The Recovering Choir Director

I have paged past the song.

Don’t recall the melody but the words are, I don’t know the right word, “dippy” maybe.

It is as if the editors wanted it to be a thick, impressive, substantial looking hymnal, but didn’t have the time or inclination to really look at what they included.

I know every hymnal has its share of dross, often the work of the editors (the St Gregory was not immune from this problem), but it is clear from the content of the hymnal itself that the editors of Gather were not Catholic, and in some cases, not really musicians.

“even more of the hymnal will seem jarringly, even grotesquely, out of place at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”

I asked the Faith Formation teacher at our parish community if she really thought “Hally, Hally, Hally” and some other slap-happy tunes she was promoting to perform with the 7th graders were appropriately solemn for use at the re-presentation of Our Lord’s death on Calvary.

She thought the question was unreasonable.

Apparantly, that’s not what the Mass is for her.

Scherza, we are sisters! (Although I suspect I am old enough to be your mother.)
What is to be done?
Who are the unfeeling lunatics who think that these giddy mediocrities are a suitable aural underpinning to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Bloodless re-presentation of Christ’s Sacrificial death on the Cross at Calvary?
I am in the process of helping plan music for a mission, and there is a woman on the planning committee who keeps reiterating the need for, I quote precisely, ” a nice, peppy Kyrie.”

At the first meeting, I though she was joking.

“Peppy.”

(A nice, bouncy, glib, insincere apology, is all it brings to mind.)

Sheer luck, I assumed we would be forced to sing “Ashes” for Ash Wednesday, and signals were crossed as to who was xeroxing the ‘wordsheets,” so no one had the words. We made due with “There is a Wideness in God’s Mercy.”

I have learned that elementary school children pick up chant easily (they aren’t the hide-bound “conservatives” their teen-aged siblings have become, or the absolutely fossilized reactionaries their aging baby-boomer Religious Ed teachers are, who can conceive of singing nothing for Mass other than the pop pap they have had for the past few decades,) and further, that they like it.

They learned Jesu Dulcis in Latin and in two different English versions in less than a half hour.
In a few decades we may have this musical mess straightened out, but it is slow going.