Fake Gregorian Chant YouTube Channels Produced by AI
Paul Rose produces SING THE HOURS which each day posts Morning and Evening Prayer from the LITURGY OF THE HOURS. It is one of the choices on my website.
Paul is currently producing a series which he calls OFFICE HOURS to describe how he does this, all the technology behind it. He does this just by going on line and talking to some of his regular listeners. He does this in very disorganized fashion.
He and some of his listeners have concern about the AI generated "Gregorian Chant" channels that in the last two years have been taking over the real market for Gregorian Chant on YouTube. Listening to whole two hours would be quite a chore, however I hope you have enough interest in AI to do the 30 to 40 minutes that I have marked in Red below. It is captioned!
00:00 Welcome, my lords, to Isengard.
Brief Discussion of His Reluctance to talk about AI
It's too early in the development
Analogy to the early criticisms of the printing press.
Risks looking silly when viewed in the future
01:30 Obligatory Beverage Tasting - A Sparkling Water Taste Test
10:21 Soda Stream Product Placement (not an official sponsor)
11:01 Bubble ASMR
12:32 Too many bubbles
13:50 San Pellegrino in a plastic bottle is like Mass with bad music
Part 2: California Pilgrimage
14:53 California Pilgrimage
16:16 Do you want to schedule a group, staff, or business pilgrimage? Reach out to Charlie.
17:18 Pilgrimage Route
24:20 Stays and Liturgies on the Pilgrimage (some are open to the public!)
40:56 Why go on this pilgrimage?
Presents his case for singing the Hours
Vatican II Decree on Liturgy
83. Christ Jesus, high priest of the new and eternal covenant, taking human nature, introduced into this earthly exile that hymn which is sung throughout all ages in the halls of heaven. He joins the entire community of mankind to Himself, associating it with His own singing of this canticle of divine praise
Part 3: Chant Bot or Not?
51:16 Why AI Bot Music is not real liturgy
52:07 What do you think? Are these chant channels real chant or bot made?
55:05 Brief intermission on the new canticle translations
YOU CAN SKIPE THIS
PAUL IS A STRICT LITURGICAL INTERPRETER
HE ALSO ASSUMES THAT WHEN THE NEW BREVIARY COMES OUT
WE WILL INSTANTALY CHANGE TO IT LIKE WHEN THE MISSAL
CAME OUT. I WOULD SUSPECT THAT THE CURRENT BREVIARIES WILL
CONTINUE TO BE USED IN PERSONAL RECITATION
1:01:23 Back to it: Bot or Not?
1:02:40 Everything that's wrong with this AI chant
1:13:37 Check out these bot channels
1:16:58 Watch Paul make AI Slop
1:24:02 AI voice replication is so problematic (the commodification of the human person)
1:25:24 What should we listen to then? Floriani, Neums and Tunes, Sing the Hours
I FOUND THE ABOVE 25 MINUTES AN EXCELLENT TUTORIAL ON HOW ALL THESE AI GENERATED "GREGORIAN " CHANNELS ARE PRODUCING SOMETHING THAT HAS ALMOST NONE OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF GREGORIAN CHANT EXCEPT FOR A LATIN TEXT WHICH IS RENDERED IN VERY GOOD LATIN
THESE CHANNELS ARE GETTING FAR MORE TRAFFIC THAN REAL GREGORIAN CHANT CHANNELS AND THEY ARE DECEIVING VIEWERS THAT THERE ARE REAL PEOPLE SINGING THEM AND PRAYING FOR THEM
YOU CAN SKIP THE PART BELOW
1:25:51 Another Channel: Bot or Not?
1:32:33 One way to check if it's AI
1:33:35 Another Channel: Bot or Not?
1:36:11 AI is incapable of praying real Catholic prayer
1:37:05 The Collect Prayer from Mass
1:38:12 AI is blinding us
1:39:13 Another Channel: Bot or Not?
1:44:35 Effects of Baptism. You can't baptize AI.
1:47:15 Can you bless AI?
1:49:25 Support real Catholic musicians
1:50:15 Scandal: The State of Music in the American Catholic Church
I listened to some of it, but not all of it. I was not very good at discerning what was real and what was AI. Of course I'm no chant expert. I do understand why AI is not real prayer. It reminds me of those Buddhist prayer wheels that they put in a stream of water so there is constant prayer. The problem is that there is no one praying. There has to be people in order for there to be prayer. AI is different too, from those MIDI file soundtracks. No one thinks those are real music, they're just so people can get an idea of how a tune might sound. The sound quality is pretty bad. AI isn't so bad from a sound perspective, but I don't think musicians have to worry about being replaced. Yet. Paul mentions the coming new translation of the hours. I don't know why they're doing that. Any clergy that I've heard talk about it say they hate it. They dont want a new translation. I imagine most of them are going to continue using the old one in private. The problem will be is if they're going to pray in community. Also nobody likes the new translation of the Benediction hymns. The Latin is still the same, but not the English, which is what we're using, since that's what is in the missalettes.
I think they are going to have problems in getting the priests to adopt the new breviary. Unlike the missal, most priests do the office in private, so no one is going to know that they are not using the new breviary.
I suspect that many dispensations will be issued, e.g. allowing older priests etc. to continue to use the old translation.
The bishops might also issue permission to use the old breviary especially the psalms in parallel with the new one. For example, if a parish already has a booklet with a musical setting for the old office, you can continue to use it, but if you are creating one from scratch you have to use the new one.
Paul is preparing to use the new translation by phasing it in. That is when he redoes an Hour, he is using the new settings of psalms and canticles. It is legal to use them now since they are approved whether or not they become required once they are available remains to be seen. As Paul says in an early video each year about 70% of what he does remains the same. It really takes a lot of time to completely do or redo an Hour with both its audio and video.
Paul does the audio with a clicker in hand. Any time he does not like a verse or phrase he hits the clicker and immediately redoes it. Then at the end goes back and edits out the verse and phrases that he rejected. He sometimes makes the chant sound richer by singing verses with himself. And he uses sometimes uses a drone (a recording of a cord of his own voice to keep him on pitch). Any person or choir that chants for a long time without accompaniment tends to lose pitch.
I am finding the whole behind the scenes explanation of the technology of audio-visual recording very fascinating. In comparison to much of what is done on YouTube, Paul puts out a consistently high-quality audio-visual presentation.
Therefore, the contrast with AI production is very striking. An audio-visual presentation of a psalm which might take Paul at least an hour perhaps three hours to do can be done by AI in a minute or two. Not only one version but about a dozen options that you can choose from.
All of these involve sounds and visuals designed to be attractive. And they are attractive; these sites get far more views that legitimate Gregorian chants sites. However, none of it except for the Latin text has anything to do with real Gregorian chant. None of it is done by real singers. None of it is found in monasteries or houses of worship. So people will not longer be able to know what real Gregorian chant is like, or how it is sung.
I would think if they go to the actual web sites of the monasteries and convents of the religious orders which do Gregorian chant, people could be assured of getting the legit material.
Katherine - “ it reminds me of those Buddhist prayer wheels that they put in a stream of water so there is constant prayer. The problem is that there is no one praying.” Catholics light candles and the rising smoke is supposed to represent constant prayer even when there are no people there. Seems to me to be a lot like a Buddhist prayer wheel. Except that candles eventually burn out but the water doesn’t run out.
The idea behind the candles is that there was a prayer, when they were lit. Maybe that's the same with the prayer wheels too. AI? I don't know, it just seems like the goal with that is to eliminate the human element. I remember that my mom used to say she would light a candle for me if I had something that was stressing me or if I wasn't feeling well. It was comforting. I do the same sometimes for my kids.
This guy is strikes me as tiresome and self-involved, like most people who get on YouTube to school the rest of us, but he seems to have genuine concerns about human worship vs machine-generated "content."
Seems like these are some of the big questions he's churning up, questions I am not qualified to offer opinions about and will not try to answer:
--Worship lies in the hearts of humans. Chant, prayer, hymn singing, and whatever else comes out of human vocal chords are only a reflection of that worship, no?
--Even if not produced worshipfully, AI chant cannot exist without being "fed" chant originally produced as a result of human worship. So can we say that AI chant is the reverberation of that original worship? (Like candles and prayer wheels?)
--AI chant may not be an accurate representation of what chant is "supposed" to sound like. Does that disqualify it as worship if it puts the listener in a prayerful state of mind?
There's also the concern that AI can put musicians out of business if it gets too good (or good enough). That's something that the institutional wing of the Church will have to wrestle with.
Reminds me of AI Jesus-in-a-box in Switzerland that I posted about some months back. IMO, AI-generated entities in chatboxes and holograms generally send the message: You aren't worth an encounter with a real person, so talk to this fake instead.
I suppose people could use AI chant for background music and relaxation without really caring about its authenticity. But that would be different from someone actually trying to pray with it.
A little off topic, but not really; yesterday's Gospel reading was the one from John about the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. Jesus talked to her about Living Water. It was also the Sunday when they were making another announcement about the upcoming Evangelization Fair. Some people were talking after Mass. About how we have to engage people. Give them programs. Great music. Good homilies. They're not going to come if we bore them. Now I have nothing against good homilies. And good music; I try to help make some. But entertainment is something they can get elsewhere (and more than likely get it better). It just seems like we lose focus on the Living Water.
A little side note on that, I wondered if Jacob's well still exists. So I did a little research, turns out that it does; and it is pretty well documented that it is same place, revered over millennia. An Orthodox church surrounds it. People can still drink water from it, and take some water home in a bottle, similar to Lourdes water.
"This guy strikes me as tiresome and self-involved, like most people who get on YouTube to school the rest of us,"
This guy's efforts are a result of the pandemic. He was advised by a psychologist to get a project to keep his sanity. "Sing the Hours" is the project.
Paul comes from a very musical family. They are all converts to Catholicism led by their father, who seems to know Latin and music well enough to make some very good literal translations of Gregorian hymns.
His sister gifted him with a breviary, so he decided he wanted to learn how to chant the Hours. He was disappointed at the lack of resources for doing that on the web.
He decided that he had enough music talent, and audio-visual production skills that he could teach himself and everybody else to sing chant by singing the Hours (morning and evening prayer) on YouTube.
He now has over 74 thousand subscribers and each post of Morning or Evening Prayer gets over five thousand views. Now quite as popular as Dean Roberts Morning Prayer (he was up at about 15000 after the pandemic had abated) but quit well given that he has nothing like Canterbury Cathedral to back him.
In the meantime, he has married, now has two children with a third on its way.
A convert dynamic appears to be in play here, where converts become very enthusiastic about some aspect of Catholicism and take up promoting it, in this case chant.
Paul admits that he does not know how to sing Gregorian chant very well, that he is merely a "peasant" but in fact chant was designed for peasants and none of us should hesitate to chant.
In watching him edit his audio, I have come to the conclusion that if I learned to use his audio-video programming equipment, I too could sing chant well by editing out all my mistakes.
Of course that is what the modern recording industry does for everyone. The recordings we hear are generally not of live performances. Much music is already machine made.
Now AI generated music may be the logic next step in recording.
Betty and I both like to sing the Hours using the Meinrad Psalm Tones. The monks of Saint Meinrad only record Vespers, and their office has different psalm selections because they do the full psalter in two weeks rather than four.
Now Betty and I could in theory record our four-week psalter using one of these audio editors like Paul uses. That would take a lot of time. However, it sounds like it might be possible to do only some psalms in the various psalm tones and then ask AI to finish the project. We could instruct it to us our voices according to the Meinrad tones, using our instructions, e.g. alternating male and female voices in the verses.
What we would then have is a virtual breviary in Meinrad chant tones that one can either listen to or sing along with. Sing the Hours is a virtual breviary. My website is a virtual breviary containing within it selections from other virtual breviaries (such as Sing the Hours) and individual videos of psalms and hymns.
You can pray a virtual breviary either by singing along or simply by listening. You can even use it as background to other activities such as walking, gardening, food preparation, etc.
Virtual breviaries, like medieval manuscripts have a visual dimension. I share my photography collection and more recently Betty's art-work on my blogs.
So, a virtual breviary enables one to share not only one's voice but also one's visual experiences with others "for the greater glory of God."
"Virtual breviaries, like medieval manuscripts, have a visual dimension."
That's true, though I have a knee-jerk reaction against comparing the years of training and number of people involved in producing an illuminated MS and a do-it-yourself Web site that anybody can put together in a day.
It's like comparing a cathedral to a prefab house.
I also think that when everybody can throw something out there, people have to wade thru a lot of very poor quality and inaccurate stuff. And when everyone is concerned with their own "content," I'm not sure how much sharing is going on.
"Views" and "followers" are dicey indicators of quality. Or even how many people are regularly looking thru the content in its entirety and finding it useful.
I don't want to sound mean here, and no offense to your personal efforts, but in a world filling up with info produced by influencers, conspiracy theorists, and outright loonies, I want gatekeepers and standards and expertise.
Unfortunately, I guess we have to be our own gatekeepers. You are right that there is a lot of random stuff of questionable quality out there. There ought to be a site where people can log sites that they have vetted and found to be reliable.
"in a world filling up with info produced by influencers, conspiracy theorists, and outright loonies, I want gatekeepers and standards and expertise"
Paul as he says at the top of his post was reluctant to discuss AI because he realizes that we are at the beginning of something like the print revolution. According to him many opposed the printing press because of its ability to spread heresies and old sorts of bad things, but he judges that it brought more good things than evil things, the same may be true of AI
However, "gatekeepers standards and expertise" do not necessarily produce a better product.
Word on Fire is producing a monthly booklet that contains the text of Morning, Evening Prayer and Compline that reads strait through like a book so that "anywhere, anywhere with anyone" might celebrate the Hours.
BUT, it costs 9$ a month and is not readily reusable because the calendar changes each year. A lot of it is very fine print unlikely to be used by the many elderly shut-ins that could be praying the prayer of Christ and the Church. The hymns are in the back of the book so that you still need a prayer card or ribbons. Very high-quality artwork within for what is essentially a disposable commodity. I have suggested they put the high-quality hymns on a website; at least one staff member thought that was a good idea, but nothing happened. And these people are getting the contract for the New Breviary.
I do credit the Barron with the spiritual insight to promote the Hours among the laity where we are: "anywhere, anytime with anyone."
One of the reasons I began my Saint Gabriel Hours site was that seeing an individual bishop and some very grass roots people going in the same direction is the type of thing that has happened historically in the many changes that have occurred in how the office has been prayed. They all began at the grass roots followed by episcopal endorsement not the other way around.
Even Morning Prayer at Canterbury began with the urging of Fletcher to pray in the garden since they were locked out of the Church. While Dean Roberts had all the existing standards and expertise plus the willingness to invite, Betty and I think Fletcher's camera skills were at least as essential. At Roberts funeral here Dean Randy of the National Cathedral said that although they had just implemented a great sound and camera system, Fletcher shot past them with his iphone camera. Of course that followed by hours of editing before published. Dean Roberts once explained the details of their whole amazing collaboration.
Word on Fire has the money to produce the Hours in audio-visual making it free for the whole English speaking world. Our experience with EWTN does not suggest that is a desirable experience.
I like the idea of many individual, small groups, parishes and other communities around the world producing their own virtual Breviaries rather than a Word on Fire or EWTN equivalent of a printing press.
I spent 35 years jabbering about "reputable sources" to students in classrooms.
In my lesser career as a journalist, in which I tried to be as careful about facts as possible, I can cite many examples when editors and researchers kept me from looking like a fool.
For students entering the world of professional cyber communication, I stressed the importance of visual design and made them learn Yale's Web Style Guide.
When the Mayo Clinic started an online support group with access to moderators and oncology nurses, I gladly scrapped my own group and told people to go to the Mayo site. Happy day! People with this rare cancer found a place to get world-class info instead of having to muddle thru with a duffer like me.
I have never published any creative literature, much to Raber's consternation, because the world has enough poems and stories that are derivative and of middling quality.
All of these guardrails, including and maybe especially self-criticism, strike me as more important than ever as the amateur stuff proliferates.
Jack, sorry, our messages crossed in the ether. You are right that even gatekeepers don't guarantee a quality product. But it has a better chance than something a solo amateur produces. And even a grassroots, small-group effort can apply basic style standards.
Again, I speak generally and not to your virtual brevity project specifically.
"There ought to be a site where people can log sites that they have vetted and found to be reliable."
Well, we have newspapers that follow SPJ standards, peer-reviewed journals, news wire services, imprimatur and nihil obstats, etc. If you want vetted info, those are the places to go, always with the caveat that these things have their own blind spots and slants.
As to the question "what is prayer?" In the Ignatian tradition of contemplation in action, i.e. finding God in all things. Everything is prayer. In fact, Ignatius says that for the truly "mortified" person, i.e. one that is dead to all of one's selfish interests but alive to the grace of God and the welfare of the others, "fifteen minutes" a day could be better than hours spent in mediation which often ends up centering us upon our interests not those of God and others.
Re: revising the Liturgy of the Hours: I assume it's driven largely by biblical translation changes. Whenever the book of Psalms is retranslated, the breviary and the lectionary ideally would be retranslated as well.
One aspect of praying the hours daily is that you become pretty familiar with the psalms that are in the hours you pray - they come up every four weeks (a few come up more frequently). So when the translation is altered, it probably will feel like a jolt.
For example, here is the first quatrain of Psalm 51, prayed every Friday morning throughout the year:
Current translation:
Have mercy on me God in your kindness In your compassion, blot out my offense Wash me more and more from my guilt And cleanse me from my sins
New translation:
Have mercy on me, God, in accord with your merciful love; in your abundant compassion blot out my transgressions. Thoroughly wash away my guilt; and from my sin cleanse me.
It's not just that the words are different. The meanings shift a bit; the rhythms of the lines are different.
It's like your old friend went away and came back a changed person: changed his politics, married a spouse you're not sure you like, gained 35 pounds. You try to accept him as he is now, but a part of you mourns for the way your friend was before.
Jim, I can really relate to your last paragraph. Seems likely that the people who are very familiar with the Psalms reading a certain way will experience some disorientation when they are changed in subtle ways. And we can also understand how the people who were very familiar with the Latin Mass back in the day felt that way when it changed
Less we all become "Catholic fundamentalists" by placing too great a value on the liturgical texts (which Paul does in his post above) there are two strong opposing traditions.
First the desert communities of monks where they did basket weaving while a monk chanted the psalm text, there was a pause at the end of each psalm for personal mental prayer by each monk to make the psalm prayer his own prayer. At the end of this signified by the "Glory be" everyone rose for an extemporaneous "collect" by the leader summarizing the psalm. (The English-speaking conference actually tried to revive this custom by printing psalm prayers after the psalms. They were optional but I gather few people use them).
Another opposing tradition is psalm paraphrases which particularly took off after literacy became more widespread. I have done some of it myself. I am familiar enough the Latin text that if I repeatedly pray it, an English text begins to form that is none of the present texts. I sometimes then consult the Greek text to improve my English text. I would call these paraphrases rather than translations because I tend to go beyond archaic language e.g. Lord, etc. and bring to it modern concepts of cosmology, etc. Sometimes I use my Bibleworks many English translations to improve my translation even more.
Authentic Catholicism incarnates the Word (scripture, liturgy) into our present culture in ways that both transform our culture as well as illuminate previous forms of Catholic culture, e.g. Latin and Greek. The Word is much richer than any literal translation. Tradition is living not dead.
On the Saint Gabriel Hours I provide sung versions of the Psalms most of which do not use the official text but other texts some of which are translations, others of which are paraphrases from music composers. I encourage people to use these as meditations or songs in response to the official text either experienced by Paul chanting it or by the written text in WOF monthly booklet. These psalms are from a wide variety of musical and liturgical traditions.
I think doing the Hours in this manner offers us Catholics a great opportunity to witness our ritual tradition in our homes in a manner that is ecumenically hospital to other traditions. It also promotes the Hours among our own people who may enjoy various musical traditions.
The norms for personal recitation which the clergy are encouraged to observe need not be observed by laity who are celebrating the Hours personally or in small groups.
The clergy are not encouraged to substitute one psalm for another in personal recitation to satisfy their own needs. However, psalms may be substituted in celebrating the Hours with the people to make the Hours easier to celebrate, e.g. a more familiar musical setting.
The clergy also fulfill their obligation to celebrate the Hours any time they participate in celebrating with a community even if the calendar and text is different from that which they are obliged to use in fulfilling their canonical obligation.
A close reading of the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours provides a great deal of flexibility for laity adapting the Hours for their personal, family, and faith community settings. We do not have to imitate precisely what is provided in the text which is given the breviary. On the other hand, clergy should do that text because they are essentially doing that in place of a community and should not change text unless they have a concrete community before them for which they can provide the many legitimate adaptations provided by the General Instruction.
Of limited interest: The Psalms in the 1978 BCP were translated using Old English poetic conventions--alliteration, half lines (handy for responsive reading), etc.--but rendered into modern idiomatic English. I like them way better than the KJV Psalms in the 1923 BCP, but people got het up about it. At funerals, they still use the old KJV version of PS 23.
I don't know how closely the 1978 Psalms hew to the actual Old English Psalter, which was translated from the Vulgate. Maybe a nice little Lenten project to keep me quiet.
Anglo-Saxons sometimes played fast and loose with source material when they rendered it into the vernacular for lay people. There was a big effort starting with Alfred the Great to push literacy and to catechize the common people. Moses in the Old English Exodus is like a super hero swinging his Staff of Power around and calling down the wrath of God. I don't think it's an accident that he is more than vaguely reminiscent of Thor and his big Hammer.
Actually, this is quite interesting to me. The whole discussion, including the latest translations that Jim mentioned, that express somewhat different meanings, seem to highlight the reasons that scripture should not be taken literally. Not just as literally as fundamentalist Protestants, but as literally as many Catholics. How many similar changes have occurred during the last 2000 years? I never knew about the role Anglo- Saxons or Alfred the Great played in contributing to this process. More reasons to look at scripture as metaphor rather than as literal Truth. Did Jesus really mean that the remembering his the last supper words about his body and blood “ given for you” and “ poured out for you” should be interpreted as meaning that those who share bread and wine in his memory are literally consuming his flesh (muscle, skin, fat etc) and blood that appears to be bread and wine via transubstantiation?
There are more than a thousand Greek manuscripts of the Psalms. It will be quite a project to analyze them all and how they relate to each other. Seems like a long and tedious project of comparison that could use some help from AI!
Somewhere I remember reading that there is a strong tradition in early Ireland of interpreting the Psalms very literally, e.g. relating them to King David's life. This tradition seems very similar to a tradition around Antioch.
There are also similarities of Irish monasticism to Egyptian monasticism.
Although travel was difficult in the ancient world, people did wander around a lot. For example, when the desert solitaries became famous, a lot of people journeyed there, lived with them for a while, and then returned home to found their own monasteries.
I'm not interested in Greek Psalm texts. Just want to compare 1978 BCP Psalms with their Old English counterparts to see if the OE versions contributed anything to the modern ones. Just plain old drudge work with Bosworth & Toller's OE dictionary, pencil, and paper. You have your fun, I have mine.
Just a cursory look at Psalm 135 in OE Paris Psalter (King Alfred's project) compared to the 1978 BCP version. The OE version omits some specific references to Jewish names and places from the OT, and replaces them with new lines emphasizing God's might, power, glory, and mercy. Looks like the general theme is still there, but the writer wants to underscore the nature of God (whose power is above the old Germanic gods?) rather than get bogged down in allusions that his listeners might not be familiar with. Using original sources as the basis for loose retellings like this is not uncommon in OE lit.
"By the terms Spiritual Exercises, we mean every method of examination of conscience, meditation, contemplation, vocal or mental prayer, and other spiritual activities, such as will be mentioned later. For, just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will and the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul."
Within the Ignatian framework "meditation" usually refers to actively employing the mind and emotions on the subject of prayer, e.g. a scene from the life of Christ or a scripture passage. One is to imagine how Christ might have looked, spoken, the responses of others, the setting and place oneself with the scene, and also how we react and/or should react and to engage in conversation with Christ or others e.g. Mary.
Personally, I was never attracted to this form of mental prayer. But evidently many Jesuits were, and wanted to spend hours doing it, not just the one hour allotted by Ignatius.
On the other hand, I was very attracted to keeping a spiritual diary (which might be seen as a form of examination of conscience) largely because Merton kept diaries.
Merton decided early on that his diaries were really drafts of his books and essays rather than conversations with God or himself. I decided that mine where really conservations with myself which are often shaped by God. In Ignatian terms they speak of where I find "consolation" i.e. things that bring me to God, or "desolation" things that take me away from God.
Over time, my reflections have become less conversations with myself and more drafts of conversations that I might have with others, and for posts on my blogs.
Some of you might be interested in this video by a Dominican priest about how he incorporates prayer into his daily life. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SFZtzSUuav8 He is particularly devoted to midday prayer. His day job is campus ministry at the University of Arizona.
I don’t worry about incorporating formal, structured prayer into my life. I practice informal prayer regularly - mostly mental conversations with God. The conversations don’t often reveal,God’s will so I seek Gods will by listening - working to clear out all the words so I can hear by sitting in silence.
Like Jack, the Ignatian practice of imaginative meditation never worked for me. A modified form of the Examen is helpful though.
Above, Anne brings up the matter of interpreting scripture literally vs metaphorically. If I may, let me quote a couple of paragraphs from Dei Verbum, which is Vatican II's document on divine revelation. I'm going to break this passage into bullets to make it a bit easier to digest what the Council Fathers wished to teach us about interpreting scripture.
This is taken from no. 12 of Dei Verbum:
"...[T]he interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.
"To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to:
* ""literary forms." For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse.
* The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.
"But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to:
* "the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out.
* "The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith.
It is the task of exegetes to work according to these rules toward a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture, so that through preparatory study the judgment of the Church may mature. For all of what has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God."
I think Holy Tradition has a place in scriptural interpretation, no? If I recall correctly from my Episcopal confirmation class, tradition predated Scripture and guided what was included in the books handed down to us from the 4th Century. So Scripture scholarship cannot toss out those basic beliefs held by Christians from the earliest times.
The process described in Dei Verbum sounds a bit like “originalism”, Unfortunately it hasn’t always been the best interpretation for our times. The SC Justices are working with a text that is only 250 years old and struggle to get it right. Those who interpret scripture are working with material authored by dozens of writers working in eras separated by hundreds and thousands of years; materials that date back thousands of years without original source documents, with dozens of generations of copies of copies, none in the original ancient languages.
Scripture scholars gotta do their thing, and the attempt to get as close as possible to the original text is fascinating. And I suppose for public worship they have to agree on texts which check the boxes of both accuracy and understandable language. However my favorite version for personal reading remains the Confraternity translation. For instance I enjoy reading that in Luke 24:42 they gave the risen Jesus a piece of fish. And some honeycomb. The honeycomb does not appear in any more modern translations. Supposedly it was only in the Greek, but not in other texts. So it is questionable. But I remember it, and so does my husband, since it had been in the KJV that he grew up with. Anyway, little things like that , which are just personal preference. And I like to think they gave Jesus a little sweetness after having given him so much that was bitter.
I like that, too. It works in a human level, the disciples sharing their best food with a guest. And on a literary level, honey is an archetypal symbol of divine promise. You see it in the OT--land of milk and honey, manna tasting like honey in Exodus; God's love for his people as honey in the Psalms. So there are overtones of that in the Gospel.
It is interesting that both St. Jerome's Vulgate and the King James translations were sourced from such original manuscripts as were available at the time. So they represent an ongoing effort to stay close to the original meaning and intent.
If I'm not mistaken, for centuries the church used the Vulgate (Latin) for the scripture used in its worship. The church had its own English version of the bible, translated from the Vulgate, called the Douay-Rheims. But because worship (both the Mass and the Hours) were in Latin, the English translation was useful only insofar as worship aids were prepared for worshippers so they could follow along.
Post-Vatican II, the use of the vernacular in worship caught on quickly - perhaps more quickly and comprehensively than the Council Fathers had anticipated. Scripture scholarship - like liturgical development, a fruit of the Council with deep 20th-century roots - deemed the Douay-Rheims lacking, presumably in some of the same ways that the KJV had been deemed lacking, i.e. scripture scholarship has advanced in many ways, more sources have been discovered, words have fallen out of common usage or meanings have shifted since Renaissance times. One can note these without disparaging either translation.
The biblical translation produced by the American bishops of the immediate post-conciliar era, the New American Bible, has itself been gradually retranslated since then. The psalm translations used in the official version of the Hours no longer accord with the current NAB psalm translations. I suppose many people don't care, but it is an issue, insofar as these scripture texts are formative for our individual and collective faith.
The printing press ushered in a preoccupation with standardized texts, close translations, and comparative linguistic studies. For the first 1500 years or so, Christianity had authoritative texts like the Vulgate, but a lot of loose vernacular translations and paraphrases reworked for various times and places.
St Aidan, Irish missionary to the English, used to sit outside his house with a Latin book of the Gospels. He would tell curious passers-by, who had never seen a book, that it contained stories of a great king. Well, heck, who could resist that?! He would open the book and do extempore "translations," which amazed people. It was powerful magic!
Possibly this is why there are so many different "flavors" of Catholicism around the world. It might bear thinking about how much the Church wants to demand standardization if it means that the approved language is clunky, colorless, and speaks to no one but wonks.
Just for curiosity I went and dug out my old St. Andrew daily missal. Every single thing is Latin on one side and English on the other. I am remembering that the priest did read the Epistle reading and the Gospel in English on Sunday, after he had first read the Latin. But not for daily Mass, he just read the Latin. Which seems strange, because that was the Mass the school kids attended. We had daily missals when we were old enough to follow along, and I followed the Epistle and Gospel. But I didn't even try to read the other stuff, the introit, collect, gradual, etc. I think the scripture version was the Challoner Rheims, which was an update of the Douay Rheims in the 1700s. The Grail Psalms are what I am used to for Morning and Evening prayer (full confession, I only did that when K was in formation, I just do an abbreviated version of morning prayer now). But I like the Grail Psalms.
"Possibly this is why there are so many different "flavors" of Catholicism around the world."
Yeah, that's an interesting insight. I think of scripture as formational - it informs and builds our faith. Then our faith, fed by scripture - and worship, and family, and culture, and many other factors - takes flight in a lot of different directions.
The "translation wars" so often seem to be about fidelity (and, to some extent, ideology). One could wish they were more about poetry, as I think that is what feeds people's souls.
There are a few things I didn't like about the previous liturgical translation (the criticisms of inaccuracy and glossing over meaning ring true, as far as I can tell), but they had a certain directness and clarity that the new wordier and more Latinate translations lack. Personally, I think this is what people mean when they complain that the new translation is uninspiring. It makes the meaning more obscure. If that was how Jesus spoke, I don't think Peter and Andrew and James and John would have told him to get lost.
In our high school Unitarian youth group, we did a little exercise where we had to write our own creed and gospel. We talked about similarities, differences. (I still reread and update my gospel once every year or two.)
The exercise led me to conclude that the Church can provide any number of "correct" and scholarly Scriptures for our use, and of course they are valuable and formative. But it's the gospel in our imagination and memory that truly lives and guides us.
I don't think this is a big surprising insight. Ask any two siblings to write a description of their mother, and they'll come up with different pictures.
"Ask any two sibling..." Yeah, I think all siblings had a different childhood, unless they were born quite close in time to each other. It's way different being the oldest (me) and a middle child (my sister ten years younger), and my youngest sister (eighteen years younger, with an eight year gap between her and our middle sister). Not to mention gender gaps, two brothers who were three and six years younger than me.
I find it salubrious to go thru the Nicene Creed once in awhile and ask myself how much of it I take on faith and how much I have to say, "if that's the way God wants it, m'okay, but doesn't make much difference to me." What bothers me about the creeds is that neither of them says, "I believe in the Great Commission, to love God with all my heart and my neighbor as myself." I have been known to substitute that for the creed when I say the rosary by myself ...
I listened to some of it, but not all of it. I was not very good at discerning what was real and what was AI. Of course I'm no chant expert. I do understand why AI is not real prayer. It reminds me of those Buddhist prayer wheels that they put in a stream of water so there is constant prayer. The problem is that there is no one praying. There has to be people in order for there to be prayer.
ReplyDeleteAI is different too, from those MIDI file soundtracks. No one thinks those are real music, they're just so people can get an idea of how a tune might sound. The sound quality is pretty bad. AI isn't so bad from a sound perspective, but I don't think musicians have to worry about being replaced. Yet.
Paul mentions the coming new translation of the hours. I don't know why they're doing that. Any clergy that I've heard talk about it say they hate it. They dont want a new translation. I imagine most of them are going to continue using the old one in private. The problem will be is if they're going to pray in community.
Also nobody likes the new translation of the Benediction hymns. The Latin is still the same, but not the English, which is what we're using, since that's what is in the missalettes.
I think they are going to have problems in getting the priests to adopt the new breviary. Unlike the missal, most priests do the office in private, so no one is going to know that they are not using the new breviary.
DeleteI suspect that many dispensations will be issued, e.g. allowing older priests etc. to continue to use the old translation.
The bishops might also issue permission to use the old breviary especially the psalms in parallel with the new one. For example, if a parish already has a booklet with a musical setting for the old office, you can continue to use it, but if you are creating one from scratch you have to use the new one.
Paul is preparing to use the new translation by phasing it in. That is when he redoes an Hour, he is using the new settings of psalms and canticles. It is legal to use them now since they are approved whether or not they become required once they are available remains to be seen. As Paul says in an early video each year about 70% of what he does remains the same. It really takes a lot of time to completely do or redo an Hour with both its audio and video.
Paul does the audio with a clicker in hand. Any time he does not like a verse or phrase he hits the clicker and immediately redoes it. Then at the end goes back and edits out the verse and phrases that he rejected. He sometimes makes the chant sound richer by singing verses with himself. And he uses sometimes uses a drone (a recording of a cord of his own voice to keep him on pitch). Any person or choir that chants for a long time without accompaniment tends to lose pitch.
I am finding the whole behind the scenes explanation of the technology of audio-visual recording very fascinating. In comparison to much of what is done on YouTube, Paul puts out a consistently high-quality audio-visual presentation.
DeleteTherefore, the contrast with AI production is very striking. An audio-visual presentation of a psalm which might take Paul at least an hour perhaps three hours to do can be done by AI in a minute or two. Not only one version but about a dozen options that you can choose from.
All of these involve sounds and visuals designed to be attractive. And they are attractive; these sites get far more views that legitimate Gregorian chants sites. However, none of it except for the Latin text has anything to do with real Gregorian chant. None of it is done by real singers. None of it is found in monasteries or houses of worship. So people will not longer be able to know what real Gregorian chant is like, or how it is sung.
I would think if they go to the actual web sites of the monasteries and convents of the religious orders which do Gregorian chant, people could be assured of getting the legit material.
DeleteKatherine - “ it reminds me of those Buddhist prayer wheels that they put in a stream of water so there is constant prayer. The problem is that there is no one praying.” Catholics light candles and the rising smoke is supposed to represent constant prayer even when there are no people there. Seems to me to be a lot like a Buddhist prayer wheel. Except that candles eventually burn out but the water doesn’t run out.
DeleteThe idea behind the candles is that there was a prayer, when they were lit. Maybe that's the same with the prayer wheels too.
DeleteAI? I don't know, it just seems like the goal with that is to eliminate the human element.
I remember that my mom used to say she would light a candle for me if I had something that was stressing me or if I wasn't feeling well. It was comforting. I do the same sometimes for my kids.
This guy is strikes me as tiresome and self-involved, like most people who get on YouTube to school the rest of us, but he seems to have genuine concerns about human worship vs machine-generated "content."
ReplyDeleteSeems like these are some of the big questions he's churning up, questions I am not qualified to offer opinions about and will not try to answer:
--Worship lies in the hearts of humans. Chant, prayer, hymn singing, and whatever else comes out of human vocal chords are only a reflection of that worship, no?
--Even if not produced worshipfully, AI chant cannot exist without being "fed" chant originally produced as a result of human worship. So can we say that AI chant is the reverberation of that original worship? (Like candles and prayer wheels?)
--AI chant may not be an accurate representation of what chant is "supposed" to sound like. Does that disqualify it as worship if it puts the listener in a prayerful state of mind?
There's also the concern that AI can put musicians out of business if it gets too good (or good enough). That's something that the institutional wing of the Church will have to wrestle with.
Reminds me of AI Jesus-in-a-box in Switzerland that I posted about some months back. IMO, AI-generated entities in chatboxes and holograms generally send the message: You aren't worth an encounter with a real person, so talk to this fake instead.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/21/deus-in-machina-swiss-church-installs-ai-powered-jesus
I suppose people could use AI chant for background music and relaxation without really caring about its authenticity. But that would be different from someone actually trying to pray with it.
ReplyDeleteA little off topic, but not really; yesterday's Gospel reading was the one from John about the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well. Jesus talked to her about Living Water. It was also the Sunday when they were making another announcement about the upcoming Evangelization Fair. Some people were talking after Mass. About how we have to engage people. Give them programs. Great music. Good homilies. They're not going to come if we bore them. Now I have nothing against good homilies. And good music; I try to help make some. But entertainment is something they can get elsewhere (and more than likely get it better). It just seems like we lose focus on the Living Water.
ReplyDeleteA little side note on that, I wondered if Jacob's well still exists. So I did a little research, turns out that it does; and it is pretty well documented that it is same place, revered over millennia. An Orthodox church surrounds it. People can still drink water from it, and take some water home in a bottle, similar to Lourdes water.
Delete"This guy strikes me as tiresome and self-involved, like most people who get on YouTube to school the rest of us,"
ReplyDeleteThis guy's efforts are a result of the pandemic. He was advised by a psychologist to get a project to keep his sanity. "Sing the Hours" is the project.
Paul comes from a very musical family. They are all converts to Catholicism led by their father, who seems to know Latin and music well enough to make some very good literal translations of Gregorian hymns.
His sister gifted him with a breviary, so he decided he wanted to learn how to chant the Hours. He was disappointed at the lack of resources for doing that on the web.
He decided that he had enough music talent, and audio-visual production skills that he could teach himself and everybody else to sing chant by singing the Hours (morning and evening prayer) on YouTube.
He now has over 74 thousand subscribers and each post of Morning or Evening Prayer gets over five thousand views. Now quite as popular as Dean Roberts Morning Prayer (he was up at about 15000 after the pandemic had abated) but quit well given that he has nothing like Canterbury Cathedral to back him.
In the meantime, he has married, now has two children with a third on its way.
A convert dynamic appears to be in play here, where converts become very enthusiastic about some aspect of Catholicism and take up promoting it, in this case chant.
Paul admits that he does not know how to sing Gregorian chant very well, that he is merely a "peasant" but in fact chant was designed for peasants and none of us should hesitate to chant.
In watching him edit his audio, I have come to the conclusion that if I learned to use his audio-video programming equipment, I too could sing chant well by editing out all my mistakes.
Of course that is what the modern recording industry does for everyone. The recordings we hear are generally not of live performances. Much music is already machine made.
Now AI generated music may be the logic next step in recording.
Betty and I both like to sing the Hours using the Meinrad Psalm Tones. The monks of Saint Meinrad only record Vespers, and their office has different psalm selections because they do the full psalter in two weeks rather than four.
Now Betty and I could in theory record our four-week psalter using one of these audio editors like Paul uses. That would take a lot of time. However, it sounds like it might be possible to do only some psalms in the various psalm tones and then ask AI to finish the project. We could instruct it to us our voices according to the Meinrad tones, using our instructions, e.g. alternating male and female voices in the verses.
What we would then have is a virtual breviary in Meinrad chant tones that one can either listen to or sing along with. Sing the Hours is a virtual breviary. My website is a virtual breviary containing within it selections from other virtual breviaries (such as Sing the Hours) and individual videos of psalms and hymns.
You can pray a virtual breviary either by singing along or simply by listening. You can even use it as background to other activities such as walking, gardening, food preparation, etc.
Virtual breviaries, like medieval manuscripts have a visual dimension. I share my photography collection and more recently Betty's art-work on my blogs.
So, a virtual breviary enables one to share not only one's voice but also one's visual experiences with others "for the greater glory of God."
So, a virtual breviary enables one to share not only one's voice but also one's visual experiences with others "for the greater glory of God."
DeleteMore precisely a virtual breviary enables one to share both one's auditory and visual experiences with others, some of which might be self-produced.
"Virtual breviaries, like medieval manuscripts, have a visual dimension."
DeleteThat's true, though I have a knee-jerk reaction against comparing the years of training and number of people involved in producing an illuminated MS and a do-it-yourself Web site that anybody can put together in a day.
It's like comparing a cathedral to a prefab house.
I also think that when everybody can throw something out there, people have to wade thru a lot of very poor quality and inaccurate stuff. And when everyone is concerned with their own "content," I'm not sure how much sharing is going on.
"Views" and "followers" are dicey indicators of quality. Or even how many people are regularly looking thru the content in its entirety and finding it useful.
I don't want to sound mean here, and no offense to your personal efforts, but in a world filling up with info produced by influencers, conspiracy theorists, and outright loonies, I want gatekeepers and standards and expertise.
Unfortunately, I guess we have to be our own gatekeepers. You are right that there is a lot of random stuff of questionable quality out there. There ought to be a site where people can log sites that they have vetted and found to be reliable.
Delete"in a world filling up with info produced by influencers, conspiracy theorists, and outright loonies, I want gatekeepers and standards and expertise"
DeletePaul as he says at the top of his post was reluctant to discuss AI because he realizes that we are at the beginning of something like the print revolution. According to him many opposed the printing press because of its ability to spread heresies and old sorts of bad things, but he judges that it brought more good things than evil things, the same may be true of AI
However, "gatekeepers standards and expertise" do not necessarily produce a better product.
Word on Fire is producing a monthly booklet that contains the text of Morning, Evening Prayer and Compline that reads strait through like a book so that "anywhere, anywhere with anyone" might celebrate the Hours.
BUT, it costs 9$ a month and is not readily reusable because the calendar changes each year. A lot of it is very fine print unlikely to be used by the many elderly shut-ins that could be praying the prayer of Christ and the Church. The hymns are in the back of the book so that you still need a prayer card or ribbons. Very high-quality artwork within for what is essentially a disposable commodity. I have suggested they put the high-quality hymns on a website; at least one staff member thought that was a good idea, but nothing happened. And these people are getting the contract for the New Breviary.
I do credit the Barron with the spiritual insight to promote the Hours among the laity where we are: "anywhere, anytime with anyone."
One of the reasons I began my Saint Gabriel Hours site was that seeing an individual bishop and some very grass roots people going in the same direction is the type of thing that has happened historically in the many changes that have occurred in how the office has been prayed. They all began at the grass roots followed by episcopal endorsement not the other way around.
Even Morning Prayer at Canterbury began with the urging of Fletcher to pray in the garden since they were locked out of the Church. While Dean Roberts had all the existing standards and expertise plus the willingness to invite, Betty and I think Fletcher's camera skills were at least as essential. At Roberts funeral here Dean Randy of the National Cathedral said that although they had just implemented a great sound and camera system, Fletcher shot past them with his iphone camera. Of course that followed by hours of editing before published. Dean Roberts once explained the details of their whole amazing collaboration.
Word on Fire has the money to produce the Hours in audio-visual making it free for the whole English speaking world. Our experience with EWTN does not suggest that is a desirable experience.
I like the idea of many individual, small groups, parishes and other communities around the world producing their own virtual Breviaries rather than a Word on Fire or EWTN equivalent of a printing press.
I spent 35 years jabbering about "reputable sources" to students in classrooms.
DeleteIn my lesser career as a journalist, in which I tried to be as careful about facts as possible, I can cite many examples when editors and researchers kept me from looking like a fool.
For students entering the world of professional cyber communication, I stressed the importance of visual design and made them learn Yale's Web Style Guide.
When the Mayo Clinic started an online support group with access to moderators and oncology nurses, I gladly scrapped my own group and told people to go to the Mayo site. Happy day! People with this rare cancer found a place to get world-class info instead of having to muddle thru with a duffer like me.
I have never published any creative literature, much to Raber's consternation, because the world has enough poems and stories that are derivative and of middling quality.
All of these guardrails, including and maybe especially self-criticism, strike me as more important than ever as the amateur stuff proliferates.
Jack, sorry, our messages crossed in the ether. You are right that even gatekeepers don't guarantee a quality product. But it has a better chance than something a solo amateur produces. And even a grassroots, small-group effort can apply basic style standards.
DeleteAgain, I speak generally and not to your virtual brevity project specifically.
BREVIARY. Jean, follow your standards, dammit!
Delete"There ought to be a site where people can log sites that they have vetted and found to be reliable."
DeleteWell, we have newspapers that follow SPJ standards, peer-reviewed journals, news wire services, imprimatur and nihil obstats, etc. If you want vetted info, those are the places to go, always with the caveat that these things have their own blind spots and slants.
As to the question "what is prayer?" In the Ignatian tradition of contemplation in action, i.e. finding God in all things. Everything is prayer. In fact, Ignatius says that for the truly "mortified" person, i.e. one that is dead to all of one's selfish interests but alive to the grace of God and the welfare of the others, "fifteen minutes" a day could be better than hours spent in mediation which often ends up centering us upon our interests not those of God and others.
ReplyDeleteJack, how do you define meditation?
DeleteRe: revising the Liturgy of the Hours: I assume it's driven largely by biblical translation changes. Whenever the book of Psalms is retranslated, the breviary and the lectionary ideally would be retranslated as well.
ReplyDeleteOne aspect of praying the hours daily is that you become pretty familiar with the psalms that are in the hours you pray - they come up every four weeks (a few come up more frequently). So when the translation is altered, it probably will feel like a jolt.
For example, here is the first quatrain of Psalm 51, prayed every Friday morning throughout the year:
Current translation:
Have mercy on me God in your kindness
In your compassion, blot out my offense
Wash me more and more from my guilt
And cleanse me from my sins
New translation:
Have mercy on me, God, in accord with your merciful love;
in your abundant compassion blot out my transgressions.
Thoroughly wash away my guilt;
and from my sin cleanse me.
It's not just that the words are different. The meanings shift a bit; the rhythms of the lines are different.
It's like your old friend went away and came back a changed person: changed his politics, married a spouse you're not sure you like, gained 35 pounds. You try to accept him as he is now, but a part of you mourns for the way your friend was before.
Jim, I can really relate to your last paragraph. Seems likely that the people who are very familiar with the Psalms reading a certain way will experience some disorientation when they are changed in subtle ways. And we can also understand how the people who were very familiar with the Latin Mass back in the day felt that way when it changed
DeleteLess we all become "Catholic fundamentalists" by placing too great a value on the liturgical texts (which Paul does in his post above) there are two strong opposing traditions.
DeleteFirst the desert communities of monks where they did basket weaving while a monk chanted the psalm text, there was a pause at the end of each psalm for personal mental prayer by each monk to make the psalm prayer his own prayer. At the end of this signified by the "Glory be" everyone rose for an extemporaneous "collect" by the leader summarizing the psalm. (The English-speaking conference actually tried to revive this custom by printing psalm prayers after the psalms. They were optional but I gather few people use them).
Another opposing tradition is psalm paraphrases which particularly took off after literacy became more widespread. I have done some of it myself. I am familiar enough the Latin text that if I repeatedly pray it, an English text begins to form that is none of the present texts. I sometimes then consult the Greek text to improve my English text. I would call these paraphrases rather than translations because I tend to go beyond archaic language e.g. Lord, etc. and bring to it modern concepts of cosmology, etc. Sometimes I use my Bibleworks many English translations to improve my translation even more.
Authentic Catholicism incarnates the Word (scripture, liturgy) into our present culture in ways that both transform our culture as well as illuminate previous forms of Catholic culture, e.g. Latin and Greek. The Word is much richer than any literal translation. Tradition is living not dead.
On the Saint Gabriel Hours I provide sung versions of the Psalms most of which do not use the official text but other texts some of which are translations, others of which are paraphrases from music composers. I encourage people to use these as meditations or songs in response to the official text either experienced by Paul chanting it or by the written text in WOF monthly booklet. These psalms are from a wide variety of musical and liturgical traditions.
DeleteI think doing the Hours in this manner offers us Catholics a great opportunity to witness our ritual tradition in our homes in a manner that is ecumenically hospital to other traditions. It also promotes the Hours among our own people who may enjoy various musical traditions.
The norms for personal recitation which the clergy are encouraged to observe need not be observed by laity who are celebrating the Hours personally or in small groups.
DeleteThe clergy are not encouraged to substitute one psalm for another in personal recitation to satisfy their own needs. However, psalms may be substituted in celebrating the Hours with the people to make the Hours easier to celebrate, e.g. a more familiar musical setting.
The clergy also fulfill their obligation to celebrate the Hours any time they participate in celebrating with a community even if the calendar and text is different from that which they are obliged to use in fulfilling their canonical obligation.
A close reading of the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours provides a great deal of flexibility for laity adapting the Hours for their personal, family, and faith community settings. We do not have to imitate precisely what is provided in the text which is given the breviary. On the other hand, clergy should do that text because they are essentially doing that in place of a community and should not change text unless they have a concrete community before them for which they can provide the many legitimate adaptations provided by the General Instruction.
Of limited interest: The Psalms in the 1978 BCP were translated using Old English poetic conventions--alliteration, half lines (handy for responsive reading), etc.--but rendered into modern idiomatic English. I like them way better than the KJV Psalms in the 1923 BCP, but people got het up about it. At funerals, they still use the old KJV version of PS 23.
DeleteI don't know how closely the 1978 Psalms hew to the actual Old English Psalter, which was translated from the Vulgate. Maybe a nice little Lenten project to keep me quiet.
Anglo-Saxons sometimes played fast and loose with source material when they rendered it into the vernacular for lay people. There was a big effort starting with Alfred the Great to push literacy and to catechize the common people. Moses in the Old English Exodus is like a super hero swinging his Staff of Power around and calling down the wrath of God. I don't think it's an accident that he is more than vaguely reminiscent of Thor and his big Hammer.
Actually, this is quite interesting to me. The whole discussion, including the latest translations that Jim mentioned, that express somewhat different meanings, seem to highlight the reasons that scripture should not be taken literally. Not just as literally as fundamentalist Protestants, but as literally as many Catholics. How many similar changes have occurred during the last 2000 years? I never knew about the role Anglo- Saxons or Alfred the Great played in contributing to this process. More reasons to look at scripture as metaphor rather than as literal Truth. Did Jesus really mean that the remembering his the last supper words about his body and blood “ given for you” and “ poured out for you” should be interpreted as meaning that those who share bread and wine in his memory are literally consuming his flesh (muscle, skin, fat etc) and blood that appears to be bread and wine via transubstantiation?
DeleteThere are more than a thousand Greek manuscripts of the Psalms. It will be quite a project to analyze them all and how they relate to each other. Seems like a long and tedious project of comparison that could use some help from AI!
DeleteSomewhere I remember reading that there is a strong tradition in early Ireland of interpreting the Psalms very literally, e.g. relating them to King David's life. This tradition seems very similar to a tradition around Antioch.
DeleteThere are also similarities of Irish monasticism to Egyptian monasticism.
Although travel was difficult in the ancient world, people did wander around a lot. For example, when the desert solitaries became famous, a lot of people journeyed there, lived with them for a while, and then returned home to found their own monasteries.
I'm not interested in Greek Psalm texts. Just want to compare 1978 BCP Psalms with their Old English counterparts to see if the OE versions contributed anything to the modern ones. Just plain old drudge work with Bosworth & Toller's OE dictionary, pencil, and paper. You have your fun, I have mine.
DeleteJust a cursory look at Psalm 135 in OE Paris Psalter (King Alfred's project) compared to the 1978 BCP version. The OE version omits some specific references to Jewish names and places from the OT, and replaces them with new lines emphasizing God's might, power, glory, and mercy. Looks like the general theme is still there, but the writer wants to underscore the nature of God (whose power is above the old Germanic gods?) rather than get bogged down in allusions that his listeners might not be familiar with. Using original sources as the basis for loose retellings like this is not uncommon in OE lit.
DeleteFrom Ignatius, the Spiritual Exercises:
ReplyDelete"By the terms Spiritual Exercises, we mean every method of examination of conscience, meditation, contemplation, vocal or mental prayer, and other spiritual activities, such as will be mentioned later. For, just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will and the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul."
Within the Ignatian framework "meditation" usually refers to actively employing the mind and emotions on the subject of prayer, e.g. a scene from the life of Christ or a scripture passage. One is to imagine how Christ might have looked, spoken, the responses of others, the setting and place oneself with the scene, and also how we react and/or should react and to engage in conversation with Christ or others e.g. Mary.
Personally, I was never attracted to this form of mental prayer. But evidently many Jesuits were, and wanted to spend hours doing it, not just the one hour allotted by Ignatius.
On the other hand, I was very attracted to keeping a spiritual diary (which might be seen as a form of examination of conscience) largely because Merton kept diaries.
Merton decided early on that his diaries were really drafts of his books and essays rather than conversations with God or himself. I decided that mine where really conservations with myself which are often shaped by God. In Ignatian terms they speak of where I find "consolation" i.e. things that bring me to God, or "desolation" things that take me away from God.
Over time, my reflections have become less conversations with myself and more drafts of conversations that I might have with others, and for posts on my blogs.
Some of you might be interested in this video by a Dominican priest about how he incorporates prayer into his daily life. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SFZtzSUuav8
ReplyDeleteHe is particularly devoted to midday prayer. His day job is campus ministry at the University of Arizona.
I don’t worry about incorporating formal, structured prayer into my life. I practice informal prayer regularly - mostly mental conversations with God. The conversations don’t often reveal,God’s will so I seek Gods will by listening - working to clear out all the words so I can hear by sitting in silence.
DeleteLike Jack, the Ignatian practice of imaginative meditation never worked for me. A modified form of the Examen is helpful though.
Above, Anne brings up the matter of interpreting scripture literally vs metaphorically. If I may, let me quote a couple of paragraphs from Dei Verbum, which is Vatican II's document on divine revelation. I'm going to break this passage into bullets to make it a bit easier to digest what the Council Fathers wished to teach us about interpreting scripture.
ReplyDeleteThis is taken from no. 12 of Dei Verbum:
"...[T]he interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.
"To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to:
* ""literary forms." For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse.
* The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.
"But, since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to:
* "the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out.
* "The living tradition of the whole Church must be taken into account along with the harmony which exists between elements of the faith.
It is the task of exegetes to work according to these rules toward a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture, so that through preparatory study the judgment of the Church may mature. For all of what has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God."
I think Holy Tradition has a place in scriptural interpretation, no? If I recall correctly from my Episcopal confirmation class, tradition predated Scripture and guided what was included in the books handed down to us from the 4th Century. So Scripture scholarship cannot toss out those basic beliefs held by Christians from the earliest times.
DeleteThe process described in Dei Verbum sounds a bit like “originalism”, Unfortunately it hasn’t always been the best interpretation for our times. The SC Justices are working with a text that is only 250 years old and struggle to get it right. Those who interpret scripture are working with material authored by dozens of writers working in eras separated by hundreds and thousands of years; materials that date back thousands of years without original source documents, with dozens of generations of copies of copies, none in the original ancient languages.
DeleteScripture scholars gotta do their thing, and the attempt to get as close as possible to the original text is fascinating. And I suppose for public worship they have to agree on texts which check the boxes of both accuracy and understandable language.
DeleteHowever my favorite version for personal reading remains the Confraternity translation. For instance I enjoy reading that in Luke 24:42 they gave the risen Jesus a piece of fish. And some honeycomb. The honeycomb does not appear in any more modern translations. Supposedly it was only in the Greek, but not in other texts. So it is questionable. But I remember it, and so does my husband, since it had been in the KJV that he grew up with. Anyway, little things like that , which are just personal preference. And I like to think they gave Jesus a little sweetness after having given him so much that was bitter.
I like that, too. It works in a human level, the disciples sharing their best food with a guest. And on a literary level, honey is an archetypal symbol of divine promise. You see it in the OT--land of milk and honey, manna tasting like honey in Exodus; God's love for his people as honey in the Psalms. So there are overtones of that in the Gospel.
DeleteIt is interesting that both St. Jerome's Vulgate and the King James translations were sourced from such original manuscripts as were available at the time. So they represent an ongoing effort to stay close to the original meaning and intent.
DeleteIf I'm not mistaken, for centuries the church used the Vulgate (Latin) for the scripture used in its worship. The church had its own English version of the bible, translated from the Vulgate, called the Douay-Rheims. But because worship (both the Mass and the Hours) were in Latin, the English translation was useful only insofar as worship aids were prepared for worshippers so they could follow along.
DeletePost-Vatican II, the use of the vernacular in worship caught on quickly - perhaps more quickly and comprehensively than the Council Fathers had anticipated. Scripture scholarship - like liturgical development, a fruit of the Council with deep 20th-century roots - deemed the Douay-Rheims lacking, presumably in some of the same ways that the KJV had been deemed lacking, i.e. scripture scholarship has advanced in many ways, more sources have been discovered, words have fallen out of common usage or meanings have shifted since Renaissance times. One can note these without disparaging either translation.
The biblical translation produced by the American bishops of the immediate post-conciliar era, the New American Bible, has itself been gradually retranslated since then. The psalm translations used in the official version of the Hours no longer accord with the current NAB psalm translations. I suppose many people don't care, but it is an issue, insofar as these scripture texts are formative for our individual and collective faith.
The printing press ushered in a preoccupation with standardized texts, close translations, and comparative linguistic studies. For the first 1500 years or so, Christianity had authoritative texts like the Vulgate, but a lot of loose vernacular translations and paraphrases reworked for various times and places.
DeleteSt Aidan, Irish missionary to the English, used to sit outside his house with a Latin book of the Gospels. He would tell curious passers-by, who had never seen a book, that it contained stories of a great king. Well, heck, who could resist that?! He would open the book and do extempore "translations," which amazed people. It was powerful magic!
Possibly this is why there are so many different "flavors" of Catholicism around the world. It might bear thinking about how much the Church wants to demand standardization if it means that the approved language is clunky, colorless, and speaks to no one but wonks.
Just for curiosity I went and dug out my old St. Andrew daily missal. Every single thing is Latin on one side and English on the other. I am remembering that the priest did read the Epistle reading and the Gospel in English on Sunday, after he had first read the Latin. But not for daily Mass, he just read the Latin. Which seems strange, because that was the Mass the school kids attended. We had daily missals when we were old enough to follow along, and I followed the Epistle and Gospel. But I didn't even try to read the other stuff, the introit, collect, gradual, etc.
DeleteI think the scripture version was the Challoner Rheims, which was an update of the Douay Rheims in the 1700s.
The Grail Psalms are what I am used to for Morning and Evening prayer (full confession, I only did that when K was in formation, I just do an abbreviated version of morning prayer now). But I like the Grail Psalms.
I had a St Joseph’s Missal. Same layout - Latin on one page, English on the facing page
Delete"Possibly this is why there are so many different "flavors" of Catholicism around the world."
DeleteYeah, that's an interesting insight. I think of scripture as formational - it informs and builds our faith. Then our faith, fed by scripture - and worship, and family, and culture, and many other factors - takes flight in a lot of different directions.
The "translation wars" so often seem to be about fidelity (and, to some extent, ideology). One could wish they were more about poetry, as I think that is what feeds people's souls.
There are a few things I didn't like about the previous liturgical translation (the criticisms of inaccuracy and glossing over meaning ring true, as far as I can tell), but they had a certain directness and clarity that the new wordier and more Latinate translations lack. Personally, I think this is what people mean when they complain that the new translation is uninspiring. It makes the meaning more obscure. If that was how Jesus spoke, I don't think Peter and Andrew and James and John would have told him to get lost.
s/b "...I think they would have told him to get lost."
DeleteIn our high school Unitarian youth group, we did a little exercise where we had to write our own creed and gospel. We talked about similarities, differences. (I still reread and update my gospel once every year or two.)
DeleteThe exercise led me to conclude that the Church can provide any number of "correct" and scholarly Scriptures for our use, and of course they are valuable and formative. But it's the gospel in our imagination and memory that truly lives and guides us.
I don't think this is a big surprising insight. Ask any two siblings to write a description of their mother, and they'll come up with different pictures.
"Ask any two sibling..." Yeah, I think all siblings had a different childhood, unless they were born quite close in time to each other. It's way different being the oldest (me) and a middle child (my sister ten years younger), and my youngest sister (eighteen years younger, with an eight year gap between her and our middle sister). Not to mention gender gaps, two brothers who were three and six years younger than me.
DeleteJean, writing my own creed would be a good Lenten exercise.
DeleteI find it salubrious to go thru the Nicene Creed once in awhile and ask myself how much of it I take on faith and how much I have to say, "if that's the way God wants it, m'okay, but doesn't make much difference to me." What bothers me about the creeds is that neither of them says, "I believe in the Great Commission, to love God with all my heart and my neighbor as myself." I have been known to substitute that for the creed when I say the rosary by myself ...
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