The Fourth Day... Letting Our Light Shine... Another Part of the St. James Story...
Well, the dear old lady's sleeping now...supposedly waiting on official word from the Vatican as to whether she'll ever open her eyes again as a Catholic Parish. But for now, her bells are quiet. For many years, they were an integral part of Lakewood's daily life.
I've written about my profound personal experiences at St. James before on these pages. Briefly restated here, I'd felt strongly compelled one Sunday morning in 1977 to attend a Mass there. What I really knew at that time was that I was between jobs, and that I needed a whole lot more than the comfort of my sofa. I heard a great guitar group singing and playing there and asked to join them. For eight years, I played music with that group, although I never officially became a Catholic at that time.
Back then, that new guitar-supported music was beautiful to my ears, having rich vocal harmonies and a folk-style informality that reflected the openness of Vatican II's many changes in the Catholic Church. While some people resisted, and even resented, the new developments that were going on in the church, others welcomed the spirit of modern community that marked the Guitar Mass worship experience.
Like other styles of music, I suppose, people tend to either love or hate folk music. Coming from a professional musician's home, I learned to enjoy all types of music, but that kind of eclectic taste doesn't often seem to carry over to the rest of the world. There are lovers of Heavy Metal, Classical, Country, and other musical forms, and seldom do they ever seem to cross-pollinate.
As they say, though, there are four-leafed clovers to be found in every cow pasture, and all styles of music have tunes that are more appealing to some than to others.
When I was at St. James, one of the people there introduced me to a beautiful folk song titled "Hail Mary" that was written by a man named Tedd Browne. Tedd had been a Cleveland-based professional folksinger, originally hailing from South Carolina. In 1968, at the height of a period of intense racial unrest in Cleveland, Tedd was gunned down near his home in Cleveland Heights. Shortly before his passing, Tedd had reportedly performed his "Hail Mary" song at a Christian community event called an "Ultreya." A posthumously released album by Tedd called "This Little Light Of Mine" was completed only days before his untimely passing. Tedd was, and still is, a well-remembered member of the folk music community.
I bring all this up because Tedd was also reportedly part of a movement in Christianity called the Cursillio. The word "Cursillo" means a "short course" and back then it involved taking a 3-day course having to do with Christian renewal in a world that so often appears to care very little about the true aspects of spirituality. After taking the course, there was a follow-up aspect called the "fourth day," where the renewal group participants were to return to the world, taking what they had learned to be witnesses for Christ. Unfortunately, Tedd's living witness transpired on this earth all too briefly, although his memory continues to inspire others.
The allusion to a "fourth day" would not be hard to see, for there was a period of time where Jesus, after His crucifixion, lay in the tomb, and then on the third day, arose. What comes after a "third day"? The fourth day, of course... where the responsibility of representing God's message of love transfers into our own reluctant, weak, transient, and unsteady human hands.
Well, that kind of torch-passing, links-on-the-chain message has been around since time immemorial, has it not? You know the old story in at least one of its many forms. In one of them, the son picks up the armor, sword and shield of his fallen father, and goes back out to fight the good fight. Well, here's another one of those kinds of tales....
After Mass at St. James the other day, a middle-aged couple approached me with an amazing component of my own guitar-playing story at that church that I never knew about. It seems that same week that I joined the guitar group, the wife, who had played guitar with the group, was experiencing a personal moment in her faith, and felt that she needed to leave the guitar group and pursue a family-related ministry. She was, however, reluctant to leave her friends there, who needed her help very much. When she called a friend in that guitar group later, however, she was delighted to learn that out of the blue, there was this new guitarist already helping out. She told me that she never played guitar again after that. She felt that God had sent me there to play guitar on that day, and used me at just the right time, to help out all concerned.
Links on the chain, indeed. There always seems to be someone there to carry on when others encounter difficulties in life. An Act of God, perhaps, or of coincidence? I think the former.
Well, St. James Church is indeed gone, at least for the time being, but her people are still around, and from the many encounters that I've had with them, there's a lot of serious hurting going on right now. Maybe we all need to be reminded of what those Cursillo people were talking about. The three days of mourning are now past. The "fourth day" has arrived. Time to get back out there in the world and be those "living stones" that the Scriptures tell about. Church buildings, and even people, after all, come and go. It's the Spirit that counts... with the pulse of this city...as well as with whatever pulse this fallen world of ours may have left in it.