Further Adventures in Lincolniana

As happens every year or so, I've been on another Lincoln kick. Last summer I revisited the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, as well as various other places, including his house, his tomb, and the church he attended (which has a fabulous Brombaugh organ I was permitted to play).

Why should one particular historical figure prove so persistently compelling? This post provides sufficient explanation. One gets, in Lincoln, the sense of a truly moral man, perhaps the closest thing to a saint that secular American society has produced.

An aside: though the evidence suggests that Lincoln could not really be considered a Christian in any orthodox sense, his language owes an incalculable debt to the Authorised Version. We, in this age of literary and spiritual decline, are much impoverished for not being a referential culture. (Or, if we have broadly-shared references, they are generally from popular movies and other light entertainment.) Discourse in the nineteenth century was permeated with references to Scripture, and Lincoln's speeches are no exception. In losing any societal sense of a shared literary or religious corpus, we are cut off from the conversation with the dead that must inform real conservatism (in its original and best sense).

I'll recommend here an instructive book: Lincoln in Photographs. In my more optimistic moments, I like to think that Lincoln's face is iconic not merely because it is on our currency, nor because it so strikingly homely, but because we can intuït on it the markings of a great soul — melancholic but confident, resigned but determined, defined by a generous sense of humor and an iron will.

Oh, and spare a thought, kind reader, for Mary Todd Lincoln. Much-maligned, temperamentally unable to perform her prescribed rôle, marked by tragedies both minor and cataclysmic, hers was in many ways an unenviäble life. She went insane, but for very good reasons.

An Evensong for Bach, Handel, and Purcell

The Episcopalian sanctorale, to the extent that it is observed at all, is a higgledy-piggledy affair. But it is gratifying, nonetheless, to note that three very good composers — J.S. Bach, G.F. Handel, and Henry Purcell — have their very own commemoration on July 28th. (That this day happens to coïncide with my birthday is merely gravy.) I am not prepared to argue for any particular sanctity of these three men; indeed, sources suggest their moral failings were as plentiful as anyone's. But theirs is some of the best music the Christian tradition has produced. In thanksgiving for this, and for sacred music in general, we at St. Luke's, Dixon put on a nice little Evensong this past Sunday, the musical selections of which I share here.

Organ voluntary: Dieterich Buxtehude - Praeludium in D Major, BuxWV 139
Hymn 432 "O praise ye the Lord!" Laudate Dominum
Preces (by William Smith)
Psalm 150 (Tone VIII, by Basil Kazan)
Magnificat (by Thomas Tallis, from the Dorian Service)
Nunc dimittis (ibid.)
Responses (by William Smith)
Pater noster (by Robert Stone)
Anthem: Henry Purcell - An Evening Hymn, Z.193
Hymn 24 "The day thou gavest, Lord, is ended" St. Clement
Organ voluntary: Herbert Brewer - Carillon

John Donne: Upon the Annunciation and Passion Falling upon One Day.

1608

Tamely, frail body, abstain to-day; to-day
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away.
She sees him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came, and went away.
She sees him nothing, twice at once, who’s all;
She sees a cedar plant it self, and fall,
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive, yet dead.
She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclus'd at home, public at Golgotha;
Sad and rejoic'd she’s seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen.
At once a Son is promis'd her, and gone;
Gabriel gives Christ to her, He her to John;
Not fully a mother, she’s in orbity;
At once receiver and the legacy.
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
Th’ abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one
(As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)
Of th’ angels Ave, and Consummatum est.
How well the Church, God’s Court of Faculties,
Deals, in sometimes, and seldom joining these.
As by the self-fix’d Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where th’ other is, and which we say
(Because it strays not far) doth never stray,
So God by his Church, nearest to him, we know,
And stand firm, if we by her motion go.
His Spirit, as his fiery pillar, doth
Lead, and his Church, as cloud; to one end both.
This Church, by letting those days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one;
Or ’twas in him the same humility,
That he would be a man, and leave to be;
Or as creation he hath made, as God,
With the last judgment, but one period,
His imitating spouse would join in one
Manhood’s extremes; He shall come, he is gone;
Or as though one blood drop, which thence did fall,
Accepted, would have serv'd, he yet shed all,
So though the least of his pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords.
This treasure then, in gross, my soul, uplay,
And in my life retail it every day.


[See also the excellent article at A Clerk of Oxford]