It was back in 91 or so that the thought on which I was allowed to lift my prayerfully immobilized bones out of bed, some considerable time before the dawn, was this, from the usual source: "If I wanted you to do it, I could have you working on four books at once."
At that time, if I remember correctly, I already had more than one book on the go, yet there was a certain sense of precision to the statement that only comes clear now, thanks to the Net, Blogger, and, as always, the amazing technical skills of MT. In the last ten days she has not only transferred the entire text of Not Without The Angels to a more pleasing format but also unearthed the twelve chapters of The Yacht, my story most concerned with music instruction, heretofore buried in Microsoft Word on the old computer, and set it up on the Ranger list. (Mind you, The Yacht does not yet connect with Sitemeter, but this does not interfere with readership, only with the author's awareness of whose reading it. No life can be truly full which does not include a little mystery.)
So now, I work away at four distinct undertakings in print. While I have not been discontent with less, previously, daily wondering gratefully at the available technology, I must confess that the foursome does give me a definite sense of fullness, and I think brings with it an added sense of leisure. Writing well is inevitably an anxious business, and anything that will tone down the stress must be welcome. The goal, I think, is to be able to feel, writing your own stuff, as you feel, reading Jane Austen. (At the moment on Emma, and in general on course with the entire canon, film and book, since the middle of Advent, as it is the perfect material for the moment in a faith community run ragged by the sort of undisciplined imaginations Jane is so good at exposing. I said as much to our bishop, over a cup of tea in my living room.)
The timing is not unprovidential, nor contrary to gradual, and eminently mysterious, unfolding of my grasp of music theory and technique. Although I had an extremely good time with the first dozen chapters of The Yacht, and although they admittedly contain a mass of music instruction that must daunt any reader, and probably dismiss the faint-hearted, in spite of my every effort to make the logical as plain as possible, they still lacked certain essentials, certain fundamentals of the art of teaching anyone without previous instruction, yet possessed of a working ear and a grasp of the common sense of arithmetic, especially when it came to uniting fingers, sound, and the printed staves with all those funny little black marks that look so undecipherable.
A long time ago the Lord said to me: "It's my book, and I market it how I like." In those days, I assumed he was only talking about my first novel, as I had no idea of creating a music text that stood by itself, although I was putting a lot of music instruction into my fiction. Jacob Cameron was not for idle chatter the adopted grandson of Philippe Gagnon, whose understanding of all sorts of music was as close to incomparable as one could get. But of course the Lord always means more than he seems to at first hearing.
I have to admit that I enjoyed re-reading chapter twelve of The Yacht, where I had left off many months ago, and had only to do a little editing before I felt I could release the story on the Net. I also must admit that once I had come up with the two immediately previous posts on the channel at hand, I began to wonder if that was it for using the Ranger for so much music instruction, as Yacht had been precisely designed for that purpose, initially inspired after discovering an utter rocket of a keyboard drill featuring right hand triads and left hand octaves, all put together to deal with all the possibilities of those associations in logical a dramatic order, somewhat in the style of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, except for the ease which should go with any sensible scale study. This was all very well at the time, and good for a chapter that generally had a positive effect on those good enough to read it for me, but it certainly did not unlock the secrets of a truly comfortable study of four-part harmony and reading skills.
But this last is pretty much done now, at least to the point where I can give the next section of the book the precision it has been waiting for. So, there's a dozen chapters of the tale, here comes the rest of the lessons, and there are enough interesting signs out there in the real world to indicate that the entertainment community might just be capable of waking up, eventually.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Mary Christmas, Keyboarders
How come Mary instead of Merry?
Because the most recent stop on this long and complicated journey to get to music fundamentals that every child should and can know came through Gregorian Chant Mass IX, traditionally the mass used to celebrate a feast dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In my early years in the Church, before everybody got so busy either misinterpreting or downright disobeying Vatican Two, while I did chant quite steadily, it was usually Mass VIII, that of the angels, at least the Kyrie of which was not in old mode D. This was good as far as it went, and infinitely better than all that slop written by second rate priests on fourth rate guitars, but it was by no means old mode D, which was created in the mind of the Eternal from way back, and might even lead to the conversion of Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, etc, once they realize how it cranks a Stratocaster into outer space, right up there with the angels, their boss of the feminine version, and the Face everybody both longs to see and is afraid just might show up. Grace builds on nature, as Saint Thomas was always saying, and there's nothing more natural than old mode D, especially on a git-fiddle. I haven't had time to sort it out on the 5-string yet, but we'll probably get there.
The funny thing was, Santa's little helper in all this discovery was something of an old enemy, that is, just one more publisher who wouldn't publish my novel, and was none too bright about it. But as Augustine says, the guy you let you down today just might be the guy with the helping hand tomorrow.
Ignatius started off well, with us. In 1985, they published The Ratzinger Report, a modest little volume that did many things for my piece of mind, but the principle effect of which was to reassure me that John Paul's theological alter ego was good at his job - running the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith - and had few illusions about the idiot factor so rife in the Church. But when Ignatius couldn't grasp the obvious significance of Contemplatives I had to write them off with that old bromide that superintendents of schools use to mercifully identify a none too effective teacher: "Works well under supervision."
But then in 1997 they worked very well indeed, and certainly without any supervision of me, in an area for which I was most unqualified, when they brought out Adoremus, the parish hymnal that contains all sorts of chant - although no Latin Credos - all nicely laid out in a mere three parts, making life all that much easier for the beginner. The ancient melody, from the days of no accompaniment, no harmonies, in the treble stave, with fairly simple two voice arrangements in the bass. This ordering of the notes was not original with the publisher, as I thought too gratefully at first, but was simply in line with the original practice, as was proved by photographs from old manuscripts in a book Marianne ordered, concerning the legendary Monsignor Richard Schuler.
Nonetheless, perhaps with the interfering aid of the Muse's finger, I found the two-voices not to my taste, and then came out of my agonies with the realization that I should create a predictable, musically logical, schedule of two voices, that would do for numbers practice - eventually solfage practice - in every key. It is, after all, the fingers, not the eyes, that make the actual sounds.
I have given this for guitar, in my mind at least in old D mode with a dropped 6th string. Here it is for keyboard. I would recommend the initial run in C major. I write it for two octaves, with the single right hand finger, preferably 3, ranging from tonic to tonic. It comes first with the smaller intervals in the left hand, 3rds and 4ths, and then with the larger, 5ths and 6ths.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 1 e above small c = 3
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 small c = 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 e above small c = 3
5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 g below small c = 5
The second schedule provides the richer sound, of course, because it creates real triads, not modified triads like the first schedule. But it is naturally harder to grasp, because the melody is hidden in the left hand. I`ve been quite close to it for years, but never so precisely as now, never so able to use it for initial reading studies, never so flooding my thoughts with images of a cathedral organ using real music theory to bring the congregation back to its senses, in the way that only chant can do.
If there are any gainsayers left out there they should be advised that the angel Gabriel was big around here last week. That`s the fellow on trumpet.
When you get good at alternating on these patterns, from the small to the large intervals and back again, you`re close to reading.
Because the most recent stop on this long and complicated journey to get to music fundamentals that every child should and can know came through Gregorian Chant Mass IX, traditionally the mass used to celebrate a feast dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In my early years in the Church, before everybody got so busy either misinterpreting or downright disobeying Vatican Two, while I did chant quite steadily, it was usually Mass VIII, that of the angels, at least the Kyrie of which was not in old mode D. This was good as far as it went, and infinitely better than all that slop written by second rate priests on fourth rate guitars, but it was by no means old mode D, which was created in the mind of the Eternal from way back, and might even lead to the conversion of Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton, etc, once they realize how it cranks a Stratocaster into outer space, right up there with the angels, their boss of the feminine version, and the Face everybody both longs to see and is afraid just might show up. Grace builds on nature, as Saint Thomas was always saying, and there's nothing more natural than old mode D, especially on a git-fiddle. I haven't had time to sort it out on the 5-string yet, but we'll probably get there.
The funny thing was, Santa's little helper in all this discovery was something of an old enemy, that is, just one more publisher who wouldn't publish my novel, and was none too bright about it. But as Augustine says, the guy you let you down today just might be the guy with the helping hand tomorrow.
Ignatius started off well, with us. In 1985, they published The Ratzinger Report, a modest little volume that did many things for my piece of mind, but the principle effect of which was to reassure me that John Paul's theological alter ego was good at his job - running the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith - and had few illusions about the idiot factor so rife in the Church. But when Ignatius couldn't grasp the obvious significance of Contemplatives I had to write them off with that old bromide that superintendents of schools use to mercifully identify a none too effective teacher: "Works well under supervision."
But then in 1997 they worked very well indeed, and certainly without any supervision of me, in an area for which I was most unqualified, when they brought out Adoremus, the parish hymnal that contains all sorts of chant - although no Latin Credos - all nicely laid out in a mere three parts, making life all that much easier for the beginner. The ancient melody, from the days of no accompaniment, no harmonies, in the treble stave, with fairly simple two voice arrangements in the bass. This ordering of the notes was not original with the publisher, as I thought too gratefully at first, but was simply in line with the original practice, as was proved by photographs from old manuscripts in a book Marianne ordered, concerning the legendary Monsignor Richard Schuler.
Nonetheless, perhaps with the interfering aid of the Muse's finger, I found the two-voices not to my taste, and then came out of my agonies with the realization that I should create a predictable, musically logical, schedule of two voices, that would do for numbers practice - eventually solfage practice - in every key. It is, after all, the fingers, not the eyes, that make the actual sounds.
I have given this for guitar, in my mind at least in old D mode with a dropped 6th string. Here it is for keyboard. I would recommend the initial run in C major. I write it for two octaves, with the single right hand finger, preferably 3, ranging from tonic to tonic. It comes first with the smaller intervals in the left hand, 3rds and 4ths, and then with the larger, 5ths and 6ths.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 1 e above small c = 3
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 small c = 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 middle c = 1
3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 e above small c = 3
5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 7 1 1 3 4 5 5 g below small c = 5
The second schedule provides the richer sound, of course, because it creates real triads, not modified triads like the first schedule. But it is naturally harder to grasp, because the melody is hidden in the left hand. I`ve been quite close to it for years, but never so precisely as now, never so able to use it for initial reading studies, never so flooding my thoughts with images of a cathedral organ using real music theory to bring the congregation back to its senses, in the way that only chant can do.
If there are any gainsayers left out there they should be advised that the angel Gabriel was big around here last week. That`s the fellow on trumpet.
When you get good at alternating on these patterns, from the small to the large intervals and back again, you`re close to reading.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Mary Christmas, Rockers
I suspect this is going to be a long one, sort of a novella unto itself, and done in chunks, like morning around the Christmas tree, with one present after another to open. On that occasion, in my trinitarian household, we always have breakfast first, and make sure there's lots of coffee, and of course my coffee always get laced with brandy or single malt. It was the same when we were happily stocked with six children
Another familiar image to keep in mind is the school teacher's blackboard, with plenty of chalk, an eraser for the inevitable mistakes that seem to come when a newly discovered doctrine is being exposed for the first time, a good old fashioned pointer for whacking on the board to wake up the nodding heads, or to point out the essential stepping stones in the crossing of the troubled and confusing stream known as music theory.
The tree, in this case, is the old fashioned D Mode, the one they used for a couple of thousand years, possibly, before someone thought of adding the Bflat, the first of the accidentals. It went like this, for a simple octave only:
D E F G A B C D
That's right, no Bflat. This means that the second half-tone comes between the B and the C, or, in the all essential numbers that no publisher other than myself seems to know how to think about, 6 and 7.
So let's have all the numbers, for just an octave, for now.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 ( This one is also known as 8.)
Furthermore, to make the schema complete, and also to smack the crap out of the tradition of the theoretical foundations of the thinking of the Teutons and their offspring - English, Dutch, Scandahoovian, etc., let's bring up solfage.
Re Me Fa So Lah Te Do Re (I give the lah an 'h' for future reference.)
Now, any really good music school will teach you all three of these names, but I'm not so sure that such music schools exist more than in theory. In my long life around music I'm the only teacher I know who has the common sense - a very favourite term of Thomas Aquinas - to start absolutely with numbers, especially in instrumental studies, and I've no history at all of leadership that has anything to do with music wheeling out the incredible dynamics of an individual or a group waltzing around with enormous effect with the syllables of solfage, when it comes to vocal instruction. It's as if Guido D'Arrezo never existed, and everyone's forgotten the story of how his fellow monks hated his guts and only the Pope of the day was able to see the light and shut their goddamn mouths, and thus put the icing on the cake that was Gregorian, at least until the polyphonists created their own versions of chaos and confusion, and lost the body of the one really important choir, the people in the pews. Nothing ever really changes, right? Christ is forever having to put the Sanhedrin in its place.
This doesn't mean that I don't like great choral music. God forbid. Everyone knows that such a creation provides an enormous sense of the choirs of heaven, of there really existing such a community as the angels, especially for those who cannot read Saint Thomas on the same subject and only get the buzz through music. But what I really love is to hear an ordinary congregation, led by a good voice or two, getting all that love, grace, salvation, and perhaps even a taste of perfection, out of the ordinary food of the mass, Gregorian Chant. Nothing else can bring the Holy Spirit so fully, so evident.
The following, by the way, works on anything, especially an organ keyboard, but what I have in mind this morning, following the nifty practices of the last couple of days, is the guitar.
1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5
5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3
1 1 5 1 5 1 1 1 1 5 1 5 1
Now, goddammit, and beating the shit out of the blackboard, get it in your imbecile head, that it is the MIDDLE line that leads the way, and that, on the guitar, is in the MIDDLE of the instrument. The 5, happily, is the fifth string, the A, open. And the 6, the 7, and the 1 continue on the same string. Only a fool, such as I was in my chords-only early days, jumps immediately to a higher string. The docile student will do well to work on just this scale, dividing it into its logical numeric parts: 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3; 3,4,5; 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3. This simple bit of common sense and humility, as opposed to the incredibly-idiotic-because-mentally-stultifying-whole-scale-method-of-interpretration, will make a Clapton or a Knopfler of the beginner more quickly than even Johann Sebastian Bach or Carlos Montoya could imagine.
In this schema, for the moment, one never even gets to the First string. Don't worry. It becomes useful, especially in the higher modes. Musicians always have to learn how to make the middle of the scales sound interesting. (Especially when they're singers.)
The upper line is, of course, the harmony. Just thirds, with the odd fourth. How simple, how neglected, like a lot of simple things. And I would recommend getting a good handle on just this basic double-stopping, as dear old Amy Ferguson called it, before too much ambition for the piece de resistance, that is, the adding of the bass line and therefore the real butt-kicker. Just as it took me so damn long to realize that the heart of the guitar was in the lower line as the melody, so I was sluggish to realize how to use dropped D.
This was to a very large degree the fault of the practical operation of the Roman Catholic Church and its insufferable neglect, amongst its modern bishops, to apply the norms of its own rules and advice, following Vatican Two, and the insistence, in the document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium,
that Gregorian Chant be given the pride of place.
Had the various collections of bishops North America has had in the last decades ever got their act into gear, I might have caught on sooner. Singing garbage, or the second rate, teaches us nothing, surrenders no insights.
You will, of course, need three fingers. All music resolves in three notes. Thus it imitates theology, which always resolves in three persons. Eat your heart out, all religions other than that which has been drawn up into the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And yet , I must admit, it is the Virgin Mary who provided me with the insights on the D mode. Mass IX, from the good old XII century, when was born Saint Francis of Assisi, troubadour turned founder and stigmatic.
Another familiar image to keep in mind is the school teacher's blackboard, with plenty of chalk, an eraser for the inevitable mistakes that seem to come when a newly discovered doctrine is being exposed for the first time, a good old fashioned pointer for whacking on the board to wake up the nodding heads, or to point out the essential stepping stones in the crossing of the troubled and confusing stream known as music theory.
The tree, in this case, is the old fashioned D Mode, the one they used for a couple of thousand years, possibly, before someone thought of adding the Bflat, the first of the accidentals. It went like this, for a simple octave only:
D E F G A B C D
That's right, no Bflat. This means that the second half-tone comes between the B and the C, or, in the all essential numbers that no publisher other than myself seems to know how to think about, 6 and 7.
So let's have all the numbers, for just an octave, for now.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 ( This one is also known as 8.)
Furthermore, to make the schema complete, and also to smack the crap out of the tradition of the theoretical foundations of the thinking of the Teutons and their offspring - English, Dutch, Scandahoovian, etc., let's bring up solfage.
Re Me Fa So Lah Te Do Re (I give the lah an 'h' for future reference.)
Now, any really good music school will teach you all three of these names, but I'm not so sure that such music schools exist more than in theory. In my long life around music I'm the only teacher I know who has the common sense - a very favourite term of Thomas Aquinas - to start absolutely with numbers, especially in instrumental studies, and I've no history at all of leadership that has anything to do with music wheeling out the incredible dynamics of an individual or a group waltzing around with enormous effect with the syllables of solfage, when it comes to vocal instruction. It's as if Guido D'Arrezo never existed, and everyone's forgotten the story of how his fellow monks hated his guts and only the Pope of the day was able to see the light and shut their goddamn mouths, and thus put the icing on the cake that was Gregorian, at least until the polyphonists created their own versions of chaos and confusion, and lost the body of the one really important choir, the people in the pews. Nothing ever really changes, right? Christ is forever having to put the Sanhedrin in its place.
This doesn't mean that I don't like great choral music. God forbid. Everyone knows that such a creation provides an enormous sense of the choirs of heaven, of there really existing such a community as the angels, especially for those who cannot read Saint Thomas on the same subject and only get the buzz through music. But what I really love is to hear an ordinary congregation, led by a good voice or two, getting all that love, grace, salvation, and perhaps even a taste of perfection, out of the ordinary food of the mass, Gregorian Chant. Nothing else can bring the Holy Spirit so fully, so evident.
The following, by the way, works on anything, especially an organ keyboard, but what I have in mind this morning, following the nifty practices of the last couple of days, is the guitar.
1 1 2 3 5 5 6 1 1 2 3 5 5
5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3
1 1 5 1 5 1 1 1 1 5 1 5 1
Now, goddammit, and beating the shit out of the blackboard, get it in your imbecile head, that it is the MIDDLE line that leads the way, and that, on the guitar, is in the MIDDLE of the instrument. The 5, happily, is the fifth string, the A, open. And the 6, the 7, and the 1 continue on the same string. Only a fool, such as I was in my chords-only early days, jumps immediately to a higher string. The docile student will do well to work on just this scale, dividing it into its logical numeric parts: 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3; 3,4,5; 5,6,7,1; 1,2,3. This simple bit of common sense and humility, as opposed to the incredibly-idiotic-because-mentally-stultifying-whole-scale-method-of-interpretration, will make a Clapton or a Knopfler of the beginner more quickly than even Johann Sebastian Bach or Carlos Montoya could imagine.
In this schema, for the moment, one never even gets to the First string. Don't worry. It becomes useful, especially in the higher modes. Musicians always have to learn how to make the middle of the scales sound interesting. (Especially when they're singers.)
The upper line is, of course, the harmony. Just thirds, with the odd fourth. How simple, how neglected, like a lot of simple things. And I would recommend getting a good handle on just this basic double-stopping, as dear old Amy Ferguson called it, before too much ambition for the piece de resistance, that is, the adding of the bass line and therefore the real butt-kicker. Just as it took me so damn long to realize that the heart of the guitar was in the lower line as the melody, so I was sluggish to realize how to use dropped D.
This was to a very large degree the fault of the practical operation of the Roman Catholic Church and its insufferable neglect, amongst its modern bishops, to apply the norms of its own rules and advice, following Vatican Two, and the insistence, in the document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium,
that Gregorian Chant be given the pride of place.
Had the various collections of bishops North America has had in the last decades ever got their act into gear, I might have caught on sooner. Singing garbage, or the second rate, teaches us nothing, surrenders no insights.
You will, of course, need three fingers. All music resolves in three notes. Thus it imitates theology, which always resolves in three persons. Eat your heart out, all religions other than that which has been drawn up into the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And yet , I must admit, it is the Virgin Mary who provided me with the insights on the D mode. Mass IX, from the good old XII century, when was born Saint Francis of Assisi, troubadour turned founder and stigmatic.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Ivan Turgenev
Many months ago I came home from yet another lesson in the real essentials of music - numbers, numbers, numbers - with Tim McDaniel, to find that I had received a virtual flurry of hits on my blog from Russia. In spite of the absolute necessity of spiritual perfection for getting into Heaven, the spiritual writer must always settle for relative anonymity, complete lack of notice in his own time, and never seek to expect the fame that comes to those who deliberately write for the attention of the world, sending up the traditional sops to the thinking of the earthbound, especially in the lamentable areas of gratuitious violence, sensuality, and the acquisition of wealth and power; and in religious writing, the simple minded sentimentality of those who know nothing of interior suffering, and imagine that babbling about spirituality makes for devotion; so this snow storm of attention, relatively speaking, both flabbergasted and delighted me.
Like any true lover of literature, I have, of course, enormous respect for the Russian story tellers and playwrights, and value my considerable experience, all other things considered, of their genius. For one thing, hugely important to a soul like myself whose childhood relationship with nature, with the visible earth, was unquestionably a religious relationship, the Russian love of landscape, of the fields that grew their food, had always been incredibly evocative. When I taught grade six geography, it was almost like reading the Bible to have explained to me how milleniums of birch leaves had created so many feet of top soil, and when a young friend gave me Gogol's "Dead Souls" to read I was not unaware of the humour of odd way of reckoning personal wealth among land owners, but I found the descriptions of the estates even more interesting, a most acute reminder of my own time among the fields and farms of Canada, that other great expanse of territory, so much of it virtually empty. So the fact that I could be read in Russia, thanks to the wizardry of Blogger and the Net, is such a return to some very happy and purposeful days of the past.
Tovarich.
Keep in mind also that my widowed Nana's second husband was Russian by birth, orphaned in England, and that where I live in the Kootenays makes it impossible not to be cheek by jowl with the Russian accent of the Doukhobors, who have been here in quantity since the very early 1900s. They too are great lovers of what you grow cabbages in, and all the Anglos around here have learned their recipes for borsch.
I wonder if these Russian readers have hung in there, shifting over to Google Reader. In daily life, in the quite constant encounters with new acquaintances, I invariably strike fire as an artist, a listener, a man committed to the universal presence of a basic human interest in the spiritual life, but the good ship of open exchange and conversation also quite constantly hits a reef at some point after the inescapable fact - in my life - of Catholicism crops up. That most useful phrase of Thomas Aquinas - obediential potential - seems to be a factor of individual human growth very few souls can recognize, for one reason or another, and the ignominy of relating sincerely to someone who actually believes in the need for a Pope and a carefully structured, dogmatic, Church, looms with frightening inconvenience to a variety of deeply cherished personal preferences.
Russians, of course, like everybody else, have deeply cherished personal preferences. Mostly to a man, they stick to their schismatic predicament, even if it threatens to drive them crazy, or to vodka, as the statistics show it does to an alarming extent. One can, of course, with impeccable justice, lay much of the blame on the general depression of the land of the bear created by the evil genius of Josef Stalin, and the mentally clogging filth of atheistic communism. Talk about galley slaves mired in their own excrement.
But the Russians also knew their good and useful talents of great calibre, Turgenev by no means the least. For the perceptive writer, there are magnificent weapons in his arsenal. One might consider them amongst the most effective in the unique Russian weaponry, a gifted sensitivity for dealing with a selection of the enemies of life even longer than he imagined, and perhaps more universal.
That the Czar and his minions should have put him under house arrest indicates the sickness of the anti-Western mentality in Russia he was trying to overcome, and forecasts the need of the revolution, and that Turgenev should have chronicled so well the death rattles of his society provides a wonderful index of folly in all sociological entities. His ghost rages through so many factors and elements in modern Catholicism, where leadership behaves so slavishly imitative of his tiresome government officials.
What a price we pay for illiteracy, especially in leadership.
Like any true lover of literature, I have, of course, enormous respect for the Russian story tellers and playwrights, and value my considerable experience, all other things considered, of their genius. For one thing, hugely important to a soul like myself whose childhood relationship with nature, with the visible earth, was unquestionably a religious relationship, the Russian love of landscape, of the fields that grew their food, had always been incredibly evocative. When I taught grade six geography, it was almost like reading the Bible to have explained to me how milleniums of birch leaves had created so many feet of top soil, and when a young friend gave me Gogol's "Dead Souls" to read I was not unaware of the humour of odd way of reckoning personal wealth among land owners, but I found the descriptions of the estates even more interesting, a most acute reminder of my own time among the fields and farms of Canada, that other great expanse of territory, so much of it virtually empty. So the fact that I could be read in Russia, thanks to the wizardry of Blogger and the Net, is such a return to some very happy and purposeful days of the past.
Tovarich.
Keep in mind also that my widowed Nana's second husband was Russian by birth, orphaned in England, and that where I live in the Kootenays makes it impossible not to be cheek by jowl with the Russian accent of the Doukhobors, who have been here in quantity since the very early 1900s. They too are great lovers of what you grow cabbages in, and all the Anglos around here have learned their recipes for borsch.
I wonder if these Russian readers have hung in there, shifting over to Google Reader. In daily life, in the quite constant encounters with new acquaintances, I invariably strike fire as an artist, a listener, a man committed to the universal presence of a basic human interest in the spiritual life, but the good ship of open exchange and conversation also quite constantly hits a reef at some point after the inescapable fact - in my life - of Catholicism crops up. That most useful phrase of Thomas Aquinas - obediential potential - seems to be a factor of individual human growth very few souls can recognize, for one reason or another, and the ignominy of relating sincerely to someone who actually believes in the need for a Pope and a carefully structured, dogmatic, Church, looms with frightening inconvenience to a variety of deeply cherished personal preferences.
Russians, of course, like everybody else, have deeply cherished personal preferences. Mostly to a man, they stick to their schismatic predicament, even if it threatens to drive them crazy, or to vodka, as the statistics show it does to an alarming extent. One can, of course, with impeccable justice, lay much of the blame on the general depression of the land of the bear created by the evil genius of Josef Stalin, and the mentally clogging filth of atheistic communism. Talk about galley slaves mired in their own excrement.
But the Russians also knew their good and useful talents of great calibre, Turgenev by no means the least. For the perceptive writer, there are magnificent weapons in his arsenal. One might consider them amongst the most effective in the unique Russian weaponry, a gifted sensitivity for dealing with a selection of the enemies of life even longer than he imagined, and perhaps more universal.
That the Czar and his minions should have put him under house arrest indicates the sickness of the anti-Western mentality in Russia he was trying to overcome, and forecasts the need of the revolution, and that Turgenev should have chronicled so well the death rattles of his society provides a wonderful index of folly in all sociological entities. His ghost rages through so many factors and elements in modern Catholicism, where leadership behaves so slavishly imitative of his tiresome government officials.
What a price we pay for illiteracy, especially in leadership.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
King Ralph
Yes, I'm very fond of John Goodman. A big actor, in body, and a very big actor in talent. He dances well, too, and I take a particular pleasure in watching big people show a dancer's skill. I've seen a number of his films but I'll save space and unwonted distraction by mentioning only the one, King Ralph, because it provides the perfect image for a complaint. Not about John, you understand, but about the thinking - or lack of it - behind music writing software. In case anyone hasn't seen the movie, just let me say that the salient point is that ordinary American Joe J.G., a musician anxious to cut a record and find fame and fortune, turns out to be a very distant relation to the British Royal Family and thus succeeds to the throne of England when everyone else gets electrocuted standing on metal bleachers in the damp for a group photo. Right, it's a comedy. It's a very entertaining plot, with also a beautiful actress, and when a more likely heir - Peter O'Toole - admits his connection to the crown, Goodman happily bows out in return for his own recording studio, back in L.A.
All this from me because MT has been scouting the Net for a programme by which I can share my latest scale discoveries, both in single note and added voices, with interested students. That is, interested students already familiar with ordinary staves, and who haven't been coached on my fundamental use of the numbers. The numbers people have got themselves a trio of humdingers, studies I'm almost proud of, were it not that I have to shake my head over how long it took to find something so obvious. Is that how Einstein felt when he finally came up with E=MC2?
There are a lot of programmes, but they are totally oriented to would-be composers, most of them addicted to noise. This may be all right in its place, but where is the room for teaching? Is it that difficult to the technical whiz kids to add the chops for fingering notation? One of first schemes MT found I sat to, and happily typed in an old-fashioned D mode octave, very much pleased with how much neater the computer printed than I can. But where was the device for letting me put down fingering as neatly and quickly as the notes of the scale? Do these designers have no idea of the history of wars over fingering? It's almost as outrageous as the controversies over voice training.
How can so much money, so much science, simply drop the ball where pedagogy is so necessary?
Does the Great White West really want to keep itself in the Third World as far as basic music understanding is at stake?
All this from me because MT has been scouting the Net for a programme by which I can share my latest scale discoveries, both in single note and added voices, with interested students. That is, interested students already familiar with ordinary staves, and who haven't been coached on my fundamental use of the numbers. The numbers people have got themselves a trio of humdingers, studies I'm almost proud of, were it not that I have to shake my head over how long it took to find something so obvious. Is that how Einstein felt when he finally came up with E=MC2?
There are a lot of programmes, but they are totally oriented to would-be composers, most of them addicted to noise. This may be all right in its place, but where is the room for teaching? Is it that difficult to the technical whiz kids to add the chops for fingering notation? One of first schemes MT found I sat to, and happily typed in an old-fashioned D mode octave, very much pleased with how much neater the computer printed than I can. But where was the device for letting me put down fingering as neatly and quickly as the notes of the scale? Do these designers have no idea of the history of wars over fingering? It's almost as outrageous as the controversies over voice training.
How can so much money, so much science, simply drop the ball where pedagogy is so necessary?
Does the Great White West really want to keep itself in the Third World as far as basic music understanding is at stake?
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Forty-four Years Ago
I think it was on our last return from Kaslo, as we drove through that part of the lake shore where Marianne grew up, that her late mother's spirit - it is All Saint's Day, early in the morning, that I write - said to me, "Aren't you glad that I insisted that she go to Saint Joseph's?"
It was a very sweet moment, and because Father Matthieu had become well accustomed to the ordinary level of the household conversations, being an attentive child of Francis of Assisi, I was able to share it immediately. This has rarely been easy with Canadian priests, never been easy with our diocesan priests, especially the home grown ones, but it has become a given with Matthieu and our Capuchin bishop. No wonder my "first priest" was Padre Pio, and my second saint's biography - after Cardinal Newman's Apologia - was Jorgensen's story of the stigmatic. Marianne laughed, of course, because in the summer after grade six she had made up her mind that she was not going to submit to a martinet, especially one so fanatical about grammar. I heard about this decision, to my surprise, when I stopped in at the garage one afternoon in the latter days of my cooking duties at the diocesan summer camp. Marianne had been cutting the grass on the front lawn as I wheeled in, and I simply asked her as a matter of course about seeing her in the fall.
At the time, the word from Heaven was simply a nice moment, as I said, something to chuckle over in the course of an hour's drive in the evening, now dark as we were nearing Nelson. Like any lunkhead of an earth-dweller, I had no idea of what the Almighty Muse and his little friend from Valmadrera, northern Italy, had in mind.
It was not until the autumn of 1966, the early weeks of my last year in the classroom, that Providence finally began to explain one of the major reasons I had been inspired, right at the beginning of knowing Shawn, to think of settling in Nelson, and why it had been so worth it to endure the slings and arrows of a totally unsuspected fortune, that of being so disappointed in the university. It was in that fateful autumn that I discovered, through a writing assignment, that MT had the very valuable talents of a story teller. (This was Providence beginning to explain; the rest of the revelation did not come until a few weeks after Christmas, when I gave another assignment in original work, this one in religion class.)
You could not really blame the twelve-year old for her reluctance. To her and the rest of that huge grade six class, I had been merely the demanding old grammarian who roared through the door three afternoons a week to splatter the blackboard with such annoying terms as nouns, verbs, conjunctions, subordinate clauses and so on, and also had the infernal cheek to insist, not at all timidly or in a soft and gentle voice, that these things were the stuff of ordinary human life. Hardly the way to win the academic heart of a poetic young lady. In my own classroom I also drilled the grammar until they reeled, but at least there were all the other subjects, and a great deal of music and art and literature. Apparently the grade sevens had not shared the history of their good fortune with the grade sixes, or else Marianne, living miles out of town, had not been around to hear the stories.
But, as I said, Mercedes Tremblay, diminutive little person though she was, put her foot down, and the daughter returned for her final year at Saint Joe's. A good six or seven of her female classmates, on the other hand, moved on to the junior high, leaving me with ten girls and twenty boys, one of whom became a star in the NHL, and two others heroes of the eventual war in the Balkans. They were no more loved or disciplined than the others, but all teachers spend a little time now and then wondering where their charges will end up.
She did manage to sit as far away from her teacher as possible, electing a seat in the farthest corner, day after day quietly doing all her work very well, leaving me with no complaints about her attitude or behaviour and therefore that much more time to spend with the harder wills and slower minds. And living out of town, she did not volunteer with the rest of the girls, who showed up in spades on a Saturday afternoon after I had asked for help with the vegetable preparation for a mighty stew Shawn and I cooked up for a parent-teacher get together.
But not long after, I laid on an assignment in creative writing, insisting that it be more or less authentic, with names changed to protect the innocent or guilty, and the quiet, albeit orderly and productive mouse from the back corner roared with a voice that utterly shook the teacher. I wanted short stories, and I wanted them to be more fact than fiction. Everybody had a life worth looking at with a judicial eye, even adolescents, and in my second year of teaching in Terrace, before we came to Nelson, my grade eights had proved this in spades, each raconteur reading aloud to the class during art class. We'd all had an enormous amount of fun telling the truth. Part of the trick was to tell the kids they should write dialogue if it came up, something I can't remember thinking of when I was faced with the burden of a school room sketch.
For reasons I can't remember, I did not ask for the first stories to be read out, but simply took them in to be marked. A lot my boys played organized hockey, so I received all sorts of Foster Hewitt and Danny Gallivan, and of very respectable length. My future warriors wrote hugely of tank battles. But it was MT who came up with some humourous realism, so craftily done, so utterly beyond anything I could have written at the same age, even if my spelling had always been more consistently better than hers has ever been, that I was simply amazed as well as very much pleased, because she had so justified my pedagogical intuitions. It had helped the tale no little, mind you, that I myself made an excellent protagonist, being the camp cook pretty much responsible for setting the tone of good order and discipline, but at my best, I was still only a foil for the four girls as lively and quick as any heroines of that age I had ever read about, and this story was actually true, as well as artlessly told, right to the last sentence. I kept waiting for the initial sparkle to fade, finding it difficult to believe that a child could sustain such a robust unfolding of the imaginative memory, but the tale rolled on, quite effortlessly, to a fitting conclusion. A real beginning, a real middle, a real end, without any of the common resort of importing incidents and characters actually outside, and often well outside, the actual history of the author. I think especially of Mark Twain and L.M. Montgomery. It also helped that the setting was the diocesan summer camp for children, located on a lake with a fine beach and all the paraphernalia that goes with a well established facility. I had quite loved my first summer in camp kitchen, and was delighted to have it brought back so well.
Was this simply phenomenal luck, a one shot that she would never be able to repeat, or had a mere classroom teacher stumbled across a genuine writer of significant stories, one whose name was destined to go down in history, and therefore, possibly, much more of a responsibility for his own knowledge of the trade than would be your ordinary student? I did in fact, later, spend a certain amount of time talking with her about writing more fiction, but nothing conclusive in that genre really worked, no doubt because what did begin to come out, some weeks after Christmas, was the series of letters between us that led to Marianne's becoming a contemplative, and eventually, the bane of wicked or sluggish clergy and religious and an advisor to Popes. All of this, of course, was of much more use to God than an anecdote about four young girls in conflict - I forget who won - with a camp cook.
And so, for years, we left it at that. Then, in 1978, six full years after entering the domestic monastery, she was moved to write a short story about a high school football match and its aftermath. She wrote it quickly, shrugged, and put it away in a folder with some letters, and it never turned up again until three weeks ago when Father Matthieu, for reasons unknown to me, asked to see some of the correspondence that had passed between Rome and ourselves. In the course of getting out the relevant folders, MT found the hand-written draft of the story. She instantly recognized the life, the truth, and the way to put something up on her blog. The rewrite was done in a weekend, and though I am generally against rushing where creation is concerned, I found myself with the good old school teacher/editor's corrective pencil in hand by Sunday night, thoroughly enjoying myself, and the post went up not long after.
She insists she doesn't have another story in her, but then she talked that way about poetry for a long time. We shall see.
It was a very sweet moment, and because Father Matthieu had become well accustomed to the ordinary level of the household conversations, being an attentive child of Francis of Assisi, I was able to share it immediately. This has rarely been easy with Canadian priests, never been easy with our diocesan priests, especially the home grown ones, but it has become a given with Matthieu and our Capuchin bishop. No wonder my "first priest" was Padre Pio, and my second saint's biography - after Cardinal Newman's Apologia - was Jorgensen's story of the stigmatic. Marianne laughed, of course, because in the summer after grade six she had made up her mind that she was not going to submit to a martinet, especially one so fanatical about grammar. I heard about this decision, to my surprise, when I stopped in at the garage one afternoon in the latter days of my cooking duties at the diocesan summer camp. Marianne had been cutting the grass on the front lawn as I wheeled in, and I simply asked her as a matter of course about seeing her in the fall.
At the time, the word from Heaven was simply a nice moment, as I said, something to chuckle over in the course of an hour's drive in the evening, now dark as we were nearing Nelson. Like any lunkhead of an earth-dweller, I had no idea of what the Almighty Muse and his little friend from Valmadrera, northern Italy, had in mind.
It was not until the autumn of 1966, the early weeks of my last year in the classroom, that Providence finally began to explain one of the major reasons I had been inspired, right at the beginning of knowing Shawn, to think of settling in Nelson, and why it had been so worth it to endure the slings and arrows of a totally unsuspected fortune, that of being so disappointed in the university. It was in that fateful autumn that I discovered, through a writing assignment, that MT had the very valuable talents of a story teller. (This was Providence beginning to explain; the rest of the revelation did not come until a few weeks after Christmas, when I gave another assignment in original work, this one in religion class.)
You could not really blame the twelve-year old for her reluctance. To her and the rest of that huge grade six class, I had been merely the demanding old grammarian who roared through the door three afternoons a week to splatter the blackboard with such annoying terms as nouns, verbs, conjunctions, subordinate clauses and so on, and also had the infernal cheek to insist, not at all timidly or in a soft and gentle voice, that these things were the stuff of ordinary human life. Hardly the way to win the academic heart of a poetic young lady. In my own classroom I also drilled the grammar until they reeled, but at least there were all the other subjects, and a great deal of music and art and literature. Apparently the grade sevens had not shared the history of their good fortune with the grade sixes, or else Marianne, living miles out of town, had not been around to hear the stories.
But, as I said, Mercedes Tremblay, diminutive little person though she was, put her foot down, and the daughter returned for her final year at Saint Joe's. A good six or seven of her female classmates, on the other hand, moved on to the junior high, leaving me with ten girls and twenty boys, one of whom became a star in the NHL, and two others heroes of the eventual war in the Balkans. They were no more loved or disciplined than the others, but all teachers spend a little time now and then wondering where their charges will end up.
She did manage to sit as far away from her teacher as possible, electing a seat in the farthest corner, day after day quietly doing all her work very well, leaving me with no complaints about her attitude or behaviour and therefore that much more time to spend with the harder wills and slower minds. And living out of town, she did not volunteer with the rest of the girls, who showed up in spades on a Saturday afternoon after I had asked for help with the vegetable preparation for a mighty stew Shawn and I cooked up for a parent-teacher get together.
But not long after, I laid on an assignment in creative writing, insisting that it be more or less authentic, with names changed to protect the innocent or guilty, and the quiet, albeit orderly and productive mouse from the back corner roared with a voice that utterly shook the teacher. I wanted short stories, and I wanted them to be more fact than fiction. Everybody had a life worth looking at with a judicial eye, even adolescents, and in my second year of teaching in Terrace, before we came to Nelson, my grade eights had proved this in spades, each raconteur reading aloud to the class during art class. We'd all had an enormous amount of fun telling the truth. Part of the trick was to tell the kids they should write dialogue if it came up, something I can't remember thinking of when I was faced with the burden of a school room sketch.
For reasons I can't remember, I did not ask for the first stories to be read out, but simply took them in to be marked. A lot my boys played organized hockey, so I received all sorts of Foster Hewitt and Danny Gallivan, and of very respectable length. My future warriors wrote hugely of tank battles. But it was MT who came up with some humourous realism, so craftily done, so utterly beyond anything I could have written at the same age, even if my spelling had always been more consistently better than hers has ever been, that I was simply amazed as well as very much pleased, because she had so justified my pedagogical intuitions. It had helped the tale no little, mind you, that I myself made an excellent protagonist, being the camp cook pretty much responsible for setting the tone of good order and discipline, but at my best, I was still only a foil for the four girls as lively and quick as any heroines of that age I had ever read about, and this story was actually true, as well as artlessly told, right to the last sentence. I kept waiting for the initial sparkle to fade, finding it difficult to believe that a child could sustain such a robust unfolding of the imaginative memory, but the tale rolled on, quite effortlessly, to a fitting conclusion. A real beginning, a real middle, a real end, without any of the common resort of importing incidents and characters actually outside, and often well outside, the actual history of the author. I think especially of Mark Twain and L.M. Montgomery. It also helped that the setting was the diocesan summer camp for children, located on a lake with a fine beach and all the paraphernalia that goes with a well established facility. I had quite loved my first summer in camp kitchen, and was delighted to have it brought back so well.
Was this simply phenomenal luck, a one shot that she would never be able to repeat, or had a mere classroom teacher stumbled across a genuine writer of significant stories, one whose name was destined to go down in history, and therefore, possibly, much more of a responsibility for his own knowledge of the trade than would be your ordinary student? I did in fact, later, spend a certain amount of time talking with her about writing more fiction, but nothing conclusive in that genre really worked, no doubt because what did begin to come out, some weeks after Christmas, was the series of letters between us that led to Marianne's becoming a contemplative, and eventually, the bane of wicked or sluggish clergy and religious and an advisor to Popes. All of this, of course, was of much more use to God than an anecdote about four young girls in conflict - I forget who won - with a camp cook.
And so, for years, we left it at that. Then, in 1978, six full years after entering the domestic monastery, she was moved to write a short story about a high school football match and its aftermath. She wrote it quickly, shrugged, and put it away in a folder with some letters, and it never turned up again until three weeks ago when Father Matthieu, for reasons unknown to me, asked to see some of the correspondence that had passed between Rome and ourselves. In the course of getting out the relevant folders, MT found the hand-written draft of the story. She instantly recognized the life, the truth, and the way to put something up on her blog. The rewrite was done in a weekend, and though I am generally against rushing where creation is concerned, I found myself with the good old school teacher/editor's corrective pencil in hand by Sunday night, thoroughly enjoying myself, and the post went up not long after.
She insists she doesn't have another story in her, but then she talked that way about poetry for a long time. We shall see.
Friday, October 22, 2010
High Noon
Remember the great Jimmy Stewart? A lovely actor, almost in all his roles a figure of habitual kindness, a quality not at all constantly easy to effect. The old Westerns from time to time essayed the quality of profound kindness in the gunslinger, the angel of death, thus making him a figure of God.
"Every man owes God a death, and he who pays this year is quit for the next."
This is bold stuff, of course, like most of Shakespeare, but fairly small potatoes when compared to the greater realities of the greater soldiery of the spiritual life, in which every man - or woman, as we must mention in the omnipresent silliness of an age when it is so hard to find a woman who can actually think in symbols - must know that to spiritually die today is by no means to avoid the same thing again tomorrow. Actually, it was a woman who said this, Saint Jane Francis de Chantal, spiritual daughter of Francis de Sales and founder of an order of nuns, the spirit of whom is very hard to find in so many of today's "ladies of the veil", all so eager to destroy the Church as it used to be known.
But we now have a test case, a turning point. Do the nuns begin to come to their senses, and drop their moronic "inclusiveness", actually effeminacy, or do they, like Charlemagne's troublesome Saxons, get backed into some symbolic river, there either to accept baptism or to be drowned? The Saxons, of course, were soldiers, male to the last, and thus having common sense, saw the light. I'm not sure these truculent babes can do the same.
Yep, I had an encounter this morning, right under the vault of our lovely cathedral, following Father Matthieu's last daily mass in our diocese for at least a month, and it had all the earmarks of a classic exorcism. Oh, no, not the kind of a poor possessed soul that has no free will, no control of its faculties, but the other kind, the more important one that comes from diseased minds defying common sense theology and getting away with it, year after year, decade after decade, until they run into a real theologian, a real prophet, a real vessel of the Seventh Mansion, thus, a real exorcist.
Has the Church ever known so many Jezebels, all running around in civilian clothes and mouthing certain selected phrases from both Scripture and the modern imbeciles who clothe themselves as social scientists? I think not. It's quite a unique phenomenon. An urban myth, a plague all of its own singularity.
And this encounter, because God is immensely fond of anniversaries, happened on the anniversary of John Paul II's elevation to the Papacy. As I used to thump on him, being his spiritual director for an interesting ten years, he must have enjoyed the spectacle of my thumping on the very class of religious sister that gave him heart burn. Happy anniversary, JP.
The difference between being a gunslinger and an exorcist, mind you, is that while the gunslinger, at least according to the novels and the films, walks away blowing the smoke from his gun barrel, the poor old exorcist spends the ensuing hours utterly overwhelmed with some of the purgatory his client is either facing into or has, by the exorcist's efforts, avoided.
The crucifix can never go away, nor can the ordeals of passive prayer, of the dark night, from the contemplative.
And neither can the images of the Gospel. Remember Christ, and His whip in the temple? We might yet have such a thing. John Paul said there could be violence erupt out of fiddling with the liturgy, which includes the words of the Mass, many of which have been corrupted by the feminist whoring of the nuns.
In our parish, however, there has been considerable seduction and corruption of the laity, so any broohaha could be voluminous. I got a hint of this at a recent evening, albeit daily, mass.
But with Father Matthieu off to Rome for a month, we will not be showing up at daily mass. They can putter along without the contemplatives, while the contemplatives return to the cathedral after a five week engagement in Kaslo, for the weekend mass, and take it from there.
Get used to it people, the new translation of the mass is coming, and as the Church never tires of insisting, the liturgy is the ultimate public teacher.
It wasn't actually high noon, being about 9:10 a.m., but certainly the guns were blazing. And I had no idea the incident would take place when I began this post! The Muse is most interesting.
"Every man owes God a death, and he who pays this year is quit for the next."
This is bold stuff, of course, like most of Shakespeare, but fairly small potatoes when compared to the greater realities of the greater soldiery of the spiritual life, in which every man - or woman, as we must mention in the omnipresent silliness of an age when it is so hard to find a woman who can actually think in symbols - must know that to spiritually die today is by no means to avoid the same thing again tomorrow. Actually, it was a woman who said this, Saint Jane Francis de Chantal, spiritual daughter of Francis de Sales and founder of an order of nuns, the spirit of whom is very hard to find in so many of today's "ladies of the veil", all so eager to destroy the Church as it used to be known.
But we now have a test case, a turning point. Do the nuns begin to come to their senses, and drop their moronic "inclusiveness", actually effeminacy, or do they, like Charlemagne's troublesome Saxons, get backed into some symbolic river, there either to accept baptism or to be drowned? The Saxons, of course, were soldiers, male to the last, and thus having common sense, saw the light. I'm not sure these truculent babes can do the same.
Yep, I had an encounter this morning, right under the vault of our lovely cathedral, following Father Matthieu's last daily mass in our diocese for at least a month, and it had all the earmarks of a classic exorcism. Oh, no, not the kind of a poor possessed soul that has no free will, no control of its faculties, but the other kind, the more important one that comes from diseased minds defying common sense theology and getting away with it, year after year, decade after decade, until they run into a real theologian, a real prophet, a real vessel of the Seventh Mansion, thus, a real exorcist.
Has the Church ever known so many Jezebels, all running around in civilian clothes and mouthing certain selected phrases from both Scripture and the modern imbeciles who clothe themselves as social scientists? I think not. It's quite a unique phenomenon. An urban myth, a plague all of its own singularity.
And this encounter, because God is immensely fond of anniversaries, happened on the anniversary of John Paul II's elevation to the Papacy. As I used to thump on him, being his spiritual director for an interesting ten years, he must have enjoyed the spectacle of my thumping on the very class of religious sister that gave him heart burn. Happy anniversary, JP.
The difference between being a gunslinger and an exorcist, mind you, is that while the gunslinger, at least according to the novels and the films, walks away blowing the smoke from his gun barrel, the poor old exorcist spends the ensuing hours utterly overwhelmed with some of the purgatory his client is either facing into or has, by the exorcist's efforts, avoided.
The crucifix can never go away, nor can the ordeals of passive prayer, of the dark night, from the contemplative.
And neither can the images of the Gospel. Remember Christ, and His whip in the temple? We might yet have such a thing. John Paul said there could be violence erupt out of fiddling with the liturgy, which includes the words of the Mass, many of which have been corrupted by the feminist whoring of the nuns.
In our parish, however, there has been considerable seduction and corruption of the laity, so any broohaha could be voluminous. I got a hint of this at a recent evening, albeit daily, mass.
But with Father Matthieu off to Rome for a month, we will not be showing up at daily mass. They can putter along without the contemplatives, while the contemplatives return to the cathedral after a five week engagement in Kaslo, for the weekend mass, and take it from there.
Get used to it people, the new translation of the mass is coming, and as the Church never tires of insisting, the liturgy is the ultimate public teacher.
It wasn't actually high noon, being about 9:10 a.m., but certainly the guns were blazing. And I had no idea the incident would take place when I began this post! The Muse is most interesting.
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