Precious Blood (Body and Blood of the Lord, Year B)

I wasn't a part of the Twilight craze, which is pretty amazing since I am such a follower of pop trends. I guess I feel too old for it, and I’m happy with the way the vampire legend rests (so to speak) in the line that runs from Bram Stoker through Nosferatu and Bela Lugosi to Anne Rice and Lestat, with a brief detour through Mel Brooks. Recently I saw a lovely and disturbingly insightful Swedish film entitled Let the Right One In, which was about a chillingly young vampire who had been twelve years old “for a very long time,” a movie that revisited those universal connections between rejection and friendship, persecution and solidarity, and most uncomfortably, love and obsession. But at its heart, the vampire legend and our ongoing obsession with it is about the desire for immortality and the inevitability of death as an apparent obstacle to it, and the intimacy of sexual union and obsession as a sort of foretaste or substitute for it. This was possibly never quite so apparent as it was in the sensual free-for-all called The Hunger, a rhapsodic cinematic response to the AIDS awakening, when blood suddenly became an obstacle to love and, in a sense, a kiss of death.

Where on earth was I going with this?
 Ah, I remember! 😊

Sunday for Catholics is the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord, the feast formerly known as Corpus Christi. There is a different set of readings for this feast for each year of the lectionary, and this year the central image is the image of blood, particularly the blood of the covenant. Moses seals the Lord’s covenant with Israel by the sprinkling of the blood of sacrificed bullocks; Jesus pronounces “a new covenant in my blood” at the last supper with the disciples; the author of the letter to the Hebrews waxes eloquent on Christ as sacrifice and priest, ending animal sacrifice and through his death bringing eternal life to the human race.




Now, while the scriptures (and the vampire legends) are fairly clear about blood and its meaning for the community, we ourselves, stuck in our enlightenment literalism, are not. For us, blood is, literally, blood; for Catholics, we can’t deal with saying that blood is “just” a “symbol” of anything — we have to be belligerent and defensive that, for instance, the consecrated wine at Mass is literally the blood of Christ. But surely, transubstantiation is more than that. Since what is seen does not change, it is the meaning of what is unseen that must be changed, and we end up being caught in a polemic battle whose terms we not only don’t understand but to whose possibly infinite wonder we aren’t able to be open because we’ve chosen to block the pathway to it by narrowly understanding what a sign or symbol might be.


For Moses and Israel, the sprinkled blood of the bulls was a symbol of life and death. Blood was both the life-force of the bull (and for that matter, of the people as they well knew), it was also a sign of death. Blood drained was life drained. The sprinkling of the blood of the animals sacrificed to God was both a bonding with that God and a way of saying, “may the same thing that happened to the animal happen to us if we fail to keep this promise.” But the sacrifice was essentially a symbol of life: the slaughtered animal was seen as food for the gods; sometimes, this food was shared by those who took place in the rite.


With the resurrection eyes of the evangelist looking backward toward the events in the life of Jesus and seeing them through the eyes of a church only a few decades old, the food Jesus shared in his meals, including the last supper were also matters of life and death. Life, in the sense that all meal-sharing is life-sharing, that the meals of Jesus in particular were ways of restoring or re-forging the bonds of community between outsiders and friends, and that the remembered meals in the agape, the breaking of the bread or Eucharist, were also life-giving to the fledgling community which asserted the living presence of the Lord in their midst while affirming and strengthening the spirit that held them together in unity. At the same time, as Paul had made clear in the first letter to the Corinthians, the food that symbolized “the body and blood of the Lord” (by which he meant the living and risen presence of Christ in the community) proclaimed the death of the Lord. That death was in no small way the direct result of the solidarity with sinners that the meal-sharing of Jesus had come to represent. By claiming relationship to God and at the same time eating and drinking with sinners, Jesus’ life became a kind of blasphemy to some of the Jewish leaders. It was this crime, at least in part, that led them to their collaboration with the Romans to have him executed.


Blood is a powerful symbol, because within it is the reality of the sign it conveys. Think of how we use the words “blood brothers” - in common usage, it means friends who are bound to one another in a way that is as important and intimate as family, but, ironically, not by being “blood relatives” but through the sharing of actual blood in an oath. The words themselves are so powerful that they are often used to describe a relationship that doesn’t include a blood oath, but that strengthens the sign, and doesn’t dilute it. Blood constitutes a group, whether it’s a group of blood relations or a clan, a military platoon, a gang of thugs, or a family of vampires. But for Christians, the real thing is that our covenant, what binds us together, is the blood of Christ. This blood was once and for all poured out in love for the life of the world, but is now a sign in a shared cup of sacred wine that is a symbol with bread of the living Christ. In the paschal mystery of God, as we continue to meditate upon it, death and life are mysteriously intertwined. The pouring-out of self that is agape, the divine love in which the Christian shares through the baptismal life of the Holy Spirit, looks a lot like death, and in fact shares much in common with death. Only faith tells us that God is, at the heart of this self-emptying love, the God of life, abundant life, and communion. The myth of the vampire, the blood-brotherhood of gang life and violent militarism, are all counterfeits and shadows of the true reality of communion in the blood of Christ. There, in the shadow of the cross, in a death embraced by the innocent one who lived for and sought the reconciliation of all the children of God, we can discover how precious life really is, and how rich and complex a sign it is to partake of the body and blood of the Lord. For it is a living Christ whose life it is we share, a living Christ head and members, the sacred body and precious blood of every person at the table, every person served by any of them, every person who has ever lived or who is yet to be born who participates in agape by truly living for another. It’s something to sing about for another week as we come to join in Christ’s banquet of love.

Gathering: Table of Plenty (Schutte)
Psalm 116: Our Blessing Cup (Cooney)

Gifts: We Come to Your Feast (Joncas)
Communion: May We Be One (cup verses) (Daigle-Cooney)

Recessional: All Are Welcome (Haugen)

"The blood is the life!" (Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

3 X 3 X 7 = the primes of life

You get to a certain age, you grasp at every numerological straw to break the fall of time. Next year will be 4³, or 2⁶. After that, it gets less glamorous, until 72 (2³x3²). 63 has the distinction of being the sum of the powers of 2 from 0 to 5, equivalently it is a repdigit in bases 2 (111111), 4 (333), and 8 (77). Somebody stop me.

Every year I want to be able to say something meaningful on my birthday, but find I have less and less time to reflect on it. Why? Because my birthday happens at the end of May, when, as everyone knows, all parochial Hades breaks loose: brides, first communions, confirmation, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, and this year, testifying at a dang trial.

What have I learned this year? Well, I'm still trying to interiorize a lot of things I've learned over the last 3-5 years. The "big two" for me have been important in re-forming my relationship with the rest of the cosmos.

1. What isn't my best isn't necessarily bad. It can be OK sometimes just to be OK, especially when everybody else thinks that the not-best thing is better.
2. What is my best isn't necessarily good. It's important for me to remember this, so that "I'm sorry" is easier to say. Just because I couldn't do any better doesn't mean I did good. I have to learn to love myself anyway, ameliorate the damage, remember who is God and who isn't, and get along with things.

I think these things have helped me learn to be a little more patient and tolerant of other people, too. It really takes a long time to evolve out of egocentricity for some of us, to just give in to the fact that the world was doing just fine before we came along, and will do just fine when we aren't around any more, and that time is coming sooner rather than later. The collapse of personal time helps us see ourselves more honestly, evaluate our value to the universe with more acumen, moving the decimal of significance a few more zeros to the left.

My mom, I know, has said about herself something that I feel too. Whatever our age is, and that number becomes unbearably large, best expressed in scientific notation (3²x7, for instance), our inner self doesn't seem to age. There's a sort of inner mirror in which we (I?) experience ourselves as the same person we were at 12, or 22, or 40, that doesn't really care about which birthday we're passing. This might be a good defense mechanism against getting older, a way of transcending the downward arc of physicality, but for me, especially this year, it's been something I have consciously tried to moderate with a physical reality check. I try to look into that inner mirror and a real one at the same time. In conversations and in reflection, I realize that however 22 or 30 I might feel in there, I'm really in my 60s, and I can't keep acting on the inner mirror or I'm going to end up freaking people out, and be the creepy old guy no one invites to parties or dinner. I don't really want to be 22 or 30 anyway. Somebody pass me a laurel to rest on, and let me finally just be who I am.

Worst.Year.Ever

So I've discovered that I don't have the stamina to do what I did, say, five years ago in the running department, and have had to accept that it's OK to jog 3 miles instead of five, and a lot slower. I have to check myself out of "geezer mode," when I start to resent more than necessary the amount of church and cultural attention paid to young people, as though being young were somehow of more intrinsic value than being older, that looks and strength were automatic qualifications for status. Not being particularly good looking or strong, I never felt entitled as a young person either, but I certainly was in intellectual rivalry with the entrenched status quo with which I associated anyone over thirty. Then forty. Then fifty. Now, with no regret but acutely aware of the creator's sense of irony, I have to concur with George Bernard Shaw that youth is wasted on the young.

I find myself worrying less and less about my children, who all seem to be getting along just fine, thank you, and more and more about my friends and our parents, who are coming up more and more quickly against the limits of our cells' ability to replicate themselves with quality and vigor. An optimist from my youth, I keep hoping that we'll all turn a corner together, and things will get better. Generally, they don't.  Instead, I'm grateful for the solidarity we've fostered with each other, the excellence and passion of individuals who refuse to cede the day to negativity and despair and who work patiently for human betterment in every field: politics, medicine, economics, resource management, and the arts.

My daughter wrote today on my Facebook page, "Darling popi! If you had not been born, why then, neither would I!" which makes me think that all of us, especially me, needs to try to be aware of the genetic and evolutionary miracle by which we're gathered around the electrons reading or writing (or oblivious to) these words. One man who put this into words in a way that I would never be able to approach was Bill Bryson in his wonderful book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. I cannot know God's mind in this context, or what it means that "God created the heavens and the earth" and that because of that, here I am. I celebrate the God of the naturally-selected who is also the God of the extinct and consumed, who has placed within us the counter-intuitive idea that "survival of the fittest" is not the law of the land, and who pitched his tent among us to show us exactly what S/He meant by "life more abundantly." Still, I want to leave you with Bryson's words, and thank you for honoring me with your eyes and thoughts today, as we make our way another year around this indistinctive star, in this solar system, on the edge of this ungraspably large galaxy, among more galaxies than we are able to number. Somehow, we found each other. Whether that is luck of the draw or blessing or curse we may not know, but I'm looking forward to the next orbit. Here's Bryson:

I’m delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. 

To begin with, for you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. 

To be here now, alive in the 21st century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most, 99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on earth, you see, is not only brief, but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. 

The average species on Earth lasts for only about 4 million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to changed everything about yourself—shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything—and to do so repeatedly…To get from “protoplasmal primordial atomic globule” (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over….So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground and lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts and you might now be licking algae from cave walls, or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. 

You have (also) been extremely – make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from it’s life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you.

An offer, with those John 6 weeks coming in July and August

Every three years, in mid to late summer, the lectionary in year B jumps back to the gospel of St. John from Mark for five weeks of reading the entire sixth chapter of the fourth gospel, which we commonly call the "Bread of Life" discourse.

I'm not going to say too much about that right now. If you're anything like me, though, you love-hate those weeks as you try to keep the music for the liturgy fresh without being overly repetitive. Maybe you wish the preaching would kick up a notch, but that's not going to happen in the middle of the summer any more than the congregational singing would, or the choir (where those souls are released from ministry for three months of the summer season) magically reappear to sing "Ego Sum Panis Vivus" each Sunday by a different composer.

But you might know that back in 1987 NALR published a (1985) song of mine called "(I Myself Am the) Bread of Life," which is currently published by OCP Publications and has been in print all that time, re-recorded in 2000 on our CD Change Our Hearts. I actually wrote that song for the Year B readings that year, while working with a group of young people at St. Jerome Church in Phoenix, and inspired by a number of my teachers, particularly John Gallen, S.J.

And yes, there has been controversy on and off in some quarters about it, which I wrote about in my blog in 2013 in a post entitled "Theological Tempests in Musical Teapots, Part 2." So I'm not going to defend the song any more. I've said what needs to be said, and if some folks don't like it, then they are certainly blessed with a torrent of good songs for communion that they can happily use.

If, however, you still use this song, or would like to use it (it's in Music Issue and Today's Missal,  Choral Praise, Journeysongs 3rd Edition, and legacy Glory and Praise and Gather editions), I have a proposition for you. Last time around, I wrote four new verses for the song that invoke imagery from other readings on the weeks of the John 6 gospels. My thought was it might both help those readings sink in, and also make the lyrics of the verses "pop" when they're sung by the assembly with allusions to texts and people that are heard in the other texts of the day.

I have made a ".tiff" file of these verses, which use the same tune as many of you already know, on my "freebies" page at www.rorycooney.com, link here. There are instructions there for downloading the file. The download is free. I only ask that you continue to abide by the usual copyright rules, and if you use or reprint any of the material owned by OCP that you do the usual reporting protocols via licensingonline.org. These are available with OCP's blessing. I asked them to make the verses available to those who would like them free of charge, but the rigmarole of figuring all that out from contractual and electronic point of view was daunting, so they said I could make the verses available myself. So think of them as my birthday present...to you!

These are the texts of those verses, if you'd like to see them standing on their own. Please feel free to circulate the link to this blog page to others who might be interested.

Thanks to all of you who have stood by "I Myself Am the Bread of Life" these thirty years. I have kids younger than this song!

I Myself Am the Bread of Life

additional verses, text copyright © 2012 by Rory Cooney

4. Full cup of blessing,

Free as the rain and sun,

Is passed among us,

Gathering all to one.

A living sign of God in Christ.

5. We, like Elijah,

Hunted, afraid, alone,

Receive in slumber

Food for the path unknown,

A living sign of God in Christ.

6. Taste Wisdom's table,

Spread with the richest fare.

The poor and simple

Dine at her calling there.

A living sign of God in Christ.

7. Sent from this banquet,

Strength in our hearts restored,

We go together,

Summoned to serve the Lord,

A living sign of God in Christ.

Singing Trinity (Trinity Sunday, year B)

The Scripture this weekend gives us an interesting and challenging approach to the mystery of God. Some will, as always, and as might be expected from a church that rightly values the efforts of the intellect in pursuing rational faith, make this feast into a celebration of doctrine. But faith isn’t in a doctrine, it’s in a person, or persons. In the case of the Trinity, this God whom we try to “define” as three-but-one, our use of the term “person” must necessarily remain a metaphor, an anthropomorphism we use to get at something about God’s nature from the revelation that we are made in God’s image and likeness. Something about God is something like being individuated, self-aware, and voluntary; that’s what we mean by “personal.” Yet, it is God about whom we’re talking, and all these words need to be voiced humbly and expecting correction and surprise. 



At the same time, with the same breath in which we say that something about this personal God is singular, we acknowledge that something about this God is trinitarian, communal, di- (or tri-)alogical. God’s very nature is not to be alone, but to be-with, as the rabbis used to teach as they suggested that perhaps a way of translating the sacred name of God in Exodus rendered as the Hebrew tetragrammaton (four letters) represented in English by the letters YHWH. In Catholic liturgy in the 1970’s, there was permission to use, among several translations of the bible, the Jerusalem Bible, which, as a scholarly work, was the first modern bible to use the anglicized word Yahweh where the name of God appears as such in the scripture. Generally, the word is replaced by the word Adonai, “the Lord,” which you often see in all capital letters (the LORD) when the name appears in the Hebrew scriptures. This is why, by the way, there had to be a Vatican decision about excising the word Yahweh from Catholic liturgical song and psalm texts. Those of us writing in those days, most notably Dan Schutte (“Yahweh, I know you are near...”) and Tim Manion (“to you, Yahweh, I lift up my soul...”) were using the liturgical texts as we had them, not trying to make any kind of political or religious statement. The current discipline about avoiding the speaking of the name in liturgy is an ancient practice, and a way of being “good neighbors” with our older siblings in the Jewish tradition, where among the orthodox, at least, the liturgical tradition of not speaking The Name lives. (In fact, they often don’t even write the name of God as “God,” opting instead for the unpronounceable metonym “G-d”.)



I think all of this is good: it helps us understand, if we deal with it and don’t avoid it, that we don’t ever really “know” God in a way that allows us to define God. The person that we are can be known by God; perhaps better, as a race we all can be known by God together, and describe that being-known as a discerning, collective, peacefully collaborative effort. For many of us, Christ is God’s word in our language about God’s self, an ultimate, unique, and perfect self-expression. We would like to convey that image to others; but if we’re genuinely convinced of Christ as God’s self-revelation, it means that persuasion by witness of life is the only means at our disposal for this endeavor. If God is revealed in Christ, and has revealed self through a human being who came from the peasant class in a dominated nation, and who was executed by the empire in collusion with his own countrymen, then it strains the imagination to think that it is all right to impose by force of law, threat, or arms that belief on any other person in the name of that God!




The scriptures Sunday reveal to us a God who “goes out,” who is somehow active and goes after us to change our destiny from destruction to life. This is the insight of Moses describing the God of the Exodus. It is the insight of Paul in the letter to the Romans, describing the Spirit of God as leading us out of fear into family, from intimidation to intimacy. And Jesus expects that, just as he says that the “full authority” of the divine nature is bestowed upon him, that the Church called out to continue God’s ministry on earth after Christ’s ascension should also “go out” like God does, and make disciples of all people of this outgoing God, just as he attempted to do by the example and witness of his days.




Expressing this reality in music has been a journey. My advice to music ministers over the years has been to celebrate this divine identity on Trinity Sunday by singing music that people love to sing, their “love songs” for God. For some, this is music like “How Great Thou Art,” or the great doxology of “Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.” Those of us who write texts and music for worship have wrestled with new and old images to try to find new ways of singing our love for God. Some of these find their way into our celebrations as well. Here are a few examples that I particularly like: certainly leave your own favorites as comments, if you would like. Mine are in no particular order, just in the order about which I’m thinking of them.




Bernadette Farrell, “God Beyond All Names”


God, beyond our dreams, 


you have stirred in us a mem’ry; 


you have placed your pow’rful spirit 


in the hearts of humankind. 


Refrain: 


All around us we have known you, 


all creation lives to hold you. 


In our living and our dying 


we are bringing you to birth. 





God, beyond all names, 


you have made us in your image; 


we are like you, we reflect you; 


we are woman, we are man. 





God, beyond all words, 


all creation tells your story; 


you have shaken with our laughter, 


you have trembled with our tears. 





God, beyond all time, 


you are laboring within us; 


we are moving, we are changing 


in your spirit ever knew. 





God of tender care, 


you have cradled us in goodness, 


you have mothered us in wholeness, 


you have loved us into birth. 





© 1990, Bernadette Farrell. Published by OCP. All rights reserved.


Brian Wren, “Stand Up, Friends”


Praise the God who changes places, Leaves the lofty seat, 


Welcomes us with warm embraces, Stoops to wash our feet. 


Stand up, friends! Hold your heads high! Freedom is our song! Alleluia! 


Freedom is our song! Alleluia! 





Praise the Rabbi, speaking, doing All that God intends, 


Dying, rising, faith renewing, Calling us his friends.


Stand up, friends!...





Praise the Breath of Love, whose freedom Spreads our waking wings, 


Lifting ev'ry blight and burden Till the spirit sings;


Stand up, friends!...





Praise, until we join the singing Far beyond our sight, 


With the Ending and Beginning Dancing in the light.


Stand up, friends!...





Text: Brian Wren, b.1936, © 1986, Hope Publishing Co.


Brian Wren, “God Is One, Unique, and Holy”


God is One, unique and holy, endless dance of love and light,


only source of mind and body, star-cloud, atom, day or night:


ev’ry thing that is or could be tells God’s anguish and delight.





God is Oneness-by-Communion, never single or alone;


all togetherness including friendship, family, and home,


common mind and shared agreement, common loaf and sung Shalom.





God is One through desolation, blindness, treason, blood and gall;


One, though torn by separation in the Son’s forsaken call;


One through death and resurrection; One in Spirit, One for all.





God is One, unique and holy, endless dance of love and light,


only source of mind and body, star-cloud, atom, day or night:


ev’ry thing that is or could be tells God’s anguish and delight.





Text: Brian Wren, b.1936, © 1983, Hope Publishing Co.

Of course, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of others – I simply chose these because they are
in our hymnal and I know them better. There are my most recent attempts, "To You Who Bow" and “O Agape,” which I’ve written about before. There’s also my song “Mystery,” from the eponymous and out-of-print NALR collection, also “You Are a Sacrifice” on that collection. “One Is the Body,” a sort of credo song I wrote for communion, summarizes for me, at least at that point in my life, what I had learned about communion with Christ as promise and reality of reconciliation.



Rory Cooney One Is

One is the body, one is the bread, 


one are the living, the unborn, the dead. 


One is the cup, one blood in us flows, 


one is the breath of the star and the rose. 


One is the Spirit with Maker and Son, 


just as the source and the river are one; 


one are the stranger, my foe and my friend.


To this I will say, “Amen.”





Gather, disciples, your master to meet. 


Learn to forgive from the bread that you eat; 


treasure the earth in the cup that is poured. 


Taste and see the goodness, the love of the Lord.


One is the body...





Now split the timber, now turn the stone; look where you will, you are never alone. 


High as the heavens, deep in the flood, 


all things are charged with the presence of God.


One is the body...





I am the hungry, you are the poor; God is the stranger who waits at the door. 


While any suffers, no one is free. Whatever you do, then, you do it to me.


Text: Rory Cooney, b.1952, © 1993, GIA Publications, Inc.




Here’s what we’re singing Sunday at St. Anne’s, along with some iTunes links. Have a good weekend.



Gathering: I Am for You 

(Gather 3)
Psalm 33: Happy the People You Have Chosen by Rory Cooney (OCP octavo)


Preparation rite: O Agape 


Communion: One Is the Body (Gather)
Closing: Glory and Praise to Our God (Gather)




The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit 

that we are children of God,
 
and if children, then heirs,
 
heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, 

if only we suffer with him
so that we may also be glorified with him. (Rom. 8: 16-17)

"I have much more to tell you" (Pentecost)

Seraph in flames

Just a few thoughts today on Pentecost. Something we learned at St. Anne from the late Fr. Jim Dunning (of happy memory) was a process called “echoing God’s word,” based on the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina. The idea was to read scripture together (generally, it has been the gospel of the approaching Sunday) and then we each repeat the word or phrase that we heard that spoke to us directly as we listened; we repeat that word or phrase three times. Of course, sometimes there is just one phrase or two that everyone seems to have keyed in on, but sometimes the response is remarkably varied. Since parish leadership has changed, our style of sharing scripture has too, but it doesn't really matter for the scope of this little blog post.


I find for myself that more often than not this practice in our staff meetings is a left-brain exercise for me; it doesn’t always engage me on the level  of affect. I tend to hear what I’ve been thinking about, rather than what might be speaking to my emotional or personal life. Not that thinking isn’t personal; it’s just the difference between loving and being in love with the idea of love. They’re both all right, but the latter is no substitute for the former..



But what catches me on Sunday is almost always personal, almost always a surprise, and almost always something I didn’t notice in the spiritual exercise of "echoing God’s word." The last time we had Pentecost with year B readings, with the optional gospel, I know that did not expect to hear the words, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now” jump out at me from the gospel. It spoke to me as I was thinking that I tend to believe that the sudden change in the disciples on the feast of shavuot, what we call Pentecost, the feast of first fruits 50 days after Passover, was more of a metaphor than an actual event of wind and fire. I don’t know that at all. It’s just more like my reality. I don’t really want a God who does magic tricks, one who intervenes with tongues of fire and simultaneous translations, because that kind of God plays favorites, doesn’t come around for those who really need him, only lives in stories of old deeds done brilliantly, but who isn’t of much help to people in need today.



But I do have experience of true things working on me. I mentioned about how as the gospel story leaves the apostles on the mount of the ascension, they’re still talking about a restored kingdom of Israel, missing the point of Jesus’s entire time with them, including his suffering, death, and resurrection. But that missing the point is important to me, because I know that I miss the point all the time; my whole life is an exercise in missing the point. But things work on me. I’ve been cruel, but I’ve learned to change my behavior from being exposed to the gospel. I’ve been angry and self-important, but I’ve learned to see myself in a bigger picture, and tried to learn to behave more gently and gratefully. 



Remembering, re-membering, putting the pieces together, is what allows this to happen in us. We’re too busy or angry or just distracted by life to react to, let alone respond to, the gospel at certain times. But we keep hearing the word of God calling us to something new and really, really, different, calling us into the mystery of agape. It’s really different to wake up and be part of a family, God’s family, in a way we didn’t know before. It’s really, really different to think about how we fit into a world where every single person is just as important as we are. It’s really, really different to live not under the threat of punishment by a divine judge nor because of the promise of a deferred salary as “payback” in the afterlife, but to live for other people because we were made that way, because that’s the only life that makes any sense. 



We’ve heard the exact same stories since we were children, but Jesus said to our hearts, time and time again, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” 



Of course, it may be, it almost certainly is, that no matter what I/we think we know now, there is still more to learn from the Holy One than we can bear at any age or time of life. The story is told of the seraphim, the highest rank of angels, that they are made of fire, that they rise up out of the river of fire that flows in front of the throne of God in heaven. When they behold the countenance of the One who is beyond knowing or naming, they dissolve into fire again, returning to the river over and over again, and being reborn. We never know God completely; our knowledge and love dissolve with every morning, new insight supersedes our previous thought even as it builds on it.



So back to that Pentecost story in Acts. The flash of tongues of fire, the thrill of the mighty wind, these sound like metaphors for life-changing insight, the kind that (metaphorically?) may have knocked St. Paul down on the way to Damascus. The speaking in tongues, the hearing of the good news in many languages, this sounds like the development and growth of the Church in the Mediterranean basin as the story of Jesus was taken to every land. Did it happen fifty days after that awful Passover when Jesus was murdered? Fifty weeks? Fifty years? Fifty is a mystical number, too, remember: the perfection of seven multiplied by itself, mystery times mystery, plus one. The "twelfth of never," we might say, or "infinity plus one." In other words, it all happened at the perfect time. The right time, kairos, God’s time. Like the grain of wheat, after the right time in the ground, the plant is ready for the harvest. It took as long as it took for the apostles to begin to understand that God was not in fact going to intervene against Rome, but that God, made visible in Jesus, was claiming the world again as empire anyway. Only it is not an empire of coercion, violence, and the amassing of treasure and goods, but an empire of peace, dialogue, and shared resources. And the message is, choose your empire, and live there now. Augustus, who founded the Pax Romana, is dead, and food for worms. Jesus, the herald of God’s empire, is alive. Choose your emperor. Turn around and go in this new direction.



St. John, you’ll recall, sees all of this happening on the cross, when Jesus “hands over the spirit” as he dies. John reports the birth of the ecclesia, the community of believers “called out” the way that Abba called Jesus, by telling that “blood and water” flowed from the pierced side of Christ, the afterbirth of the newly born incarnate children of God. Like those children, the meaning of life, the reality of who we are and the mystery to which we are called, grows gradually inside of us, not so much with miracles and spectacles of power as with the flashes of insight that are the sparks that fly when the flint of the gospel strikes the hard rock of our lives.

One of these days, those sparks, enough of them, will set a fire to the earth. Aflame with agape, the Church will rise from that river, see the face of God everywhere, in every person and living creature, every quark and galaxy, and dissolve in the energy of love, to be raised again, over and over, to its destiny of self-sacrifice and loving service.


This is what we are singing this weekend at St. Anne:



Call to Worship: Pentecost Sequence (music by Rory Cooney) My setting is what I think of as a “jazz chant,” using Jesuit Fr. Peter Scagnelli’s poetic translation of the Veni Sancte Spiritus.

Gathering: Send Down the Fire by Marty Haugen
Psalm: Psalm 104: Send Out, Send Out Your Spirit by Rory Cooney
Preparation rite: This Very Morning (GIA octavo, Rory Cooney) I think I’ve said before, I don’t think that I can write any better than this, but it hasn’t exactly flown off the shelves. I wrote it for the ordination anniversary of a friend and colleague, which happened to fall on Pentecost a few years ago. YouTube video is below, right; the lyrics are here. 

Communion: May We Be One (GIA octavo, Daigle/Cooney)

Recessional: Over My Head (spiritual)
 or I Send You Out by John Angotti




Other Pentecost posts:
Urban Renewal in the City of God
The Fifty Hour Pentecost
From Babel to Pentecost
Christ and the Spirit (this is your brain on too much oxygen)

"I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. 
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,

he will guide you to all truth.”

SongStories 45: Pentecost Sequence (Christ the Icon, 2005, WLP)

The Veni Sancta Spiritus is a masterpiece of late medieval poetry. The Latin sequence for the Feast of Pentecost is composed in ten tercets linked into sestets by a rhyme scheme AAB CCB. Jesuit Father Peter Scagnelli's translation, like others, maintains this scheme, and with perhaps even more masterful craft maintains the seven-syllable lines, an homage, one must imagine, to the sacrum septenarium, the "sevenfold gifts" of the Holy Spirit referred to in the ninth stanza (or fifth, depending on whether you're counting tercets or sestets!)

Sequences were songs that came into the liturgies of solemn feasts and other liturgies (like the Dies Irae, in masses of the dead). They were sung before the gospel until the revision of the Roman Missal in 2002, wherein the General Instruction places it before the Alleluia. Of the many sequences that had been used up until the time of the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, only four were retained in the Roman Missal of Pius III, and of those, only three were retained in the current Roman Missal, with two (the Easter sequence, Victimae Paschali Laudes and this one) being obligatory, and the sequence for the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, Lauda Sion Salvatorem, being optional.

I don't know about you, but it's not easy to negotiate music placement in liturgy in these days of resurging subjectivism with practice. As the iron-fisted "by the book" approach to rubrics and liturgy of the latter-day Pope St. John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI fades away, and the less restrictive, pastoral attitude of Pope Francis suffuses the church, one side effect has been (for me) that it is virtually impossible to use the phrase "the rubrics say" or "we really ought to..." with regard to the liturgy any more. I'm not really complaining about this, it's just that there's no authoritative center of authority in these matters any more other than the desire of the pastor or presider at a particular mass. Since there is pretty general agreement among us on certain basics, for instance, that the readings are from scripture, we follow a general structure, there's a eucharistic prayer, a breaking of bread, and communion, it seems less important whether, for instance, we sing the Gloria every Sunday, use metal vessels on the altar, or sing the two sequences that are "mandatory" in the rubrics on Easter and Pentecost. Sometimes, this works to communal advantage, in my opinion, as when the strictures around "authorized translations" of the psalms aren't observed for singing responsorial psalms or adjusting the obnoxiously non-inclusive language of some of the NABRE readings. But it does call for some compromises and relaxing into "millennium mode" about other rubrics governing music and celebration. By "millennium mode," I mean taking a look at the importance of the disagreement over implementation from the vantage point of a thousand, or, when necessary, ten thousand, years into the future. Is it really going to matter to the future of the church and the reign of God if we don't sing the sequence this Sunday?

As for me, I've set both the Easter sequence and the Pentecost sequence with some success. Obviously, with such a specialized piece of music only used once a year, one has to decide whether the participation of the congregation is of value to the effort. For me it is, though I think for others it need not be. In a parish (or cathedral) situation where time isn't of the essence and a rubrical authenticity is desirable, a choral sung or chanted sequence would certainly be as acceptable as any option. But when I set the Victimae Paschali Laudes for Easter, I used the Latin text and music which are gorgeous in their immediate inaccessibility, but added the familiar Alleluias from O Filii et Filiae as a response by assembly three or four times during the chant, leading into the gospel acclamation using those alleluias.


With the Pentecost sequence, I opted to use the beautiful and really virtuosic translation by Scagnelli, bound to a chant like tune that actually starts on the seventh tone of the natural minor scale, adding another layer of metaphor to the seven-syllable lines of Scagnelli's translation. I named the tune "QUANDO ITA" because the melody bears a certain resemblance to the Bill Withers tune "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone." (QUANDO ITA is an approximate Latin translation of "when she's gone.") There's no symbolism (nor plagiarism) in the resemblance to the bluesy Withers anthem, it's just a motif that is easily singable, woven into a melody with inner repetition to make it memorable.

That's it for today, just wanted to get another song into the "Songstories" list that connects to the rhythm of the liturgical year. In case you're wondering, at St. Anne we will be singing the sequence as a "call to worship" before mass, rather than before the Alleluia. I'm trying to choose my "battles" these days, looking for some balance in my life, saving my energy for what, I hope, is more important than a song, however ancient and beautiful.

Gaining the whole world: Nixon, Cheney, torture, and Thomas More

That mounting cacophony we hear? It's the expanding field of candidates for the 2016 presidential election. For the most part they identify themselves as Christian (Bernie Sanders is ethnically Jewish but doesn't identify with any "organized religion") and for the most part their Christianity self-identifies around reproductive and gender issues: being against abortion and LGBT equality, and not so much around issues important to other Christians, like poverty, healthcare, peace, and immigration. Still almost eighteen months out from the actual election, the volume of chatter is rising as the candidates, at least one of whom is an ordained minister, try to preach their way into the unaffiliated Christian heart of middle America, hoping to knit together the magical plurality that will earn them four years in the Oval Office. Lord, I want to be a President in my heart, in my heart.

So far though, the United States of America is not a theocracy. The Constitution is not the Ten Commandments, much less the Sermon on the Mount. It’s patently absurd to think that any nation, ever, could represent Christianity at all, because the very nature of Christianity is to break down borders, not to set them up and defend them. So it’s all right for our leaders, Obama, Bush, Clinton, to say that they’re Christian. It’s not all right to do terrible things in the world and to end every speech with “God bless America” and refer to the United States as a Christian nation; that borders on blasphemy.



In the ongoing attempt of the previous Christian administration’s efforts to establish its legacy, Dick Cheney has been out recently defending their decision to allow “enhanced interrogation” techniques to secure information from detainees, some of whom have proven inimical  to our national interests. His justification for what the rest of the world defines as “torture” and harsh treatment of prisoners: the results. In yet another assault on Christian values, now Cheney, following a strategy conceived in the think-tanks of the Reagan era, alleges that for the USA, might makes right, and the end justifies the means. Winners write history; winners define the terms. So they write a new story with a new vocabulary, and go about the strategy of winning at all costs so that their definitions stick.



“What profit is there,” Jesus asks the disciples, “for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? What could one give in exchange for his life?” What might we lose in this wild grasp at history, at “gaining the whole world” for this moment of rightness, of victory?



First, don’t take my word for it: here are Cheney’s ipsissima verba from his speech at the American Enterprise Institute in 2009, and he hasn't changed his tune in the intervening years. If anything, he's less apologetic.


In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear.  I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.  The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed.  They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.  (Emphases mine) The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people... And to call this (enhanced interrogations) a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims.   What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme.  It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.



In other words, for Cheney, torture is justified because it was “successful.” The question thus becomes, if the good guys (us) become the torturers, what is it exactly that we’ve succeeded at? Without so much as a “may God have mercy on our souls,” the born-again bullies of Bush 42 set aside the rule of law and international convention to make our “Christian” nation a base of terror wrapped in the rhetoric of patriotism and justice.



But without law, without the imperfect and arbitrated negotiations of men and women of legislative and judicial vision over the years, where does a people stand against those who wish to impose their will upon history? Robert Bolt deals with this question in the person of Thomas More in his Pulitzer- and Oscar-winning work, A Man for All Seasons. In one famous scene, a confused and sycophantic courtier named Richard Rich comes to visit More at his home, and offers him his services in exchange for favors. More dismisses the pathetic Rich, who would become the official who would later perjure himself at More’s trial by giving false evidence. More’s son-in-law, William Roper, and More’s wife, Alice, see through the charade, and after Rich departs they urge the Chancellor to have him brought to justice.



ROPER: Arrest him.

ALICE: Yes!

MORE: For what?

ALICE: He's dangerous!

ROPER: For libel; he's a spy.

ALICE: He is! Arrest him!

MARGARET Father, that man's bad.

MORE: There is no law against that.

ROPER: There is! God's law!

MORE: Then God can arrest him.

ROPER: Sophistication upon sophistication!

MORE: No, sheer simplicity. The law, Roper, the law. I know what's legal not what's right. And I'll stick to what's legal.

ROPER: Then you set man's law above God's!

MORE: No, far below; but let me draw your attention to a fact—I'm not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who could follow me there, thank God . . .
(He says this last to himself)

ALICE: (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he's gone!

MORE: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!

ROPER: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE: (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man's laws, not God's-and if you cut them down—and you're just the man to do it—d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

ROPER: I have long suspected this; this is the golden calf; the law's your god.

MORE: (Wearily) Oh, Roper, you're a fool, God's my god . . . . (Rather bitterly) But I find him rather too (Very bitterly) subtle . . . I don't know where he is nor what he wants.

ROPER: My god wants service, to the end and unremitting; nothing else!

MORE: (Dryly) Are you sure that's God? He sounds like Moloch. But indeed it may be God —And whoever hunts for me, Roper, God or Devil, will find me hiding in the thickets of the law!



As freshly as the late Bolt framed the question for the world of the 1960s and as immediate as his words sound today, more recently, director Ron Howard confronted some of these same issues anew when he looked at the interviews given by former president Richard Nixon to the British talk-show host, David Frost. Outmaneuvered and outclassed in the first three of the four sessions granted him by Nixon, Frost finally confronts Nixon with a series of readings from the transcripts of Oval Office tapes, cornering the former President by exposing the lie that he was unaware of the cover-up engineered by Haldeman and Ehrlichman before a specific date in the spring of 1972. Frost asks Nixon, if he knew, why didn’t he do something about it? Why didn’t he have the pair arrested by the FBI? This clip is from the movie Frost/Nixon. The entire script is available online here (see page 97 or so).





The very hubris that brought down the President in 1973 is being trotted out by Cheney and other apologists and conservative pundits as justification for torture, suspension of due process and habeas corpus, wiretapping of the phones of U.S. citizens, and whatever other means were necessary to achieve their stated (as well as their unstated and possibly more self-serving) ends. And, I regret to say, President Obama has brought about little meaningful change. The administration's stonewalling and obstructing the Feinstein committee's report on torture subjects President Obama, who campaigned on transparency and an "unwavering" commitment to the principle that torture is "always wrong," to a hermeneutic of suspicion on the subject. He has refused to talk about the accountability of those who authorized torture, and his CIA is not above suspicion on the subject of the transfer of terrorism suspects to US-friendly jurisdictions where torture is carried out by other governments on our behalf.

America, America,
God mend thine every flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

This admonition from Katherine Bates’ beloved “America” is as cogent today as when it was first written. It serves as an intelligent and conscientious counterpoint to Keys’ “Star-Spangled Banner,” with its overreaching imperative that foreshadowed Manifest Destiny and the acquisitive exploitations of super-patriots ever since,

Then conquer we must
When our cause it is just.
And this be our motto:
In God is our trust.

In A Man for All Seasons, at More’s trial for treason, Richard Rich has been made the attorney-general of Wales, and wears the badge of his office while testifying against More on behalf of Henry VIII. After his perjured testimony, as he is leaving the stand, he passes by Sir Thomas, who addresses him:



MORE: I have one question to ask the witness. (RICH stops) That's a chain of office you are wearing. (Reluctantly RICH faces him) May I see it? (NORFOLK motions him to approach. MORE examines the medallion) The red dragon. (To CROMWELL) What's this?


CROMWELL: Sir Richard is appointed Attorney-General for Wales.


MORE: (Looking into RICH'S face, with pain and amusement) For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!



That’s the question for us, it seems to me. What is it that we seek to gain for this loss of our Christian soul that allows us to continue to use violence and threats of violence as the weapons of choice for our national will? What can the legacy of the Bush and Obama presidencies be, if they chose to set the values of the Constitution aside in their own defense? What world is it that we hope to gain by abandoning our soul? 
And if our soul is not confirmed in self-control, if our law is not undergirded by a human decency and ethic of interdependence formed by our exposure to the Golden Rule and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, teachings of the one for whom Christianity is named, won't our leaders continue to feel entitled to sidestep those laws with impunity, since we will have abandoned our spiritual accountability to the gospel?

Politically, in a pluralistic and fundamentally secular society, these are complex issues. But Christians, at least, need to ask and answer these questions. We can’t serve two masters. Once we’ve rendered our integrity, our soul, to Caesar, what is left that we can claim belongs to God?

We live in a political world

Where love doesn’t have any place,

We’re living in times where men commit crimes

And crime don’t have a face.

(Bob Dylan)