Bad Church Music

This Sunday, my family went to church at Immaculate Conception at 5:30 p.m. My sister had come home from Iowa State University and Dad seemed pretty happy to have us all together for Mass. He loves Fr. Podhajsky, too, and the church itself is beautiful, with stained glass windows, vaulted ceilings and all the classical architectural details of an old church. The pews are quarter-sawn oak, stained dark, with hand carved scroll work. The fact that I am so cognizant of the wood the pews are made out of might suggest to you that I am not sufficiently getting into the Mass. There is a reason for that. Aside from my love of architecture (I am currently in a Goth phase, and by that I do not mean Goth or Emo but Gothic as in the style of castles). My appreciation for a beautiful building is not the reason I was seemingly not paying attention to the reason for being in church. If I seem to be taking forever to get to the point, there's a reason for that, too. Part of Mass is the music. Unpaid volunteers stand up there in front of hundreds of people and sing. It takes courage to do that, and a certain generosity. It also takes something I shudder to say in public. For a woman my mother's age to cantor, or lead the congregation in singing all the Mass parts, it takes a certain delusion that she is capable or qualified to do so. Maybe for elderly church goers who are hard of hearing, the music is uplifting. For people like me dad, born with nearly perfect pitch, trained for years in classical piano, listening to music like this is more painful than hearing my mother's polka so-called-music on you-tube. And yet here we were, all together as a family, except for Miles who left around noon to go to work; my sister, who left home again in August to attend college, was here on a Sunday night, and we were supposed to be celebrating Mass and praising God for all that is good, and for that matter, as Catholics, we must thank God for everything, even if it seems bad. So, by that logic, or that theology, I should have been smiling and singing joyously with great gratitude for the bad music that God had given us this Sunday night. Hallelujah! Or as the Pentecostals might say, Have Glory! It's a beautiful sunny afternoon in October. My annual fear of Oktoberfest had come and gone. My sister was home. The music--the 10-minute long responsorial song, with its 17-second-long Amen, was a wonder to behold but not to hear. Oops! I didn't mean to sound snide. God bless that dear woman who has the courage, the damaged ears, and the generosity to stand before all these people and help us celebrate God's love for humanity. Let me recount our blessings. My hair is so long and so thick, I might be able to wear ear plugs to church and get away with it. Oops again! Let's see. This organist and this cantor may be helping us to shorten our time in Purgatory by getting some of our suffering out of the way here and now, on this earth.

Al right, I give up. But I was not the only "bad Catholic" thinking this way. Mom--not I--says the singer couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. All of us, Mom, Dad, Claire and I agree that the organist never plays in the right key. It is always so much lower than it should be, no one can even sing along because it is too low for them. Both the singer and the organist cannot count, in terms of rhythm and reading music. However, as I said before, they are unpaid volunteers. We are not members of this parish, and I do cantor sometimes at our own church with my dad playing piano, and I absolutely HATE singing in front of all those people.

So, I feel a little bit evil, complaining about the Sunday night music at Immaculate Conception. On the bright side, we all must have looked happy and sincere to join everyone in saying "Thanks be to God!" when the priest said "Mass has ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord."