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On this Rejoice Sunday, the word that jumps out in the scriptures is the word “kindness.” Paul writes the Philippians, “Your kindness should be known to all.” The kindness of God to Israel is expressed in the reading from the prophet Zephaniah, “The LORD has removed the judgment against you he has turned away your enemies; the King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst, you have no further misfortune to fear.” John the Baptist is exhorting his followers to act kindly toward one another, “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” The readings exude the generosity and kindness of God to not just the Jewish people, or the Christian community, but to all the world.

The common responsorial psalm for Advent (a common responsorial psalm is one that can be used for all Sundays of a liturgical season), is Psalm 85. The response to that psalm is “Lord, let us see your kindness.” The psalm text speaks of God’s everlasting love. God’s peace and salvation is offered to all people. In God,love and faithfulness meet, justice and peace shall kiss. In spite of Israel’s many sins and betrayals of God, God’s love for Israel remains steadfast andf aithful. Kindness is the quality which flows from the faithful love of God.

Tragically, kindness that has been sorely lacking in humanity from the moment of creation.We have specialized in cruelty and harm toward others. Violence and hatred are qualities in which humanity excels, not kindness and love. Yet, if we are to achieve the fullness of our humanity, to be human as God intended humanity to be at Creation, it is God’s kindness and love in which we must wrap ourselves.If we act in kindness toward one another, there will be no conflict, no hunger,no violence, no war. All people would be cared for and loved.

 This Rejoice Sunday spreads before us the abundant hope that humanity will be healed of its brokenness and sin, and be restored to full human nature. May our lives be an expression of the outpouring of God’s love, kindness and peace in our world, in which love and faithfulness will meet, and justice and peace will kiss.

As my sister, Mary Ruth, lay dying at the age of 42 years,she asked me, “Will I be remembered?” Her question is an important one. We all wonder whether the world will ever remember that we once lived. There is a haunting song entitled, “Once There Was”, composed and recorded by Tim  Buckley, in which a young man asks the girl who has left him whether she will ever remember him. In the HBO Vietnam War documentary,“Letters From Home”, this song was played following the reading of a letter from a young soldier to his girlfriend. It is revealed that the young soldier was killed in the Tet Offensive.

 There was an elderly nun who hearing that she had Alzheimer’s was distraught because she would not be able to remember who Jesus is. The nun’s spiritual director listened, then gently responded, “Even though you may forget who Jesus is, Jesus will never forget you.” The first reading from the prophet Baruch tells a downtrodden Jerusalem, that God has not forgotten them. Rather,God will fill Jerusalem with splendor, and all of God’s Chosen People from the East and the West will rejoice for they are remembered by God.

 In the summer of 1992, I composed a hymn for the choirs at St Hubert, based on this reading from Baruch. In the text of the song, I paraphrased what we hear today. “Let us prepare a way for the Lord, let us put on the splendor of God forever. Let us gather with all people and rejoice for we are remembered by God. Upon the heights let us stand and look East and look West, and see all of God’s children, whom God brings into our midst with mercy and justice. May we be clothed with God’s robe of salvation. Wrap around us God’s mantle of justice. And go forth led in joy by God’s light that grows within us.”

 During this time of increasing darkness and cold,it is easy to feel despondent and isolated. We can find ourselves in a crowd of people and still feel all alone. The scriptures for today reminds us that we are never alone. God calls us to take off our robe of mourning and misery and put on the splendor of glory from God forever. Why? God will never forget us. God will always remembers us.

THROUGH JESUS

I am releasing  these very rudimentary recordings I made in the year of 2012 through CD Baby. I made these recordings following 11 months of recovery from two hip replacements and a MRSA infection. Having tangoed (an interesting image considering I didn’t have a left hip for almost 6 months) with death from the MRSA infection, I began to look at the legacy of music I had composed over the years as a director of music and liturgy in the parish churches I had served. All of this music started out as settings for SATB choir and piano/organ and composed for the various feasts of the liturgical year.

No longer directing parish music and having the musicians at hand, with arthritis developing in my hands, compounded by an injury that took 40% of usage from my right hand, I wondered how I could document the vocal music I had composed.

My intent behind composing music for liturgy has always been twofold: 1) to give glory and praise to the God who created me; and, 2) the love of composing music. While the intent behind this music was not solely to make money, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make a few cents off of them.

With my guitar in hand, and a microphone hooked up to my laptop computer, I ended up making the music heard on this CD. As stated above, the recordings are very rudimentary. I suppose in the terms of the music industry, they would be “demos”, rough recordings that a real recording studio could fashion into something much finer. I took music from the two CDs I made in 2012, reducing the total number of songs to the 8 best recorded songs and had the musical engineers at CD Baby master the recordings. All in all, it turned out pretty good (think the sound quality of early folk song albums from the 60’s).

This should be available on Amazon and iTunes fairly soon. I will then make a number of CDs to sell, too.

 

At my niece, Joan’s wedding, Sydney, my granddaughter danced the whole night then collapsed into a chair at 11 pm. My daughter, Beth, snapped this wonderful photo of Sydney dancing barefoot in her “swirly red dress.” I have decided to use this photo as the defining art for my music, well aware, that if this gets off the ground financially, Syd and Beth may be hitting me up for royalties on this picture.

As you are aware, I have started a “business page” at Facebook. It is under the name of Robert Charles Wagner  @psalmofferings. Upon reading an article in the daily newsletter of ASCAP in early May, I decided to self-publish my music entitled “Psalm Offerings.” I am doing this self-publishing through a company called CD Baby, and am satisfied with the results. They distribute the music to Amazon, iTunes, Spotify and other streaming markets and collect the money. While it has never been about the money, if I make a little along the way, I won’t complain.

Since 1974, I have composed piano songs dedicated to or in memory of people as a present. In 2011 during a life and death battle with a MRSA infection, I decided to begin some autobiographical work. The first was a volume of poems dedicated to my beloved Ruth that recounted our courtship, our wedding, the birth of our children to the present day. The second occurred during a recovery from an injury during which I decided to transfer all the music I had written, songs, vocal scores for SATB choir, and piano music to a digital format.

Psalm Offerings are instrumental piano pieces, mostly 3 to 6 minutes long. They embrace all musical periods from Baroque to Modern. I like to think of them as musical prayer for someone. It is somewhat similar to the Catholic prayer practice of lighting a candle as a prayer intention for a person, the lit candle being a visible manifestation of the prayer. The Psalm Offering is an aural manifestation of a prayer said for someone.

I invite you to listen to some of the music I post to this blog. If you enjoy it, I encourage you to go to CDBaby, Amazon, of iTunes to buy and download to your favorite device. The nice thing about downloads is that you are able to download those songs you like in contrast to downloading a whole album. You can also contact me and I will send you a CD. The CD will be more expensive than a downloaded album (unless you burn them off a computer).

 

I composed this Psalm Offering for Laura Schoenecker, the Director of Religious Education at St Wenceslaus Parish, and my good friend.

The inspiration for this Psalm Offering comes from Psalm 96:

O sing to the Lord a new song;
sing to the Lord, all the earth.
Sing to the Lord, bless his name;
tell of his salvation from day to day.
Declare his glory among the nations,
his marvelous works among all the peoples.
For great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised;
he is to be revered above all gods.
For all the gods of the peoples are idols,
but the Lord made the heavens.
Honor and majesty are before him;
strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.

Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples,
ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;
bring an offering, and come into his courts.
Worship the Lord in holy splendor;
tremble before him, all the earth.
Say among the nations, “The Lord is king!
The world is firmly established;
it shall never be moved.
He will judge the peoples with equity.”
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it.
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the Lord; for he is coming,
for he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with his truth. (Psalm 96, NRSV)

The music is meant to evoke an image of one grand, joyful waltz danced before the throne of God. All of Creation in praise and thanksgiving of our God who created us.

About the Music: It is simple ABA form. Variations of the two melodies evolve as the melodies repeat, ending in one great flourish at the Coda.

Psalm Offering 4 Opus 10: A Waltz for Laura Schoenecker

Jesus said to the apostles, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” In the gospel for the 16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, the apostles have returned from their missionary journey. Ministry saps a lot of physical and spiritual energy from a person. Jesus tells them to rest in God. His advise applies to all of us.

Our lives are filled to the brim with activities and distractions. Some of our busyness is by obligation and some is of our own making. In the movie, “Only You,” an Italian business man observes to an American the difference approaches of Italians and Americans to work. He says to her, “ We Italians work so that we can live. You Americans live so that you can work.”  Jesus is telling us the same thing. We need to take a rest from all the stuff we cram into every minute of our waking hours. We need to set aside time everyday to rest in God.

This statement of Jesus impacts our prayer life, too. Do set aside time to pray to God?  How much of that time is spent “yammering” at God?  As ordained clergy, Fr Kevin and I are obligated to pray the Liturgy of the Hours a minimum of 3 times a day. The Liturgy of the Hours is wonderful prayer, but it is extremely wordy, albeit those words are lovely. There are times when praying the Liturgy of the Hours is more work than resting in God. To rest in God means to rest from all the words; to shut up and just listen to presence of God within us. This very ancient way of praying goes back to the prayer life of Jesus and the early Church. It is has been called many things; meditation, contemplation, and, more recently, centering prayer.

There are many books and tapes about the practice of centering prayer. It requires as little as 5 minutes a day to 20 minutes a day. It is quieting oneself, focusing on a sacred name, like “Jesus”, and resting in that sacred name. When thoughts flit into the mind, one just refocuses and continues resting on the sacred name and listening to God speak to us in the silence. Let us take to heart Jesus’ words today and come away a while to rest in God.

I composed this psalm offering shortly after trump abused his powers as president to prevent families fleeing the violence of the Middle East from entering our country. I resubmit it here today as a prayer for the children ripped from the arms of their mothers and fathers because of trump. I offer it up for all those abused and are being destroyed from this heartless, soulless tyrant who is currently occupying the oval office. I offer it up in hopes that the Congress controlled at this time by a spineless, immoral political party may undergo a major conversion in their lives; that their hearts of stone may be transformed into human hearts, once more and end the tyranny of the horrible person who calls himself president, but is nothing but a petty dictator.

(c) 2017 by Robert Charles Wagner. All rights reserved.

I remember when my son, Luke, received the sacrament of Confirmation. His Confirmation Mass was at St Wenceslaus on a Sunday afternoon. The bishop called for all the Confirmation candidates to stand. He then extended his hands over them and called upon the Holy Spirit to come down upon the Confirmation candidates. At that precise moment, something began swooping over the heads of the Confirmation candidates. It wasn’t a dove, nor some bird that somehow got trapped in church. It was a bat making this great swooping arc from the choir loft over the heads of the kids, turning around in the sanctuary, flying back up to the choir loft and then swooping down again. The kids didn’t know whether  to stand , duck, run or cry. Eventually, the ushers using the collection baskets chased the bat into the west stairwell and closed the door. I thought it was both ironic and amusing. Not all shared my sentiments. But the one thing we could agree on was that it was surprising. Surprising is a good feeling word for what the apostles experienced that Pentecost Sunday so many centuries ago.

We hear Jesus tell the apostles in the Gospel today, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.” This Gospel is taken from the Last Supper discourse in John’s Gospel. This is Jesus’ last teaching to the apostles before his arrest, his torture, and his execution on the cross. Jesus knows that the events that are about to happen will shake the apostles to the very core and that much he could reveal to them would be forgotten by the terror they would experience over the next several days. Jesus reassures them that in spite of all that will happen, in the end, everything will turn out well. When the time is right, the Holy Spirit will come to them and they will understand why Jesus had to suffer and die. Everything will be made right and whole again in the Resurrection of Jesus.

What was true for the apostles is true for us, too. Our whole lives are not revealed to us at our birth. We could never be able to take all that knowledge in at one time. We need to be surprised. When I wass 22 years of age, I married Ruthie, and thought that the rest of my life would be spent as a music educator, composing music, living in destitution and being buried in a pauper’s grave. Had I known that I would be doing what I am doing right now, I might have suggested someone take me out in the yard and put me out of my misery. As we all know our lives unfold and surprises happen along the way. Through the power of the Holy Spirit we are guided and gradually come to know that which we are suppose to do in our lives. We gradually learn the gifts the Holy Spirit has bestowed upon us and how those gifts can benefit the lives of others. The Holy Spirit uses the failures in our lives to help guide us along the path we have been called by God to take. Not all surprises are fun. Some are painful. Through the power of the Holy Spirit we can even begin to understand the suffering we have in our own lives. I have told this story before. After a serious head-on collision on highway 21, I found myself in the trauma unit at North Memorial Hospital. I remember Fr Steve Ulrick, the pastor of St Hubert, visiting me. I had gotten out of surgery and had all sorts of tubes and electrical leads going in and out of me. Steve looked at me and said, “So, where is the grace?” My first inclination, punch him in the nose. I replied that I had no clue as to where the grace was but would eventually find out. That was true a statement. I knew that over the next 18 months as I recovered from that car accident the Holy Spirit would reveal much I had needed to learn from that car accident and the suffering that accompanied it.

You see, we just don’t encounter the Holy Spirit in the sacraments or those “churchy” moments in our lives. We are in the presence of the Holy Spirit at all times. We move, live and have our being in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is all around us, above, below, and within us. And so we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.”