Pour the Pimm's. At four a.m. my time, it'll taste a little strange; maybe I'll have it over oatmeal.
Anyway, I don't know whether she made it up, or whether she got it from someplace, but my daughter has been hosting a "What's Your Royal-Wedding-Guest Name?" party on Facebook, and the results so far are funny. Here's the deal:
1. You are Lord or Lady Somebody
2. Your first name comes from one of your grandparents.
3. Your hyphenated surname is a combination of your first pet's name and the name of the street you grew up on.
So I am going as Lady Lyna Cat-Valleybrook. Over oatmeal.
And you?
PS: If you don't want to give out this kind of personal info, you could always have this spiffy device generate an aristocratic title for you.
PPS: You could always opt to go as a celebrity. They seem to be having as many of those as they're having nobility types, though these days it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Me, Myself, and Whoever Else Is Living This Life of Mine
Once upon a time -- in Wales, I believe it was -- Aelred found himself seated at dinner beside a pleasant elderly man, an Anglican priest. During the course of the dinner, Aelred managed to discover that in addition to being a clerk in holy orders, the man also was a tertiary of some order, or a member of some confraternity, or something, with a peculiarly restrictive rule of life. I say that he managed to find this out, because the only part of this rule which I remember now, indeed the only part of the rule relevant to this story, was that tertiaries, or confreres, or whatever they were, were forbidden ever to talk about themselves.
As Aelred said later, this made for maddening dinner conversation. Course after course after course to get through, and all his neighbor would say in response to any remotely personal question was, "Oh, really, that's not important." By the end of the evening, Aelred said, he was torn between an unnatural degree of burning curiosity to know the man's life story, and the temptation to strangle him. To this day I don't know how he actually found out about the rule of life; possibly someone else told him. At any rate, if I ever knew anything about the other people at that dinner, I've long since forgotten it. The only enduringly memorable person at the table -- besides Aelred himself, of course -- was the self-effacing man.
Max Lindenman, subbing for The Anchoress this week, takes on the idea of narcissism and the role of the I in a writer's voice.
I like Phillip Lopate, and I think that what he says here is essentially true. Write what you know, as the wheezy maxim goes, and what do I know simultaneously best and least of all, except myself? I'm my own homeland; at the same time, I feel like an alien in my own skin. Why did I say that? Why did I think that? Why can't I read that scene in Prince Caspian, where the trees almost come to life but don't, without crying, which disturbs my children no end? And why should I pretend that this is normal behavior?
Lindenman's essay recalled to me the principal of the public high school where, in my early twenties, I briefly taught. Like many people, I suspect, he was allergic to the first-person pronoun, so that all his announcements over the PA system went like this:
Teachers, just wanna remind you . . .
Students, just wanna let you know . . .
"WHO?" I used to want to shout at the loudspeaker above my desk. "WHO wants to remind me?"
He was a non-entity as an authority figure. I would send disruptive students to the office, and they'd laugh all the way, knowing they'd score a no-first-person kind of talking to, after which they'd dawdle back through the halls to make trouble in class again. Lather, rinse, repeat. The worse that could happen to them was to partay for an hour in detention after school, or goof around in in-school suspension.
To me at the time the no-first-person thing seemed emblematic of this whole dreary cycle, though the vice-principal who favored the Royal We fared no better:
Students, we have noticed that some of you think it's funny to put milk in the salt shakers. We have removed them, and if this doesn't stop, we'll take away the ketchup and mustard, too.
While I suppose it can be solipsistic to talk or to write about the self, what choice do we -- all of us -- really have? As a writer, you -- you know, you -- can use the second person to intimate that your experience is mine, that you are under my skin, that you know me. Which you don't. And I don't know you, not that way. Not that that stops me from writing frequently in that voice, but it's good to consider that like anything else, it's a rhetorical affect.(really, I think I mean something more like the idea that no matter where we locate the voice of our writing -- first, second, third person -- all good writing is driven by an I. As one of Max's commenters points out, C.S. Lewis tends to talk a lot about what we should do, or do do, as Christians; at the same time, what makes his writing so effective is that you, the reader, never lose the sense that there's an I at the back of it all, that a real, singular, embodied person is saying all these things. In the case of Mere Christianity, of course, that may be a function of the book's having begun as a series of radio talks. But that sense is always there. It's not jarring, in the Narnia books, when the narrative voice interrupts the story to remark that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy's return to Narnia is like King Arthur's to England -- "and the sooner the better, I say." You knew he was there all the time; someone has been telling you the story. The fact that the story takes precedence most of the time does not utterly efface the person recounting it.)
Meanwhile, what are the other choices? You can sound like Queen Victoria -- We Are Not Amused -- or Prince Charles. One Enjoys A Good Polo Match, What? One Is Forced To. Either way the writer sounds afraid to own his or her experience, to risk being laid bare.
Sort of like being afraid to go to confession . . .
As usual, all this amounts to notes for something to write more seriously later, like in ten or fifteen years, when time presumably will hang heavy on my hands. At the moment, a child all set to get her driver's license tomorrow has just discovered that she needs some additional piece of paperwork from the state, so I need to call a number and leave a message and have it sent. Here, on my very doorstep, is an experience; now I have to go own it.
As Aelred said later, this made for maddening dinner conversation. Course after course after course to get through, and all his neighbor would say in response to any remotely personal question was, "Oh, really, that's not important." By the end of the evening, Aelred said, he was torn between an unnatural degree of burning curiosity to know the man's life story, and the temptation to strangle him. To this day I don't know how he actually found out about the rule of life; possibly someone else told him. At any rate, if I ever knew anything about the other people at that dinner, I've long since forgotten it. The only enduringly memorable person at the table -- besides Aelred himself, of course -- was the self-effacing man.
Max Lindenman, subbing for The Anchoress this week, takes on the idea of narcissism and the role of the I in a writer's voice.
[S]peaking as both a reader and a writer, I have to say that a certain amount of self-consciousness — if not self-centeredness — has its value. Many spiritual writers, or so I’ve noticed, tend to default to the first-person plural: “We should do X”; “We know well that Y.” Personally, I’ve always found that very off-putting; I have a bad case of “we-ennui.” At best, it sounds too normative and prescriptive — in a nutshell, preachy. If the writer slips, switching from objective truths to subjective experience, it sounds presumptuous. Who’s ‘We,” lady?
Phillip Lopate has written that a good personal essay involves an interrogation and dissection of self. The writer should question himself constantly, digging for the real reasons he believes this or does that. To be sure, that sort of writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s mine. I find it very comforting to know that someone so much cleverer than I is no less a confused clod.
I like Phillip Lopate, and I think that what he says here is essentially true. Write what you know, as the wheezy maxim goes, and what do I know simultaneously best and least of all, except myself? I'm my own homeland; at the same time, I feel like an alien in my own skin. Why did I say that? Why did I think that? Why can't I read that scene in Prince Caspian, where the trees almost come to life but don't, without crying, which disturbs my children no end? And why should I pretend that this is normal behavior?
Lindenman's essay recalled to me the principal of the public high school where, in my early twenties, I briefly taught. Like many people, I suspect, he was allergic to the first-person pronoun, so that all his announcements over the PA system went like this:
Teachers, just wanna remind you . . .
Students, just wanna let you know . . .
"WHO?" I used to want to shout at the loudspeaker above my desk. "WHO wants to remind me?"
He was a non-entity as an authority figure. I would send disruptive students to the office, and they'd laugh all the way, knowing they'd score a no-first-person kind of talking to, after which they'd dawdle back through the halls to make trouble in class again. Lather, rinse, repeat. The worse that could happen to them was to partay for an hour in detention after school, or goof around in in-school suspension.
To me at the time the no-first-person thing seemed emblematic of this whole dreary cycle, though the vice-principal who favored the Royal We fared no better:
Students, we have noticed that some of you think it's funny to put milk in the salt shakers. We have removed them, and if this doesn't stop, we'll take away the ketchup and mustard, too.
While I suppose it can be solipsistic to talk or to write about the self, what choice do we -- all of us -- really have? As a writer, you -- you know, you -- can use the second person to intimate that your experience is mine, that you are under my skin, that you know me. Which you don't. And I don't know you, not that way. Not that that stops me from writing frequently in that voice, but it's good to consider that like anything else, it's a rhetorical affect.(really, I think I mean something more like the idea that no matter where we locate the voice of our writing -- first, second, third person -- all good writing is driven by an I. As one of Max's commenters points out, C.S. Lewis tends to talk a lot about what we should do, or do do, as Christians; at the same time, what makes his writing so effective is that you, the reader, never lose the sense that there's an I at the back of it all, that a real, singular, embodied person is saying all these things. In the case of Mere Christianity, of course, that may be a function of the book's having begun as a series of radio talks. But that sense is always there. It's not jarring, in the Narnia books, when the narrative voice interrupts the story to remark that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy's return to Narnia is like King Arthur's to England -- "and the sooner the better, I say." You knew he was there all the time; someone has been telling you the story. The fact that the story takes precedence most of the time does not utterly efface the person recounting it.)
Meanwhile, what are the other choices? You can sound like Queen Victoria -- We Are Not Amused -- or Prince Charles. One Enjoys A Good Polo Match, What? One Is Forced To. Either way the writer sounds afraid to own his or her experience, to risk being laid bare.
Sort of like being afraid to go to confession . . .
As usual, all this amounts to notes for something to write more seriously later, like in ten or fifteen years, when time presumably will hang heavy on my hands. At the moment, a child all set to get her driver's license tomorrow has just discovered that she needs some additional piece of paperwork from the state, so I need to call a number and leave a message and have it sent. Here, on my very doorstep, is an experience; now I have to go own it.
Simply Messing About
"Is it so nice as all that?" asked the mole, shyly...
"Nice? It's the only thing," said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leaned forward for his stroke. "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."
"Simply messing...about in boats -- or with boats... In or out of 'em it doesn't matter. Nothing seems to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
As I Was Going to St. Ives
Here it is, at either dawn or dusk, I forget which: the market town of nursery-rhyme fame, fled by seven times seven times seven times seven juvenile sack-borne felines. I don't know why they were leaving it. We liked it enough to stay several days.
Here it is at midday. You can see more clearly the medieval bridge, with its chapel in the middle.
"Boating is not so bad after all. We can sit on the deck and color in our notebooks."
Church steeple at St. Ives -- I think. I have four years' worth of shots of church steeples, each one of which looked unique in all the world the moment I was photographing it.
Some miles downriver from St. Ives: near Hemingford Grey.
Along this stretch of river you find the manor house most recently inhabited by the writer L.M. Boston, who recreated it in her Green Knowe stories for children.
Moored on the green between Hemingford Grey and the smaller Hemingford Abbots. As you can see, though I love narrowboats, that wasn't what we wound up hiring for this excursion.
Dinner company.
Pub at Hemingford Abbots.
The boating baby. He truly didn't spend the entire time on his own in the bow cabin. We let him out in the evenings to fly around.
Read more here.
Read more here.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Messing About In Boats
Not long ago, at the bottom of some box or other, Aelred found a set of photo disks from nine years ago (give or take a few months), our last full summer in Cambridge. That was the summer when we took what remains for us the gold standard of family holidays: a week's cruise down the River Ouse, from Ely to a place called Hemingford Grey, in a self-catered rented boat.
Helier had been born in mid-July of that year. In those days the older children still went to school, and we wanted to go away somewhere before it started up again, out of the hot, crowded flat and the traffic noise and the drunks of the night singing at the taxi stand five minutes after the pubs let out -- but where to go to escape it all? And how? The very thought of straggling on and off trains with children and baggage and a baby in arms, which meant more things to leave behind on the train, exhausted me; better to stay home, I thought, with the traffic and the drunks, than to live, in recurring nightmares, the not-unlikely scenario of leaving the baby himself on the train.
I forget now how and when I hit on the idea of a boat trip. I was, however, always thinking about boats. Cambridge rests in the elbow of the River Cam; it flows down from the flat black fenland out Ely way to loop around Midsummer Common and Jesus Green before meandering away behind the gardens of Trinity and Kings and the playground at Lammas Land, and eventually down to Grantchester, where the church clock stands at ten to three and there's always honey for tea.
I could, and did, spend hours in those days walking by the river, looking at the boats. Along Midsummer Common, where the college boathouses stand, every available inch of river bank is lined with narrowboats like floating gypsy caravans: my favorite of these, for its name alone, was called the Unthinkable. Some were playthings; others were lived in, with bicycles tethered to their top decks, or whole container gardens set out to catch the temperamental sun.
Idealistically -- because of course a boat would be more crowded even than our flat -- I was in love with the idea of this peripatetic life, puttering up and down from one mooring to the next, falling asleep and waking to the mutter of water just outside. Walking, I would see a lady on a houseboat raise her window to throw the remains of her morning toast to the swans, and something about this mundane gesture, on the water, sent me into private raptures.
Whenever I read The Wind in the Willows, my heart belongs to the Water Rat. He speaks my inmost language. It must have been in a moment of utter Rattiness that I thought of a boat as the answer to our holiday dilemma. What could be better? No trains, except the very short one from Cambridge to Ely, where the boatyard was. No hotels, no leaving either the baby or his necessary accessories behind in some inconvenient place; we would take it all with us, wherever we went. We could stop and get off the boat to explore, but mostly the trip would be the boat itself, with the water beneath it and the enormous sky above it and the land drifting past at a maximum speed of seven miles per hour.
Too often, family holidays suffer from the disease of anticipation. By looking forward to them, we ruin them: the weather's never so fine, the food so good, the company of our household so pure and sweet and devoid of maddening attributes, as our imaginations render things beforehand. On this trip, we experienced a day of rain, some bickering and temper tantrums, a general fear of going through locks, a grocery shortage on Sunday when all the shops in the hinterlands are shut, and an incident with a quayside which cost us a good foot of flashing along the stern. But mostly it was -- we remember it clearly as -- idyllic, as we had anticipated that it would be.
No doubt you are wanting me to shut up now and show you some pictures.
More to come. Stay tuned.
Helier had been born in mid-July of that year. In those days the older children still went to school, and we wanted to go away somewhere before it started up again, out of the hot, crowded flat and the traffic noise and the drunks of the night singing at the taxi stand five minutes after the pubs let out -- but where to go to escape it all? And how? The very thought of straggling on and off trains with children and baggage and a baby in arms, which meant more things to leave behind on the train, exhausted me; better to stay home, I thought, with the traffic and the drunks, than to live, in recurring nightmares, the not-unlikely scenario of leaving the baby himself on the train.
I forget now how and when I hit on the idea of a boat trip. I was, however, always thinking about boats. Cambridge rests in the elbow of the River Cam; it flows down from the flat black fenland out Ely way to loop around Midsummer Common and Jesus Green before meandering away behind the gardens of Trinity and Kings and the playground at Lammas Land, and eventually down to Grantchester, where the church clock stands at ten to three and there's always honey for tea.
I could, and did, spend hours in those days walking by the river, looking at the boats. Along Midsummer Common, where the college boathouses stand, every available inch of river bank is lined with narrowboats like floating gypsy caravans: my favorite of these, for its name alone, was called the Unthinkable. Some were playthings; others were lived in, with bicycles tethered to their top decks, or whole container gardens set out to catch the temperamental sun.
Idealistically -- because of course a boat would be more crowded even than our flat -- I was in love with the idea of this peripatetic life, puttering up and down from one mooring to the next, falling asleep and waking to the mutter of water just outside. Walking, I would see a lady on a houseboat raise her window to throw the remains of her morning toast to the swans, and something about this mundane gesture, on the water, sent me into private raptures.
Whenever I read The Wind in the Willows, my heart belongs to the Water Rat. He speaks my inmost language. It must have been in a moment of utter Rattiness that I thought of a boat as the answer to our holiday dilemma. What could be better? No trains, except the very short one from Cambridge to Ely, where the boatyard was. No hotels, no leaving either the baby or his necessary accessories behind in some inconvenient place; we would take it all with us, wherever we went. We could stop and get off the boat to explore, but mostly the trip would be the boat itself, with the water beneath it and the enormous sky above it and the land drifting past at a maximum speed of seven miles per hour.
Too often, family holidays suffer from the disease of anticipation. By looking forward to them, we ruin them: the weather's never so fine, the food so good, the company of our household so pure and sweet and devoid of maddening attributes, as our imaginations render things beforehand. On this trip, we experienced a day of rain, some bickering and temper tantrums, a general fear of going through locks, a grocery shortage on Sunday when all the shops in the hinterlands are shut, and an incident with a quayside which cost us a good foot of flashing along the stern. But mostly it was -- we remember it clearly as -- idyllic, as we had anticipated that it would be.
No doubt you are wanting me to shut up now and show you some pictures.
Leaving Ely: you can see the towers of the Cathedral in the distance, rising on their hill above the fenland.
Breakfast company
"We love boating, and our trust in Dad's ability not to land us in a watery grave is unwavering and absolute."
How the baby spent the entire week, except when we were going through locks and I had to stand on shore and hold ropes. Then he went berserk.
Entering the Old West River below Ely; here the Ouse does some kind of funny dog-leg. If you bear left at the fork, you're on the Cam and headed for Cambridge. Bear right and you're on the Old West River for a stretch, at the end of which you meet the Ouse again.
An Encouraging Sight
One minute the morning looked like this.
And then it looked like this.
(moored near a place called Over)
More to come. Stay tuned.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Sweet Girl in Hand-Me-Down Dress
We were trying to remember yesterday how old her older sister was when she wore this dress. It was England, the Feast of Corpus Christi, and she was scattering petals before the Blessed Sacrament in solemn procession. But when? She had to have been taller than the dress-wearer here, because I distinctly remember this as not a maxi dress.
Oh, well, whatever. The first girly was beautiful then; the last girly is beautiful now. The Risen Lord is beautiful yesterday, today, tomorrow, and always.
Alleluia.
Christ My Hope Is Arisen
Christians, to the Paschal victim
offer your thankful praises!
A lamb the sheep redeemeth:
Christ, who only is sinless,
reconcileth sinners to the Father.
Death and life have contended
in that combat stupendous:
the Prince of life, who died,
reigns immortal.
Speak, Mary, declaring
what thou sawest, wayfaring:
"The tomb of Christ, who is living,
the glory of Jesus' resurrection;
"Bright angels attesting,
the shroud and napkin resting.
"Yea, Christ my hope is arisen;
to Galilee he will go before you."
Christ indeed from death is risen,
our new life obtaining;
have mercy, victor King, ever reigning!
Amen.
offer your thankful praises!
A lamb the sheep redeemeth:
Christ, who only is sinless,
reconcileth sinners to the Father.
Death and life have contended
in that combat stupendous:
the Prince of life, who died,
reigns immortal.
Speak, Mary, declaring
what thou sawest, wayfaring:
"The tomb of Christ, who is living,
the glory of Jesus' resurrection;
"Bright angels attesting,
the shroud and napkin resting.
"Yea, Christ my hope is arisen;
to Galilee he will go before you."
Christ indeed from death is risen,
our new life obtaining;
have mercy, victor King, ever reigning!
Amen.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
A Peter Rabbit Easter
Via Rosemary at Content in a Cottage, here's some sweet, lighthearted fun for Easter Day.
Actually, Crispina's about to play the game right now, while I iron her dress for the Easter Vigil.
Holy Saturday
Here it is, the nothing time in the Triduum. Holy Saturday always feels to me truly like a time-out, when you're released from your participation in events in first-century Palestine in order to go to the grocery store and give the house one last pass at spring-cleaning.
For the people in first-century Palestine, this was the Sabbath: no work done, no meals cooked, no dead anointed. For all Jesus' friends knew, this was the first day of the rest of their lives on the far side of a three-year delusion. The man who had said he was God was dead, and the world gave every indication of going on just the same without him. The sun came up. It does that, even when you think it has no right to, in the face of your heartbreak. They might have welcomed some busyness to hasten it down the sky, but all they could do was rest and wait, while their hope lay dead in the tomb.
******
Meanwhile, here I sit thinking that I could use some Sabbath about now. If I'd thought ahead more, I say to myself, the Easter baskets would be finished, the cooking done, the house less frowsted with dust. But then I remind myself that I did dust; it's just that at this time of year we like to leave the doors open, so that the floors and furniture wear a continual coat of yellow pollen. The day will be full of this and that, and there's lunch to think about, and then dinner.
And then the sun will go down at last -- what we get to see of it on this rainy Saturday -- and Easter will dawn. At our own parish Easter Vigil, three people will be received into full communion with the Catholic Church; diocese-wide, the number is something like 850. More exciting still, this week we received news that in England, an Anglican Ordinariate group led by an old Cambridge acquaintance were received into full communion on Wednesday night and anticipate with joy their first Easter as Catholics.
I'd like to say more about this, and to ponder again the implications of coming to Catholicism from Anglicanism. I've used the word "conversion" to describe our own process, because it's easy and readily understood, and also true on some levels, at least: as marriage, rather than engagement, is a real move from one distinct state to another. But at the moment the children are waiting to go to the farmers' market. Holy Saturday is upon us. The world is going on. For the moment, it's the big things that have to wait.
For the people in first-century Palestine, this was the Sabbath: no work done, no meals cooked, no dead anointed. For all Jesus' friends knew, this was the first day of the rest of their lives on the far side of a three-year delusion. The man who had said he was God was dead, and the world gave every indication of going on just the same without him. The sun came up. It does that, even when you think it has no right to, in the face of your heartbreak. They might have welcomed some busyness to hasten it down the sky, but all they could do was rest and wait, while their hope lay dead in the tomb.
******
Meanwhile, here I sit thinking that I could use some Sabbath about now. If I'd thought ahead more, I say to myself, the Easter baskets would be finished, the cooking done, the house less frowsted with dust. But then I remind myself that I did dust; it's just that at this time of year we like to leave the doors open, so that the floors and furniture wear a continual coat of yellow pollen. The day will be full of this and that, and there's lunch to think about, and then dinner.
And then the sun will go down at last -- what we get to see of it on this rainy Saturday -- and Easter will dawn. At our own parish Easter Vigil, three people will be received into full communion with the Catholic Church; diocese-wide, the number is something like 850. More exciting still, this week we received news that in England, an Anglican Ordinariate group led by an old Cambridge acquaintance were received into full communion on Wednesday night and anticipate with joy their first Easter as Catholics.
I'd like to say more about this, and to ponder again the implications of coming to Catholicism from Anglicanism. I've used the word "conversion" to describe our own process, because it's easy and readily understood, and also true on some levels, at least: as marriage, rather than engagement, is a real move from one distinct state to another. But at the moment the children are waiting to go to the farmers' market. Holy Saturday is upon us. The world is going on. For the moment, it's the big things that have to wait.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Pain and Good Friday
From Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
More . . .
There would be no such thing as thirst unless there were such a thing as water. Man could not reason unless there was such a thing as Reason. We could not ask questions if there were no such thing as answers. This is why Christianity puts suffering right at the heart of our faith. We do not avoid it. We do not come up with philosophical or theological theories. We do not say that suffering is an illusion and that we must simply rise above it. Instead we behold the cross. We preach Christ crucified. We say, "Ecce homo--Behold the Man" and as you behold the man you behold humanity, and as you behold humanity you behold everything else.
Here, we say, "Is the question and the answer. Here in the crucified one you find humanity in all its reality, and that reality is suffering. Here is the Alpha and the Omega. Here is the desire and the destiny. Here is the humanity and the divinity. Did you want to understand the riddle of suffering and human existence? Contemplate the crucified one. As you do you will not only come to understand the riddle of suffering and human existence, but you will also come to understand that the Good God you longed for is far stranger and disturbing than simply a grandfather in the sky who is there to take away your pain.
More . . .
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Notes on Watching in the Night
On an ordinary sunny day six years ago this summer, my father suffered an utterly unexpected heart attack and, after lingering for two days, died. The last night of his life, when we all knew that he would die before another night, Aelred and I took it in turns to sit up with him, to bear him company while my poor shattered mother got some sleep.
I forget how long our watches lasted -- two hours, maybe, or three. In my off hours, I lay covered with a thin hospital blanket in a recliner in the dark waiting room, listening to the breathing of strangers around me, all waiting even in their shallow sleep for whatever the morning would bring, joy or heartbreak or more waiting. Then Aelred would come in and touch my shoulder, and I would get up and take the elevator to the eternal bleached daylight of the intensive-care floor, to sit on a cold plastic chair at my father's bedside, while his blue eyes searched the ceiling and a machine did his breathing for him.
I knew what the morning would bring. If my father didn't die in the night, as I sat by him holding his hand, it was a certainty that he would not outlive it for long. Already his fingers felt chilly in mine. Though he was awake and sometimes looked at me, his was the intent, uncomprehending gaze of a newborn baby, who knows that he has heard a voice somewhere before, but has never connected it to a face. To all appearances, the ceiling made at least as interesting a study to him as I did.
As I sat there talking to him, singing to him, praying, saying nothing, I felt -- as far as I can remember -- nothing. The night was sunk too deep in itself, and I was too far beyond sadness at that point. Earlier that evening, a century ago at least, Aelred and I had gone together to the hospital chapel and jointly broken down in tears, he as much as I, because he loved my father. Then, I was thinking to myself, We'll never be happy again. How could we be? How could we be happy without my father's laugh, his aptitude for losing himself in thought, his twisting a forelock of his hair as he scratched notes on a legal pad with a yellow number-two pencil? How dared the sun even come up any more, I thought, if my father wasn't going to see it, if it wasn't going to slant through the windows of an upstairs room where he sat drawing a goldfinch in oil pastel? How dared it? How could we dare to want it to?
I had thought those thoughts until my brain couldn't think them any more. In the middle of the night, I put them all aside to sit and watch, knowing that I would do anything, throw any switch, to send us down a different track with a happier ending, and knowing also, in numb resignation, that there was nothing that I could do.
Not a day goes by that I don't think of my father and miss him. I offer every Mass I go to for the happiness of his soul. I think less often these days of the actual event of his dying, but tonight, praying before the Blessed Sacrament on the altar of repose, amid its Gethsemane flowers, I remembered that long dark night.
I thought of the disciples, trying to watch and falling asleep, and at first what I imagined was that I knew what they had felt like. I don't remember ever being so tired beyond tired, so freighted with sorrow, as I was then. It's a wonder I didn't fall asleep there in intensive care, upright on the hard chair with monitors blinging all around me. If sorrow beyond feeling made me tired, I suppose it also propped me up. Though grief weighs several tons, and you want to pass out after an hour of carrying it around, at times there's also something weirdly bracing about it.
Then it occurred to me: sitting with my father, I had known something that they could not have known with any certainty. I knew that the person with whom I sat was going to die. Really I think I'd known it from the moment I first walked into the hospital, though maybe I'm just the kind of person to whom catastrophe always seems the most likely outcome. At any rate, by the time I came to be sitting by that bedside in the bowels of the night, I had relinquished any last lingering claim I had to hope -- not, maybe, to the larger kind of hope that tries, at least, to see beyond the grave, but to the here-and-now hope that in a week or so we'd all be laughing at the scare Dad had given us.
I don't know what he knew, if anything, about his condition just then. I don't know what he saw or heard, or what he was able to hope as he lay in that strange in-between state, in which the rest of us in the conscious world were doing all the waiting and grieving.
In Gethsemane, however, the situation was reversed. It was the person soon to die who knew, beyond the faintest whisper of a doubt, that the morning would deliver Him to His death. He also knew perfectly well, I imagine, that despite His having dropped broad hints to all and sundry, and especially to His particular friends, those friends could not possibly have digested those hints so as to know what He knew. The sleep they slept was the sleep of innocence. The watch He kept was the wakefulness of knowledge and grief and dread, as the hours stalked past and the fatal torches guttered in the distance.
And, kneeling, I thought to myself, No: I know how that feels, a little.
Well, all right, I don't know. I won't claim to know the mind of God at that or any other time. Still, my heart went out to Him, dreading the day the Lord had made. Like every other day it was the day of His own making and choosing and loving, yet the thought of it brought him sorrow beside which my own sorrows are like dandelion seeds on the wind.
At the end of the Holy Thursday service I knelt and prayed a while, to comfort someone beyond my paltry power to console. Then I got up to look for the rest of the family, who as it turned out had already gone home. So I went back and knelt there again for a little. And then I came home myself, and I read to the children, and now I'm sitting writing this in the quiet house, the dog snoring beside me on the futon. I watch, he sleeps. In a few minutes, because whom are we kidding here, I'll go to sleep, too, though my sleep is hardly all that innocent. Whether I watch or whether I sleep, the morning will bring what it brings.
I forget how long our watches lasted -- two hours, maybe, or three. In my off hours, I lay covered with a thin hospital blanket in a recliner in the dark waiting room, listening to the breathing of strangers around me, all waiting even in their shallow sleep for whatever the morning would bring, joy or heartbreak or more waiting. Then Aelred would come in and touch my shoulder, and I would get up and take the elevator to the eternal bleached daylight of the intensive-care floor, to sit on a cold plastic chair at my father's bedside, while his blue eyes searched the ceiling and a machine did his breathing for him.
I knew what the morning would bring. If my father didn't die in the night, as I sat by him holding his hand, it was a certainty that he would not outlive it for long. Already his fingers felt chilly in mine. Though he was awake and sometimes looked at me, his was the intent, uncomprehending gaze of a newborn baby, who knows that he has heard a voice somewhere before, but has never connected it to a face. To all appearances, the ceiling made at least as interesting a study to him as I did.
As I sat there talking to him, singing to him, praying, saying nothing, I felt -- as far as I can remember -- nothing. The night was sunk too deep in itself, and I was too far beyond sadness at that point. Earlier that evening, a century ago at least, Aelred and I had gone together to the hospital chapel and jointly broken down in tears, he as much as I, because he loved my father. Then, I was thinking to myself, We'll never be happy again. How could we be? How could we be happy without my father's laugh, his aptitude for losing himself in thought, his twisting a forelock of his hair as he scratched notes on a legal pad with a yellow number-two pencil? How dared the sun even come up any more, I thought, if my father wasn't going to see it, if it wasn't going to slant through the windows of an upstairs room where he sat drawing a goldfinch in oil pastel? How dared it? How could we dare to want it to?
I had thought those thoughts until my brain couldn't think them any more. In the middle of the night, I put them all aside to sit and watch, knowing that I would do anything, throw any switch, to send us down a different track with a happier ending, and knowing also, in numb resignation, that there was nothing that I could do.
Not a day goes by that I don't think of my father and miss him. I offer every Mass I go to for the happiness of his soul. I think less often these days of the actual event of his dying, but tonight, praying before the Blessed Sacrament on the altar of repose, amid its Gethsemane flowers, I remembered that long dark night.
I thought of the disciples, trying to watch and falling asleep, and at first what I imagined was that I knew what they had felt like. I don't remember ever being so tired beyond tired, so freighted with sorrow, as I was then. It's a wonder I didn't fall asleep there in intensive care, upright on the hard chair with monitors blinging all around me. If sorrow beyond feeling made me tired, I suppose it also propped me up. Though grief weighs several tons, and you want to pass out after an hour of carrying it around, at times there's also something weirdly bracing about it.
Then it occurred to me: sitting with my father, I had known something that they could not have known with any certainty. I knew that the person with whom I sat was going to die. Really I think I'd known it from the moment I first walked into the hospital, though maybe I'm just the kind of person to whom catastrophe always seems the most likely outcome. At any rate, by the time I came to be sitting by that bedside in the bowels of the night, I had relinquished any last lingering claim I had to hope -- not, maybe, to the larger kind of hope that tries, at least, to see beyond the grave, but to the here-and-now hope that in a week or so we'd all be laughing at the scare Dad had given us.
I don't know what he knew, if anything, about his condition just then. I don't know what he saw or heard, or what he was able to hope as he lay in that strange in-between state, in which the rest of us in the conscious world were doing all the waiting and grieving.
In Gethsemane, however, the situation was reversed. It was the person soon to die who knew, beyond the faintest whisper of a doubt, that the morning would deliver Him to His death. He also knew perfectly well, I imagine, that despite His having dropped broad hints to all and sundry, and especially to His particular friends, those friends could not possibly have digested those hints so as to know what He knew. The sleep they slept was the sleep of innocence. The watch He kept was the wakefulness of knowledge and grief and dread, as the hours stalked past and the fatal torches guttered in the distance.
And, kneeling, I thought to myself, No: I know how that feels, a little.
Well, all right, I don't know. I won't claim to know the mind of God at that or any other time. Still, my heart went out to Him, dreading the day the Lord had made. Like every other day it was the day of His own making and choosing and loving, yet the thought of it brought him sorrow beside which my own sorrows are like dandelion seeds on the wind.
At the end of the Holy Thursday service I knelt and prayed a while, to comfort someone beyond my paltry power to console. Then I got up to look for the rest of the family, who as it turned out had already gone home. So I went back and knelt there again for a little. And then I came home myself, and I read to the children, and now I'm sitting writing this in the quiet house, the dog snoring beside me on the futon. I watch, he sleeps. In a few minutes, because whom are we kidding here, I'll go to sleep, too, though my sleep is hardly all that innocent. Whether I watch or whether I sleep, the morning will bring what it brings.
The Holy Thursday Table
Chicken's in the oven. Amicus is chopping apples. Aelred's taken Epiphany to her violin lesson, during which half-hour he'll make a final grocery run. It's always a little disorienting to realize that while you're preparing a festal dinner, the world is going on its mundane way in the ordinary sunshine, but there it is. In England we gave up celebrating Thanksgiving on a Thursday, because the fact of its being a school day pretty much negated the whole holiday aspect of the thing. Now we can declare our own school holidays, whether the universe at large, including the Panacea Falls School of the Arts, moves over for them or not.
I'm blah-blahing on like this because the camera takes its own sweet time disgorging the photographs into the iPhoto li-berry. Blah-blah, blah-blah-blah.
Okay, now.
Around noon, Crispina and I went out looking for flowers for the table and raided this climber, which Amicus freed the other day from a tangle of vinca, and which is waiting for a fan trellis. Last year it didn't bloom at all -- too choked, I guess -- but right now it's loaded with hot-pink blooms.
Some salvias, some azalea blossoms, a sprig of the omnipresent vinca, and . . .
Okay, well. We go for the unstructured floral look around here. Anyway . . .
At the very beginning of the dinner, the mother (a.k.a. me) lights the ritual candles. I made holders out of little tin molds, belonging to Crispina, which came from a secondhand shop on Main Street.
Helier, who helped set the table, is summoning me in again to look at the dining room, because I might have forgotten how pretty it looks. Meanwhile, the rice seems to be boiling dry. Better pay some attention to the actual meal here.
I'm blah-blahing on like this because the camera takes its own sweet time disgorging the photographs into the iPhoto li-berry. Blah-blah, blah-blah-blah.
Okay, now.
Around noon, Crispina and I went out looking for flowers for the table and raided this climber, which Amicus freed the other day from a tangle of vinca, and which is waiting for a fan trellis. Last year it didn't bloom at all -- too choked, I guess -- but right now it's loaded with hot-pink blooms.
Some salvias, some azalea blossoms, a sprig of the omnipresent vinca, and . . .
Okay, well. We go for the unstructured floral look around here. Anyway . . .
Finally, a tablecloth to fit the entire length of our refectory-style table. The price was right, too: this length of fabric, which is actually doubled underneath itself on the table, if you can believe it, began its life (as far as I know) as a gi-normous swag shrouding our bedroom window. It was the top layer over about thirty-two layers of green tulle. Anyway, I came upon it in the cupboard today, and wa-la.
Pitcher and basin in which the father washes his hands at the beginning of the seder rite.
At the very beginning of the dinner, the mother (a.k.a. me) lights the ritual candles. I made holders out of little tin molds, belonging to Crispina, which came from a secondhand shop on Main Street.
Helier, who helped set the table, is summoning me in again to look at the dining room, because I might have forgotten how pretty it looks. Meanwhile, the rice seems to be boiling dry. Better pay some attention to the actual meal here.
Into the Triduum
From the study window I'm watching the green morning outside: a dogwood, a strip of gravel drive, the brick wall demarcating the line between our yard and Rebecca's next door, a thread of clematis vine venturing up Rebecca's arbor, squirrels everywhere.
Wondering idly if squirrel really does taste like chicken; it seems to me that the answer to both our grocery bill and certain destruction in the vegetable garden this summer might depend upon this question, and upon Amicus's aim with a pellet gun he does not yet own but very much wants.
Speaking of chicken, I really must get up and clear off the dining-room table before four this afternoon, and pull out the pretty china and set the little kids a-polishing the silver. Holy, a.k.a. Maundy, Thursday is upon us, with its attendant rituals to usher in the great and solemn events of death and resurrection. I'm still bemused at how deeply our practice of a family seder has ingrained itself in the children's imaginations in the relatively short time that we've been doing it; every year I sort of feel like not doing it, but then I consider that to suggest this would be akin to suggesting that we could do without Christmas dinner, too. Even dinner on Easter, which we do up in as grand a style as we can muster in our exhaustion, with lamb and spring vegetables, always seems something of an anticlimax after this.
So we're doing it again. The menu is as follows:
roast chicken with garlic and rosemary
spinach salad (which will do for our "bitter herbs"), with oil and balsamic vinegar for dressing
rice pilaf
haroseth
"matzoh," which is essentially just firecake (I use whole wheat flour) baked thin on a cookie sheet
red wine for all -- we water it down heavily for the younger children, who get sherry or port glasses
Crispina, as the youngest child, gets to ask the series of questions which begin, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" We'll practice them this morning, though last night, when she was asking me about them, it struck me that this year, for the first time, she can actually read them.
We'll start around four, to be finished by six, when I have to dash off to church to rehearse the choir for Mass at seven. Here's our musical program for the bilingual Mass, in which the Spanish choir will also participate:
Processional Hymn: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
Foot-Washing: Ubi Caritas (chant; I get to cantor); an offering from the Spanish; Drop, Drop, Slow Tears
Offertory: Dona Nobis Pacem, combined choirs
Communion: Elgar's Ave Verum Corpus; something from the Spanish choir; Tantum Ergo
Procession to the Altar of Repose: Pange Lingua
Looking ahead:
Tomorrow we endure the Good Friday marathon: confessions early for anyone who needs to get in one last good shriving before Easter; Passion service and the Living Way of the Cross put on by the Spanish community in the afternoon. It's a fast day, of course, so the menu isn't much to speak of: bean soup, probably.
Choral program for Good Friday (bilingual choirs again):
No processional
Veneration of the Cross: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed (in a striking early-American setting which I can't find on YouTube; it's in the first Catholic Choir Book -- which you can get in a free download -- if you're interested); something from the Spanish Choir; Stabat Mater
Communion: Adoramus Te, Christe (Dubois); Ah Holy Jesus; Spanish offering; Sing My Tongue the Glorious Battle; My Song is Love Unknown (why Kings College doesn't do the parts to this hymn I don't know; they give it all kinds of texture)
Silence
Holy Saturday: farmer's market in the a.m. for asparagus and greens, cooking and cleaning for Sunday. I priced lamb yesterday and nearly passed out, so we're having it ground in moussaka for Easter, with fresh asparagus from the lovely friendly market people who also sell the baked goods. Epiphany has been wanting to make baklava, so we'll have that for dessert with strawberries.
Also, Easter-egg dyeing. The egg lady at the market last Saturday showed me eggs she'd colored with natural dyes like blueberry, greens, and something else which turned the eggs brown. This last effect disgusted her, she said, because the dyed eggs looked exactly like the regular old brown ones the brown hens lay. Something to try . . .
Minimal singing at the Easter Vigil; the Saturday-Mass cantor will do most of it.
Easter Sunday music:
Processional: Jesus Christ is Risen Today
Gradual: Christians to the Paschal Victim
Offertory: Alleluia, the Strife Is O'er; Jesu Rex Admirabilis
Communion: This Joyful Eastertide; At the Lamb's High Feast We Sing; Glory Be to Jesus
Mind you, we are a choir of five regular singers with a nice lady organist in a space designed with acoustical death especially in mind, so our offerings will not be turning up on YouTube to compete with Kings College any time soon. Still, if you squint hard you can imagine it all.
A blessed Triduum to everyone.
Wondering idly if squirrel really does taste like chicken; it seems to me that the answer to both our grocery bill and certain destruction in the vegetable garden this summer might depend upon this question, and upon Amicus's aim with a pellet gun he does not yet own but very much wants.
Speaking of chicken, I really must get up and clear off the dining-room table before four this afternoon, and pull out the pretty china and set the little kids a-polishing the silver. Holy, a.k.a. Maundy, Thursday is upon us, with its attendant rituals to usher in the great and solemn events of death and resurrection. I'm still bemused at how deeply our practice of a family seder has ingrained itself in the children's imaginations in the relatively short time that we've been doing it; every year I sort of feel like not doing it, but then I consider that to suggest this would be akin to suggesting that we could do without Christmas dinner, too. Even dinner on Easter, which we do up in as grand a style as we can muster in our exhaustion, with lamb and spring vegetables, always seems something of an anticlimax after this.
So we're doing it again. The menu is as follows:
roast chicken with garlic and rosemary
spinach salad (which will do for our "bitter herbs"), with oil and balsamic vinegar for dressing
rice pilaf
haroseth
"matzoh," which is essentially just firecake (I use whole wheat flour) baked thin on a cookie sheet
red wine for all -- we water it down heavily for the younger children, who get sherry or port glasses
Crispina, as the youngest child, gets to ask the series of questions which begin, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" We'll practice them this morning, though last night, when she was asking me about them, it struck me that this year, for the first time, she can actually read them.
We'll start around four, to be finished by six, when I have to dash off to church to rehearse the choir for Mass at seven. Here's our musical program for the bilingual Mass, in which the Spanish choir will also participate:
Processional Hymn: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling
Foot-Washing: Ubi Caritas (chant; I get to cantor); an offering from the Spanish; Drop, Drop, Slow Tears
Offertory: Dona Nobis Pacem, combined choirs
Communion: Elgar's Ave Verum Corpus; something from the Spanish choir; Tantum Ergo
Procession to the Altar of Repose: Pange Lingua
Looking ahead:
Tomorrow we endure the Good Friday marathon: confessions early for anyone who needs to get in one last good shriving before Easter; Passion service and the Living Way of the Cross put on by the Spanish community in the afternoon. It's a fast day, of course, so the menu isn't much to speak of: bean soup, probably.
Choral program for Good Friday (bilingual choirs again):
No processional
Veneration of the Cross: Alas and Did My Savior Bleed (in a striking early-American setting which I can't find on YouTube; it's in the first Catholic Choir Book -- which you can get in a free download -- if you're interested); something from the Spanish Choir; Stabat Mater
Communion: Adoramus Te, Christe (Dubois); Ah Holy Jesus; Spanish offering; Sing My Tongue the Glorious Battle; My Song is Love Unknown (why Kings College doesn't do the parts to this hymn I don't know; they give it all kinds of texture)
Silence
Holy Saturday: farmer's market in the a.m. for asparagus and greens, cooking and cleaning for Sunday. I priced lamb yesterday and nearly passed out, so we're having it ground in moussaka for Easter, with fresh asparagus from the lovely friendly market people who also sell the baked goods. Epiphany has been wanting to make baklava, so we'll have that for dessert with strawberries.
Also, Easter-egg dyeing. The egg lady at the market last Saturday showed me eggs she'd colored with natural dyes like blueberry, greens, and something else which turned the eggs brown. This last effect disgusted her, she said, because the dyed eggs looked exactly like the regular old brown ones the brown hens lay. Something to try . . .
Minimal singing at the Easter Vigil; the Saturday-Mass cantor will do most of it.
Easter Sunday music:
Processional: Jesus Christ is Risen Today
Gradual: Christians to the Paschal Victim
Offertory: Alleluia, the Strife Is O'er; Jesu Rex Admirabilis
Communion: This Joyful Eastertide; At the Lamb's High Feast We Sing; Glory Be to Jesus
Mind you, we are a choir of five regular singers with a nice lady organist in a space designed with acoustical death especially in mind, so our offerings will not be turning up on YouTube to compete with Kings College any time soon. Still, if you squint hard you can imagine it all.
A blessed Triduum to everyone.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The Center Line of Holy Week
They're winding down now, the bluebells, and I never got a shot of them in their full glory. These are last year's, but you get the idea.
After the recent storms, we've had a spell of sweet-natured April weather which has made me feel, every time I step into the yard, that this whole project of remaking Eden, which we all seem hard-wired to undertake in one way or another, is not really that quixotic. The clover lawn's so green that the color itself has a smell. The azaleas are flaming, the roses are loosing their tight little buds. The dogwoods are putting away their lace, which this year, at last, was really white, after two seasons of a dispiriting ecru which made me wonder whether I ought to cut down the trees and plant something else. Now I'm glad I didn't.
The county schools have spring break this week, so we're taking a break as well. On Monday and Tuesday, Helier went to a little baseball camp sponsored jointly by Parks and Rec and the athletic department of Fiat High School (Go Wombats!). Here we exposed ourselves, again, as aliens, this time from the Wild Planet of Total Sports Cluelessness. Okay, I guess, if you sign your kid up for baseball camp, you ought to assume that they assume that you own such a thing as a baseball glove and that bringing it to camp would be a gesture as automatic as breathing. Helier, in his Cub Scout cap and the blue play-pants he wears daily, everywhere, despite the current hole in the knee, looked like an orphan in the Fresh Air Farm program alongside all the little . . . not Barry Bondses, not Pete Roses . . . unfortunately these are the kinds of baseball names which occur reflexively to me. I know there are good baseball players; I just can't think of any right now.
None of this bothered Helier in the least. Others of my children would have taken one look at the businesslike kids swinging bats and begged to go home and learn to crochet. Not Helier. He loved every second of it, despite the fact that he alone, uniquely handicapped in his parentage, knew nothing about baseball, except that it does involve hitting balls with bats and running someplace. When I picked him up the first day, he was waving energetically to all the other kids as we walked to the van; it was a little like watching a dog, on the floor, greeting a bunch of cats gathered on top of a china cabinet, but he, friend to all, didn't seem to mind.
By the end of camp yesterday, he had made an honest-to-goodness friend, with whom he exchanged phone numbers. They called each other after lunch to rehash the glory of the morning and to fill in details of each other's life stories. According to Helier, they have planned to call each other again on Easter, a prospect which may well outshine the Lord's Resurrection in his imagination, which is kind of the way it goes when you're eight. What I think is that if the day of the empty tomb is also the day you get to talk to your friend on the phone, eventually theological priorities will sort themselves out.
Meanwhile, it is Holy Week, though I'm having a hard time believing it. The late Easter has made the whole spring seem off-kilter, though I don't know why that should be so. Maybe it's that it feels like summer here already, whereas in my memory, Easter is mostly springtime in the cold. When we lived in Salt Lake, often as not we had to tramp through the snow to church for Good Friday; the year Amicus was a baby, it snowed on Easter. Then in England the intense paradox of the spring -- whole riverbanks of daffodils shivering in the wind and rain -- came to be synonymous with Easter, the fire in the dark.
In our Anglican parish, we held the Great Vigil of Easter at four in the morning, so that it was always the serious stalwarts -- and the choir, which was my reason for stalwartness -- who gathered in the churchyard to watch the Easter fire leap up, melting the black air. The choristers would slip back into the church ahead of the procession; inside that ancient building, it really was the tomb, cold and black and silent with waiting which, you felt, might just as well go on for eternity. Nothing to see, folks. Go back to sleep. To sit in the stalls before the altar and wait, shivering inside your coat and your academic gown, your cold bell muffled in your hand, unrung -- this was to intuit what death was like, the reign of death in its last moments. And then the light advanced into the church, not in an explosion like Grunewald's nuclear-looking image of the Resurrection, but quietly, a tiny flame which gathered the darkness to it: The Light of Christ. Thanks be to God.
Even in the sunshine, though, we're waiting. There's the tomb of the house needing cleaning, the tomb of the shopping and planning of meals, the mulch -- an entire freaking truckload of pine mulch -- like a burial mound risen on the driveway. There's the tomb of me not feeling like dealing with any of it, and the tomb of the utter ordinariness of it all. Still, the little kids keep counting down the days till we can say the A-Word again, and tomorrow afternoon we'll hold our family seder of Holy Thursday to open the Triduum, so it'll be off to the races -- and, fortunately for denizens of the Planet of Total Sports Cluelessness, somebody else has done the winning for us.
****
PS. Today is "Spy Wednesday." Speaking of cluelessness, I'd never known about this particular tradition till last year. Here is a poem for the day.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Music for Palm Sunday
The Royal Banners Forward Go
The royal banners forward go,
The cross shines forth in mystic glow
Where he, as man, who gave man breath,
Now bows beneath the yoke of death.
Fulfilled is all that David told
In true prophetic song of old;
How God the nations' king should be,
For God is reigning from the tree.
O tree of beauty, tree most fair,
Ordained these holy limbs to bear;
Gone is thy shame, each crimsoned bow
Proclaims the King of glory now.
Blest tree, whose chosen branches bore
The wealth that did the world restore,
The price of humankind to pay,
And spoil the spoiler of his prey.
O cross, our one reliance, hail!
Still may thy power with us avail
More good for righteous souls to win,
And save the sinner from his sin.
To thee, eternal Three in One,
Let homage meet by all be done:
As by the cross thou dost restore,
So rule and guide us evermore.
Text: Venantius Fortunatus, tr. John Mason Neale
Melody: Agincourt, from a 15th century Trinity College MS
Another, more splendid version, from St. Peter's Catholic Church in Columbia, SC . . .
(I prefer the austere medieval tune myself, but this is beautiful):
A blessed Holy Week to all.
The royal banners forward go,
The cross shines forth in mystic glow
Where he, as man, who gave man breath,
Now bows beneath the yoke of death.
Fulfilled is all that David told
In true prophetic song of old;
How God the nations' king should be,
For God is reigning from the tree.
O tree of beauty, tree most fair,
Ordained these holy limbs to bear;
Gone is thy shame, each crimsoned bow
Proclaims the King of glory now.
Blest tree, whose chosen branches bore
The wealth that did the world restore,
The price of humankind to pay,
And spoil the spoiler of his prey.
O cross, our one reliance, hail!
Still may thy power with us avail
More good for righteous souls to win,
And save the sinner from his sin.
To thee, eternal Three in One,
Let homage meet by all be done:
As by the cross thou dost restore,
So rule and guide us evermore.
Text: Venantius Fortunatus, tr. John Mason Neale
Melody: Agincourt, from a 15th century Trinity College MS
Another, more splendid version, from St. Peter's Catholic Church in Columbia, SC . . .
(I prefer the austere medieval tune myself, but this is beautiful):
A blessed Holy Week to all.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Lenten Sunday Night Music
That is actually me, thanks to the magic of Garage Band. I don't sound nearly that ethereal in real life. Or that multiple, either.
(and don't listen too carefully, or you'll hear that I can't count that well, and that I actually messed up the round -- really each new "group" should come in on the previous group's "tear," not "bound." Oh well. It is Lent.)
Saturday, April 9, 2011
I Too Dislike It
(mostly/kind of, except when I don't).
Via James Russell Ament:
On the other hand, you gotta do something while you listen to weather radio. The very sound of the computerized voice, coupled with words like "megahertz," makes us all kind of low-key hysterical. And that's before they even start listing the counties under the tornado warning.
Via James Russell Ament:
On the other hand, you gotta do something while you listen to weather radio. The very sound of the computerized voice, coupled with words like "megahertz," makes us all kind of low-key hysterical. And that's before they even start listing the counties under the tornado warning.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Storms in the Night
I was sleeping badly, with the window open. As my mind scuttered over the surface of its own subconscious, trying to find a way in, something outside kept sucking the corner of the white bedsheet, which I'd tacked up for a curtain, out of the window, then back in again, with a noise not unlike a very large and unmannerly person eating spaghetti. Sloop! Sloop! Smack!
Aelred, meanwhile, was sitting at the dining-room table writing a book review and watching the wind hurl debris past the windows. The children were upstairs sleeping, and the dog was wandering miserably from room to room, moaning to himself as he tried to outwalk the weather.
Outside, the trees were frantic.
What woke the boys was a chunk of the front-yard oak hitting their dormer window. Amazingly, the window didn't break, but Helier -- as he told me later, though not in quite these words -- was out of bed, across the room, and scrabbling for the light switch in one fluid motion of sheer somnambulant terror. So it was that when we came up to herd everyone downstairs, we did not have to shake them. Even the girls, who tend to sleep as those in the tomb, long-forgotten: even them we did not have to call twice.
So it was that at two in the morning we found ourselves in the basement. Our basement, it should be noted, is not the kind of comfortable finished basement in which you find a pool table or even a palm sander. Basically it's a hole in the ground, with some shelves on one wall, because at some point this house contained people who thought about things like home canning and disaster-preparedness. Last fall Helier and Crispina spent significant time down here turning it into a Stone-Age site, complete with archaeological enquiry; we had to stop the whole cave-dweller experiment when it turned out that they were excavating the foundation.
See above the authentic prehistorical-like hand paintings of the cave people. See also the irresistibly excavatable red-clay foundation . . .
not to mention the super-fascinating corpus of the original furnace . . .
in which, it has been said, a person could hide to escape, say, a really violent storm, should one happen to rage overhead.
Well, last night, nobody hid in the furnace, but I can report that it was, to re-coin a phrase, quite something to sit on the cold, dirty basement stairs with four kids, plus a dog on the verge of convulsions, at two in the morning while what sounded for a while like the end of the world did in fact rage overhead.
What struck me, actually, was how instantly distant the storm became once we were underground. There, there was no wind, only the occasional muted crash, as of thunder or the metal roof being ripped off. One one side of me, Helier shook in his Star Wars pajamas; on the other side of me, the dog trembled and drooled. The girls were huddled together a few steps below us, wrapped in the pink fairy quilt off Crispina's bed, and at the foot of the steps Amicus, who dislikes storms almost as much as the dog does, though he forbears to moan aloud, sat brooding and wishing that Aelred would stop watching the storm and come down basement, too.
The same storm system had passed yesterday morning through Memphis, where we used to live. My mother sent me a link to the local newspaper's article about it, noting that our old neighborhood had been particularly hard hit, with trees down on houses and cars. Scrolling through the post-storm photo gallery, I remembered the Shrove-Tuesday afternoon we spent camped out in the narrow hallway of our house there, with blankets and pillows and a wind-up radio and Epiphany's friend Hilaria, who came to our house every day after school until her mother got off work. The house was a one-story 1960s rancher, built on a slab, with nowhere really to hide if a tornado came after you, just this center hall with -- you didn't want to let yourself think about it -- only shingles and air between you and the raw death-dealing outdoors.
That day a tornado touched down about a mile and a half from our house, chewing up a warehouse and part of a shopping mall, while we sat clutching our blankets around us and trying to pretend that sitting in the hall could be fun, really, if you maintained an upbeat attitude about it. What I was thinking about the whole time was a friend of my aunt's in Jackson, who during a tornado warning hid with her children in the bathroom. Actually, they hid in the bathtub, so that when the tornado hit the house, it lifted them right out, in the tub, and carried them away. You know that the story ends in relative happiness, because the woman to whom it happened related it to my aunt, but all the same, while you sit in the hallway of your flimsy house while the tornado is consuming the local shopping precinct, you don't especially want to contemplate this woman's experience. They sailed along, she said, high in the air -- she could see power lines passing beneath them -- she and the children in the slippery bathtub. I can't imagine how they held on. In fact, at one stage they hit some turbulence, and she was thrown out, while the children in the tub went on without her. She broke her back, but the children got down safely, and as I say, when you consider all the things that might have happened, it's a bizarre story with a happy-enough ending. Still, though I could imagine enjoying talking about it later, I didn't really want it to happen to me.
The house we live in now has stood through storms since 1922, which ought to be comforting. As houses go, it's solid enough, or so I guess I should think. I wonder, though, what happened to all the walls upstairs, that the original plaster should have been replaced by wallboard: When did that happen? Why? I wonder about the cracks in the plaster walls downstairs. I wonder why the floor seems to give in certain places when you walk on it and how old the beetle-holes are in the wood.
Maybe the general passage of time, the roar of its wind as it mows right over me, makes me hypersensitive to the frailty of just about everything. The world's not safe. The house could fall down -- in fact, I'm continually surprised that it hasn't. The house falling down seems a far more likely scenario than the house standing, and yet it stands.
It didn't fall down last night, at any rate, and neither did either of the giant trees, front or back. At 2:15 the tornado warning officially expired, and we wandered back up, bleary and red-clay-dusted, into a quiet which seemed to look askance at us, as if we were unexpected visitors blown in on the storm: Where did you come from? The refrigerator hummed, the kitchen faucet dripped, and outside the rain fell placidly, a nice soft innocent rain, minding its own business.
We bedded the kids down in the study for what remained of the night. Then we went to bed ourselves to find sleep waiting at last, with its still small voice.
Aelred, meanwhile, was sitting at the dining-room table writing a book review and watching the wind hurl debris past the windows. The children were upstairs sleeping, and the dog was wandering miserably from room to room, moaning to himself as he tried to outwalk the weather.
Outside, the trees were frantic.
What woke the boys was a chunk of the front-yard oak hitting their dormer window. Amazingly, the window didn't break, but Helier -- as he told me later, though not in quite these words -- was out of bed, across the room, and scrabbling for the light switch in one fluid motion of sheer somnambulant terror. So it was that when we came up to herd everyone downstairs, we did not have to shake them. Even the girls, who tend to sleep as those in the tomb, long-forgotten: even them we did not have to call twice.
So it was that at two in the morning we found ourselves in the basement. Our basement, it should be noted, is not the kind of comfortable finished basement in which you find a pool table or even a palm sander. Basically it's a hole in the ground, with some shelves on one wall, because at some point this house contained people who thought about things like home canning and disaster-preparedness. Last fall Helier and Crispina spent significant time down here turning it into a Stone-Age site, complete with archaeological enquiry; we had to stop the whole cave-dweller experiment when it turned out that they were excavating the foundation.
See above the authentic prehistorical-like hand paintings of the cave people. See also the irresistibly excavatable red-clay foundation . . .
not to mention the super-fascinating corpus of the original furnace . . .
in which, it has been said, a person could hide to escape, say, a really violent storm, should one happen to rage overhead.
Well, last night, nobody hid in the furnace, but I can report that it was, to re-coin a phrase, quite something to sit on the cold, dirty basement stairs with four kids, plus a dog on the verge of convulsions, at two in the morning while what sounded for a while like the end of the world did in fact rage overhead.
What struck me, actually, was how instantly distant the storm became once we were underground. There, there was no wind, only the occasional muted crash, as of thunder or the metal roof being ripped off. One one side of me, Helier shook in his Star Wars pajamas; on the other side of me, the dog trembled and drooled. The girls were huddled together a few steps below us, wrapped in the pink fairy quilt off Crispina's bed, and at the foot of the steps Amicus, who dislikes storms almost as much as the dog does, though he forbears to moan aloud, sat brooding and wishing that Aelred would stop watching the storm and come down basement, too.
The same storm system had passed yesterday morning through Memphis, where we used to live. My mother sent me a link to the local newspaper's article about it, noting that our old neighborhood had been particularly hard hit, with trees down on houses and cars. Scrolling through the post-storm photo gallery, I remembered the Shrove-Tuesday afternoon we spent camped out in the narrow hallway of our house there, with blankets and pillows and a wind-up radio and Epiphany's friend Hilaria, who came to our house every day after school until her mother got off work. The house was a one-story 1960s rancher, built on a slab, with nowhere really to hide if a tornado came after you, just this center hall with -- you didn't want to let yourself think about it -- only shingles and air between you and the raw death-dealing outdoors.
That day a tornado touched down about a mile and a half from our house, chewing up a warehouse and part of a shopping mall, while we sat clutching our blankets around us and trying to pretend that sitting in the hall could be fun, really, if you maintained an upbeat attitude about it. What I was thinking about the whole time was a friend of my aunt's in Jackson, who during a tornado warning hid with her children in the bathroom. Actually, they hid in the bathtub, so that when the tornado hit the house, it lifted them right out, in the tub, and carried them away. You know that the story ends in relative happiness, because the woman to whom it happened related it to my aunt, but all the same, while you sit in the hallway of your flimsy house while the tornado is consuming the local shopping precinct, you don't especially want to contemplate this woman's experience. They sailed along, she said, high in the air -- she could see power lines passing beneath them -- she and the children in the slippery bathtub. I can't imagine how they held on. In fact, at one stage they hit some turbulence, and she was thrown out, while the children in the tub went on without her. She broke her back, but the children got down safely, and as I say, when you consider all the things that might have happened, it's a bizarre story with a happy-enough ending. Still, though I could imagine enjoying talking about it later, I didn't really want it to happen to me.
The house we live in now has stood through storms since 1922, which ought to be comforting. As houses go, it's solid enough, or so I guess I should think. I wonder, though, what happened to all the walls upstairs, that the original plaster should have been replaced by wallboard: When did that happen? Why? I wonder about the cracks in the plaster walls downstairs. I wonder why the floor seems to give in certain places when you walk on it and how old the beetle-holes are in the wood.
Maybe the general passage of time, the roar of its wind as it mows right over me, makes me hypersensitive to the frailty of just about everything. The world's not safe. The house could fall down -- in fact, I'm continually surprised that it hasn't. The house falling down seems a far more likely scenario than the house standing, and yet it stands.
It didn't fall down last night, at any rate, and neither did either of the giant trees, front or back. At 2:15 the tornado warning officially expired, and we wandered back up, bleary and red-clay-dusted, into a quiet which seemed to look askance at us, as if we were unexpected visitors blown in on the storm: Where did you come from? The refrigerator hummed, the kitchen faucet dripped, and outside the rain fell placidly, a nice soft innocent rain, minding its own business.
We bedded the kids down in the study for what remained of the night. Then we went to bed ourselves to find sleep waiting at last, with its still small voice.
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