RSCM Report, Part One: The Question

From plague, pestilence, and famine,
Good Lord, deliver us. (BCP p. 149)

Monday, July 23: Feast of St. Mary Magdalene

Last week as I cycled to work, I walked my bike through a narrow railroad underpass as is my custom, and met a deer. She was at the road's edge, eating weeds – short, tough weeds. She stood still, gazing at me as I approached almost close enough to touch her. She was thin, her bones showing through her brown coat – too thin for midsummer. There is nothing to eat, and winter lies ahead.

Today we drove to the RSCM Course in St. Louis, through more than two hundred miles of the finest farmland in North America, almost entirely devoted to corn and soybeans. It was grim: some cornfields entirely dead, the stalks brown and brittle. Some were still green, more or less, but they will not make a crop; it was too hot and dry at the critical time when corn tassels and pollinates. Later in the week I walked to the edge of the soybean field behind the chapel. The plants looked well enough, but most had not set any blossoms. Only about one plant of every three or four had anything, and then it was just one or two little pods, an inch long or less. The other plants were half-heartedly putting out blossoms; with rain, they might yet make a crop, if there is time before first frost.

I will utterly consume all things from off the land, saith the LORD. I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumblingblocks with the wicked; and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the LORD. (Zephaniah 1:2-3)

We have made this mistake before, pinning everything on one or two crops [e.g., the Great Famine of Ireland, 1845-52]. But this is America. We don't have famines.

And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the LORD: and their blood will be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung. Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD's wrath, but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land. (Zephaniah 1:17-18)

When these and like passages come in the Daily Office (they rarely if ever appear in the Sunday Lectionary), I am terrified. How can we escape the wrath of God, we who have turned judgment into wormwood, and leave off righteousness (Amos 5:7)? And when a summer like this comes, we do not repent. Nor, for the most part, do we even pray for rain. We do not any longer believe that God “sendeth the rain on the just and on the unjust” (St. Matthew 5:45) -- why should we? It is all a matter of atmospheric circulation and moisture. Or is it?

We have plenty of food, for now; one bad year for crops won't kill us. We can buy corn from Brazil, as the Smithfield company is doing; the same for wheat and soybeans. Sure, it will be expensive. But we are Americans: someone else can go hungry. Ethanol for our cars is more important than masa for someone else's tortillas. This is iniquity, and one day we will be judged for it.

The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers at St. Louis looked to be about half their usual size, with wide and dry sandbars, grass growing where there had always been water.

A dry summer? Perhaps it is random chance, a fluke. But what if next summer is like this, and the next after that? “The times, they are a-changing.”

And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD. (Amos 4:7-8)

What is to become of these young people, the chapel filled with them at rehearsal this evening? Children and teenagers and young adults whom I love: what is to become of them?

Tuesday, July 24: Feast of St. Thomas á Kempis

Just as I am, thy love unknown
hath broken ev'ry barrier down;
now to be thine, yea, thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come. (Charlotte Elliot: Hymn 693)

I love solitude. Much of my work depends upon it – the organ playing, the selection of choral music, score study. But all of these things can bear fruit only in the congregation of the faithful (Psalm 149:1).

Choral rehearsals are the bridge. They draw me out of myself into the community of singers. This is true when I conduct rehearsals at home; it is even more true when I am a chorister at the RSCM Course.

Our tenor section this year is young, largely men of middle school age, thirteen or fourteen years old. There are only two adults: Eric and me. I was shy about plunking myself down into their midst at the first ATB rehearsal this morning; surely they did not want this grey-haired old coot beside them for the week. But singing together casts down all such barriers of age and background, which in truth are mostly constructs of a culture that seeks to pigeonhole us into market segments in order to enslave us.

It is not only age that is a barrier: on my left was Chris, an African-American Baptist from a Lutheran school, on my right for most of the week was Mario, a Hispanic Roman Catholic, and me in the middle, a white Episcopalian from the old South who can well remember the days of Jim Crow. By the end of this first full day of rehearsals and Choral Evensong, we were talking, working together, accepting one another's imperfections, becoming brothers in song. I respect their quick intelligence, their obvious love for this music and for our Lord. They appear to respect me as well.

Today there were many mistakes, but it was a good beginning.