Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Thursday 14 June 2007

"You Are Near"

So, I finally give in and program "You Are Near" --no, "give in" is wrong, I have intended to program it before when its verses are textually so well related to the lectionary readings.

But I can never remember its name, and don't see "Yahweh, I Know You Are Near" or "I Know You Are Near," in the index and figure that, while clearly one of the better bits of not-very-good music of my catachetical years, it didn't make the cut when so much of the American Catholic Church.... upgraded, from the plastic GLOP to the (hardbound and yet less durable) Goiter.

(Bear in mind, only the pew edition has the full indices, not an excuse, but my explanation of why I didn't always do the obvious thing and use the scriptural reference index.)

But I like its use of the psalm, its POV, the mostly step-wise motion, especially its prosody -- if the verses were unmetered and sung as chant, it would be quite elegant. (I always forget who wrote it and think it is Foley because it is so far beyond the usual competence level of it's author.)

But an online discussion of the (very common,) use of the tetragrammaton in contemporary music led me to this, from Liturgiam Authenticam:
"in accordance with immemorial tradition, which indeed is already evident in the above-mentioned "Septuagint" version, the name of almighty God expressed by the Hebrew tetragrammaton (YHWH) and rendered in Latin by the word Dominus, is to be rendered into any given vernacular by a word equivalent in meaning."

So, clearly, we are not to pronounce "Yahweh."

Mind you, this is not a "mistake" on Schutte's part, it hadn't been spelled out post VCII until LA in 2001.

So it was not wrong, for him to have done this, in the sense of deliberately flouting a directive.

It was an ignorance of tradition, perhaps, and certainly an ignorance of the concept that if something has already been said... why, then IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING.
I am reading more and more that much of the post-VCII mess the Church found itself in was because some of the basics that the framers of the documents thought were "a given" were completely ignored by the iconoclast who saw their chances and took'em.

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