It was many months ago, starting to feel confident that it was only a matter of time, not too much more time, before I was down to the bedrock elements of music instruction, that I told myself that there would be a definite milestone of such progress the day I took up to the study the first volume of Aquinas' Summa Theologica and tapped out his immortal prologue.
Now as Providence would have it, that moment in the unfolding of the history of culture has fallen on today, June 11, which happens to be the feast of the Sacred Heart this year, but ordinarily the celebration of Barnabas the Apostle. It is also the day in 1987 when I managed to write a full 20 pages of Contemplatives. That was my most quantitative day of all with that work, although still almost a year before I was done. June 11 was also the date in 1980 when, as I thought about publishing the fiction, the Lord said: "Make no decisions until September." I assumed He was talking about the autumn of 1980. It's more likely he was talking about this one. Infinity can always afford to take the longest possible view. In 1980, for one thing, I had no ideas whatsoever about the World Wide Web and its possibilities. So here goes.
"Because the Master of Catholic Truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners . . . we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian Religion, is such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners. We have considered that students in this Science have not seldom been hampered by what they have found written by other authors, partly on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments; partly also because those things that are needful for them to know are not taught according to the order of the subject matter, but according to as the plan of the book might require, or the occasion of the argument offer; partly, too, because frequent repetition brought weariness and confusion to the minds of the readers."
I would doubt that Thomas also had music texts in his mind when he penned these words, because music instruction texts were not prolific in his time, as far as I know. Learning music was pretty much by rote, and not only used numbers more logically, but had little of the massive complications produced after Thomas' time by the growth of polyphony. Also, the use of solfage had been flourishing for a couple of hundred years and no one had yet found reason to get rid of it, or pervert the sense of it.
But for a long time his words have rung in my head as the first thing to be said if ever I were able to put out a text on music instruction. The criticisms apply, in varying degrees, to every music text I have ever seen, and they apply even more critically in works aimed at children and other beginners.The utter collapse, in all Western vernaculars as far as I know, of the primacy of numbers in initial music education, has created more harm, frustration, discouragement, and a wrongful sense of the individual's own innate ability, than any other branch of learning.
Well, as a contemplative I know that instruction on the real possibilities of the prayer life is also pretty lousy, but we'll leave that for another time. This is one of those posts that comes out in sections, and this morning, a few days after the start of the the above, I trotted over to our local cathedral to have a good practice on the electric organ. It's not quite a pipe, but as an Allen it's pretty good, and anyway it's not really in the building to entertain the masses, it's there to provoke them to raise their voices in worship, and in the right hands it can most certainly do so.
My hands are not quite right, yet. I did some good stuff, a lot smarter than I used to be forty years ago when I mostly boogied on its predecessor, in those days in the gallery, with an octave/fifth cadence in the left hand, but I also found out that I need more work on thirds in the left, using fingers 2 and 4 more often than has been my wont. This simply doubled my reading chops. Technique, technique, but away from all that confusion and boredom and neglect Thomas would have found in today's texts of scales and studies. I merely started playing a hymn in Catholic Book of Worship Two and applied the recent investigations to my difficulties. Something more to practise, of course, but we're getting close to the end. I'm reminded of the spring of 1988, when about four or five chapters before the end of Contemplatives I felt like the pressure to finish was over. Winding down is a good feeling. Yet I also have to ponder how come all these finishing touches are coming so fast, and with the price of feeling so stupid about not realizing for so long how obvious it all is.
Symbols, symbols, symbols. I have been recalling that it was back in the middle 90s that I said to the good lady who ran the restaurant in the Hume/Heritage/Hume Hotel in Nelson that so much of the time all I really knew in those days was that I lived on the symbols of symbols. I had so many ideas that rarely turned concrete in the ordinary worldly sense. I was by no means depressed, just surprised and amused. Or bemused. But so much of the time I had to think that I was waiting for some major external event.
God uses that term somewhat regularly these days: Event. Or events. Well, we're having the event of having two nuns, who have been around for years, and done everything they could to degrade the standard of liturgical music, finally get out of town. Whatever use they were in other areas, and that may have been considerable, they were nothing but harmful to the liturgy. Altar girls, inclusive language, the saccharine whining of music group after music group, all based on ignoring or disobeying what Vatican Two actually said.
The Church change is interesting, because the growth of interest in the music theories continues in the "real world", so much so that to get booted to the church by the Usual Suspects was something of a surprise, and I don't think it was only for the sake of learning more about left hand thirds.
Of course one follows signs of some sort or another. Yesterday Marianne picked up her latest purchase of a book related to the liturgy, Dr. Christopher Page's The Christian West and its Singers (The First Thousand Years). Yale University Press, New Haven and London. Smack dab on a first glance I found a most arresting statement about the importance of singers to the growth of this and that. It possibly even gave me a bit of a glance into what the Almighty has been plotting the last while. Would I have been able to proceed to the cathedral without it?
Well, I also have to admit that with a new guitar student I was able to sketch out some radical new charting methods, and with Tim McDaniel this week finally got to using the treble and bass staves in a way that actually made sense.
Dr. Page's book weighs five pounds, just about right for thumping on the heads of the purveyors for a lot of what we have to listen to these days.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Poems, Chiefly Purgative
If only to keep my own ego under as many wraps as possible, I long ago began to study the process of rejoicing in, and promoting, the virtues of other people's talents and accomplishments. I have to be honest and admit that this sometimes required a deliberate act of the will and did not always arise with spontaneous generosity. I would discern certain motions of envy within myself and then get on with the appreciation and the praise, simply because I had the grace to realize that a little pain now was a lot better than the lingering resentment that would later follow not taking these steps. Being a quick study with bookish things - except Latin and Chemistry - I rarely had the chance to practice such common sense in academic matters, but it came up often in sports when I was in elementary and high school, and then, as if these instances were merely warm-ups for the more significant future, it really blossomed at university when I discovered that a couple of very good college journalist friends of mine were absolutely brilliant at writing satirical songs and created a duo that left no room for me except as an appreciator, and eventually something of a promoter, inasmuch as I could also perform the songs once I learned half-a-dozen chords on the ukulele. And of course, once I continued a little further in the necessary business of growing older and wiser, I realized that for all that I liked a good joke, and more and more understood the divinely appointed office of the court jester, the heart of my calling was in the epic and romantic, which on fretted instruments comes out in the folk songs. And ultimately in liturgical music, especially chant.
So, it was decades ago, with utterly no vision then of the practical future, that I was schooled to deal with the question that is before us now: my own personal presentation and promotion of Marianne's sudden explosion into a consistent flow of utterly wonderful short lyrics. As John of the Cross says in his preface to The Living Flame, even after we are so lucky as to land in the Seventh Mansion, we can still improve, still find things to sweep out of the spiritual closets left by original sin. Yes, I can hold my head up by admitting that I can come up with an image or two as sharply incisive as the kid's; I just can't find a plot for it, and as Aristotle said, plots matter. Her plots are magnificent in their brief intensity, like the javelin style prayers hurled by the old desert monks of Egypt.
People who are not poets or creative writers, of course, are not really bothered by this problem of "what about me?" when they come upon great writing. They can just appreciate the God-given skill and let its blessings flow over them. But we are bugged by activity in what we consider our own back yard, our turf, until we get the large view, and see where the new kid on the block fits into the overall design.
As a person, of course, as a contemplative, our humble cook, house manager, and in-house doctor has always fit into the overall design impeccably. God never charted a human course with more precision and spiritual efficiency. I suppose part of that plan was keeping the talent of the poet hidden from everyone except me, and occasionally, a bishop or a pope. But the Net has sent her forth into the world, and the world, or at least that part of it that can take such an intense spirit, will only be the better for it.
This post has been percolating for some time, of course, but it could not come out this way until I noticed, a few weeks ago, that not only had the Ranger become noticed in Russia, but the fiction that has found its way to it was also being read there. When I happily told Shawn this, she wondered out loud how the computer translation facilities would handle my idioms.
My immediate reaction to this was that of the completely unaware, so-called, theologian. "I don't write idiomatically," I said.
She laughed. (She laughs a lot.Especially at my not infrequent pronouncements.)
I thought about it, and realized that I am actually relentless in using the idioms of my culture. Thus, for my beloved friends in Russia, let me say that when I was high school, when my wife was in high school, we had a volume of poetry called Poems, Chiefly Narrative. They were good stuff, largely, but as I was to learn from A.E. Housman decades later, so much of British education had been aimed at making good little servants for the British East India Company, and in those days, the tail end of the Stalinist era, good little Canadian students were still under the influence of such empire building.
Thus the genesis of my title for the mystic's poesy.
So now, what to do with promotion? Her blog title, From George, gets drowned by other Georges. George Bush, George Cloony, Lake George, and so on. This she determined last night. On the other hand, when she Googled the title of one of her latest poems, Mary Magdalene, she was fifth on the list, and wonderfully content. So should have been the reader who found it.
It was in my last year of ordinary pedagogy that she became my apprentice. Then, this was for the sake of theology, mysticism, and, I thought, perhaps for a short story career. She had written an awfully good one, with myself starring as the adult protagonist, a credit to an mature professional, let alone a twelve-year-old. But that success was never repeated, except in a minor way in our two bouts of correspondence.
But the poems, of course, are also stories, and stand on their own, without the director-client relationship to give them a meaningful structure. An interesting shift, and one I would not want to be without. Poetry rarely meets the peak of the spiritual life, outside the Scriptures, and when it does, as in the case of John of the Cross, I don't think anyone would think of those verses standing alone. They were most fundamentally written for the sake of the commentaries, which is by far their most valuable reason for existence.
I suspect that we have a sui generis, and note should be taken by more than our beloved bishop, John Corriveau, ofm cap, although we gratefully recognize that he is by no means your average cleric, and, probably, bishop.
So, it was decades ago, with utterly no vision then of the practical future, that I was schooled to deal with the question that is before us now: my own personal presentation and promotion of Marianne's sudden explosion into a consistent flow of utterly wonderful short lyrics. As John of the Cross says in his preface to The Living Flame, even after we are so lucky as to land in the Seventh Mansion, we can still improve, still find things to sweep out of the spiritual closets left by original sin. Yes, I can hold my head up by admitting that I can come up with an image or two as sharply incisive as the kid's; I just can't find a plot for it, and as Aristotle said, plots matter. Her plots are magnificent in their brief intensity, like the javelin style prayers hurled by the old desert monks of Egypt.
People who are not poets or creative writers, of course, are not really bothered by this problem of "what about me?" when they come upon great writing. They can just appreciate the God-given skill and let its blessings flow over them. But we are bugged by activity in what we consider our own back yard, our turf, until we get the large view, and see where the new kid on the block fits into the overall design.
As a person, of course, as a contemplative, our humble cook, house manager, and in-house doctor has always fit into the overall design impeccably. God never charted a human course with more precision and spiritual efficiency. I suppose part of that plan was keeping the talent of the poet hidden from everyone except me, and occasionally, a bishop or a pope. But the Net has sent her forth into the world, and the world, or at least that part of it that can take such an intense spirit, will only be the better for it.
This post has been percolating for some time, of course, but it could not come out this way until I noticed, a few weeks ago, that not only had the Ranger become noticed in Russia, but the fiction that has found its way to it was also being read there. When I happily told Shawn this, she wondered out loud how the computer translation facilities would handle my idioms.
My immediate reaction to this was that of the completely unaware, so-called, theologian. "I don't write idiomatically," I said.
She laughed. (She laughs a lot.Especially at my not infrequent pronouncements.)
I thought about it, and realized that I am actually relentless in using the idioms of my culture. Thus, for my beloved friends in Russia, let me say that when I was high school, when my wife was in high school, we had a volume of poetry called Poems, Chiefly Narrative. They were good stuff, largely, but as I was to learn from A.E. Housman decades later, so much of British education had been aimed at making good little servants for the British East India Company, and in those days, the tail end of the Stalinist era, good little Canadian students were still under the influence of such empire building.
Thus the genesis of my title for the mystic's poesy.
So now, what to do with promotion? Her blog title, From George, gets drowned by other Georges. George Bush, George Cloony, Lake George, and so on. This she determined last night. On the other hand, when she Googled the title of one of her latest poems, Mary Magdalene, she was fifth on the list, and wonderfully content. So should have been the reader who found it.
It was in my last year of ordinary pedagogy that she became my apprentice. Then, this was for the sake of theology, mysticism, and, I thought, perhaps for a short story career. She had written an awfully good one, with myself starring as the adult protagonist, a credit to an mature professional, let alone a twelve-year-old. But that success was never repeated, except in a minor way in our two bouts of correspondence.
But the poems, of course, are also stories, and stand on their own, without the director-client relationship to give them a meaningful structure. An interesting shift, and one I would not want to be without. Poetry rarely meets the peak of the spiritual life, outside the Scriptures, and when it does, as in the case of John of the Cross, I don't think anyone would think of those verses standing alone. They were most fundamentally written for the sake of the commentaries, which is by far their most valuable reason for existence.
I suspect that we have a sui generis, and note should be taken by more than our beloved bishop, John Corriveau, ofm cap, although we gratefully recognize that he is by no means your average cleric, and, probably, bishop.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Lights, Camera, Action
For a good week now, the Lord has been somewhat flamboyant around my shelf of journals. They've always been an excellent mental and spiritual exercise to write, even if the first of them is quite amusing, being the awkward jottings of a mystic still ignorant of his own condition, and they've also been much consolation, and of course, butresses to the failings of human memory. Especially as to dates. I once put in a phone call to the Assistant General Secretary to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops that was immensely useful politically, in a very quiet sort of way, and subsequently thought of it as having been done in the early spring, as the day was dark, cold, and wet. But there in my journals the note states, I think, July. That's the interior rain forest for you.
You can imagine the novelist, raging with sudden, irresistable, inspiration: "It was a stormy day, in March, the snow barely gone from the lawns of the substantial domiciles of ______, when Edgar left the house to ramble about the town and ponder the significance of what he had just heard over the telephone from the nation's capital." Especially when the note for the next day spoke of a change in the weather and a youngest daughter counting her nickles and dimes to see if she had enough money for a trip to the Dairy Queen, at the same time getting out bathing suit, towel, and suntan lotion.
Just about every time I sit down in my chair - the journals to my left, at eye level as I sit - there is a modest, fairly brief, display of light, as if the Virgin Mary were actually winking at me. Those mostly hard-backed books of many colours are hers, by the way, as she periodically reminds me. It's consoling of course, but it has also been mystifying. Why this externalism? The journals never fail to radiate instruction, new and old explanation, strengthening, when I open them up, so why this cheerful display that has been happening without my even laying a hand on them?
The answer came this morning, while I was still not quite clear of wondering if I should write another post about male hysteria, this time the result of too much physical exercise. (No, not mine this time. I've been admirably moderate of late, yet the weight continues a modest slide.) I had run into a lad who seems to have failed to read Saint Paul adequately, in respect to exercise, and cannot put the spiritual in its proper priority. I had some pretty good ideas going, but not a balanced order to them, so I commenced the second half of the daily reading of the date in the journals. I prefer to break them up into at least two parts. Like the breviary, then can be pretty heavy reading and I don't like to skate over the surface if I can help it.
The clue to the light show came right at the beginning of what I think of as the second half: June 2, 1994. Sixteen Years ago, as in one of Bob Dylan's longer songs. I render the text:
Yesterday aft an image of bishops, quite a column of them, 2x2, in mitres, on the streets of Dublin.
The Pope, of course, has just named the archbishops who will lead the visitation of the Irish Church, including two from Canada, over the question of the cover up of child abuse.
Sixteen years. Well, no one ever said that contemplation was life in the fast lane. But I hope the solution to the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't take that long. I've only been able to pray for it recently, in any of the spirit I can feel any confidence in. This was after realizing that the Providential aspect of this unmitigated environmental nightmare is its tit for tat reponse to the recent habit of America - and others - dumping its toxic wastes on other continents. This is unlikely to be of any comfort to the poor citizens on the coasts of the afflicted states, but it is a consideration that cannot be avoided, and should be considered part of the guilt package.
Inevitably, the Lord does hear the cry of the poor, no matter how young and helpless, or far away and desperate for food at any price.
You can imagine the novelist, raging with sudden, irresistable, inspiration: "It was a stormy day, in March, the snow barely gone from the lawns of the substantial domiciles of ______, when Edgar left the house to ramble about the town and ponder the significance of what he had just heard over the telephone from the nation's capital." Especially when the note for the next day spoke of a change in the weather and a youngest daughter counting her nickles and dimes to see if she had enough money for a trip to the Dairy Queen, at the same time getting out bathing suit, towel, and suntan lotion.
Just about every time I sit down in my chair - the journals to my left, at eye level as I sit - there is a modest, fairly brief, display of light, as if the Virgin Mary were actually winking at me. Those mostly hard-backed books of many colours are hers, by the way, as she periodically reminds me. It's consoling of course, but it has also been mystifying. Why this externalism? The journals never fail to radiate instruction, new and old explanation, strengthening, when I open them up, so why this cheerful display that has been happening without my even laying a hand on them?
The answer came this morning, while I was still not quite clear of wondering if I should write another post about male hysteria, this time the result of too much physical exercise. (No, not mine this time. I've been admirably moderate of late, yet the weight continues a modest slide.) I had run into a lad who seems to have failed to read Saint Paul adequately, in respect to exercise, and cannot put the spiritual in its proper priority. I had some pretty good ideas going, but not a balanced order to them, so I commenced the second half of the daily reading of the date in the journals. I prefer to break them up into at least two parts. Like the breviary, then can be pretty heavy reading and I don't like to skate over the surface if I can help it.
The clue to the light show came right at the beginning of what I think of as the second half: June 2, 1994. Sixteen Years ago, as in one of Bob Dylan's longer songs. I render the text:
Yesterday aft an image of bishops, quite a column of them, 2x2, in mitres, on the streets of Dublin.
The Pope, of course, has just named the archbishops who will lead the visitation of the Irish Church, including two from Canada, over the question of the cover up of child abuse.
Sixteen years. Well, no one ever said that contemplation was life in the fast lane. But I hope the solution to the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't take that long. I've only been able to pray for it recently, in any of the spirit I can feel any confidence in. This was after realizing that the Providential aspect of this unmitigated environmental nightmare is its tit for tat reponse to the recent habit of America - and others - dumping its toxic wastes on other continents. This is unlikely to be of any comfort to the poor citizens on the coasts of the afflicted states, but it is a consideration that cannot be avoided, and should be considered part of the guilt package.
Inevitably, the Lord does hear the cry of the poor, no matter how young and helpless, or far away and desperate for food at any price.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Making Book
As Aristotle says - and I totally agree - the wise man never gambles. But it might be fun, or even useful, to ponder betting on how long it will be before the new English version of the latest Roman Missal, with the alleged return to decent music that goes with it, will drive the slop from the current liturgy in more churches than one really wants to count.
Just in, you see, Jeffrey Tucker's cautiously hopeful account of what will eventually be coming to a parish near you, or if you live in England, Marianne tells me, is already happening is some areas there. Some hope does seem to be on the way. Jeffrey today published his comment on the New Liturgical Movement website, and I asked her to print it. The last thing I asked her to print out was the suddenly lengthy body of her own poetic works, so you can see how pleased I was by Jeffrey's observations.
It can only be some hope, the best you can expect when an organization is still trying to function without accepting as a matter of course that it must live up to its original charter, or face varying degrees of failure in its day to day operation, but it's better than no hope at all. After all, every honest auto mechanic knows that if he refuses to use his training - to say nothing of the principles of physics and chemistry - when he is rebuilding a carburetor, he should not be surprised if the car won't run properly. So when the bishops of the Church, seemingly universally, refuse to honour even the initial sentences of a document of Vatican Two, that is, Sacrosanctum Concilium, they must expect a pitiful liturgy. The document insisted that Gregorian Chant be given "pride of place". It has not been given this, by and large, and thus it is difficult to take pride in the current liturgies.
This has not stopped various so-called authorities - should we call them liars or fools? - from trying to tell us that the modern hymns "invigorate" congregations, but none of this has deceived God, who finds it very easy to know whether or not the prayer that arises in a song is genuine or not. He also knows that he who sings garbage is not "singing well", and therefore is not only not "praying twice" but not praying at all. Jeffrey has some great stuff on what the waltz time congregations actually accomplish in their state of inspirational deprivation, and perhaps even more valuable insight on the mental states of the people who have composed this stuff.
My own particular parish has a unique problem, in that most of its most knowledgeable singers and musicians are mystics, that is, souls made by God - not themselves - to be experts in prayer. Thus, they are made to sing, or not sing, through the actions of the Holy Spirit, who, when He does not approve the chosen text and tune, is awfully good at making them shut up. Now, as these people once upon a time were the chief vocal, and occasionally keyboard, most genuinely invigorating leaders of the parish liturgy, all genuine "vibrancy" - filthy word in the mouths of most, these days, but I use it to make a point - has been lost for some time. It returns occasionally, at Christmas, or at other times if a real hymn happens to make the list for the day, but generally it has been lost for years, even more than a decade, as the parish became mired in its complete lack of congregational taste or clerical leadership.
But because of the former tradition, which, in total orthodoxy, used to "rock the place" in a fashion Mick Jagger himself would have envied, and the Beatles could never have dreamed of, the parishioners all know who has put class to rest, and who also can bring it back if the music is acceptable to God and those men who are still men.
We are told the new music just might be available around here for Advent of 2011. In the meantime, I conclude my keyboard researches, swank out on the fretted instruments, and work out the basics for getting the great McDaniel smarted up on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. A piece of cake, when you know the numbers, and he told me the other day he heard it around the house, a lot, when he was a kid. His Dad was very fond of classical music.
Gee. Just think. If they'd made McDaniel senior a bishop, we just might not be so far behind the eight ball.
Just in, you see, Jeffrey Tucker's cautiously hopeful account of what will eventually be coming to a parish near you, or if you live in England, Marianne tells me, is already happening is some areas there. Some hope does seem to be on the way. Jeffrey today published his comment on the New Liturgical Movement website, and I asked her to print it. The last thing I asked her to print out was the suddenly lengthy body of her own poetic works, so you can see how pleased I was by Jeffrey's observations.
It can only be some hope, the best you can expect when an organization is still trying to function without accepting as a matter of course that it must live up to its original charter, or face varying degrees of failure in its day to day operation, but it's better than no hope at all. After all, every honest auto mechanic knows that if he refuses to use his training - to say nothing of the principles of physics and chemistry - when he is rebuilding a carburetor, he should not be surprised if the car won't run properly. So when the bishops of the Church, seemingly universally, refuse to honour even the initial sentences of a document of Vatican Two, that is, Sacrosanctum Concilium, they must expect a pitiful liturgy. The document insisted that Gregorian Chant be given "pride of place". It has not been given this, by and large, and thus it is difficult to take pride in the current liturgies.
This has not stopped various so-called authorities - should we call them liars or fools? - from trying to tell us that the modern hymns "invigorate" congregations, but none of this has deceived God, who finds it very easy to know whether or not the prayer that arises in a song is genuine or not. He also knows that he who sings garbage is not "singing well", and therefore is not only not "praying twice" but not praying at all. Jeffrey has some great stuff on what the waltz time congregations actually accomplish in their state of inspirational deprivation, and perhaps even more valuable insight on the mental states of the people who have composed this stuff.
My own particular parish has a unique problem, in that most of its most knowledgeable singers and musicians are mystics, that is, souls made by God - not themselves - to be experts in prayer. Thus, they are made to sing, or not sing, through the actions of the Holy Spirit, who, when He does not approve the chosen text and tune, is awfully good at making them shut up. Now, as these people once upon a time were the chief vocal, and occasionally keyboard, most genuinely invigorating leaders of the parish liturgy, all genuine "vibrancy" - filthy word in the mouths of most, these days, but I use it to make a point - has been lost for some time. It returns occasionally, at Christmas, or at other times if a real hymn happens to make the list for the day, but generally it has been lost for years, even more than a decade, as the parish became mired in its complete lack of congregational taste or clerical leadership.
But because of the former tradition, which, in total orthodoxy, used to "rock the place" in a fashion Mick Jagger himself would have envied, and the Beatles could never have dreamed of, the parishioners all know who has put class to rest, and who also can bring it back if the music is acceptable to God and those men who are still men.
We are told the new music just might be available around here for Advent of 2011. In the meantime, I conclude my keyboard researches, swank out on the fretted instruments, and work out the basics for getting the great McDaniel smarted up on Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. A piece of cake, when you know the numbers, and he told me the other day he heard it around the house, a lot, when he was a kid. His Dad was very fond of classical music.
Gee. Just think. If they'd made McDaniel senior a bishop, we just might not be so far behind the eight ball.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Lead Kindly Liturgy
When pondering the English, an expression native to the Sceptered Isle comes to mind: In for a penny, in for a pound. In the previous post I began taking John Paul's administration to task for its inability or refusal to dialogue with the Nelson mystics, and pointed out an area or two concerning the effects of this hiatus. It seems I have to continue this critical analysis, and I must honestly admit to not being surprised, except by the location that provokes it.
Once again it is Marianne's watchdogging the Net that sets me off. She's picked up on the rising concern in England about the disastrous music that threatens to accompany the Masses marking the Pope's visit to England for the beatification of John Henry Newman. The first image that came to mind is that of the sentimental caterwauling that all those moon-eyed girls, and not a few young males who should have known better, were swaying to at the big papal mass when it was Toronto's turn to stage World Youth Day. I know there was a strong wind gusting from time to time that day, but I think the sways were purely internal, and in keeping with the beat. You begin to understand why Gregorian, made for honest worship rather than the campfire, lacks a pulse you can dance to. Even sung prayer, in order to work, has to possess a profound element of stillness to it.
Only an idiot would have thought of that gush of meaningless emotion as the 'hope of tomorrow". The despair of tomorrow would be more like it. Making feelings a foundation for anything can only lead to that which throws hope out the window, once the real world of adult life settles in with its relentless sameness of the daily demands.
This is the beauty of chant, that it demands all the first attentions to the words, the thought, of the prayer that is also sung. But the singing comes second, and it is led by a submissive intellect, aware, or studying to be aware, of its proportional place in the universe, not inviting God to waltz - or even jig - with its self-seeking fantasies.Certainly feeling can come out of this ordered arrangement, but it is a refined feeling, purified by prayer, and thus the best and deepest and most lasting feeling of all.
Damian Thompson, of the London Telegraph, has begun raising the alarm over the threatening cacophony, and Jeffrey Tucker has pointed out that Cardinal Newman loved the Gregorian. (Can you still hear it in Birmingham?) and further reminded us that chant is remarkably easy to teach to children. He's quite right. I had occasion to work up the Kyrie from Mass Eight, many years ago, with my handy little dozen in Ocean Falls. I think we had only a couple of weeks. The English Church has months before Benedict arrives.
Maybe the little children can start leading the way out of this continuing downward spiral. Chesterton once said that Anglicanism was not a religion, it was an aesthetic. But that was in the days of the Latin, which, while it may not have been the vernacular, and did feature priests and even bishops who thought they were competing with the overnight express to Edinburgh, also gave the congregation some chant. We may still have the Mass, which of course the Anglicans do not, but the externals of our religion have become a squalor, and the faithful wouldn't know an aesthetic if if became a double decker bus and ran over them. Well, perhaps some of the faithful would, but they would be different than far too many bishops, and for better or for worse, outside the monasteries, it's always been the bishops that make the decisions.
Once again it is Marianne's watchdogging the Net that sets me off. She's picked up on the rising concern in England about the disastrous music that threatens to accompany the Masses marking the Pope's visit to England for the beatification of John Henry Newman. The first image that came to mind is that of the sentimental caterwauling that all those moon-eyed girls, and not a few young males who should have known better, were swaying to at the big papal mass when it was Toronto's turn to stage World Youth Day. I know there was a strong wind gusting from time to time that day, but I think the sways were purely internal, and in keeping with the beat. You begin to understand why Gregorian, made for honest worship rather than the campfire, lacks a pulse you can dance to. Even sung prayer, in order to work, has to possess a profound element of stillness to it.
Only an idiot would have thought of that gush of meaningless emotion as the 'hope of tomorrow". The despair of tomorrow would be more like it. Making feelings a foundation for anything can only lead to that which throws hope out the window, once the real world of adult life settles in with its relentless sameness of the daily demands.
This is the beauty of chant, that it demands all the first attentions to the words, the thought, of the prayer that is also sung. But the singing comes second, and it is led by a submissive intellect, aware, or studying to be aware, of its proportional place in the universe, not inviting God to waltz - or even jig - with its self-seeking fantasies.Certainly feeling can come out of this ordered arrangement, but it is a refined feeling, purified by prayer, and thus the best and deepest and most lasting feeling of all.
Damian Thompson, of the London Telegraph, has begun raising the alarm over the threatening cacophony, and Jeffrey Tucker has pointed out that Cardinal Newman loved the Gregorian. (Can you still hear it in Birmingham?) and further reminded us that chant is remarkably easy to teach to children. He's quite right. I had occasion to work up the Kyrie from Mass Eight, many years ago, with my handy little dozen in Ocean Falls. I think we had only a couple of weeks. The English Church has months before Benedict arrives.
Maybe the little children can start leading the way out of this continuing downward spiral. Chesterton once said that Anglicanism was not a religion, it was an aesthetic. But that was in the days of the Latin, which, while it may not have been the vernacular, and did feature priests and even bishops who thought they were competing with the overnight express to Edinburgh, also gave the congregation some chant. We may still have the Mass, which of course the Anglicans do not, but the externals of our religion have become a squalor, and the faithful wouldn't know an aesthetic if if became a double decker bus and ran over them. Well, perhaps some of the faithful would, but they would be different than far too many bishops, and for better or for worse, outside the monasteries, it's always been the bishops that make the decisions.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
On Mothers' Day
It's no fun losing a post. Especially when it's the sort of post that is not all that easy to write, one in which the writer has to scold the very people he has every reason to admire, love, and be grateful for. I really do not know how I did it, other than to realize that it must have been through some strange combination of key striking that is programmed, inadvertently or not, to do it for me. It's never happened to me before, and of course I don't ever want it to happen again. It was a whole post, just finished before breakfast, and then in the process of editing. I was tinkering with a passage about the bishops who had complained at the very short run of the film "The Jeweller's Shop", that strange brew a commercial group made from a poem of Karel Woytyla's. With not a few questionable scenes, no catharsis, and startlingly forgettable sound track, it drew its due reward at the box office. As Vatican Two was at no little pains to point out, the arts and the sciences really do have rules of their own, and everyone involved with this enterprise was equally at no little effort to break them. I had pointed out that for a film demographically aimed at young married couples it had come out remarkably short of the sort of music they like. Put a good rock track in there, and the Thirty-somethings will turn out to a flik on gardening. I had come up with just a little more salt for the wound when the unthinkable happened. (But at least it wasn't a chapter of fiction. That is a much harder thing to come by these days.)
Why am I going on about something of so little consequence and that happened so long ago?
Because, frankly, I am delighted by the new opportunity John Paul's successor has presented to his own newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. Benedict has let the kids at it, like someone who in trying to figure out why the old folks are drying up, then suddenly hid away to read Aristotle's chapter on friendship, eight in the Nichomachean Ethics. Yes, the young certainly do need the advice of the old, but the old also need to not only value the energy of the young, but to learn how to dialogue with it. "The Jeweller's Shop" had about as much real dialogue as a speech by Fidel Castro.
There is no doubt that John Paul was a great man, and the Slav Pope that clobbered Soviet Communism. As a lie, it had to die eventually, but it was the Trumpeter of Krakow who led the charge. But he was overrated as a mystic, and was a Pope of dialogue much less than necessary. It's probably a good thing he became a priest rather than an actor.
Why does this seem so stern, even ungrateful? (And I'm sure there's the odd churchman fuming at such apparent insolence from a layman, but then he's never been alone with the Transformation in my study.)
Nothing easier, when you know your John of the Cross.
This is not the time to go into my long formation as a prophet as well as a mystic, but by January 15, 1984, suffice to say that it was suitably extensive, as well as suitably without honour in my own country, my own province, my own diocese, my own parish. So, when I was told to pick up the phone by the Holy Spirit, and also cleared for my target by my spiritual advisers, I called the telegram people and dictated the following to John Paul II:
"Redemptor Hominis courts error. Come to Nelson for your penance."
By then, the Pope had known months in which to familiarize himself with my thoughts, my record, my spiritual history and position. Not only all my fiction up to that date, but a number of letters. Moreover, he had at hand all manner of theologians supposedly familiar enough with such matters to know how to shoot me down if it were necessary, whereas I had among the local clergy one criminal bishop, and an entire diocese full of priests and religious willing to follow his directives on myself and my community, a situation which never substantially changed until our present bishop, by the grace of God a Capuchin with a sound grasp of the early days of the Franciscans.
Jesus rarely makes it easy for his closest friends, as Saint Teresa was fond of pointing out to him.
I was very aware, of course, once the heat of the prophetic moment had cooled down, that the Holy Spirit might have intended only a spiritual coming to Nelson, and in fact for a decade John Paul did this rather well, especially after a few more months and his trip to Canada and the Holy Spirit upping my status to make me his spiritual director.
But now I think it is not too inaccurate to suggest that He would have preferred a literal obedience. What dialogue would then have ensued? What stories about our little nest of criminal clergy and perverts in high places, all wonderfully masking the truths of the sordid details?
What was lacking? Spiritual courage? Perfect humility? Or, following Pius VII's reaction to the Napoleon who assumed that to have the Pope under lock and key was to run the Church: "Without my advisers I am not Pope!", did he simply lack the right staff?
It was very difficult for John Paul to realize the horror so many priests were creating out there, and he seemed unable to grasp the outright criminal content of their actions. Jesus was crucified; why is a priest above hanging? Or having his throat slit like the false prophets of Baal?
Benedict has been the one to pay for this neglect, via the recent profoundly unprofessional antics of some of the press, and the Lord's view of the record needs to be set straight.
It would be interesting to see some of this clarity emerge in the "New" L'Osservatore.
Why am I going on about something of so little consequence and that happened so long ago?
Because, frankly, I am delighted by the new opportunity John Paul's successor has presented to his own newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano. Benedict has let the kids at it, like someone who in trying to figure out why the old folks are drying up, then suddenly hid away to read Aristotle's chapter on friendship, eight in the Nichomachean Ethics. Yes, the young certainly do need the advice of the old, but the old also need to not only value the energy of the young, but to learn how to dialogue with it. "The Jeweller's Shop" had about as much real dialogue as a speech by Fidel Castro.
There is no doubt that John Paul was a great man, and the Slav Pope that clobbered Soviet Communism. As a lie, it had to die eventually, but it was the Trumpeter of Krakow who led the charge. But he was overrated as a mystic, and was a Pope of dialogue much less than necessary. It's probably a good thing he became a priest rather than an actor.
Why does this seem so stern, even ungrateful? (And I'm sure there's the odd churchman fuming at such apparent insolence from a layman, but then he's never been alone with the Transformation in my study.)
Nothing easier, when you know your John of the Cross.
This is not the time to go into my long formation as a prophet as well as a mystic, but by January 15, 1984, suffice to say that it was suitably extensive, as well as suitably without honour in my own country, my own province, my own diocese, my own parish. So, when I was told to pick up the phone by the Holy Spirit, and also cleared for my target by my spiritual advisers, I called the telegram people and dictated the following to John Paul II:
"Redemptor Hominis courts error. Come to Nelson for your penance."
By then, the Pope had known months in which to familiarize himself with my thoughts, my record, my spiritual history and position. Not only all my fiction up to that date, but a number of letters. Moreover, he had at hand all manner of theologians supposedly familiar enough with such matters to know how to shoot me down if it were necessary, whereas I had among the local clergy one criminal bishop, and an entire diocese full of priests and religious willing to follow his directives on myself and my community, a situation which never substantially changed until our present bishop, by the grace of God a Capuchin with a sound grasp of the early days of the Franciscans.
Jesus rarely makes it easy for his closest friends, as Saint Teresa was fond of pointing out to him.
I was very aware, of course, once the heat of the prophetic moment had cooled down, that the Holy Spirit might have intended only a spiritual coming to Nelson, and in fact for a decade John Paul did this rather well, especially after a few more months and his trip to Canada and the Holy Spirit upping my status to make me his spiritual director.
But now I think it is not too inaccurate to suggest that He would have preferred a literal obedience. What dialogue would then have ensued? What stories about our little nest of criminal clergy and perverts in high places, all wonderfully masking the truths of the sordid details?
What was lacking? Spiritual courage? Perfect humility? Or, following Pius VII's reaction to the Napoleon who assumed that to have the Pope under lock and key was to run the Church: "Without my advisers I am not Pope!", did he simply lack the right staff?
It was very difficult for John Paul to realize the horror so many priests were creating out there, and he seemed unable to grasp the outright criminal content of their actions. Jesus was crucified; why is a priest above hanging? Or having his throat slit like the false prophets of Baal?
Benedict has been the one to pay for this neglect, via the recent profoundly unprofessional antics of some of the press, and the Lord's view of the record needs to be set straight.
It would be interesting to see some of this clarity emerge in the "New" L'Osservatore.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
A Nose That Stings
Bless me, Father, I've been too ambitious again. Not intentionally, so keep it down to three Hail Marys, and God has already been pounding the living daylights out of me anyway, so I don't want much of a lecture either. But I have learned something about old man's fitness programmes: even when you're in pretty good shape for 74 you're still 74, which means it takes longer to recover. Yep, Gordie Howe was playing professional hockey in his 60s, but he knew he couldn't survive on the same full schedule the young guys played.
(Obviously, we're putting off the heavy stuff I was promising. Three different Popes and the abuse scandal not only need a little more recollection, but is also waiting on the official news of a very major appointment in Rome, which I suspect will augment the clarity the Holy Spirit seems determined to provide, if only to underscore the credit of Benedict.)
On the weekend I set off on a much increased rowing schedule, aiming for five or six hundred calories a day, in two sessions, morning and late afternoon. This was after several weeks of a mere 200 calories, occasionally a bit more. And for three-and-half glorious days I got it, too. As I said a few months ago when I had an opportunity to promote rowing in the Valley Voice, just watch that fat melt. At such a rate, I could be down to fighting weight by the end of the summer! (I think I've mentioned my boyhood admiration for Marcel Cerdan and Sugar Ray Robinson and my conviction that I should be a middle-weight, which I did become once I spent a summer swinging a surveyor's axe in the wilderness, but of course lost again without a regular discipline in weight bearing exercise.) But by Tuesday afternoon, out walking, I found myself mentally practicing the following dialogue.
"No, no, Officer. I assure you I'm not drunk, I just seem a bit off balance because I've been rowing so much that my legs are a touch rubbery, and my equilibrium is having to work overtime to catch up. Check me out in a day or two and I'll show you why my wife still thinks I move like a dancer."
And, to a degree, I was right. next morning - yesterday - I was skipping about as usual making the coffee and attending to the cat. And at six, I climbed the ladder to once more set off with Tennyson and mostly the memories of my blessed and coastal youth. Oh, and Bonaventure's Little Psalter. Such a great companion on a boat trip.
But as quickly as Calorie 30, as I was being dutifully Ayurvedic, taking a leisurely warm-up and breathing religiously through my nose with my four count, my reliable old right nostril began to sting. On the one hand I was annoyed that my vaunted schedule had clearly hit a reef, but on the other I was happily grateful for the genius of John Douillard and just clear scientific proof that my numbers would have to be scaled back. Obviously, for one thing, my lungs had much improved from my beginning weeks on the erg, when the nose was constantly humiliating me. Oxygen shortage, you see, because my suddenly assaulted system was still repairing the destruction of all those cells - in the name of new ones, of course - and the lungs demanded priority, as they were originally programmed to do. So, at a mere 100 calories - and continuing proof that more warm-up was not going to take the sting out of my nose - I cut my losses and climbed back down the ladder, and took the rest of the day off. Walking later, I could stop thinking about chats with the constabulary.
That is, fictional chats. Once upon a time that will feature in this space in the future, I had a conversation with a policeman which had to do with the very visible, public, ligature of the faculties, back in the bad old days when the kids didn't have a chance, thanks to Church, government, press, police all having taken vows to wear bags on their heads.
And then, just a few months later, I started writing to Joseph Ratzinger. Before and after I wrote to an awful lot of other people, too, but he's about the only one who really listened.
(Obviously, we're putting off the heavy stuff I was promising. Three different Popes and the abuse scandal not only need a little more recollection, but is also waiting on the official news of a very major appointment in Rome, which I suspect will augment the clarity the Holy Spirit seems determined to provide, if only to underscore the credit of Benedict.)
On the weekend I set off on a much increased rowing schedule, aiming for five or six hundred calories a day, in two sessions, morning and late afternoon. This was after several weeks of a mere 200 calories, occasionally a bit more. And for three-and-half glorious days I got it, too. As I said a few months ago when I had an opportunity to promote rowing in the Valley Voice, just watch that fat melt. At such a rate, I could be down to fighting weight by the end of the summer! (I think I've mentioned my boyhood admiration for Marcel Cerdan and Sugar Ray Robinson and my conviction that I should be a middle-weight, which I did become once I spent a summer swinging a surveyor's axe in the wilderness, but of course lost again without a regular discipline in weight bearing exercise.) But by Tuesday afternoon, out walking, I found myself mentally practicing the following dialogue.
"No, no, Officer. I assure you I'm not drunk, I just seem a bit off balance because I've been rowing so much that my legs are a touch rubbery, and my equilibrium is having to work overtime to catch up. Check me out in a day or two and I'll show you why my wife still thinks I move like a dancer."
And, to a degree, I was right. next morning - yesterday - I was skipping about as usual making the coffee and attending to the cat. And at six, I climbed the ladder to once more set off with Tennyson and mostly the memories of my blessed and coastal youth. Oh, and Bonaventure's Little Psalter. Such a great companion on a boat trip.
But as quickly as Calorie 30, as I was being dutifully Ayurvedic, taking a leisurely warm-up and breathing religiously through my nose with my four count, my reliable old right nostril began to sting. On the one hand I was annoyed that my vaunted schedule had clearly hit a reef, but on the other I was happily grateful for the genius of John Douillard and just clear scientific proof that my numbers would have to be scaled back. Obviously, for one thing, my lungs had much improved from my beginning weeks on the erg, when the nose was constantly humiliating me. Oxygen shortage, you see, because my suddenly assaulted system was still repairing the destruction of all those cells - in the name of new ones, of course - and the lungs demanded priority, as they were originally programmed to do. So, at a mere 100 calories - and continuing proof that more warm-up was not going to take the sting out of my nose - I cut my losses and climbed back down the ladder, and took the rest of the day off. Walking later, I could stop thinking about chats with the constabulary.
That is, fictional chats. Once upon a time that will feature in this space in the future, I had a conversation with a policeman which had to do with the very visible, public, ligature of the faculties, back in the bad old days when the kids didn't have a chance, thanks to Church, government, press, police all having taken vows to wear bags on their heads.
And then, just a few months later, I started writing to Joseph Ratzinger. Before and after I wrote to an awful lot of other people, too, but he's about the only one who really listened.
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