Month: March 2004

Liturgical Music and Prayer

I started reading Music and Morals this week because the author, Basil Cole, OP is part of duo of Dominicans preaching a mission at our parish. I’ll blog more specifically about the book at some point, but one of Fr. Cole’s key points is that the function of liturgical music is to facilitate prayer.
And I was thinking about some folks who think that if you can’t sing along it’s not good liturgical music. I know some music directors that minimize the role of the choir because if the choir sings by itself the congregation can’t participate. I’ve experienced people taking offense that they can’t sing everything on the program – every note and every word of every piece. There’s a gentleman with a loud voice that sings lots of things that are intended for the cantor simply because he knows them (sometimes we have the cantor sing the refrain to the communion hymn prior to the congregation coming in.)
That’s simply a misunderstanding of prayer and the role of liturgical music. Vocal participation on the part of the congregation must happen, but just as prayer is a conversation with God and one must listen to God, there are time where a person should listen to the choir. One-way prayer from a person to God doesn’t facilitate long term spiritual growth.
So – the drumbeat of “participation” as reflected in having the congregation sing everything is actually not what’s intended with liturgical prayer. In the same way we don’t say all the prayers of the priest there’s a role for the choir to lead and act in some ways as the voice of God at certain times.

Back to the ConCon

The so-called “compromise” proposal that would have forced Massachusetts voters to choose between full gay marriage or civil unions, with no option to refuse both — is on the way out. House Speaker Tom Finneran has moved to separate the two issues and give voters a choice. Offering two amendments to the voters — one to ban gay marriage and one to establish civil unions — looks like a compromise package that pro-family legislators can legitimately support.

Homosexuality and Fatherhood

I was reading an interesting article the other day, one which I now wish I had bookmarked. The crux of the piece is that most boys tend towards either wimpiness or barbarianism, whereas true manliness is found as a happy medium between these two extremes. Since most boys won’t find this happy medium on their own, however, they need fathers to guide the course and correct them were needed.
Unfortunately, because divorce is rampant in today’s society and fatherhood has been greatly devalued, we’re seeing a generation of boys grow into either barbarians or wimps. This reminded me of a couple of incidents, the first from my college days and the second from my primary school days.
Back in college one of my best friends was a male librarian. He immensely enjoyed the library sciences and had hoped to make a career out of it. When I asked him why he had returned to college to study some other discipline, he replied bluntly: “Because all the other male librarians with whom I worked were homosexual. As a heterosexual I got sick of 1) being stereotyped a homosexual by the general population; 2) being stereotyped a homosexual by other male librarians trying to pick me up when we would get together as male librarians, and 3) always being exposed to the homosexual chatter from the other guys at librarian conferences that basically amounted to size and how it was (mis)managed.”
Concerning the third point, I am not and have never been homosexually inclined. Yet for some reason the topic seemed — albeit in a manner much less promiscuous — vaguely familiar. Where had I experienced these as topics of conversation before? The answer hit me the other day while conversing with another orthodox Catholic author. I was explaining how, from my Tribunal experience, homosexuality is often linked to narcistic personalities. The same goes with certain acts of a solitary nature.
“Yeah, that was one of my favorite activities when I was fourteen,” the individual replied. “I prayed about it because I knew it was wrong, but what really stopped me was when my dad caught me. He embarrassed the heck out of me.”
And this takes me back to when my dad was studying for the permanent diaconate. The families of the candidates would travel once a month to a town located in the middle of the diocese. Here our parents took classes while some of the men and ladies from the local KofC organized events and babysat for the families at the local Catholic school where our parents studied. One morning, in the boys’ change room at the gymnasium, I was hanging out with the other boys who fell between the ages of eight and ten. For whatever reason, we began to compare the size of something other than the floor hockey equipment we had been using out on the gym floor. One of the younger brothers told on us and we got caught.
Our fathers were called out from their classes to correct the situation, and they did. First they dealt with us collectively, then each father took his son somewhere private to deal with the issue individually. We were told, both individually and collectively, that what we had done is wrong, that certain things were to remain private, that this is not how Catholic men behave, that they as candidates to the diaconate were embarrassed at having their classes interupted because of our misdeeds, that a priest was being made available for our confession, etc… Our fathers really stuck together on this issue and continued to embarrass the heck out of us for the rest of the weekend. Additionally, there was no peer support since we were all separated for the remainder of the weekend.
Although resentful at the time, we were fortunate to have fathers who told us “to grow up”. Men don’t engage in certain behavior and our fathers let us know where we crossed the line. I’ve heard a lot of similar stories from other guys. In one case, with a friend who grew up without a father in the inner cities, and whose entire gang had been stopped by the police one evening for minor acts of mischief, it was the drill sergeant in the Marine Corps who administered the correction. With another friend in a similar situation, it was his football coach.
Which makes me wonder whether, in many cases, homosexuality is simply a progression from a sophomoric jocularity that went uncorrected. Boys will be boys. Which is why they need fathers (backed up by coaches and drill sergeants) to turn them into men. Where boys don’t have men to guide them into manhood, young women suffer. For they end up having to choose between barbarians who treat them as sexual objects, or wimps who need to be mothered.