Today’s prelude is a piece by Canadian composer and organist, Denis Bédard who was born in Quebec City. He has served at various churches throughout Canada and as a composer is well-known. His most recent appointment was at Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire de Vancouver, a position he held for 20 years and from which he retired in 2021.

Bédard has been prolific in his lifetime. I like his compositions because they are fresh and accessible to most organists. I hope you’ll enjoy hearing this lovely set of variations on the Latin chant Ubi Caritas. It’s from an 8^th-century, Maundy Thursday hymn that takes its inspiration from today’s gospel lesson. The first line of the chant is, Ubi cáritas et amor, Deus ibi est – Where charity and love prevail, God is there.

In thinking about what these words mean, I was reminded of a story. A friend of mine once visited a sweat lodge on a Native American reservation in Kansas. The men gather around heated rocks in a dome-shaped hut. Water is poured over the rocks, and the heat and steam get very intense. The ritual is probably more about physical endurance and mental stamina than its intended purpose, which is for cleansing and purifying. I was intrigued to learn how the men were advised to cope with the intense heat. The natives said that if you get to a point where you feel you cannot take it anymore, think of your neighboring sweat-lodge mate and offer up prayers to relieve their suffering.

Do you ever tire of yourself? You’re afraid of what might happen to you, and then you’re afraid your fear will never go away, so you fear that you’ll be afraid forever. It never ends, or so it seems. The best way to relieve the double bind of fear and of wanting to “overcome” fear (which is a roundabout way of having more fear), is to just put your attention on others. That’s charity, and I love how Bédard captures the essence of these ideas in his setting. The tune is free, sometimes whimsical, but serious and mysterious. He gathers up all iterations of what it means to be human and displays each version with poignancy and grace. At the end, it floats away, possibly representing the oneness and fragility of life.

The empath has no enemy, but the psychopath has many. When you see Joe Biden fall down the steps, or Mitch McConnell freeze up at the podium, or Dianne Feinstein get confused on the Senate floor, it’s hard to play politics if you’ve ever had an ailing grandparent who was losing their faculties. When you wish harm, it seems OK from in front of the TV. But from behind the enemy lines of electronic media, a face-to-face encounter is much different.

If you get too hot in the lodge, just pray for your fellow humans, be your fellow humans. You control the thermostat. Psychopathy turns others into enemies, and the heat rises. Empathy turns them into friends, and the temperature gets perfect. When you see a real human, in a real space, and in real time, it’s hard to see “them” as anyone else but yourself. Someone must be empathic first. It’s the charitable who surrender first. When you do that, enemies vanish, God appears, and love prevails. It works every time, if only we could remember to turn down the heat. Soli Deo Gloria.