"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?