Songs I Never Sing (and Why)
I'm going to get a little nitty and gritty now. There is a whole lot of "classic" "contemporary" "Catholic" music that I ignore whenever possible, and I get asked about them frequently.* I have some very practiced answers that you might find useful if you agree with me. Top offenders: Be Not Afraid, You Are Mine, Here I Am Lord, On Eagle's Wings, Gather Us In, One Bread One Body... you get the idea. What are those scare quotes - classic, contemporary, Catholic - up there all about? Well, all three of those descriptors are false. These songs have not earned the label of classic because they are too young - the tradition of the Church is way too big for songs written in living memory to be considered "classics" yet, not alongside thousand-year-old poetic masterpieces. They've outgrown the label of contemporary by being too dated. And many of them don't get the label "Catholic" because they are theologically suspect at bes...