Newman Catholic Students' Society of McGill University

Back after a bit of a break, to tell you a little about the hymns we sing at Newman. Saying that I will give you a short history of hymns is a bit of a misnomer, since a hymn is literally any “song of praise” – it doesn’t even have to be Christian or spiritual at all! But in our context at Newman, we know hymns as the songs we sing together during mass. Usually, there are four main hymns sung in the Catholic mass.

We start with an Opening or Processional Hymn. We try to make this a more upbeat and easy-to-follow song that everyone can sing together as we welcome the procession (including the lectors, acolytes and priest) up to the alter. Sometimes we pull from the Catholic Book of Worship, and other times from the Gather. There is usually a noticeable difference between these two hymnals. Catholic Book of Worship contains mostly traditional hymns. Many date back to the 19th century when modern Christian hymnody was at its peak. Did you know that many hymns are actually borrowed from Protestant composers? For example, one of the most prominent composer of Christian hymns is Charles Wesley, who founded the Methodist movement in Protestantism. In some instances the lyrics have been slightly changed in our Catholic Book of Worship, but often they express the basic Christian message so well! Take a listen to one of his most popular hymns (that we sung during Advent): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjn3fBTvBjY

The next hymn we sing is for Offertory. This is the period in between the two sections of the mass – The Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. We try to choose a hymn that is more meditative that reflects the readings from that day. So, for example, if the Gospel was about the Beatitudes, we may choose something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqY9S1Lm2w You will also notice that this piece comes from our Gather hymnal. It was written by a contemporary American composer, David Haas. It has a more modern/contemporary feel to it.

Next we sing a Communion hymn, which the congregation is receiving communion. We sing not just to ‘fill up the space’ but to put everyone in a reflective and meditative atmosphere. The choir won’t usually announce this hymn, but know that you are always welcome to sing along! We do a variety of music (such as the Chant or Polyphony mentioned in earlier posts) or hymns or praise and worship music. We try to pick something that makes sense with the liturgical season and something that may be a little too complicated for the entire congregation to sing (since most won’t sing anyway because they are receiving communion).

Finally, after all the announcements and the final blessing, we sing a Recessional Hymn as the priest, acolytes and lectors process to the back. Again, we try to make sure this is something everyone can join in, from either the Catholic Book of Worship or the Gather.

Now you know a little more about the structure of music at mass and the wide variety of hymns we sing!

We live in a culture that doesn’t like to wait. We are trained from very young to expect to get what we need and want very quickly. The technologies we have created also serve to reinforce this impatience. When we turn on a computer and it takes more then a minute to load, we feel like its taking an eternity. Progress in technology is basically measured in terms of how much less we have to wait for the thing to work compared to the older version. If it’s faster, it’s better, period!  Because we don’t like to wait!

When we translate this impatience to our spiritual lives it can be problematic. The thing about God though, is that he’s not a high speed computer, he isn’t updated every 6 months, if you get tired of him you can’t trade him in for a new one. If he doesn’t suit your style you can’t switch brands. But people love to try to treat God like a fancy computer or a smart phone don’t we. And we get angry at God when we don’t get want we want in life when we want it. The point that I’m trying to make is that God by definition isn’t like any of the contingent, changeable things we can control in this world. St Thomas Aquinas described God as “ipsum esse subsistence”, or the shear act of to be itself. God isn’t an item in the world that we can grasp and control on our time. Rather God…is…period.

What does this have to do with advent? Well our culture loves to skip advent doesn’t it! We start Christmas right after Halloween. The shopping malls pull out all the Christmas decorations, and start selling Christmas stuff. Just like the advance of the computers and Smartphone’s, Christmas starts earlier and earlier, and progress is measured by how much less we have to wait. “Shop at our store”, the commercials say, “Christmas starts November 2^nd….the other mall only starts Christmas November 9^th”. They are telling us you can have Christmas now, when you want it.

What is advent telling us? The word advent means, “to come to, or coming to”. It’s telling us a very different and much more realist message. It’s telling us a sobering message that our post-modern culture doesn’t want to hear. It’s saying…. wait. It’s saying Christmas isn’t hear yet, but Christmas is coming on Gods time not ours. Unlike the gods of computers and smartphones and the gods of immediate gratification that we love to worship, the true God can’t be grasped at, can’t be controlled.  All the good things God gives us in this world are a gift, not a pay check. We don’t earn it or deserve it, it’s offered to us by the God who does not need us, but chooses to love us anyways.

At Christmas we celebrate two things that defy cultural expectations. The first thing is, that the long awaited messiah of Israel, the one who will defeat the enemies of Israel, and make it the dominate society of the world, turns out to be a tiny helpless baby, born to a couple of nobodies, in the middle of know where. Very much not want the people of Israel were expecting, and probably not what they want to hear. How is this baby going to accomplish his mission? Well they had to wait and see. The second thing we celebrate at Christmas is that the same Christ has promised to come again. Um…great…… when is that going to happen? Well we have already been waiting 2000 years for Him to come again, and chances are we will be waiting a bit longer.

God is that which we can’t grasp, God is that which we can’t control, because the true God…IS. (period!). The season of advent is meant to remind us that we are not the centre of the universe, and that life doesn’t operate according to our schedule. In real life, things don’t magically happen exactly as you want when you want it, as our culture teaches us. Advent is the season that reminds us that Jesus is the centre around which the universe spines (if I can press the metaphor), and everything happens on God’s schedule. During advent we are reminded that Christ is coming, but we haven’t a clue when that’s going to be. During advent we are meant to remember that God knows what God is about, and he will answer our prayers, but it’s going to happen how he wants it to happen, and it’s going to take place when we least expect it, and all we can do now, is slow down, and wait, and surrender to grace. Christmas and Christianity isn’t primarily the story of humanities quest for God, but rather its mostly the story of God’s quest for us, it’s about God’s desire that we share in his life. Not because he needs us. God doesn’t need anything or anyone. But because he loves us. Grace is God’s free unsolicited gift of himself. It’s a gift we are free to accept or reject. God is making us wait so as to prepare our hearts for the gifts he is planning to give us when we are ready for it, when we are ready to surrender to grace.

By: Terrel Joseph (Campus Minister)

Another semester comes to a close, and it’s time to update you and what we have done together to support those working towards social justice around the world!

Our first Social Justice Event was a back-to-school clothing drive. Students were able to drop off gently used clothing in the bagel-lounge for the first month of school. Many bags were then packaged up to be sent to Benedict Labore House, a day centre for the homeless, here in Montreal.

Shortly thereafter we organized a Thanksgiving food drive for the St. Willibrord Parish Soup Kitchen (in Verdun) and needy parishioners. We filled a giant box of nonperishable items to donate which was taken to St. Willibrord’s.

In late September, we organized a bake-sale for Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which sends recent university graduates (including our very own NSS Alumna Emily) to work in impoverished communities around the United States. For example, Emily works at the Open Door Mission, a rehabilitation clinic and convalescent care center for homeless men in Houston, Texas. We were able to support their mission through a donation of $50.

We have continued our partnership with St. Padre Pio Parish in the Philippines this year. This is a rural parish in Camarines Sur. We are truly brothers and sisters in Christ, so we continue to pray for them (and them for us!). We also are able to support their children’s feeding program, through donations. This semester we had three fundraisers for them – a special soup and bagel, a bake sale and, of course, our semesterly coffee house. We were able to donate $504 this Christmas from these three events.

In November, we re-launched our popular Sandwiches for the Homeless program, in which students make and distribute sandwiches to the needy of Montreal. We hope to make it a monthly occurrence come the winter!

In light of the recent storm in the Philippines, we also leaped into action to raise funds for those affected by the storm. We were able to raise money through a second collection after mass (which will be sent to the Red Cross) and our Christ is Coming Dinner, in which we donated $100 from ticket sales to Caritas International.

Finally, our Advent second collections will be going to the Sisters of Life, a community of religious sisters who uphold the dignity of life, through retreats, support for pregnant women and other programs in the United States and Canada. Here’s one opportunity you haven’t missed out on yet – we will be collecting funds throughout Advent.

What should we support next year? You can always contact your VP Social Justice Anita if you have ideas!

Holly, Webmaster Chairperson

Howdy! My name’s Amy, and I was a Newmanite circa 2007-2009. I wasn’t on the NSS council, I wasn’t in the choir, I wasn’t baptised or married at the Newman center – the way Newman has deeply touched my heart and my life can’t be attributed to obvious Big Participation. I’m very happy to share with you how I spent my time at Newman back then and why you’ll see me popping up now and then even now. It’s going to inevitably be constructed as a composite of portraits (because of course, the people around you are what give any chapter in your history colour and depth) and snapshots of events; I’m not really a historian, so if homey tales are what you want you’ve come to the right place.

First of all, I chose McGill largely because of the NewmanCenter. I was a more-or-less freshly-returned Catholic (my then-boyfriend, now-husband Tony had led me back to the Church through a series of conversations and challenges at cégep), and I’d spent a lot of time with the daily-mass suburban parish crew (aka the over-70 club) and delightful as those men and women were, dear to me as they still are, I knew I needed peers in my faith other than Tony and the internet to move to the next level of Being Catholic.

That first summer, a small group of us did the Christopher West Theology of the Body DVD and discussion group series led by Sister Susannah, a Monastique de Jerusalem who was with us as campus minister before the equally well-loved Terrel. It was very fruitful for me personally. There were a lot of laughs and insights and ah-hah moments. The Theology of the Body remains a core part of my Catholicism, loosened and smoothed now into a less sharply-defined version, weaving into and integrated with my own experiences and reflections.

Now, if you never had the pleasure of meeting Sister Susannah, you need to imagine a near-constant Cheshire-like grin, a lot of laughter, and a very intense, intimate love of the Blessed Sacrament. When she wasn’t with her community or on a desert day she was reliably found around the center or in her office (now the Claude Ryan reading room). She was always ready to do counselling about painful experiences or to tell anecdotes about her time in Italy or about her past as a Seventh-Day Adventist or just listen to you vent about university life.

A lot of you do probably know Richard, who was our Director in those days. I’ll be brief about Richard since he is more likely to read this, and I don’t want to embarrass him, but as we all know he is one of the best human beings around and was a fantastic Director. My two images are Richard at Newman are of him and Kale cracking each other up over soup and bagels (I’ll try to keep references to people who’ve moved on down but Kale and Richard just pressed each others’ hysterically clever buttons in a way that was incredible, they had us rolling on the floor the entire time) and of Richard up in the common room, fingertips together, frowning in his thoughtful way as he chooses the best way to answer a question that’s been put to him. To my knowledge, he never let anyone down at that. (In fact, one of the questions I had for him was about the theology of Bl. John Henry Newman, whose approach has become an important part of my faith – full details here http://hosheana.blogspot.ca/2009/10/john-henry-newman-on-reason.html).

Our pastor was Fr. Sylvain, a wonderful francophone priest who’d occasionally ask you into his office to have you proof his pronunciation of key words in English homilies he was working on. When I think of the Divine Praises I still hear Fr. Sylvain’s voice: “Blessed be Sain’ Jozeph, ‘er mos’ chaste spoose [rhymes with moose]”. Father Sylvain formally received my husband, formerly Greek Orthodox, into the Catholic Church right up in the chapel.

So to get back to history, after that first summer, and with the personalistic context set, we move on to daily university living. I was a commuter in those days, travelling to and from Chateauguay (about an hour away by bus and metro) daily, so perhaps more than other students I saw Newman as my retreat. I plopped on those couches many times. I love to laugh and be with people but I also need a steady diet of quiet and calm to keep me going, and the NewmanCenter was the place for it.

That first year, I volunteered at a McGill conference about religion in the public square (an amazing experience!), I worked the lunch program for a semester or two, I went to the Newman Ball, I tabled for NSS and I helped fundraise for the Eucharistic Congress pilgrimage trip in 2008. Tony and I didn’t actually go to Sunday Mass often, because we were the token Latin Mass couple back in our day (and actually Fr. Sylvain’s uncle was our pastor over at St Irenée, the Latin Mass parish, at the time!), but we would go to Adoration and weekday Masses regularly. I started working that spring, and decreased to part time studies the following academic year, but the Newman Center continued to be my base.

Choose Life started in 2007 or 2008, if I recall correctly. I was on the exec from the get-go (I think I was VP communications), and we had at least a couple of events at the Center. I definitely remember going to an ice cream social at the Center in 2010, when my son was a tiny bean and the leadership torch had been passed on from Natalie to Lizzy, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Tired of the commute, I decided to move to the Coach House in May 2009. I ended up only living there a few months, because we got engaged (Tony proposed right in the Coach House, actually!) and so in July I moved to a little apartment on my own to get the nest ready for our upcoming December wedding. While I was there, though, I enjoyed being right in the thick of things, eating with my housemates, visiting the chapel, and generally relishing being part of the succession chain of Newman residents. That was toward the end of my Newman time; I started working full time that fall and didn’t finish my degree at McGill, so between working, and then planning our wedding, and then being pregnant, Newman involvement basically decreased to zero.

However, the connections I made continued to take root, sometimes in ways that surprised me. There were a number of people I’d say I was friendly with in my actual university days, but with whom I wasn’t intimate friends. Once I left school, I figured that would also just fizzle out and become a nice memory. But, in a wonderful way, that hasn’t been the case. There are in fact several old Newmanites with whom we are closer now than we were at university. I suppose that, predictably, I (or I should say, we) maybe took a lot of the community for granted, the sense of communion and solidarity and easy smalltalk that comes from shared experiences; when we find each other now it’s like smelling a delicious childhood smell you’d nearly forgotten. The culture beyond university common rooms doesn’t really have as many spaces and opportunities to just hang out in an unstructured way and get to know people, nor does the world give you the sense of family the Church does.

A lot at Newman is the same. Y’all have your daily Mass, your fireside chats with the Bishop, SNS, bagel lunches, Bible studies, social justice events, and so on… the green donation jar for soup and bagels is the exact same one, Linda is still whipping you all into shape, and beyond a few cosmetic reconfigurations most of the art and furniture is also the same. I hope that despite working too hard, weathering inevitable cliqueishness and the drama of sin, dealing with heartbreaks and personal growing pains, the Center has been and will continue to be for you a refreshing sanctuary that will bear much fruit. Just remember, you get out of it what you put into it! And if you see me loitering, smiling to myself while I examine the familiar surroundings with more satisfaction than seems normal, with or without my preschooler at my feet, feel free to come over, say hi, and tell me what the Newman Center means to you! God bless you.

This post is part of our series on liturgical music. Also check out our part on Gregorian Chant!

Another type of music we love to sing with the choir is polyphony (If you have no clue what I’m talking about, these are the pieces we sing on special occasions during communion, the ones that sound particularly ‘Catholicy’). Polyphony was introduced in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance and contrasts from Gregorian Chant in that multiple voices build ontop of each other to create a really unique texture and complexity to the music. Some popular composers include Byrd (who wrote the Ave Verum Corpus we often sing), Palestrina (who wrote the Sicut Cervus and the Jesu Rex Admirabilis you will most likely hear this Sunday), and Tallis (who wrote a piece that’s in our duotangs for next semester, If Ye Love Me).

Did you know that polyphony was not always particularly welcomed within the Catholic liturgical tradition? This may be surprising the lyrics so clearly point to Scripture and liturgy. But it was precisely because the words are sometimes hard to hear in polyphony that it stirred up so much controversy. You will probably notice that it’s hard to make out (despite the language differences, as we sing mostly in Latin) exactly what the lyrics are because the multiple voices are overlapping each other. So when you hear polyphony, you might not quite understand the words, but many people note that the beauty of the music certainly lifts their soul! We hope that it helps you to lift your thoughts and pray!

Take a listen: Ave Verum Corpus – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFZZMF7SRRo

Secut Cervus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yd5EE0hAB8

Jesu Rex Admirabilis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXQuOQccCWA

Holly Ann Garnett, Director, Newman Centre Choir