So I knew I had to plan music for praise and worship before first Friday Mass last night, and for the Mass itself. I wasn't exactly procrastinating on it . . . okay, maybe I was procrastinating on it a little. I could have worked on it Wednesday night after choir rehearsal or Thursday night after my ride. But I didn't take advantage of either of those windows, so I decided I'd work on the planning on Friday at lunch time. Oh, but the day after a challenging ride I get so hungry, so I went home early for lunch to eat instead of taking some of that time to plan music (though I did at least look up the readings for Mass when I got back). So I finally decided that I'd stop whatever I was doing at 4:30 and figure out the music, except a couple work things needed to be tied up at the end of the day. All right, DAMMIT, I procrastinated until the LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT. Are you satisfied now? So at 5:30 I'm mad-dashing through the listing of music to pick stuff we haven't done for the last couple times we've been together, so things aren't stale, that will still bring a nice combination of invigorating praise followed by uplifting worship. I wanted to leave the house by 6:00 so I could be set up before the rosary started, but I didn't leave work until then. I called ahead and Teri had my guitar waiting for me to pick up, then I was going to swing by church and see if there we had a setting of the responsorial psalm for the day, which I was hoping for because it was such a musically oriented selection (from Ps 80). On the way to St. Helen, I realized I'd left my listing of song and page numbers on my desk at work. Ugh. Now I was going to have to take time to recreate it from memory when I got there; at least I remembered what most of the songs were, but trying to look up song and page numbers in the middle of trying to lead praise and worship is way frustrating (he says from experience), as it seems I can never find the song title very quickly in the numerical listing (oh, I'm going to make an alphabetical one! Duh! I do have them in a spreadsheet). At any rate, it was definitely going to be a better plan to remake my list before we started singing. As I was pulling into St. Helen parking lot, I realized: I didn't grab my church keys. If I didn't also have to recreate the song listing, I could have gone back to the house to get them, but now I was just running out of time. We'd just have to recite the psalm, no matter how much I wanted to sing it instead. So I headed toward UD, knowing that I had serviceable guitar and music stands with me, too.
Arriving at the chapel, I saw they were just beginning to pray the rosary. They use a format that I find more distracting than helpful, but I now had other things I needed to focus on anyway. I carried in most of my stuff with some help from Carol, then realized I'd left my bag of music (and my music stand) in the car. I opened my guitar case to let my instrument acclimate to the cooler temperature, went out and got my bag, then stayed in the back of the chapel where there was a convenient countertop on which I could work. One of my fellow CREDO team members (Marika) asked what setting of acclamations I was planning to use, reminding me of another musical need that I might have fulfilled had I actually gotten into St. Helen as I'd planned. As the other congregants progressed through the rosary, I looked up the song numbers I'd selected and wrote them down (again) so I could refer to them during the evening. Then I got out my music stand and started setting it up so I could simply carry it forward and set it in place when they were finishing and we could transition right into praising the Lord.
Now, I'd just used this stand on Tuesday night with no problem, but it is probably about ten years old now, and I've gotten a lot of use out of it - at least weekly - since I bought it. The carrying sleeve, made from some sort of heavy-duty baggage material, has been deteriorating badly over the past couple years, and we haven't found a suitable material for making a replacement for it. Still, the stand itself has been holding up fine. But now, the thumbscrew which secures the bottom tripod portion of the stand was apparently stripped out. It would not tighten. I tried to push it in further, pull it out completely, figure out any way of getting it to hold in place. Nothing doing. I looked through all the open doors around the chapel hoping to find a stand that I could borrow, and Marika looked a couple places I hadn't considered. There was none to be found. Finally, out of other options, I simply set the stand on its tripod, and the solution turned out to be the simple physics which God designed long ago. The stand just stayed where I put it, even with the thumbscrew loose.
The rosary was now finishing, so I moved to the front of the chapel and prepared to lead praise and worship for about twenty minutes, after which we usually maintain a period of silence before Mass starts. I could tell I was going to be one song short based on what I had selected for before Mass, but I had also chosen a postlude that I was going to just play instrumentally as needed as people were being prayed over for the Anointing of the Sick. The praise was okay, but felt a bit stifled and scripted. In particular, there is one attendee to whom we are going to have to speak about the proper order of sharing in a meeting. She has been blessed with a gift of prophecy, but does not seem to have any sort of regulator: she often speaks longer than she should and multiple times. Now that I am on the CREDO council, I will need to raise this issue with them, even knowing that they may determine that I am the one who needs to raise it with her, as well. Another who is not well established in the gift of prophecy shared something that we will need to weigh against scripture and church teaching; there was one word in it that she may have misunderstood, as it seemed to carry a different meaning than I think she intended. I do not usually tend to share when I am leading praise and worship, but because of these two circumstances I felt led to pick up my bible and share a passage from it. "As it happens," I opened to Romans 12 and shared a bit from it, looking the whole time for a good place to stop without becoming too long-winded myself. It was apparent when I'd reached the first good break point, and by that time it was about five minutes before Mass should have begun.
"Should have," because our priest had not yet arrived. In fact, I'm not sure if we ever learned what happened to the priest who was scheduled to celebrate Mass for us. Finally a couple of our members went to one of the dorms where they knew some visiting Marianist priests were staying, and were ultimately able to recruit one of them to come preside for us, and we'd finally get started about a half-hour late. Meanwhile, after maintaining silence for about 5 minutes and there being no sign of a presider yet. I began picking quietly on the guitar. After a while I looked up a song number that I hadn't planned on doing, but for which I had the music, and we began singing it together. At the end, I kept playing along, alternating spontaneous prayer and praise and worship with instrumental accompaniment, reprising the refrain a couple of times. Before selecting another song, I explained that this was one of my favorite ways to worship God, just using one song for ten or fifteen minutes and drifting back and forth between sung and spoken words and just music, and invited them to allow the Spirit to bring them along as I announced the next song, which had been suggested by one of the congregants sitting nearby. Someone then asked if we might pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, at the end of which our unplanned celebrant arrived (oh, I dunno, there might have been one more piece of music in there, I just don't remember this afternoon).
I had picked out some really nice music for the Mass, too, including a piece I'd never played before for our gathering hymn, Holy is the Lord by Chris Tomlin and Louie Giglio, which I cut short by one iteration in light of a) how late we were getting started and b) our priest having to be somewhere else after our Mass. I remembered enough chords from the Mass of Redemption to get us through it. We used Breathe (by Marie Barnett) for communion, and finished with Graham Kendrick's Shine, Jesus, Shine. There was this young lady near the front - maybe in her late twenties? - who is mildly autistic, but she was so excited as she danced in her seat throughout that recessional song.
So the unanticipated extra half hour of prayer, praise and worship completely changed the tenor of the evening. It was as if God knew that we all needed to just soak in His presence for that extra time. The scripture I'd shared before this was also just what we needed. Our unplanned presider's homily tied everything right together. He didn't have time to stay around to share the Sacrament of Anointing, so using the song I'd thought I was preparing for that time beforehand instead worked out perfectly. The whole evening became a reminder that no amount of "making good decisions," as important as that is, can ever substitute for time with Him, and that He will not allow any amount of our planning and preparation for how things should go to interfere with providing us what we really need, so long as we remain open to His plan even when we hit an unexpected and frustrating derailment of our own.
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