Albums 13 - "This Very Morning" - (1998, GIA)

In 1998, at Mark Karney's Norwest Sound Studios in Barrington, we started working on our first recording in the Chicago area. Norwest is right in the heart of the village of Barrington, which is very cool: it is in the basement of a wonderful Starbucks, and it's just a block from the Metra commuter rail, making it easy access for gigsters coming from the city. It's also occasionally a pain in the arse: it's in the basement of a Starbucks (think of late-night recording—is there another kind?—with chairs and tables squeaking across the floor above, even with lots of soundproofing) and its less than a block from the Metra commuter rail (three dozen trains a day on the Northwest line). What tips the balance in its favor is that Mark owns the place, Gary knows the recording equipment so well, and there are a number of worthy eateries within walking distance. At the time of this recording in 1998, and through all the records we have made since, Terry and I lived, and I worked, just two blocks away. There is something to be said for small-town life in the Midwest. (I purchased a Ford Focus new in 2003, and today, in 2013, it has barely 60,000 miles on it.)

What had begun to collect and what we thought would be the heart of a good new collection was music for Holy Week and Triduum. My work with the North American Forum, as well as our work at our jobs in Phoenix, had us working to create music for more "family friendly" Triduum celebrations, as I wrote about in a previous blog post. We also had the millennium-themed "Trumpet in the Morning," a spring-flavored graduation song that fit the general mood of the album, and an Easter-Pentecost anthem I had written for a friend's anniversary of ordination that would provide the title song for the collection. GIA was interested in a new collection, so we got to work.

I've written more extensively on a number of these songs, so there are links to those songs with their "song stories" if you missed them. On a couple of them I have added some reminiscences about the recording process.

Tracklist and comments

1. Trumpet in the Morning
2. Quiet Strength
I wrote "Quiet Strength" for my daughter Claire's eighth grade graduation mass as St. Jerome School in 1994. I had previously done the same for Joel ("Building a City") and would do so again for Aidan ("Fly Together"). The song title was actually the class theme for their respective year. This little ballad just expresses hope in the peaceful growth of things moving toward maturity, and asks for God's favor on the process of waiting in silence and breaking free. These three songs taken together especially are very special to me, trying to express both the hopeful optimism of a proud parent and the faith that believes that God guides the path to the future by inviting us to go there together, in whatever messy peace we can compromise.

3. Palm Sunday Processional
One big difference between the midwest and the southwest is the weather in winter and early spring. Most of the time, we wouldn't dream of having a Palm Sunday procession outdoors in northern Illinois, but it was not unusual in Phoenix at all. When we thought about doing this, it always seemed difficult to manage a form and style of music that was amicable to walking with minimal accompaniment, and not dependent on a worship aid that would both be distracting from the procession and probably a deterrent to participation, since people wouldn't probably look at it anyway. My thought one year was to write this chant-like litany with a refrain that had a sort of walking rhythm to it and lots of repetition.

The bonus was being able to add instruments to the processional music as the congregation enters the church so that there is a natural crescendo of both depth and excitement to the music as we gather. This simple little litany has proven very successful over the years, and has been in the last two editions (2nd and 3rd) of GIA's Gather Hymnal, and appears in Worship 4th edition as well.

4. Lenten Gospel Acclamation
A simple setting of the last dispensations "Glory to you, Word of God" acclamation, with a Lenten verse and one for Triduum. It can be done a cappella, with ensemble instruments or organ, and has instrumental parts for Holy Thursday use.

5. Precious Blood
A couple of years previous to this, Terry recorded a collection with Pamela Warrick-Smith and Donna Peña entitled One Heart. You may have noticed that I left a hole at "12" for that album, in case I can get Terry to write a little bit about her memories of recording it. See, I can't, because we recorded it in Minneapolis, where Donna lives. Pamela, a wonderful chanteuse from New York, had spearheaded the effort to make this recording, and she and Donna did most of the writing and arranging for it. I was singularly blessed to contribute "Precious Blood" to the effort because of Terry's participation. On the One Heart collection, Pam had sung the song. Terry sings it here. More information at the link to the "SongStories" page.

6. Fraction Rite and "Tableprayer"
Gary's generous nature as a musician and collaborator may well be learned behavior from his years as a member of the Dameans. Their song "Tableprayer" is a beautiful litanic song that praises God for the gift of the eucharist in a series of invocations to which the assembly responds with the words, "How wondrous are your gifts to us." It appeared on their fine collection Morning to Night in 1985. For our collection, Gary wrote a Fraction Rite (Lamb of God) to segue into the communion song, for which I wrote additional invocations or tropes. The Dameans allowed me to add some more verses to their lovely text in order to make it more useful for longer communion processions. "Tableprayer" (the Dameans original version) appeared in the first edition of Gather Comprehensive in 1994, and in RitualSong.

7. Concertato on "I Am the Bread of Life"
No one needs any introduction to Sr. Suzanne Toolan's wonderful communion song, whose origin dates back to the late 1960s. As I mentioned in a recent post, she nearly threw it away, but it was rescued by a young postulant who heard her singing it. It has been part of my liturgical spirituality since then, and I was honored that she allowed me to share my arrangement on this collection. It is always in the top five of my most popular downloads on iTunes, not because of my arrangement, but because people love the song.

8. Psalm 31: I Place My Life
We had recording this psalm on Psalms for the Church Year, Volume 4, when we were in Phoenix, with the great baritone Mike Wieser cantoring. (Spellcheck wants to make that participle "cantering," but in fact he was standing still as he sang.) For this recording, we wanted to have Terry sing it, bringing it another rich layer of meaning and emotion. Annually the responsorial psalm for Good Friday, many people look forward to the 3pm service at St. Anne's when she leads the singing of this psalm in the liturgy of the word and leads us on the psalmist's journey from desolation to hope.

9. Genesis Reading for the Great Vigil
Nothing much to say about this, except that I hear so much, from so many places, that people enjoy participating in the proclamation of the Genesis (and Exodus) readings through my setting, and that I love the CEV translation of "be fruitful and multiply," to wit, "Have a lot of children!"

There was a moment of near disaster (and, consequently, murder) in the studio when huge sections of this piece, largely necessarily improvised, were erased during mixing after the choir had recorded them. Gary was able to re-record some sections of the narration and incidental music, and fly in other refrains from other tracks. Necessity is the mother of improvisation, but it can be a real mother. If you follow me.

10. Psalm 118 (Easter Alleluia) for the Great Vigil, with Easter Gospel according to John
11. A Litany of Saints
Terry and I (mis)conceived of this litany that blends the invocations to the saints with the refrain of "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" while staying at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans with Gary one year at the Hofinger conference. A little shaken by the staid and solemn liturgy at the cathedral we had just briefly witnessed as we walked in the Vieux Carré on a Sunday morning, we wondered why this city that played such an important role in American music didn't have a more American sounding liturgy in its cathedral, and began thinking about how it might be reimagined. One of the ideas we threw around was a litany of the saints based on "Marchin'", and this is what happened.

The local instruments you hear on the refrain were recorded later by Gary in New Orleans. What a coup. So grateful for the opportunities we've had over the years to do this sort of thing.

12. You Have Put on Christ
Gary and I collaborated on this little baptismal acclamation, though my contribution was simply adapting the scriptural acclamations in the RCIA to Gary's music. Easy to sing and perform, simple and joyful, I think it fits the definition of "acclamation" to a tee, and is further adaptable as a sprinkling rite by changing "You" to "we" in the refrain.

13. This Very Morning
I worked with Fr. Stan Szcapa in the North American Forum's institutes on reconciliation, first called "Re-Membering Church" and then "Becoming Reconciling Communities." Stan asked me if I would write a song for the 25th anniversary of his ordination, which was going to take place on or near Pentecost in 1996. The link in the title above will take you to a Pentecost post where I shared the text of the song as a prayer. I still think it's about as good a lyric as I'm capable of, with multiple scriptural images wrapped around the single theme of Pentecost as a moment happening now.

This Very Morning - product page at GIA website



Hits and misses. I've been very happy with the reception of the music on this collection. Two songs (three, if you include Table Prayer) have been anthologized in hymnals, several others are popular in choral music and in reprints. I cannot explain why the song "This Very Morning" didn't work for anybody else. It must just be sign of my interior disorientation: the closer I get to the best I can do, the further away from general acceptance. Just God's way of smiting me, and sparing me from the worst ravages of my own ego. It makes me very grateful for my choir, who humor me, and continually offer me the support and affirmation that gives me the courage to go on. That is how it's supposed to work, it seems to me, at least on this very morning.

I know that my redeemer lives (C32O - music)

This weekend I will be remembering my dad, who went to God on November 12, 1993, so I have my own private November moment every year. It was six weeks before I said "goodbye" to St. Jerome's, too, and headed to the midwest and St. Anne in Barrington, and all the changes that brought about. Lots to ponder.

OK, so on to the music for this weekend. 

Entrance: I the Lord (Kendzia)
Psalm 17 – When Your Glory Appears (Cooney, OCP)
Preparation Rite: New Jerusalem (Cooney, GIA)
Communion:  I Am the Bread of Life (Toolan)
Sending forth: I Know that My Redeemer Lives (Haas)

My last post was about the texts for this Sunday, which are among the one most quoted in discussions about bodily resurrection, one of the tenets of the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds. Whatever “bodily resurrection” may mean, and don’t let anyone tell you that they know, it seems to have arisen around the time of the Maccabees and the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucid empire being ruled by Antiochus Epiphanes IV. It was as a result of this tyrant’s extreme cruelty that there arose the apocalypse of the Book of Daniel; it is the origin of the figure of “a Human Being,” or as most translations traditionally put it, “The Son of Man,” a hero who would arrive to deliver the suffering from the hands of the powerful in the name of God. At this time, also, the later books of wisdom literature were being compiled, like Sirach and Wisdom. In today’s readings, we hear a compressed version of the story of a mother and her seven sons who were arrested for refusing to eat the meat that was sacrificed to idols placed in the temple. Epiphanes makes the mother watch as each of her sons is tortured to death in turn, but they throw his cruelty back in his face, trusting that God will raise their bodies to mortal life again.

John Dominic Crossan does some work on all this in his lovely little book with Marcus Borg called, The Last Week, What the Gospels Really Teach about Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem. He goes into some detail about bodily resurrection, of course, as he deals with the details of Jesus’s resurrection and also of “what happened” to Jesus, in Mark’s mind, for instance, on Saturday, when he says almost nothing. Crossan does a long piece on the “harrowing of hell,” referring to an icon in a monastery in Istanbul (above) that captures for him the essence of the church’s faith in this area. Faith in resurrection from the dead is at the heart of what I chose in music for this weekend, along with the sense that we can’t impose our categories what that means, or on anything, really, in God’s empire. This is why Jesus won’t play nice with the Sadduccees, who think that in the clever, entitled way of the rich and religious they have God figured out, and the backwater Pharisee Jesus doesn’t. By telling them, in effect, that their question is stupid, he’s saying that God’s empire is not subject to human quantifying. So, resurrection, whatever it means, is better than and completely different from whatever we imagine. I’m not sure that really says anything at all, but not telling an untruth is at least better than hyping a lie.

We're starting off with a song that has always seemed to be well sung at St. Anne, which was in the first edition of Gather Comprehensive that we used until 2011, and which inexplicably disappeared in the interim with the second edition, like many other useful songs. Tom Kendzia's "I the Lord" first appeared in the late editions of Glory and Praise, from a collection of his entitled No Greater Love. What a solid song of solidarity and resurrection faith it is! Simple, straightforward text and form, short verses with a memorable refrain. It also has a trumpet part guaranteed to give your brass section an aneurysm, so I'd have them play every second or third note, or alternate notes or something, to avoid an incident. We lose more brass players that way. Imagine the baroque trumpet solo on "Penny Lane" going on for thirty two bars of sixteenth note triplets, and you have the basic idea. Blow, Gabriel, Blow! I love it.

Psalm 17, “When Your Glory Appears,” is one of a handful of psalms for Year C that I was asked to write for Assemblybook in either 1986 or 1989, who can remember? It was before we started not using the Jewish name of God, rendered YHWH in the Hebrew bible, in my psalms. This was not an issue thirty years ago, as the Jerusalem Bible was approved for use at worship, and that translation used "Yahweh" in context as the name of God. Tom Conry always advised me against it, but I didn't listen, and probably  should have.  I might have told you before that I remember Tom telling me that using “Yahweh” in a song was like being the only one at a party that didn’t get God’s joke. Moses asks God, “Whom shall I say sent me (to you, Pharaoh of Egypt, in order that I don’t get my ass kicked)?” and God says, “Tell him, YHWH sent you.” Unpronounceable, unknowable, ineffable, name-that-is-no-name. In other words, “Just go. Leave the rest to me, you’re out of your league.” We recorded this version of Psalm 17 on Cries of the Spirit, Volume 2. It’s through-composed, and I think it carries the spirit of the text really nicely. Apparently, no one else noticed! (We've edited the text. No "Yahweh" any more.)

“New Jerusalem” is a song we’ve been using for about ten years now. It’s a setting of Revelation 21-22 that goes to the tune of the American folk song “Shenandoah,” or “Shanadore.” I set up the lyric like the song might have been sung as a work song, in call and response form. We were driving to Wisconsin for a concert and talking about how nice it would be to sing the tune Shenandoah in church, and I realized that “O Shenandoah” and “Jerusalem” have them same number of syllables with matching accents. This is all it took to get me thinking about it. I use this song on the last Sundays of the year, the 1st Sunday of Advent, and often on the Sundays of Easter when the end of Revelation is part of the liturgy of the word.

The communion song is "I Am the Bread of Life." If you don't know the story of Sister of Mercy Suzanne Toolan, who wrote the song, you should check out the NCR article I linked below. This song is so popular that even my little arrangement of it holds pretty steady in the top 5 of my iTunes downloads from Apple. The article indicates that Sr. Suzanne is writing or has written a memoir, and tells the story that she almost threw “I Am the Bread of Life” away when it was saved by a young girl who overheard her singing it. Shades of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, with “Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word.” The story can still be found online here.

We are ending with David Haas's gospel-flavored anthem, "I Know That My Redeemer Lives," based on the beloved text from Job that is a frequent choice for funeral masses that don't opt for the (misunderstood and bowdlerized) Ecclesiastes 3 pericope or the passage from Wisdom 3 ("The souls of the just are in the hands of God...") My feeling about this song is, if you can't feel the hope that rises in the community when you sing this together, then you may, in fact, be need of resurrection. Now, not later!

(2019 music update)
Entrance: Find Us Ready (Booth), or I the Lord
Psalm 17 (same, OCP setting by RC)
Prep Rite: Hold On to Love (Manibusan, OCP) -- or Eye Has Not Seen
Communion and Closing as above.

Songstories 18 — Apocalypse (2001, WLP)

There are hits and there are misses, I'm afraid. We write songs because we feel they are worth writing, they have something unique to contribute to the dialogue, etc. But on the receiving end of that "gift" is the church, incarnate as it is in local parishes and publishers. Sometimes the perceived needs of the church and publisher don't match the songwriter's need to write a song. In fact, that happens most of the time. What is wonderful, or has been so far for songwriters and the church, is that there is so often a mesh. Of course it is not an accident. It's the way the church works, and community of need and charism. And publishers are to be commended for keeping at it when so many of our songs, which are usually good in themselves, miss the mark. It must be worth it for the few that actually "hit" with people's prayer life and imagination.

Since we're in the last weeks of the church year, I wanted to feature a song of mine called "Apocalypse," from a 2001 collection entitled Keep Awake. Both songs are songs for the last Sundays of Ordinary Time. I may get to the title song, "Keep Awake," by the end of this month. This Sunday's gospel, as I mentioned in yesterday's post, talks about God as a God of the living, as an answer to the plea for just in the community of believers on behalf of those who were defeated in death in this world by God's rivals. The danger with that may be a kind of quietism that is content to wait out injustice in this world in exchange for a better life in some future world. But that doesn't seem to be the point at all: Jesus is all about the empire of God "at hand," here and now, right before our eyes in this world. The apocalyptic literature of Israel in the two centuries preceding Jesus and that of Christianity in the century or so after his death are also about restoration of the dead to life in this world, life of which they have been cheated, and furthermore, about God's use of a "human being" (one like a son of man) to bring that about.

I am only outlining the edges of this right now because in both "Apocalypse" and "Keep Awake" Claire and I were trying to write a song that hinted both at the injustice we experience in this world and hope for a divine solution, through human beings (sons and daughters of people) in this world. In any event, I don't know that either of these songs ever got used outside of my own parish, for whatever reason. Maybe we were wrong in the way we expressed the scriptural or faith-reality, or maybe it didn't match the faith of music-directors, or maybe it was the way the material was marketed, or some combination of these things. It's also true that the liturgy (the Mass, I mean here, since that's the most common way most of us worship liturgically) is, at its heart and seen from a certain perspective, not amicable to the song form. So it's hard to break into the repertoire anyway, for structural reasons, and there are all the human reasons as well, and then commerce is in the picture.


Anyway, I like what we did, or tried to do, in "Apocalypse," which is to see the world as it is, and announce a different world, one that is within the grasp of God with the cooperation of the human race. Maybe without our cooperation, but I'm not so sure of that. I'm not all that on with a coercive divinity. I suppose, when we can see "beyond the veil," ("apocalypse" is from two Greek words that mean "to remove a veil" or uncover) we'll know better. Truth be told, it seems to me that seeing "beyond the veil," seeing the genuine apocalypse, is seeing into this world, not out of it.

Lyrics of "Apocalypse," by Claire Cooney and Rory Cooney:

I have dreamed a dream

I have dreamed the strangest dream

And my spirit is troubled within me

Who can understand my dream?

How this silent, fearsome thing

Like a Beast prowls the country within me?

Will you send a sign

O mysterious Divine

Send a spirit to speak from within me

For I fear to dream alone.

Put your finger to the stone,

Bring the meaning apparent within me.

Then a change of scene:

I am beckoned from the dream

To a world red with hatred and fire

Children starving in the street

Bombs exploding at their feet

And their cries and

The skies filled with fire

And this world of fright

Does not stay within the night,

Will not stay bound by moonlight and shadow

For the world beneath the sun

Overthrown by fist and gun

And the blood cries from pavement and meadow.

Will you send a sign

O mysterious Divine

Send your spirit to wake those who slumber

Put your finger to the wall

With a message for us all

Who ignore  the oppressed without number.

From the peoples’ cries

Will a savior arise

Strong as God, but like us, born of woman,

Is it woman, or a man

Who is hero for the land?

I can only be sure  it was human.

Let us sing the dream,

Sing a new world into being

Like a child being born from within us.

Let us stand together still

Like a city on a hill

Like the lanterns we can’t hide within us.

God of my dreams, burn in me…

God of my dreams, burn in me…

Copyright © 2001 World Library Publications. All rights reserved.

We don’t have many songs that try to incorporate apocalyptic imagery responsibly (at least, I think we did it responsibly), seeing in the “human being” figure the crucified Christ, and in the crucified Christ, humanity. "Apocalypse" has a Sade/Cassandra Wilson thing happening musically (well, for me, Michael Franks, but somebody updated it ☺), and it’s one of my favorite songs from Keep Awake. I love including it in our concert repertoire. We’re hoping that the classy Meredith Dean Augustin might record it someday, like she did with “Is This Goodness God?” If not her, then maybe Sade or Cassandra Wilson.

Apocalypse - Keep Awake (iTunes link) Link to Sheet music (songbook)

They pondered what it meant to 'rise from the dead' (C32O)

Sunday’s scriptures, as usual, are full of what will no doubt turn out to be unrealized hermeneutic potential. Taken together with the readings for next weekend, they represent excerpts from foundational passages that chart the faith of the people of God in the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, particularly the resurrection of the body, which is a pretty hot topic in Jesus studies. The Nicene creed (resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi) and Apostles’ creed (the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting) both refer to this mystery, but it rarely, even at funerals, gets talked about except in apolitical language of reunion in the afterlife and people living on in their descendants if we could just imitate their good points. (These “good points” are later expanded, in the “words of remembrance,” into such things as “loved horses,” “drank and smoked a lot,” and “loved the Cubs.”) In a certain way, this kind of afterlife imagination was the root of the Sadducees’ test of Jesus in the gospel yesterday.

The Sadducees were the ruling class in Jerusalem, and as such, had no need of the afterlife that the lower classes had. If your belly is full now, and you have the ear of the king, how can it be any better in the future? For similar reasons, the Sadducees did not accept the teaching of the prophets, which demanded justice on earth as proof of covenant living, as part of divine revelation. They only accepted the Torah, the law of Moses represented in what we call the books of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers. Many Pharisees and Essenes, on the other hand, along with a great number of Jewish peasantry, by the time of Jesus had a faith that life continued after death. This faith came about by an unshakeable sense of God’s justice that was mortally tested at the time of the Hasmonean revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes (The Shining One) in the second century BCE. It was around this time that, in addition to the books of Maccabees, from which we heard the first reading read yesterday, the books of Wisdom and Daniel (also considered apocryphal in some Christian traditions) were written. In all three of these texts, there are indications about this rising sentiment of a bodily resurrection, and they arise from a sense of divine justice. If God is good and just, and these martyrs die with broken bodies at the hands of persecutors for keeping the covenant, then God, being just, must restore their bodies to them when God makes all things right. Just how that happens is the stuff of which apocalypses are made, such as the apocalypse of Daniel from which we will hear next Sunday and often do on November Sundays. It is from the Daniel texts that we (and Luke, and Mark, and Jesus himself) receive the imagery of the Son of Man, one whom God sends to make right the rule of earth. This “Son of Man,” more precisely, “one who is a human being,” is actually a title given to all the just in the land, but conferred upon the one for the benefit of all. The Wisdom text that we hear so often at funerals, which begins, “The souls of the just are in the hands of God, and no torment shall touch them,” is from a section of Wisdom (2-5) that deals with this very problem, the untimely death of the just at the hands of the unjust. 

The Sadducees, clinging to the Mosaic law and scoffing at Jesus and the pharisaic belief in resurrection, appeal to Moses in their question that is intended to ridicule Jesus. But Jesus retorts (even more strongly in Mark than in Luke) that the Sadducees understand neither Moses nor God. Using their own “version” of scripture, the Torah, he quickly refutes their argument by saying that if Moses called God the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then they must be alive, because God is a god of the living, not the dead. (Crossan points out that the argument from Moses does not appear in any other literature about the resurrection, so it might not be the real point of Jesus’s retort, which might have been simply to put the Sadducees down and play to the sympathetic peasant crowd.) He further argues that in the resurrection there is no married or being married to - people are completely different, “like angels,” he says. This argument is picked up by James Alison (and possibly by Rene Girard himself) to show that God is so utterly outside the realm of death that even to define God as “immortal” is to define by a negative. Where there is no need for progeny, for children to keep one’s name going, because all relationship is in relationship to God, there is no death. Or better, where there is no death, then the sexual-political machinery of marriage is not required either. But all of this is in the realm of the unknown: the real point is just that, in the world of God’s justice, things are transformed, they are different than we can know, and better than we can imagine.

So, what does all that have to do with us? I find Crossan’s conclusion both familiar and stunning. On page 69 of The Last Week, he summarizes the meaning of this Tuesday-of-Holy-Week (in Mark) encounter between Jesus and the temple establishment:

“His words suggest that God’s concern is the living and not the dead. To think that Jesus’s message and passion were about what happens to the dead, and to ask questions about the fate of the dead, is to miss the point. For Jesus, the kingdom of God is not primarily about the dead, but about the living, not primarily about life after death, but about life in this world.”


Alison, in Raising Abel, the Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, takes the point further, urging us to consider that our very view of God is skewed because of our being complicit with death, which has nothing to do with God. God is so different from what we imagine that “to God, all are alive.” One really good homily that is available online that deals with these texts puts the repercussions for us, the living, like this:

...(In) our world, anxiety about death makes us slaves to the insurance companies or lenders whose rules convert our fears into money for their shareholders; if we believed only in life then our attitude to money would be different. 


In our world anxiety about death makes us liable to get into relationships which might be harmful, for fear of being alone - forgetting that we are never alone with God; if we believed only in life then our relationships would be different. 


On the other hand in our world anxiety about death stops us taking risks, being creative, living a bit dangerously sometimes, pushing life to its limits to enjoy it as much as possible; if we believed only in life then our faith, our enthusiasms, might overcome our fears. 


Also in our world anxiety about death makes some people frightened of not being remembered, which drives them to do extreme and terrible things; the leaders of our nations are prone to fall into this trap, but so can we be in our own ways. If we believed only in life then our politics, our behavior towards outsiders and opponents, would be different. 


Boy, this gets really hard to wrap one’s heart around. Is it possible, when we can see that death is empirically part of the process of natural selection in the cosmos from stars and galaxies through the biosphere of this planet to the molecular level, that death is an illusion? On the other hand, we know that by the conservation of energy nothing is really “lost” or dies, it just changes form. Even the smashed nuclei of atomic particles reappear in other forms after their apparent destruction. Nothing is ever lost. But is this also missing the point?

It seems to me Crossan gets it right, appealing to the pre-scientific Jesus, who seems to intuit that God is only life, and that in justice, God must in fact restore to life what has been lost in injustice. But his message is that the “empire of God is at hand,” and ‘at hand’ almost certainly means “already here.” What happens after we die, then, is less important if we are convinced that we carry within us now the love and the gospel of the God of life. Like Jesus, we might be able to find the courage to face the apparent might of other powers who want an empire of violence and oppression rather than one of peace and equality. A faith in the resurrection of the body, then, might just be oriented toward behaving in this world in ways that are life-giving to everyone, and don’t simply hoard the best of life for ourselves and those who share our economic and political biases. The passion of Jesus for this God of life leads him to take his “throne” for us on Christ the King Sunday this year, crucified by Rome’s governor between two other insurrectionists. 

I don’t know about afterlife, but I can put my faith, here and now, in this “Human Being,” whose empire of peace and equality transformed even the executioner’s device into a symbol of compassion and a sign of divine presence. I can perceive that this world is worth living for, and I make better and better decisions the more I let into my heart the realization that the God of life, the God of Jesus, is not a death-dealing, power-hungry emperor like Caesar, but love-poured out, like Christ and all who have loved like him and because of him. It helps me begin to understand the joy that underlies Paul’s cry of liberation (1 Cor 15:55):

"Death is swallowed up in victory.

Where, O death, is your victory? 

Where, O death, is your sting?"

Mr. Jonah's wild ride to Barrington

Cripes, what a day.

I just had a feeling that I needed a day off, and NOW, not later. So when I saw there was going to be a funeral yesterday morning after the 3-day weekend of 9 masses, I made a couple of calls to some nice friends and subbed it out so that I could spend the morning writing and running, then do all the domestic chores that make marriage bliss: paying bills, doing laundry, dishes. Problem solved. 

Sometimes there's the little voice that whispers "all is not well with your little plan, Einstein," but the voice was my college biology teacher who never really warmed to me, or to much of anything other than mating fruit flies. I woke in the wee hours with the passing thought I should double check the funeral sheet, but forgot about it as I settled back into the arms of Morpheus, or Charlize, or whomever. Besides, I already knew all was not well, since I had forgotten to create worship aid for Sunday, omitted an intercession, and had to call an audible for closing song Saturday evening. Then there was the matter of the Disappearing Homily this weekend.

Fr Mark Bartosic, pastor of St. Frances of Rome in Cicero, our sharing parish, was making his annual visit and preaching at the morning masses. Terry and I heard him at the 9, and thought he was wonderful. As he began to preach at the choir mass, he interrupted himself to say his homily wasn't where he left it, and knowing his style, I knew he would need to refer to his text. Jumping into the fray as he vamped, I ran to the sacristy and found it after a brief but frantic search....in the recycling bin. Now, this isn't so strange, except that the same thing happened at the evening mass. This time, though, the text was in confetti sized pieces in a garbage can. This was no accident. So see why it's better to memorize your homily? Fortunately, his laptop was in the car. But I digress.

I only added all of that to give you a glimpse of my state of mind, roughly that of a sleep-deprived Gitmo inmate, as I sat at my trusty iMac yesterday morning in my Jammie's, writing on my blog, drinking a third cup of Starbucks Fair Trade Italian Roast. At about 9:30, I decided to go for a run, then remembered, by some badly timed synaptic misfire, the concern I had about the funeral. Go out and ignore the instinct, or check it, and know things were really OK for the morning? It was 9:40. I checked the funeral info on my iPhone. 10 am start. I had told my subs it was at 11. I fired off strongly worded messages that would have had NSA black marker drawn through the expletives had they been leaked to the press; as I expected, my keyboard player found the time parameter impossible. The singer was on her way. There was nothing to do but throw on some clothes, glue my hair down with peanut butter, and make the 15 minute journey to St Anne. If they'd stall, I could be close.

Well, guess what? two of the roads between Lake Zurich and Barrington were closed yesterday morning with construction. There are more than two, but these were the closest routes. More stress. 

But as those of us know who do these things for a living, funerals rarely begin on time. This one was 25 minutes late. 

So the stress of the morning, as I tried so hard to avoid St. Anne's to which I was called in ministry and now upon whose shores I was cast unshaven, befogged, wearing running socks and topsiders, made me feel like Jonah, the patron saint of work avoidance and shirkage of duty. I did what had to be done, but not only didn't get a day off, I messed up the schedules of two colleagues as well. Yes, I'm going to pay them both as though they had done the job; one actually, heroically, did. I felt sorry for myself the rest of the day, sort of giving the rest of my life the finger as I did the no-longer-ignorable laundry and tried to take a nap. If you thought it didn't get any worse, I spent the day "talking to mortgage bankers," which is a literal translation of the Japanese phrase "hara-kiri." 

Is it really so bad to want to have a whole day off, especially after a Yule-or-Pascha-like mega-weekend of worship services? Is God, in fact, out to get me? I realize, of course, it was my own too-casual and disorganized approach to office work that was the day's undoing. But may I please blame the insanity of the preceding week for my inattention? Please? I need a scapegoat. Maybe the St. Louis Cardinals. Really? You can't beat a bunch of hillbilly moonshiner lookalikes in your own stadium, even when their lame-oid pitchers have to bat for the first time all season? Way to represent the NLC. Sigh. 

Moving from my office so rapidly to commando sweater-blazer-dockers and slip-on footwear, unable to stop to make myself presentable to my genteel cantor and funeral choir, I had a moment of panic hoping I didn't smell like last night's mahi mahi. One can carry even a divinely inspired metaphor a shore too far. 

Songstories 17: "The Road to Jerusalem" (1984, NALR)

As we dive into the chilly waters of November, its Sunday gospels populated with stories from Jesus's last days, before and after the entry in Jerusalem, I wanted to bring out "song stories" of a few pieces I've written over the years for this time of year. I've done posts already on a few, notably "Thy Kingdom Come," "Trumpet in the Morning," and "New Jerusalem." I hope to cover three more in the coming weeks leading up the the Solemnity of Christ the King. Two of these I co-wrote with my daughter Claire on our 2001 collection Keep Awake, the title song, and another entitled "Apocalypse." Today's post is about a song that antedates all the other five.

"Road to Jerusalem" is a setting of Psalm 122 that I wrote over thirty years ago, updating the text of this psalm of ascent (sung by pilgrims on their way to the Holy City) with echoes of present situation in Israel. For me, it puts the liturgy in the context of journey, of the journey to our best selves, our future, the reign of God, but it also helps to suggest the road to Jerusalem that Jesus walks in the gospel when is journey is briefly interrupted by the encounter with Zacchaeus, plotting Sadduccees, and a cosmos turned upon itself as a result of its own addiction to greed and violence. All of the nascent chaos that is roiling in the gospel plays out in the Holy Land today; Psalm 122 adjures people of every time and place to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” And when we pray for Jerusalem culticly, we don’t pray just for a city in time and place, but for the Jerusalem that is the city of God, the “City of Shalom,” the church, and by extension, the human race.

I don't remember exactly when I first wrote this, but I think it was 1978 or so. In my zeal to adapt the psalm as an entrance or gathering song for Eucharist, I took some liberties with the psalm text itself, something I'd be more circumspect about today. Tony Barr, the well-known poet, musician, and scholar has always been very complimentary about the song, and said he first noticed my music because of it. A bit of an iconoclast himself, that probably gives you a clue about his interest! I would just say, at this point in my life, that the text was inspired by Psalm 122, maybe parallel to it, but not really a translation or even a paraphrase.

1. I would laugh when I used to hear, "May we meet next year in Jerusalem!"
But here I am, walking through your gates, O Jerusalem.

2. Jerusalem, jewel on a hill, stands rebuilt from the ruins of warfare.
I sit and watch as the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord.

3. Long ago it was written, I know, we should praise the Lord in Jerusalem,
For there it is told that the kings of old ruled with the power of God.

4. Pray for peace in the Holy Land, and may those who love her find happiness,
In peace at last, with their borders fast, their gates thrown wide to the world.

R. I rejoiced when I heard them say, "Let us go to the house of the Lord."

(all lyrics copyright © 1983 NALR. Published by OCP. All rights reserved.)

The composer's notes include two verses based on the entrance antiphons "Pueri hebraeorum" for Palm Sunday, so that the refrain can be used on that day as well:

Jesus came to Jerusalem, and the populace came out to meet him.
They lay their cloaks on the road and sang, "Hosanna to David's son!"

Hebrew children bore branches of palm, and aloud they sang glad hosannas,
And so they foretold like the seers of old Messiah would rise from the dead.

For the many years we sang this song before its publication, we did it with just the three-part choir arrangement and ensemble instruments. For its recording on the You Alone album in 1984, when it was the first song on side A, we recorded it with guitar, bass, drums, and piano, with a trumpet trio. On the 2000 re-recording on Cries 2, we used strings and a single trumpet. The biggest change in the performance today from 35 years ago (for me) is that I pulled a trick out of the Paul Simon-Sting playbook, and lowered the key to the vocal-friendly C from the more guitar-friendly D. I guess that's why performers use all those differently-tuned guitars on stage? ;-)

The etymology of "Jerusalem" suggests that it comes in antiquity from words suggesting a place built in honor of the Canaanite god "Shalem," the god of dusk or evening, but that the consonants (s,l,m) are the same as the Hebrew "shalom," the harmony that God provides. The end of the liturgical year has us all thinking about the ultimate meaning of things, the meaning of life itself, what Christ means, what community means, what death means. "Going to the house of the Lord" is a metaphor for all that. But the psalm grounds us in this world, in our pilgrimage to peace and meaning through a battleground and graveyard. Nevertheless, we are inspired by making the journey together, and take heart from the rejoicing of our song along the way. In the year's evening, we remember that the journey may be uphill, but its destiny is the house of the Lord, the city of peace, Jerusalem.

Psalm 122: The Road to Jerusalem - link to page at OCP.org.

No one, I think, is in my tree (music for C31O)

Desi (Zacchaeus Junior), in backyard tree, May 2004.

Before I talk about the songs we're doing at St. Anne this weekend, these are a few of my prejudices on the texts of the gospel, because obviously they're going to affect the choices. The gospel is the pericope of Jesus visit to the house of Zacchaeus in Jericho. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, intending to pass through this good-sized town, when he spots a local tax-collector up in a tree trying to catch a glimpse of him and his entourage. Here we go again with Luke’s apparent preoccupation with Samaritans, tax-collectors, and people with bad reputations, many of whom end up at table with Jesus, or in his stories. We know the reputation of Zacchaeus from the reported response of the crowd: “He has gone to eat in the house of a sinner.” This is reminiscent of the grumbling of the Pharisees in 15:2 (“He welcomes sinners and eats with them) and of Simon in 7:39 (“If he were a prophet, he would know who and what kind of woman this is...”) So I'm thinking about about the scapegoating mechanism again - the righteous blaming the unrighteous for the ills of society; insiders blaming outsiders; and perhaps most perniciously for some of us, the poor blaming the rich for the ills they suffer. This isn’t to say there is not blame enough for everyone, or that some don’t deserve it, but that the act of blaming itself, and scapegoating, is the beginning of violence, and scapegoating does not address the real evil that is within the human heart, that of misdirected desire. We need to be saved; we need some "light in the darkness."

Back to Zacchaeus. The most interesting question for me in the story is, are the verbs used by Zacchaeus to describe himself in the present or future tense? This is a question scholars debate, so it should be taken into consideration. To some extent, it shapes our understanding of the story. Is it a conversion story? In other words, is Zacchaeus indeed the evil man that others make the tax collector out to be, and having Jesus come into his house changes him so that he pledges to give half of his belongings to the poor and pay back fourfold restitution? Or, as others point out, are the verbs in the present tense, so that, having Jesus in his house and being away from the accusing scapegoaters, people with whom Jesus has ample experience (and is about to have lethally more experience), Zacchaeus protests something like this, “Jesus, you are a good man, and you need to know this about me, whatever you might be hearing. I give half of my belongings to the poor, and if I ever cheated anyone, I pay them back fourfold.” 


See what a difference that makes? Jesus, however, is interested neither in the scapegoating crowd nor the protestations of innocence, whichever it may be. He is aware that all are lost, in a sense, and that his mission is to “seek out what was lost” and bring it back into the house. What will happen after Jesus leaves? Will the tear between Zacchaeus and the townspeople be mended, either through his change of heart or his opening up about his life through the presence of Jesus? We don’t know. But part of what Jesus is exposing is the sinfulness of the accusers, showing their jealousy and ostracizing to be what it is, a breach of the covenant. The opportunity for everyone to change is at hand. Jesus will continue on his road to Jerusalem, and finally, once and for all, God will expose the scapegoating mechanism for the evil that it is. The innocent one will be slain by the guilty who will see his death as righteous, and God, raising Jesus up, will side with the innocent, and drive a stake into the heart of blood-sacrifice and religion-as-boundary forever.

So, how do we sing this gospel into our lives this weekend?

Bernadette Farrell's "Christ Be Our Light" is not a song I ordinarily use as an entrance or "gathering" song, but it seemed appropriate for todays feast because of the text that suggests the penitential movement from darkness to light, the movement suggested by today's gospel's call (to the crowd and/or to Zacchaeus, depending on your reading) to conversion. It suggests, with the Eucharistic Prayer of Reconciliation, that finding our way to God we might find our way to one another.

Psalm 145 “I Will Praise Your Name” is the psalm of the day. What David’s setting lacks in inspiration and melody (particularly in the verses) it makes up for in accessibility and practicality. The psalm seems to have been chosen as a link between the sentiments in the reading from Wisdom and the gospel, training our ears to listen for words of forgiveness and mercy in the readings and their echoes in our lives. In notes I wrote to myself in previous years, I wished I had opted for Psalm 103, one of the common psalms for Ordinary Time, with its clearer refrain, “The Lord is kind and merciful.” Live and learn: this year, we're singing Jeanne Cotter's lyric setting.

Bernadette Farrell’s gentle and stunning setting of Psalm 139, "O God, You Search Me" is our song during the preparation of the gifts. I don’t know whether any of our homilists will even engage the question of the Greek verbs and offer the interpretation that Zacchaeus, and many of the people that I might accuse of being the cause of my problems and the evil in the world, might in fact be innocent and more personally justified than I am. But the words of this song and the psalm itself offer a prayer of intimacy and an acknowledgment of desperate, naked transparency before God that is only made tolerable by the fact that it is this God who "knows when I sit and when I stand." I can imagine Zacchaeus, or Jesus, or the crowd, or any of us praying those words, and trying to place ourselves where we belong in the cosmos, as creatures, but beloved of God.

Both the communion song, "Come to the Water," and the closing song, Roc O'Connor's "The Saving Power of God," celebrate the invitation to all of humanity to revel in the abundance of God. The Foley song is not typical in form for a communion song at my place, where we usually opt for call-and-response, or at least a song with a short and well-known or easily-remembered refrain. But we have been singing "Come to the Water" for three decades, and people have enough of it in their hearts that the can sing for the walk to the table without a book, so I think in this case we'll be all right. All are called to this meal that is a foreshadowing of the messiah’s banquet in the empire of God. All are indeed welcome to share the breaking of the bread, even those with bad reputations, undocumented aliens and other outsiders, and even tax collectors, traitors, collaborators, and blasphemers. God seems to be so big that you just never know when someone blaspheming against the God you (or I) believe in might actually have a point. We’ll leave that discernment for another day, but keep our ears open for what God’s word might have to say to us this weekend. Father Mark Bartosic, pastor of our sharing parish in Cicero, is preaching at all the masses about our parish's relationship with his, and this seems like an appropriate Sunday for that to happen, when all of us can confess that the Lord can, for some strange reason, be found dining in Barrington and Cicero, right here in our house, the house of a sinner.

UPDATE: Music for 2019

Gathering: A Place at the Table (Murray; True, GIA)
Penitential Rite: Kendzia
Psalm 145 (Haas)
Alleluia: Mass of St Aidan (Cooney, WLP)
Gifts: Rise Again (Cosas, WLP)
Lamb of God: Mass of St Aidan
Communion: What Is This Love (That Comes to Dine) (Cooney, OCP)
Recessional: All Are Welcome (Haugen, GIA)