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Music loving Pro-lifers might want to check out the latest solo album from Iona’s Joanne Hogg, entitled Raphael’s Journey. For those not familiar with Ms. Hogg, she is an angelic-voiced Irish beauty who has been the lead vocalist for the Contemporary Christian band Iona since its inception in 1989. Iona falls into more or less the same genre as bands like Clannad or Eden’s Bridge: playing ethereal, Irish-flavored pop, mixing traditional instruments and themes into the standard rock band ensemble. But when Iona rocks, which is not infrequent, they rock with considerably more gusto than most of the other bands of this sort, and their music is often constructed around Christian themes – and is always edifying and nourishing, even when it isn’t explicitly Christian.

Ms. Hogg’s solo efforts, of which I believe Raphael’s Journey is the third, tend musically toward the softer side, as compared to her band’s music, and are much more explicitly confessional  (her first, Looking Into Light, was in fact a collection of hymns; the second, Personal, essentially a collection of prayers set to music). This album seems to be a gentle, prayerful exploration of Joanne’s journey into the mysteries of motherhood in recent years, during which time she has borne two children. The cover of the economical packaging is focused on an angelic figure, but with a bright but indistinct image of what appears to be a human right arm reaching up from behind the angel’s right shoulder, hand extended skyward. Overall, it is hard to avoid inferring a reference to the most significant literary appearance of the Archangel Raphael, in the Biblical book of Tobit, where Raphael is sent from the throne of God to make a journey with Tobiah, son of Tobit, to heal the sorrows of two pious families through the marriage of Tobiah and Sarah.

Song titles such as Songs from the Womb, Life is Precious, and Dance of the Unborn convey the sensibility of the album, which places the mystery of human life in the heart of our Creator God, and in the hands of those of His creatures whom He has called to manifest His love. As a father, I have to smile at this new mother singing, in her song Lullaby in Colour, of her determination to let her baby sleep, despite the urge to pick him up and hold him – such a scene is truly a microcosm of parenthood on a couple different levels.

The song Life is Precious, placed in the setting of an abortion clinic witness, is a direct plea to women contemplating abortion to respect the integrity of the human being entrusted by God to their care. While there are aspects of the lyrics that rub me the wrong way (e.g. “I’m not standing here in judgment”), Joanne mentions something of enormous import, which rarely seems to get the notice it deserves in the “culture wars” around abortion, when she sings: “I see you in mortal danger” and “This is life and death for you” – referring to the mother she’s addressing, not the child whose own life hangs in the balance on the sidewalk outside the abortuary. The death of an innocent is a terrible thing, but the killing of an innocent truly manifests a deadly savaging of the perpetrators; a spiritual death sentence that too many will never be able to overcome through the grace of repentance and forgiveness.

Although I think there are better songs on the album, Life is Precious stands out for its clarity of purpose, and for the gentle and accurate portrayal of the Pro-Life movement’s most visible – and despised – champions.

Given that, I’ve transcribed here the song’s lyrics, and posted an audio stream. I encourage Pro-Lifers  to purchase the album from the Iona web store, both for your own musical and spiritual edification, and to support the work of these wonderful people:

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Life is Precious

Standing in the rain I’m praying…

Standing in the rain I’m praying…

 

Standing in the rain I’m praying / you’ll come out that door

Give me just a minute of your time / to hear the words that I am saying:

     You are precious

 

I know that you see a stranger / holding words for you to read

I see you in mortal danger / I’m the second thought

     I pray you’ll heed

 

For life is precious, life is given to us

Life is ours to live, but not to take

 

I’m not standing here in judgment / I am here in love,

Pleading for a chance to help you see / there’s another way

     For you are precious

 

This is life and death for you  / but not just you, it’s for another

God made you someone in His image / but he also made a mother 

     Out of you

 

For life is precious, life I given to us

Life is ours to live, but not to take

Life is precious, life is given in love

Life is ours to hold, but not to break

 

Two hearts beating / inside you

Mercy waiting / to hide you

Two voices speaking / inside you

Truth is waiting / to guide you

 

For life is precious, life I given to us

Life is ours to live, but not to take

Life is precious, life is given in love

Life is ours to hold, but not to break

 

Standing in the rain…

Standing in the rain, I’m praying

Standing in the rain, I’m praying

Quote of the Day for Saturday, December 4th, 2010:

Handel and Haydn Society Artistic Director Harry Christophers, from the Conductor’s Notes in the program for this season’s performance of Handel’s Messiah:

When listening to our performance, take note of [librettist Charles] Jennens’ amazing contribution. We need only look back to mediaeval carols where texts take us from Christ’s nativity through to his crucifixion and resurrection but Jennens takes us further – his is a unique journey which takes us from prophecies of Christ’s coming through the Nativity to Christ’s suffering, his resurrection, ascension to the Kingdom of God and finally to that amazing and jubilant epilogue celebrating Christ’s redemption and immortality.

Huh? Such palaver is the price one pays, I suppose, when the chattering class wanders into the sanctuary.

My wife and I yesterday took in, for the first time, the Handel and Haydn Society’s annual performance of the Messiah – their 156th consecutive year of performing it in Boston! H&H is a very talented ensemble, and the performance of guest alto Catherine Wyn-Rogers was memorable, yet I must confess to having had a hard time getting comfortable during much of the show.

I was haunted all night by the probably well-founded suspicion that most of the assembled – of both performers and audience – were engaging this magnificent musical setting of these sacred texts as if it were some kind of fashionably quaint fairy tale, which could just as well have been swapped out for some Italian opera with a snow-elf intoning candy-cane cantatas.

Not surprisingly, good folk complained back in Handel’s day that the theatre was no place for the presentation of such content. I understand the sentiment: I love the piety of the work, but when the presentation substitutes artistic sentimentality for its inherent piety, it is like salt that has lost its flavor.

In one of his many teachings that sounds too offensive to modern ears to be much remembered or mentioned these days, the Lord tells us: "Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you” (Mt 7:6, RSV). Again, that might sound harsh, but it’s self-evident that Christ was actually being charitable, as he, by nature, always is. Offering strange fire has never worked out well for anyone.

I tried to enjoy the concert, and I am still trying to reconcile the experience into a true satisfaction, but I can’t quite escape the sense that the aesthetic magnificence obscured a careless trampling of the Pearl of the Word. What you mean matters more than the aesthetic form of what you render, needless to say.

Staying on my theme of music I listen to on the holy days… I have an Easter morning musical tradition that stretches back a lot further than the 10 years or so I’ve been listening to Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony on Good Friday.

I don’t remember when I started listening to Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans on Easter morning, but it goes well back into my murky pseudo-Christian (proto-Christian?) past, into those pre-Church days when I thought that Christianity was something you believed – maybe even something ontologically transformative – but not something that meant, by necessity, an inescapable belonging to – like an ancestral heritage, but of the Spirit. Well, change we must, as surely time does (to borrow a line from the piece).

The music is a bit of an odd choice to commemorate this highest of Christian holy days, being as it is a musical and poetic reflection on the Shastric Scriptures. Religiously, it falls into the category of cheesy New Age noodling. In rather stark contrast to the flesh and blood realism of a resurrection faith, it meanders through layers of mysticism, mythology, and dualistic struggle.

Still, it’s not a wholly inappropriate choice for the occasion. The work’s final movement is, as principal writer Jon Anderson notes in the album’s liner notes, “about the struggle between sources of evil and pure love” (Ritual), and the other major themes of the work revolve around the irrepressibility of revelation, and of the role of tradition – memory and ancestry – in forming the foundations of culture, which is really just a single word for the experienced reality that forms the canvas of the work’s character.

And the Easter message is, after all, about the triumph of love over evil, though Christianity would see the struggle as one of faith lived out in human history, rather than a cosmic struggle between opposing forces – a view naively supposing that God might have an adversary (therein obliterating the meaning of Godhead in monotheistic religion). Indeed, Christianity has much criticism to offer the essentially agnostic character of this and other eastern religious worldviews, but that should not obscure the significance of the reality that many points of contact make such criticism viable.

All the same, the occasion of Easter morning would warrant a Christologically-ordered musical accompaniment – something that says “we are of the Son,” rather than “we are of the sun.” In that light, I set the piece aside for a couple years or so, trying to either replace it with something more orthodox, or just leaving the music off. But I’ve found that, so far at least, neither tact has worked.

Part of the problem is that none of the Christian music in my collection has the gravitas required to be a soundtrack to Easter morning. I have a couple Masses, and you’d think they might be appropriate, but I’m not looking to hear Mass at home on Easter morning – the time for my listening to Easter morning music is typically after I’ve been to Easter morning Mass, the time when breakfast is being prepared, and served, and the family is relaxing or getting ready for the afternoon. I guess I’m looking for gravitas, but not that much gravitas. And the rest of the music? Well, it’s just … songs, for the most part, and I’m not looking for songs; I’m looking for music.

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Part of the reason Tales works so well in our house on Easter morning is that, while it does explore certain ideas, the lyrical focus is so abstruse as to be virtually meaningless at most points. Particular turns of phrase certainly carry with them images, which together form a kind of patchwork of meaning once or twice removed, so to speak… but the abstractness is so pronounced that the meaning of the work becomes almost wholly malleable in listening to it. In many ways, the words are really just important for their aesthetic character – Anderson could be singing in Sanskrit and it wouldn’t make much difference.

This was a nice characteristic of early Yes music, which would eventually give way to lyrical content with much more direct intent, which I think has the unfortunate consequence of highlighting some of the underlying silliness of the New Age sensibility that has more or less always informed Yes’ and Anderson’s work. “Equal rights for equal people,” Anderson writes in 1997′s “Children of Light.” You’d think it couldn’t get much gushier than that, until in 2001′s “In the Presence Of” he writes: “If we were flowers we would worship the sun, so why not now?”

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However, I think the larger part of the reason the work has, so far, retained its place in my house on Easter morning is that it simply feels like it belongs there. In other words: tradition. I’m not sure I would have played it this morning until Joyce dropped a not very subtle hint that she thought it should be playing. It’s just been that way for a long time, and it ties today’s Easter morning together with our past Easter mornings, which in a way is how they themselves are tied together with that morning in Judea long ago, when Mary Magdalene was startled to encounter the living flesh and blood of a man she had seen die two days earlier.

I think if I were to encounter Topographic Oceans as a new piece of vocal music today, I would not want it played in my house as Easter morning “mood music.” I would consider it largely inoffensive in what it had to say about reality (even if a little loopy at times), but sorely lacking in terms of what it does not understand, and hence misleading as an artistic expression intended to provide musical context for this particular, great Solemnity. But I do not encounter it as if it were new, I bring 35 years of familiarity to my encounter with it – and for many of those years, it held a place of high honor in my hierarchy of artistic value. It still does today, in a sense, though primarily because of what it has meant to me – especially in my youth.

At one time, this work was probably the most “spiritual” creation I’d encountered, and it had significant influence in the beginnings of my journey toward God. Not long afterwards, I began to encounter Christ in the Christian Scriptures, where I found some stark differences between the pathos of the Christian (and Jewish) God, and the sterile idealism of the search for enlightenment. I began to understand that my journey to God is not so much a “journey to” at all, but a turning back to a faithful Creator and Redeemer who had been seeking me from the moment of my conception in his Mind. The “journey to God” is actually what the Muslims call islam, submission.

But I would remain without Church for a long time, and in the absence of a genuine organizing principle in the spiritual life, something else will always take its place – even something like music that seems to connect at a deep level. For some years, listening to Topographic Oceans on Easter morning was the closest I ever got to liturgy. In a way, then, it was both a catalyst to my turning toward God, and a workable substitute for a genuinely Christian expression of faith in community.

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All this is not to say that we can’t – and shouldn’t – move on from the affections of our youth, just that there are important spaces in our lives that need to be filled – and will be filled – with something…usually something familiar. Jesus himself expressed much the same idea when he warned about the unclean spirit who comes back to the person it had left, and finding his former home “empty, swept clean, and put in order,” returns to dwell there with seven spirits even more evil that itself (c.f. Mt 12:43-45). Now, I’m in no way trying to depict Yes’ music as unclean with this analogy, the point is just that we need to proactively fill the spaces in our lives with the most perfect good we desire, with the deepest truth w can apprehend, because they will be filled with whatever fits, regardless. Things tend to stick, regardless of their character, and the spiritual life is about nothing if not about repentance…

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This opens up many questions – which I’ll have to leave, and hope to pick up at a later time – about the nature of tradition, about how it is personalized, about how it develops, about how cultural forms might play very different roles in a stream of tradition, depending on its developmental nature (e.g. how a particular form might play a constructive role in the tradition at a particular point in history, but take on a destructive role later on based either on an anti-historical formalism or a sentimentality that fails to note its contingent character in pointing to something beyond it – such as a puritanical or biblicist attempt to recreate the apostolic-era church).

At the least, though, this problem of mine should leave me more charitable than I was in my recent lament over the way some very poor liturgical music seems to have found communal staying power by living in familiarity’s comfort zone for many older (and not quite so old) priests. It looks like I’m in a very similar boat, after all. But let me also say that I’m very ready to let my Easter morning tradition develop appropriately toward a more orthodox expression of faith, just as soon as I can find something that can also meet the aesthetic standards demanded by the occasion. Ideas are always welcomed!

He is risen, alleluia!

ΑΩ

As has been my custom for several years, I listened to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) this afternoon, before attending the Good Friday liturgy. This is a remarkable work that never fails to move me. I don’t listen to it very often during the rest of the year, but it has become a Good Friday staple for me.

Though Gorecki himself insists that the work has much broader meaning (no doubt), it is difficult for me to listen to it without being overwhelmed by thoughts of the insane brutality of the Nazi death camps in Gorecki’s own Poland. The text of the second movement is actually taken from scratchings on the wall of a Gestapo prison in southern Poland, and the entire piece seems imbued with the lingering memory of a people and a boy (b. 1933) who lived through the madness. In this connection, I see a particular affinity between this piece and Good Friday. It is not for nothing that Isaiah 52 is read in today’s liturgy.

At the simplest level, it is a piece about the suffering of mothers losing their children. It is a Pieta, writ upon the maternity of humanity. The first movement’s text is quite literally a Marian lament, dating from the 15th century, that could have been spoken at the foot of the cross. The third movement uses a local folk song that speaks of a grieving mother yearning for her son, lost in a violent uprising in the early 20th century.

But the shorter second movement is the most remarkable to me. It recognizes a mother’s sorrow through the eyes of a lost child – in this case an 18 year-old Polish girl named Helena, imprisoned by the German Gestapo on September 26, 1944. On the wall of her prison cell, she wrote: “No, Mamma, do not cry -Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always” (followed by the beginning of the Ave Maria – in Polish).

It is humbling to realize that this girl – in such dire straights – concerned herself, before all else, with the suffering she knew her mother must have been living through on her account. I know a man who, we are told, acted very similarly in his own hour of darkness. It’s a tale that tells of the triumph of charity – and faith – over despair, despite an aching sadness.

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Musically, the symphony culminates when, after almost an hour of slow, brooding, dark, aching, sometimes devastatingly angst-ridden waves of sound, the third movement resolves – twice – into an A Major chord that witnesses to the persistence of possibility – though not without a lingering knowledge of darkness.

It is in no way corny or contrived, the way the piece comes around like this; rather, it smartly reflects the essence of a faithful existence in the face of madness and rampant sin. In a Good Friday context, it is simply the realization that Easter has the last word.

God bless all grieving mothers on this day. And God bless Henryk Gorecki, who, whether he intended to or not, managed to capture the Pieta in music – right down to the last note.

The parish Lenten Mission began tonight, and I got to the church a minute or so late for the start. The congregation was singing the opening hymn – what it was I have blessedly forgotten, but it was one of those carnival tunes of fairly recent vintage that we used to sing fairly regularly, not too long ago. As I ducked into a pew near the back, I was met by the distinct aroma of moth balls.

The presider was a retired bishop, who seemed to give a very thoughtful reflection (I had trouble hearing a lot of it), but the music we used all night was awful. I got to thinking that the moth balls I could smell were perhaps being used to preserve the 1970′s era pop-hymns we kept pulling out. It was actually rather discouraging.

I pray that enough people will get fed up with this kind of schmaltz before long, and the pop songs will go away. But as of now, this stuff feels like tradition to some of the older priests who’ve spent entire careers singing it – and some not-so-old ones as well. Alas, I might be sing-songing it for the rest of my earthly life. At least I can have confidence that, then, will be the end of it…

As we were preparing to leave, we were all invited to join in singing “City of God,” that ubiquitous hit hymn set to the tune of “Old Smokey” (or is it “On Top of Spaghetti?”):