Anticipating Heaven

After listening to (and participating in, God help me) the dissonant chorus of response to this morning’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act for 6 hours, I need to go Somewhere Completely Else. It’s my contention—though I’ve been called today, so far, morally reprehensible, ignorant, a socialist, and a cricket(!) for holding to it—that the ship of state and the barque of Peter are in no worse state now than before the decision came down, and that Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, was correct in returning this issue to the electorate. The USCCB’s official statement says all there is to say, but if your dudgeon needs cranking up any higher, you will find more support for it all over the netz than you can ever keep up with. Start here.

Me, I’m argued out. And truly weary of explaining, again and again and again, that the individual mandate is not the HHS mandate. And now, that the individual mandate itself is not a tax (though the Court’s majority found that only Congress’s power to levy taxes could render the mandate constitutional). Mandate, schmandate. It’s hard to believe that until recently I just thought a mandate was something I hadn’t had one of in a very, very long time.

So, on National Federation of Independent Business et al. v Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services et al., all I can give you is two, uh, mandates: (1) Don’t despair. It’s what the devil lives for. (2) Don’t go all Crusader on the world’s ass, OK? Irresponsible talk like this serves no good. Dying a martyr’s death is one thing, but dying in a persecution you’ve deliberately incited with this kind of rabble-rousing is not saintly. It’s suicide.

Now on to that Somewhere Completely Else, which is St Peter’s Basilica for tomorrow morning’s Papal Mass on the patronal Feast of Sts Peter and Paul. I had the privilege of attending that Mass two years ago when Archbishop Schnurr received the pallium, and though it was awe-inspiring it was also a horrific rugby scrum cum death-by-fan-stampede rock concert cum being delayed overnight in O’Hare by a blizzard and trying to find somewhere to sleep nightmare. So I never expected to want to go back.

But then I learned that at tomorrow’s Mass, the Anglican Choir of Westminster Abbey will, in an historic first, join the Sistine Chapel Choir to make music in sweet harmony. I tell you in all sincerity that I would happily brave the prospect of being run over yet again by a flying wedge of Vatican ninja nuns (man, you think the LCWR crowd is dangerous? try standing between these little habited Jawas and the chance to snap an iPhone photo of the tip of His Holiness’s miter passing by!) to be present when the best of my two liturgical worlds collide.

The Sistine Chapel Choir was the one thread of saving grace in the chaos of that Mass two years ago. I had not yet heard the conscious call to reversion that I would receive at Assisi a couple of days later, but I had tears in my eyes when I realized that I was singing along with the choir’s soaring chant of the Credo, and every word of the Latin, every note of the setting, was right there on my tongue from my days in the Immaculate Heart of Mary Grammar School choir 50 years before. (I think this is why I have had so little trouble with the Third Edition of the Roman Missal’s reversion to “consubstantial”: consubstantialem Patri is mother’s milk to me.)

But the Sistine Chapel Choir is not the average American Catholic liturgical music experience. Since my reversion, I have been conscious of how much I miss the power and grace and—OK, sue me—quality of the music that was part of my weekly worship experience at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Dayton. I have enough of the 60s in me to love many of the best contemporary Catholic hymns, but they just don’t have the same soul-stirring effect as listening to a Parry anthem or singing “The King of Love my shepherd is” or “Guide me, O thou great Redeemer.” Even when these Anglican standards work their way into Catholic liturgies, as they occasionally do, the singing is spotty, the accompaniment too lugubriously slow or thinly electronic, and all the best verses are left out. (And yes—perverse and foolish oft I stray—as an Episcopalian I used to whine about having to sing all the verses all the time.) I attended a friend’s mother’s funeral on Tuesday—mom was Catholic, friend Episcopalian and chose the hymns, which were painfully destroyed by the Catholic organist and off-key cantor—and had to make a quiet Act of Contrition for how badly I grieved the missing descant on “Lift High the Cross.”

I usually soothe my jones for Anglican hymnody with CDs of the Kings College Choir and repeated viewings of royal weddings and funerals, but I can’t help but long for the celestial beauty that will be echoing through St Peter’s tomorrow. The invitation to the Westminster Abbey Choir comes, we are told, as “a symbol of Christian harmony after centuries of discord.” After a morning of discord that seemed to last centuries, I think that tomorrow’s Christian harmony would be more than symbolic. It would be anticipating heaven, where even the ninja nuns will be stunned into stillness by the singing.