Getting It Right

As a lifelong Protestant until last Easter, I was no stranger to church divides. Not only was I familiar with the many (some count them in the tens of thousands) splinters politely called “denominations,” I had been in individual churches that had been rent asunder by dissent over some issue that was deemed to be a hill worth dying on.?

But I was not prepared for the divides I discovered in the Catholic Church.?

I’m not talking about doctrinal issues, such as the question of women in the priesthood. The divides I’m referring to are the ones that affect that most basic and holy of practices in Catholicism: the Mass.?

I’m by nature a box-checker – which, in terms of faith, could brand me as someone who is trying to “earn” my salvation by works (read: box-checking). I fully understand, of course, that a list with all the boxes checked is, in itself, as worthless as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). But I also fully understand that what we do matters because what we do is the living-out, the literal animation, of our faith (James 2:26).

And there is this: as one who searched so arduously, for so long, under such disheartening circumstances, to find the truth, now that I have found the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, I want to get it right.

So when I am confronted with the suggestion that in some way within Catholicism, I might in fact not be getting it right, my spirit and my sensibilities are troubled.

One such issue: church music.

Since Vatican II, music in the Catholic Church has changed; this is partly, I believe, a move intended to make worship a more personal and accessible practice. I believe it also reflects the influence of changes in music in the culture at large (witness the surge in folk music concurrent with Vatican II) but also within Christianity. The “Jesus movement,” a West Coast phenomenon, was folk-inspired and grew into today’s contemporary Christian music industry. No longer confined to organs and pianos, this music could be sung anywhere, and if you didn’t listen to the words, it was virtually indistinguishable from something you might hear on the radio, at a coffeehouse, or from a guy busking on a street corner. The lyrics, too, strived to make the faith more personal and relatable.?

I saw all this play out when I was still a Protestant. One large pillar-of-the-community church I attended in the heart of the Bible Belt threatened to split over the introduction of choruses by Bill and Gloria Gaither. One of the first Gaither choruses I remember seemed to be all of a piece with a book being taught in my parents’ Sunday School class: “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” This sounded to me like (and probably was) pop psychology, and I wasn’t sure what that had to do with church, but I was a kid and mine was not to question. The chorus that reminded me of the book went like this:

I am loved, I am loved

I can risk loving you

For the One Who knows me best loves me most.

I am loved, You are loved,

Won’t you please take my hand?

We are free to love each other – we are loved.?

Well – all true, and all good. But was this worship?

To me, it wasn’t. It lacked any reverence, and although at the time I did not have the theological vocabulary to understand why, my spirit was longing for reverence – it would prove to be transformative in my relationship with the Lord.?

In the late twentieth century something began to happen in many Protestant churches, starting first in Great Britain and then making its way across the Atlantic. The change in music from sacred to contemporary transformed not only congregational singing but the physical layout of the churches themselves. Gone were the pulpits and the organs or pianos. The altar was now a stage. It happened gradually, but today we have “mega-churches” that are basically performance arenas featuring rock bands opening for (we’re assured) Jesus. There are light shows, electric guitars, drum sets so powerful they need to be encased in isolation booths (couldn’t you just make them less, you know, powerful?), and the ubiquitous “praise and worship band,” an ensemble of casually-dressed musicians whose purpose is to whip you into a proper spiritual attitude – pumped up to start, a calculated wind-down before the sermon, and another pump-up to send you off.?

From a very young age, I have always been profoundly affected by music. I love music of all genres – from Gregorian chant to classical (especially Baroque and Impressionistic) to folk to blues to classic rock to pop. I’ve seen Barry Manilow, James Taylor, and Bonnie Raitt in concert, and lately I’ve been revisiting the greatest hits of the B-52s. So it’s not that I have some cultural or age-related bias against contemporary music. It’s that I feel strongly that music should be appropriate to the time and place. And nowhere is this more true than in church.?

The Catholic Church has not been untouched by the changes in music ushered into Christianity fifty years ago. There are no Gaither choruses in the Missal (thanks be to God), and so far in my experience, the Church has stayed well away from the rock-concert ethos that dominates Protestant churches. (One of my favorite memes features a photo-shopped church sign that reads, “Rock Concert Followed By Poor Exegesis.”)?

But there are those who would have me believe that much of the music we sing at Mass is cheesy at best and subversive at worst.?

This grieves me, and I mean that sincerely. I don’t care for every song in the Missal, but then, I don’t care for every song on the radio, either. And there are songs that in my short time as a Catholic have become very important to me – particularly the songs that were sung at last year’s Easter Vigil. I revisit them regularly, with great gratitude and joy.?

There is another song that is special to me because I heard it at the very first Mass I attended. It is "Glory to God", a hymn of praise sung at the beginning of Mass for most of the liturgical year. There are numerous settings of it, but the one I heard that morning a decade ago is by composer Dan Schutte, in his "Mass of Christ the Savior." I am not exaggerating when I say that the first time I heard it my spirit soared, and it happens without fail even today.?

Schutte’s setting of the Gloria suffers from one problem, however: its opening strains bear an unfortunate resemblance to the opening strains of the “My Little Pony” theme song. This has caused some wags to refer to it as the “My Little Pony” mass, and one Catholic talk-show host has claimed that the whole point of this setting is to incorporate a toy into the holy sacrifice of the Mass. Let me state emphatically that he is wrong. I studied music theory in college and used those skills recently to do a systematic comparison of Schutte’s “Glory to God” and the “My Little Pony” theme song – aside from the opening strains, there is no similarity between the tunes. But sadly, the urban myth has stuck, and this setting of “Glory to God” is trotted out as Exhibit A in the case against modern music in the liturgy.

Truth be told, there are songs I sometimes hear at church that set off an instinctual adverse reaction in me, because they are straight out of the rock-concert church services I used to attend. I didn’t like them then, and I would prefer not to hear them now. They don’t fit my definition of reverence, and the lyrics are sometimes theologically suspect, and they are a crushing reminder of all those years in which I was trapped, not knowing what I was seeking and powerless to seek it.?

But happily, that is not true of the vast majority of songs we sing at Mass. (How songs are sung at Mass – how the leader interprets them – can cause them to veer in the wrong direction, but that’s a topic for another day.) It has been a delight to gradually learn the modern canon of music in the Catholic Church, and I even bought a copy of the Missal from Amazon so that I could practice, and enjoy, them on my own.?

Am I “getting it right” by singing these hymns? Or am I, musically speaking, sleeping with the enemy?

I’ll share this, and you can decide:

Part of my morning routine, in addition to prayer, the Scriptural readings of the day, the saint of the day, and the first decade of the Rosary, is singing the “Gloria.” I don’t know if I am committing some kind of heretical act by singing it outside of the Mass or the appropriate liturgical season. What I know is that when I sing it, my spirit soars. I find, every time I sing it, what I sought for so long.?

It sounds right to me.

#catholic #mass #music #gloria #danschutte