Holy Week: into the maelstrom

Sunday evening and Monday – In the last month or so, I have moved my “Sabbath” from Thursday to Monday. It gets it closer to the actual Day, and at times Sunday evening can then be part of it. I work late, but I can finally lock the door, brew some tea, and perhaps listen to some music. And so it was: the opening chorus of the Johannespassion. I would say that this is the most incredible manner of beginning any extended musical composition that could possibly be imagined – were it not for the St. Matthew Passion with its triple chorus.

Outside, it is a spring night with the moon waxing toward full. Passiontide is here.

On Monday, I slept late (8 am!) and spent much of the day at the county park, my first visit since November. "In seedtime and harvest," the Book says - Holy Week is pretty much a church employee's equivalent, the week when one absolutely cannot afford a day off. But He says "Do it anyway." It is a question of trust -- can we trust God enough to be obedient, or are we going to try and get it all done ourselves? The Sabbath is one of the very greatest gifts of the God who is merciful and compassionate, who knows our human frame, who Himself has walked this earth and been weary and perplexed.

Tuesday – Into the maelstrom. This day is the critical one for Holy Week, in my experience – if I do not make it to the Bench, I am sunk. Thanks to a delay in staff meeting, I do: almost an hour all told, working on the Pièce d'Orgue for the postlude at the Great Vigil.

Staff meeting is followed by a meeting with the clergy where we go through the Three Days' liturgies. That runs me right up to 12:15 – Stations of the Cross, for which I am Officiant. I see how late I am and almost run into the church, to find five persons sitting quietly in meditation. I feel awful for thinking so lightly of this service that I almost missed it.

Towards the end, a familiar person slips in the back: it is K, a person who has gotten a lot of money from the parish and from me. He has been absent for a long while (since we pretty much banned him from the building). As I learn, this is partly because he has been in jail for several months. But he is out again and needs help. I listen to him for about a half hour. What can I do? I have just walked the Path with Our Lord; I cannot brush off one of His Children.

From there, I try to sort through the many loose ends from the morning's meeting, meanwhile dealing with incoming e-mails. My friend and co-worker N. is ill; I try to pick up a few pieces for her, with mixed results. At least C. (the secretary) and I get the 32-page large format Triduum Service Booklet underway; 110 copies, over 800 sheets of 11x17 paper, and all told about six hours of editing. I am very happy to get this printed; whether it is correct or not, it is done.

And so is the day: I must catch the bus.

Passion Sunday

3:45 am – Time to get up. It is not so bad as it sounds; I go to bed early on Saturday whenever I can. But anything before 4:00 remains hard for me.

5:30 am – Out the door, into the Honda for the trip downtown. The streets are quiet at this hour, which makes the half-hour drive a pleasure.

6:10 am – Begin the work day. I start my Sundays by opening doors, turning on lights, feeling kinship with young Samuel at the House of the LORD in Shiloh (I Sam. 3:15). Then, to the organ bench. These few minutes are precious, and I wish I could get up earlier to have more time. I spend a good bit of time on an extended introduction to “Ride on, ride on in majesty” (tune: “The King's Majesty”). As the congregation enters the church from the procession with palms, singing “All glory, laud and honor,” I kick in with full organ on “The King's Majesty” and must “preludize” until most of the congregation is in the room, then we shall sing.

7:15 am – Matins in the upstairs Chapel, with Fr. Hulme. I choke up while trying to read the First Lesson: Zechariah 9:9-12:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal of an ass.

This day is the Scripture fulfilled. All four Gospels describe it, which signifies how important it was. Psalm 24 is fulfilled as well:

Lift up your heads, O gates:
Lift them high, O everlasting doors;
and the King of glory shall come in.

8:00 am – In my office. Final setup for the choir room, a final look at the choral music. Pace the floor; Holy Week is here, and it will require all that we have.

8:45 am – Upstairs to the Parish Hall. A handful of people are there for the 9:00 service; it all feels dispirited. But it improves when children begin to arrive. They play with the palm fronds, they raise the energy level of the room. Now it is all right. It feels like a crowd on a parade route, waiting for the action – and that is how it should be for Palm Sunday.

Our wonderful sexton, John, is pacing about, attending to last-minute issues. He goes outside and discovers that a (probably large) dog has pooped right on the step at the side entrance, where we will all be entering the church in a few minutes. He cleans it up. And then learns that we will not be going outside after all – there is a light rain, and we will stay indoors. So now he has to move the Green Songbooks from their place inside the door to the parish hall, and all of this at pretty much the last minute. He gets it done.

9:00 am – We begin:

Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 270)

Normally, I start the singing and scurry through the Sacristy by the short-cut into the Church to be ready when the procession arrives; for the first time in years, I am free to walk the procession with everyone else. I find myself beside H., my almost-seven-year-old goddaughter, each of us holding our palms and singing. Again my eyes fill with tears. She drifts back in the procession and now I am beside L., one of our choristers. She is not a particularly religious girl. But I find that she knows by memory all the words to “All glory, laud and honor” and sings them with vigor. She stumbles on stanza 5 and looks over at my church bulletin, but she certainly knows more of the hymn than I do. Her father and younger brother (also a chorister) are with us, and H.'s family is behind. All of these people, ahead and around and behind, are my friends, my family. It is good to be here with them, palm frond in hand, walking down the hallway and singing.

Last week, I had a discussion with one of my fellow-laborers in Christ about one of the challenges of this work. When you do this, your experience of Sunday morning is not what it would otherwise be. It is hard for us to receive the nourishment that others get by coming to church, and we must find other ways to remain connected to our Lord and his Body, the Church. While others are worshipping, I am noticing the mistakes in the bulletin – the bulletin that we worked so hard to prepare. There are mistakes in the liturgy, in the music. But we are here, this “family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners” (BCP p. 276). And it is good.

10:00 am – The service ends: exactly one hour. We had worried about this; how could we keep it short enough so that the children could have church school? This will be the first year in many that they have even made the attempt, for the long liturgy has most often chewed up all of their time. Not this year; we moved the middle service from an 8:45 start time to 9:00 last summer (to a loud and continuing chorus of complaints), and here is a place where those fifteen minutes have made a difference. It allowed the 7:45 service to get done, instead of it running late and forcing the middle service to likewise get a late start.

10:15 am – Choir warmup. I spend too much time on the hymns and psalm; we have only five minutes for the anthem, just enough to sing it through. And I have worried about this one; it is right at the edge of what this choir can do.

10:55 am – Rev'd Raisin tells me that the service bulletins have disappeared; there are only thirty copies! We printed many more than this, and they were in place earlier this morning. Where could they be? She and I dig through the recycling basket; no luck. I am in a panic, and certainly no state to be leading worship.

11:00 am – Ready or not, we begin. I start the singing, head through the short-cut, take my place at the organ. I kick in with “The King's Majesty” as planned – and the congregation is so small that the long introduction I was prepared to play turns into twice through the tune, about thirty seconds. All that work for nothing...

I am still flustered, not at all in a spiritual state; I am not sure that anyone is. But it is time for the Psalm:

Have mercy on me, O LORD, for I am in trouble;
my eye is consumed with sorrow,
and also my throat and my belly.
For my life is wasted with grief,
and my years with sighing... (Psalm 31:9-16)

The calm sanity of Plainsong Psalmody saves me, and I hope it saves others. This day it immediately connects me with Holy Mother Church and her thousands of years with these texts, with the eternal Song.

The service proceeds. At the earlier service, we took the “short” version of St. Mark's Passion (15:1-39) to keep the liturgy short. At this service, we have time for the “long” version, beginning with the woman and the jar of spikenard. This is how is should be; the short version was too short, “Passion-lite” as it were. There is nothing “lite” about the Passion, and it should take all the time it needs. We should be in Kairos, not Chronos. But at the middle service, we cannot.

The prayers of the people: it is not at all what we expected, which was Form VI in the Rite Two liturgy (BCP p. 392). It is, instead, the Rite One prayers “for the whole state of Christ's Church and the world” (BCP p. 328), which we have used through Lent. We will certainly hear about this on Tuesday at staff meeting.

We have had to produce too many pieces of paper, and we are short-handed. And this week was mostly consumed with the death of a former rector and plans for his funeral – and for the crucial day when all this happened, none of our clergy were in town. One was sitting in an airport, the other was on the road going to visit her mother, who is dying. And that was the day when these prayers and much else also had to be done. And it was also the second day at work for our new secretary.

But we will nonetheless hear about this from the congregation.

Our anthem is “Vexilla regis” by Anton Bruckner, written a few years before he died, a setting of three stanzas of the hymn, given in our book (Hymnal 1982) as “The royal banners forward go,” number 162. The choir sings with intensity and commitment to the sound, to this text and its music.

I have posted our work on YouTube (here). It seems to me that it stands up well against many of the other versions there. Our reading is slower than almost all of them as one can tell from the timings – some of them are almost twice as fast. I notice that our tempo is about the same as that taken by Eugene Jochum and the Bavarian Radio Chorus

Jochum is one of the foremost Bruckner interpreters; his readings of the Symphonies are among the best. It pleases me that he and I seem to be hearing this motet in a similar manner; perhaps there is hope for me. His version is very fine, by far the best of the few that I sampled this afternoon. We are not a professional choir; on this day, we had two basses, two tenors, three altos, and four sopranos, a much smaller group than Jochum doubtless had. But I think we sang with an intensity that approaches that of his recording. I am very proud of our choristers for this.

During Lent, I have not played organ preludes at the choral service, and my postludes have been quiet – some of them posted here through the recent weeks. Today's postlude completes that series: a setting of the tune “Herzliebster Jesu” (Ah, holy Jesus) by Max Reger, entitled “Passion.” Here is my version. To my surprise, I can find only one other playing of this on YouTube, a fine rendition by Edgar Krapp, played on the 1928 Steinmeyer organ at Passau Cathedral in Germany, perhaps the best Reger organ in the world: five manuals, 327 ranks. It will give you a better idea of how this piece should sound. I have adapted it to our much smaller instrument (two manuals, nineteen ranks) as best I could. If I am to play any Reger at all, that is what I must do.

12:45 pm – the postlude ends, and with it the liturgy – almost twice as long as the middle service. I am worn out; I put things away, eat a piece of corn bread, try to work. It is Holy Week; I do not see how we will get everything done.

Jesu, juva.

What wondrous love is this

Not much to say this time: mostly, this is to link to this week's music, my piano improvisation on the shape-note tune “Wondrous Love,” from this morning's service.

There will probably be no more music to upload until Easter, and there may not be much in the way of written posts, either. Maybe Wednesday, if all goes well...

I notice that I now have one Subscriber to my YouTube channel. Whoever you are, thank you! My channel is not much, but I would like for it to be helpful to others in a small way. To all of you who read these pages and (perhaps) listen to some of the music, may God bless you.

... according to the Scriptures

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, that that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures... (I Corinthians 15:3-4)

The fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians was written by St. Paul in the late 50's of the first century, less than thirty years after the death and resurrection of Our Lord. There were still many people alive who had followed Jesus and had seen him after his resurrection (verse 6). None of the Gospels had as yet been committed to writing, making this passage the earliest written account of these events.

St. Paul emphasizes that the death of Christ was not random, nor an accident, nor simply an innocent teacher falling victim to the Romans; it was all “according to the Scriptures,” as was the resurrection. The Gospels emphasize this as well, telling how Jesus taught his disciples ahead of time that he “must” be killed and rise again on the third day (St. Mark 8:31), and that “he spake that saying openly” (St. Mark 8:32).

This is why we hear Exodus 12 on Maundy Thursday, describing the institution of the Passover, and why on many Sundays we hear the Celebrant say “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” This is why the Suffering Servant passage from Isaiah (chapter 53) is part of the Good Friday liturgy. And this is why we have nine Old Testament lessons plus the psalmody at the Great Vigil of Easter. The early Church, and by the Gospel accounts Jesus himself, understood his death and resurrection to be the fulfillment of these passages and many others – as St. Luke says, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets” (24:27).

Holy Week is where it all comes together. At the beginning of the Palm Sunday liturgy, we pray “that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts whereby [God has] given us life and immortality” (BCP p. 270). On Good Friday we sing “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Yes, we were there, and not just vicariously: “I am crucified with Christ,” says St. Paul, “and the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20). At the Great Vigil and on Easter Day – and by extension, every Lord's Day – we give thanks for his resurrection. “For this is the Passover of the Lord, in which, by hearing his Word and celebrating his Sacraments, we share in his victory over death.” (BCP p. 285)

'Tis the spring of souls today;
Christ hath burst his prison,
and from three days' sleep in death
as a sun hath risen;
all the winter of our sins,
long and dark, is flying
from his light, to whom we give
laud and praise undying.
(St. John of Damascus – Hymn 199)

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The above will be my essay in the church newsletter for April. Writing it was a struggle.

Partly, it is a case of post-recital lassitude. I managed to stay on task Wednesday afternoon and evening, but once that was done, it has been hard to pick up the threads of my work, this essay being one of them. I wasted time, dawdled over meals, did other work that was not at all pressing – anything but writing.

But part of it was wondering how to say it. There are many, probably a majority, in our congregation who do not believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead. They have been greatly influenced by the teachings of Marcus Borg and others that Jesus was no more than a good and holy teacher who was crushed by the Roman power, the passion accounts in the Gospels are in essence pious fabrications with no resemblance to what actually happened, and that Jesus most certainly did not rise from the dead, except in a spiritual sense.

I must be fair about this; you should visit Borg's website.

Near the top is the final post from his blog, dated 11 December 2014, about six weeks before he died: “Has Christmas been swallowed by the miraculous?” [Here is the link to the essay in his blog]. He wrote:

The problem with the Christian meaning of Advent and Christmas is not primarily commercialism, though that affects many. Rather, Advent and Christmas have virtually been swallowed up by the miraculous. The angel Gabriel comes to the virgin Mary and tells her she will conceive without the involvement of a human father. Prophets foretell such a birth, and even its location in Bethlehem, despite Mary and Joseph living in Nazareth. A special star moves with the precision of a global-positioning device to lead wisemen from the east to the place of Jesus’s birth. Angels sing in the night sky to shepherds. These are the themes of Christmas cards, hymns, manger scenes, concerts, and pageants.

To be candid, I do not think that any of this happened. Of course, there is some historical memory in the stories. Jesus was born. He really lived. He was Jewish. His parents’ names were Mary and Joseph. They lived in Nazareth, a very small peasant village, perhaps as small as a few hundred. But I do not think that there was an annunciation by an angel to Mary, or a virginal conception, or a special star, or wisemen from the East visiting the infant Jesus, or angels filling the night with glory as they sang to shepherds.

Yet I am not a “debunker” of these stories. I do not dismiss them as “fables” or “fabrications” or “falsehoods.” Many in the modern world do see the two options as “it happened this way” or “it didn’t” – and if it didn’t, then we are dealing with delusions and deceptions. A few years ago, a television special on these stories posed the question that way: are they “fact or fable”?

There is a third option. Namely, the Christmas stories with their miraculous elements were not intended to be “factual” in the sense of reporting what actually happened. Rather, they are early Christian testimony, written roughly a hundred years after Jesus’s birth. They testify to the significance that Jesus had come to have in their lives and experience and thought. The stories are parabolic, metaphorical narratives that can be true without being factual. [my emphasis]

Borg's views on the Resurrection are similar; the accounts are “true without being factual.”

But what should we then make of St. Paul and I Corinthians 15? As I wrote above, this was not a hundred years after the fact; it was barely twenty, and many of the first-hand witnesses were still alive. Had St. Paul misrepresented the death and resurrection, there were people who would be able to say “No, you are wrong. I was there. I saw it for myself.”

The problem for me: how to say this in a manner that people will hear it? How to disagree with Borg's teachings (and, I suspect, our Rector's views, as well as those of her predecessor), without being disrespectful of them, nor of my many friends who believe in this manner? I do not know if I did an adequate job or not.

For the record: I do believe that there was an annunciation by an angel to Mary (which we will celebrate next week), and a virgin birth, a special star, wise men from the east, angels in the sky. And I do believe that Christ died according to the scriptures – the four Gospel accounts as well as the Old Testament prophecies – and rose again on the third day in his physical body [“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (St. Luke 24:39)] – and ascended into heaven, from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.

Choral in B minor

Today was my noontime “Lenten Meditation” at the Congregational Church: the two Bach settings of Dies sind die heil'gen zehn Gebot' and the Franck Choral in B minor. It all went well enough, for which I give thanks to God. I have posted the Franck on YouTube, to go alongside the hundreds or thousands of other performances of this piece; here it is.

From the program notes:

In the summer of 1890, which proved to be the final year of his life, César Franck wrote a collection of three Chorales for organ. They are among the crown jewels of the organ repertoire. Today's program includes the second of the three, the Chorale in B minor. In form, it is a passacaglia, a set of variations on a sixteen-measure bass with which the piece begins. After three variations of increasing intensity, a second theme is presented which may be thought of as the “chorale.” Two phrases are presented on the Great Organ, separated by passages on the Swell. The third phrase is a coda in B major, now presented softly on the Swell rather than the Great; its conclusion is the midpoint of the work. An interpolation on full organ leads into more variations on the passacaglia theme, now combined with the chorale theme and developed, building to a statement on full organ. With a beautiful diminuendo, we return to the B major coda, which concludes the work.

Sunday Scorecard

On Friday, I wrote of my hopes for this day:

So what about that descant [Hymn 518, “Westminster Abbey”]? I view it as a possible breakthrough moment for our choir. We have sung descants, but they have not been strong enough to carry over the full congregation and organ. This Sunday, if they do it as they are capable of doing, that may change. I think they can pull it off. And if not this time, maybe the next.

I had not figured on several of our strongest singers being absent. All told, we were short by seven choristers, giving us a choir of fifteen instead of twenty-two. Of the senior girls whom I described as essential to “That Sound,” only Elise and Alice were present. It was not as strong as I had hoped it would be, but it was audible. Here is the sound clip, with the descant on stanza four. One of the descanting voices that you will hear was the Celebrant, Rev'd Raisin. She loves this hymn, and I hope it was meaningful for her to sing it alongside the choristers. You will hear the young people as well.


What about the Liturgy, Rite One with Penitential Order? At the beginning, there was much scrambling about in the BCP for the Decalogue – by congregation as well as choir – but by the seventh or eighth Commandment, they had the page open and said the responses. As I wrote the other day, there is never enough time. I would have liked to have gone over the Decalogue with them and gotten them thoroughly familiar with it and its place in this liturgy. We touched on it at the rehearsal a couple of weeks ago – the one where we had an ice storm and only a handful of them could make it to choir. It needed more teaching, but I was pleased with them for their effort in this, and especially the way that they helped each other. As the service progressed, they did fairly well with the other responses, especially “The Lord be with you/And with thy spirit.” They sat quietly through the sermon, they said the Creed, they participated. There were plenty of rough edges, but I was pleased with their progress. And at the end, they all said the Post-Communion Prayer, just as we had rehearsed.

The Psalm went better than I had expected. It was far from professional, but they got through it. Our primary emphasis had been listening to one another. We did much rehearsing without a conductor to encourage this, repeating verses until they were singing at the same speed – this took many tries, a half-dozen or more at times. In the event, the pacing was good and the words were clear. “This is like talking on a pitch,” one chorister observed at the end of this morning's warmup. It is, indeed.

The Anthem was not so good. It was here that we chiefly missed those senior girls; without them, several of the entrances were shaky. Still, we got through it, and they had the experience of singing it well in several of the rehearsals.

During the Sermon and Prayers, I sat with the treble boys. Looking down the row at the five of them, I thought about what a fine group they are, and how good it is be making music and liturgy with them. At two different times in my past, I have directed boy choirs; I never had a group of trebles as good as these young men. And the girls of this choir are just as good. I want them all, boys and girls alike, to be good singers, but much more, I want them to be good Christians, witnesses of the Resurrection in a dark world. I hope that this day was a small step in that direction.

It was a Good Day.


Here is my improvisation for the contemporary service, in a somewhat different style than what I more often do; it is based on the spiritual “Let us break bread together,” and is essentially (once it gets going, which takes a while) just a single leisurely play-through of the song, repeating the second half of it, with lots of ornamentation around the tune in homage to the way that some of the great old singers of these songs would do.

King of glory, King of peace

King of glory, King of peace,
I will love thee;
and that love may never cease,
I will move thee.
Thou hast granted my request,
thou hast heard me;
thou didst note my working breast,
thou hast spared me.
(George Herbert)

"This is my new favorite hymn," G. told me after rehearsal. She is a second-year chorister, maybe nine years old. She had the hymnal in hand to show it to me. We had sung it a little while before in the rehearsal, along with other hymns and music for this Sunday's liturgy. It is not what the Experts would call "age-appropriate" or "child-friendly." It is by a Dead White Male, and not only that, but he lived a long time ago and wrote in old-fashioned English which, they tell us, Modern People cannot understand. That is why we are supposed to avoid Rite One with its traditional language and use the 1970's Rite Two language or the more recent "Enriching Our Worship" texts, and why we are not supposed to use the Authorized (King James) Version of the scriptures. But nine-year-old G. knows little of these issues; she recognizes that there is Something here in this text and its tune, something that is worth her attention.

Our youth choir is to sing this Sunday for the 11:00 choral liturgy. I am giving the adult choir the day off, so it is all up to the younger group. That means they have to deal with our Lenten Rite One liturgy, complete with the Decalogue and the Penitential Order. We have to sing the Psalm appointed, which is the Nineteenth, all of it, in plainsong, with congregational antiphon. We have an anthem by David Conte, the "Prayer of St. Theresa," to a text sometimes known as St. Theresa's bookmark. And we have a descant with the processional hymn, "Christ is made the sure foundation," to the tune Westminster Abbey.

Long-time readers will know that the annual St. Louis RSCM Summer Course is important to me. One of the things about the Course for which I long through the cold winter months is "That Sound," the unique choral sound made by a group of confident trebles. Every year when we start doing warmups at the first rehearsal, I get choked up at its beauty.

Back home, this year's Youth Choir is young; the oldest chorister is fifteen and he has hardly been at rehearsal, being busy for most of the year with show choir at school. Without him, we have only one non-treble: Max, of whom I am extremely proud. He has proven his ability to sing a tenor line all by himself and hold his own against all these trebles -- he has some "solos" this Sunday in the Conte anthem, tenor lines that are not really solos, but he is the only one singing them. The center of gravity of this year's choir consists of about a half-dozen girls and treble boys between the ages of about ten and twelve. And some of them are becoming first-rate singers.

A key ingredient of "That Sound" at the RSCM course is the leadership of the older girls. Currently, that would be Kyle and Bryn and Olivia and a few others; not so long ago, it included Meara and Jenna, and before that two from our choir (Jennifer and Meredith), and before that Caitlin and Laura and Margo. We are very close to having a few singers of that calibre in our own parish choir -- Lucy and Caleigh and Elise are among this group, and they get a lot of help from other girls a few years younger, and from some excellent treble boys -- Ted, Charlie, Issay, and Evan come to mind. They watch the director in rehearsal, they sing with confidence, intelligence, and leadership. In another year or two, if we don't lose them all to Show Choir, we will have "That Sound" right here at home.

So what about that descant? I view it as a possible breakthrough moment for our choir. We have sung descants, but they have not been strong enough to carry over the full congregation and organ. This Sunday, if they do it as they are capable of doing, that may change. I think they can pull it off. And if not this time, maybe the next.

Wherefore with my utmost art
I will sing thee,
and the cream of all my heart
I will bring thee.
Though my sins against me cried,
thou didst clear me;
and alone, when they replied,
thou didst hear me.

-----------------------------------

The Lord be with you.
And with thy spirit.

As mentioned, this Sunday is Rite One. I have been working with the choristers on the responses, especially that one. Few of these choristers have experience with Rite One, and we have not had sufficient rehearsal time to explore it properly. There is never enough time. But we took the time at this week's rehearsal to read the beautiful post-communion prayer together. I told them that it is one of my all-time favorite prayers of those granted to the People to say, which it is (alongside the Prayer of Humble Access). It will not be enough, but if I can plant the seed that with Rite One, there is Something there, something worthy of their attention that is not present in the "People Magazine" prose of the Rite Two and EOW services, they can seek it out later. If they are very fortunate, they may find a parish where such liturgy is valued. At the least, I hope they can see that I consider this language to be important and beautiful and good.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,
I will praise thee;
in my heart, though not in heaven,
I can raise thee.
Small it is, in this poor sort
to enroll thee;
e'en eternity's too short
to extol thee.

There are times when my work is so enjoyable I can hardly stand it. This Wednesday's rehearsals were that way, the adult choir just as much as the youth choir. And yesterday, I had the privilege of an entire day of Music -- no meetings, no bulletin issues, almost no e-mail (I ignored it until late in the day). After Matins, I did a first workout on this Sunday's postlude, the Bach setting of "These are the holy Ten Commandments" from the Clavierubung, in response to the First Lesson which is the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20). After dinner, I went to the Congregational church for three hours of work in preparation for my noontime recital over there [for local friends, that would be Wednesday, March 18, 12:30 pm]. I am playing the Franck B minor Chorale, a marvelous piece which I love -- but cannot play on our little Pilcher. And after that, a quick supper in my office and upstairs for a violin doctoral recital. The artist was Timothy Hsu, resplendent in a red Chinese silk jacket, and the bulk of his program was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (with piano accompaniment). I do not like Tchaikovsky. I do not think that this concerto is well-built -- it is to a large degree just a bunch of tunes strung together to provide opportunity for virtuosic display. But boy, was it fun to hear! I sat in the back row with a smile on my face as one Big Tune after another came and went, and as Mr. Hsu played the heck out of the piece. "Virtuosic display," indeed!

It takes a certain panache to play something like this effectively, a panache which I entirely lack. But there are other things that I can do musically. None of us can sing the entire Song; we are granted only a part, a small part, though irreplaceable because only we can sing or play it.

The Post-Communion Prayer, from the Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost feed us, in these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favor and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom. And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.