Binding the Strong Man (B10O)

I think most of us who are in the church music biz keep records going back several lectionary cycles so that, for instance, each time the 4th Sunday of Easter, Year A, comes up, we can see what music we've done in the past to get our creative juices flowing and to cut down on "reinventing the wheel." For me at least, liturgical music is kind of a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" thing. You've worked hard over many years to choose the best songs in the repertoire for your community for this particular Sunday, so if there's not some better ones (or a better one) that have come along since last time, I at least tend to go with some of those songs I used last time, or use the best of what I've done for over the last nine years, with an addition or two of something maybe new, or an older song I've discovered, that might fit the Sunday better than things I've used before.

I bring this up today because, as you'll notice from my doing a new "Sundays" post for the 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, that I realized a few weeks ago that I don't have any records of music or liturgy texts that I've used before for this Sunday. That's because we haven't had a 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, in this century! The last one was in 1997, before our church was built. The year I started keeping all my files on my computer for each year was, you guessed it, 1998. Ergo, all the usual prayers and notes I keep for the parish will have to be written anew from scratch this weekend. This is why many people are atheists.

What I do have from The Last Year B archive is an article I wrote from a series of articles I was writing at that time for Today's Parish magazine, which I think was published by Twenty-third Publications. (If so, it goes into a long line of institutions for which association with me has brought ignominy and/or extinction. That list includes the high school seminary, novitiate, and college which I attended, the original Composers Forum for Catholic Worship, the Corpus Christi Center for Advanced Liturgical Study, Modern Liturgy magazine, the North American Forum on the Catechumenate, and possibly the United States of America, though the jury is still out on that one. And that list is by no means exhaustive.) This little article had a one paragraph reflection on the day, my usual dose, with a few music selections, but it pointed me again to Ched Meyers’ tome Binding the Strong Man, reminding me of how influential that book has been on my thinking about the first gospel. For Meyers, the passage we hear this Sunday is a central text for the whole gospel, hence his title. In it, he says, Jesus “declares ideological war” on the temple establishment, and I made the point in my notes that in the Genesis reading, God declares ideological war on Satan. Of course, it turns out to be the same war, but we need to be careful about underestimating and localizing “Satan,” lest we think this cosmic battle has little to do with us. More below on this.

For Girardian exegetes, the "Satan versus Satan" narrative is a core scripture. Satan in the earliest narratives is the Accuser, and only later becomes the Evil One. As Satan assumes both roles in the mythology, we begin to see how the Accuser is the one who accuses the Evil One, creating the Satan versus Satan scenario. This is a central theme of Rene Girard's The Scapegoat and certainly of his work, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. As one author puts it, "when Jesus asks, seemingly rhetorically, 'How can Satan cast out Satan?', Girard essentially answers, 'It happens all the time. In fact, that’s what human culture is founded on. Our anthropology can be summarized by the phrase Satan casting out Satan.'" The murderous blood sacrifice of the scapegoat is used to appease the desire of the murderous crowd. The only way out of this spiral of temporarily sating violence is the act of Christ, the Forgiving Victim, innocent, who comes back from death to rewrite the myth from the perspective of the victim. When God finally speaks definitively about sacrifice, the answer is, "Are you kidding? No thank you. Let's get on with building life."

It's good to get back to St. Mark's gospel, and dig into the great story that the author says is just "the beginning of the evangelion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." We're getting more accustomed to the vocabulary of Roman civil religion being used in the story of Jesus, starting with that word evangelion which has a specific meaning related to news of an imperial victory. We hear the stories of  the entry into Jerusalem in that light, the name "Legion" given to the demons that are cast out and into a herd of swine that jump off a cliff into the sea, we might even hear an echo of a Roman imperial procession in the language of the story of Bartimaeus, and his "eleison" shouted from the roadside to the approaching king, here, however, a "son of David." And just this past Sunday, in the narrative of the Last Supper, we get reminders of the subterfuge and hints about the extent to which Jesus and the disciples have to go to keep under the radar, resorting to passwords and secret arrangements for the last supper. Sometimes, to be subversive and stay alive, you need to go underground. Or at least under whatever passed for the radar in the first century CE.

The message of Jesus has enemies in the imperial cult, but it also is at odds with the temple cult, both because of his message itself and because both depend on the maintenance of a status quo to keep the peace among the people. Have-nots mustn't try to become haves, people outside of the power circle mustn't try to usurp the power structure, and generally speaking, outsiders shouldn't try to become insiders. The story in Sunday's gospel is sandwiched between two mentions of one kind of insider-outsider groups: Jesus's family, who are outside his house and think he's crazy and want to stop him, and Jesus's discipleship group, his family of choice, who are "outside" the status quo group in his society of actual family, but are nevertheless inside his house, and are the ones to whom he offers his attention and allegiance. Between these two slices of narrative "bread," a meaty battle of wits goes on between Jesus and the scribes. While the inside-outside dialectic plays out in the "family-house" event, a more cosmic one is being addressed between Jesus and the scribes, and at stake is the honor of Jesus, the source of his authority and power, and the balance of authority between the status quo symbolized by the scribes and temple cult and the subversion of that status quo by the preaching and ministry of Jesus. Placed between the two pieces of the "in-out-family" narrative, the battle with the scribes become the core of the lesson, an inclusio, so we need to pay attention.

This is just chapter three of Mark. We've just heard of Jesus forming a band of disciples, a resistance group against the prevailing theologies of temple and state. The scribes in this story, agents of the temple rulers, do what ruling hegemonies always do to those who challenge their authority: they demonize him. Here, they do so literally, saying "it is by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that he casts out demons." He is possessed, they allege. Jesus's response will echo his (and even more certainly Mark's) audience's experience in watching the collapse of Herod's kingdom, first that of Herod the Great's being divided into a tetrarchy, then the complete collapse in the 60s with the war against Herod Antipas when he divorced the daughter of Nabatean king Aretas, who then defeated Antipas in war. "A house divided against itself will not stand." (3:25)

Jesus's parable about the strongman is another tactic of subversion, hiding truths in plain sight so that his followers might understand, but not the attackers. The "master of the house," the strong man, is Satan. In fact, the Aramaic name Beelzebul means "master of the house." Jesus has come, he says, to "bind the strong man," and take back what belongs to the reign of God, that is, the human race, starting with the Jewish race. His discipleship community, ministry of healing and exorcism, parables, and teaching are all oriented toward that: releasing those bound by the power of fear and murder, and sapping the strength of the myths that keep them bound. By myths here, I mean the structures of behavior and ways of thinking that keep oppressed people oppressed, the shrinking options that seem to be available to those under domination by others. Jesus is pretty clear in Mark that what he is about to do is "plunder the strong man's house," put an end to the rule of Satan by unleashing the reign of God upon the world. The scribes cannot see it, and yet they are God's agents, the ones whose role is supposed to be keeping the Torah alive in the community. As Ched Meyers puts it in Binding the Strong Man (page 167):

Imperial hermeneutics, ever on the side of law and order, will of course find this interpretation (i.e., the liberation and rescue of the captives of tyrants) strained, offensive, shocking. Yet Mark drew the image of breaking and entering from the most enduring of the primitive Christian eschatological traditions: the Lord's advent as a thief in the night.

Then Jesus announces that all kinds of sin will be forgiven except that of the ones who accused him of being empowered by Satan: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, that is to say, calling the actual work of liberation and wakening the children of God to who they are "demonic possession." If you can't see the work of God right before your eyes, he is saying, you've missed the bus to the reign of God. You're going nowhere, and you're already in hell.

Which leaves us with the inside family and the outside family in the gospel. We should be grateful that the lectionary compilers left this whole pericope intact when including it in the reading for Sunday, so that we get everything that's going on here. All the labels: family, believer, baptized, circumcised, Jew, white, straight, American, Christian—all the labels have to go. Being "inside" the reign of God isn't a matter of claiming to be there by some birthright or self-oriented entitlement. Being inside the reign of God is participating in Jesus's project of liberation with him, doing what he does, giving everything for the sake of others. The goal of the insider is to tell the outsiders that everyone is actually inside already, and there aren't any outsiders, unless one chooses to be out there.

Gee. Are you having as hard a time as I am trying to figure out what this has to do with us?

Maybe it's the damage we do by identifying law with actual morality, by not repenting nationalist euphemisms like "manifest destiny" and working to first acknowledge and then undo the horrific legacy of the Indian wars and treaties. Or maybe repenting the sin of slavery and its enabling mother-sin of racism, and working together to undo the systems of injustice and prejudice that flourish in our time, not to mention the enabling of racist and white supremacist rhetoric under the guise of "freedom of speech."

It's important to keep remembering that the tactics and strategy of the reign of God are peaceful and non-violent, but they are urgent. They require non-cooperation with evil, putting all of the danger and risk on us who believe with Jesus that death is meaningless to God, but that we are God's children, and he counts each of us, and all of us together, with unimaginable love that risks everything even before we do. We, disciples, are part of the confederacy of subversives for the new order, the reign of God. Let's be careful not to let ourselves be aligned with or sucked into the strategies of the status quo, blaming the victims of injustice rather than calling out the perpetrators. As in Mark's day, as in Jesus's day, there are two religions with competing altar calls. One is the voice of imperial religion, promising peace through force, naming insiders and outsiders, saying that it's always expedient that a few (or a lot of) others die so that we can keep things the way we want. The other is the voice of the reign of God, promising peace through justice, naming everyone as inside the circle of divine love, with a strategy of healing, equal protection, and table fellowship. The altars are on different horizons. To choose one, we need to turn our backs on the other.

What we're singing Sunday at St. Anne's:

Entrance: In Christ There Is No East or West (John Oxenham)
Kyrie: Kendzia ("Lead Us to the Water")
Psalm 130: With the Lord there is Mercy (Modlin)
Presentation of Gifts: Turn Around (GIA, Cooney) I chose this song because of one of the later stanzas, stanza 6, which uses the "break-in" imagery of the gospel:

Good news for he comes like a thief in the night
To take back his own from the enemy's might.
And like a small seed, or the yeast in the dough,
God's justice in silence will grow.

Eucharistic Acclamations: Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso) I'm trying this again after introducing it in winter OT. I'm trying it in the key of C for a while. When I switched it at daily mass, the singing improved by (literally) 100%. I think the tesitura is a little high on the "Hosanna" passage and the "Amen," and this seems to fix the issue. It's not that the mass isn't singable. And one size doesn't fit all. Just giving it a shot.
Communion: Faithful Family (Cooney) (link is to yesterday's blog post on this song)
Sending Forth: Lover of Us All (Schutte)

SongStories 55: Faithful Family (1986, 2000, OCP)

One of the texts that is favored in the Roman Missal for the washing of feet at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday is an ancient chant song called “Ubi Caritas,” whose English refrain is rendered: “Where charity and love are, God is there.” In the Liber Usualis, the chant book used for Mass and the hours in previous years, it was listed last among the antiphons for the rite, but the rubric indicates that it is always to be sung, begun toward the end of the foot washing. The Latin text is terse: there is only one verb at the end of the antiphon, so, literally, what we see is “Where charity and love, God is there.” While the words caritas and amor are often used interchangeably for “love,” caritas often translates the Greek word agape, while amor renders the Greek philia or even eros. The tiny phrase covers a huge truth of the faith. All love flows from God, most clearly perhaps the agape love that gives with no hope or desire of return, the love that seeks first and only the good of the other. But nevertheless, all kinds of love—friendship, family love, affection, all of it—have their source as God who is love. God is the source and the ocean, and all rivers both flow from and lead back to the One.

The Holy Thursday liturgy, like the gospel of John which is proclaimed that evening, want us to be clear about what Jesus was doing with the Eucharist. As you’ve heard many times, St. John in the fourth gospel doesn’t say anything about the Last Supper itself. He has a long farewell discourse from Jesus after the supper (chapters 14-17), but about the supper, all he has to say is in chapter 13, that during the supper, Jesus took a towel, undressed, and took the role of a slave by washing the feet the disciples. After that, there are a few words about the betrayal by Judas with reference to eating from the same dish, and then the prediction of Peter’s denial, leading right to the farewell discourse. John doesn’t want us to focus on the food or the sharing of the meal without understanding what was at stake for Jesus in the meal. With important overtones throughout the passage recalling the atonement rituals of the temple, we are meant to see that the meal of Jesus is a sign of service to the world, a sign of willingness to “take on the form of a slave” in order to bring about the reconciliation of God and people, and that “do this in memory of me” is as much about imitating the self-emptying of God in Christ (which we call kenosis) as it is about eating bread and sharing a cup together. After washing the feet, we mustn’t miss the mandatum (mandate, or command) of Jesus: “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” (13:15) Throughout this passage, whenever we read the word “love,” the Greek uses the noun or verb from the root agape, that other-love that transcends self-preservation and seeks the good of the other above one’s own.

In the middle of the 1980s, there were other versions of the Ubi Caritas chant hymn available, notably the hymn version “Where Charity and Love Prevail,” and a beautiful antiphonal version by Sr. Maria of the Cross, published by the Composers Forum for Catholic Worship. I wanted to write a version that, like “Where Charity and Love Prevail,” would be useful throughout the year, accessible by all kinds of people. So I started by writing a new metric translation of the Ubi Caritas that became the four verses of “Faithful Family.” Then I wrote a refrain based on Ephesians 4:32 - 5:2, words that urge the Christian community to forgive each other and live in love:

“…(B)e kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God…” Which became, in my refrain:

Be like our God, who chose to live and learn our ways
And die in deep unbounded love.
Forgive each other tenderly,
The faithful family of our God.

Most of “Faithful Family” I’m still very happy with. One little text flaw could probably have been fixed: there’s a line that goes, “The love of Christ has gathered us to one from island ways,” and I’m afraid that using the word “island” might have been ambiguous in a way I wasn’t expecting. I hope people understand that I was using “island” the way John Donne uses it in his “No man is an island…” sermon, or as Paul Simon used it in “I Am a Rock,” which continues, “I am an island.” Obviously, I intended "island ways" to suggest the false sense of self-dependence, that it is somehow noble to be alone, that isolation is a virtue, or the purest form of humanity. But I’m always afraid someone is going to think I mean “island” like Hawaii or Jamaica or Puerto Rico, and wonder why I’m dissing nice hospitable people like that. I don’t know that people get thrown by that, but every time I sing it, I wish I’d used another word!

I also think (sometimes) that it might be too high, and should have been published a step lower. I’ve tried it in F with the choir and it sounds muddy to me, but ending that third line of the chorus on a high D (“ten-der-LY” — yikes) wasn’t my smartest move, and maybe it would be better in F and having that note be a nice reasonable C. 

Oh well. I think there’s still something very right about “Faithful Family,” and it’s definitely one of the songs of mine best received here at St. Anne and in my former parish. It continues to be published in the most recent version of the Glory and Praise hymnals (3rd edition), and appears on our 2000 CD Change Our Hearts. It originally was included on our 1986 record Do Not Fear to Hope. 

Faithful Family

Music and lyrics by Rory Cooney

Be like our God, who chose to live and learn our ways

And die in deep unbounded love.

Forgive each other tenderly,

The faithful family of our God.

Wherever there is charity,

Selfless, giving care,

Surely our God is there.

The love of God has gathered us

To one from island ways:

Let us sing for joy all our days.

And let us love the living God,

Merciful and kind,

Body and heart and mind.

Let us love each other well,

Hold the stranger dear,

Reaching out to all without fear.

When we are together, let us act as one,

Ways of greed and conflict done. 

Let there be no bitterness,

Quarreling, nor strife:

In our midst is Christ our life.

One day in the company of the saints in light,

May we see your face shine bright,

Bright upon your family,

Faithful, human, flawed.

Shine in glory, Christ, our God.

Copyright © 1986 Epoch/NALR. Published by OCP, Portland, Oregon. All rights reserved.

SongStories 54: What Is This Love? (OCP, 2016)

St. Agnes Senior Choir. Founding members (of 50 years)
are standing for recognition at the anniversary mass.

About eleven years ago, Terry and I were invited by the music director at St. Agnes parish in Thunder Bay, Ontario, to come up and do a concert and workshop for them. It seemed like a great opportunity to see part of Ontario I hadn’t been to before, and so we said yes and went north and had a great time. Our hosts, Marcia Vaillant (the director) and her husband Ted, also a fine musician, trombone player, and big band arranger and conductor, showed us around, and had a son (Giorgio) about our son Desi’s age, so the time we spent not rehearsing or performing was relaxing and comfortable.

Marcia came to Music Ministry Alive in 2015, the year Terry and I helped out on the team, and later asked me if I’d consider coming back to Thunder Bay for another concert and workshop, but she also wanted to commission a piece for her choir for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the choir in their parish. We conversed about the kind of song she wanted, and settled on a communion processional. The mass was going to be held in June of 2016. The most fun part of all was that several of the members of the choir were actually members of the choir when it was founded fifty years earlier! Our time in Thunder Bay in 2016 was as much fun as nine years before, and Ted and Marcia have been to Barrington and Lake Zurich to visit us as well.

Through this particular time period, I was leading a two-year program of soup suppers, videos, and book discussions on James Alison’s wonderful “course on Christianity,” a look at the whole enterprise of Church, scripture, and faith through an almost entirely new lens, called Jesus, the Forgiving Victim. Though I had been a fan of Alison’s work for years, and before him, of his mentor, René Girard, Forgiving Victim really affected me, and helped me, much like Alison pictures Jesus doing on the road to Emmaus, to reinterpret my life as though I had never really understood it before, like it was happening around me, but not to me. The most important thing turned out to be that the interpretative key for my life is Christ himself, who Christ is, as he is, or as best we can understand who he is from the New Testament: the forever-presence of God made human in a specific person who is so much different from our expectation of what a god is like that, in Alison’s words, he is much more like no god at all than our expectations of a god.



I like to write what I’m passionate about at the time I’m writing. I want to write about whatever moves me inside, and try to communicate that passion in the song. So when I got down to writing this song, trying to say something, in a question, about who Jesus is, in the surprising way that he reveals who God is to us, and invites us to join in that wonderful, creative energy:

Who is this God who comes to dine,
Whose life is broken into pieces,
And shared with us like wine?
What is this love spread before us a feast?
Let us gather at God’s table,
And learn there the ways of peace.

The verses find different ways of expressing that: all are equal in God’s eyes; all are entitled to freedom and respect; and that the source of all this outpouring of accepting, generous love is God, giving us the Spirit of Jesus, the crucified Lord, risen and present among us. There's not really much "logic" to it, it's a cascade of images and exhortations under the impetus of the moment, when under the sign of shared food, this God "who is not like the other gods" comes to dine, and is consumed by us, empowering us to...what? Be consumed by others, if we dare to be like God, and give ourselves away, or rather, be given away by Christ's hand.

For friends and strangers,
One God, one Spirit.No foes nor rivals,
One crucified Lord.No wall nor borders,
One God, one Spirit.For all the lost:
One Christ risen, present with us here.

The song's introduction (and interlude) starts on the 7th note of the scale, a little unusual, but even more so against the subdominant bass, so a tritone. This was an accident, but as I reflected on the numerology of it, 7 being the "perfect" number, the tritone being the "devil's interval," dissonant, begging for resolution—but also 3, a number we use to describe the trinitarian nature of God, its dissonance may be alerting us to the insight that God is not what we imagined God to be. Where we want intervention, we get indwelling and cooperation. Where we want power, we get service. Where we want domination, we get community. Where we want victory, we get surrender. That's the paschal mystery. It's not just about Jesus, or even about us. It's the paschal nature of Godself.

“What Is This Love?” was picked up pretty quickly by OCP in Portland, Oregon, one of my publishers. I think it’s a nice addition to the communion repertoire, with a singable refrain, and verses that allow participation, along the lines of “May We Be One,” or Marty Haugen's "Within the Reign of God." Maybe you received a copy earlier this year in OCP's choral packet, and tabled it for later consideration? Please give it a listen and an audition, and see whether it might be right for your ensemble and choir. Thank you!

For Liturgical Composers Forum: Putting the "Sing" into "Fundraising"

My awesome colleagues and friends, mostly from LCF,
now surround me in my office and bring me joy
and inspiration. I think that's what they bring me...

One possible downside of being a published composer is that it's never a secret how old you are. No matter how many times I ask them to change my birthday to, say, a decade or two later than it seems to be recorded as, my publishers, bless their hearts, keep writing 1952. My birthday is May 29, so on that day, I will be 39. Well, for the 27th time. 66, if you want to be all scientific about it.

On the upside, I still just have one date, as in (1952 - ). So things could be worse. Or maybe better, for you. (See my rant about "The Dash" here.)

With first communions and confirmation taking place almost entirely in April this year, Deo gratias, I've had a more reflective May than I expected to have, and that kind of leisure around one's birthday almost inexorably leads to thinking about one's blessings and the amazing good fortune life has brought me. Let me clarify: not a fortune, exactly, lucre-wise, but I've been able to live my life among wonderful friends and family, I've made something like a living doing what I really love, and I've been affirmed in my work over many years by the people whom it has been my pleasure to serve.

Music is a grand collaboration, a school of cooperation and surrender. I've said a million times, and I believe it, that there is a sense in which I am so aware that I have no business doing what I do, that almost everyone else I know in the ministry of music and liturgy knows more or is more gifted or practiced and studied more. In a room full of my colleagues, everyone is better than I am at some aspect of ministry. But I know also that I've been given enough, and that it's not about me anyway, but about the collaboration, about building musical communities, about reminding people that Christians were "born singing," in Pere Gelineau's wonderful phrase, that God is love, and that people in love make signs of love, like singing, even nonsense syllables like ahhhh❤️---lehhhh---loo❤️ooo----yaaaa😍ah, and so on. It takes a village to make a musician, and all the unselfish friends and mentors and teachers I have had since I was a child at St. Vincent de Paul School in Phoenix, with the wonderful Daughters of Charity for teachers and choir directors, have given me a high bar to stretch toward in music ministry, and a constant reminder that, again, it's not about me, it's about us, and it's about God-with-us.

The last time I wrote an article about the Liturgical Composers Forum (though I did post a set list of a concert in other years here and here), I mentioned that they had somehow miscounted the ballots and elected me to the steering committee, where I was able to work with Tom Kendzia, Carol Browning, Jaime Cortez, Feargal King, most recently Tony Ward and Christian Cosas, and the St. Louis executive committee members Betty Halley and Paul Hasser for four years, trying to envision our future as a group and shape it not just for survival but for growth. This past January, in what had to be some kind of lesson in both humility and the need for better communication, I was re-elected to the steering committee and made chairperson in absentia. I took this as you might expect, that it was a sign from God that no one else wanted to do it, and as a punishment for missing the meeting to have lunch with my local friends from St. Vincent's church. But I also took it seriously, in the sense that, something wonderful had been given to us all—to us composers and to the church—by the work that had been begun by John Foley, SJ, from the Center for Liturgy at St. Louis University, and then by all the team members who have served the Liturgical Composers Forum (LCF) since, under the various members of the steering committee, led by Roc O'Connor SJ, and then by Tom Kendzia.

The Forum's membership, from our point of view, has always been anyone and everyone who has a "significant body of work" published by a major publisher. After some discernment about this while we were writing up and discussing some bylaws a few years ago, the membership came up with a few wrinkles on that original idea. We're still working through some of these, but one that we did implement was that people whose goals and ministries align with ours are now admitted on a case-by-case basis as "associate members," with all the rights and privileges (such as they are) of full members except the right to vote. We welcomed some of our first associate members this past January, and we look for others in the future. We imagine that composition and liturgy students, text writers, publishers, and people who might liaise with other similar groups (NPM, AGO, FDLC, etc.) might also become associate members. We've consciously tried to recruit and welcome more Hispanic composers, and we are also quite conscious of trying to encourage more women composers to attend. We had our largest turnout so far this year of women composers, but certainly are looking for more parity as we grow.

Costs are always a concern. Four years ago, we added a concert to the last night of our meeting, an option for those members who are able to stay. We invite the friends of Composers Forum and the church of St. Louis to an evening of our compositions led and sung by the members. This has been of benefit both to us and to the Mercy Center, the conference and retreat center where we meet each year, run by the Sisters of Mercy. We manage to (at least) break even every year through a combination of (modest) dues and a conference fee. We did a book project, edited by John Foley and published by Liturgical Press, a three-volume series of essays by the membership on aspects of liturgical music and composition. Under the umbrella title The Heart of Our Music (link above), the three books explored various aspects of our craft:

The Heart of Our Music: Underpinning Our Thinking: Reflections on Music and Liturgy by Members of the Liturgical Composers Forum 

The Heart of Our Music: Practical Considerations: Reflections on Music and Liturgy by Members of the Liturgical Composers Forum 

The Heart of Our Music: Digging Deeper: Reflections on Music and Liturgy by Members of the Liturgical Composers Forum

The royalties from all three volumes were donated by the members to the LCF.

Two areas where we currently need funding are scholarships for composers unable to pay registration costs and stipends for our two hardworking executive committee members. In the latter case, we voted that a stipend for them is a matter of justice, and we're currently working on getting grants to help cover these costs. But guess who's trying to get the grants? You guessed it: our hardworking executive committee. We think that in a year or so we may have this under control. But we feel that underwriting worthy but needy members who can't afford to come to our meetings will be an ongoing ministry of the group. We need everyone's voice. The  publishers really help underwrite our costs, we closely watch our budget and our yearly fees, but things happen. Each year we work toward better communication with each other, sharing ideas and strategies for writing and balancing the demands of family, work (most in parishes or academia), and faith, we work toward new ways of mentoring and helping each other make our work better.

This is why you may have noticed that I have a birthday fundraiser going for LCF this year. Already, less than a week into the two-week drive (and it's not even my birthday), we've far exceeded my expectations, making me wish I'd just asked everyone to send ME money, and I could have had a much better vacation this summer! But instead this has been put through the fundraising arm of Facebook, and over fifty people have already contributed.

If it's possible for you to contribute via Facebook (link here), please do. LCF is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so your donations are tax deductible. If you aren't a Facebook user, you can make a donation directly to LCF by sending your donation to

Liturgical Composers Forum

c/o Betty Halley

1355 Kraft Street

St. Louis, MO 63139

You don't have to worry: this won't be a yearly event for me! I just wanted to try to give us a small financial cushion going into the 2019 meeting, when we hope to give a push for women composers, and make more inroads welcoming the wonderful Spanish-language composers working for the church.

Look, I just want to say "Thank you" to all of you who support your local church musicians and especially composers and text writers. I want thank everyone who teaches music and poetry and language and theology and inspires young(ish) people of faith to want to be songwriters. I am so very grateful to people like Rev. David Windsor, CM, and Sr. Georgianna and Sr. Thomas Anne DCs, of my first parish, SVdP in Phoenix, and to Bob Klimek, Bill Fraher, Mike Javor, the late Jim Mahoney, Sr. Anthony Poerio IBVM, who has also gone before us into glory, Cyprian (Daniel) Consiglio OSB Cam., the late John Gallen, SJ, Tom Kendzia, Gary Daigle, Tom Conry, every choir member or cantor or instrumentalist who ever worked with me, my mom, my grandfather, Terry Donohoo and everyone else who inspired me, encouraged me, taught me, helped me learn to be more generous and broader in my lyrical brush strokes. There are dozens, maybe hundreds more of you, of course.

At 66, I know that my life is nearly half over, and it's about time to pass the torch to the next generation of church musicians so that they, too, can know the special kind of anonymity that comes from writing songs, the joy of teaching a pew to sing. But to borrow a couple of phrases, "to you who bow," "we will make music to you while we breathe." It's so worth the effort. It's such a joyful, rewarding ministry. It is a great honor to be a part of the Liturgical Composers Forum, and I hope you will join me in making a gift this spring for the health and longevity of our ministry!

SongStories 53: Song of the Chosen (Psalm 33) - OCP, 1985 and 1998

When we were working on our first trio album for North American Liturgy Resources in 1985, I was very excited because since my You Alone album the previous year, an album which had a lot of music I’d written over the previous 10-15 years, I had written a number of new songs that reflected some new insights I’d gotten in my classes with John Gallen SJ in Phoenix. I was “beta-testing” these songs at my "new" parish (since 1983) in Phoenix, St. Jerome Catholic Community. Gary Daigle, Terry and I were very excited about doing a recording together, and maybe starting to work together as a trio.

The album that eventually came out was called Do Not Fear to Hope, and in addition to the title song, there were several songs that were anthologized from the collection in hymnals and worship aids for many years: “Come to Us,” for instance, is still published in OCP’s Glory and Praise, Third Edition and in GIA’s Gather Third Edition three decades later, as is “We Will Serve the Lord. “Faithful Family” was on that recording, as were some of my responsorial psalms like “The Lord Is Kind (Psalm 103)” and “Psalm 98, Psalm for Christmas.”

Tom Kendzia was the producer. Tom and I had been friends for about five years since we'd first met when he came to work at NALR and invited me to help introduce his music at an NPM in Detroit. Tom brought in to the sessions a former college roommate of his from Manhattanville College in New York, a fellow named Stacy Widelitz. Tom wanted Stacy to play synthesizers in place of a lot of “real” instruments, and among his keyboards Stacy had brought a state-of-the-art synth called an Emulator, which boasted a wide range of beautifully sampled orchestral and rock instruments. I had written a setting of the 19th century text “Save the People,” or “The People’s Anthem” by Ebenezer Elliott, a contemporary of Charles Dickens, that had also been used in Godspell. I had imagined the accompaniment as a woodwind quartet. Stacy played the flute, bassoon, and oboe parts separately on the Synergy, and we were all amazed at the authenticity of the sound, especially when a "real" instrument or two was added into the mix. Stacy had played an Oberheim OB-8 during the sessions.

I was new to the whole synth scene, but like everyone else had been amazed by the use of the Mellotron by the Moody Blues and other bands since the 1970s. Wendy (nee Walter) Carlos had made synths mainstream with recordings like Switched On Bach, Vangelis had a huge pop hit with the soundtrack from Chariots of Fire that featured synth as well. Tom's interest in using computers to arrange and sequence music got me mildly interested for a while, but his expertise showed up in his use of sequencing in some of his liturgical music, which was always surprising and energetic to me. I went to a workshop on the Synergy system, that Carlos had used for his performances, but the price aside, the recording studio metaphor that computer recording was based on just eluded me, and I was happy to cede all that to Tom and later to Gary in our work together. 

But this whole lead-in is oriented toward the first song on the record: “Song of the Chosen.” This was a setting of Psalm 33 I had written on a private retreat at my former high school seminary. It found its way into later editions Glory and Praise hymnals and is still in the 3rd Edition, and was in Gather Comprehensive, the 1989 reboot of the Gather series published by GIA. "Song of the Chosen" had an energetic refrain, “We are God’s chosen people, we are saints. We are God’s work of art, signed and set apart: let us sing!” Later, I added the refrain, “Happy the people you have chosen, chosen to be for you alone,” so that the psalm could be used on Trinity Sunday and the RCIA Rite of Acceptance. This later refrain was featured when we re-recorded the song with alternate verses on our 1996 recording, Cries of the Spirit, Volume 2.

Stacy was experimenting with synth pads on the song, and had an idea to start the music before the downbeat with an upward-moving “portamento,” an effect that slides the tone of a note or chord upward smoothly, to land on the opening piano chords as the rhythm starts. It sounds incredibly eighties, but makes me smile every time I listen back to it. (If you haven't already done so, listen to the beginning of the SoundCloud track above.)

We wouldn't be able to afford Stacy any more, I’m sure: he went on to co-write the song “She’s Like the Wind” with the late Patrick Swayze for the movie Dirty Dancing, and did music for Beverly Hills 90210 and other television and movie scores. 

"Song of the Chosen (Psalm 33)" was, when I wrote it, an attempt to write a song that would help me and others to sing into being a belief in ourselves as God’s beloved children, God’s “work of art,” against the sometimes prevailing thought of ourselves as rejected and sinful. This may be less so now, but it was a strong current in popular pre-V2 Catholicism, and as a songwriter I just wanted to offer a way, out of scripture, that might present a way out of that mindset. The refrain comes from 1 Peter 2:9 and Ephesians 2:10, combining the ideas of the chosen and the saints (Peter) and God’s work of art (Ephesians), while the verses are a metric paraphrase of almost all of Psalm 33. 

The record Do Not Fear to Hope was on cassette and vinyl, and was never digitized, but I did have a friend at St. Anne's, Mark Karney, at whose studio most of our albums since 1995 (including Cries of the Spirit Volume 2) were recorded, digitize the vinyl for me so I’d have a copy.The SoundCloud track above from “Song of the Chosen” was digitized that way.

In those days, I was using the Jerusalem Bible for most of my work, and it was an approved translation in the US, with its own lectionary. Admittedly too, I wasn't sensitized yet to the way the use of the divine name (Yahweh) being used in public prayer can be insensitive to some. As one friend of mine put it, "It's like repeating a joke you don't get." Over the years, I've changed the original text which used "Yahweh" like the Jerusalem Bible did to more generally acceptable terms.

Song of the Chosen (Psalm 33)

words and music by Rory Cooney

We are God's chosen people,

We are the saints.

We are God's work of art,

Signed and set apart:

Let us sing! 

1. Rejoice, you saints, in God, for praise from you is right;
Music makers, sing by play, and play with all your might!
Sing God a new song, play well upon your strings,
For God loves truth and righteousness, God's word does wondrous things. 

2. God's kindness fills the world, whose word the heaven forms,
Whose singing mouth, to north and south, as spoken stars and storms,
Whose might forbids the waves to trespass on the land,
And gathers all the oceans up to cup them in a hand,
Who gathers all the oceans up to cup them in a hand. 

3. God speaks and it is done, whose word existence gives,
So let the world its God revere, and hear the One-Who-Lives.
Your wondrous plan, O God, is known to you alone,
And happy is the people you have chosen for your own. 

4. From heaven, God looks down upon all humankind,
God knows the dwellers of our globe, and probes the heart and mind.
No, none escapes the glance of God who reigns on high:
No secret can creation keep on earth or sea or sky,
No secret can creation keep on earth of sea or sky. 

5. No king is safe from death, though armies guard him well;
No warrior armed and mounted strong can long escape from hell.
But see! The eyes of God look earthward west and east
To snatch the poor from famine's thrall, and call them to the feast. 

6. So wait upon the one who is our help and shield.
Rejoice, you saints, to sing the Name. Proclaim God's might revealed.
May your blessings fall upon us all our days.
We hope in you, we trust in you. To you be endless praise.
We hope in you, we trust in you. To you be endless praise. 

Copyright © 1985, 1989, 1996 OCP, Portland Oregon. All rights reserved. 

Alternate refrains:
1. Happy the people you have chosen, chosen to be for you alone.
2. Lord, let your mercy be upon us; we place our trust in you.
Lord, let your mercy be upon us; we place our trust in you.

SongStories 52: This Very Morning (GIA, 1998, "This Very Morning")

Sometimes people ask me what my favorite song I've written is. There are a lot of answers to that question. My favorite answer is, "the next one." The truest answer is, "whichever one I hear people singing really well." But another answer is that there are a few songs where I think the words and music fit together really, really, well, and both words and music represent about the best that I can do. One song like that is "The Wilderness Awaits You," which was on our Today album. Another is "Let Us Go to the Altar of God," from Christ the Icon, and I think I'd include the title song of that album too. "To You Who Bow" is another, and there are others. I never publish anything that I think is less than the best I can do at the time, but some just stand out for me. This may sound weird, but I sometimes will be singing it, or hearing people sing it with me, and I'll think, "I don't know how I did this. I don't know where this came from. How did it happen?" There's a sense, and by no means do I mean this is infallible or not completely subjective, that it's better than I am, that I literally "outdid myself," because I can't trace its origin.

One song like that is "This Very Morning," which is a song we use in the Easter season, especially as we approach the feast of Pentecost. The song was commissioned by Fr. Stanley Szcapa, a priest friend of mine from my years working on Remembering Church institutes (or "The Reconciling Community") with the North American Forum on the Catechumenate, for his 25th anniversary of ordination in 1996. (Wow! Stan, that means you're just 3 years away from 50 now! I guess the "ad multos annos" superscription worked!) The date of his anniversary was on Pentecost, so I wanted to pull together the Easter season with some Pentecost imagery that would embody what in the Forum we used to call the "Pentecost perspective," a way of looking at the paschal mystery from the perspective of mission, the outward impetus of the Holy Spirit.

The paschal mystery calls us to see everything through Easter eyes. Everything that ever was is present to God right now, and so the story of God told through us, told through the revelation of scripture, told through creation, is all one story that helps us understand who we are and give us hope and momentum as we struggle to learn to love better in a world that is often nothing less than hostile to love. The presence of God, the reign of God, is here right now, this very day, this very morning. God made this day, this moment, as God made every day and moment. Here's how I did that, in stanza one, for instance:

As though this breeze were born of hovering wings,
As though this singing were the breath of God,
As though this world were wet from recent birth,
As though these thankful tongues were all the tongues of earth,
As though our eyes were lit by tongues of fire,
As though on clover paths God spoke our name,
As though a slave awoke in freedom's light,
As though from death a dream might leap as day from night,
Let us rejoice! This very morning,
This is the day that God has made: Let us rejoice now! (1)

I wanted to express this in a way that suggested the past, the present and the future were all in one moment, so I used the phrase "as though" at the beginning of each image that suggests a scriptural moment, so that each verse is constructed, "As though..., as though..., as though..., Let us rejoice! This very morning, this is the day that God has made. Let us rejoice now!" So the first line of the stanza above suggests that "this breeze" that we feel now might come from the wings of Pentecost; this singing might be God's breath, and this singing might somehow be all people everywhere. Each line refers to a reality that has been, or might be possible, carried with us in this present moment.

As though all chaos hushed at God's command,
As though earth's bounty might be shared by all,
As though from human sin a promise bloomed,
As though we wept, and saw though tears an empty tomb,
As though no power might hold God's own in thrall,
As though no human grip could grasp and hold,
As though a king could fear a baby's cry,
As though a god might hang a strongbow in the sky,
Let us rejoice! This very morning,This is the day that God has made: Let us be glad now!
As though a God might kneel to wash our feet,
As though new wind and flame might rout our fear,
As though a gift were given for every need,
As though this bread we break might all creation feed,
Let us rejoice! This very morning,This is the day that God has made: Let us be glad now! (1)

I set the music of "This Very Morning" to a simple hymn tune, with just unison choir with a soprano descant, in order to make participation as immediate as possible. Each four-line stanza has the same tune, with the eight-bar refrain happening three times. Lifting the final half-stanza by a half tone would, I hope, inspire some to take up the strain with a little more gusto. In a sense, you'd better, because the refrain ends on the highest note in the song, so unless you're going to cheat, you'd better belt.

Just because these songs make me, in a way, feel like a stranger to my own work, doesn't mean that I'm not grateful for the opportunity and the task of creating them. So many influences on my life over a lot of years made songwriting possible for me: certainly the music and poetry of others, the love I've experienced in family and friends, the expertise of teachers and mentors, the gifts and opportunities I've been given and the impetus and urgency to share them. I feel like I must be doing what I'm supposed to be doing, for better or worse, because so often it's as though these things happen not because of me, but through me. The good they are comes from above, any weakness or flaws or unworthiness are my own. I'm surprised, humbled, and delighted by the mystery of it. And I'm grateful for those who have taken risks to support me, publish and distribute my songs, and especially grateful for the affirmation and love of those who sing them, especially Gary Daigle and my wife Terry Donohoo, and my wonderful choir friends now and through the years. Thank you all. What a wondrous journey it has been, and continues to be.

This Very Morning. More information at GIA Publications. 



(1) Copyright © 1998 GIA Publications, Inc. 7404 South Mason Avenue, Chicago IL 60638.
All rights reserved. Used with permission.

SongStories 51: God Is Love (GIA, 2013 "Gathered for God," 2017 "To You Who Bow")

You can only sit through so many weddings before you start listening again to the scriptures. Once you start understanding that St. Paul is writing a letter to a church that has a real problem, writing to people whom he loves with a great passion for them and for the gospel, that he wants them to stop arguing about who is the best, or the holiest, or who’s in charge, who ought to be leading, and wants them to start seeing that it’s quite possible to see signs of God’s action in their church in the way they love each other, it’s not just a “pretty reading” any more, not just words. It’s a way out of hell.

Same with St. John and his vocabulary that we hear both from the letters (1 John) and the gospel during the Easter season. Neither St. John nor St. Paul set out to write texts for weddings, and yet, because love is one, their words resonate with lovers of all kinds. I like to hold those two thoughts, in a sense, in tension and complementarity: married love in all its incarnations, is a pathway and an initiation into agape, to which most of us only aspire most of the time; at the same time, our attraction to the kind of generous love St. Paul speaks of in 1st Corinthians, and to which we are drawn at wedding time, ought to be the way Christians, celibate, married, and everything in between, live in relationship with the whole world, in fact, the whole universe. It's the Golden Rule spelled out for dummies: I want to be loved that way, I want to be loved by God and people patiently, kind, without jealousy, without grudges. Therefore, my path to that love is to surrender in faith to God's love, and practice it on everyone else. For this reason, maybe, we occasionally hear 1 Corinthians 13 at funerals, because the deceased lived in a way that made them an icon of divine love, the kind of love to which we are called by the gospel.

G. K. Chesterton wrote a little book about a hundred years ago called The Four Loves, in which he tries to reintroduce the nuances of the various kinds of love that the Greeks described with different words: eros, storge, philia, and agape. You could include mania too: mania is desire gone askew, so that craving becomes a kind of disease, but he’s mostly interested in healthier kinds of love. Separating these four loves is a little risky, because there are times when some of them are used interchangeably, even in scripture. But for our purposes, eros pertains to different kinds of physical love, storge pertains to affection. The two most often used in the New Testament are philia, which is friendship, particularly close friendship, even within a family, and agape, which is most often used to mean the kind of love God has for us, that is, self-emptying (kenotic) love, love that asks nothing in return, always freely given, no strings attached. When John says, “God is love,” he uses agape. When St. Paul talks about “love is patient, love is kind,” and so on in 1 Cor. 13, he uses agape. You can begin to see that, where Christian love is concerned, whether it’s God’s love for us, ours for God, or ours for each other, it’s agape that is meant. The other loves are pathways to agape. All love flows from the source, God's indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit, who abides in every person because of creation, and more consciously because of membership in Christ.

In the SongStories post about “Heart of a Shepherd”, a song based on John 21: 15-19 as well as Gelineau's setting of Psalm 23, I talk about the way the fourth gospel uses agape and philia in what seems to be a particularly meaningful way. It’s too long to tell here, but the short version would be that in that passage, when Jesus is asking Peter “Do you love me?” and Peter answers him, “You know I love you,” Jesus is asking Peter “Do you agape me?” and Peter answers “I philia you.” That happens twice. Third time, Jesus asks, “Do you philia me?”, making Peter's answer a little easier. Think about that. Since the English translation uses “love” every time, it’s possible that some of the nuance is lost. (You can read the whole story at the link.)

When I sat down to write “God Is Love,” what I wanted to do was pull all of that together so that we’d begin to celebrate that the love that Paul is talking about in the first letter to the Corinthians and the love that John is talking about it 1 John and the gospel are the same. God’s love is patient, kind, doesn’t put on airs, never wishes the other harm, doesn’t brood over injury. Paul says that we can do all kinds of good deeds, but without love, that is, the desire to give ourselves for the other, the desire for the good of the other before our own, it means nothing. And Paul understands that God already loves like that. So the chorus of my song uses the words of St. John, “God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God in them.” There is only one love, and it is the very life of God, shared with utter generosity, poured out on the whole world. The verses sing the words of St. Paul. In the third verse, it comes together as the choir sings “God is love,” and the cantor sings, “Love is ever patient,” and the word “Love” overlaps, so that we begin to hear “God/Love is ever patient,” “God/Love is always kind,” and so on.

To You Who Bow is, in many ways, a record of my wrestling with these ideas over the last couple of decades. The title song, along with "O Agape", "Gathered and Sent," "Turn Around," and "God Is Love," all struggle to imagine someone like me learning to do, for the other 167 hours of the week, what I sing about for an hour on Sunday. My world would sure be different if I could manage that. What if twelve Christians could? Or seventy-two? Or a billion?

God Is Love words and music by Rory Cooney 

God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God in them.

God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God in them.

All our works are nothing—tongues of earth and angels

Only clashing cymbals without love.

All our words are nothing—prophecy and science,

Faith to face the lions

Without love is nothing at all. (refrain)

If I give the needy all of my possessions?

Just a loud distraction without love. 

If I give my body boldly as a witness,

Call myself a Christian,

Without love I’m nothing at all.  (refrain)

(God is love.) Love is every patient,

(God is love.) Love is always kind.

(God is love.) Love is never jealous,

(God is love.) Love never fails.

(God is love.) Love is not rude.

(God is love.) Love endures all things.

(God is love.) Love is ever hopeful.

(God is love.) Love, love will never fail. 

God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God in them.

God is love, and those who live in love live in God, and God in them.

God is love. God is love.

Copyright © 2013 GIA Publications. All rights reserved. 

Available on the recording To You Who Bow, from GIA Publications.