"The Wish to be Generous", Wendell Berry

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

Summer Work

South Bend, three quarters of the year, is a generally unpleasant place to live, what with the near-constant cloudiness and not-too-great traffic and general urban decay. But in the summer, oh, the summer, South Bend is a veritable nice place to live. This is no doubt due to the weather, which is as sunny as the rest of the year is cloudy, the time zone, which means the sun sets here at nearly ten in the evening, and the lack of Notre Dame students, who made roads and Fiddler's Hearth altogether too crowded. Yes, life is good, for the moment, in South Bend. I'm keeping busy, what with five hours of classes daily and cantoring for evening prayer in the Ladychapel nightly. Indeed, there aren't enough hours in the day to really finish all of my homework. Spirits are high, though: I am too busy to be unhappy.

I wonder about this. Industriousness is to be praised, innit? The saying is that "hell is full of the talented, but heaven is full of the hard-working". But I wonder whether all this work is a distraction, eh? Well, let's hope not. In any case, I don't have time to think much about such things, anyway.

Worship as Idolatry

The Ten Commandments give an admirable sense of the priorities of ancient Jewry. The first (or first and second, depending on your reckoning; I am inclined to use the numbering of Lutherans and Papists) is that we are to have no gods before God, nor shall we make graven images. In many ways this commandment sums up the set: God is to be our chief desire.

The great danger to religious sorts (and I hope it is fair to include myself among those of a religious bent) is that one's vocation, or theological dispute, or worship itself, can become an idol, supplanting God from God's rightful place at the Center of Things. I may maintain, in my correct opinion, that Thomas Tallis is vastly superior to Marty Haugen, and that the Roman Catholics' attempts at translation pale in comparison to the peerless language of Cranmer, and that, all things considered, ad orientem is probably a better way of celebrating a Mass, but the moment that any of these opinions distracts me from the Charity which is the heart of God, I have committed idolatry. We forget, in our attempts to perform good music for the rite, that the rite itself is no substitute for God.

Recently I've been reading C.S. Lewis's quite sensible (though not particularly scholarly) essays on the Psalms. While I'll recommend the whole book to you, I'll only quote a relevant passage:

[N]o sooner is it possible to distinguish the rite from the vision of God than there is a danger of the rite becoming a substitute for, and a rival to, God Himself. Once it can be thought of separately, it will; and it may take on a rebellious, cancerous life of its own. ... Worse still, [rituals] may be regarded as the only thing [God] wants, so that their punctual performance will satisfy Him without obedience to His demands for mercy, "judgement", and truth. To the priests themselves the whole system will seem important simply because it is both their art and their livelihood; all their pedantry, all their pride, all their economic position, is bound up with it.

The frightening thing for a church musician, of course, is that we are just as susceptible as priests to this sort of distortion. It's enough to make one wonder whether we really need professional church musicians at all.

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In other news: Praetorius! | Prakticello!

Yes He Kahane

I sometimes whether wonder I've heard enough music. That is, I wonder whether any new discoveries I make are merely further distractions, when indeed I have heard more music than anyone can really appreciate in a lifetime. And then I find something new. (Novelty is a seductive mistress, though short-lived.)

The latest discovery is Gabriel Kahane, who was born in the same decade as I, and who writes what I believe is called "chamber pop" music, inflected with influences ranging from Bach to Appalachian folk to Schoenberg. Here's a gadget by which you can listen to his self-titled album:

Indianapolis

Greetings from Indianapolis, capital of Indiana, seat of several dioceses, city of broad streets, numerous beggars, limited green space and, at least on the Fourth of July, lots and lots of traffic. I was here to play a wedding (it went well enough). Yesterday I attended church with the Episcopalians downtown, which was pleasant: excellent instrument, choir (all-male! one doesn't hear that sound much anymore), and sermon.

Indianapolis is a nice enough place to visit, but I wouldn't live here. It's too big: urban areas of a certain size inspire me with neuroses. Modern life in these United States, and urban life in particular, requires a profound amount of trust in people one does not know: architects, elevator-builders, policemen, food safety standard-setters and inspectors of many sorts, motorists, even fellow pedestrians. In the city one must count on everyone else not to be crazy. This confidence is sometimes misplaced.

At the same time, I think it's important that the Church is present in the city. There's enough emphasis in the Bible on helping the poor that it is more than negligent to avoid them. (Are you ever bothered by thoughts of your sins of omission? I certainly am. I'm banking on the idea that this "God" fellow is the merciful sort.) I had planned to attend a Lutheran church yesterday, but there is not a single Lutheran congregation, ELCA or LCMS, in downtown Indianapolis: they've all moved to the suburbs. Where would Jesus live, I wonder?

Catafalque:

About an hour ago, prompted by a friend, I was perusing a sermon on the inter-net for my edification when, all of a sudden, the word CATAFALQUE appeared to me. This was curious, because that word was nowhere to be found on the page, nor did I see any adjacent words that could easily be jumbled and arranged to spell it. (Nonetheless that is my theory, that I saw enough constituënt letters of the word that my brain somehow assembled it.) What was more curious is that, though I had probably seen the word somewhere before, I could not define it. Upon looking up "catafalque", I was intrigued to find that it is a synonym of "bier", or "hearse". One does wonder whether this is some sort of omen. In any case, it is an interesting word.

Corpus Christi (Observed)

Today is the celebration of the Body of Christ. (Or rather, Thursday was the celebration of the Body of Christ, but it's more convenient to do the celebrating today.) The term has two senses, both of which are absurd. The first is that from the Gospel, where Jesus institutes Holy Communion with a piece of bread and the words "this is my body". I'll let Miss O'Connor speak for that:

"Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the 'most portable' person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.' That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."

The second sense is from Paul's letters: here it is the mystical union of all believers under the headship of Christ. Like Christ's earthly body, it is broken and wounded: it gives every impression of being done for. Christians have failed, and continue to fail, at that whole "unity" business, just as we have failed at that "charity" thing. I'm not exactly sure how we're supposed to remedy our shortcomings in embodying the second meaning of "Body of Christ". Perhaps it has something to do with the first meaning.

The Order of Precedence in Boardinghouse Fires

Mark Twain was no stranger to priorities. In his Unfinished Burlesque of Books on Etiquette, he presents a list of things to be saved in boardinghouse fires. The first things to be saved by any gentleman are, of course, young ladies. "Partiality, in the matter of rescue," he writes, is "to be shown to:
1. Fiancées.
2. Persons toward whom the operator feels a tender sentiment, but has not yet declared himself.
3. Sisters.
4. Stepsisters.
5. Nieces.
6. First cousins.
7. Cripples.
8. Second cousins.
9. Invalids.
10. Young-lady relations by marriage.
11. Third cousins, and young-lady friends of the family.
12. The Unclassified.

"Parties belonging to these twelve divisions should be saved in the order in which they are named.

"The operator must keep himself utterly calm, and his line of procedure constantly in mind; otherwise the confusion around him will be almost sure to betray him into very embarrassing breaches of etiquette. Where there is much smoke, it is often quite difficult to distinguish between new Relatives by Marriage and Unclassified young ladies; wherefore it is provided that if the operator, in cases of this sort, shall rescue a No. 12 when he should have rescued a No. 10, it is not requisite that he carry No. 12 back again, but that he leave her where she is without remark, and go and fetch out No. 10. An apology to No. 10 is not imperative; still, it is good form to offer it."

Later on, Twain gives the remainder of the list of things to be rescued from fires:
13. Babies.
14. Children under 10 years of age.
15. Young widows.
16. Young married females.
17. Elderly married ditto.
18. Elderly widows.
19. Clergymen.
20. Boarders in general.
21. Female domestics.
22. Male ditto.
23. Landlady.
24. Landlord.
25. Firemen.
26. Furniture.
27. Mothers-in-law.

De Civitate

The Bible, one will note, begins in a garden and ends in a city. This seems to imply some sort of progression from rural to urban life, a progression which I am not sure is real progress at all. Let me explain.

My travails started when I agreed, most agreeably, to drive some friends to Union Station in Chicago, the train ride from South Bend being inconveniently timed for a transfer to the train to Milwaukee (their home). I had not anticipated that this would necessitate my driving into the very heart of downtown Chicago (and on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, no less: the very time when, it seems, the totality of the citizenry of the Windy City departs, by car, for greener climes). Suffice it to say that the experience was not pleasant: what is normally a four-hour drive from South Bend to home became a seven-hour ordeal. The more I visit the city, the more I am convinced that I hate it beyond reason. This is mainly due, I suppose, to traffic, which provokes in me a most powerful misanthropy.

Does city life have any redeemable qualities? Surely it must; surely something must counterbalance the infernal drudgery of commuting. Or is it only for money that people work in such an environment? If this is so, then I cannot understand people, in general, at all. It is far better to live in a bare cell in heaven than a McMansion in hell.

Those Mid-May Blues

These past few days in May, for some reason, have provoked a certain nostalgia in me, for reasons I can't quite rationalize. (Well, yes, granted: nostalgia generally isn't to be rationalized. But here even the cause of the nostalgia is a mystery. Perhaps it's the weather?) I find myself looking back on my salad days—fully behind me, I assume—with a certain wistfulness. Why? Certainly not because I was happier; indeed, I was far more morose, if not melancholisch, back in high school. I suppose it's the callowness that I miss. I was less aware, then, of how many problems there are out there in the world.

Dear, if I feel such nostalgia at the age of twenty-three, what shall I do at forty-three? How many more realities can I face before becoming either irreparably cynical or inescapably escapist?