Morning Prayer on Ash Wednesday steers us away from wallowing too much in our own sinfulness. We are in a relationship with God. Let's lean into it!
The word "Ash" conjures images of death, and of sin and repentance. So every year I am surprised when the church's prayer which begins the season of Lent, Morning Prayer on Ash Wednesday, sounds themes which take us in an entirely different direction. The first psalm for morning prayer begins,
My heart is ready, O God; I will sing, sing your praise. Awake, my soul, awake lyre and harp. I will awaken the dawn.
Next comes an Old Testament canticle. Today's is a well-known passage from Isaiah 61:
I rejoice heartily in the Lord, in my God is the joy of my soul; for he has clothed me with a robe of salvation, and wrapped me in a mantle of justice, like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem, and a bride bedecked with her jewels.
Then comes another psalm. Today's begins,
My soul give praise to the Lord; I will praise the Lord all my days, make music to my God while I live.
Thus the three scriptural poems (or lyrics) which comprise the first half of Morning Prayer are songs of praise and joy. No breast-beating here, no lamenting, no guilt or self-loathing.
Next comes the scripture reading for Morning Prayer. It continues in the vein of hope and encouragement, with this passage from Deuteronomy chapter 7:
You are a chosen people sacred to the Lord, your God; he has chosen you from all the nations on the face of the earth to be a people peculiarly his own. It was because the Lord loved you and because of his fidelity to the oath he had sworn to your fathers, that he brought you with his strong hand from the place of slavery, and ransomed you from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Understand, then, the Lord, your God, is God indeed, the faithful God who keeps his merciful covenant down to the thousandth generation toward those who love him and keep his commandments.
This passage invokes God's covenant with us. Covenant is one of the three primary dimensions of Lent; the other two are penitence and initiation. In my view, penitence has overshadowed the other two aspects in the Catholic imagination, although in recent decades the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) has provided a bit more balance by claiming a larger mind-share for the theme of initiation.
Yet Morning Prayer on Ash Wednesday introduces these themes of praise, joy - and covenant. God loves us enough to call us back to this agreement with him. And he is ever-faithful to his end of the bargain.
That God would become party to a covenant with us implies that we have been granted a modicum of dignity. God treats us, not as slaves or puppets or pets, but as persons. Nor did God coerce us into this agreement; we enter into it freely.
The heart of God's original covenant with his chosen people is: "I will be your God; you will be my people." That's the bargain. God sealed it with his chosen people ages ago, and has renewed it throughout salvation history.
Jesus, who is fully God and fully human, is the New Covenant, incorporating all of the human race into the agreement, making it eternal, and sealing it with his blood.
Lent invites us to uphold our end of the bargain by being God's People. To be sure, we haven't always been faithful to the agreement, so penitence may be an appropriate posture for us to adopt.
Another aspect of covenant worth considering: agreements bring obligations. Especially here in the United States, we have have a tendency to be stronger on rights than on obligations. Let Lent be a time for us to reconsider what it is we owe God.
Lent begins with liturgical prayer telling us that we already are God's chosen people. That elected, exalted status should fill us with joy, and it should elicit our praise. Perhaps we could carry that spirituality through the Lenten season this year.
Jim, thanks for this. I have never before heard ( read) morning prayer for Ash Wednesday.
ReplyDeleteJim McDermott has a very interesting article at the America site on Ash Wednesday homilies written by AI. Some are quite good.
Lots of former teacher English teacher friends have been playing with AI compositions and are pretty depressed about it.
DeleteAll of the AI compositions people have forwarded to me are shorter (3-4 pages). Most are competently written, tightly connected to a clear thesis, well organized, and use proper citations. They are also somewhat predictable and superficial because the algorithms search for and synthesize the info that shows up most often in searches on a given topic. It's often info that reasonably well informed people already know.
All of that would be a step up from a lot of the homilies people complain about.
AI could free up homilists to go out and do whatever they're actually good at instead of wasting time writing bad and rambling compositions.
As long as AI has the capacity to use info only from specified digital sources or databases, the AI can also ensure nothing heretical is going to come out.
And AI can be programmed to stay within a word limit and to use a conversational style with a few hip slang words and sports metaphors.
No reason AI can't churn out the 10-minute upbeat mediocrities most people want to get Mass over with as painlessly as possible!
Hey, if ChatGPT is going to drone on for 10 minutes, our people will rise as one and unplug it. I lose our people after about 4 minutes, tops!
DeleteI guess one of the philosophical debates about these robots is: will they be servants or masters? If they can be tamed/trained to serve homilists, it could be extremely useful.
But the core of homilizing should be heart speaking to heart: the faith of the preacher enkindling the faith of the people. Understood that way, I would say a robot can't give a genuine homily. (Of course, there are those who believe these AI programs already are sentient, so maybe I'm wrong!)
I wasn't thinking of your homilies specifically, but about Francis's comments to improve them and keep them to 10 minutes.
DeleteThe quality of ChatGPT is contingent on the "assignment" you give it. You can set it to crank out 4 minutes instead of 10.
Try it out. Let us know whether it's a reasonable facsimile of "heart speaking to heart."
I am so far not tempted to fiddle with it myself. I enjoy doing my own writing and research, which is one more way in which I demonstrate my obsolescence and uselessness.
"The core of homilizing should be heart speaking to heart..."
DeleteI agree with that, Jim.
I think though, that what we are really speaking of with this AI assisted stuff is canned homilies, which have been around awhile. There are two volumes of a set called the "Book of Homilies"; Church of England dating to the 1500s. There are other much more recent books of homilies, which people could cut and paste from if they wanted to. Mostly they don't, they just lift some ideas. Much more helpful than these books or publications are Scriptural commentaries. My husband's favorites are the Collegeville set, and Barclay's.
I am remembering a British novel in which someone was complaining about the clergyman "singing the Paraphrases". I was assuming this meant some kind of pre-written homilies. But it turned out the truth was more interesting. The Paraphrases are from the Church of Scotland, the Psalter set to verse so it can be sung. I came across this video from the Isle of Lewis. The congregation are singing the Paraphrases in Gaelic:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k3MzZgPBL3Q
ChatGPT compositions are not really canned sermons. The bot doesn't search for a pre-existing sermon, but generates a whole new one per your instructions.
DeleteI think that speaking heart to heart is sentimental and nice to people of a certain age for whom compositional endeavor is a labor of love.
But we won't live in that world in another 10 or 20 years. At best, we can urge the bot users to be creative and choosy about how to direct the AI composition generators and to carefully analyze the results.
Jean (and all): don't you think that one of the marks of a good, or at least interesting, writer is originality of insight? That's what often strikes me about poetry, anyway. And it's often the characteristic of preaching that grabs my attention, too - at least when the original insight hits the bulls-eye.
DeleteFWIW, this verse struck me today. It is from the hymn "Praise to the Holiest in the Height", words by John Henry Newman:
O generous love! that he, who smote
in Man for man the foe,
the double agony in Man
for man should undergo
(The "double agony" being the Agony in the Garden, and the Agony on the Cross). The "in man for man" formula struck me as neat. Ah well, lyrics beat homilies at least 90% of the time!
Sure, I think that. I could spend the rest of my life swimming around in John Donne's poem, "The Relic."
DeleteI'm not defending AI as anything "good," just "good enough" in some cases. And "good enough" may be better than something that is downright bad, given the way compositional and creative thinking skills have been downgraded in the last 50 years.
One of my friends sent me a poem in Old English that a bot composed. Another had it write a sonnet about Obama care in the style of Shakespeare. My friend Julie had it write a Valentine poem for her husband. ("Here's a poem I had the computer write for you, honey. I agree with almost everything in it.")
If the beta versions of these things are already that good, I expect that the bots will get more sophisticated at imitating style and synthesizing content. They will also likely get really good at anticipating a specific user's style, vocab, and topics, and become very adept at mimicking all that.
I'll be dead (I hope) before publishers quit bothering with reading manuscripts from real writers, and just have the market researchers figure out what the hot sellers are. A few programmers can enter the formulae into the bot, and in a day you can have 20 sure-fire sellers.
It's just dollars and cents capitalism. Get to market quickest with what people want and maximize profits with high prices or by low labor costs.
The porno biz has already jumped on AI in a big way for "content." I expect a lot of communication-driven enterprises are watching that closely.
As news outlets lose staff (10 percent staff cuts for NPR this spring), fewer reporters can add info bits into AI, which can generate stories so they can move on to more assignments quickly. Never mind what happens to reporting when reporters don't have enough time to corporate over what a story means.
But news outlets will make money again, so hallelujah!
Anyway. I got supper on, so that's all I got time for.
"My soul give praise to the Lord; I will praise the Lord all my days, make music to my God while I live." I love Psalm 146. A good one for choir and church music people.
ReplyDeleteJim, BTW, I made your lasagne recipe. My husband gave it an enthusiastic "thumbs up". There's enough leftovers he can have some when I'm gone this weekend.
ReplyDeleteAwesome :-). I made it yesterday, too. That means we saved the fish for Friday. Not as good as lasagna, but my wife makes it pretty well - better than I do.
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