While my parents and family taught me the heartbeat of Eucharistic life1 and my daughter, Lucy, and wife, Katherine, draw me forward in sustaining it, my Eucharistic living was crystallized during my four years as part of the Notre Dame Folk Choir.
At the University of Notre Dame, we are blessed to have a beautiful basilica on our campus. Beside the golden dome, the towering architecture of our amazing church shoots high into the sky, co-anchoring the skyline of our campus with the gleaming icon of Mary. Our basilica depends upon a robust stable of ministers, including the basilica choirs. The Folk Choir’s chief purview was the 11:45 Mass, and ascending the spiral staircase up to the choir loft each Sunday inflamed my heart potently and with great ease.
Our choir was musically strong, but it was built on more than just tone, harmony, and dynamics. Members auditioned not just by singing but by demonstrating their faith and their inclination toward ministry. 2 The choir was a community, a group that prayed together at every rehearsal, that dined together regularly, that facilitated friendships with deeper roots than dorm parties did. I always thought our fabric was well described by the title of a 1990s album the choir recorded: Prophets of Joy. When we toured, it was definitely neat to see new towns and cities, to go sightseeing, and to travel with friends, but what’s more, it was a way to canvass and take in the Church. I loved walking into new churches, seeing the parish halls, chatting with different locals, and especially visiting with the host families who would take us into their homes. Sharing Masses, concerts, workshops, and more with these local communities was a wonderful reciprocal blessing between our choir and these parishes.
It was being a part of this choir of faith-filled people that taught me huge lessons about ministry, chief among them that one’s ministerial efficacy is not based solely on one’s individual ability levels. Ministry instead is about giving of yourself, however you best can, as gift to another, and receiving them charitably in return. The truths at the heart of our community came out beautifully in our traditions, and it’s here that the depths of the Eucharist were further revealed to me.
Our signs of peace were notoriously thorough. Up in the close quarters of the loft, we’d inevitably hug our way well into the first notes of the Lamb of God, during which we were supposed to begin descending the stairs to go forward for communion.3 But even then we weren’t done.
The choir risers upstairs were bifurcated by the organ console and its many pipes, and each half a spiral staircase down to the nave. As each half of the choir emptied out of the its side’s narrow stairwell, the lines would move toward the center-back of the church, where the baptismal font resides. As we moved around the font toward the center aisle, we’d always briefly stop with the person from the opposite side and share one more sign of peace in front of the water before we continued forward into the communion line. Some might say that’s all quite gratuitous; I’d agree... and I loved it anyway.
As I walked forward, I’d scope out the pews, certainly locating family members who may have been in for the weekend and otherwise curiously scanning to see if there were any friends, dormmates, or other familiar backs-of-heads in the pews. Then, we’d inch forward, take our turns in receiving the Eucharist, and then round the corner to walk up the side aisle and toward our spiral stairs back upward. From our spot in the rear balcony of the church, we could never really see people’s faces. However, once we had received communion and turned to walk back, for a few seconds, we could look face to face at the faithful gathered for Mass.
By this point, I would usually be grinning quite cheesily. Contemplating the diversity of stories, sins, motivations, etc. that people carry to Mass has always enthralled my spirit, and as I peered toward the faces of the faithful there in the basilica, stacked tightly into the pews, my smile continued. From undergrads to families to visitors in the opposing school’s colors, 4 I loved this hodgepodge of people who gathered for Mass. After a few months of taking this holy stroll, I realized that my gratuitous grin not only reflected the love in my heart for this mess of people gathered together in Christ, but also directly proceeded from the Christ in the Eucharist. The very person of Jesus who I was consuming as I smiled was dwelling in me, present gracefully behind my grin.
But some Sundays, we had to stay upstairs for communion. Certain occasions packed the basilica even more than usual, and logistically, it was just too complicated and long to get the whole choir down and back for communion. So, a brave choir sacristan would take a loaded ciborium and wiggle his or her way through the tightly packed choir to serve everyone at their place.
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| Here's the basilica choir loft, as pictured with our alumni choir who reassembled with our directors for our wedding in 2015. It actually looks much different now, as they've installed a new organ and reconfigured the loft. |
Then, at the end of our choir tour freshmen year, the seniors all took their turns saying their farewells to the choir. While these speeches inevitably included funny war stories, inside jokes, and embarrassing jabs at our director, the farewells usually came with their share of wisdom and advice, too. A senior named John took his turn, and he dropped the wisest insight of the night.
John5 and I, like the rest of the taller choir members, were typically assigned spots in the back row or two of the risers so that the shorter members had a clear sightline to the director. Our director was quite specific about making sure our shoulders were perpendicular to the altar, especially since the risers were angled such that we’d naturally face toward our director.6 If we made sure to stand as he directed, our faces and voices all pointed forward, out over the congregation, toward the mics, and toward the altar.
Having spent lots of time in that back row of the risers, John highlighted the positioning we all took as he filled the risers, and brought up that little tabernacle. While all of us faced out toward the people and sanctuary, singing our hearts out, that tabernacle and its contents dwelled behind us. As we sang, John explained, Jesus had our backs.
It was such an insight. We often found ourselves quite tired from schoolwork, sick from our dorm-incubated colds and flu bugs, hoarse from football games and weekend adventures, ragged from the demands placed on the choir. But the team always pulled it together to do great music ministry at countless Masses, concerts, and workshops. And the simple geography of our choir loft emphasized the truth of our Eucharistic life as a community of faith: Jesus had our backs.
The Eucharist isn’t meant to be just an ephemeral moment of encounter when one reaches the end of an aisle in church. The Eucharist is the pulsing heartbeat of the life of faith. It becomes more palpable when its Blood can flow through all parts of life, when we allow our faith to suffuse our friendships, our hobbies, and our whole selves. By letting this community become my family and the place where I made my deepest friendship, my choir helped me build a Eucharistic life that made Christ the smile on my face and affirmed that Christ is the one pushing me forward. As we seek to humble our hearts and love better, living Eucharistically illuminates how Christ has our backs.
1 Last week, while juggling Lucy from arm to arm, I gave a talk of Eucharistic reflections to some parishioners participating in a morning of faith formation. No matter how many credits I’ve accrued in theology, I always feel slightly inadequate to the more naked moments of catechesis. When a room of people looks forward with the seeming, even if not real, implication that the person speaking “has the answers,” I feel a bit intimidated. I know I have a lot to say to even the more difficult questions, but I don’t gravitate toward that platform and worry I’ll displease or mix up a curious question-asker. Put me in a retreat small-group or an off-the-cuff one-on-one, and I’m totally game. So I usually approach these kinds of engagements more in that vein, and seek to talk with groups in more intimate, personal terms than speakers who may be more inclined to what I might call “loud and crowd” settings or otherwise high-stakes contexts. With all due respect to the more polished theologians and those preachers who relish the big crowd, my remarks gravitated toward identifying the roots of my Eucharistic faith and peace.↩
2 This reality was a lifesaver for me. I am an above-average, more-than-amateur singer, but an accomplished soloist I am not. My imperfect musical ear and lack of technical know-how puts an upper limit on my abilities. I am at my best when standing in the midst of fifty other singers, with whom I am striving to blend and balance. My strength is in ministry, in sharing my faith and helping others to share theirs, and this part of my heart is what drew me to the choir and the choir to me.
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3 Practically speaking, it made the most sense. Our instrumentalists and a soloist would stay upstairs to lead the first communion song while we went forward for communion downstairs. The first song would typically be a simpler song with verses done by a soloist and a simple refrain that we could sing without sheet music as we traveled. Then, as we came back up, we’d reassemble and join in from upstairs again as the song continued. Usually, we were all back in place by the start of the second song, which could then a more typical choral song since we had our binders back and could see our director.↩
4 Our wonderful, gregarious, and sometimes dry-humored rector at the basilica would make the same announcements with the same wording before every Mass. But those six or seven Sundays a year that followed a home football game came with an extra joke was he welcomed our visitors: “And to anyone who’s still here from USC/Michigan/Navy/Purdue/Michigan St./insert team here… … welcome.”
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5 One particular memory from standing in the back, just in front of John: during the Our Father, he’d put his hand on my shoulder since to his right was just the wall of the organ. When we reached the “For the kingdom…” part, during which people often elevate their clasped hands, John would often pinch a portion of my shirt and lift it slightly off my shoulder. Classic.
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6 He even had a special hand gesture that looked sort of like the “hang loose” fingers with a wrist rotation that I was conditioned to know meant I needed to rotate my body slightly.
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