Music for Mass

Wanted : good hymns about love There’s a need, at various points in the Church’s year, for some general hymns about love.  It can be hard to find them, but here’s one which isn’t sung enough in Catholic churches, in my experience :  Jesu, lover of my soul. We sang it here a couple of weeks ago, and I was surprised to find that several members of the choir were unfamiliar with it. It is a…

Magnificat anima mea Setting women’s words is a rare pleasure for a church musician, so I tend to grab any chance I can find. I’ve set the Magnificat before, because it comes up occasionally in the readings at Mass (not often enough). When it does come up, it’s usually not in the place of the psalm but as part of the spoken readings. I’ve blogged about it before too (see here). However, it is…

St Patrick and his multiple psalms Saint Patrick and a soon-to-be-banished snake I should probably start with an apology.  I didn’t realise until this year that the feast of St Patrick had a different Psalm during Mass depending on whether you were in England, Wales or Scotland, or Ireland. This is actually quite unusual, and I thnk it’s because the Saint’s day is classified differently in the…

Carols in church : a partial guide

Carol, carol gaily Each year I rummage through my (large and still growing) collection of carol books, to check everything will be ready in time, and I get distracted by the Oxford Book of Carols‘ insistence on definitions and distinctions, as it goes into detail which most people presumably just skip over; but it is all actually fascinating stuff, and written by great men (then) working at the…

Choosing hymns for Sunday Mass

let’s all keep singing I usually know before I start a blog whether it’s for The Tablet or for this website, but I was in two minds about this one. I wanted to write about choosing the hymns for Sundays, which meant it was about Church music, but it wasn’t specifically psalm-based. But after all, I have written about hymns here before, so it was a difficult decision to make. Hunting for extra…

My God : owning and being owned in the Psalms

Longing and belonging me and my God O God, you are my God, for you I long, sings the psalmist in Psalm 62/63, most beautiful of the yearning psalms.   ‘My Lord’ or ‘my God’ is  a very frequent way for him to address the Almighty.   It is a distinct and deliberate declaration : ‘I say, ‘You are my God” (Ps 30/31).  Sometimes God is labelled as belonging to someone else, nearly always Jacob (e.g.…

Stations of the Cross : #WomenWereThere

Big in Lent, but available all year Although most of our churches have the Stations of the Cross on their walls all the year round, the devotional exercise ‘doing (or praying) the Stations’ tends to receive more emphasis in Lent.  This is because it is a way to organise our meditations around ‘the way of the cross’ (another title for the Stations, Via Crucis in Latin, or Via dolorosa, the…

Psalms in time of war

War and peace, and everything else too There is no human situation not covered by the Book of Psalms. Whatever is going on in your life, there is a psalm which will reflect it, as well as multiple psalms which help you to deal with it.  This is partly because the Psalms are so old, and also because they are mostly expressions of feelings, so even the fact that we don’t know if there is a single…

Singing in God’s voice

Multiple voices, many Psalms The Book of Psalms has been described as the Church’s first hymn book, and of course it’s much older than the Church itself.  One of the outstanding features of the Psalms, in any translation, is how direct and personal they are, written mostly in the first person (even though we don’t know who wrote any of them). There are many different speakers or singers,…

Seeking God’s face as a theme in the psalms

I know that face How do we recognise people? By their voice, by their touch, but above all by their face. Where does that leave our relationship with God? Every now and again, there is great internet excitement about someone finding ‘the face of God’ in the inside of a fruit or vegetable, or a picture of Our Lady, or Jesus. Sometimes it’s the letters which spell the Holy Name.   What always…

Advent of Year C : joy just round the corner

Starting a new liturgical year Lovely but entirely mythical scene of St Luke painting Mary and baby Jesus We are hurtling towards Advent at quite a scary speed at the moment, and I want to seize the moment to take a look at the psalms and readings for it. We will be leaving Year B of the Liturgical Cycle after the great feast of Christ the King, and moving into Year C.  Year B is Mark’s year,…