On any given Sunday, many Catholics leave Mass with more vivid memories of the music than of the preaching. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; remember St. Augustine’s saying, “He who sings, prays twice.”
Liturgical music is currently the subject of some debate in Catholic circles. Here in the United States, that debate has appeared in a couple of ways. First, the recordings of the monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, Anonymous 4, and others have helped create a nascent rebirth of plainsong in some parishes. Second, Thomas Day has created a firestorm of controversy with his books, Why Catholics Can’t Sing, and Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo? Day’s point of view can be seen in his subtitles: “The culture of Catholicism and the triumph of bad taste” and “The loss of soul in Catholic culture.”
While this debate has been helpful, it’s missing a key component. Critics of liturgical music have focused largely on the musical content of new hymns, as well as on what might be called performance issues. Critics ask a lot of questions: Why is so much new music insipid? Why is so much new music unsingable for the average assembly? Why is the cantor so close to the microphone? Why is the cantor at the front of the church acting like a master of ceremonies? Why do our new churches have so much sound-deadening carpet? Why is so little new music written for the organ? Perhaps most importantly, why isn’t anyone singing?
These are all important questions, but they ignore an equally important facet of modern liturgical music—the lyrics. What makes this omission all the more surprising is the recent failure of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) to produce new translations of the Psalms and the Sacramentary that the Vatican found acceptable.
Given all that, it’s curious that so little attention has been given to the lyrics of our new liturgical music. There are several reasons for this oversight. First, one has to consider the sheer volume of new music being published today. With competing publishers all seemingly flourishing there are more opportunities than ever for liturgical composers. There has probably been more Catholic hymnody written in English in the three decades since the Second Vatican Council than in the three centuries before it. No one can become familiar with more than a fraction of it. Second, unlike many Protestant denominations, Catholics in the United States do not have a centralized authority that evaluates new music. We have no national Catholic hymnal in the United States. In fact, we have rival publishers segmenting the market, producing hymnals for every variety of musical taste, including separate hymnals for African-American and Hispanic Catholics. Third, and perhaps most important, the musical choices differ not just within different parishes in a particular diocese, but even between different Masses at the same parish.
The upshot of all this is that, unlike the ICEL fight over the language of the Sacramentary, it’s hard to know what people are singing in different parishes. All the same, someone needs to start looking at the theological implications of the lyrics in new music. It is possible to introduce a theological position through a liturgical practice without having to face the same level of scrutiny as if one submitted a paper to a theological review—to say nothing of submitting such a paper to the proper ecclesiastical authority.
To illustrate how the lyrics of a song can raise some troubling theological questions, let’s examine a popular new hymn, God, Beyond All Names by Bernadette Farrell.
God, Beyond All Names
Farrell is one the most popular composers of liturgical music for Catholics in the English-speaking world. She has written dozens of hymns, litanies, psalm-settings, and other pieces. Among her most well-known works are Your Words are Spirit and Life; Christ, Be Our Light; Praise to You, O Christ Our Savior; and Restless is the Heart.
Farrell writes beautiful melodies, and unlike many contemporary composers, she doesn’t consider choral arrangements an afterthought. While much of what passes for liturgical music soon will be deservedly forgotten, I believe that Farrell has written some works that may endure for decades in Catholic hymnody.
Farrell published God, Beyond All Names in 1990. The melody is haunting, usually done antiphonally, with the cantor or the choir singing the verses and the assembly singing the refrain. It’s also a popular cantor solo piece, and is being added to most new hymnal editions. In many parishes it has become part of the congregation’s musical memory.
Most of Farrell’s more popular pieces are explicitly biblical. For example, Unless a Grain of Wheat is based on John 12:24; Your Words are Spirit and Life is drawn from Psalm 19; All that is Hidden comes from Luke 12:2-3; and Praise to You, O Christ Our Savior is replete with traditional christological references. However, it’s hard to find anything in the verses of God, Beyond All Names that the average Buddhist or Hindu would find objectionable—which isn’t necessarily an indictment of the song.
The verses contain an interesting progression. Verse two contains the line, “You have made us in your image; we are like you, we reflect you; we are woman, we are man.” The reference to Genesis is clearly understood, although one wonders why Farrell mixes the plural we with the singulars woman and man. If the line were to end, “we are women, we are men,” it would merely state the obvious. As written, the verse seems to indicate that each of us is in some way both “man” and “woman,” male and female. That’s an entirely different proposition.
Whatever the reason, in verse two, Farrell still mentions both sexes. However, by the time she gets to verse five, Farrell is using only feminine imagery: “You have mothered us in wholeness, you have loved us into birth.” There is no corresponding verse that uses masculine imagery.
In the vocal score (OCP Edition 7236TL), paragraph three of the performance notes contains this from Farrell:
Our image of God is inevitably influenced by our society and its language. Studies of hymnbooks reveal a preponderance of metaphors based on strength and power, together with almost exclusively male pronouns (none of which is surprising in a human-built patriarchy). And yet Christian theology recognizes a God who is beyond gender. The scriptures include feminine as well as masculine images of God. Perhaps our own understanding of what it is to be human can be affirmed and valued if our sense of God is not constricted. Through Jesus Christ, we know God to be at the heart of our human condition, in powerlessness, vulnerability, and change.
Here we run into some obvious difficulties. Looking at our culture today, can anyone honestly say that we suffer from an oppressive sense of the strength and power of God; in fact, isn’t the problem exactly the opposite? To use a metaphor, people increasingly see God less in the majesty confronting Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, and more like George Burns in Oh, God: a kindly old guy in a windbreaker and a baseball cap. It wasn’t that long ago that people intuitively understood what the psalmist meant when he talked about “fearing God.”
Looking past that issue for a moment, one sees the reference to “human-built patriarchy.” It’s not immediately clear what Farrell is referring to here—the companies that make hymnals, western society in general, or Holy Mother Church?
What if Farrell is referring to the Church herself? Granted, the Church is a community of sinners as well as saints, but is it accurate to say that she is a human-built institution, in the same sense that General Motors or the National Organization of Women are human-built institutions? Such a belief would contradict our Lord’s institution of the Church in the Gospel of Matthew, to say nothing of her 2000 years of inspired teaching. Indeed, one wonders if the average Catholic singing the hymn shares Farrell’s view that the lyrics are a necessary corrective for 2000 years of sexist patriarchy.
As Farrell correctly states in the performance notes, God is beyond gender. We are created in his image, not he in ours. However, in verse two Farrell conflates name and gender. If God is beyond gender, is he beyond all names? The two concepts are not the same. The Catechism is quite clear on this question of the name of God:
§ 203. God revealed himself to his people Israel by making his name known to them. A name expresses a person’s essence and identity and the meaning of this person’s life. God has a name; he is not an anonymous force. To disclose one’s name is to make oneself known to others; in a way it is to hand oneself over by becoming accessible, capable of being known more intimately and addressed personally. [emphasis added]
Of course, there is a sense in which God is, indeed, beyond any particular name. This is especially true if we believe that by naming something we can define it. During Advent, for example, we sing O Come, O Come Emmanuel, which incorporates the O Antiphons from that season with their different names for Jesus Christ: Emmanuel, Dayspring, Key of David, Rod of Jesse’s Stem, Wisdom, Lord of Might, and Desire of Nations. Surely, no one would claim that any one of these titles completely defines Jesus Christ; neither do all seven taken together completely define him. Having said that, these titles are important, coming as they do from Scripture. Each of them tells us something about our Saviour.
The Catechism addresses the same question Farrell does in her hymn, but look how much more nuanced is its treatment of the subject:
§ 206. In revealing his mysterious name, YHWH (“I AM HE WHO IS,” or “I AM WHO AM”), God says who he is and by what name he is to be called. This divine name is mysterious just as God is a mystery. It is at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is—infinitely above everything that we can understand or say: He is the “hidden God,” his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.
§ 207. By revealing his name God at the same time reveals his faithfulness which is from everlasting to everlasting, valid for the past (“I am the God of your fathers”), as for the future (“I will be with you”). God, who reveals his name as “I AM,” reveals himself as the God who is always there, present to his people in order to save them.
Farrell’s hymn causes confusion for another reason. It ignores the example of Jesus Christ, who called God Abba, or Father. Proponents of inclusive language accuse their opponents of being literalists for “harping” on this point, but the tradition of our Church is unequivocal in this regard. To say that God is beyond all names minimizes the fact of the Incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ. In being made man, God most definitely took on a name.
Unfortunately, we still haven’t exhausted the hymn’s difficulties. What does the last line of the refrain mean: “In our living and our dying we are bringing you to birth”? How can we understand this as anything other than some form of pantheism? We are called to build the Kingdom of God, but the Mystical Body of Christ does not bring God into being out of nothingness.
It’s Only a Song
Faced with such concerns, someone might reply, “Lighten up! It’s only a hymn.” To say this, however, ignores the point at hand. All too often in our worship, we find people trying to advance theological agendas during the liturgy without submitting these agendas to theological or ecclesiastical oversight. Whether or not Farrell so intended, God, Beyond All Names functions in some parishes as a sort of anthem advocating the ordination of women.
Further, to paraphrase the late philosopher Richard Weaver, lyrics have consequences. They attach themselves to our thoughts without our conscious approval. That’s why a hymn like Amazing Grace can exert such a powerful effect over us, even though the actual content of its lyrics is not that compelling. The emotional force of the music reinforces the intellectual content of its lyrics.
While this can be extremely positive when a hymn’s lyrics accurately reflect the teachings of the Church, the opposite is also true. A hymn that contains an excellent melody but questionable lyrics can help to overcome our resistance to ideas that we would reject if we heard them in a homily. After all, a priest who preached five or six times a year on the pantheistic notion that we somehow “create God” would rightfully be questioned by the members of his parish. However, that same parish is unlikely to question the lyrics of this hymn. In fact, is it not likely that a parish that sings this hymn on a regular basis might become, over time, less likely to object if their pastor began to preach on this theme? Perhaps this isn’t the composer’s intent. But even if we give Farrell the benefit of the doubt, the result is the same—a drift toward heterodox opinion.