Is Nothing (or Anything) Sacred?

June is the month that is most closely associated with weddings. Don't ask me why. But while we're on the subject, let's talk about the possibility of secular music at sacred occasions.

In particular, let's set our sights on one particular piece of music, the favorite or whipping boy of choice when Catholic weddings are planned, “The Wedding Song” originally composed by Noel Paul Stookey (the party of the second part in Peter, Paul, and Mary). A growing number of parishes and dioceses are forbidding its use, because it is a popular music selection, which is to say, secular music, making it inappropriate for sacred use.

So, if you never heard it on the radio or anywhere else, but you heard it at your friend’s wedding, you’d say: “Duuude, that’s not sacred music, that’s a pop song!”

Or would you?

You see, I don’t think people take that position with this song because their disapproval has any merit. I think they take that position because most guitarists suck at it. They don’t play it even close to the way Stookey composed it. As you can hear in the first video, his own performance at a 1986 concert, you probably don’t hear it sound like that anywhere else.

And there’s a reason.

Behind The Music

But first, some background on the song, from the “Shout Music Factory” YouTube channel.

”Wedding Song (There Is Love)" is a song written by Noel Paul Stookey in the fall of 1969 and first performed at the wedding of Peter Yarrow - Stookey's co-member of Peter, Paul and Mary - to Mary Beth McCarthy at St Mary's Catholic Church in Willmar MN: Stookey was best man at the ceremony which took place in the evening of October 18, 1969.

Stookey had written the song on a midnight flight between PP&M concert dates in San Jose and Boston setting out to write a song for Yarrow's wedding which would convey Stookey's Christian convictions while respecting Yarrow's Jewish faith.

According to Stookey, "the melody and the words [of 'Wedding Song'] arrived simultaneously and in response to a direct prayer asking God how the divine could be present at Peter's wedding." (The first two lines of the song's second verse: "A man shall leave his mother and a woman leave her home/ And they shall travel on to where the two shall be as one", is largely a paraphrase of the text of Genesis 2:24: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.") Believing he could not take personal credit for composing "The Wedding Song", Stookey set up the Public Domain Foundation which since 1971 has received the song's songwriting royalties for charitable distribution.

So, everybody can relax, no one is making a living off this little ditty, are they? Try claiming that about the stable of artists at Oregon Catholic Press, which for nearly half a century has succeeded in dumbing down the music programs for more than half the parishes in the United States. (There’s a secret to how they do it, and my Very Close Personal Friend Jeffrey Tucker explains it all for you.)

The song doesn't celebrate those who hear it, and not really the bridal couple. Whatever one thinks of it, the song celebrates how God is love, with the scriptural references to bring the point home.

Behind The Details

I was certain that Stookey played it in an alternate tuning (that is, a tuning other than E A D G B E, from sixth to first strings), which was the only explanation for its very modal quality. I was surprised to learn that, other than tuning the guitar down three half-steps (Db F# B E G# Db), or four half-steps (C F Bb Eb G C), depending on who you ask, standard tuning and chording is applied. It’s how he takes it from there (as seen in the second video by some anonymous guy who actually doesn't suck at it) that sets it apart from all the wannabes. There are plenty of websites that have the tablature to show how it’s really done, so you have no excuse to play it badly.

To put it another way, you have no excuse to suck at it.

It also doesn't hurt that Stookey uses a twelve-string guitar, both in the original recording and in the live stage example shown here. We all know at least one guy who plays only a twelve-string for the sole purpose of sounding more obnoxious than the next guy in a jam session (or at the parish "folk Mass"), but they really do serve a specific purpose in adding an additional texture, especially with picking or fingerpicking styles (as opposed to the average flattop flogger who should either invest in a six-string, or just stay home).

Roma Locuta, Causa Finita

Let's put the hit parade aside for a moment. What does the Church say about sacred music? Quite a bit, actually. In the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1963, says that music for sacred worship must serve "the glory of God and the sanctification of the faithful." (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 112) Further, the 1967 instruction on sacred music in the liturgy, Musicam Sacram, states that it must "be holy, and therefore avoid everything that is secular," and further, that such criterion must be "universal" in its understanding. In other words, it must not be subject to the passing whims of popular culture and fashion.

Most important, inasmuch as lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of praying is the law of believing, in other words, as we pray, so we believe), the words of the composition must be doctrinally sound. It must serve, and not offend, the Truths of the Faith and the glorification of God.

However ...

Having said this, we could subject many of the English-language hymns of the late 19th and early 20th century to the same scrutiny as luminaries of the 1960s "folk scare." One saccharine example is "Mother At Your Feet Is Kneeling," its composer identified only as "Sister SC," and composed as early as 1929 or as recent as 1952, depending on whom you ask. It was recorded for the popular charts by such crooners as Dennis Day and Bobby Wayne, and can be found in a number of preconciliar (and ostensibly traditional) hymnals.

What is it about sugary sentimentality that was acceptable before the 1960s, that suddenly becomes anathema after the 1960s? If the Psalmist wrote of praising the Lord "with trumpet sound ... with lute and harp ... with timbrel and dance ... with strings and pipe ... with sounding cymbals" (that's Psalm 150; read it and weep, suckas!), is it conceivable that He can be praised with the guitar, the stated preference by the Church for the organ in Sacrosanctum Concilium (120) notwithstanding?

So, Now What?

We may still insist that secular music has no place in a sacred setting. But if a band of monks can hit the Top 40 with an album of Gregorian chant, there’s always that chance of it cutting both ways. There's also that chance that walking the fine line between sacred and profane didn't start with Ray Repp and a bunch of singing nuns. Music is sacred on the basis on its own merits and objective characteristics, not some arbitrary classification of who did it first or how, or in which section at Barnes & Noble you find the recording.

If we want to get people to start making sense in choosing sacred music, it helps to know that to which we are both referring, as well as not referring, don’t you think?

Or don’t you?

(NOTA BENE: The above is proposed by this writer as a gedankenerfahrung, a "thought experiment," and does not take away from his dedication to the restoration of the sacred in Catholic worship, and his active promotion of Gregorian chant, the treasury of sacred polyphony, and the Traditional Latin Mass.)