A couple of months ago, a friend of mine asked me to do the music for his forthcoming wedding. He and his wife are both septuagenarians. While we were choosing readings and going through the music planning for the event, we came to the psalm. I noted that the psalm for today’s readings, Psalm 128, is often done for weddings. The skeptical bride-to-be looked up and said, “We don’t have to do that verse about the fruitful wife, right?”

Right. Been there, done that; I get it.

In this contentious age, when people, churches and legislators are at loggerheads about who may marry whom and in what circumstances, the wise music director might choose to keep the context general: God is love, and they who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them. (John 14:16)

That was the lifelong theme of the extraordinary and gifted Rev. Clarence Rivers, who back in 1964 introduced his spiritual “God Is Love” as part of his American Mass Program, first brought the influence of gospel music into Catholic worship. In 1956, Rivers was the first African American to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood in Cincinnati; he was an author, speaker and playwright, as well as a musician and liturgist. In an article written 58 years ago about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he wrote:

  “If you are really alive in Christ, you need to love and be loved. ... The words ‘I love you’ can change misery into joy, hate into brotherhood, poverty into plenty. And why not? We are all children of the same Father, brothers and sisters of the same Christ who is neither black nor white.”

If that’s not what we’re singing about, we’re doing it wrong.