Dies Irae

     Who says that poets can't be prophetic?  I found these alternate verses of the Dies Irae in an old hymnal.  They're obviously intended for Roman Catholics, but from what I've heard of the suffering of my Protestant brethren, I think their appeal can be truly ecumenical.

Dies Irae

Day of wrath, O day of mourning!

Earth to ashes now returning!

Gather, by the millions, burning!

Cleansed at last by cataclysm

Butchered rhyme and battered rhythm,

Neopagan narcissism!

On that day, Lord, when thou comest,

And our dreadful hymnals thumbest,

Smite the ugliest and dumbest.

Smite them, Lord, yet of thy pity

Take their songsters to thy city:

Even Haugen, Haas, and Schutte.

Spare them on the stern condition

That they feel a true contrition

For the Worship III edition.

Doom them not to loss and ruin

While the darker storm is brewing!

They knew not what they were doing.

On that day when Palestrina

Dare not touch a celestina,

What will Sister Ballerina?

With thine eyes that pierce like lances

Still her silly heathen dances

And her flirting with Saint Francis.

Purge us of the prim and prissy,

Ditties fit for Meg or Missy,

Not for Francis, but a sissy.

Cantors who thought nothing grander

Than a sheaf of propaganda

Writ like office memoranda,

Raise them to thy room to bide in

Where their hearts and ears may widen

To the strains of Bach and Haydn.

Let their hearts within them falter,

Hearing, as they near thine altar,

Seraphs sing the Scottish Psalter.

Seize those devils set to pen a

Hymnal neutered of its men -- ah,

Fling ’em back to black Gehenna!

Fling them one and all to mangle

Their pronominals, and wrangle

Lest a participle dangle!

Who held manhood in derision,

Preaching double circumcision,

Suffer now their own revision.

Though the songs of Hell are naughty,

None by Handel or Scarlatti,

At the least they’ll have castrati.

Pitch, O Lord, the bald and raucous

Slogans of a leftist caucus

Down to Sheol, or Secaucus!

Save their singers, though: restore ’em

To a silent sweet decorum,

Saecula per saeculorum.

Various are the throngs of heaven:

Some were lump, and some were leaven,

Some as lame as six and seven.

When the demons hear thy curses,

And this world’s dense fog disperses,

Heal the hobbled -- not their verses.

Hush me, too, Lord, when I grumble:

In thy mercy make me humble,

Lest On Turkey's Wings I tumble.

     Though Haugen sing “Hosea” evermore,

     Save me I pray -- but keep me near the door.  Amen.

Comments

[Joe Long]

In the vernacular (and with full recognition of the irony of the expression), this ROCKS.

BTW, if that rhyme for "city" is done without assonance, then that's a really unfortunate surname, isn't it?

[Tony]

Ah well, Joe, it sure seemed fortunate to me at the time!

[Dan Janeiro]

You know, Dr. Esolen, it's a funny thing,I was perusing my Inferno and found a little snippet that seemed to touch on this very point.

"And I, while errors flew about my brain,
said, "Master, what is this I hear, and who,
are these whose wailingscause all listeners pain?"

And he to me, "Here sing that wretched crew
who tried to castrate every good refrain,
and favored the P.C. over the true.

Heaven can't stand their sound,the doomed complain
that even they don't deserve such tortured tones,
so we get stuck with them, and they remain."

[Tony]

Danno, I fear I have created a monster.

The Dies Irae rhythm is perfect for this sort of thing. I was riding around trying to think of a stanza that would rhyme on "praying," "allaying," and "flaying". Now that I think of it, "countertenor" sure might work with "Gehenner."

Thanks for the good laugh!

[Fr. Robert Hart]

Me thinketh the writing is like unto the writing of Tony E., for he writeth furiously.

[John Hetman]

What a wonderful adaptation of Dies Irae! It often is quite painful to attend Sunday mass and to have to suffer through the horrid banality of Haugen, Haas, Joncas, et al. Especially when accompanied by the music director on the piano. HH and J lend themselves easily to ruffles and flourishes--kind of like Liberace.

Even more painful is when the church band that refer to themselves as the "Disciples of Rhythm" play for mass. They have a lead singer, a rather second-rate Peggy Lee type, who nonetheless is sufficiently distracting in a libidinous kind of way, along with a teen drummer who seems to be auditioning for a heavy rock band. Of course, an associate pastor is one of the guitarists.

I count these times as moments of indulgence, and hope that charity and patience with these crappy kinds of tunes may win me a bit of reprieve from my time in Purgatory--should I be fortunate enough to wind up there rather than further down.

I have taken the liberty of sending our pastor this fine adaptation along with our music director.

Thanks.

John Hetman
Niles, Illinois

[Tony]

Father Bob,

I thought you would like that line about the Scottish Psalter .... And English had any rhymes for Ralph Vaughan Williams, he'd be in there too.

Thanks, John, for the commiseration. This Sunday I had to put up with a heretical and miserable song (music not bad, for a show-tune) by Carry Laundry (I may be, er, misspelling the gentleman's name), called I Myself am the Bread of Life. Lest you think Mr. Laundry was just inappropriately quoting Christ, the verse continues: "You and I are the bread of life," united in Christ, with the stories of our lives broken open, etc. You get the idea. Pal, I ain't no bread of life, no manna come down from heaven. You ain't either.

[Ed the Roman]

Tony,

I know what you mean. I do not, in fact, have within me all sweetness, and if you eat my flesh, you will certainly at least WANT to die.

[David]

I can beat that: I endured *Gather Us In* four times in the past month. But as to Esolen's *Dies Irae* -- it's brilliant, and I am much amused and consoled.

[Daniel P]

You seem to be "preaching to the choir" so far, Tony, but I don't quite agree with you. Perhaps Mass isn't the place for it, but many Gather songs are defensible, orthodox, and -- and this is a virtue -- they connect with people. It is a firm and established custom in the Catholic tradition to work through the culture, not just around it.

As a church musician, let me tell you: Reverence is not in the instruments you play, nor in the lyrics you sing. Reverence is in the hearts of people making the music. As soon as they become performative, or emotive, or disrespectful, they have done serious harm to the congregation's worship.

Many modern songs are badly concieved, but please don't overgeneralize. For the most part, the songs themselves aren't the real problem.

That said, the "I Myself Am the Bread of Life" song is absolutely reprehensible. There is a difference between scriptural truism ("We are the body of Christ," a mystical claim) and Eucharistic heresy. We are not the bread of life, and shame on us for singing so.

[Maclin Horton]

Choice. I just linked to this from Caelum et Terra.

[Dan Reed]

I'm all for working through the culture if we take what is best and most enlightening about the culture, instead of trying to be derivative in a sad search for relevance. The classical composers wrote music that was equal or superior to any other music written in their day.

Anyone who has heard Moses Hogan's arrangements knows that great Christian music can be made that resonates with the modern ear. I think the important thing is that he was using modern jazz and blues ideas to update spirituals, but not messing with the words. Most mondern hymm-writers bring us completely vanilla (if not heretical) sentiments, and their tunes are weak to boot.

I propose a hymm-writer's test; if you can't put a psalm to music in a way that gets some toes tapping, you're out of the songbook.

[Fr. Robert Hart]

In our Continuing Traditionalist Anglican movement we sing from the 1940 Hymnal. Originally this was done not to preserve orthodoxy and good taste (which tend to go hand in hand), but to avoid using that ECUSA favorite, Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" as we proceed.

[ladyluthien]

Three cheers for the genius who wrote that poem!

[Stephanie]

Dr E-
This is great! And incidentally, it's such a shame that the Dies irae isn't actually song at funerals anymore.

[Tony]

Stephanie,

I have a friend's ironical promise that he will play it at MY funeral!

Daniel,

Gosh, I agree with your point about the Church being able to work through cultures. But we have several points of severe disagreements, I'll bet:

First, the contemporary music is NOT a product of contemporary culture. This would take some time to argue -- but basically, what I mean is that the old folk hymns (those in Southern Harmony, Kentucky Harmony, etc) were produced BY the people, and sounded a lot like what the people themselves hummed and whistled and sang when they were a-courting or raising a barn. The so-called folk tunes now are not folk tunes at all; they are supremely ill-adapted for congregational singing. Their rhythms -- for the most part; there are exceptions, such as They'll Know We are Christians -- are show-tune rhythms, with weird shifts from triple to duple (Take the Love of God as You Go). Their intervals are odd, too, meant for soloists who know what they are doing (On Turkey's Wings).

Second, I've been to a lot of Masses outside my parish (which uses NONE of that music), and in most of them the people do NOT sing. My wife, who is Protestant, can tell you what church singing really sounds like (and I've witnessed it myself): four-part harmony at a chapel in Nashville, whose denomination forbade instrumental music. But that was no anomaly: all the old hymnals are written for four-part harmony. Anyway, the people DO NOT sing. A few women do, and that is it. If you think that's inevitable, I've seen otherwise.

Third, lots of things "connect" with people, and we wish they did not. I am not sure that people standing in their pews waiting for the painful rendition of Gather Us In are "connecting," but if they are, I'd prefer there were no hymn at all. Is there a SINGLE hymn in the Gather hymnal that stresses our sinfulness and the fallenness of our world, and that our only hope is in the grace of God, as does Abide With Me?

Fourth, when we have such riches -- and such a variety of riches, too -- why on earth should we bother with Carey Landry and Dan Schutte?

[Tony]

More verses, for the middle:

Bring them, Lord, where Mozart's playing
Airs as of an organ praying,
Not a tomcat flogged or flaying.

If of ho-downs, Lord, they're fonder,
On revivals let them ponder
WHEN THE ROLL IS CALLED UP YONDER.

Generous is the Church's dowry:
Charles Gounod and Robert Lowry,
Stern and bracing, sweet and flowery.

Not too frilly, though, the floral:
Songs not penned by semi-moral
Men whose only taste was oral.

But that last verse is too nasty .....

[Beth]

Tony, this is wonderful! I printed it off for my colleagues and they loved it. I am continually complaining about the "music" in our church service for these very reasons. (And the few times we actually sing a hymn, we never sing all the verses. Besides the arrogance towards the poet, why is it that it's always the Holy Spirit who is left out?) Anyway, I'll have something to laugh about Sunday morning now.

My bd was this week, and the other profs in the department arrived in my office to sing a beautiful rendition of "Happy Birthday" with harmony (3 part; there were only 3 of them!) complete with flourishes. This is what makes our faculty meetings endurable: the lovely harmony when we sing the hymn at the beginning or end. It's also what I loved about the Mennonites.

I also just linked this at the CCC forum (Bill Mouser's ICGS group). Thanks for the laugh!

Blessings,

Beth

[emma]

yh i think its nice

[Nicholas]

To use the modern half-literate electronic slang, *omg roflmao*.

Or, in other words, brilliant. This may need to become the official song of the Society for a Moratorium on the Music of Marty Haugen and David Haas.