DVD “Die Messe” Ausschnitte

Fr Johannes Schwarz has just published a DVD on the Mass.

 

Something else profound

The music starts about 1′ 32″.

 

Something profound

A scheduled post, as is the next one and the previous one.

The flurry at the beginning is fun, but just wait till the toccata gets going after the pedal solo. The first time I heard this I smiled for a week. Is it not the most joyful thing you have ever heard?  I would love to play this after an Easter vigil, if I could think of a way to start it without the introductory flurries (and could remember how to play the organ at all, never mind how to play this, twelve years on, and so on and so forth). Double-click so it goes through to the Youtube site, then you can click on the relevant things on the right-hand side to get to the adagio and fugue, which are in separate videos.  I love this chap’s playing of the toccata and the fugue, and the adagio is perfectly nice too.

 

Taking Men Seriously

If I talk to a man about a problem I have, I won’t listen to “what” he is saying until I feel that he has empathised with my problem, that he has “felt my pain”. This is daft, but is the flip side of Boeciana’s famous earnest phone lecture to Aelianus on How To Talk With Distraught Women.  I need a lecture on How To Listen To Men When You Are Distraught. Just because A N Bloke hasn’t gone “mmm, yeah, oh that must be hard, I see that you must be very worried” for ten minutes, doesn’t mean he’s not sympathetic or helpful or doesn’t understand.

 

Read the Turks

A Chip off the Old Block.

You may recognise one of the contributors from a Catholic Britblog (or a British Cathblog); since she’s decided to anonymise, I won’t give the link to that blog here.

They say if Palestine is the birthplace of Christianity, Asia Minor (part of modern Turkey) is the cradle in which it thrived. This is where the first communities of Christ were formed, great debates that shaped the Christian faith took place, and creeds were written after heated discussion.

We are a group of Turks who have the privilege of having born and grown up in Turkey. Even more so, we have the privilege of enjoying God’s grace as expressed in His Son, Jesus the Christ.

We come from different Christian traditions, and our interests and foci range widely. However we all love to explore and to share what we are discovering in our respective journeys. As sons and daughters of this land that gave to the church apostles, saints and martyrs, we try and follow in the footsteps of this great cloud of witnesses. So here we are, a chip off the old block…

 

The theory

Is to be basically out of here till October. How much do you bet I fail? If I have anything intwesting I’ll email it to Notburga, if she feels obliging she can post it. Obviously I should think of something meaningful to post after this.

 

ma filosfy’s in ur theologee, messin wiv ur understanding uv sanktifikashn

 

Garrigou-Lagrange on why we need good philosophy

[The doctrine] of the nominalists [...] said that grace is a gift which is not essentially supernatural, but which morally gives a right to eternal life, like paper money which, though only paper, gives a right, by reason of a legal institution, to receive money. This doctrine constituted the negation of the essentially supernatural life; it was a failure to recognize the very essence of grace and of the theological virtues.

(The Three Ages of the Interior Life)

 

One-liner by Our Lord, and parishes

Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

Is this not a summary of Mass in one sentence? I was thinking this yesterday as we recited the divine mercy chaplet led by the PP, all of us  kneeling before Our Lord on the altar.

Did I mention I love my parish? I love my parish so much I even quite like the flying wire-mesh angels, though I cannot argue against my opinion that sanctuaries designed after the introduction of the new missal tend to be a mess, and that ours is no exception. Did I mention I love our pp? He preaches most excellently well and offers Mass with devotion and recollectedly. The family-life-themed stations of the cross through the streets of the  parish were a series of perfect short sermons delivered through very powerful speakers, echoing through the blocks of flats around us.  Big solid hands, delicate words, most edifying example. [And a crotchety git in person.] Did I mention the drumming and wailing of the neo-cats in the “undercroft” is really really annoying, but worth putting up with for the effect it seems to have on the parish in general? Did I mention I love the organist? It is not easy to accompany the ordinary of the Mass well, especially not the Gloria, nor to prevent long things like the Te Deum becoming the Tedium. He is a magician, and the instrument is a good one, together they lift the prayer and do not crush it. Did I mention we sang the Te Deum yesterday in thanks for the election of the Pope? Did I mention I love the fact that of the nine priests in the parish (one of the trendy young bearded ones in the photies under the wire-mesh angels, pp in the bottom photie) only one yawns his way through Mass? The crowds on Sundays, the lines of people walking to church on Sundays and feasts? The daily exposition of the Blessed Sacrament? We’ve even got a proper bookshop.

To think I nearly didn’t take this flat.

To think of my poor little parish in West Lothian, where the folk group played over and over again a small selection from an old edition of Hymns Old & New, when they didn’t have more interesting plans for Sunday than going to Mass. A little later someone discovered CDs of Celtic Sacro-pop, and we sang along to those (I jest not). A religious decided he liked the parish and used to say Mass to help out the pp (who had two or three parishes) – in the summer vac he announced that since it was the holidays, he wouldn’t preach, but would tell jokes instead.  His sermons were a joke anyway, so  the material change was not great. It was so sad. It shouldn’t have been sadder for the folk in the parish being so great, but it was. Nivver mind social justice, how about ecclesial justice?

[update: more photies of me parish church: Warszavka.

You can see it in the previous post as well, looking as though it's in the middle of the world's most horrible concrete jungle, which it's not.][and I've just discovered four thousand people can fit into the church at one time - certainly on Maundy Thursday one had to check carefully if there was enough space to kneel].

 

The good and the bad, or: better than parody

Using this second-but-last day of the Easter octave I wish all of you faithful readers who have returned after the Lenten silence a very happy and blessed Eastertide!

I was happy enough to spend the Triduum in a retreat led by a Passionist priest, which was extremely good. So far I have come across the Passionists through the lives of St. Gemma and that of Newman (who was received into the Church by a Passionist priest and gives a very approving though somewhat scary picture of the order in ‘Loss and Gain’), through their bookshop in Glasgow (much to be recommended!) and of course through the Laus Crucis blog and Father Spencer’s comments kindly left at ours. The very favourable impression I had was strongly confirmed by the retreat. For you see, the priest usually giving these Triduum retreats also does it very well, but can be a bit – tough. Telling you very directly what to do. I felt I needed a bit of softer handling this year. So when I read that Our Lord’s last speech at the Last Supper as reported by St. John was to be the topic, and a very kindly-looking priest was going to give the retreat, I felt relieved. And very kindly and friendly indeed, he spoke about the wounds of Our Lord and the necessity of the Cross in our lives. This was not quite what slothful me had hoped he would… (O.K. Notburga. What do you expect for a Good Friday/Holy Saturday retreat then?). Yet when being told about these things in such a manner, even reluctant nature really starts to feel it is somewhat cowardly and ungrateful to revolt.

But the main point I wanted to make is that this priest – very sound theologically apart from a most unfortunate touch of Balthasarianism that is so terribly widespread among the otherwise orthodox priests in Germany – quoted St. Hildegard of Bingen in one of his talks. Now I have always avoided St. Hildegard because she has been so annoyingly hijacked by divers strange esoterics and health fanatics. The quote, however, was extremely interesting for me, and it is not the fault of a saint as such if some crazy people centuries later start getting obsessed about her writings. Hence I began to look for the ‘Opera Divinorum’ on the internet. The only edition in either English or German available on-line looked, alas, like having been edited by an exemplar of the above-mentioned esoterics. Weighing the danger of serious misinterpretation by tendentious translation in my head, I bought it.

No doubt it will prove to be very edifying and interesting. So far the main fruit of reading it has been hearty laughter, for I started with the introduction. This was written by a Dominican named Matthew Fox. I had always thought that the Dominicans, though sometimes dodgy, did not go off the rails to the extent that the Jesuits and some Franciscans did. Father Fox’s field of work, however, seems to be ‘Creation Spirituality’. Reading this already caused considerable mirth in me. During the perusal of his writing, I had to burst out in laughter frequently. We sometimes give far to much credit to parodists: I think they often just copy things out. This text could have been copied and pasted to the Curt Jester’s blog without further ado. I think the crowning passage to be this:

We need to bring our whole selves into an encounter with our deepest mystics and prophets. This means we need to bring our right brains – our hearts – as well as our left brains – our intellects – into this encounter. Reading Hildgard with the right brain, or open heart, means that we place ourselves in her presence and, in a non-judgmental fashion, simply allow her images and words to wash over us. When such an image or word alerts you or strikes you or surprises you, do not hesitate to liner on it, to be with it, to make connections from it. Feel free to respond with poetry or dance or clay or drawing when Hildegard’s words have so moved you. In this way, you can be sure that Hildegard is awakening the mystic in you and drawing it out.

There are other gems: his “Creation centered grid for reading the creation mystics”, including points so wonderful as “Pantheism: experiencing the diaphanous and transparent God” or: “Our royal personhood: our dignity for building the kingdom/queendom of God”, “God as mother, God as child; ourselves as mothers of God and birthers of God’s Son”.

How surprising that googling Father Fox you find this:

Seeking to establish a pedagogy that was friendly to learning spirituality, he established an Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality that operated for seven years at Mundelein College in Chicago and twelve years at Holy Names College in Oakland. For ten of those years at Holy Names College Cardinal Ratzinger, as chief Inquisitor and head of the Congregation of Doctrine and Faith (called the Office of the Holy Inquisition until 1965), tried to shut the program down. Ratzinger silenced Fox for one year in 1988 and forced him to step down as director. Three years later he expelled Fox from the Order and then had the program terminated at Holy Names College.

Rather than disband his amazing and ecumenical faculty, Fox started his own University called University of Creation Spirituality nine years ago in Oakland, California. Fox was President and a member of the Board of Directors for nine years. He is currently lecturing, teaching and writing and is President of the non-profit that he created in 1984, Friends of Creation Spirituality.

The principle objections from the Congregation of the Faith to Fox’s work were that he is a “feminist theologian;” that he calls God “Mother” (Fox has proven the medieval mystical tradition did exactly that); that he prefers “original blessing” to “original sin;” that he calls God “child”; that he associates too closely with Native Americans and people of the wikka tradition; that he does not condemn homosexuals; that he has replaced the naming of the spiritual journey as Purgation, Illumination and Union with the four paths of Creation Spirituality: The Via Positiva (joy, delight and awe); the Via Negativa (darkness, silence, suffering, letting go and letting be); the Via Creativa (creativity); and the Via Transformativa (justice, compassion, interdependence).

O, really? How small-minded of our now Holy Father to be opposed to that, indeed!