Your description of planning your father’s funeral music is almost a universal experience.

Quite sadly, almost all Catholics think that the funeral Mass is supposed to be about what they or their loved ones like or prefer. Quite honestly, it is not. It is about the soul that God has claimed for Himself.

Let’s try this another way. Suppose the president of the United States invited you to dinner. He goes through all the trouble of cooking you a feast, hiring a band, and creating the right ambiance… all apropo to your date with the White House. After receiving your invitation from the President, you call him up (or his staff) and you tell them that you have picked out the music YOU want for your big day. Word goes to he who is up on high.

Do you think you would ever consider doing this? Do you think the president is going to happy with you? Do you think he will switch the music so you can have Guns n Roses instead of his military band playing Sousa? Of course not!

But you and the most people expect to do this with God himself at the throne of his Sacrifice of His Holy Mass. Think again!

Music is very hard to control. It goes over walls, under doors, and through the cracks. One way to try and control music is to marry it to text. We are much more used to controlling words, our favorite vehicle of communication, law, and knowledge. If words are printed, they stand still (even better – then they can be disposed of if necessary – or inscribed on a monument so that they have a grasp on eternity).

So putting music at the service of text has been a long-standing practice, especially in religious settings. Restricting music to text that contains God/Jesus/Holy Spirit is one way of weeding out problems, making the field of possibility smaller and more containable. In my decades as a liturgical musician, I have seen this happen over and over again.

Throughout the history of Western music in the churches, music and text have been posed against each other, with polyphony and homophony altering through the ages as the primacy of text either ascends or descends in importance. But at the heart of this tension is really not just theological instruction, or clarity of language: at heart is what to do about the way music causes people to respond?

I have been fascinated for a long time by the need some people have to control music. One of my favorite snapshots of this tendency was written by musicologist Richard Taruskin for the NY Times on Dec. 9, 2001, following the attacks of 9/11 and subsequent overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (the Taliban had banned all music during their tenure: cassette tapes were unrolled and wrapped around telephone poles; instruments burned or at best, buried and rotted; musicians caught playing had their hands cut off; some of the most moving testimonies to the life-affirming power of music in human life comes from these Afghani musicians who lived in a spiritual musical desert for so many years). Taruskin reminds his readers that the history of Western culture bears more than a few resemblances to the musical fear and oppression of the Taliban:

“In the fourth century, St. Augustine confessed that as a result of his sensuous enjoyment of the melodies he heard in church, “I have become a problem unto myself.” In the 12th, John of Salisbury complained that the spectacular music sung in the Paris Cathedral of Notre Dame could ‘more easily occasion titillation between the legs than a sense of devotion in the brain.’ Protestant reformers in England and Switzerland seized and burned books containing ‘popish ditties’ with Talibanish zeal. Somewhat later, the Orthodox patriarch of Moscow ordered bonfires of musical instruments…Secular thinkers have been no less leery of music…Plato’s mingled awe and suspicion of music’s uncanny power over our minds and bodies have echoed through the ages wherever governments have tried to harness music to uphold the public order (or at least keep music from disrupting it).”

Your conflict over the music for your father’s funeral stands in a time-honored tradition of power struggle. A further point: when music is joined with sounds meaningful to the contemporary age, it also shifts from a vehicle of preserving and conserving some idealized past (which someone can claim authority over) into a possibility of power and transcendence now and into the future. Very, very scary to some people – especially those who don’t understand it at all, and those who feel the power of music all too well.

Years and years of singing and playing as a liturgical musician have brought me into continual conflicts of this kind. In my opinion, restrictions and reductions never work. There is quality music that is life-affirming, and there is music that is not quality. Explicit text has little to do with it. But the way people may respond: that has a lot to do with it!

“Danny Boy” is one of the most beautiful songs to sing at a funeral or memorial. I’m not Irish – just a singer and a poet and a novice theology student – but the text alone of “Danny Boy” is a fragment of beauty, goodness and hope that points to a love that not even death can destroy. My husband played it on his trumpet at my grandmother’s grave.

Kudos to you for having the sounds of your ancestors sound out from the bagpipes at your father’s funeral. And kudos also for turning your churning emotions to the music that could sustain them, recognize them, hold them, and organize you into healing wholeness.

Despite my love for the church, and all her quirks, it is a pain that continues to grow.

O Come Holy Spirit!