Saturday 6 May 2023

Catholic hymns for Coronation Sunday

 No, not the 1952 coronation, this one, in 2023. 

In real life, I never choose music for public prayer based on political considerations:  a congregation will have people from all sorts of persuasions, eg tomorrow I will be worshiping alongside a Polish women who loves the English royal family. 

But this is a list of what I'd love to choose.   Of course it starts with the readings, influenced by events in the world.


Readings / Main ideas

Acts 6: 1-7  - The apostles asked the community to set up the first parish council!  

Psalm: 32 - May your love be upon us O Lord as we place all our hope in you 

I Peter 2: 4-9 -  the cornerstone - you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation - out of darkness into - light.

John 14: 1-12 -  "I am going now to prepare a place for you"  - whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself 


My summary for the day: 

Jesus the Way, the Truth and the Life - the call to a life of service.


Mass setting

Is there a Mass of Christ the King?  Yes here:   https://www.ilpmusic.org/category/SAHMassCTK.html

I don't know any of it, so might have to settle for the Schutte  Mass of Christ the Saviour.   People know, and it's almost as on-point.


Hymns

Entrance

Hail Redeemer King Divine

Because we have no king but Thee!  And it has a verses about service, even it didn't fit into most hymn-books, and "Feed us, lead us, keep us thine" - surely the Way, Truth and Life.


Offertory

Do Not be Afraid for I have Redeemed You - because following The Way comes with lots of challenges and failures


Communion

In Christ Alone - indeed he is the Way, Truth and Life, and no mention of kings.


Sending

Hail Queen of Heaven - because it's May, and because we only have one Queen too.

Thursday 23 August 2018

What makes a woman anyway?

An article I want to keep a link to: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html


Very brief summary

Different brains in men and women are because they have been shaped by a different experiences.

Many people who call themselves progressive ...— are buying into the idea that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us: the kind of nonsense that was used to repress women for centuries.

People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women shouldn’t get to define women - that’s something men have been doing for far too long,and it needs to stop. .... Their truth is not my truth. Their female identities are not my female identity. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails. They haven’t suffered through business meetings with men talking to their breasts or woken up after sex terrified they’d forgotten to take their birth control pills the day before. They haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering that their male work partners’ checks were far larger than theirs, or the fear of being too weak to ward off rapists.
....

The “I was born in the wrong body” rhetoric favored by some trans people .... is just as offensive, reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas. Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.

Saturday 12 August 2017

Why I'd never work for the church - by the numbers

American figures, but I suspect the ratios are the same all over the world:

https://prounione.blog/2017/08/09/if-i-wanted-to-be-wealthy-i-should-have-been-a-priest/

Monday 28 October 2013

Live as though money is no object?



Twittering-class poppycock strikes again.

I'm sure that it must be lovely to have enough money that you can spend your life doing what you desire.

But back in real-world-land, I really appreciate that there are rubbish-collectors, bus-drivers, shop-assistants, road maintenance staff etc etc who spend some of their lives doing very boring-ordinary-not-the-stuff of dreams things, so that all of us can spend a little of of lives doing what we dream of.

Hedonism = society failure.

Church rules and funeral music vs sound pastoral theology

A great piece of pastoral theology from
http://rorycooney.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-ipad-doesnt-lie-funeral-music.html


"because church "rules" about music can be bent for the rich and famous (for instance, when at the cathedral "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" was played at Harry Carey's funeral during the final procession), they can be bent for the not-so-rich and otherwise-unknown when grief enters their houses as well. I resist, I expect that the funeral liturgy will proclaim the resurrection. Since the resurrection is such a surprise, and I have no idea what that means as well, I've had to decide that
assuaging a family's grief by (rarely) playing a song "sacred" only to the memory of the deceased won't keep me or them out of heaven."

Amen to that - what more can I say.

Saturday 24 August 2013

Musicians as God's workers

A quote from Andrew Greeley's introduction to Rory Cooney's 1987 collection "Mystery"
"Musicians, you see, are men and women who see the wonders of God's graceful love in patterns of sound, the splendor of the form of God's beauty manifested and revealed in the proportioned parts of the matter with which they work. They do God's work and are worthy of the respect, the encouragement and the payment due in justice to all God's workers."  

Nice.

We need all styles of music

I do wish our more traditionally-minded brothers and sisters could see things this way:
... discern how the Lord speaks through the different types of worship expressions in the Church and therefore use these expressions appropriately in ministry:
  • ... through contemporary praise & worship music, I see the Lord’s intimate love for his people & their passionate response back to him expressed in the simplicity and freedom of the music.
  • Through traditional hymnody, I see God’s majesty expressed in the beauty of ordered rhythm & meter.
  • In sacred chant, I see the solemnity & truth of God expressed through his Word which are beautifully sung according to the rhythm of the text itself.
  • And through the blending of Sacred chant and praise & worship in the Liturgy .... I see God’s people “singing a new song” to the Lord.
Ref:    http://catholic-worship.com/growing-as-a-music-leader-a-reflection-on-the-jesus-retreat-2012/

Personally, I find a great depth of spirit "feeding" in the rhythms of Irish traditional music.   In the intricate patterns blending around each other, with a unifying underlying tune, with a huge sense of life and energy in them ... I see God's hand at work guiding us our lives, and giving us occasional surprising moments.