Chant Café

You’ve no doubt seen the video or heard the story about the priest who sang Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah!” at a wedding.

Praytell blog makes a good point and asks a thoughtful question.

On Facebook, I have many friends who are liturgists, music ministers, youth ministers, and clergy. There, I’ve noticed that those who are liturgists mostly cannot stand what this priest did in the video. Those who are youth ministers tend to be much more enthusiastic about this. Music ministers and clergy seem to be on both sides. Yet most all agree that the priest has a lovely voice and sang this song very well. And almost everyone I know loves the original song by Leonard Cohen.

I’ve already tried to explain to my Facebook friends why this is not an example of good liturgy. But the arguments I hear back from those who are overjoyed at what this priest did are not about what constitutes good liturgy but about what brings joy to the assembly. I lament that we’ve gotten to the point where for some, “good liturgy” equals joyless liturgy.

The social media conversation around this video is very telling. Liturgists (myself included) have not done ourselves or others any good by beating people over the head with rubrics. Yet rubrics do have value, as does human emotion. How can we bridge the divide?

So, without recourse to “It’s against the rules,” what is a helpful way of explaining why this is so inappropriate?

Well- I think you have to toss out all the liturgical explanations, and questions of style, or even questions about secular music in church in order to get at the root of it. Those things are all important, but the atrocity being committed here is much deeper than that, I think.

Let’s even lay aside questions about the theology of the song (which is a bit sketchy), since people don’t tend to care about that sort of thing (and God can withstand stupid things being said about Him).

The first big problem is that the wedding liturgy is about the couple, not the priest. (It’s about God, first. But, whatever, right?) The singing drew attention away from the couple and directed it toward the priest. This is selfish and narcissistic, and robbed the couple of what is rightfully theirs.

Priests tend to forget how a wedding functions in the life of the couple. For a priest – he may preside at hundreds or possibly thousands of weddings in his lifetime. A couple gets married only once. It doesn’t matter if the priest is bored, or has heard all the prayers before, or has to do this same thing again tomorrow. Each wedding is a unique event in the life of a couple, and a priest should not impose his own personality onto that.

Which brings me to the second point, the really disturbing one.

In singing this song in particular, the priest is not just intruding on the wedding celebration, but is intruding on the couple’s relationship. If the song has little meaning for them, the intrusion is only annoying. If it has real meaning to them (which, according to the social media advocates of this nonsense, it does for many many people), the intrusion is profoundly disturbing, even creepy.

Does anyone listen to lyrics anymore?!

It’s really a profoundly moving song, but its not even remotely appropriate to a wedding. It’s about the ways that lovers hurt each other and the glory that can be found even in that pain.

Love is a lot of things, including sometimes a cold and broken “hallelujah.” But a wedding is specifically about the “victory march” of love.

Because of its focus on the private aspect of love (hidden pain and secret joy), and not the public aspect (celebration) it is a remarkably intimate song, with the speaker of the song addressing it to his (or her, I guess) lover.

From a liturgical standpoint, you could fault the lyrics for their vagueness. But that misses the point. The mystifying and pseudo-biblical imagery allows any couple with a shared history to write their own meaning into it, to put fleshy details into the cosmic and romantic poetry. Any couple who finds this song specifically meaningful has a meaning in it that is unique to them.

It is really beyond inappropriate for a priest to publicly insert himself that way into a couple’s private story, taking on the vocal role of one of the lovers. Honestly, it creeps me out a bit, and makes me wonder about that priest’s personal life and his own private longings and struggles in a way that the public should not ever be privy to.

More than a violation of rubrics or good taste or even theology, it is a violation of the sacred rites and private stories that bind lovers together, like a confused idiot stumbling unaware upon two people sharing their first kiss, and not knowing enough that he should turn back around and let them be.

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EDIT
The priest apparently did not sing the original text of the song. I didn’t know this because I honestly could not bring myself to listen to it.

The problem with that is that everyone already knows the original lyrics. The song is embedded into our culture, and the story that we each associate with it- whatever that story is – cannot be separated out just by making it more “optimistic.”

Either the song is meaningless to the couple, in which case there’s no point in doing it, or the song has meaning to them, in which case this is an intrusion into their story. Changing the lyrics just makes it worse. And, since the priest didn’t ask the couple ahead of time, or give them any indication it was going to happen, he had NO IDEA whether the song was meaningful or not to them, no sense of whether he may have been intruding.

The people who advocate a “liberal/progressive” (for lack of a better term – I know it’s not a good term) liturgical paradigm, and/or the people who promote creative adaptations to liturgy and bemoan adherence to rubrics, those people tend to scream about sensitivity, about personalization, about the needs and longings of the individuals. This event, and all events like it, are contrary to all those values. It is ham-handed and awkward. The couple in the video may have been delighted, but the next couple may be appalled, embarrassed, hurt, or just annoyed.

It isn’t the violation of rubrics and theology that primarily bothers me. It is the potential violation of the couple’s relationship that I find so appalling.

For the last two USCCB meetings, no proposal from the floor has received less support from the bishops than any suggestion that the recent translation of the Roman Missal should be reviewed or challenged in any way.

The most recent tiresome proposal from a liturgist suggests that only the presidential prayers–admittedly the most challenging aspect of the translation–be changed from the current translation, to an earlier, completely inadequate work of ICEL.

The reason it was inadequate had very little to do with syntax, something to do with vocabulary, and everything to do with theology, and specifically the theology of the presence of God.

The world has very little faith in the presence of God on earth, and since 1973, there has been precious little in the English-language prayers of the Mass that would challenge this prevailing view. There is much presence-specific language in the Latin of the prayers, however, and this is adequately rendered in the 2011 translation of the Missal.

Two major soteriological moments follow directly from the presence of God.

• Divine help is an intimate, ongoing gift.
• This help is powerful to change people, making their actions, although limited, truly meritorious.

One of the major reforms of the new translation is a recovery of the expression of both this sense of the presence of God, and of these two results of God’s presence that mean so much in our daily lives: help, and transformation.

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In the collect for the First Sunday of Advent, for example, the 1998 working group completely failed to adequately render the “help” aspect or the “merit” aspect of the collect. The prayer’s very first word is “give,” “Da.” The word “give” does not occur in the 1998 draft. Instead, the word “strengthen” is used:

Almighty God, strengthen the resolve

Whereas the 2011 correctly renders the sense of absolute gift:

Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,

According to the draft of 1998, God helps us, some. This inadequate prayer asks God to strengthen what is already there, as though we had any good–any being–beyond what God our Creator gives us. The truth is that all that we are, God gives us, beginning with our very existence. Certainly the resolutions of our will are God’s gifts to us. We are not self-standing beings sending a memo to tell God to help us, some. We are ourselves God’s gift to us. “Every gift and every perfect gift is from above.”

There are other problems in this first section of the collect, including a major inaccuracy of the basic surface meaning of the text, but as I will emphasize again, in my opinion the key improvement of the 2011 translation concerns presence, and what follows: help, and merit.

Regarding the divine help, we are a Church that begins every hour of the Office by asking God’s assistance to even begin praying. The 1998 draft definitely changed the wording of this prayer in this important aspect of theology.

***

Likewise, the 1998 draft omits the word “merit,” a key soteriological expression, and unavoidable in any accurate translation. Like the opening “Da,” it is just there, right in the prayer, inarguably. But the 1998 draft changes this precise theological term to the rather proforma image of “calling”:

he may call us to sit at his right hand

Whereas the 2011 again gets the translation pretty much right; although frankly I would prefer the clarity of the theological word “merit,” it might fly pretty much over peoples’ heads, and the word “worthy” is rather striking here and might well hit home to the worshipper. Me, worthy? Could this happen to me? Yes. And it is about time we as Catholics remembered the promises of our religion.

gathered at his right hand,

Personally I think merit is such an important category that once I wrote a rather silly song to make it even more accessible than the above. It’s written to be sung to the tune of the old Frank Sinatra song Love and Marriage:

Grace and merit, grace and merit,
God’s so great He just can’t wait to share it,
‘Specially with His mother; you can’t have one without the other.

Grace and merit, grace and merit,
The cross is heavy but you’ll have to bear it.
Let me tell you, brother: you can’t have one without the other.

Try, try, try to separate them. It’s an illusion.
Try, try, try, and you will only add to the confusion.

Grace and merit, grace and merit:
It’s a legacy we may inherit,
With the blessed mother. You can’t have one. It’s just not done. You can’t have one without the other.

***

Note how extrinsic the 1998 draft made God to the whole salvation process, as the one who “calls” us into heaven–a sentiment completely missing from the Latin text. Yes, the calling of God as to one outside His kingdom is an important moment of the life of grace, but that is not the kind of moment that the collects are about. We are already God’s faithful, in the prayer. God’s presence to us–actually, in us, by the sanctifying grace of Baptism–is certainly a strange doctrine. But it is true, and our liturgical prayers should go all the way. They should express the full boldness of our radically hopeful faith.

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Update: Rev. Mr. Dr. Fritz Bauerschmidt faults the above for using just one collect as an example. I should mention that it is simply the collect mentioned in the blogpost to which I’m responding here. In other words, it’s from my point of view a random example–and yet it doesn’t surprise me to find the theological problem in it, because that problem is pervasive throughout the draft translation.

The aesthetic issue he raises is another matter, and frankly I believe that the 2011 translation is much more beautiful and reflective, much more reposed, than either the draft or the 1973. I wonder if it sounds foreign because we are used to a certain rather assumed style, formed as our ears have been for forty years of desert living. But that is another issue.

Not sure how we at the Café missed this at the time, but a couple of years ago, a very large study was undertaken, involving 9,016 Episcopalian congregation members, 2,575 clergy, and 1,139 music directors, representing 3,060 congregations, as well as 55 bishops and 102 seminarians.

The subject? Revising the 1982 hymnal.

As this article explained, those of us involved in parish music at the ground level will not be surprised by one of the elements of the survey. Young people are much less likely to want the hymnal to be revised. This pattern holds even more true for those clergy who are 29 and younger.

A quick glance at the charts throughout the study shows that music directors generally value new music much, much more than their congregations do, including the wide variety of contemporary styles such as worship, multicultural, and praise music.

One of the study’s conclusions:

Perhaps most significantly, there is no pattern in which youth correlates with a particular movement towards new forms of musical expression. To revise the Hymnal must in some way be a project that is a gift to the next generation. Gaining some clearer sense of what the worship music of that generation will look like will require a longer and more careful period of discernment.

The entire report is certainly worth reading!

 Thanks to Michelle Klima

Wyoming Catholic College in Lander, Wyoming, seeks a full-time chaplain to care for souls at our growing institution. We are a faithfully Catholic college that combines a classical Great Books liberal arts education with an innovative outdoor leadership program. The College places at the center of its campus life the reverent and beautiful celebration of the liturgy in both forms of the Roman Rite. In keeping with the teaching and example of recent popes, liturgies and devotions are celebrated in a manner that stresses continuity with Tradition, with treasures such as Latin and Gregorian chant widely employed.

The College has a well-established program of sacred music. Each Sunday there is a Missa Cantata in the usus antiquior, with the schola chanting the full propers and the choir providing polyphony and hymnody. The choir also sings at the Wednesday all-school Mass and the schola provides chant for daily Masses. The chaplain should therefore be comfortable with chanting the parts of the Mass proper to the priest.

The chaplain’s duties include offering Mass in both Forms of the Roman Rite, hearing confessions daily, conducting spiritual direction, presiding at Benediction, organizing and leading processions, and promoting other devotions from time to time, in keeping with the liturgical year. To serve this community well, he should be energetic in working with young people, ready to preach in a way pertinent to students’ needs, and comfortable with offering spiritual direction. Interest in outdoor adventures (hiking, camping, rock climbing, kayaking, canyoneering, skiing, etc.) is a definite plus, but not absolutely required.

The chaplaincy is intended to run all year long, with a lighter summer schedule. The College employs two chaplains in order to allow one or the other to go on outdoor trips or personal trips as well as to have appropriate time off. The incoming chaplain would join our current chaplain.

If interested, or to ask any questions you may have, please contact Dr. Kevin Roberts, President (kevin.roberts@wyomingcatholiccollege.com). For more information on the College itself, please visit the website.