Isaiah 61: 1-2a, 10-11 (RM) or 1-4, 8-11 (RCL); Psalm 126 or Luke 1: 46-50, 53-54 (RM) or 47-55 (RCL); 1 Thessalonians 5: 16-24; John 1: 6-8, 19-28.

It was absolutely, deliriously glorious.

And that’s not something I’d normally say about an event held in a hotel ballroom.

It was the closing Eucharistic celebration at the 2015 conference of Women’s Ordination Worldwide in Philadelphia, the third such international gathering (the second had taken place in Ottawa ten years earlier.) I was serving on the liturgy planning committee, and we had decided to use Luke 1: 46-55, Mary’s Canticle, the Magnificat, as the Gospel reading.

But we weren’t sure what source to take it from, and the discussion swirled round and round on Skype. And then I remembered the version we had sung a number of times at the seminary where I had served for some years as liturgy professor. It was energetic and unabashedly radical in its powerful call to bring to birth a vision of radically transformative social justice. I always smiled inwardly as we sang, wondering how much of its world-upending message was seeping subconsciously into the minds of seminarians who would probably sooner die than upset the prevailing social and ecclesial power structures.

It was Rory Cooney’s “Canticle of the Turning:”

From the halls of power to the fortress tower
not a stone will be left on stone,
Let the king beware for your justice tears every tyrant from his throne.
The hungry poor shall weep no more for the food they can never earn,
There are tables spread, every mouth be fed, for the world is about to turn.

Though the nations rage from age to age we remember who holds us fast:
God’s mercy must deliver us from the conqueror’s crushing grasp.
This saving word that our forebears heard
is the promise which holds us bound,
‘Til the spear and rod can be crushed by God
who is turning the world around.*

The melody is the Irish “Star of the County Down,” and the driving rhythm never lets up, barely pausing for breath between verses. And at that Eucharist in the Marriott hotel the musicians played for all they were worth, the assembly sang out wholeheartedly and the dancers, oh gee the dancers, twirled and swirled in the aisle with gauzy scarves aloft, on and on, until the energy could have lifted the hotel from its foundation. We had to hope there was still a spirit of sheer joy and irreversible hope for change in the air when Pope Francis came to visit Philadelphia the following week.

This Canticle replaces this week’s Psalm Response in the Roman Missal, and can be used as an option this week or next in the Revised Common Lectionary. As we saw a few weeks ago in the U.S. RM version of the Proverbs 31 reading, the Scripture scholars who assembled the Lectionary took out all the radical bits. What’s left of the Magnificat in the RM version emphasizes the “nice” things God promises to do. But the Isaiah 61 reading reminds us of what each of us is called to do, in our own context, in our own circumstances to:

“bring good news to the oppressed, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives and release to prisoners,” 

– and to do it all in a spirit of joy.

The Magnificat follows the pattern of the song of Hannah in I Samuel 2: 1-10. Both of these are literary constructions written by a male author or authors to represent the emotions of women who have learned of their first pregnancy. What an amazing context for exultation over the large-scale transformation of unjust social structures in the world as a whole.

And what a compelling call to each of us to proclaim the powerful hope embodied in the halting and healing of injustice and destruction, particularly in the landscape of human suffering, the warscape if you will, of our world right here and now.

© Susan K. Roll

This week’s Reflection is a revised version of the Reflection from December 13, 2020