St. Johns Workshop:
Breaking Open the Word
... Staff and Prayer Partners Commune
Friday, October 5th, 2001

St Joan of Arc Staff and Members of the Prayer Partners attended the workshop “A Sense-able God” at St. John’s Abbey on October 5. Those attending included our Pastor George Wertin, who returned to old stomping grounds he frequented when he was a Professor and Spiritual Director amidst the “Bennies,” Tom Smith-Myott, Anna Vagle, Julie Madden, Karin Grosscup, Mary Eve Thomas, Roger Dick, Lisa Chirpich, and myself Pat Stevens. To report what this experience was for me is my intention here.

Abbey Church at St. Johns

I arrived a day early so I could work in the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library on some manuscripts of Dante and stay overnight with the monastic community and attend prayer at the Abbey Church.

The conference centered about the use of the arts (music, dance, graphic arts, poetry) to come to know the beauty of God and to bring what is beautiful to the celebration of the Word and of Eucharist. Special emphasis was on the Word. The keynote address was delivered by Dominican Mary Katherine Hilkert, who teaches Theology at Notre Dame. Her powerful eloquence showed how “the Word became flesh” in all the loving deeds following the September 11 bombing of the twin towers.

That evening Peter Pitzele gave an interactive workshop using theater improv techniques to get us inside the people in the story, and more importantly to the person inside each of us who hears the story in our own way. Peter broke open the story from Luke’s Gospel about Jesus as a young boy of 12 being found in the Temple. Using Torah-Talmud and Midrash approaches to each nuance of this narrative, Peter spent an hour painting this story in my mind in such a way to encourage contemplation and suggest spiritual meaning. I had always “blown off” this story, not knowing quite what I was supposed to do with the Word, the detail, the essence of the story. Peter created a Byzantine icon, painting each brush stroke slowly from each detail of the text. He did this interactively through asking people to be the characters of the story. We were the brush painting the icon. This isn’t terribly surprising, except that Peter is Jewish and teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York. I thought maybe I was in ancient Antioch, where the Word was reverenced for what it said, and not in ancient Alexandria, where it was revered for the mystery it hid behind the literal text. Both approaches are valid.

A similar contrast of these approaches to the Word came up in another workshop the next day by Fr. Jan Michael Joncas, our own famous church musicologist from the St. Paul Archdiocese. His session, which Roger Dick and I attended, studied how music illuminates the word. Referring to Blackwell’s incredibly luminous book, The Sacred in Music, he found two diverging approaches: the Pythagorean and the Incarnational. Using examples from a range of music from rap to Gregorian chant to Bach’s “Magnificat,” Mozart’s “Ave Verum,” contemporary ballad and other forms, he showed how music and the Word interfaced through the centuries, from Ambrose and Augustine to Gelineau. Augustine of course loved Ambrosian Chant with sensory passion, yet distrusted any kind of sensory or sensual passion. At heart he was a neo-Platonic. Spirit was good, physical was suspect, an obstacle at times to coming to God.

And au contraire, the Incarnational approach finds an integration of body/soul in a Christian “transvaluation of music” which can lead one closer to God. An hour with Fr. Joncas gave me the joy of dissecting the final cadenzas of Bach’s Magnificat and of finding in its doxology a physical commentary on the Trinity that was both reverent and profound. Likewise the serene simplicity and harmonics of Mozart’s “Ave Verum” in Joncas’ hands became a down-to-earth meditation on the Incarnation and Death of Jesus, simple, profound, masterful. All this in one hour.

Roger, Anna and I attended “the power of the small poem” by Luci Shaw. Luci covered Frost, Dickenson, haiku, her own writings for a while, and then had us write and share and critique poetry. A connect was not made directly to the Word because we ran out of time. Roger and I wrote and delivered poems that stretched the elasticity of the session. Our poems may have been a bit whimsical, but they were concrete and incarnational, if a bit earthy. His poem ended with a metaphorical naked lady, while mine made reference to the divine derriere (a reference to a conversation with Moses in Genesis). Anna did not get a chance to read her poem, which was quite nice and had more decorum than ours.

The music and arts at St. Joan of Arc have, since 1970 or before, been Incarnational. During the wonderful flowering of the 1990’s under Anna Vagle’s direction, music and the arts have illuminated the liturgy without ever detracting from it. Far from being a mere accretion on the side, they have been integral statements of the Word, Christ the Word made flesh whom we celebrate, imitate, and become in Eucharist at the table and in social justice afterwards as a continuation of the celebration.

John Shea from Loyola gave a session on “storylistening” that delighted George and Anna and all who attended. Give an Irishman an audience…..the rest is history. John was able to bring people into the heart of Wisdom stories with a flair for timing, pacing, and meaning. So they told me.

Lunch in the old Abbey Church, now called the Great Hall

The session included tours of the monastic manuscript library and of the campus in general. It is overwhelming. I was able to examine manuscripts on microfilm which the abbey had acquired over the past thirty years. These were acquired by staff from St. John’s in traveling, negotiating, and bringing equipment to film the material on location. I had Manuscripts of Dante’s Divine Comedy from Portugal, Vienna, and South Africa to choose from. I examined all three, done in the 1300’s and 1400’s. I came away with a printer copy (which the staff taught me to use in a few short minutes) of Cantos 1-20 of the Inferno. I also came away with great appreciation of all the people through all the centuries who preserved the Word and the words in manuscript. Also I truly admire the staff and Hill Monastic Manuscript Library whom I met. The founding Director, Dr. Julian Plant, was my grade-school friend and classmate who lived a block away from me, so I always feel at home and welcome at HMML.

St. John’s has an Ecumenical Institute. Its Director, Dr. Bill Cahoy, bade us welcome. The Word goes forth to all the world, but it also comes to us from all parts of the world. It is this receptive and global paradigm at St. John’s University, which has enriched Minnesota for so many years. We at St. Joan of Arc have a love of the Word in our celebrations for which owe much to Dom Virgil Michael and Godfrey Diekman and other liturgical pioneers from St. John’s.

Pat Stevens has been at St Joan of Arc for 30+ years, was first Executive Director of Trust in 1970, taught Humanities and foreign languages for 12 years, has been a real estate broker for 25 years with his wife Irene Taddiken. They have 11 grandkids. Pat studied philosophy and theology at St. Paul Seminary, Greek Drama and Classical Languages at Yale. He is a Prayer Partner at SJA and is on the Affordable Housing Committee.

The closing Eucharistic celebration was an eclectic panoply of music, color, incense, barefoot dancers, and a sung mass with the melodious voice of Fr. Joncas. It was global in material, gender, music, and theology. It was an attempt to sum up all the wonderful materials from the Breakout Sessions. It succeeded beautifully.

At the same time as I appreciate the beauty of all of this, I feel more grounded back at my home parish of St. Joan of Arc, where the excellence of the integration of music, art, theology, liturgy and social justice seem to flow on every week. We take it for granted until we go somewhere else.