The Recovering Choir Director

It’s always a shock to me when it comes time to plan for Lent.  It seems as if we suffer the double insult of Christmas getting away from us and Lent coming too quickly.  I always resent this, until I start sinking my teeth into the work.

There is something authentic about Lent, something that resists and even thwarts the self-righteous caterwauling of the preacher under the big top.  To that end, this season is not only needed for each man’s personal renewal, but also for the cleansing of religious communities in general.  It helps us to realize that we are all bird brains, and it helps others to realize that the truest Christians are not the self-congratulatory ones—which is not to say, of course, that doom and gloom “I am a worm and no man” grandstanding is the way to go, either.  I have to say that I would take a good Lent over almost any other time of year.  Maybe it fits my introspective character; perhaps I’m just a masochist.

Every year, I have something of a pattern of hymns that I follow, and it is based more on seasonal than on scriptural considerations.  I split the season into three parts:  early Lent, Laetare Sunday, and Passiontide.  In early Lent I tend to pick music that is about…..Lent.  One of my favorite English hymns in this category is Lord, Who throughout these forty days.   I was looking at this hymn the other day when I had something of a flashback to my childhood, to the early 1980′s in a church-in-the-round built by a decent but low-church Monsignor, who took the brunt of jokes that the bell tower looked like a grain elevator.

When my family first moved into this parish—let’s call it St. Hilarious—the music director was a gentle old lady.  Even in those days, she was ancient; I’d be shocked to find out that she’s still with us.  She was no Virgil Fox, but she could play a hymn, and she could pick good hymns, and her no-nonsense assistant who played on Saturday nights was just as solid.  (He played for my parents’ wedding—some years before, as you would hope—and I remember listening to the tape and being impressed, even as a youngster.)  Salt of the earth people were these.  In these times, the parish repertoire consisted mainly of four-square hymns.  The pews were filled with the old People’s Mass Book and the missalette.  No, I wouldn’t use these books if my life depended on it, but they were better than what was to come later, and at the time they contained enough solid hymns around which to build a tolerable, if less than perfect, repertoire.

It was in this milieu that I first became familiar with Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days.  And so the other day, I played through it and was flooded with memories, and a shiver went up my spine.  I recalled how people used to sing and lamented at how their mouths fell silent over the fifteen years that followed.  I remembered the Stations of the Cross, and the way forty old men in those days (as if it’s that long ago!) could put 100 of today’s men to shame.  They sang well, too, and they didn’t expect to become famous for it.  I remember one Good Friday, spotting one of the older Knights of Columbus (who reminded me of “Norm” from Cheers) in the parish across the church, belting out Were You There (again, not perfect but it is authentic music from an authentic culture) with all his heart, and it shook me.  What makes people sing like that? These were days when communal singing still arguably existed.  These days you’re lucky to have such experiences on Christmas Eve.

Then came a new parochial vicar, who installed Glory and Praise hymnals in the pews alongside the other materials.  They were used sparingly for awhile, but then another parochial vicar came, along with Sister Sidekick.  (We had a better nickname for her as children but it would give away too much information about her identity to share it.) In this mix was also a new parish musician.  Slowly but surely, the repertoire shifted, and pretty soon we no longer heard Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days, but Ashes instead.  (My brother and I really had fun with that one once we were old enough to use early Anglo-Saxon words in the house, if you catch my drift.)    We went from singing about heroism and sacrifice to singing about dust.

And then the singing stopped.  People crossed their arms and protested quietly.  The size of the choir shrank.  Others began attending the early Mass to avoid the music entirely.  In a way, it was a miracle that all this took as long as it did.  It was the late 1980′s by this point—a solid twenty five years or more after the appearance of the first hootenanny Mass.  Being off the beaten path had its advantages.  Every now and then, an old standard would be sung, and the people picked up their hymnals again, but the lesson was never learned by the myopic people in charge.  One of the co-conspirators even made the disparaging remark once that all those parishes in the coal regions are “fifteen years behind where we are.”  I thought to myself that maybe they actually still sang at Mass.

Now, I am not suggesting that the music at St. Hilarious Parish was ever perfect.  But those People’s Mass Book days exhibited signs of good health.  There is more to this story, of course, than a couple of baby-faced priests who were eager to implement what their seminary professors taught them, but we’d be fools to underestimate the deleterious effects of yanking an entire repertoire out from under the feet of a parish.  These men, though I’m sure they meant well, accomplished exactly the opposite of what they set out to do.  This gives me pause, because as a perfectionist, I can sometimes undo my best efforts by insisting on more than what’s possible.  I try to keep this in mind every time someone asks for Mass VIII, which I personally wouldn’t miss if I never heard it again.

I have a friend in a faraway place.  He comes to Philadelphia from time to time, and we usually sit down to chat over dinner at some point.  He goes to church every week when he’s home, but he’s not sure what he believes.  So why does he go to church?  ”I think it’s important to sing with other people,” he says.  He also says that music makes him feel closer to the Divine.  Isn’t that incredible and wonderful?  Boethius said, more or less, that music takes the fractured pieces of our souls and puts them back together again.  That is how important music is.  For this reason, I do not side with the Catholic fundamentalists who sneer at those who come to church “just because” of the music, nor do I blame people for running away for the same reason.  In light of my friend’s input, we can see just how destructive our foray into musical experimentalism has been.  I’m not saying that Ashes destroyed the parish, but I do think that sometimes there’s no harm in sticking with the tried and true.

It is difficult to know where to go from here, but maybe that is a good thing.  If there is any lesson from the debacle at St. Hilarious, it’s that programs and long-range plans and all manner of chin-scratching really gets us nowhere.  We are in a kind of dark night, in which it is hard to see, and the way out will make itself apparent slowly, over a long period of time, and it is unlikely that there is anything any of us can do to hurry this process along.  Not to understand this is to repeat the mistakes of those young, idealistic parochial vicars.