I may be as guilty as the next person here. I have a song called “We Will Serve the Lord” which is very macho and tries to conjure the spirit of Joshua and the tribe at Shechem with its martial cadences, sort of a liturgical “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” I won’t take that song back—it has other redeeming qualities!—but what I will do is try to come up with another song that might be called, “We Will Not Serve the Lord,” because, I might say, that our God is a servant, not a “lord” as human beings know lords.

While the presiding bishop and others in the room waited with varying degrees of patience, the choir was singing a polyphonic "Sanctus" in latin. It was unbelievable, as though twenty years of history hadn't even happened. The assembly's unusurpable part of the eucharistic prayer had been coöpted by the choir in the mother church of the diocese, on a Sunday no less, in a language known by none except the elder presbyters, in a musical style of the courts of the sixteenth century. We shook the dust off our feet as we left the place, not staying to hear if this visionary place would save the Benedictus qui venit to sing after the minor elevations, perhaps instead of the memorial acclamation.

The sad truth is that the story repeats itself in cities all over the United States.

You probably can think of a person in your life who is characterized by the words I’ve used from our common vocabulary to describe open. It might be a woman or a man, but I will wager that this person, for all their faults, is a joy to be around, a good person to have a conversation with, a traveler, a journey-maker, with varied interests. The person probably makes a lot of mistakes and is able to laugh at them and learn from them. The person sees the pain and hurt in the world, and accepts responsibility as a human person for ameliorating that suffering in whatever ways are possible. You’ve probably caught yourself wishing on some days you were more like that one, with their eyes, their heart, their charming ability to be a fool and not be foolish.

And on the other hand, you may know someone more characterized by closed-ness. This one also might be a man or a woman. But I suspect that this is the person with whom you’re most likely to discuss sports and the weather, and politics and religion rarely come up in your table talk. Everything is a problem for this one, and the blame for the problem can clearly be placed on others. If only everyone believed what this one believed, if they voted like I do, if they went to this church, if they’d just go out and get a job. If we’d just build more prisons, if there were more capital crimes and hanging judges; if we’d close the borders, make that a sin, bring back the Baltimore catechism .....well, you get the idea. You know this person. Ralph Cramden, Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson, Jesse Helms. Lampooned in every generation, and they just won’t go away.

Perhaps American music is too frightening: it's too democratic. The possibility of imaging God through its rhythms and melodies lays a short-fused explosive at the foundation of the institutional European church, a church with many American defenders. Our music doesn't fit the ecclesiology that's being crammed down the throat of the church by some of her princely members and their minions whose buttons are pushed by music of the court, music which supports their other-worldly vision of God. Some people in the pew buy into that vision because it's always easier to worship that kind of a god than one who is so utterly immanent that this God names Self "Emmanuel." We still want to believe in an "all-powerful" god, rather than one whose clearest image of godliness was kenosis, utterly powerless self-emptying. At the heart of our prejudice are a false doxology that holds up God-King imagery as normative in blatant antithesis to the incarnational/paschal mystery imagery of the 2nd Vatican Council (and Holy Scripture), and a false mysticism which seeks to replace an incarnational spirituality with one manifestation of spirituality: the monastic one.

Our manifesto must not create a tyranny of style. I have lived long enough to see that part of the catholic genius is that our church, in obedience to the inclusive love of Christ, is able to accommodate Veronica Luekens and Matthew Fox, William Buckley and Mario Cuomo, Rosemary Haughton and Mother Teresa.

The 1990's will see the sesquicentennial of the Communist Manifesto arrive, and with it the triumphalistic demagoguery of those who misperceive the fall of this incarnation of communism as the failure of its ideals. The epitaph on capitalism (can its demise be far behind?) will probably say, "Marx was mostly right." As in the mid-nineteenth century a visionary called for ordinary folks to throw off the old economic order so that the world's wealth might not stay concentrated in the hands of a privileged hegemony, the church in America awaits an American Manifesto around which good, faithful musicians can rally and throw off the trappings of unthinkingly monarchical and moribund liturgical music.