Liturgy of Thanks

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It starts Thursday morning when my dad and I play in the neighborhood football game for the one time all year I care about sports. When we come back, we all help out with the preparations and drag our nice “dining room” table from the crawl space, where it was put for storage when the dining room was turned into the piano room when I got a grand piano in high school. I’m always in charge of place settings, and ever since turning 21, my family gets a kick out of me being the one to uncork the wine. We eat early (~3:30) so that by the time most people are sitting down to eat turkey, we can be eating dessert. Dinner starts with grace, and then each one of us goes around and says something we’re especially thankful for that year. After dinner, we play family games until dessert. After dessert, we watch whatever Thanksgiving specials are on TV—ideally A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, but in a pinch whatever Disney Channel Thanksgiving special is on will do. We go to sleep early, because our traditions aren't over yet.

On Friday, we wake up early and go out to breakfast. We share our Christmas lists while we're eating, but try to be fast, because our goal is to be at the mall by 9 am. At the mall, we pair off—one parent and one child, switch, and then the parents and kids—and take advantage of the Black Friday sales. We have a late lunch and then go see whatever movie in theaters that we haven’t seen yet.

I felt a little guilty this Thanksgiving, and all this week, though. I missed Mass last Sunday. Sure, I had a ton of work and wasn't sleeping (thus missing the blog post, too), but it was the second time this semester I’ve missed Mass for no better reason than “I have a lot of work.” I'll admit, there's not much incentive to go to Mass here. The law school Mass here lasts just over 40 minutes, has no music, and is in a classroom. Add that to the new translation that I’m still stumbling over (aren’t we Harvard students supposed to be quick on the uptake?), and it can be hard to convince myself to go when so much else is going on. Compare it to the Masses I grew used to during undergrad at Duke Chapel, it almost just doesn’t feel even feel like Mass.

When the new priest for the Catholic Center came to campus, his first words to me and the other student music coordinator were, “people come to Mass for two things: good preaching and good music.” I fought that interpretation, because, really, Mass is all about the Eucharist—about God. Music should be at most a nice supplement. But my priest was right; it’d be great if people came to Mass and could walk away saying “I fell asleep during the sermon, and there was no music, but that’s okay, because I got the Eucharist”. Sometimes, that happens, but God didn’t make us that way. Our tradition of liturgy has grown up with music, surrounded in a beautiful Church, for a reason.

This is okay. In a society where in educated circles being “spiritual" is more fashionable than being “religious,” our politics continues to tell us that religion should be relegated to the private sphere, and acts such as the rosary are looked down on as superstition, it only makes sense we would think that only interior disposition matters—that any exterior “act” is at best superfluous. Thus we fall into the Valentinian heresy the Church Father St. Iranaeus wrote so much against which set up a dichotomy between holiness and the physical world. However, in Catholicism, we recognize that the Bible exhorts both “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (James 2:24) as well as “you have been saved through faith…not from works” (Eph. 2:8). Ultimately “faith without works is dead,” (James 2:26) and what we do matters. Yes, that means the corporal works of mercy, but it also means going to Mass and engaging our physical senses there as well as our spiritual ones. It means that the Church tapping into that experience so many have called “spiritual” when looking at a beautiful piece of art or hearing a moving piece of music during liturgy is not only okay, but it’s more in tune with the way God created us: both spiritual and physical.

However, we must not forget that while aesthetic appeal adds to a Mass, it is never the focus. That has to be the Word and the Eucharist. The Eucharist is, first of all, an act of Thanksgiving; the word eucharist itself means “thanksgiving” ( CCC 1360). And, like Thanksgiving traditions, sometimes they don’t work out quite as planned. Our Friday afternoon movie, 20/20 hindsight would say that we might have been better off listening to my dad’s suggestion of Lincoln, instead of going with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2. That doesn’t mean our Friday was ruined. Going to a movie with the family can have more value than just the movie itself. Even if football were cancelled, the turkey burned, and the producer of a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving opted to be out waiting for The Great Pumpkin instead of producing his TV special, we would still have a day of thanks. We still have so much to be thankful for, and there is beauty in that giving of thanks, not matter if the traditional acts for some reason are stripped away. Just the same way, there is beauty in the Word, no matter how poorly a lector proclaims it. There is beauty in the words of the Mass, no matter how much the priest mumbles it. When Christianity was illegal in Rome, the Eucharist was not celebrated with a brilliant pipe organ, but with whatever was available. The artistic beauty is useful, but not essential. There are so many other ways we are engaged .

So families have their traditions around Thanksgiving, and the Church has her traditions around her act of thanks. And just as every member of the family has their favorite traditions, different members of the Church will like different traditions differently. Though, in the long run, it will probably be best, sometimes God asks us to forego our favorite part and remember the point: God. And so this Sunday, I plan on going to classroom Mass again, and to truly be in communion with God—not my favorite song on the organ.

The Correct Resolution

This past Wednesday, I was able to see the Venezuelan-American pianist Gabriela Montero perform at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s (CSO) summer home at Ravinia, just north of Chicago.  After her performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto—an old favorite of mine—she took a tune unfamiliar to both me and her that a random audience member sung for her and improvised on it.  (For the musically-inclined: she added counterpoint to a random melody on the spot.)  

Improvisation, or making up music as you go along, is normally strictly the realm of jazz pianists, but Montero has made a name for herself by creating improvisations based on well-known (or less well known) tunes suggested to her by the audience.  She does it with all sorts of music:  a Classical/Baroque Happy Birthday, Rachmaninoff’s 3^rd piano concerto à la Bach or à la jazz, a Romanticized national anthem of Scotland, and a latinized Harry Potter.

Certainly, if you transcribed Montero’s improv, it probably wouldn’t satisfy music theory professors who critique composers who spent years on their compositions.  But my jazz piano teacher in High School always said there is no wrong note in improvisation. Whatever note you play is the right one, no matter how weird it sounds to the ear. The trick, though, is how you “resolve” the note you just played.  If your note was dissonant, building tension or perhaps downright discomfort in the listener, do you relieve that tension with a harmonic note, or purposely build it up further for a later release?  The true art of improvising is making that choice deliberately and correction.  So “There is no wrong note in improv—just incorrect resolutions.”

This makes me think of how God works in our lives.  In his allegory, “The Music of the Ainur” from The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien describes the act of God’s creation as that of a composer directing His musicians (angels) in improvised variations on His theme.  Tolkien writes of God as the master improviser and composer, while the Devil attempts to insert His own themes and creations over and above God’s.  Eventually, there are two clearly different musics being played at once. God’s “was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came,” while the Devil’s was “loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison of many trumpets braying upon a few notes.”  While the Devil’s music might try to drown out God’s by sheer force of violence, somehow “its most triumphant notes were taken by [God’s] and woven into [God’s music’s] own solemn pattern.”

I’m always skeptical of the “it’s all in God’s plan” reassurances when things are going rough.  It’s hard to look at the Aurora shootings and say “Yup, God’s plan at work.  Isn’t it beautiful?” It seems loud.  And vain.  And endlessly repeated.

So instead of being endlessly distracted by the discord, I started looking for God’s resolutions, for no matter what notes the Devil may insert, the Master Improviser could certainly resolve them in a way to make even the most ugly act a part of a beautiful composition.  Then, I read this article a friend had sent me a few days after the shootings, and I realized that here was just one small example of God doing just that, and I saw in a moment of resolution a piece of God’s grace.

God gave us free will, and as a result, a lot of things against His law happen.  And it is so easy to allow the Devil’s dissonance to crowd out God’s melody of grace and hope.  Those of us forced to live with the discord can only strive to make sure that we don’t cause it and have the faith to look for those moments of resolution, for in those moments, we find not only grace, but hope.  And not only does hope save us, but with faith, perhaps God will begin to call on us to be a vehicle of hope to another person.  And that is the greatest gift of all.