What we mean by love

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." … So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?  - Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday, and I am lucky that many of my friends have spent the day sharing quotes and reflecting on King’s legacy of firm love in the service of justice. I am partial to the quote above, and thought of it when I woke up this morning. I can’t think of a better challenge than to be an extremist for love.

Never satisfied by soundbyte answers, I asked myself this morning "what does love mean?" What does it mean to be an extremist for love? Most people think of themselves as loving, most people think that they are doing the right thing. History fixates on the obviously horrific practitioners of hate, but most people are not that sort of extremist. And yet we, motivated by love, reach wildly different conclusions about how to act justly.

I just started learning a song cycle by Lori Laitman that I will be singing in a recital in April. The last song of the cycle has captivated me – it feels like it was written for my voice, and the poem, like all the poetry in the cycle, regularly moves me to tears (this complicates my learning process, to say the least). The poem, Pioneer Child’s Doll, begins: Here, child, is what we mean by love. 

The poet, Judith Sornberger, described her inspiration in an interview. She saw pioneer child’s doll in a Nebraska museum: The head of the doll was actually an old, beat-up bedpost. You know, the knob at the top of a bedpost. How hard up would you have to be able to love a doll with that kind of head?

Here, child, is what we mean by love:

a block head doll of coarse-grained wood,

eyes two knife-pricks, mouth a crooked stab.

As we are given to love land

that few would covet, where no tree

dares stand up to the sky,

So shall you love her whose grain sack skirt

covers not petticoats, but sticks

whose curls must be imagined in the wood.

And as we break the stubborn sod

of our backs to know what we

can be on this earth,

So by the sweat of your palm

on her brow will you bring

to her flat face a sheen.

We know that love can transform, and we know that we are in need of transformation. About 6 times a day I pray Ignatius’ prayer for generosity: “Lord, teach me to be generous…”. I pray to be loving, to be kind, to be patient, to be fortified and transformed, to be better. And these are the prayers I think of as selfless. Could I sacrifice my prayers and my love to transform others instead?

Could love be the willingness to look at an ugly doll and see something lovely? Could it be the determination to be devoted to that which others would throw away? Could it be beholding the beauty in others? We lament that the world needs transformation, but are the true acts of heroism to see the world and behold in it the possibility of goodness? Isn’t that why we still envision Dr. King’s dream?

Maybe it’s more self-centeredness to imagine that the world hinges on how I see it, that if I look on it with love it will meet my expectations. I’m not sure I know how to pray for anyone other than myself.  A self-emptying prayer that turns me inside out could be the loving extreme to which Dr. King exhorts me.  Perhaps I am called to an outward facing love that wills the other into grace.

Love, grace, God, prayer – these things are the types of wonderful mysteries that we could talk about for eternity and never explain or exhaust.  Dr. King set big, lofty goals that stretch us and our world. For me, it’s goal enough to try each day to discover more of what we mean by love.

The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

At the end of the day

At the end of an off-the-charts exhausting day, one that began with a parking ticket, included mishaps galore and wall hangings crashing to the floor, questions I couldn’t answer and tasks I couldn’t accomplish, I was not far from home tonight when I spied in my rearview mirror the flashing of blue lights, signaling I should pull over.


It wasn’t just blue lights I saw. I saw my insurance going up, a bill to pay. I saw another 10 minute delay before I could fall into my apartment and take off my heels. I saw another way to be disappointed in myself, another reason to feel like I can’t keep it together.

I pulled over, rolled down the window, rested my head against the headrest, and waited. He came around the side of the car and I just looked at him. I couldn’t be clever or cute or cool. Maybe my day was written on my face; I’m not sure, but he kindly, humorously chastised me and sent me on my way.

Mercy. The rest of the way home that word rolled around in my head. I had simply been let off, not because of anything I had done or because I deserved it. Someone else had made a choice about how to treat me, and I, with my head leaned back wearily, had passively accepted that treatment.

I would have accepted anything at that point, but that magnanimity came as a shock. I was powerless. I was too broken down to try to muscle my way to a particular outcome. Someone else chose for me, and the choice they made was mercy.

The last few years have been one long meditation on mercy - how deeply I believe in it, how I can show it to others, how God can show it to others. Never have I considered how it could be shown to me. As I walked down the hill from my car to the apartment tonight, I prayed from my gut that someday I would be shown deeper mercy. I have done worse than traffic violations.

If I hadn’t been so weak, would I have been able to accept the gift? Would I have tried to control the situation and manipulated my way into a less gracious outcome? Is our weakness the only place we find the strength to let ourselves be swallowed up in forgiveness?

Because of Prayer

For someone as Church-y as I am, I came somewhat late to prayer, or at least to talking about it. In college I was too cool for prayer: you could be contemplative or you could be active, and I knew what side I was on. I didn't have any of the incense-laden moments one might describe as prayer, and I saw that sort of talk as the purview of athletes pointing to the sky after a homerun on the one hand, and of the simperingly pious kids who judged ones spirituality on how many hours they'd spent in Eucharistic adoration that week on the other. Plus, I wasn't convinced I knew how to pray, and despite all appearances I really do try not to talk about things I don't know anything about.

That's why it was so shocking to me a few weeks ago when this thought popped into my head, the kind of thought that if I heard anyone say it out loud I'd either roll my eyes or throw up a little: If I have succeeded in anything in life, it is because of prayer.

I still don't know anything about prayer. I know that I am only able to perform because I am used to seeking out what is real. I know God best when I am dealing honestly with reality. So when I'm put in front of people to sing or act or speak, and I am expected to give them something real, I can fall back on the habit of searching for truth rather than for the easier fiction.

I know that I am only able to minister because I have experienced love in my life, then examined it and called it by name. When I am called on to be a loving presence, I am well served by this diligence in learning love. Prayer involves listening and paying attention, and when I fail at loving well I can use those habits to seek out and seal up the cracks in the armor of light. When I don't give myself time for silence and stillness I fail more often than not, often in spectacular, hideous ways that make me feel like someone I don't know. I need to check in often with that which is most real if I have any hope of staying real myself.

I don't know anything about prayer. I'm scared to write about it but I can't stay silent. If I have succeeded at anything in life, it is because of prayer. That doesn't mean I write my request on a slip of paper and God answers me with a magic trick. I think it means that I am willing to keep searching and to accept how high the stakes are. It means I listen and I pay attention. It means I give care to remembering who I am so that I can live fully as a one Created rather than as a caricature. I think it means I have re-tooled my definition of success to include all those things that build up God's Reign. When I am successful it is because I have allowed myself to collaborate with Creation, entering into the Goodness for which we were made, assenting to the Beauty we can only glimpse when we open ourselves to the glory we've named God in the rush we've named prayer.

Keep turning it 'til it fits

When I was quite young I had a puzzle of Bert and Ernie that I really liked. It was a young child's puzzle with only a few thick cardboard pieces and often my mother would help me put it together. If I would get stumped with what piece went where, she would instruct me to pick up a piece, try it in a certain spot, and "keep turning it 'til it fits".

Somehow that expression made it into our familial language, and I still think of it frequently, much more often than I think of that flimsy puzzle that has surely outlived its usefulness just as surely as it still lives in the corner of the basement my mother reserves for memories.

I wonder if our lives are puzzles, and we spend most of our lives trying to get the pieces to fit. Few of us live in a constant state of disshevelment, but most of us know the feeling of playing whack-a-mole with our lives: when we finally get one thing in order, another pops up.

So we keep trying to fit our pieces in together. As soon as we find the right place for prudence, prayer becomes displaced. Then we get charity just as it ought to be and the jigsawed edges of chastity protrude from what should be the puzzles' smooth edge. There's a part of each of us that knows what the puzzle is supposed to look like and isn't satisfied until it is just so. A part of us knows that holy = whole.

It has been suggested to me before that since I work in ministry I 'teach virtue'. That could not be farther from the truth. Teaching virtue is impossible: virtue lies in all of us, and at best I walk with people as they uncover it. But finding our virtue is not so much a clearing away the clutter but turning traits the right way, making foul tempers into zealousness, shyness into contemplative patience, mouths inclined to harmful chatter into those that blabber the goodness of God.

I doubt the work of our turning ever stops. Is an outcome of original sin that we are never put together quite right this side of eternity? If in my minds eye I can see what the puzzle should look like - or even if I can't - I can keep feeling my way to its completion. No discouragement or apparent failure can stop me plowing forward, piece by piece, if I just keep turning it 'til it fits.

Being Prodigal

When we’re just plodding through Ordinary Time, I don’t expect to hear one of the Greatest Hits readings. But it’s the Twenty-Fourth Sunday today, and one of the parishes where I sang this weekend read the long form of the Gospel, including one of the Top-Ten Parables: the Prodigal Son.


People who get fussy over this sort of thing like to point out that it should be called the “Prodigal Father”, because it is the father whose lavishness we celebrate. But the son is lavish too, just with the wrong resources. In the narrative he gets all the action (in more ways than one), he goes on an “emotional journey”, as they say. He is the main character.

He remains the main character because it is he to whom we are meant to relate. We are the sinful and broken in need of forgiveness. Blessed are those of us who have known a love that celebrates our arrival no matter the circumstances and welcomes us back into home and heart. Not everyone knows that acceptance, and I am fortunate beyond measure to have friends and especially family who love me despite my selfishness and faults.

Although my experience of being loved helps me to believe in a God who loves, the core of my belief comes from turning the parable on its head. I have also had cause to be the father. There has sprung up in me a mercy that is not self-satisfied pardon, nor an absolution that congratulates itself on its own benevolence, but is a love that simply overpowers any offence. If I, a sinner, can feel that love, then I do not question that God can do that and more.

Una sola, ma grande come il mare

When covering Musetta in La Boheme two summers ago, I easily watched Mimi die 40 times. Because the rehearsal process was so intense and private time was so scarce, every time the opening chords of Sono andati sounded I would turn into a total basket case, channeling every emotion that I didn’t have time or space to process, pretending it was grief for a fictional character. To this day I can’t make it through that moment of the fourth act without crying.




In the opening lines of the aria Mimi sings one of my favorite lines in all of opera: Ho tante cose che ti voglio dire, o una sola, ma grande come il mare. (There are many things that I would like to tell you, or one thing, but large as the ocean). Between Puccini’s melody, the way the vocal line descends amid the sparse orchestration, and the beauty of the poetry, that line simply tears me apart every time I hear it.

What is the one thing worth saying, that is as large as the ocean? Maybe it’s because I’m an over-emotional Italian, but I know the feeling of having something to say that is beyond words: a feeling that is deeper than feelings, that comes from our foundation. We long to express it - in art, in poetry, in music, in gesture, in prayer. There is something holy about that infinite expression.

I sometimes wonder if we try to define our God before we decide whether or not we believe in one. Rather that accept that there is something out there that is as large as the ocean, wholly integral to who we are and undeniable, we build a god and then decide if it suits us. One of the most liberating things I was ever told was that when my emotions run away with me, that is prayer. God is in the beautiful yearning that wants to share something too big to express. We don’t learn “about” God, using our reason to build a deity we can worship, but we find God in big beautiful spaces, and then start to name that God as we continue the encounter.

Similarly, I often wonder if we attempt to figure out what it is we want to say before we commit to saying it. As I write those words it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do (commonly referred to as “thinking before you speak”, an activity about which I know very little). But if there is truly something that is big as the ocean, and if we truly spend our whole lives exploring it, perhaps we should commit to sharing it even if we don’t know where that path will lead.

Sometimes when we start singing we don’t know what sounds are going to come out of our mouth, but we start anyway. What moves me so about Mimi’s moment in Sono andati is that she is saying what she wants - needs? - to say in her final moments, rather than ruminating on the depth of her emotion privately or keeping her truth under wraps. With her last breath she struggles to express the inexpressible: love. Although Puccini might not have put it there consciously, I find God in that moment, propelling devotion and affection toward our highest goal: sharing love and ourselves with other people.

When the sun rises

Visiting my parents earlier today I heard of a terrible incident of violence quite close to where they live. All morning and afternoon the area was abuzz with the news of an employee, his co-workers, and the many families who will go to bed tonight in a different world from the one they woke up in this morning.

There’s a tactic with which my singing friends may be familiar, of trying to choose an opening aria in an audition that will result in the panel choosing the second aria that you want them to pick. It’s a hopeless tactic, and it rarely works, but we are all tempted to try to crawl into people’s heads and manipulate them into choosing what we want.

What do starter arias have to do with workplace violence? Not a lot, thankfully. But I thought of that today when pondering that people are not predictable. I become more convinced every day that we are all universes unto ourselves, full of good and evil, impulses and control, and often as likely to break out in unexpected heroism as unexpected malice. At first that’s scary: if people are their own universes, then we cannot predict what they will do or manipulate them into doing what we want. People are not predictable. The more I’ve lived with that scary truth, the more liberating it has become. If we cannot predict what people will do, then we can stop trying to do so.

Even if I’ve lost most of my capacity to be shocked, I haven’t lost my capacity to be moved, and I was deeply moved today – my eyes overflowing with tears today almost before my brain had processed what I was hearing on the news, and long before I realized how closely this would touch my hometown. We have lots of words to describe this sort of feeling-along-with – compassion, empathy, sympathy, etc – and clinicians and linguists parse them all a million ways to be specific to certain reactions. For me though, those terms don’t begin to describe what is truly prayer for me, this spontaneous heart-opening (and often heart-breaking) that I feel in times of sorrow.

Along with this heart-breaking often comes a longing for something else, for a world in which tragedy does not occur, and a readiness to be swept up in God’s presence before we make any more of a mess than we have. There must be a goodness we were made for: we weren’t made for what happened today. If we were made for this, I wouldn’t have felt like I got kicked in the stomach all morning. If we were made for this, the news wouldn’t be exploding with attempts to explain and describe this morning’s perpetrator. If we were made for this, people wouldn’t be shocked or angry or mystified. If we were made for violence and tragedy, everyone would accept this as if it were perfectly natural, an expected closing-of-the-door on the future. If we were made for this, the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow.

The sun will rise tomorrow, and when the sun rises people will comfort each other, and grieve, and love stronger than ever. People will try to put back together what has been broken and comprehend the incomprehensible. What greater signs of hope than that we naturally move to comfort one another, to heal and to repair? When the sun rises tomorrow we will be brave enough to seek out the universe of others, to find the places our orbits cross and our stars align, with that foolish, blessed hope that in light of each others’ galaxies we can better know ourselves and each other.

That is enough for me.

“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.
He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,
for I do not have space to store my harvest?’
And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:
I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.
There I shall store all my grain and other goods
and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,
you have so many good things stored up for many years,
rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’
But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;
and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’
Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves
but are not rich in what matters to God.” - from Luke 12, today's Gospel

Sometimes I worry that I am a hoarder. You’re probably thinking that there is not a lot of ambiguity in that designation, that it should be pretty easy to know whether I am or not. And anyone who has been to my itty bitty apartment, or seen me on one of my merciless clutter purges, or knows that I only spend money on books, food, and wine, knows that letting crap pile up probably isn’t among my compulsions.

I wish that made me rest easier about today’s Gospel. Even if I don’t accumulate stuff, I am often tempted to store up treasure for myself. The things I hoard are intangible: affection, esteem, opportunity. There is a fear that we all share, an uncertainty that is part of being human, and we all find ways to fight the fear off by building up reserves of what we think we need.

Yesterday was the feast of St Ignatius, whose famous Suscipe concludes “Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.” I wish I were able to mean those words. Would God’s grace been enough for me if I had to do something that caused people to not like me? Would it be enough if I abandoned my self-centered charm? Would I be satisfied by divine love if I made a choice or commitment that closed certain doors to me? Rather than putting all of my eggs in God’s basket, I have spread them out over countless baskets, just in case…

If we are going to hold the saints up as our idols, we need to be realistic enough to acknowledge the cost. One of the most treasured quotes from Pedro Arrupe reads: More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God's hands. He offered that reflection after a stroke that rendered him unable to speak. Perhaps to truly surrender to God involves a destruction, a shattering. After all, surrender is a war metaphor.

Is that part of the beauty of prayer, that we repeat these phrases, like “that is enough for me” even when our heart isn’t in it? Lots of people call us hypocrites because we pray “Thy will be done” or “peace be with you” and then go off and behave in the silly, destructive ways we always do. I’m not sure it’s hypocrisy – I think it’s hope. We are hopeful that someday we will conquer ourselves, or be conquered, and be able to truly mean the things we pray for. All of our prayer is a plea for transformation. We want nothing more than to arrive at the day when God’s grace is enough for us, even though now we let all our little wants get in the way of that larger goal.

Augustine wrote How shall I call upon my God, my God and my Lord, when by the very act of calling upon him I would be calling him into myself? And still he prayed. Knowing how hard it is should be no excuse for stopping. It is dangerous to offer our memory, our understanding, our will, our freedom as Ignatius did, because someday God might take us up on our offer. When the things we think define us are stripped away, may we find consolation in what we think is desolation. May we understand more fully that our hearts are made for love, restless until they rest in God. May the barns and silos we can’t help but fill with ourselves not come between us and the grace for which we are destined.

I will hold Your people in my heart

Earlier today I clicked on a link to a post titled “Ten worst hymns of all time”. Despite the flippant title I expected to read something examining texts, vocalism, needs of communities, and musicality. Unfortunately I found the same list of popular tunes that I’ve read 100 times before, followed by reader comments lamenting the good ol’ days when we sand Gregorian chant and Holy God, We Praise Thy Name (which happens to be one of my favorite hymns, although people taking issue with awkward lyrics in modern songs shouldn't then turn around and raise up a tune with the line 'Lo! the apostolic train angel choirs above are raising'). I should be clear my beef here is more with the comments and the idea of picking out the “worst hymns” than it is with the actual list (although the inclusion of Pescador de Hombres offends me).

Judging by their comments most of the readers could be called “traditional” or “conservative” (yes, labels are odious, but sometimes they are necessary) , and it is no surprise that they don’t like the St Louis Jesuits, and they don’t have much use for Marty Haugen and David Haas, either. I have always argued that post-conciliar American liturgical music is a mixed bag, and that it is going to take sometime to separate the wheat from the chaff. But despite picking out a handful of bad couplets as evidence that these pieces are on shaky theological ground, it’s obvious that most of these people just don’t like that particular genre of eighth-notey, hyper-melodic, G or D major, Haugen/Haas style jams.

There are plenty of pieces in that genre for which I don’t care either. My issues with these lists (and I have read plenty, and they are almost always similar) is that rather than addressing particular shortcomings in a way that could be constructive, they self-righteously vent about how much they hate a song or how tired they are of it. It’s worth noting that One Bread, One Body has too many held notes and not enough internal rhythm, that I Am the Bread of Life has as wide a range as the National Anthem, and that We Are Called would be much better in G. Pinpointing challenges in popular hymns helps us to be more prudent about their use (We Are Called only as a closing hymn rather than opening, One Bread One Body with an organist and singers capable of subdivision, I Am the Bread of Life in thick enough orchestration that people can switch octaves and not feel like they’re sticking out). But that’s not as much fun as being snarky.

The elephant in the room when we get kvetching about Here I Am, Lord, is that people really like that song. I know, some people really like smoking, too, even though it’s bad for them. But if something is a legitimate conduit of grace, we need to give some value to that. If we don’t, it means we don’t trust our fellow worshippers’ taste or spirituality. Almost every song on this list is deeply meaningful to many people, and none are so theologically or musically revolting that they are truly unacceptable for worship. Yet there are still scads of liturgists (and armchair liturgists) who see their role as protecting the people from themselves. I literally cannot find words to express how frustrated this makes me. If you do not value or trust your community you have no place leading it.

I often joke to my choirs that they make me like songs I don’t like, and they do this by filling them with life and art and prayer. There are a very few songs that are on my “absolutely not” list, and I’ll admit that it’s often more fun to criticize a piece I don’t like than to open myself to learning why it is meaningful to other people. Just because this is what I do for a living doesn’t mean I get to decide for everyone what their values should be. I can try to influence their taste and offer new examples of meaningful music, and I can make the best of the meaningful music that is not ideal. The people who worship beside me in any setting are my family in Christ, fellow heirs of the Reign of God. To love and listen to a community can be exhausting and aggravating, but I don’t do my job as a minister or a baptized person if I smugly blow off their consensus, experience, and wisdom.

Getting out of the way

A few years ago I sang with a musician who I really respect and who tells it like it is. At the end of my coaching he asked me “why do you sing like you think you’re worse than you are?”

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I just completed six days in an Institute for Arts and Worship. You would think, having spent nearly a week dealing with two of my favorite things that I would be writing prodigiously. Instead, I’ve found myself totally blocked. There are many new ideas bumping around in my head and not a lot of direction as to how to piece them all together.

One insight from the week that stuck with me was that there are many similarities between worship and art. Both require honesty, vulnerability, communication, and trust. Both are expressive and both can be a little bit radical.

There is a tendency to be fussy with our liturgical worship and prayer, dressing it up in inauthentic ways to feel as if we’ve prepared enough. I was relieved to hear John Bell, our keynote, announce that our worship should be free of gimmicks, as gimmickry is one of my biggest pet peeves in liturgical planning (and I’ve yet to find a diplomatic way to point it out when I see it). Much like in art, the nonsense we use to dress things up often ends up getting in the way of the Thing.

I, of all people, should know, master that I am of getting in the way. I have been working all month on Carmina Burana, a piece I find extremely difficult, and which, therefore, scares me to death. Practicing has been going well, but one movement was still giving me grief this week. I was singing scared, singing like I couldn’t do it, getting in my own way. Not only was I not making expressive art, I wasn’t even singing in tune. I dreaded going to the practice room, and my dread was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So after a week of being pushed and stretched a million ways through the workshops at this Institute, I decided to let it all hang out in the practice room, to decide what I wanted to say in this movement and just let it out. No thinking about technique or perfection or control. Lo and behold, it was pretty close to perfect.

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Why do we pray like we think we’re worse than we are? Are we afraid to let it all hang out, to cede control? Do we think that we won't be able to do it? Do we worry if we dig too deep to express ourselves most authentically that we’ll dig up something we – or God – can’t handle? We let our liturgies turn into variety shows – or morgues – rather than daring to be the Body of Christ gathered in prayer. If that gathering is not our goal, why bother?

Getting out of the way is challenging, especially when we are comfortable with our impediments. Fortunate are we that we don’t need self-conscious gimmicks or to become someone else in order to pray. All week I fought the good fight at this institute, listening to effusive enthusiasm from others about their prayer experiences in dance, improv, collage. My experiences were no doubt holy, but nothing to go home and write a poem about. I felt pressure to find my bliss in one of these less familiar prayer forms, and it was making me a little grumpy.

During our final worship together we sang one of the hymns that I know inside and out. I closed my eyes and sang my prayer with a confidence that I was offering my most honest worship. God met me there, when I was being most myself, rather than when I was trying on other guises. I trusted enough to sing and pray as I was, not believing I was worse (or better) than I am. I wasn’t in my own way, and as the singing ended I concluded just as the hymn did – lost in wonder, love, and praise.

All you holy men and women, pray for us.

Last weekend I sang the ordination of two new priests. Having only sung one ordination prior (7 years ago), if you had asked me about the rite, the only thing I would have remembered was that it includes a litany of saints.

For a jaded old church nerd like me, it takes something special to move me (for instance, it's rare that the Agnus Dei lights my fire). Certain liturgical elements, thanks to their rarity, catch my attention (I'm a sucker for a good Sequence) and a litany is one of them. This weekend we sang Becker's popular setting of the litany. As we invoked saint after saint, while the newest members of the presbyterate lay prostrate, I became unexpectedly emotional.

The assembly repeated "pray for us" as we called upon saints familiar (Mary & Joseph), arcane (Chrysogonus & Hippolytus) and particular to our Jesuit community (Ignatius & Francis). On other occasions I have sung litanies that put Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day and Pedro Arrupe alongside Linus, Cletus and Clement. Where do we get the confidence to call upon our heroes to petition God on our behalf?

Any Catholic concerned with public perception keeps all this saints hoo-ha quiet if they can. Maybe we hedge a bit, acknowledging that we admire these people, but leaving out the more radical part of our claim to the saints: we believe there is something so generous and holy about them that they will back up our prayers.

As we asked for prayers on Saturday, what really took my breath away was the list we had in front of us, one that only skims the surface of our wealth of heavenly intercessors. And even when we mumble our response, or can't hear the cantor, or let our eyes and minds wander, the saints are still on our side, welcoming us into their communion. What greater advocates can we have than the saints named and unnamed, living in love with God forever?

[Two notes on the litany - I tried to find a recording of the Becker setting to which to link, but I was unable to find one that wasn't either out of tune, goopily sentimental, or one singer overdubbing his own responses to the invocations. Also, after the ordination I said something flippant about not knowing why a piece of music that is mildly cheesy was so moving. Luckily I was with the Jesuits, one of whom had a characteristic reply enumerating all of the evidence for this being the superior setting of the litany. Typical]

In lieu of a sound clip, I will include a photo of myself and one of my favorite saints.

It goes without saying that I like to express myself. I hear a sarcastic “tell us what you really think” a few times a week, and try to take it as a compliment rather than taking it in the spirit it is given. As the years have gone by and I’ve become less invested in getting my own way all the time, I’ve developed a habit that, like many of my habits, can be a little off-putting. If I’m involved in a discussion or situation in which my voice is the minority, I still say my piece knowing that the outcome of the discussion is probably not going to go my way. I feel better knowing that I haven’t kept my dissent secret from anyone, and I can go on my way ready to live with whatever outcome results. I think there is virtue in sharing what little wisdom I may have to offer, and I think that the conversation is more important than the outcomes.

Last night I had dinner with some friends with whom I can talk about anything, from work to music to vocation to tea, and over the course of our long chat last night the conversation turned to prayer. All three of us have degrees in theology, which sometimes makes it harder to talk about these topics – every comment about prayer has a million theological implications, and we waffle between tossing around terms with ease and being awe-struck and humbled by the act of trying to define that which cannot be defined.

We were talking about petitionary prayer, a subject I find particularly difficult for theology-folk to talk about. To the more snobbish among us it seems so juvenile, so lower-stages-of-moral-development. And to the realists among us it seems fairly unproductive: we ask for what we want, and God’s will sweeps forward on its path regardless.

Is the answer then not to offer our needs and wants to God in prayer? I don’t think so. If I believe it is worthwhile to share my wants and ideas with other people, regardless of the outcome, how much more worthwhile is it to share those with God, even if God’s will may not match our dreams and imaginings? Every time we share a piece of who we are, what we want, or what we believe, we deepen the intimacy between us and God. There is value in that, in the honesty needed to share ourselves, and in the communion that can only develop in the shadow of that honesty.

The measure with which I measure

From Chapter 6 of Luke's Gospel:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
“Stop judging and you will not be judged.
Stop condemning and you will not be condemned.
Forgive and you will be forgiven.
Give and gifts will be given to you;
a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing,
will be poured into your lap.
For the measure with which you measure
will in return be measured out to you.”


My hair is naturally curly. But its not “Oh don’t you have charming hair!” curly, rather “Yikes, look at her hair” curly. I get a piece that sticks out in the front, and the back all bushes up, and I sleep with one hand on the side of my head and wake up looking like a cartoon monster. So most days I tame my hair, hoping to get myself a little more ready for the world: presentable, manageable, under control.

Years ago when I was taking Italian I remember being asked in class what parts of our bodies were most representative of our personalities. I don’t remember the context – we must have been learning the terms for body parts – but after others explained that they were flexible like their wrists or strong like their legs or perceptive like their eyes, I had to own to the face that I am wild, like my hair.

By all accounts I sprang from the womb with an enormous personality. Mouthy and opinionated, I got in trouble a lot in school. Reckless and impulsive, I got in trouble a lot out of school. I liken my adolescence to the taming of a wild animal. Discipline came at me from all directions, often in ways that were painful at the time, but I had to learn that constantly pushing my limits, even if it only resulted in catastrophe one out of every ten times, still had the potential to hurt me and other people.

Over time, I learned to discipline myself (imperfectly, mind you; to this day I am asked to lower my voice about twice a week). Although my friends tease me about what has been called my ‘relentless quest for self-improvement’ I know that if I don’t keep that discipline going, there’s no telling what will happen.

So, with my love of discipline, I have been accused of having a draconian approach to Lent. I make big sacrifices and large commitments, and make my best effort to let God set a watch over my mouth, limiting gossip, whining, cursing, rambling. And no, I don’t let myself go back to whatever I gave up on Sundays during Lent.

Yet I know these disciplines are only a means to an end: closer communion with God. As someone who has been compared to a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal, I know well that all of my sacrifices and achievements mean nothing if I have not mastered that greatest discipline, the discipline of love.

“The measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” It is tempting for me to merely take comfort in that prophecy, confident that like my hair and personality, my measure will also be big. I am abundant in affection, enthusiasm, and laughter. But I can’t ignore the censure in Jesus’ words, because often the portions I mete out to the world are exemplary only in quantity, not quality. I can also be abundant in anger, in self-indulgent sadness, and in ugly moral righteousness. No simple sacrifice, no added almsgiving, can make up for the helpings of negativity that I have been known to heap onto the lap of the world.

Working more than one job, studying, conducting, singing – I interact with hundreds of people on any given day, and a candid assessment of these interactions reveals a lack of love that makes me ashamed. A student calls out my name with a smile, and I don’t notice until I am three steps past him down a crowded hallway. On the third rehearsal of a day I conduct entire pieces without looking up from my music stand. I have committed most of my adult life to ministry, and still I don’t always see the currents of grace that I swim in every day.

And so this Lent I recommit myself to loving other people. This is scarier than all my other rules and practices because it’s not about me and what I can accomplish – it is about what other people are to me and how I allow them to change me. And in the end, it is what we will be judged on – not on how many years in a row we gave up drinking or if we accidentally had bacon bits on a Friday, but on how well we loved other people.

To be merciful, just as our God is merciful: there is nothing in the world that is more difficult for me than this. I know my heart is capable of great mercy, but I can’t say I exercise it on a daily basis. I know I should always be ready to say “whatever you have done, no matter how terrible or frustrating or horrifying or dumb, I love you”. This takes an act of will. My lifetime of discipline is for naught if I don’t use that practice to direct my heart where it ought to go.

Sometimes God makes this act of conversion, of re-directing our hearts, quite easy. But we all know that most of the time it is not. Pray for me tonight as I will pray for you that we may prepare ourselves for that good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing. May we open our hearts to forgiveness and mercy, may we discipline ourselves to exercise caritas, and may we be abundant, wild and untamed in virtue and love.

Create in me

I haven’t been working much lately.

I know what you are thinking: the purple circles under my eyes tell a different story. Of course I have been working plenty, but I haven’t had much performing on my plate which has affected my lifestyle (and inspired the well-documented periodic panic that I will never be hired again). The upside? I’ve been using my lessons to work on technique, and on all that rep that I’m always meaning to learn and never get to work on.

Since I’ve been messing around with oratorio and art song a bit, rather than the sing-loud-and-high, cut-through-an-orchestra operatic rep that I’ve been working for a while, we’ve been working in my lessons on tweaking technique, which always ends up an emotional experience. The dark side of improving is the realization that you were not as good as you wanted to be previously. We work so hard to figure out exactly how to sing and then expect everything to stay the same. Once we have everything in order the work should be done, we think, we should be able to freeze our technique and use it forever. The truth is that it’s a constant tension: light and dark, forward and back, chest voice and head voice – holding all of those things in the appropriate tension takes work. You can’t find balance and expect it to magically stay that way.

Because the work is hard and the product is personal, there has been no shortage of near-tear moments in my recent lessons. I get so angry at how hard it is, then I get discouraged that I haven’t been singing this well all along, then I become concerned that I will never be able to maintain whatever I have just learned. Finally the magic happens, and I am transformed, after the tears and discouragement and frustration and snapping at my teacher and pianist. Whatever I thought I couldn’t do, couldn’t maintain, becomes part of me, and I leave my lesson different and a bit better.

Is anyone surprised that this pondering this leads me back to the liturgical calendar? After hearing the readings for Ash Wednesday repeatedly, singing multiple masses, I was moved in the evening when reflecting on them privately. “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.”

I have known the same frustration described above when I have tried to change myself. I can’t do it, I always think: my personality is wrong. I’m too blunt, too mouthy, too angry, too whatever to be truly good. Psalm 51 reminds me that my goodness may not come of my own initiative. Sometimes getting out of the way and letting God transform and forgive is the best I can do, which is a hard lesson to learn for someone like me who wants to constantly accomplish on her own. I focus so much on what I can or cannot do, using my faults as an excuse rather than allowing God’s initiative to work through my weaknesses, to ‘create in me a clean heart, and put a new and right spirit within me’.

Into Great Silence

Recently I showed some clips from one of my favorite films, Into Great Silence. It documents the lifestyle of the monks in a Carthusian monastery in France. Rather than being about monastic life, the film is like monastic life, and its slow pace and timeless sense of prayerfulness is intoxicating.



I spend enough time around the dismissive anti-religous to know that there are a lot of people who think that those monks are escaping from the real world, or are incapable of living with reality. When I watch them I know how brave they are. How could anyone imagine they are escaping? They live a life that offers no escape from who they really are. How many of us would be able to survive without the day-to-day preoccupations that distract us from the huge questions of our existence? How many of us could really let ourselves go and say to God 'it is ok if no one remembers me. It is ok if there is no trace of me left in this world. I abandon myself to you and need no other recognition'?

Years ago I went on a long silent retreat. When I tell people that they smirk and laugh in a way that is actually somewhat hurtful. Because I'm highly verbal no one can ever believe that I spent some time in silence, but I did and it taught me a lot about being myself rather than acting like myself. I don't think I'm built for the monastic life - like most people I am too proud to give up my pursuit of accomplishment and recognition. I envy the trust and courage of the monks at Grande Chartreuse who leave behind what they know and seek to be subsumed in God's silence.

Abide with Me

Abide with me, fast falls the even tide
The darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Darkness. Last night as I drove out of the city I happened to be driving just at sunset, which has never been a good time for me. Like a lot of people sensitive to light and seasons, my mood dips when the sun goes down in the late fall and winter. I am helpless against the power of the earth as it turns and tilts.

I need Thy presence every passing hour
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter's power?
Who but Thyself my guide, and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, O abide with me.

Grace. I teach about grace a few times a year, always with a sense of guilt - how can i stand before people and try to explain that which cannot be explained? Grace - friendship with God. Grace - participation in the life of God. Grace - God working in the world, on us and with us.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless
Ills have no weight and tears no bitterness
Where is death's sting? where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still if you abide with me.

Grave. In the darkness of night our world can indeed seem grave, when we are confronted with tragedy and sadness, the pain of those we love and the challenges of being alive in an imperfect world. It may be then that our only triumph is our hope.

Hold now Thy cross before my closing eyes
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies
Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.

Life. Throughout my life, abide with me. Is this not the root of all our prayer? God, whatever you are, however you come to us, as love, as goodness, as blessing, as grace, be with us. Abide with us. Teach us to hope in you, to serve your light, to trust against our senses and against our despair. Prepare us for the dawn of heaven's morning and remind us that the shadows of this earth are indeed vain and no match for your Light.


[Music: Eventide William Monk (19thC)
Words: Henry F. Lyte (19th C)]

Time apart

Last night in class we were encouraged to think about when and where we take time to rest. I had had a hectic afternoon. The reviews of our latest opera had been posted at 3:00 pm, and it was my task to distribute the information via email and online postings. I needed to be in Cambridge at 4:00 pm, my computer kept freezing, and everyone wanted to virtually chat and celebrate our reviews while I scrambled to get the info up. When asked later in class about taking quiet time, one of the situations that appeared when I was imagining my rest was “any time my computer is off”.

I've got a lot of irons in the fire, a lot of people I try to stay in touch with and a lot of people who rely on my to stay on top of certain tasks. Choirs need to know call times, students need homework posted, BOC needs the website kept up to date. If I make a mistake, a need to respond to a dozen emails sent to point it out. Then there's the fun stuff: twitter, facebook, my website, this blog.

I take on responsibilities because I care about people. I want to be around people, to collaborate with them, to serve them. But when I am trying to balance virtual contact with too many people I lose sight of persons, and the love I feel for the unique individuals right in front of me. I am reminded that I want to be hyper-involved by the times that I am not, when I have trimmed the distractions to a reasonable amount, or eliminated them completely.

I grew up in what I like to call “the house that technology forgot”. You can still hear a busy signal if you call there (remember the days of taking the phone off the hook?) and the dial-up internet can only handle one thing at a time (and some things it simply can’t handle). From my childhood, I’m used to that sort of isolation. I have a laptop at work that I only bring home on weekends because I don’t want the distraction of a million tasks every evening. If you want an easy way to get to bed early, hide your computer.

I used to get off on the thrill of non-stop productivity, but that thrill has passed. If mental health is built on the balance of introversion and extroversion, then I need to be unreachable for a while to preserve my sanity. If someone really needs me they can call – but if it’s after 9:00 pm, my ringer will be off.

Navigating the maze

Every other Monday night I meet with a prayer group for a one credit class. Usually I am tired or preoccupied enough that I am annoyed about having to go. Then I am ashamed of being annoyed about having to go.

On All Souls' Day we were supposed to pray the labyrinth outside the library. I was missing rehearsal to do this and was concerned about that, but had sung at a very emotional mass earlier that day and was looking forward to processing some of that in the labyrinth. The lights weren't on outside the library so we ended up meeting inside the Jesuit residence where we were to pray a 'finger labyrinth', tracing the maze with our finger rather than with our feet.

I was pretty pissed. If you've been keeping track, I had gone from annoyed to ashamed to concerned to dolorous to optimistic to aggravated - and this is all before prayer.

So I grabbed my paper maze and stomped off into the halls of St Mary's to find a place to sit. An early music group in the chapel was preparing for a concert going that evening which most of my classmates found really soothing, but like most musicians I find it hard to get zen while listening to music. The halls were noisy, side rooms were full, chairs were uncomfortable - I finally parked right by the front door in a chair with plenty of light, even though the sound from the chapel was distracting and I knew half of the people coming in the door. Whatever, I thought, let me pray and get it over with.

As soon as I started running my finger through the paths of the maze I was overwhelmed with want - an emotion that I, like a lot of people, have been taught to put away. It's tasteless to want, and wanting implies you think you deserve what you want, which would be even more embarassing if anyone found out. But my want bubbled over: I want my feet to touch the floor in chairs, I want to sing straight tone without going flat, I want it not to smell like old people in here, I want life not to be so hard, I want to not be sad at sunset, I want all music to be in tune, I want to sing, I want to hug people when I see them and not have it feel so pretentious, I want life to be easier. Dissatisfaction was swirling around me. And here I am supposed to find God?

It felt right to sit with my desire. And it hit me: this is where prayer happens. When I am distracted by people walking by or by a tuning theorbo, that's where it happens. When I have flown through 7 emotions in the course of a few hours, that's where it happens. When I've finally got my feet balanced in a way that I can be comfortable - not forever, just for a while - that's where it happens.

I will never be quiet or placid, at least not as a way of life. The lion's share of my prayer will not be in calm moments. My prayer will be in the stormy moments of my life, which is precisely when I need it. God finds me when I least expect it and all I can do is welcome God in, whether I'm annoyed, ashamed, concerned, dolorous, optimistic, or aggravated. I have often been told emotions are what separates us from the beasts, and I am becoming more convinced that we can pray through most, if not all of them.

The Helplessness of Love

Today I found myself feeling great affection for a group of people, and I thought "the appropriate response to this is humility". I recognize myself as a vessel of a powerful force I neither create nor control. I am not the first nor the greatest to have cared for people. I am subsumed by a Love far greater than myself, which is both thrilling and humbling. That humility is a great gift.

Like most powerful moments of the last few months, this one led me back into my grief. What is grief if not love made futile against absence? I remember years ago sitting with a friend who lost her entire family in a genocide, and loving her so much, and feeling so helpless because no amount of love could ever undo the trauma she had faced. Perhaps it is not my place to un-do it.

I know better now than to wish away those feelings of affection. And yet, on these gloomy fall days, standing in the dark of the chapel, fighting off tears, the love I feel for anyone is seasoned with the knowledge that it has me rendered helpless. I will care for people forever, against futility and darkness, and deal with the gloomy days as they come.

The Lord is Kind and Merciful

It's been a week and a day since my family gathered back home for the funeral. As a liturgy buff, I'm not one of those people who says they "hate funerals" - I actually don't mind funerals, it's people dying that brings me down.

If I had anything to do with it, this funeral was going to be a barnburner, for lack of a better word. One of the things I find so helpful about liturgy is that it lets us say what we want to say using words that have been used before, so we don't foul it all up because we are sad. In a situation so devastating we wanted to make sure everything was right - the music, the readings, the prayer of the faithful, the programs. All of these things can help to sum up our belief in the resurrection, in family, and in mercy. The words we use matter.

So that's my academic, overthought rambling on liturgy. Why was it important, in truth, for me? Because I needed to see that I wasn't the only person who had been blind with grief for the previous week and a half. Because when I sang Psalm 103: The Lord is Kind and Merciful I knew that I had a chance to say what I believed, to stand in front of people I loved and sing "Bless the Lord, O my soul" and really mean it in spite of everything. It is rare that singing matters so much to me.

Yesterday was the memorial of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the only Native American on the path to canonization. I learned during reflection at midday prayer yesterday that Tekakwitha was the moniker given to her due to her partial blindness, and that it means "one who gropes in the dark". I can identify with that; and I think most of us can. I have been groping through the darkness of grief with my family, mulling over the wretched questions that we know we can never answer. But day after day I think we all grope through the dark, grabbing onto what we can to orient us, be it liturgy, family, friends, or simple hope.