LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD
problem in marriage, in work, and in the family. Do we listen? Listening with care requires skill, and we can be trained to do that. Second, planning. If the priest is doing everything by himself, you don’t need a lot of planning; he can do it all in his head. But if you have a lot of people, then planning becomes much more important. One caution about planning: too often we have a tendency to become inflexible. I’ve been with too many ministers who plan something and then refuse to bend. Tey have an “it’s been planned this way and by golly, this is the way it’s going to be,” kind of attitude. Or, even more difficult, you might spend three months in planning and then find out it didn’t work. Everyone realizes the plan failed, but the planner must be humble enough to admit it, to say something like “I’ve put a lot of work into this homily and it’s no good.” Te ability to ditch the plan must become part of planning. Is there room in the church and in planning for prophets and visionaries? If there isn’t it may mean we have to rethink the way we govern ourselves. We tried monarchy, and frankly, it doesn’t work. We approached democracy, but the danger here is that the prophet or visionary can’t speak with a loud voice. In consensus, the one who is voting “no” may be the prophet. We must listen to the one “no” vote, not just to the 150 “yes” votes. We must band together and listen to where God wants our plan to go. We need planning, but we also need to be open to surprise, because the history of salvation is full of surprises.
Elaine Rendler: On a practical level for planning, I’d like to recommend holding some meetings that are not product-oriented—meetings where we sit and talk and share and make little waves into what will happen on Sunday over a period of the next year or two. Tere is no product in the world that’s going to be worthwhile if we are fighting with each other, if we don’t trust each other, if we don’t care about each other first.
Joyce Lavoy: My point is about linking communication to planning. After you have completed the plan, have you communicated it to everybody? I imagine you as the glue, the one who makes it all stick together.
John Gallen: Planning, communication and diocesan authority must all be based on content, on real content, and not on opinion or taste judgments. Let’s take a
hypothetical situation. A bishop has called a newly ordained (groovy) priest into his office to bawl him out for using an unauthorized eucharistic prayer. Te priest fights back, saying “you don’t understand, bishop, we have to be relevant to our people.” Now, it is conceivable that neither of them has any real concept of what a eucharistic prayer is. In other words, the content issue isn’t being addressed at all. People are frequently divided because they do not know the content of the issue they are discussing. It is the same when people sit down to discuss what a parish should do to celebrate Lent. If the people involved have no understanding of what Lent is, then they might as well abandon the discussion.
Elaine Rendler: And the result is a heated argument over questions of taste. If you can’t back up your opinion, you are going to get into trouble with the other folks, because we musicians see things differently than do priests.
John Gallen: And regarding questions of content and communication in our dioceses, a diocesan office of worship with a full-time staff needs to be established in every diocese in the country. Tis office needs to assume the responsibility for educating the parish liturgy committees.
Elaine Rendler: A word about supper, and ministry, and vocation. I want to say something, musician to musician. I fantasize sometimes that I should be doing something more dramatic, working with Mother Teresa, serving the poor. But I am a musician, and I have to ask the question: am I living my life, in my situation, with as much love as she is living her life? Tat’s where the struggle comes in, and the suffering, and the commitment. Do we take our marbles and go home because it’s too much, or do we put all our problems in perspective and suffer in a loving way? We need you, as musicians who have discovered your ministry, to stay with us. You are doing so much to shape our future. What you are doing is really important. It’s really difficult, but if you are discerning a vocation to this thing we call music ministry, can you bear with it through the good times and the bad? If this is our call, our vocation, I don’t know if we can be happy anywhere else.
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