Here are two of my favorite pieces of spiritual music.
Orphan Train by Julie Miller on her album Broken Things
If I Give My Soul by Billie Joe Shaver on Tramp on Your Street:
Down a dangerous road,i have come to where i’m standing
With a heavy heart,and my hat clutched in my hand
Such a foolish fool,God ain’t known no greater sinner
I have come in search of Jesus,hoping he will understand
I had a woman once,she was kind and she was gentle
Had a child by me,who grew up to be a man
I had a steady job,til i started into drinking
And i started making music that went with the devil’s band
Oh the years flew by like a mighty rush of eagles
My dreams and plans were all scattered in the wind
It’s a lonesome life,when you lose the ones you live for
If i make my peace with Jesus will they take me back again
If i give my soul,will he cleanse these clothes i’m wearin’
If i give my soul,will he put new boots on my feet
If i bow my head and beg God for his forgiveness
Will he breathe new breath inside me and give back my dignity
If i give my soul,will he stop my hands from shaking
If i give my soul,will my son love me again
If i give my soul,and she knows i really mean it
If i give my soul to Jesus will she take me back again
So, take a listen if you care to, and let me know what you think:
Can we sing these for Communion meditation next week?
Entrance? Exit? Er…processional? Recessional?
Oh, no?
Why not?
They’re religious – they mention God. Well, the second one does. The Julie Miller isn’t explicit, but the metaphor’s pretty clear.
Please?
What? The jangly, country rocking might not be everyone’s cup of tea?
Oh, that’s just a matter of taste. I’m the Music Director this week, and they’re meaningful to me, so we’re doing them.
No, it’s usually not as bad as that anymore (as my husband and I travel, and he cruises through radio stations, how many times during a trip do we hear a song, look at each other, and say, “Yeah, we heard that at Mass in 1971″….”?) but what my little exercise is (poorly) designed to show is when anything goes liturgically…anything goes. And although there are many discussions out there in the pastoral musician world about what is appropriate for Mass and what is not, almost all of those discussions come down to a matter of taste, and then what we end up with in parishes is a Dictatorship of the Music Director’s Taste and Preferences, all in the name of earnest assertions that liturgy is the “work of the people” (a mistranslation anyway) and that it is perfectly fine and probably for the best that the music at Mass reflect the local culture, even though what the “local culture” of St. Suburbia might be is an open question, perhaps settling on a weird mix of Avril Lavigne, Celine Dion and Carrie Underwood.
For most of us, even if we don’t have a Litergicle Edukashun, that seems to us instinctually not quite right. We can think of lots of music that we love, that we listen to at home or in the car, that we play ourselves, that moves us, that is either explicitly or implictly spiritual, and that might even quote Scripture, but thinking of it played at Mass strikes us as ridiculous.
So….keep walking with that thought. If that pop/folky/rocky music doesn’t quite fit the Mass…does other pop/folky/rocky music fit..even if it’s published by OCP?
I really can’t go much farther than that, because I”d have to get to the point of discussing the contemporary liturgical music that does, indeed, use more of traditional Catholic liturgical musical language, but is also clearly contemporary (and there is more of than that you’d know from what you hear in a typical parish), and that level of music discussion – of making and explaining those distinctions and shadings – is frankly beyond me.
But I’m just trying to get into the everlasting Catholic Music Discussion from a slightly different angle – by working backwards, as it were, from things that strike us as obviously unsuitable, and thinking about why that is.
What remains deeply striking to me, as I continue to read about liturgical music discussions, especially in the past month since the MP was issued and, the following week, the National Conference of Pastoral Musicians met in Indianapolis, is the divide that exists, but doesn’t have to. This divide wouldn’t be so deep if everyone would start from the same page – that same page being the foundational documents about liturgy and music that the Church gives us (this pamphlet from the Church Music Association of America is a good intro – pdf file.)
But unfortunately, there’s a substantial, established, majority cohort of folks involved in liturgy who do all they do – from the diocesan to the parish level – with either the most cursory knowledge of what those documents say or the determination to ignore them in favor of paradigms manufactured by the academics, professional groups and publishers that have come to define the shape of liturgy over the past forty years. When you actually start digging into those documents – you might be stunned by what you find and the distance, willfully measured out, between what you experience and what the function and shape of music within the Catholic Mass is supposed to be.
(As I say over and over, if you want to see it correctly practiced, you best chances are at Mass at a monastery. And then what you do is you take yourself to an Eastern Rite Divine Liturgy. And then you read over some docs. And then you contemplate a typical Latin Rite Mass at a typical parish. And you go (as I did) “Ah….I get it.” In short: Mass is not a prayer meeting. Prayer meetings are good, but that is not what Mass is, and we don’t bring the same sensibility to it. Or we shouldn’t.)
Things are changing, slowly, but the changes will be far more contentious than they need to be as long as the discussions continue to center on matters of taste and ignore the documents of the Church, and the changes will take far longer than they should as long as bishops continue to either stay out of it or nourish those who want to ignore the Church’s ideal of liturgy by employing them. It is not that hymns should be ditched – of course not – it’s an option. But one would think that every bishop would see as a mandate that he make sure that in at least one church in his diocese (the…er…Cathedral, maybe?) that the ideal be lived out, week after week, in a way that will inspire others to try to reach this ideal themselves. One would think.
At NLM, Jeffrety Tucker had a good post the other day, reminding us of some basics:
I’ve been fielding lots of emails from people who are scrambling to put together a musical program for the 1962 Missal. I’ve noticed several main problems cropping up, and I do plan a series of posts going into detail on these, but let me just quickly sum up the primary mistaken notions:
1) Hymnomania: Many people see the 1962 Missal as a chance to revive the good old hymns from yesteryear that have received such shabby treatment post 1970, and are looking for hymnbooks that can help them. The general thrust of this is a mistake. Hymns are not the musical foundation of the Mass. They are permissible in a recessional song perhaps but the ideal does not include them, even if they won’t entirely disappear in practice. The focus must be on the ordinary chants and the proper chants, and if hymns are used, they should be Latin plainchant for the most part. Let us please not repeat the mistakes of the past. The “four-hymn sandwich” came not with the new form but was inherited from the old form. It was the norm. It continues to be the bane of modern liturgical life, a regrettable gift from days of yore to our own times. Bringing back a lost liturgy should not mean bringing back the mistakes and errors and even abuses of the past. If you are talking only about what hymns you are going to sing, you are on the wrong track.
MORE
And be sure to read the 85 comments, as well – good discussion and practical suggestions.
And remember…if you want to help see this accomplished and aren’t musical yourself, you can always offer to fund a musican, liturgist or priest’s attendance at this or something similar.
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