Sister Winifred's veil: This is not a news story

Whenever Pope John Paul II travels, the events that receive the most attention are his spectacular public Masses and encounters with heads of state and other dignitaries.

But these tours also include quieter rites and meetings with priests, nuns and lay people. The pope leads prayers, delivers words of advice or encouragement, offers his blessing and shares a few moments of fellowship.

In other words, these events are rarely "newsworthy." This depends, however, on one's point of view.

Sister Winifred Mary Lyons was one of 130,000 New Yorkers at a 1995 papal Mass in Central Park and, later, she was in St. Patrick's Cathedral when John Paul led the recitation of the rosary. Afterwards, she had a brief chance to meet the pope. Years later, she still has trouble describing what she believes was a holy moment.

"As I walked out of the cathedral, I met a friend to whom I immediately said that I was going to return to wearing a veil," said Sister Winifred, a pro-life leader in the Archdiocese of New York's schools. "I could not believe I was saying it. The words were not mine."

It would be hard to make a more symbolic decision. It had been 23 years since Sister Winifred set aside her veil and started wearing "secular clothes" while going about her work in the Sisters of Charity. During the 1960s and '70s, she was one of thousands of women and men in religious life who rode the waves of change that rolled through Catholicism and the culture. She dyed her hair and pierced her ears. Her peers changed and so did she.

The first time she tried on her veil, again, she looked in a mirror and saw an image of herself as she was years earlier. This startled her, she said, and she literally lost her breath. In an essay in the New Oxford Review, she explained how this simple veil has brought her a renewed sense of her ties to the past, while her daily work continues to carry her into the present.

Sister Winifred thought she might encounter some resistance to her decision. But in all honesty, she said, this has not been the case, even though she knows that many people - in holy orders and in the pews - consider this a "monumental decision" after a tumultuous era.

The reactions of people around her have been quite touching, she said.

"Being greeted on the street was something I had totally forgotten. Moreover, the witness value has overwhelmed me: I know I cause others to think about God, if only for a few seconds, and I realize afresh the public dimension of the consecrated life and the hunger there is for it in this world. Again, this is something I had forgotten. I am in no way negating the witnessing I did and which all women Religious do, daily, but we do it after we identify ourselves. Wearing the veil, we do it in spite of ourselves."

It's fairly easy, she said, to describe the outward manifestations of this "public dimension" to her decision. She can see it in people's eyes and hear it in their voices. Once again, total strangers walk up and ask her to pray for them. It's easy to detect an increased vulnerability and openness in the people she sees in her work - especially among the women she counsels and consoles in crisis pregnancy centers.

Yet her decision wasn't about taking some kind of a public stand, she said. The biggest changes that have taken place since her return to wearing a veil haven't been on the outside. This really isn't a news story, she said. It's just part of her story.

"It's very difficult to put this into words. The change on the outside is important. I know that," said Sister Winifred. "But what happened to me on the inside has been so much deeper - deeper than all of the external changes. It is this inner reality that is so much more important. ... Yet that's the part of this that is beyond words. It's a mystery to me, too."

CCM Crossroads II – Do the math

As she pulled into traffic, Elaine Benes turned on her boyfriend's car radio and began bouncing along to the music.

Then the lyrics sank in: "Jesus is one, Jesus is all. Jesus pick me up when I fall." In horror, she punched another button, then another. "Jesus," she muttered, discovering they all were set to Christian stations. Then the scene jumped to typical "Seinfeld" restaurant chat.

"I like Christian rock," said the ultra-cynical George Costanza. "It's very positive. It's not like those real musicians who think they're so cool and hip."

Notice how the lords of Must See TV stuck in the knife and gave it a sneaky little twist, noted rocker Charlie Peacock, who has two decades of experience in both the secular and sacred markets. Contemporary Christian music – or CCM – is "positive," not "cool" or "hip." It's nice, meek and safe. After all, these aren't "real" musicians.

"Positive and nice. Helpful and friendly," writes Peacock, in his upcoming book "At the Crossroads," about the identity crisis in the thriving CCM industry. "Sounds more like a description of the Ace Hardware man than music informed by a story so ... real that it involves every action, emotion and thought under the sun - a complex, bloody, beautiful, redemptive, truthful story."

Since Christendom is built on a story that is literally larger than life, Peacock's wonders why CCM is smaller than life. The Bible is full of sin, death, doubt, love, hate, anger, war, lust and other messy subjects. The faith of the ages wrestles with the bad news before reaching the Good News. Yet many Nashville executives would agree with the "Seinfeld" gang that CCM products must be tamer than the "real" pop, country and rock albums they mimic. Truth is, no one expects CCM to appeal to many listeners who aren't already true believers.

This is, noted Peacock, a mighty strange strategy coming from people who say one of their main goals is evangelism. He also wonders if it does believers much good to consume only "positive" messages that please them, comfort them and appeal to what marketers call their "felt needs."

Some critics go even further. Writing in the New York Times, critic Nicholas Dawidoff said CCM is simply "mediocre stuff, diluted by hesitation and dogmatic formula, inferior to the mainstream popular music it emulates." But he added: "There's no reason why contemporary Christian performers, if they allow themselves to explore their talent and emotion more completely, can't successfully combine virtuosity and moral virtue."

Mark Joseph of the MJM Entertainment Group in Southern California, has dug into sports history and found an even more provocative judgment. "As with baseball, strange bedfellows have colluded to keep musicians with Christian beliefs in the modern-day equivalent of the Negro Leagues," he wrote, in Billboard. This arrangement allows Christian companies to lock up their artists, while the biases of the secular marketplace remain unchallenged.

On the other side, some purists say CCM is soul sick because its artists crave mainstream success and respect. This camp claims that it's time to return to a strict "ministry" model in which performers stick to the biblical basics - recording only explicitly Christian songs – and stop seeking to "crossover" into secular charts.

The bottom line, said Peacock, is that gifted Christians make all kinds of music – from classical to jazz, from pop to edgy rock – and it doesn't help anyone to enforce one narrow definition of "Christian music." People who run CCM companies must learn to reach the ears of unbelievers as well as believers, he said. This will, at the very least, require radically different marketing techniques and a more real-life-oriented approach to lyrics.

This would even allow some Christians to successfully write songs that appeal to non-Christians, even if that breaks the CCM rules and might, in the short run, seem unprofitable.

After all, noted Peacock, "an audience of 100 Satan punks and 10 Christians does not constitute a CCM consumer base. An audience of 95 Christians and five Satan punks does. If you're thinking something doesn't add up, you're right. Whether it adds up or not depends on whose math you're using."

CCM Crossroads – Myths, fishbowls & reality

It's an archetypal image in Nashville mythology - a young singer pulling into town with a one-way bus ticket, a guitar, a pack of songs and big dreams.

The ones Charlie Peacock meets also carry worn-out Bibles and are convinced God wants them to use their music to save souls.

"I've come into contact with my share of aspiring Christian recording artists," said the veteran of two decades of secular and sacred work as a songwriter, performer, producer and record- company executive. "If I had a nickel - make that a dollar - for every time one of them told me he was writing with unbelievers in mind ... I'd be as rich as Bill Gates."

The problem is that singing to unbelievers isn't what Contemporary Christian Music artists actually do. They sign contracts to produce what Peacock calls "a kind of Christianized pop-rock music - music which changes with the pop music of the surrounding culture."

It's a niche product called "CCM" and selling it has become a $500 to $1 billion-a-year business, depending on who does the counting. As a rule, CCM is sold in Christian stores to Christian consumers, who hear it played on Christian radio or at Christian concerts. These professionals are paid to preach to the choir.

Contemporary Christian musicians know they have to use explicitly Christian images and code words or their core fans will revolt. They also know they have to avoid many controversial, gripping, soul-wracking issues that are fair game for secular performers. This makes it hard for CCM artists to write openly and honestly about the pains and joys in their real lives.

The rare "crossover" artists who succeed on the religious and mainstream charts face even greater pressures. If Nashville is a fishbowl in which celebrities struggle to maintain a smidgen of privacy, then CCM stars live in a fishbowl perched over a Bunsen burner.

"There are so many people who are way too obsessed with their favorite CCM artists. This means they are just as obsessed with entertainment as anybody else in this culture, only they're obsessed with Christian entertainers instead of secular entertainers," said Peacock, who recently finished writing "At the Crossroads," a book describing what he believes is an identity crisis within this industry.

"Either way, this isn't healthy. ... I can't tell you how many people tell me that they don't even go to church anymore because CCM has become their church. They see their favorite CCM stars as ministers, not musicians. Stop and think about that."

No one has inspired more soul searching than pop diva Amy Grant, whose songs have evolved from praise choruses into smooth statements of quiet faith and a few nagging doubts. In 1991 her innocent, yet flirty, "Baby, Baby" video infuriated many fans, who accused her of selling out for secular success. Last year, many insiders said her "Behind the Eyes" album shouldn't be considered for a Gospel Music Association Dove Award because it contained few, if any, clearly Christian lyrics.

Now, Grant and her husband Gary Chapman, a singer-songwriter who hosts TNN's "Prime Time Country" talk show, have announced their separation after 16 years of marriage. The singers asked their fans to pray. Meanwhile, the tabloids are preying.

Once again, it's time for debates about the state of CCM's soul. The bottom line, argues Peacock, is that many of these painful tensions are rooted in clashing views of "what this music is supposed to be and what it's supposed to accomplish."

After all, there are outspoken religious conservatives who still believe that music that includes any elements of rock 'n' roll is, by definition, Satanic. Others insist that CCM must return to being merely a tool of evangelism, especially with the young. Meanwhile, there are millions of evangelicals - usually grooving in megachurch pews – who have yanked every imaginable style of pop music right into their worship services.

"If I could wave a wand and make it all go away so we could start over, would I do that? You bet," said Peacock. "But that isn't an option. The question is: What are we going from here?"

'Independent,' yet 'Anglican'?

STAFFORD, Texas – Father Tony Tripi's new church is called Tri-City Fellowship, a businesslike name that fits in among the signs for oil-tech firms, furniture warehouses, computer pros and everybody else that's floating in the sea of office complexes that encircles Houston.

"We're a fellowship and we serve Stafford, Sugar Land and Missouri City," said the Brooklyn-born priest, who in October led 300 of his parishioners out of the Episcopal Church of the Advent. "Some people were surprised that there isn't a saint in the new name - like St. John, or St. Mark, or whatever. But right now we've decided that we just need to say what we are."

"Tri-City Fellowship" sounds like one of the legions of user-friendly, entrepreneurial, freelance churches that have changed the face of modern Protestantism. But that's just the first part of the name. The second part is "A Christian Community in the Anglican Tradition."

In other words, Tripi's church claims that it is "Anglican," yet free of the legal structure and authority of the Diocese of Texas. As such, his parish resembles St. Andrew's Church in Little Rock, Ark., a controversial mission that has defied its local shepherd and now claims ties to a Rwandan bishop. Tripi's flock is linking up with Archbishop Moses Tay of Singapore.

Both of these cases are signs of the tensions between First World progressives and Third World traditionalists that dominated last summer's Lambeth conference in Canterbury. But the Tri-City Fellowship story also resonates throughout mainline Protestantism. It's becoming more common to see United Methodists bucking the United Methodist system to defend what they believe are core Methodist beliefs. The same thing is happening with Presbyterians, Lutherans, Disciples and so forth.

At some point, said Tripi, doctrines must be more important than denominations.

"My telephone keeps ringing with calls from people throughout the mainline world," he said. "People are saying, 'We are right where you are and we're having to look at doing exactly what you've done.'... They're all caught up in systems that have become oppressive and that aren't getting the job done. "

Obviously, Houston Bishop Claude Payne disagrees with this analysis. He notes his conservative record on evangelism and morality, including hot-button issues of sexuality. He considers Tripi a rebel who has abandoned his altar – leaving behind the parish's property, assets and sizable debts. But he also disagrees with the priest's conviction that orthodox bishops must attack those who want to revise church doctrines. The bishop believes that is too negative.

"Christ needs no defenders. ... Many portions of our church that are issue-driven continue to decline," he wrote, in letter to Tripi's parishioners. This is true on left and right, because those on each side get "so possessed and obsessed with fighting that they are hardly attractive to those who are lost. It is tragic, each struggling so desperately to 'uphold the truth' as they understand it, that they cease to be in a posture of sharing the truth."

Sadly, the bishop said he must lead efforts to defrock this priest because "failure to do so would undermine the structure that enables us to be an Anglican Church."

Tripi admits that he's "guilty, as charged" of rebelling against the Episcopal Church and he is willing to endure a trial to "make a public witness" about why he took this stand. The key, he said, is that when bishops are consecrated each takes a vow to "guard the faith, unity and discipline" of the church.

So defending church unity does require bishops to defend the faith of the ages, said Tripi. This is true even if it causes division in the present. Meanwhile, his freeborn church already has 500 members and is preparing for life in the crowded and confusing church marketplace.

"I am an Anglican priest," he said. "I also believe that our church stands with other Anglicans around the world. There will be a short season in which folks like us have to be separated. We will have to step aside and leave the Episcopal Church. But we are going to be brought back under the same umbrella soon – I think sooner than anyone can imagine."