Salvation’s not when you’re given a gift held inside a box and gift wrap and ribbons: salvation’s when you, the helpless, orphaned baby, are taken up into God’s arms – even you, kicking and screaming – to feed at his breast because you can do none other. So help you God, for now you are his.
I think we can have no quibbles about what that baby will do then: he continually drinks that life-giving milk, lest he die; he drinks of the winecup, lest he wither and be cut off from the Vine. Words, words, words will not nourish his life unless they come with food. If Christ’s flesh is real food, his blood real drink, it cannot be only words spoken into the air as legal fictions, but they will feed the child indeed.
For Christ our Paschal Lamb has been sacrificed, for us to feed on him by faith.
One way to follow tradition in hymnody while also enriching it lyrically with commentary: troping. The kind of troping that I mean is (1) the addition of new text to a melisma, i.e. to a single syllable of text sung on several different notes in succession, or (2) a new verse or verses, consisting of both text and music, between phrases of the original text. This is especially good, I think, for the Kyrie and the Agnus Dei, on account of their simple, biblically-based words and their great antiquity.
The linguistic benefit of troping is that interrelated streams of words can interact, the one commenting on the meaning and significance of the other. Keep reading →
Ok, enough with this ‘Christ-follower’ business, though I appreciate the stress on the call to follow Christ. A Christian is one who belongs to Christ by legitimately being a part of his Church (normatively by being baptized into faith), which is in Christ as a wife is united to her husband. Period. To emphasize any dichotomy between Christian and Christ-follower as a designation is to set up a two-tiered system with real Christ-followers (the invisible Church) on top and pseudo-Christians (the imposters) on the bottom, as judged by… ah, of course: the individual. Keep reading →
No one, on his own, thinks he’s wrong. He may have been wrong in the past, but now – even if just now, just as you’ve convinced him to change his position – he’s enlightened and no longer wrong. Therefore he says ‘I was wrong,’ not ‘I am wrong.’ This is especially true of me: it’s alright to say I was wrong in that forsaken past, but it’s the hardest of things to say I am wrong. Keep reading →
Nisi exquisitum deverticulum, canones tenendi sunt.
‘Unless the deviation be exquisite, the rules must be held to.’
I said this in English in reference to typography and form in general, and Laura said it was my motto of life. Oh, but it is: canonicity rules me (no etymological pun intended). I ought to emblazon this somewhere.
Rules are made to be followed, though sometimes they bend. Of course, if the rule’s wrong, you change or nuance the rule rather than breaking it with a myriad random exceptions. It’s that or you live as if all’s chaos and all things are equally probable, forsaking the semblance of order.
Of course I had to articulate the motto in Latin, that morphologically orderly language of few irregularities.
Okay, this first bit is just to whet your hunger, so skip this paragraph if you wish. I ate chez Hippopo last night: for appetizer, I had a carpaccio dressed in olive oil; for the plat principal, a nice steak saignant with roquefort sauce and a side of gratin dauphinois; for dessert, a crème brûlée.
Anyway, this restaurant’s motto, for the Anglophones, is ‘for the love of meat’. Indeed, my meat love was nicely satisfied. Apparently, my cousin’s asked for this place for his every birthday since he was like eight, and I can see why, although I’m more the type to ask for variety and thus make different ethnic food choices every year.
But on the menu, there was a little section called the Hippotheosis of the Desserts (Carnival of the Animals, anyone?). I’d almost be willing to wager that such a pun on apotheosis wouldn’t work in America, because few people use the word apotheosis. In Shakespeare, Professor Landreth explained the term while lecturing on the ending of Antony and Cleopatra, and before that I knew the term in connexion with heretical adoptionist Christology.
Perhaps I ought not to be surprised: the French are required to take philosophy to graduate from high school.
When heretics are excommunicated from the fold of the holy catholic and apostolic Church, when are things right again? The answer of ‘when they hold the correct beliefs again’ is probably very common (if people believe in excommunication at all), but this is distinctly unchurchly: the Church isn’t optional, and the only way normally for healing to take place is through reconciliation and restoration to the Church. This idea also inevitably leaves people hanging with an unclear reattachment, whereas the break was manifest.
But this is probably why we think it’s enough to be right without being legitimately connected to the Body of the Church except by the futility of our own thoughts. Whose solipsistic idea was it that one’s thought, unconnected to the world, could connect people? Is this all that matters to salvation? For if it is, no wonder there’s the crypto-Pelagian idea floating around that intentions alone matter. But if so, then why would we excommunicate people for heresy in the first place?
Perhaps one may suggest that visible Church actions do make things happen and that we don’t have to be all hush-hush, mysterious and Gnostic about it.
We have a lot of nice-sounding church music. Perhaps we even have too much of it. This depends on meaning, of course: what’s the right and proportionate way to portray God in all the subject matter of worship?
At least some of our church music, for the right functions in each service (okay, every song should have a particular function already, really), ought to be compatible with the sound of thunder. Keep reading →
As Marc expresses, the existence of the Church is not an excuse for something else to happen (he’s written what I’ve been wanting to write, on a different register). There can be no chill about the raison d’être, and any other purposes people dream up are mere interpolations.
Remember, O Israel, the call of thy covenants. Keep reading →
‘Such are his words, and sick at heart with immense grief he feigns hope in his expression, but hides his pain deep in his heart’ (talia voce refert curisque ingentibus aeger / spem vultu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem. Aeneid 1.208–9, translation given by David O. Ross in Vergil’s Aeneid: A Reader’s Guide [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007], 9).
I’m nothing like these epic heroes psychologically: I cannot so feign something without thinking it’s true, even if I must do violence to myself to get there. If I’m torn asunder in grief – oh, it will be known, and you need not speculate.
I note also, you are what you do, not what you intend to do, not even what you think you’re doing – your good intentions cannot save you from your monstrous deeds. The subjective deliberations in your mind between reason and counter-reason, between one emotion and another, and even what you think is your choice, are the construction of your self, not the more authentic ‘you’. In the end, no decision is final until action has actually been taken, for no one can know whether he will change his mind and be made other than he originally intended to be.
If you’re a hypocrite, your actions, and not your thoughts alone, belie your words; if you’re engaged and intend to be married, you may yet break off the engagement; if you’ve given yourself to be catechized in the Way (‘made a personal decision’), you may yet decide at the last that you cannot be baptized into the faith. Our reaction against this, our attempted revolt, is a plea for the illusion of autonomy. ‘Peace, peace,’ they cry, but there is no peace; ‘freedom, freedom,’ but they are everywhere in chains, in the hands of the Accuser.
These also are the issues of authenticity that surround apostasy, which is not predicated on your earnestness or lack thereof.
I once thought God in his beauty could be compared to a crocus or a cherry blossom in the morning, reflecting on the delicate beauty that he had dispersed into the world and seeking to apply the attribute ‘delicate’ to him. Blasphemy. The flower is his Bride, ever dependent and glorious, but he is the Sun. (Don’t worry, I’m not at all denying the kenosis of Christ.)
Dynamis. Agios o Theos, Agios Ischyros, Agios Athanatos, eleison ymas.
The weakness of ‘balance’: it’s always a superficial analysis.* It reliably gets us nowhere, and it assumes too much.
They offered scant evidence of forethought when they taught the children to ‘strike a balance’ without a way to tell what exactly to balance in the first place. Then, thinking turned into sludge. If you must teach nuance and subtlety and precision, teach that. Just don’t tell people there are no rules, or the balancing acts they attempt will be without rule, without measure, without canon, without any hope of success by any more than mere chance (though ‘chance’, too, is a simplifying abstraction).
‘Balance’ is for the non-thinkers to persist their lazy ignorance and subject all things to their worst judgement under that rubric.
* Except in such cases as Newton’s Third Law of Motion and other things that make reference to literal, physical balance.
One of the most beautiful Kyries I’ve ever heard, by Tomás Luis de Victoria, from Officium Defunctorum (although the beginning’s been cut, so the first two plainchantings of ‘Kyrie eleison’ are missing). For God to have allowed for sin to mar the world, this must be an adornment to the glory of his redemption.
Now, the day after Reformation Day, I wonder why God purposed for this piece to come out of the Counter-Reformation: perhaps it’s exactly so that greater glory will shine forth when the Church is reformed according to God’s word and once more united. What is fractured will be brought together. God loves his Church: let no man forsake the vision of her glory.
We remember all our brethren who have tasted death and wait for Christ to return in glory to raise us in the Resurrection of the Body. The collect for today from the Book of Common Prayer reads,
O almighty God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord; Grant us grace so to follow thy blessed Saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those unspeakable joys, which thou hast prepared for them that unfeignedly love thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
We wait, and we long to see what we now know by faith. Come, Lord Jesus!
First, I want to say that it would be a great reminder for me to have בעזרת השם (beʿezrat ha-shem: ‘in the help of the Name [of YHWH]’) emblazoned across my door, although I think sometimes it would be cool instead to have lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate (‘all hope abandon, ye who enter in’).
With this in mind: a certain Philologos, writing in an article entitled ‘Public Displays of Piety Are in Fashion, Thank God’, claims that routine reference to God in daily life (‘if God wills’, ‘with God’s help’, ‘blessed be the Name’) has become common among Mohammadans and some Jews but makes a passing remark that such isn’t the case for Christians. I’m wondering why this is so, if it is indeed.
Is it good for a Christian society to be filled with such acknowledgements of God in the hum-drum of daily life? Keep reading →
