Light On Dark Water

The Children’s Choir

It’s no secret that the quality of liturgical music in
the typical Catholic parish runs the gamut from bad to mediocre.
I’ve certainly done my share of complaining
about it over the years and there’s no need to repeat any
of those complaints. The subject pops up from time to time on
popular Catholic blogs such as

Open Book, and the wells of
indignation start to overflow, as they have been doing for at least
as long as I’ve been a Catholic, which is about twenty-five
years now. Same old song, you might say. I know it pretty well,
and I’m a little tired of it.

Besides, it seems to me that the situation is improving. Maybe
it’s just my parish, but we have a fairly wide range of music,
including some chant and Latin hymns, and are no longer as locked
in to the mostly dreary Glory and Praise standards. This
variety is present not just from one Mass to another but within
the same Mass, and while some complain, reasonably enough, that
it makes for a sense of fragmentation that’s a price
I’m very willing to pay.

But even when music at a Catholic Mass is at its worst, most
parishes can provide another and very rewarding auditory
experience. I refer to the sound of children. Many a time
I’ve been nudged out of a darkening resentment over some
aspect of a liturgy when, during the homily or in some other
relatively quiet moment, I became conscious of the voices of
children too young to be entirely silent on demand: laughs,
gurgles, cries, whines, absurdly loud whispers, any number of
sentences beginning with “Mommy,” and every now and
then The Big One, when you hear the thunk of a small head
banging on a pew, followed by several seconds of silence, when
you know the little one is gathering up all the outrage he feels
and all the air he can get into his lungs, and that these will
shortly burst out in a full-blown scream of anger and pain. The
experienced parent uses this awful pause to get as far as
possible in the direction of an exit before the embarrassing
storm bursts.

A few days ago I ran across some complaints about a priest who
was very intolerant of noisy children in church and published
some rather ill-tempered admonitions in the parish bulletin. I
don’t know what amount of noise he was responding to. Of
course when a screaming child cannot be quieted fairly quickly,
the level of disruption becomes unacceptable and the parents need
to take the child out. But I hope the priest wasn’t trying
to get rid of the sound of children altogether, as one or two
parishes I’ve encountered have seemed to want to do. The
sounds of children, even their crying and whining, provide a
joyful and celebratory accent to whatever else is going on in the
liturgy, forcing—or perhaps I should say inviting—the
jaded and cantankerous to consider: here is new life, asserting
its place in the community, shouting or murmuring a promise of
continuity and hope, a bit of good news no matter what else is
going on. Often I seek it out. If my mind wanders during the
homily, I may find myself waiting attentively for the next bit of
laughter or crying. At my parish I usually don’t have to
wait very long, and I always smile when it comes.