The mixed joys of not joining in

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet :  The mixed joys of not joining in

The choir summer holiday is coming to an end, and I am really pleased.

Not because I like having to spend time and energy on organising and delivering the music, not because I am looking forward to seeing the choir members back again, not because I am looking forward to making music together and creating something beautiful to the glory of God, though all of these things are true, but because I have been feeling increasingly uncomfortable at Mass on Sunday mornings.

We all know priests are in short supply currently, and this is especially true in the summer months, when they are as entitled to holidays as anyone else. This year our parish reduced its number of Sundays Masses for the summer, and instructed the choirs to take a holiday until September. I actually rather like a spoken Mass for a change, it gives me a different angle of focus. Then one of the church music groups decided that since they were mostly still around, they could do ad hoc music at the one remaining Mass. I’m sure that their motivation was just to improve the service for the Lord and for everyone else, but it’s a style of music with which I am very uncomfortable.  I do happen to know all these hymns, they were new and regarded as exciting when I was a student nearly fifty years ago, but I don’t think they have all worn well; or more accurately, some people love them and find them prayerful and helpful, but not all of us do.

Read the full article

Still small voice

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – The still small voice of God

A church musician speaks out on the unsettling problems with some of our translations

It’s holiday for the choir this month, which means I am much less busy than usual during Mass, and I don’t need to spend time in the week checking through the readings and choosing appropriate hymns. This is probably good for me, as it means I don’t start fretting about what is wrong with the new translation, but simply experience it on the fly like most people. I am already used to the St Paul reading being difficult to understand, even though I have the text in front of me, and I quite often have to look up the old version to check what it’s aiming at, but the first/Old Testament reading is usually not too bad. And yet I was jolted to hear the First Reading on the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time just recently, which is the beloved and familiar story of Elijah going off to Mount Horeb to wait for God to come and talk to him.

From inside the cave where Elijah has spent the night, God tells him to come out and stand before him (this is a wonderful and most exciting story, but a lot of it is missing from our Lectionary; it’s really worth looking it up). Elijah hears a mighty wind, then an earthquake, then a fire, but he doesn’t even come out of the cave for those, and the narrative says clearly and repeatedly that the Lord is not there in those mighty and loud events. It is only when he hears a “gentle breeze” (Jerusalem Bible and the RSV, that’s the words we are used to), that he comes out to encounter God.

Read the full article