathways in order to mislead us in our search for the truth; for the scientist, rationality, logic, and evidence cannot lead away from the conclusion that God exists. There must be harmony, not that we must make it, but that it must already exist, and it is incumbent upon us to seek it out somehow. The burden really falls on believers, though, because it is in our ethic to believe that God is light, and that the universe is charged with divine presence, and revelation is everywhere. This is how it is put in Collins’s book, where he is quoting Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, the American theologian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

We must not then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, more loyal to follow it, whithersoever it leads.


Now, there is a theology and a science that I can get behind.

So you think you want to write liturgical songs? (Part 2 - the "other hand")

Musician friends between rehearsals at an ancient
Los Angeles RE Congress

My most-read post in this blog, now five months old and with over 26,000 page views
(thank you!) was one entitled "So you think you want to write liturgical songs." There's a link in the right hand column, if you haven't seen it yet. I did not mean for it to be upsetting, but it clearly was for some people. I answered them, sometimes privately, as best I could, to let them know it's worth the effort of trying to break into the field. But lest you think I was just all about negative experience as a songwriter in this genre in which I've chosen to spend my life, don't think that! Let me try to widen the perspective.

Kendzia, Cortez, and Warner misbehaving at dinner

I can honestly say that, through the many years I've spent in liturgical music, I've always been impressed by the care and integrity with which the current owners of the publishing houses have treated me. They have received a lot of bad press because of the competitive nature of the business; some specialize in hardbound hymnals, some in paperback subscription "missalettes," but they all take very seriously their calling to provide singable music to Catholic Christian assemblies. Not just that, but they treat me, and I assume other composers, with respect and collegiality, and on some level, over the years, some relationships there have developed into friendships. 

My original publisher (after the two I wrote about in earlier blogs, the Composers' Forumfor Catholic Worship and Resource Publications, who published my songs but not as recorded collections) was North American Liturgy Resources. It was there that I got to know people like the Bruno family, David Serey and his wife Jody (who co-authored the book of my musical, Lost and Found), Tom Kendzia, the irascible but hilarious Henry Papale, and Paul Quinlan, a dear man who as a Jesuit seminarian had written a number of energetic and excellent guitar versions of psalms. His "Brand New Day," "Sing to God a Brand New Canticle," and "How I Rejoiced" were three of my favorites in the early days of the guitar mass, and I'm talking 1969-1970 here. These songs of his appeared in the FEL Hymnal for Young Christians, which antedated NALR's Glory and Praise series by several years. Mark Mellis and Rick Hardy, longtime colleagues who worked with me at St. Jerome in Phoenix when I was the director of music and liturgy there (1983-1993) also were part of the staff at NALR.

Roc O'Connor trying to straighten us out at a recent
Composers' Forum dinner in St. Louis

Around 1990,  NALR and all its copyrights were acquired by Oregon Catholic Press, and Ray Bruno's son Bruce moved to Portland with his family to be vice president of marketing. Bruce's daughter Mandy had been in the children's choir at St. Jerome at the same time as my daughter Claire, and they were both cantors and leaders in the group.  Mandy made news in high school when she was un-cast as Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar because of fears of community backlash (I believe that they did, however, let her play the part of Judas!) Mandy has since gone on to be a regular in the daytime serial All My Children, and was nominated for an Emmy in 2006. Bruce and Diane Bruno still work with Oregon Catholic Press, and I always look forward to hearing about their family when we see each other at this or that conference during the year. John Limb, the president of OCP, is a very genial man who has gone out of his way on several occasions to ask my opinion on various matters affecting composers, and I am grateful for their continued support of my older material, and ongoing friendships.

The people at GIA have been really good friends with us for over twenty years as well. When, for a number of reasons, in 1989 our trio decided to publish our next collection of songs, Safety Harbor, with GIA, we couldn't have been happier with the freedom we were given to deliver the music in a way that we felt did it justice. I still keep a letter from GIA's then-marketing-director Michael Cymbala on the wall of my cubicle at work, written just before the release of the original Gather Comprehensive hymnal, in which he can barely contain his pride with the new book, while welcoming the three of us into GIA's group of artists and thanking us for our trusting them with the music. And it has been a mutually beneficial relationship over the years, one in which we've been treated fairly, as valued colleagues. The Harris family, Bob Batastini, Michael, longtime editorial honcho Kelly Dobbs-Mickus, and many others over the years, some of whom have moved on to other work and ministries have been and continue to be good friends. Kelly's crack editorial eye made every piece of mine that GIA has published better than when I sent it in, and I try to be sure she knows how grateful I am for that.

Most recently, I've become acquainted with the team of editors and folks at World Library Publications, though I have to say that when I came to know most of them they were doing different work, and all managed to emigrate to WLP over the years as the now-retired-but-ever-fabulous Mary Prete began to assemble a staff of well-known and talented musicians and liturgists to work with the great people already in place at JSP/WLP. Mary we had known for years when she was the manager of Alverno Religious Bookstore in Chicago, and she and Alverno were an ubiquitous presence at conferences around the country for as long as I was involved in this work. She joined WLP, and then, with Alan Hommerding, names like the late John Wright, Jerry Galipeau, Steve Janco, Mary Beth Kunde-Anderson, Lisa Bagladi, and many others made up the team that drove the company. I've never worked with a more attentive text editor that Alan. Generally, I have to say, I've been cut a pretty wide path in the area of text, but Alan has been tremendous in helping me make my texts better with his mind for theological nuance and his ear for musicality. The music editors, especially Keith Kalemba, have been so helpful in making sure that what's on the page is actually what I mean, so that the end user can have a chance to play the song the way I wrote it. Thanks to all of them for their enthusiasm and hard work on my behalf.

So what was the big deal in the first posting? Obviously, it's a big tent. There are lots of singers and songwriters. We don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. Resources are strained, time in constrained, the precariousness of the church economy is kind of a drag on everyone. I still think that we writers aren't all treated the same, that there are a few writers whose work gets green-lighted without the rigorous processes to which most of us are subjected. A lot of teen-oriented music clearly doesn't get theologically or liturgically winnowed with as fine-toothed a comb as mine does for reasons that are still unclear to me. The publishers' investment is the same. The praise-chorus crowd doesn't need texts that make sense, or music that's appropriate to liturgy? Someone will no doubt explain it to me.

Those perceptions of mine might be mistaken, or dated, or just me turning into Abe (Grampa) Simpson. 

Still, it's such a privilege to be involved at all in the work of creating the music by which so many people in many places praise God, learn a vocabulary of faith, teach their children to pray, celebrate the paschal mystery, marry, and bury their dead. It's this reality upon which I try to focus when my pride and vanity threaten to sap my energy for the journey.

I got to a point with my last GIA project, Today, (2006) where I just said, "Whatever!" You know? The world doesn't need more Rory Cooney songs right now. When the time is right, nothing will stop their publication or people from singing them. When the time is wrong, no amount of cajoling or manipulation or conniving on my part will get them heard or into people's hearts. It's all in God's time; God, who works through human agents who have good days and bad days, who are over-worked, underpaid, and sometimes choose badly. It's better to keep friends than to worry about the traffic at the intersection of liturgical song and free enterprise. Help me remember that, Lord, and thanks for all the work that my friends at OCP, GIA, WLP, MorningStar, Augsburg-Concordia, and everyone else does to keep the song alive in the heart of your people.

As I mentioned in the original posting, I think we're ready now. We have good music to share. It's a matter of weighing options (like the various publishers' musical products and how they fit our target audiences) and realities (like our limited ability to concertize, and publishers' need to sell our product), making some decisions among ourselves (Gary and Terry and I) and then submitting a proposal to one or more of our publishers, and seeing what ensues. Maybe what we need is a "tribute" band to tour for us, like the "Fab Faux" do for the Beatles. Let's see, we'd need a beautiful woman with a voice to die for (like Terry), someone with a black belt in guitar, an unerring musicality, and no attitude (like Gary). Those would be hard enough. But where on earth would there be someone who could abuse the piano and sing as such a stranger to actual pitch than I? Feel free to send your application: you can always use an assumed name, and wear a fake nose and glasses.

What's your still point?

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
(from T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets")

Parish life can be crazy. Everyone may be of good will, but we're an alphabet soup of Myers-Briggs types, and an enneagram bouquet that makes a Fellini movie look like 1984. And that's just the staff! People come from all over the theological map, with needs and assumptions about what the parish should be and do for them, and we have all these expectations of ourselves, and inevitably there are collisions, "differences of opinion" that are usually expressed in terms that include the word "pastoral need." As in, "I know that this isn't legal, but it's pastoral." And you know that, as a rigid legalist, I'm going to be simmering in my office, chanting my mantra, and trying to remember that not only is the fifth commandment one of the Big Ones, it's also a class one felony.

Of course I'm exaggerating, and none of this would never happen in your parish, but it does lead me to wonder about myself. What’s my still point? When peoples’ issues like this come to me, where do I go, ultimately, to discern them? The grieving widow who wants "The Halls of Montezuma" at her husband's funeral; the bride who wants "Phantom of the Opera" for her wedding; the associate who wants to consecrate two paschal candles so that we don't have to move one from the church to the chapel for funerals. I was joking above, but somehow, over the last twenty years, I've gone from being perceived as a rebel in one parish to being perceived a legalist in this one, and I don't think I've changed that much. Some colleagues seem to view me as one who has no pastoral care for people but only wants to satisfy the man-made laws of the Church. I don’t see myself that way at all, but I suppose I can understand that, compared to an anarchist, I could seem legalistic by comparison. Is law the place one goes to make decisions? Or is it some version of love-as-accommodation that makes people as comfortable as possible, trusting that everything will work out in the end?

Part of the answer, I think, is the way we look at law. I believe, in my heart of hearts, that church law and pastoral care do not constitute a dialectic. They are a false dichotomy, they are meant to be aspects of the same reality. I certainly have a love-hate relationship with discipline. I have tended to rebel against all kinds of control for as long as I can remember, probably stemming from all kinds of childhood and adolescent repressions of the Catholic school, home, and seminary environments. I’m not, by nature, a legalist. But at some point, I suppose I came to realize that most church law, at least, was not meant to be oppressive but to prevent oppression. At its best, all law is like that. It’s set in a kind of minimalist language that attempts to protect the weak while limiting the power of the strong. We all know that there are exceptions to this, but I really believe this about most Church law. Some vestigial archetypes are taking a longer time dying than they should, like the all-male celibate priesthood, but they are clearly vestiges of culture and not likely at all to endure more than another generation or two. Not that that makes them any less painful, nor does it strengthen my argument, but I still generally find liturgical law at least to be protective of the ritual contract among the people of God.

Richard Fragomeni once talked about Catholic sacraments in a talk I heard him give as “anti-ritual ritual.” I think what he meant was something that lies in the shade of the scripture in which Jesus says “the Sabbath was made for people” and not the other way around, that if you were bringing your gift to the altar and remembered that you had an issue with another person, that it was important to reconcile before your prayer. More profoundly, he meant that the Eucharist was an unbloody sacrifice, which, in ritual terms, is oxymoronic. It is precisely in exposing sacrifice, and the scapegoating mechanism that engenders it, as bestial behaviors that the Eucharist is unbloody; the God of Jesus is a God of life, not of death. But for purposes of this reflection, the insight that community, hospitality, and connection precede ritual is important. Rite and life outside of rite are intimately connected. Ritual symbolizes life; it expresses the life of the community and intensifies it, sending it out ready to continue to face life with a more deeply recognized self-image, a little more perfectly conformed to the image of the divine Christ. As all of the church’s sacramental life is tied to the Eucharist, not least by far in the rites of initiation, this insight is important to this discussion. 

Since I’m wary of anarchy, and not sure I’m really capable of true “love” in any spiritual sense, I suppose that in my weakness I do revert to the liturgy itself, including the scripture it proclaims, the Lord whom it remembers, and yes, its law, as the still point of the turning world of parish life. I’d like to think that I’m open to the opinions of others as I try to do discernment, but I also find some comfort in the fact that the wisdom of the church, across nations and times, in collaboration and community when it’s at its best, is better wisdom than I could bring to the situation anyway.

It may be true, in a “quantum” church, that all dichotomies are false, that, like mass and energy which were once thought to be different things, grace and law are two different vibrations of the same string. That’s also comforting, if a little new agey. If I’m just a little patient, and try to discern things from a still point, even if it’s just law, I might learn to love by getting in through the back door. I’ll take it any way I can get it.

John Foley's best song that you never heard of

Looking toward this Sunday's gospel, I thought I'd share with you about a song I've used for well over twenty years that I'm pretty sure you haven't heard, even though its composer, John Foley, S.J., is one of the best-known liturgical songwriters of the last 40 years.

Toward the end of the NALR years, the St. Louis Jesuits produced a double album, à la Neither Silver Nor Gold, entitled The Steadfast Love, which was a mixed bag, as double albums tend to be, of well-written material and filler. For whatever reason, most of the songs in this collection never really caught the attention of the masses in the U.S. church. John Foley had a number of songs in this collection, including the title song and a moving setting of a text from the book of Lamentations called "A Song of Hope." It may be that their "user base" was largely the guitar-driven ensemble, and Foley had begun to branch out into more classical forms and instruments that were beyond the ability and interest of the many of us who were more accustomed to "One Bread, One Body" and "Come to the Water" than to the more angular harmonies that Foley was beginning to embrace.

But one song on that collection was a favorite of mine, and continues to be to this day. The title of it is, "The Christ of God." The text of the refrain is a praise text to Christ as the eschatological Lamb of God:

O You are the Christ of God, the Lamb of God,
Alpha and Omega, the Holy One!
You are the Lamb who is, who was, and who will be
Forever. Amen.
(c) 1986 John Foley, SJ 

But what made this text work for me, with its almost foursquare anthemic tune, was the way it was set against two other musical ideas. The song begins and ends with a solo recitative on the question, "Who do you say I am?" And the verses, taking their cue from the Markan dialogue (Mk 8: 27ff, but also Mt. 16: 13ff), are also in recitative form, with beautifully constructed, almost operatic melodies, in which the Christ tells of his impending suffering, and urges the disciples to take up the cross as well. Each time, the assembly responds with the refrain, "O you are the Christ of God," and the song, when performed in its entirety, ends with the cantor singing the question again, "And who do you say I am?"

I think that our repertoires can always use a few more songs that really force the question about the paschal mystery, that keep the cross in front of our eyes, and that help us to ask ourselves what Christ means to us. "The Christ of God" is just such a song, and if you haven't given it a look, you might think about giving it an audition, with 21st century ears. You know, before it goes out of print.

Songstories 11: Like You (Mystery, NALR, 1987)

I have been crucified with Christ;
yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me...(Gal. 16:20)

If you're like me, then there are probably key passages in the New Testament that have stuck in you over the years and that shape your thinking, formation, and action as a Christian. Certainly as a songwriter, and one who has to think theologically when writing original lyrics, the section from Galatians read in Catholic and other Common Lectionary churches yesterday is one of those passages. Few passages capture as dramatically for me the transformation of the person created by baptism than Paul's assertion here. 

The idea that baptism transforms a person completely, and that life is a process of unfolding that transformation in the world, runs through a lot of my lyrics. It's a fine line to attempt to sing about this without sounding deluded on the one hand or triumphalistic on the other. One tries to keep in mind that whatever is done in us, baptized or not, isn't our doing, but God's. God enables our transformation by love. God sustains us in life. And through it all, God rescues us from the effects of our sin, a reality that causes setback after setback for us, and for good measure, blocks the response of others to the good news of the gospel by making it invisible to them.





In the late 1980s, Christian radio was coming into its own, and contemporary Christian music was a hot commodity. Breaking into that field was never really an option for Catholic artists (at least in those days) because the medium was controlled by Christian evangelicals, and they weren't interested in most Catholic artists. That didn't mean, however, that the influence didn't flow in the other direction, and music by contemporary Christian artists like Amy Grant, Sandi Patty, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Michael Card among many others found its way into the eclectic Catholic repertoire, and certainly has influenced the style of songwriters for the last quarter century.

In the days I was writing the music that became the CD Mystery, I wanted to try my hand at that kind of writing, mostly because Gary Daigle and his group at the Casa were so good at performing it, and I thought it would give Terry a change to sing in a little bit of a different style than most of what we had been recording. That's where "Like You" comes in. Gary's Casa band, with Jim Whitaker on keyboard, the late Bob Warren on drums, the amazing Matt McKenzie on bass, and Gary himself on electric guitar, laid down a great rhythm track for Terry to sing on. She sounds terrific on the track and...

...that's pretty much where it stayed! We rarely have done this song in concert, even more rarely at worship services. But still, when I hear it, it makes me smile for those younger days when it was OK to write songs, and create albums, of Catholic music that people might want to listen to, in addition to singing in their churches, with choirs and organs and ensembles. That's what I still want to do, but it's getting harder and harder in this time of transition to new media on one hand and suspicion of creativity in worship and music on the other. 

I hope I'm around when all of this resolves itself! Meanwhile, here are the lyrics, and the Soundcloud link above, to "Like You." The lyric takes off from the Galatians verse cited above, and includes a snippet of the Suscipe of St. Ignatius as well as of a prayer of Bl. John Gabriel Perboyre, a Vincentian martyr, one that I learned in my years of formation with that community.

Like You, by Rory Cooney

Now I live no longer for myself,

But Jesus lives in me.

Spirit, live in me.

Now I know the gifts I have belong to someone else.

Use me, Lord. Choose me, Lord.

Make me like yourself, make me like yourself.

I want to be like you,

Hope for the hopeless, bread for hungry lives.

I want to be like you,

Friend of the friendless, light for sightless eyes.

I want to be like you:

A child of the Spirit whose Father loves him/her well,

A word of calm against the storm whose winds blow out of hell.

Let my hands be your hands, Jesus, please.

Let my heart be your heart. Think your thoughts in me.

Lord, accept my freedom. Heal my memory.

Your loving touch is grace enough

And all I'll ever need. You're all ever need.

I want to be like you:

Joy for the captive, fire for hearts grown cold.

I want to be like you:

Voice of the story of love that won't grow old.

I want to be like you

And see that my dying will bring a bright new birth,

To end the reign of death and pain

And heal the heart of earth.

I want to be like you

And look for the promise that hides beneath the pain.

I want to be like you

And see in the sowing the golden fields of grain.

I want to be like you

And offer your people a chance to be made new.

Take me, Lord. Remake me, Lord.

I want to be like you.

I want to be like you.

 © 1989, North American Liturgy Resources. Assigned to Rory Cooney 2002.

Father's day

My dad was born on March 10, 1932. I suspect that the proximity of his birthday to the Irish national feast day was the reason his father named him Patrick. He was somewhere in the middle of six boys. I know that he had older brothers: Ted, Joe, and Jim, and I believe that Jake (Charles Jacob) and Bill were younger than he, and when his mother died and his father remarried (her sister), they had a daughter together named Mary Ellen. I know that Ted, Jim, Bill, and Mary Ellen preceded my dad in death, and as far as I know, Jake and Joe are still alive. I guess communication isn’t a strong point of the family!

Dad died in 1993, a couple of months before I moved from Phoenix to Chicago. He succumbed after a long battle with Pick's disease. All his life he had been the picture of health, and generally a man with a great sense of duty and a ready laugh. Both he and my mother were extraordinarily generous and sacrificing parents. I know that much of the time he was working two jobs to make ends meet, with seven children in the house in Phoenix. He was a lifer with the United States Postal Service, and also worked at a small grocery store some evenings and weekends. He and Mom would always have us lined up and ready for the 7:30 mass on Sunday mornings at St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Phoenix.

Dad and I, in Ohio, probably 1955?

We had moved to the neighborhood of west Phoenix called Maryvale, near 51st Avenue between Thomas and Indian School Roads, in 1958 or so, my parents following my mother's parents to the Phoenix area. At the time, we lived on the edge of the desert, and it was not unusual at all to find horned toads, desert rodents and even snakes in the yard. Now, the old house is twenty miles or more from the western edge of the metropolitan area. On the positive side, I could pretty much throw a rock into the Milwaukee Brewers Spring Training facility on 51st Avenue from the old homestead, if only it had been built 50 years earlier.

Mom and Dad were founding members of St Vincent's; originally, we had been meeting at a Byzantine church on Sundays, which was little more than a quonset hut on 43rd Avenue and Indian School. But gradually, the community grew to a size where it could begin to support a building project, and they began to build a multi-purpose hall at what is now St. Vincent de Paul Church. My younger brother Terry and sister Cathy were in the school when it started. I started my career in the public system, and joined them there in the 5th grade. This is where I was profoundly influenced by the wonderful Daughters of Charity and the Vincentian Fathers, whose seminary I eventually joined in 1965 until leaving after three years of college in 1973.

My dad was a high school jock, so my younger brothers were more his kind of kids for most of his life, getting into football and baseball. I tried my hand at those things, but preferred not to get knocked out or, for that matter, run. I did find some athletic stride, eventually, in high school and college playing outdoor handball, but never got into the kinds of school sports that my brothers enjoyed. Later in his life, though, Dad became very interested in my writing, both my poetry and music. Often, he and Deedee, his second wife, would drive a lot more miles than they had to to come to church at St. Jerome or wherever I might be playing and have breakfast with my brother and me. When I was in college, he loved to read my poetry. I think he discovered that side of himself later in life.

It was very difficult watching disease waste him away for several years before the end. My brother David is a orthotist/prosthetist and has friends in the medical field who got Deedee to take him to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. Pick's disease is rare and hard to diagnose. In fact, it probably wasn't certain until after he passed away that that is what killed him. But he gradually fell deeper and deeper into dementia. Through all that, his beloved Deedee tended to him with the amazing love and mercy of an angel, and he never spent a day in the hospital until just before the end, when a series of seizures led to his rapid death. My brother Terry was really there for them a lot through those months and years, going to the house and giving Deedee time off to get some space away for a few hours at a time. I helped a few times, too, and learned quickly how hard the life must be for long-term caretakers of dementia patients. Sometimes Dad was listless, sometimes agitated, sometimes almost communicative, sometimes almost violent.

What endures in me about Dad is his sense of humor. I remember him laughing with us, watching Huckleberry Hound, Quickdraw McGraw, and other goofy cartoons of the era; I also remember him resenting the humor in Hogan's Heroes, because he felt that there was nothing to laugh about in the stalags. When I think of the difficulty of working as a mailman 8 or more hours a day in the Arizona sun, then coming home and going to work at a grocery store, stocking shelves and whatever else needed to be done, to make ends meet in the house, I'm amazed at the amount of commitment and sense of duty required to meet his own expectations. Later in life, when I was away, Mom and Dad kept his father and stepmother with them as they gradually succumbed to diabetes. It was during this time that he and my mother divorced, in 1972 or 73. As hard as that was on all of us, especially my younger siblings who were there at the time, Mom's love kept everyone healthy and together. We eventually came to accept my Dad as adults, and I certainly grew to love Deedee and appreciate their mutual love and her unfailing faithful devotion to him in sickness and in health. Now she herself is in an assisted living facility in Phoenix, dealing with the beginnings of dementia herself. Life is hard for everyone.


I guess I just wanted to remember him today. God bless you, Dad. May you rest in peace, in the shade somewhere. We all miss you. Deedee always said she would rather have you here as you were than be without you. May God give her the consolation shown to the merciful, and let her know that you are safe in the everlasting arms.

Now I have to deal with the reality that I'm a father too, and all my brothers are fathers, and my eldest son is a father, which makes me...(erase erase). Too much for one day! (And mom - thanks for holding it all together! xo. Your eldest and handsomest son, Rory)

2008 Gathering, L-R Aidan, Desi, Jeremy,
Joel (with Lenora) , Decko (with Amelia) , Me (with Chrissie)

Graduation week last month, L-R Desi, Claire, me, Decko

Forgiveness empowering love (C11O)

Not that we needed any more “proof” about the uselessness of trying to “earn” God’s forgiveness by good deeds or by spiritual calisthenics, but look at those words in the second reading for Sunday, which, as always, are only serendipitously commenting on what we hear in the first reading and gospel:

We who know that a person is not justified by works of the law

but through faith in Jesus Christ,

even we have believed in Christ Jesus

that we may be justified by faith in Christ

and not by works of the law,

because by works of the law no one will be justified.


Game, set, and match for our dreams of self-justification. It’s all more wonderful than we pulled-up-by-our-own-bootstraps-sons-and-daughters-of-the-pioneers had imagined. God justifies. God forgives. God’s love is origin and source. We can’t do anything to deserve it. What a relief!

I had forgotten that the first reading for this Sunday was taken from the whole complex of stories about King David, this one a piece of the wonderful story of his desire for Bathsheba. OK, let’s face it, Michal wasn’t much of a bargain, they had nothing in common, she probably hated him, having grown up in the household of Saul, and then with the rivalry during the period when there were two anointed kings in Israel. He was a musician, she hated to see him carrying on with his music and dancing. His eye wanders a little, he sees the shiksa on the roof, she’s married to an aide-de-camp of one of his generals, David’s a king, a palace dalliance and a pregnancy, David sends hubby off to war, badda-boom-badda-bing, “so sorry, Miss, your husband is dead,” come here into my palace, &c &c.

Two things I love about this story. One is the great summer experience I had at Youth Sing Praise in about 1985 or so, when I was part of the youth ministry team (Lord, can you imagine that? What was I thinking?) during the week when Our Lady of Snows was producing a musical by Fr. Ron Brassard of Providence and Chris Brubeck (son of Dave, and the bass/trombone player in the Brubeck quartet) on the story of David up to his accession to the throne. Their musical was called Champion of Israel, and I always wished that it had a part two, maybe more PG-13, about David, Bathsheba, Absalom, and Solomon. Right around this time, too, Joseph Heller (of Catch-22 fame) had written a hilarious novel about King David called God Knows. It was a good time for 1-2 Samuel.

The other thing I loved was a book that was really a major part of our spirituality around 1970, the year I was in novitiate, Louis Evely’s poetic and memorable meditations contained in the book That Man Is You. As you may recall, the title is taken from the story of the confrontation between Nathan and David that happens just before the first reading at today’s liturgy. (It’s all in chapter 12 of 2 Samuel. Today’s first reading starts at verse 7, the parable of Nathan starts at verse 1. The rest of the story - wink, wink; nudge, nudge - is in chapter 11.)

The whole thing in Luke about who’s a sinner and who’s not, who is kosher and who’s not, who’s in and who’s out, that all seems to me to be about what we call prejudice. “Prejudice” is the act of judging another person (or race, religion, country, etc.) before actually knowing that person, walking the mile in their shoes. Prejudice is, literally, pre-judging. Sometimes prejudice is obvious, as in the case of racial or ethnic prejudices. Sometimes it’s more personal and sinister, like the religious prejudice in Sunday's gospel, which was “justified” by the “good person” seeing a “bad person” in front of him. Simon in the story doesn't see the woman who was in his house, he saw a sinner, a person with a bad reputation. He saw the sin, or what he thought was the sin. Focused on that, he is unable to see the similarity between her and himself.

In another story later in Luke (19), a tax-collector named Zacchaeus, also reviled by the good people of the town for being a collaborator (and maybe, also, being short, had a Napoleon complex, trying to make up in bluster what he lacked in altitude; maybe you know the type?) He too invites Jesus to a meal, and all the good people at once say of the Lord, “He has gone to stay in the house of a sinner.” This prompts Zacchaeus to protest - "Master, I give away half my income to the poor—and if I'm caught cheating, I pay four times the damages." Some translations miss the nuance here: there is no indication in the story that Zacchaeus is actually guilty of corruption, only that he has been pre-judged as one because he is a tax collector, and therefore a thief like all other tax collectors. Zacchaeus, however, is aware that he is not God, and knows that he is a sinner; he simply refuses to be prejudged as someone who is dishonest, and Luke holds him up in contrast to the Rich Man in the earlier parable. Zacchaeus gives half his income to the poor. He is a just man. Once again, by pre-judging with hospitality and love, Jesus has enabled the reaction of Zacchaeus, and exposed the prejudice of the town’s religious elite for what it is. (Side note - this gospel is one of the ones used for the dedication or anniversary of dedication of a church. “He has gone to eat in the house of a sinner.” Isn’t that the coolest?)

This is why it’s important to keep focused not on our sin, but on the one who is all-forgiving. We risk missing the really good news about a God who has pre-judice for us, who has judged us “not guilty by reason of humanity." We’re busy with our tiresome Pelagian agendas about “getting right” with God, all our self-help talk, when what we really need to hear is that we’re beloved of a God who does not judge like we do, and has in fact spoken the words of pardon before we were even aware we needed it.

Don’t we know all this stuff from our own experience? Isn’t it true that nothing we actually do about ourselves ever makes us truly lovable or even prepared for what happens when love hits us unexpectedly? Especially when we feel that we’ve acted in so reprehensible a way that the bonds between us must be irreparably damaged, doesn’t the forgiveness of another person stun us, reduce us to tears, fill us with both the purpose of amendment and, to the extent possible, make reparation? This is completely aside from the forgiveness itself, which is gift, no strings attached. It is the forgiveness itself that enables us to act better, to make a change in direction, and to show by our actions our gratitude for the gift of forgiveness.

Having experienced forgiveness as a reality in our own lives, we can become the word of pardon and forgiveness to others. Christ revealed God’s forgiveness to us in the world. Now, as St. Paul went on to say in Sunday's happy second reading, “I live now no longer as myself; it is Christ who lives in me.” We didn’t earn it, we didn’t deserve it, we were called and baptized into it by the election of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. As the Easter song by Michael Kelly Blanchard put it,  referring back to the “debt” forgiven in the gospel parable yesterday:

Oh, Be Ye Glad, Be Ye Glad
Every debt that you ever had

Has been paid up in full by the grace of the Lord,

Be Ye Glad, Be Ye Glad, Be Ye Glad.


To me, that’s reason enough to keep focused on God’s action in our lives and in the world, and to let go of our narcissistic, self-important navel-gazing. It’s time to put the beautiful, winged horse out in front of the cart. Maybe if we do, we’ll finally get somewhere?

Check out Glad’s version of “Be Ye Glad” on iTunes. Be Ye Glad - Glad Collector's Series