 much for that welcome and that introduction. And thank you all for coming. It is a real pleasure to be here. Now today, as you've heard, I'm going to be speaking about imaginative apologetics, what it is and why we need it. And you will have a handout, which you may take home, which has one of the quotes that I'm going to read in my talk. It has a poem that you'll hear at the end, and on the reverse side are more resources that you can follow up on to learn more if you're interested about the subject, as indeed I hope that you will be. So, imaginative apologetics. What I'm going to talk about in this topic is the way that the imagination has an essential role to play in helping people to understand the truth of the Catholic faith, to understand the truth, to grasp the meaning of that truth, and to act on it. But before I do that, let me tell you two stories. The first story is one that you almost certainly know about C. S. Lewis, the most famous, the most influential popular apologist of the 20th century, whose influence and reputation continue to grow. He's known quite rightly as a man who robustly defended the truth of the Christian faith on rational grounds in books such as mere Christianity. But Lewis was not always a Christian. He came to the faith as an adult, and the imagination played a critical role in both his coming to faith and his subsequent writing. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis notes that as a young man, he was profoundly influenced by reading the novel Fantasties by the Christian author George MacDonald. Now, Fantasties does not mention Christ or the church or even the Bible anywhere in its pages, but it's deeply imbued with the Christian worldview, and it conveys what Lewis called the bright shadow that he would later recognize as holiness. And when he read this book, Lewis had a sense of this bright shadow coming out of the book into the real world and resting there, transforming all common things, and yet itself unchanged. He added that at this point, my imagination was in a certain sense baptized. The rest of me not unnaturally took longer. Imaginatively, he had tasted something of transcendence. He had gained a glimpse of the Christian vision of the world. Intellectually, he was still a convinced atheist. By 1931, Lewis had come to belief in God, largely through philosophical arguments, but he still found himself unable to accept the claims of Christianity. In one letter, Lewis says specifically, what has been holding me back has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant. You can't believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. Lewis was struggling not with facts, not with concepts, but with meaning, with grasping the fullness of the idea. And this difficulty with meaning is what his friends Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien helped him with one day in 1931 as Lewis walked with them through the grounds of Modlin College, Oxford. Lewis later wrote, now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this, that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a pagan story, I liked it very much. I was mysteriously moved by it. Again, that the idea of the dying and reviving God, Baldur Adonis Bacchus, similarly moved me, provided I met with it anywhere except in the Gospels. Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth. A myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened. Lewis went on to sum up what had occurred in this conversation. He had realized that the doctrines of Christianity come from the true myth. As he wrote, they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation crucifixion and resurrection. Tolkien and Dyson had in fact used Lewis' love of myth and mythic stories to help him see the truth of Christianity. When Lewis realized that he could connect his imaginative response to story to the factual reality of the Christian claim about the crucifixion and the resurrection, the final barrier to belief fell. He could become a Christian as a whole person with both his imagination and his reason fully engaged. The second story is my own. Like Lewis, I am an adult convert to the faith. Before my conversion, I was an atheist and a hostile one who held that Christianity was not just false but irrational and harmful. I was the sort of atheist English professor who was the reason why so many parents in this room are terrified of sending their kids to a secular school. Philosophical and historical apologetics eventually played an important role in my conversion. I would not have been able to accept Christ if I had not become convinced that Christianity is indeed objectively true. But when I was so firmly an atheist, I would not have listened to the very arguments that ultimately convinced me. I was not interested in apologetic arguments. But without knowing it, I had been experiencing the work of grace through my imagination. As a child and as a young adult, I read fantasy, fairy stories, myths, and I especially fell in love with the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lord of the Rings. I did not know it then, but I was encountering God's grace through these books. Later, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on fantasy novels and I had Tolkien's great essay on fairy stories with its powerful statement of the Evangelium, the Good News, right at the heart of it. It is a very dangerous thing for a convinced atheist to do, to be writing about Jared Tolkien. Later, still an atheist, I began to teach college literature and in revisiting classic poetry from my class preparation, I was deeply moved and intrigued by the writings of specifically Christian poets. I finally had to admit that whatever it was that these authors believed, it was not simplistic or silly. Eventually, I realized that this question of faith was more complex, more interesting than I had thought, and so I decided to learn more. Now, there were lots of questions I needed to ask and have answered before I came to accept Christ, but imagination opened the door. As George McDonald's novel Fantasties had baptized C.S. Lewis's imagination, so Lewis, Tolkien, and poets like Dunn and Hopkins had baptized mine. But also like Lewis, I had a two-step conversion. I came to belief in God, but then struggled with the idea of the incarnation. All the evidence pointed toward the crucifixion and the resurrection as historical facts, but I found that I was unable to accept the idea of Jesus as God incarnate. Incarnate. Even though I knew that it was part of a larger argument that was extremely convincing. So at that point, I turned very deliberately to the Chronicles of Narnia. I went looking for Aslan, the lion who's the great Christ figure at the heart of the Chronicles. I re-read the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Horse and his Boy, and through my renewed experience of those stories, my imagination was able to connect with what my reason had learned, and I was able to grasp as a whole person that it could be true, that God could become incarnate. And that imaginative experience removed the last stumbling block for my acceptance of Christ. Imaginative literature also helped me to continue my journey all the way home into the Catholic Church. Tolkien's deeply Catholic, deeply sacramental vision in the Lord of the Rings, the depth and resonance of the poetry of Dr. Manley Hopkins, the refreshing sanity and wholesomeness of G.K. Chesterton, these all helped to cultivate a longing for the fullness of the faith and encouraged me step by step as I grew closer to the Church without, as it happens, even realizing until I was right in the doorstep. And as a Catholic, imaginative literature, as well as the experience of the whole sacramental world of Catholic devotion, has helped to strengthen and deepen my faith. So these two stories, I hope, have shown that the imagination can play an important role in apologetics, evangelism, and spiritual growth. However, I want to make a larger claim. I would argue that the imagination is critically important today in our present apologetic endeavor. For we live today in what is essentially a post-Christian age. Church attendance has dropped, increasing numbers of people feel perfectly comfortable admitting to agnosticism or atheism. Every day, the media gives evidence of a deep-seated hostility toward Christianity. Paradoxically, we live in an age of unprecedented information access combined with widespread religious illiteracy. Never has there been more information readily available on the rational and historical grounds for Christian faith and on the actual teachings of the Catholic Church, and yet misinformation, error, and outright lies are thriving. Access is not the problem. Furthermore, the Orthodox Christian position is often tarred with claims of ignorance, intolerance, and bigotry. Without a compelling reason to approach, many people will prudently keep their distance, or if they're Christians already, they will be tempted to minimize their faith, to privatize it, to make it just a personal opinion that they hold. And that is only one small step away from leaving the faith entirely. The problem is thus not limited to evangelization, but includes catechesis. Young Catholics today are surrounded by conflicting messages, misinformation, and outright lies and distortions. When they leave home, their faith will be tested, often to the breaking point. In particular, many young people leave the Church because it experiences at college. Their faith has shallow roots and is soon withered, or it's choked by thorns and weeds. What are we to do? Here we see the need for a new approach. Both reason and imagination are modes of communicating and encountering truth. Imaginative apologetics seeks to harness the God-given faculty of imagination to work in cooperation with reason, to open a way for the work of the Holy Spirit to guide the will toward a commitment to Christ. Now what do I mean by imagination? At its most basic level, the imagination is what allows us to conceive in our minds the image of something that is not present. What J.R.R. Tolkien calls the mental power of image-making. But this apparently simple imagining is more potent than it seems, or then we tend to give it credit for in the modern age. Seeing imagination as a fundamental cognitive faculty may seem strange to us, but only because in our modern post-enlightenment age, we've gotten used to of this modern reductionistic way of viewing the world, and we've by and large abandoned an older and richer view of human cognition. For St. Augustine, for St. Thomas Aquinas, for St. Bonaventure, and other medieval scholars and theologians, the imagination is the human faculty that assimilates sensory data into images upon which the intellect can then act. It is the basis for all reasoned thought, as well as artistic or what we would usually call imaginative exercise. C.F. Lewis, who was first and foremost a scholar of medieval Renaissance literature, draws on this more robust understanding of the imagination. Lewis writes, reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. Imagination is related to reason, and necessarily so in the way that a building's foundation is related to the structure that is built upon it. Imagination is the foundation for reason. Reason is dependent on imagination. One way of illustrating this is through an experience that nearly everyone has had. Imagine that you're looking at a crowd of people, perhaps at an airport, perhaps at a big conference, looking for a friend. You see someone coming toward you, and you ask yourself, is this my friend? There will be a moment when you have the sensory data available to your eyes, but you are not yet sure, is this my friend or is this a stranger? Am I going to hail my friend or embarrass myself by saying hello to someone who isn't actually the right person? You're looking at this person, you're not sure, and then there's going to be a moment when the sensory data resolves into meaning, and you're able to identify the person, either as, yes, that's my friend that I'm looking for, or no, that's a stranger who just happens to be wearing similar colored clothes. So in this example of spotting your friend in the midst of the crowd, it's the senses that bring you the data, clothing, hair, height, movement. It's the imagination that converts the data into something meaningful upon which the reason can then act. The reason acts upon the meaningful image to perform the mental act of recognition. Only after your imagination has rendered this data meaningful from your senses can your reason make any conclusions about it. So as another example, you have been listening to me now explain this way of understanding the imagination, but you've received sound waves as sensory data which had to be assimilated and made meaningful by your imagination in order for your reason to make any judgments about the merits of my argument. So I hope that by the very act of hearing and understanding my argument you have become convinced by it. So in this broad sense imagination is constantly at work in everyone, at least to some degree, whether we realize it or not, and whether it's working well or it's working badly. And I'm emphasizing this meaning making function of imagination for a reason. This is precisely the place where we see the value of an apologetics approach that makes use of the imagination. Because the central problem of apologetics and catechesis today, I would argue, is the problem of meaning. We are awash in data in claims for and against Christianity, for and against any number of competing ideologies and lifestyles ranging from Marxism, gender ideology, radical feminism, to health fads, clean eating, fashion, you name it. One lifetime is not enough to judge the merits of each and every one of these. In the meantime, dialogue is often reduced to just shouting slogans back and forth. We have a kind of chaotic shopping mall environment in modern media and in that environment the call to follow Christ or repent and be baptized or even love God in your neighbor has to compete with just do it and have it your way and so on. And with the million, million wordless images that present the modern gospel of sex, money, fame and power. No wonder then that Christianity is more often ignored or mocked than thoughtfully discussed. To those who do not know Christ, unfortunately also to many who do, much of Christian language rings empty. Words like grace, sin, heaven and hell point to reality, but for many listeners they might as well just be empty slogans. And for far too many Catholics, these words are just the equivalents of the user's agreements on upgrade to our phone's operating system. Words that are accepted without attention and without a grasp of their meaning. It's this lack of meaning rather than disagreement with Christian doctrine properly understood that often presents the most significant barrier to any serious consideration of the faith. Now my colleague Michael Ward sums this up very nicely in the excerpt that I've put on your handout. He writes, it is no good arguing for God or for Christ or for the atonement or even for truth until the Apologist has shown at least at some basic level that these terms have real meaning. Otherwise they will just be counters in an intellectual game leaving most readers cold. Likewise apologetic arguments for the authority of the church or the Bible or experience or reason itself must all be imaginatively realized before they can begin to make traction on the reader's reason let alone on the reader's will. For instance, this statement Jesus loves you may be meaningless to a skeptic or to a lapsed Catholic on a number of levels. For the Christian this statement about our Lord's love is profoundly meaningful. It connects to life-changing insights about hope for eternal life, joy in the present life and the availability of forgiveness and grace for all who turn and ask. Hooray! But it makes a difference first of all whether people want this hope, joy, forgiveness, and grace. If they're not interested, if they're distracted and numbed or if they don't find these ideas to be meaningful, then all that is represented by this statement Jesus loves you is insubstantial and irrelevant, a platitude. And that's a best case scenario. At worst, a statement like Jesus loves you makes about as much sense to the atheists speaking from experience as saying Winston Churchill loves you, King Arthur loves you. Okay, exactly how is it possible that a man who died 2,000 years ago loves anybody? And any attempt to further explain is likely going to involve us in using terms such as the Christ, the Son of God, the Savior, but the explanation will fall flat if those terms are also just counters in an intellectual game. Likewise, an attempt to talk about the resurrection can lead to endless fruitless rabbit trails of debating totally implausible alternatives, but not because conspiracy theories are necessarily particularly strong arguments in the skeptic's mind. Rather, for the skeptic, concepts like hallucinations, conspiracies, even aliens may have more actual meaning than resurrection from the dead or miracle. And this is where Ward's claim is so critically important that apologetic arguments must all be imaginatively realized before they can begin to make traction on the reader's reason, let alone on the reader's will. To many people raised the secular culture, or influenced by it, the words that we use to talk about even the most basic principles of the faith are jargon words. They have no substantial content for the non-Christian, and indeed, sadly, often not too much meaning for the Christian either, which is why one of the most important tasks for apologists is catechesis and formation inside the church. So as a result, when apologists have conversations with skeptics about issues of faith, or even when catechists and pastors talk to people in church, there's often a huge but hidden meaning gap. And here it's worth exploring one apologetics issue in just a little bit more detail to show just how wide this meaning gap can be. Consider, what does it mean to have faith in God? Can't get much more basic than that. Now we can define faith in the words of Hebrews chapter 11. It is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, but for most skeptics, this definition merely illustrates the problem. If faith is the assurance of things hoped for, is this not an outright admission that Christianity is simply wish fulfillment? Furthermore, the conviction of things not seen suggests blind faith, because in our culture today, so deeply materialistic and naturalistic as it is, unseen is for all practical purposes a synonym for unreal. If it's unseen, it can't be measured. And if it can't be measured, it doesn't really exist. In this view, the conviction of things unseen could apply just as much to the existence of pharies and leprechauns as to the existence of God. And so the very definition of faith from Scripture itself seems to the skeptic to be a frank admission that the faith is unreal, that we are making it all up. And so it's an empty term, not even worth the time to discuss. Nor is God a more straightforward term. Even if the atheist can get past difficult to the idea of faith, his concept of God might be cosmic sky daddy, an old man in the sky meeting out in rewards and punishment at whim. Well, this is quite rightly unbelievable. Given this idea of God, it's entirely reasonable to assume that faith in God is a cultural construct, a story used to bribe or threaten people into submission, something that uneducated people believed in before there was science. Or for someone who is spiritual but not religious, the word God might be an abstract term for universal goodness. For that person talking about what God has done in history or how he offers mercy, it's a non sequitur along the lines suggesting seriously that the number 27 has a wonderful plan for your life. So we can see that for the skeptic, language about faith in God is in many cases simply meaningless. There's not even a rational disagreement there, it simply lacks meaning. And at best the skeptic might be polite about it, the way that you might be polite about an adult who seriously claims belief that there are leprechauns in the garden or that having read Shakespeare's plays, he's actually met one of Shakespeare's characters. You might be very tolerant and nice, but there's no question of actually investigating the tiny footprints in the garden or asking to be introduced to Prince Hamlet. No. Now the dangers of using religious language without attention to meaning for the listener. These dangers are not limited to interactions with skeptics. A disjunction of meaning can and often does occur in preaching and catechesis within the church itself. For instance, a young person raised in the church may have a very fuzzy idea about sin. This fuzzy idea might in his mind be defined as hurting other people, not that it's something objectively wrong in itself that harms his relationship with God and injures his soul. And that's assuming that he even assumes that sin is harmful. Even the idea of sin as harmful in any way is being steadily eroded in our culture. We have a culture of verbicide, the words are being stripped of their proper meanings. You can go into a grocery store as I did the other day and find chocolate cake being advertised as sinfully delicious. Look at the grocery store next time you go, you'll see it. Now what does this do to our idea of the meaning of sin over time? It erodes it. So take this young person with this very weak idea of sin. So he is no hypocrite. If he agrees with his parents that sin is wrong, while at the same time sleeping with his girlfriend. Because by his lights, they're consenting adults, nobody's getting hurt, and if nobody's getting hurt, there's no sin. Against this backdrop with these assumptions, arguments about the immorality of his behavior are likely to be met with incomprehension, bafflement, or a conviction that the church's teachings are arbitrary and can safely be ignored. This disagreement about meaning can hide beneath the surface, distorting the conversation without either of the people even realizing it. Pansters, ministry leaders, catechists, and teachers may simply assume that terms like salvation, sin, prayer, resurrection, and sacraments have shared and real meaning for all those who have professed faith in Christ when, in fact, this may not be the case. So when young people or when Catholics sort of on the edge of the faith reject the church's teachings or challenge it, it may not actually be a result of disagreement with the doctrine, but rather the result of an erosion of meaning for those terms so that the very concepts themselves no longer make sense or fit into a coherent framework of ideas. And indeed, a persistent failure to attend to meaning within the church can lead to a pervasive sense of hypocrisy. If Christians begin to wonder whether anybody really means these words that they say in the creeds, can lead to destructive doubts if Christians conclude that these words actually don't have real meaning. And it can lead to a movement away from orthodoxy and toward various heresies if a persistent absence of meaning for words like resurrection can take away from the historical particularity of Christianity. So we can see that this problem of meaning has a lot of corrosive effects. I imagine, if I have done my lecture correctly so far, you're all feeling a bit depressed. Yes, well, good. Because I really need to emphasize this is a real problem. It's a deep problem. It's not a problem for which there is any quick fix. But we can do something about it. Thank God. And to that I now turn. We need to find to help people to find the words that we use to be meaningful to help these words become something other than just tokens in a game. Then and only then will we have a hope of real communication. And I do want to say there is hope. I am a teacher. I have taught all sorts of age levels of college students from 18 all the way to adult students in my current program. And I will tell you one thing that I see in common. People are hungry for meaning. They are starving for meaning like people who are starving for bread. And when they have it, they reach for both hands and they sink into it. People want meaning, but we have to give it to them. And if we can give it to them, then we have a hope of real communication. As Ward explains, things must rise up out of the swamp of nonsense into the realm of meaning if the imagination is to get any handle on them. Only then can we begin to judge whether their meanings are true or false. Before anything can be either true or false, it must mean. Only when something has meaning, which is generated by the imagination, can we begin to use our reason to judge whether it's true or false. Only when our Christian claims are perceived to be meaningful as ideas that can be grasped, as ideas that are worth grasping. Then and only then will the question, is it true, be significant? And only then does the will consider acting on that truth. How can the imagination help to establish meaning? There are lots of ways. Art, architecture, music, another mode, one that I'm most familiar with in my field is literature, stories and poetry, which can help the skeptic or the Christian to imaginatively realize the meaning of the words that we use. Can it be done? Yes! And let me offer you a deliberately trivial example. Consider the word tea, the beverage tea. For me, as an American, until a few years ago, I had never had a proper cup of tea. If I had relied on my own experiences of Lipton's tea bags in a Styrofoam cup with lukewarm water, it's sort of a beverage, if I'd relied on that experience, I would have quite reasonably concluded that tea is a far inferior beverage to coffee and not worth bothering about. You might say I was an atheist. However, as someone who loves British literature and culture, I frequently encountered the idea of tea in contexts that made it seem quite a lot more appealing. By the time I finally visited England, the word tea had acquired sufficient meaning, thanks to authors like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollop, that I eagerly desired to have a proper cup. I sought it out and discovered that good, proper British tea is something totally different than what I had encountered before. Good, plain English breakfast tea made with boiling water and with milk, not cream, results in something entirely different from the sad American version. Now, it took a little while for you to appreciate this beverage fully, but I could tell right away that it was worth making the effort. In the end, I came to enjoy tea so much that I drink it every day, and in fact, this is extremely nerdy, I bring a little portable tea kettle with me when I travel. Now, the point is this, my literary imaginative engagement with the idea of tea made me aware that the word might mean something more interesting than I thought. And my subsequent investigation changed the way I live my life, albeit in a very small way. What happened for tea is, in a trivial way, the same sort of thing that happened for me with infinitely more important words like grace, prayer, sacrament in my conversion from atheism to Christian faith, my reconciliation with the Catholic Church, and in my growth as a Catholic. If we can do it through literature and the arts for a cup of tea, we can do it for the words we use to talk about our Lord Jesus Christ. So the use of literature and the arts to help a person imaginatively realize meaning is particularly well suited to the work of the Christian apologist. Now, to be sure, stories and poetry like any other form of language can be used to convey true things, false things, or things that are a mix of truth and falsehood. But as Christians, we know that language is related to truth at a fundamental level. God chose to inspire writers to produce Holy Scripture. He didn't have to do that. And he chose to inspire those writers in a range of literary genres, including historical narrative, theology, parables, and poetry, and not just in the book of Psalms, but throughout the whole Bible. And above all, Jesus is the Word made flesh. A story or poem particularizes an idea, gives it form in specific images, in a specific reading experience. Thus, literature can be set in a sense to be incarnational, in that the imagination bodies forth an idea into a particular story or image. And this incarnational element is essential in the creation of meaning for the ideas that we seek to share. So let's turn back to that example about love. God loves us. We could say God loves us and will forgive us our sins if we repent and turn to him. This is a true statement expressed as a proposition, a rational statement, that may or may not have any real meaning for the skeptic or for the Catholic who has only a shallow grasp of the faith. The words God forgive and repents are abstract to those who have not experienced the reality. So how can those words be imaginatively realized? How does one move from the abstract idea to grasping the reality? Our Lord himself shows us one way that it can be done when he tells the parable of the prodigal son. This parable provides a rich context in which the ideas can take on the fullness of meaning. This story would be a wonderful piece of imaginative literature, even if it was not also an expression of the most amazing and life-changing truth about God's love for us. This imaginative connection that we feel between ourselves and the downward spiral of the Son, it comes from the organic reality of the story. We really feel that moment of clarity and he hits bottom among the pigs. We feel the emotions he has in returning. We have that wonderful image of the father running to meet him. So after hearing or reading this parable or a retelling of it, we know something more about what repentance and divine love mean in a way that cannot be reproduced by analytical arguments, but that can provide the basis for further discussion and theological and doctrinal explanations. If the skeptic or the fallenaway Catholic can invest these words repentance and love with the meaning they gain from this parable, then the conversation with the Christian will be very different and a lot more fruitful. So this work of creating meaning can be understood broadly as a spectrum of engagement, ranging from developing basic intellectual comprehension to drawing people in to a more experiential participatory kind of knowledge. And indeed, part of the work of imaginative apologetics is helping people to gain meaning for certain truths that we hope they will never have the opportunity to experience for themselves. So for example, the imaginative realization of the ugliness of sin may help a young person to resist temptations to sexual license. The imaginative realization of bereavement may help a person who has never suffered a serious loss nevertheless to minister compassionately to those who are grieving. Apologists, catechists, parents, teachers, we often work on the borderlands where those whom we hope to reach or teach do not yet have much or any lived experience of the truth that we're presenting. And as a result, we're faced with a communications challenge. We must be able to communicate and must be able to cultivate meaning at different levels and in different ways. And in this work, rational and imaginative apologetics are intertwined as we present the truth both in propositional and in imaginatively realized ways. With both the reason and the imagination engaged, the will has a solid foundation upon which to act. And in the richness of language, in the richness of literature and the arts, we find an opportunity for creating meaning because God has so made us that we can continue to create imaginative literature to body forth meaning in words. And even as we create literature and art and respond to it, we are giving glory to God, who made us in his image. God is the creator. He is the ultimate author, the ultimate artist. As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, we are subcreators. We make in our measure and in our derivative mode because we are made and not only made but made in the image and likeness of a maker. Now in this talk, I have been explaining the idea of conveying meaning in literature. Now let me close by shifting to a more imaginative mode and sharing with you a poem that I have written, which you can find on your handout. This poem gives a little taste of how one might use imagery to convey some of the meaning of being a Catholic. One of the questions that people ask when they're considering becoming a Catholic, considering becoming a Christian, is why should we pray? What's the point of prayer if God already knows what we need? There are doctrinal and theological answers to that, but that's not always the most helpful response. There's a need for a sense of meaning for the word prayer. In this poem, I don't explain or give an answer, but I try to show a little glimpse of what it means to pray. Even song in Oxford on St. Cecilia's Day. My soul doth magnify the Lord, we sing, and offer back in music's common voice the melody he made, the gift we bring, is wholly his, and so we dare rejoice with Mary's words and trusting her with all our hopes and fears to prism them to praise before her son, her Lord, and ours. We call on her with nothing of our own to pray, and then, still prisoned in our lonely selves, we hear the piercing note of joy that calls us home with all the saints to live and dwell, and so we sing and let the silence fall to be redeemed. On these are broken words, miserable and weak. Have mercy, Lord. Thank you.