To Franciscan University of Steubenville, with gratitude

I have always been hard on the Franciscan University of Steubenville. When they didn't have the music program that I wanted in my search for an undergraduate school, I made it my mission to find every legitimate reason not to like the place so that my parents wouldn't end up sending me there "for the faith." Going to Notre Dame put me ever more on the defensive against Franciscan University, and delving into the tradition of the Church's music sealed and confirmed my dislike for the school and its liturgies. Easter Vigil in a gym with guitars? Please.

I am convinced that the liturgy in which a certain community participates will immediately show you the character of that community's faith. This is very true, but one must be careful not to turn it into an all-encompassing formula, because I found that during my attendance at the memorial mass for Kelly Roggensack this past week, the formula I had devised in my head connecting the bad liturgical music to the sappiness of the students and staff was broken down.

The main sub-group within the larger attending crowd that I spent time with was the handful of honors program students who are also on the cross country team. Smart and well-spoken, compassionate and warm - these kids were just darn lovely. The head coach of the cross country team is also a very kind man, and I realized that without even thinking about it, I had assumed that he was a practicing Catholic. And I was right.

Think about that for a moment. How often is a student of a Catholic university able to say with certainty that their biology teacher/cross country coach is a practicing Catholic, without even knowing him yet? Perhaps we are seeing more of that, what with the springing up of places like Christendom, Ave Maria, and Thomas Aquinas College, but somehow Franciscan University came before all these and underwent a truly organic conversion. I don't know how to describe it, but it seems to me that Franciscan was given its identity in a way that the others were not. Truly, the story of FUS's conversion from a party school to a vibrant place of faith is a remarkable one. Fr. Michael Scanlan was the graced priest behind that one.

I'm not saying that Franciscan University doesn't have its problems. As a musician, I don't need to be told that. But as I was standing at mass and watching the kids play their music, I couldn't help, despite myself, being moved by their reverence and conviction. Would if more church musicians could have that kind of faith. A pure faith - one that displays an obedience. Now, that obedience also means a respect for tradition...but I'm telling you, if someday I had a Ph.d. and my choice of students to whom I could teach sacred music, I would not be disappointed to start at Franciscan University. Perhaps it would be a battle, but they do - both students and staff - love the Church. In a way, that's all that matters.

So I find my heart full of gratitude these days. For smart girls knowing to apply pressure to bleeding wounds caused by car accidents, for charming young men standing up in hospital rooms to grace its sad inhabitants with "Lepanto," and for dear Third Order Regulars staying up all night for those surviving and for the girl who has fallen asleep, my heartfelt thanks for all that you did and everything you are. Franciscan University is a blessed place, and I will forever remember the light she allowed to peek through the midst of an otherwise earth-shaking tragedy.

In memory of Kelly Roggensack, 1989-2008. Requiescat in pacem.

Josef und Georg

Man in white: "I say, Georg, tell me once more how you so deftly apply your hands to that most majestic King of Instruments. I so wish I had one." (He gives a wistful sigh.)

Man in black: "Wouldn't you like to know. We both know you'd only play one composer, anyhow."

Man in white: "Mozart's music, dear brother, contains the whole tragedy of human existence."

Man in black: "Only when you play."



They are brothers, after all. Find out more about the Holy Father, Mozart, and Georg Ratzinger here.

America the Beautiful

I used to scoff at patriotism. It seemed uneducated, idealistic, and a completely clueless reaction to the mess that our country has become. As one heavily involved in the pro-life movement during my teens, I was piously incapable of comprehending why I should wave a flag for a country that permits the slaughter of innocents. There is nothing good in this kind of country, so I vowed to remain numb to any kind of affection that might grow in me for the United States of America.

This was not a hard task - Americans are strange that way. We don't really see the big deal about being from a certain place. Part of this may be that the culture and personality of our nation resembles a sort of hodge-podge, and it is very difficult to locate an organic center to it all; in what way is the United States different from all other nations - at her heart? I think it is unnecessarily cynical to say we have no culture or history, but we are VERY young, and what we have produced in art and society doesn't seem to be particularly epic. Nothing to get excited about. So what sense does it make to feel affection for this kind of place?

Maybe it does not make a lot of sense, but it does happen. Even to me. It happened to Katharine Lee Bates, when she was at the top of Pike's Peak in 1893. What she was inspired to write may be one of the most sweetly humble patriotic hymns that I've ever seen. Or heard, rather:

O beautiful for pilgrim's feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thorough-fare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

And if you ask me, she sounds rather Catholic in verse three:

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine.

When I sang this at the closing hymn of mass this morning, I realized that we should love our country for the same reason that we continue to receive communion. God loves nothing for its perfection, and we love nothing or no one except God for being perfect. We love someone (or something) because it exists, and we wish for it a refining, a transformation from the inside out into what it is meant to become. I suppose we could say that America has been given to us. Of course she was "founded" by men, but even they could not envision what it would become or what categories she would take upon herself. Politics make me sick, but underneath American politics, there lives a country, a people, that are downright good because they have been created. And through certain circumstances, foundings, and fate, we find ourselves in one nation under God. This situation has been given to us.

And thanks be to God for the grace of the resurrection, because for all her muck and mire, even America is susceptible to grace. I know the state is supposed to be incompetent when it comes to words like truth, grace, and the Good, but the fact that the state exists means that it can't escape those realities. The state can resist the touch of God, but this does not mean that God does not touch America. How preposterous to think that He couldn't!

So my gracious thanks to Katharine Lee Bates, a deeply religious woman who couldn't seem to find a church that suited her. Her hymn to America makes me think that she believed in created grace. May she now have communion with the blessed Creator.

Lovely 10-year old religious orders

The Church Music Association of America Colloquium XVIII has come and gone. Simply being with and soaking in the music of the Church for a week is enough to make you fall in love with being a sacred musician all over again. Any amount of suffering along the way is worth it.

While all the lectures and classes at the Colloquium were worthwhile, two lectures in particular were absolutely superb. One was given by Fr. Robert Skeris - "Veritas, Pulchritudo, and the Theology of Worship in Song" - and the other was "The Success of St. John Cantius," given by Fr. Frank Phillips of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius. He is the founder of this order, a Roman Catholic religious community of men, dedicated to restoration of the Sacred. Fr. Phillips related a charming and wonderful story of how this community came to be. While they do not have a women's order (yet), their charism is one desperately needed in the Church. A visit to St. John Cantius parish in Chicago will show you the deep love these brothers and priests have for the art, music, and structure that is meant to accompany the praeclarus calix that is the liturgy. May God be with them in their work and vocation.

More to come on the elements of Colloquium XVIII and the ineffable power of Roman numerals. What other system of numeration could make me feel like a talking head for the Super Bowl?

The death of a hero

I have been a bit sad this week - it seems that I am mourning a loss, feeling an empty place inside and knowing that I will never have or be what I enjoyed having and being for a while. This all follows, because there has been a death - not in my family, or amongst my friends, but in the recesses of my heart and imagination. This Wednesday, at about 11:23 PM, I lost my hero.

My mother yelled at me for going to a rock concert by myself, and I have to admit that it was a pretty stupid thing for me to do. Ben Folds' fans, however, are a pretty mild - even if eccentric - group of people. I was surrounded by preppy looking young men wearing hoodies that said things like YALE and PRINCETON and NASA. I seated myself in row F, a lot closer to the stage than I had imagined, and let the small tickle of excitement grown in my stomach as I waited for Ben Folds to strut onto the stage and tackle the beautiful Baldwin that stood before us.

That is exactly what he did. He walked onto the stage, waving to the crowd and making the sign that indicates exuberant noise to the Wolf Trap intern who was seated at the side of the stage for the viewing of all the deaf in the audience. "How charming," I thought, and I wished I was her. Indeed, Mr. Folds kept cute and flirty contact with the signers throughout the evening, but it started to grow a little sour for me about a quarter through the show. "One of the great things about being here," said Ben from his bench, "is that we all get to see what the word f*** looks like in sign." Everyone cheered, so he started playing a repetitive chord on the piano and chanting, "F***, f***, f***" followed by "shit, shit, shit" and then "poop, poop, poop."

One of my pet peeves is people who get prissy about swearing. I enjoy a colorful "damn" or "hell" as much as the next person. So why was this bothering me so much this evening? I knew that Ben Folds has a reputably foul mouth, and it never bothered me before. I looked over at the pretty blonde intern who was frantically trying to keep up with Mr. Folds and his repeated "f***'s." I found myself wishing that she was allowed the embarrassment of not knowing how - or not finding it within her - to sign that word.

The music was excellent. He played some songs from his new album, and some more from his past ones. He played one of my favorites, "Underground," but I couldn't enjoy it the whole my through because my head felt like it was splitting in two. Sitting close to the stage (and the speakers) turned out to not have been the best choice. My aching temples were allowed some respite when the bassist and the drummer left the stage to let Ben go solo for a few songs - during one of which he suffered a "f***-up" and laughed at himself before starting over - but by 10:00 PM, I began looking at my cell phone. Surely the set would be over soon. Then I chastised myself for checking the time during what was supposed to be the concert of my dreams.

The drummer and the bassist - who kept looking off-stage and laughing at someone in the wings during the entire show - came back on after Ben's solo go. For some reason, the bassist flicked the audience off after he was introduced by Ben towards the end, and he added a good passionate "F***in'" to one of his solos, just to show you he wasn't to be messed with. I was concerned with making curfew, and my head hurt so badly that I dashed out of my row before the band came back out for an encore. I had asked one of the ushers before where one should go if they wanted the chance of meeting Ben Folds after the concert, but I decided not to go to the back of the Filene Center and wait by the buses. I had curfew, and besides, I wasn't sure that I felt like it anymore.

Driving home, my head hurt and I felt sick to my stomach, but I kept waiting for that after-glow that I had waited for all week, as well as the sadness that would come with knowing that it was all over. Neither came. I didn't feel heart-broken for having missed a chance to meet Ben, and I didn't feel moved to starry eyes by his beautiful music. I felt old. Old, tired, and battered around.

My love for Ben Folds collapsed a few minutes after I got home. I entered wikipedia to read his bio for the 57th time, and I saw an update at the end: he has been married four times. Four? But he just divorced Frally a year ago...and as it turns out, he was married to Fleur this past January. Wife number four. He resides with his wife in Nashville, the same town in which Frally and his two children, Grace and Louis live. I closed my laptop when I came across a picture of Ben and Fleur gazing into each other's eyes after their wedding. I hope they're happy.

The nonsense that the evening had been was almost unbearable. Three men in their forties, playing deafeningly loud rock music, swearing unapologetically in front of pretty blonde interns, deaf people, and young families, and carrying on as if none of us will ever die. It was such an illusion. The non-chalant obscenity of the bassist, the crazy adoration of the crowd, the picture of Grace and Louis at home alone with woman #3...my love died there. He is only a man, and a lost one at that.

We are all lost, most certainly. And I will buy his next album - it sounds like it will be stunning. But I'm not in love with that rock pianist anymore. After two years of studying the meaning of being a person, I realize that I am meant for far greater things. Idolizing a rock musician is great fun, and it gives one something to look forward to when life feels particularly intolerable. What I realized this past Wednesday, though, is that I prefer the rich and quiet glory of all of life's intolerability to the dramatic charade of an oppressive and abrasive performance. More and more, I'm finding that real life is better than any fairy tale. This realization comes with a sadness, though, because it means I'm changing. It's not a loss of innocence. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It is the loss of a dream that was preventing the innocence.

So requiescat in pacem, those dreams full of rockers standing on their pianos and conducting the audience in song. It was nice for a while, but in the face of what is really true, it has lost its luster and its charm.

The sad lie of multiculturalism

Pentecost occurred but a few Sunday's ago, and the church I attended, like most, took the feast as an opportunity to celebrate the multitude of cultures present within the ecclesial community. The papal mass at Nationals stadium on April 17th seemed to follow the same sort of spirit. This was evident in elements such as the multi-lingual petitions and the varied presences of a "traditional" choir, a gospel choir, and a multi-cultural choir that performed pieces representing a wide spectrum of nationalities, from Spanish to Native American to African. These sort of masses have shown us that if what we want for the liturgy these days is diversity, then we certainly have succeeded.

If you ask me, this is a sad success. There is a problem with this success. The only way we can understand the problem, though, is if we first understand the problem with celebrating multiculturalism for its own sake. And that means we must first understand the problem with Americanism.

The problem with Americanism is that the mere fact that you have an opinion is enough to render it valuable. The fact that you come from a certain background makes you infallible, because there is always the chance you could be discriminated against. We celebrate differences not because we love and cherish them, but because we are afraid that somewhere, somehow, someone does not. A friend of mine commented that the presence of several different cultural choirs at the papal mass was not so much a testament to unity, but a testament to the innate awkwardness we truly feel with one another's backgrounds. Why is our musical testament to our unity in the liturgy not the obvious one - the formation of a single choir? Do you see the problem?

I don't think multiculturalism, at its heart, comes from a sincere love and respect for every single person's background. I think it comes from a sense of guilt and fear. So what would a sincere love of each person, not just despite, but because of their unique circumstance, background, culture, and personality look like?

I'll tell you. There's a word for it: Christianity.

In the May 10 meditation in "Co-Workers of the Truth," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger speaks of Augustine's comparison of the miracle of tongues on Pentecost to the "confusion of tongues" in Babylon:

Augustine interprets this as a description of what will happen in the Church at a later date: the one Church will embrace every land and language; the community of those who love th eLord will absorb those who are separated by a difference of language. In the body of Christ the miracle of Pentecost will be always present. In it all languages will be spoken. "The Church is intended to grow so that she can embrace all languages. I dare to tell you that I speak in all languages. I have my being in the body of Christ; I have my being in the Church of Christ. If, then, the body of Christ already speaks in all tongues, then I, too, speak in all tongues. Greek is my language; Syrian is my language; Hebrew is my language. What belongs to any people belongs also to me because I am united to all peoples [in the body of Christ]...What destroyed the tower of Babel now gives unity to the Church. Out of one tongue there arose many tongues. Do not be surprised. It was the work of hubris. Out of many tongues there arose one tongue. Do not be surprised. It was the work of love." For Augustine, being Christian was essentially a transformation from diversity to unity, from the tower of Babel to the upper room of Pentecost, from the many peoples of the earth to the one new people of God.

One tongue being the work of love...perhaps the mass being said universally in Latin was not such an irrelevant and impersonal thing. Instead of complaining that we can't understand it, maybe we should try and learn it. That one language is a sacramental sign of our unity in the body of Christ - the answer to the Tower of Babel. Perhaps it would not be best to end the saying of mass in the local vernacular language. But it would be better to choose our music and tend to the liturgy according to Augustine's conception of unity rather than the diversity that came with the babble of Babel.

Chanting it up in Chi-town, Cherished Churches et Cetera

You have to use the church Latin pronunciation on "cetera" in order for the alliterative charm of the title line to be maintained.

You may want to take a peak at the Sacred Music Colloquium XVIII, sponsored by the Church Music Association of America. It's taking place at Loyola University in Chicago from June 16-22 of this year. And I can't wait.

I attended this colloquium last year and was absolutely delighted by it. It's description of "musical heaven" isn't far off the mark - each day includes an hour and a half of polyphony rehearsal as well as a mass in which all the music is provided by the attendees and faculty of the colloquium. It's an experience you will find no where else, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the Church's liturgical tradition. It opens up before you in the context of this blessed music. The people are friendly, the atmosphere is lively, and the wonderful city of Chicago only makes this colloquium even more exciting. Check out Musica Sacra website, and you should be able to read about the possibilities the city can offer, particularly in the area of beautiful churches.

And I hear everyone is getting up early to run along the shores of Lake Michigan before morning prayer. Given the sacred musician's typical aversion to physical activity, that will certainly be a sight to behold.

Anyone is welcome. I knew practically nothing about chant before going last year, so don't let your lack of experience scare you. I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if there were a lot of beginners at Colloquium XVIII. It's getting bigger and bigger each year