This work, by John Playford, is by the "Father of English Music Publication" according to the introduction. The work was written in 1654 and covers composition of music in 2, 3, and 4 parts. It appears to be part of a larger work.
Find the complete document via PDF, here
M'Lynn reports good news, but please keep praying. There is something afoot affecting far too many people, so please remember M'Lynn and family, Christine and Gordon, Katherine and Franklin, and a young man who lives near us with more woe that it seems right for any person to have to carry.
There's been a curious sort of silence that has fallen over blogdom. It is hard to coax an answer from a group that must have opinions. But this silent pool is reflective of a larger quiet that gives me pause.
Over the last several days I have gone out to some local places at lunchtime as is my habit. In the course of doing so I have noted the parking lots usually crammed beyond any hope of finding spaces are far more than half empty. I've been able to park "at the door" of such places. The Panera near me, normally a small pandemonium at lunchtime, was so quiet that only the obnoxious order announcer intruded on our conversation.
Again I note it has only been over the past two or three days, and I wondered if it stemmed from some sort of observance on September 11, or if there were some deeper cause at work. Here, in Florida, it could be that I am merely noticing the end of major tourist season. Other parts of the country may be getting back to school, although I would have thought that would have been a week or so ago. (We start in August.)
Whatever the cause it has given an eerie, twilight-zone like aura to the days. Interesting and creepy at the same time.
But in the meantime, surely people other than Alicia have opinions about Category v. Weekly/Monthly. If so, please tell me.
I'm about 10% of the way through categorizing my archive. It will be a while before everything is in place, but hopefully soon. Then I'll try to figure out a way in which archves might be accessible by date or category. Failing that, which way might you all find more pleasing? Because I control the blog, I can always access category by other means. But if it would prove more useful (and it is possible) would you like to be able to access the archive by date and category? If not, which would you prefer?
Dylan's Mom gives us an update. Please continue to remember him in prayer. He is sorely missed.
Here is a nice discussion of those questions may be answered by science and those that may be answered by religion.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
--George Orwell writing of Gandhi a few months before Orwell's death.
from Guigo the Carthusian.
Guigo the Carthusian quoted in Ordinary Graces
Lorraine Kisly, ed.We all live by the same bread, each of us receiving his own share. . . In this gift which I have received I possess the whole of Christ and Christ possesses the whole of me, just as the limb which is possessed by the body in its turn possesses the whole body. Therefore that portion of faith which has been distributed to you is the fragment put in your mouth; but unless you reflect, often and devoutly, on what you believe, unless you will as it were break it up into pieces with your teeth, that is, with your spiritual senses, chewing it and turning it over in your mouth, it will stick in your throat, that is, it will not go down into your understanding. . . . Faith offers to us things which we cannot see, and there must be great intellectual labor before such things are passed down into the mind. Unless this dry bread be moistened by the saliva of wisdom coming down "from the Father of light," you will labor in vain, for what you have gathered up by thinking does not penetrate to your understanding. . . Therefore your faith will be idle unless by often thinking about it "you earn your bread by the labor of your hands." And yet, you cannot think about all you believe, or understand at once all that you think, but only by degrees, and as it were in fragments; and so your food can be properly prepared only by great labor.
Further the deponent sayeth not.
Erik has written (et seq.) some wonderful posts about the nature and meaning of semiotics. Most interesting in this regard is the suggestion of a semiotic study of music which appeals to me as the motifs in music do tend to be very traceable up to a point. Erik founds the grand tradition of Western Music on Gregorian Chant, to which I make no objection. But I do raise the question of the influences on Chant itself, and the relative lack of a clear means of finding these. But that is irrelevant to his basic point--merely one of those things that I often ponder. Go and read--be informed if you were not already aware, or entertained if you have already grasped semiotic theory.
Isabel is a very, very scary storm. So far it has not affected land. Let us all pray that it stays far from land and that everyone remains safe. A Category 5 is a very serious, very scary storm to be dealing with.
I've not been able to keep up with my rounds in recent days. You all know all the reasons. But stopping by a venue less frequently visited I found the following and ask all of your prayers for M Lynn and family:
Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Hmmmm. Well. Hubby got laid off today. Methinks I may take a small break from blogdom whilst I consider the financial implosion that just happened.
M'Lynn, please forgive my intrusion into your blog for this. Everyone else, please pray--this is quickly becoming epidemic in my world at least, and my heart breaks each time I hear it because I know the hardship of it.
Here--Slavery Ordained of God. There's no point in denying these realities of the past and these misconstructions of God's word, but it does hurt at times. We do well to learn from our errors.
Simple Gifts
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free.
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be.
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
Twill be in the valley of love and delight.When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shall not be ashamed.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
'Till by turning, turning we come round right.
The Shakers were/are an interesting protestant contemplative/mystical order. They maintained celibacy for all members and gained members only by recruitment. Presently there is a small community of Shakers living at the ancient residence of Sabbathday Lake in Maine.
Theologically they were terribly wrong about a great many things, unless you slant and nuance them just right. But this song encapsulates a truth that can resonate through Christianity regardless of the denomination.
This page will tell you far more than you might ever care to know about the Simplicity of God. But let us just accept for the moment that God is simple, of single substance, indivisible, whole, and uniate. Then, it would seem, to best mirror Him, we should be likewise. We should not live with a divided heart. All that we have and all that we are should reflect God's glory.
But the reality is that we are a divided people. Our hearts rest only when they rest in God, and for most of us that means that our hearts rest only momentarily before skipping on to other concerns. God is a strong presence in our lives, but for many of us, the slightest breath of discontent or of pleasure, and God is wiped out of all consideration--suddenly we are on our own.
Jesus tells us, "Where your heart is, there your treasure shall be." He teaches simplicity, "You cannot serve God and Mammon." But we do not practice it. And we do not practice it because we convince ourselves that it isn't true. That we can do both--we are superpeople, capable of conquering the world and subduing it and rendering right sacrifice and duty to God.
For those who really think this, a newsflash--"We are more than conquerers through Him. . ." not through our own efforts, not through what we do, but through what He IS.
So, throughout the day, I find myself singing this song and recalling that indeed, it is a gift, perhaps in our language a Grace, to be simple. And in being simple, we become free. For the only freedom lies in service to God and to our fellow man.
In remembrance of the day, this:
from My Invented Country
Isabel AllendeUntil only a short time ago, if someone had asked me where I'm from, I would have answered without much thought, Nowhere; or Latin America; or, maybe, In my heart I'm Chilean. Today, however, I say I'm an American, not simply because that's what my passport verifies, or because that word includes all of America from north to south, or because my husband, my son, my grandchildren, most of my friends, my books, and my home are in northern California; but because a terrorist attack destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and starting with that instant, many things have changed. We can't be neutral in moments of crisis. This tragedy has brought me face to face with my sense of identity. I realize today that I am one person in the multicolored population of North America, just as before I was Chilean. I no longer feel that I am so alien in the United States. When I watched the collapse of the towers, I had a sense of having lived in a nearly identical nightmare. By a blood-chilling coincidence--historic karma--the commandeered airplanes struck their U.S. targets on a Tuesday, September 11, exactly the same day of the week and month--and almost the same time in the morning --of the 1973 military coup in Chile, a terrorist act orchestrated by the CIA against a democracy. The images of burning buildings, smoke, flames, and panic are similar in both settings. That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever again the same: I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment, nothing will ever again be the same, and I gained a country.
Looking at some of the search strings that lead people to my site and at their resultant matches on the site, I have drawn a general conclusion--many people would profit from a short class in boolean logic and using a search engine. Better yet might be to simply read the help material from Google's site. For example, if you want to find Nudist Wombat worshipping women covered in clay, you would be wise to surround this search phrase with quotation marks that indicates that you are searching an entire string. The Google search defaults to an automatic search near trying to find as many words in your search string as possible no matter how they are related.
I am deeply grateful that seekers after wisdom and knowledge choose to stop by my place, but I fear they must leave woefully disappointed at the lack of mention of Extra-terrestrial Terrorists murdering moon astronauts. Hopefully, they leave with some nugget of information and a slightly cheerier view of the world.
Dylan needs our prayers. Please remember him as he struggles with all the problems that come with so long a hospital stay.
Gordon and Christine really need our prayers--he has been long enough unemployed that they are reaching the end of reserves and unemployment isn't going to keep them going much longer. Please remember them.
Katherine and Franklin and family all need our prayers.
Please let me know if there are other intentions or needs.
This is supposedly the next book for our religious/spiritual book group and I am finding the same difficulty with it that I had the first time through--the writing is stilted, uneven, and even just plain bizarre--or so it seems. Compared to close contemporaries Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells it lacks a polish and an immediacy these others have. He fails to engage me in any meaningful sense. I always feel inadequate when I admit this because so many speak so highly of Chesterton's work. But I'm afraid that it just doesn't resonate with me. Some of the nonfiction prose is more interesting and better composed, but frankly I rather spend the time with Greene, Waugh, O'Connor, or Percy, all of whom present their own problems and flaws, but who at least never fail to be interesting from the point of view of a writer.
I would love to have some encouragement in this reading--so if there are any who really, really like The Man Who Was Thursday I'd appreciate hearing from you, and I am certain others in the blog world would profit from it as well.
Some time back I blogged extensively about a Yancey book that I was enjoying enormously. Subsequently I have tried many others. I don't find them nearly as compelling even though all are written quite well. The attraction of Soul Survivor for me must have been the literary world and the figures he chose to represent it.
Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own had a similar attraction for me. I learned much about four figures who I stood some chance of understanding and whose vocations (in the Earthly sense) spoke to me. I suspect that I will get more out of Isabel Allende's My Invented Country than I am likely to harvest from any further reading of Yancey, and so until I hear word to the contrary, I'm likely to retire Yancey, or read him only in small bits. This is not to denigrate his work or suggest that it isn't entirely worthwhile and wonderful. It simply is an acknowledgment that aspects of it lack appeal for me, even though it is very fine in many ways.
Despite reports of some problems, I'm nearly there. The banner is now the proper shade of hibiscus blossom, and the blues complimentary. Indeed, it is much more a "flos carmeli" than the previous site--and probably more representative of who I am.
I do need to try to remedy some of the problems I'm hearing about, but so far everyone is reporting the same difficult which suggests that it may be somewhat easier to fix than I had anticipated. When you get into all those "margin-calls" that are required for a page that isn't rigidly fixed, you're bound to have some difficulty. I'll ask a friend far more expert than I am what might be done to fix it.
Thanks.
Yesterday I received news that a good friend's daughter recently entered Mother Angelica's Poor Clare convent. After a moment of shock (I had never known anyone who actually took this step--so I was surprised) I warmly congratulated the very proud father who had shared this news.
I shared this news with a couple of other people and invariably I have gotten the same reaction from them, "Wasn't she kind of young to make such a decision?" Now, I'll admit the thought had flashed across the surface of my brain, but I rejected it remembered St Thérèse, St. Dominic Salvio, and St. Aloysius Gonzaga, all very young.
It seems that nowdays, a person of eighteen years or so is considered too young to make a lifetime decision. But I wonder--isn't it a bit presumptious on our part to preempt the action of God. It isn't as though a vocation is a choice in the ordinary sense of the word. Certainly one must ultimately choose to follow where the vocation leads, but if we understand vocation properly, isn't it the tender tug of the person toward God under God's aegis?
So then, who is too young to follow God? Medieval hagiographies had legends of children who from the womb were preaching the word of God, and while that may be more than a little odd, St. Thérèse spent much of her young life playing at "Nuns in the Convent" with her sister Celine.
No matter, I am truly delighted that this young woman is exploring the meaning and possibility of vocation. There is good reason for long internships in the course of joining an order. The discernment of vocation is no easy task. It is also no decision to undertake lightly. Please pray for this young woman as she begins the journey of discovery of vocation. Pray that if she has a vocation, it is made resoundingly clear to her and that she remain true to it despite the currents of the world.
The first part of a sequence poem.
Florida FallThis morning a lizard
not much larger than a large ant
fled my foot,
a leaf of Florida fall.
I gently tapped it off
the pavement in hopes
that he would greet
my Florida spring.© 2003, Steven Riddle
Everything is set. Almost everything is as I would like it. But the color scheme just isn't coming together. Those HTML experts, any notions on three progressively darker compatible blue-greens to blues. I'm looking for a very festive Caribbean feel--hence the present coral. I think I may been to incorporate a small gif background to tile and create the color effect I want. Any advice?
By the way, thanks to all the kind souls out in St. Blogs who have so generously given time and energy to help make this come about. Soon shall report on why one might consider such a move and under what circumstances one should consider staying put.
It has been some time since I last posted this. I was reminded of it by a forthcoming event at work and thought that I'd bring it to everyone's attention again.
For a wedding shower for a colleague we were called upon to decorate large sheets with quotes from children about love. The quote I chose was a gem--
"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you meant it, you should say it a lot. People forget."
I don't do decoration--just don't do it. My artistic ability is nil--even my stick figures look anemic. When called upon to do these things my choice of decoration is always words (because normally one can't include music--and for a wedding, I really don't know what music I would choose). So the poem below are the words I chose to decorate my poster. And this was the introductory couplet I appended to it, a wish I extend to all of those who are married in St. Blog's:
May your lives be such that his holds ever true
from you to him and from him to you.
To My Dear And Loving Husband Anne BradstreetIf ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence.
Thy love is such I can no way repay.
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever
That when we live no more, we may live ever.