A world where Andras Schiff says the word “blog”

I think I’m rediscovering my inner muso. Here’s a blog by An Concert Pianist, which I found through the blog of A Former Opera Singer. I creased up on reading this:

10:12. Spectacularly beautiful rendering of Schubert A major Rondo. I go backstage and wander about. It is a zoo, a cocktail of craziness and schmooziness. I tell Andras Schiff how much I enjoyed his Bach, and he says … get this … “I enjoyed your Sarah Palin blog.”

There was a magnificent Hungarian emphasis on the word blog, and his eyes widened a bit, as if he were surprised to find himself saying that word. I consider this to be the existential climax of the whole, strange evening, I’m speechless, I have no idea how to react to the idea that Andras Schiff read the Sarah Palin blog, and my life may never be the same. Is there a world where Andras Schiff says the word “blog”? There is, and we’re living in it.

There’s also a very funny spoof here.

[edited to add: Schiff belongs  (i.e. I went to some of his concerts) to a past life of mine, W. B. B. (Well Before Blogs)- which is why I identified so much with the sentiment of this post's title ]

http://valleadurni.blogspot.com/

 

Gospel interpretation fail

Has anyone any suggestions for how “So likewise every one of you that doth not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be my disciple” is an explanation of the making-sure-one-has-enough-to-build-a-tower or practical-approaches-to-war parables in the preceding verses? I’ve been chewing on this vaguely since yesterday, and some of the patristic interpretations in the Catena Aurea arenae bad (sez she graciously), but I’m looking for the killer explanation that makes it all obvious and makes me holy just from knowing it

 

Innocents accused

One priest of my acquaintance had hilarious stories of the passes made at him by women – I am not sure if his witty brush-offs really happened, or were just what he wishes he’d thought of at the time and he’d in fact just looked mildly horrified and legged it. Less amusingly, I know one  priest who was convicted of sexual assualt on the grounds of the testimony of one woman with wobbly mental health, known to lie and to have a strong motive to lie in this matter, in a trial held in secret where no defence witnesses were called, though the defence lawyer had letter and phonecalls and visits from people with strong evidence to entirely discredit the accusation. I know another priest suspended by his bishop from ministry on the  strength of one accusation. The accuser refused to go to court, and the bishop refused the priest the canonical trial he asked for to clear his name: the chap could do nothing, except “sit in his hut and fish”, as a priest friend put it.

The sad thing is that the news reports say “Priest accused of x”, the reader carries away  “priest did x”, and “priest entirely exonerated, accuser lied” never entirely takes away the impression Madame Evangelista described.  Of course, news reports deal like this with everyone, and the lives of teachers and others are also ruined by false accusations of abuse. But for some reason, people don’t think “teacher=perv”. Or indeed, “LGBT Youth Worker = Paedophile“.

 

Why …

… for a class teaching non-English-speakers (that is, not native speakers) to read English philosophy texts, would you choose a translation from German?

Ugh.

(Dear Notburga, I am not ugghing at the Teutsch, but at the fact of giving people a text that is obviously a translation, and not natural English. )

(Moreover, if you send the text to your assistant late on a Sunday night, how do you expect to have prepare what she was supposed to prepare, get it back to you to check, and the whole thing emailed out to the class for them to print in time for a Tuesday class?)

 

pater Rupert Mayer, OP

I think he joined the Dominicans as an act of rebellion – the comments from fond aunties and so on must have gotten very tedious. I recall the impact made by the single sentence “There is no excuse for being lazy” in one of his weekday sermonettes. It was sharper than a two-edged sword etc, because behind it was Pater Rupert. An engineer by profession, if I recall correctly, he had to be sent on holiday on doctor’s orders (the Dominicans have not drawn conclusions from the unfortunate effects of overwork on a neurotic German Augustinian in the early modern period) . You have never seen anyone so disciplined and working so hard, and in being so, so focussed on the things of God. This is a Real Dominican – speak to God or of God, and that only when you’re not studying.  I fell in love with metaphysics in Pater Rupert’s class on the virtue of faith.  As I wrote to someone, it was two sessions a week of peering into the abyss of non-being. (Poor Pater Rupert felt that he was peering into the abyss of student igronance and sloth.) And if I’d taken his gentle advice about a decision I was making, that would have been a very good thing to have done.

Picture taken without permission from here.

 

Fr John Reid, OSA

I’d started at the local Poly-as-was, just round the corner from my school. As far as God went, I had two things – a sense of the presence of God, and that the faith was very real. The latter was born of the enthusiasm with which our RE teacher spoke to us about social justice and the passages of the Old Testament and Gospels she had us read on the subject. Injustice cries out to heaven, and hell very much exists.

That was about it, really. Fr John was PP of the parish where my department was, an area of grey pebbledash and supermarkets that sell apples priced not by the pound or kilo, but per piece. He gave me his time – we went for lunch, or just tea. A real person whose Christianity was not some private add-on – when we talked, about people and life and interests, God was part of that life. From Fr John, not school, I first became aware of books that were serious and not fiction. Not that I hadn’t seen or read any, but somehow I hadn’t noticed them. Fr John is thus indirectly responsible for My Religious Opinions, if I were to write a Newman-style history of these.  First, he lent me The Stripping of the Altars, and though I had yet to learn the phrase, sentire cum Ecclesia became a new principle.  Second, this new interest in Serious Books took me to God’s Own University, whose Catholic community quickly evanglised me with vast quantities of respectable red wine and the Old Testament types of the Assumption. If Fr John hadn’t nursed that little Christian life after it left school, it might well have been washed away in a tide of righteous opinionating.

When I hear religious talking about poverty, the picture that comes to mind every time is of Fr John microwaving the contents of a tin of beans for his dinner.  And on the meaning or witness of priestly celibacy (though of course he is in any case a religious) , his comment “If there’s no God, your parents still have each other”.

Fr John is also one of the warmest people I have met.  It’s an example I haven’t always borne in mind, and we haven’t seen each other in, um, thirteen years, but he remains a model of Christian kindliness and warmth in manner and in action. Now I write this, I realise how much I have forgotten of our conversations – the impression remains, but the details are lost.

 

Appriestiate

Madame Evangelista wrote a post about the kindness of a priest at St Mary’s Cathedral in Newcastle.  James Preece wrote a post praising his parish priest and saying something about their friendship. I wonder if we could get a thing going here for this priestly year? I remember listening to a PP years ago thanking the congregation for their support in the weeks after some scandal or other involving a priest had come out. It hadn’t occurred to me that the scandal would affect other priests. Now, as ME says,

To put it bluntly, the common stereotype of a catholic priest is of a paedophile. At best, when they are not thought of as actual criminals, the view is of a stern and forbidding man who promulgates hate or at least, makes people feel like complete shit about themselves.

Whereas I think my experience, if broader than that of most people, is probably typical: a couple of well-meaning careerites, (and a friend knew one real manipulative shit) and many many kind, generous, sensible, hard-working and prayerful men of all kinds, from thug to aesthete, from monk to bon viveur. I have received so many kindnesses and so many graces from these men.  It would be good if the cesspit of the internet had more Posts In Praise of Priests. Appreciations of individuals, by name, if it would not cause them embarassment or difficulty.

 

Preventing single-person-itis

Marriages, families – famously difficult to live in. Religious communities – there will be someone who will insist on clicking their nails behind you in choir, or say intolerably moronic things in recreation. But what do we singles do to make sure our corners are rubbed off? Volunteering for a day a week is not the same thing at all.

I recommend adopting a granny, your own or someone else’s. One party gets a strenuous drilling in forebearance, consideration and patience, and you have someone to peel the potatoes.   Think about those stories in Cassian and hagiographies, where adopting a Difficult Widow is on a par with living in a cave.  If like me you’re not up for caves, adopt an Occasionally Mildly Trying Widow(er).

Some fairly upmarket British authoress wrote a novel, under a pseudonym, about a successful businesswoman who more or less by chance ends up adopting a non-resident granny. I found it fascinating, because by the time I’d read it I’d already spent six weeks shut up in a tiny flat on the sunny side of a noisy street in a hot summer with a Frail Little Old Lady just beginning to be able to get out of bed after a hip operation. Said FLOL had been a widow for 35 years, and was quite alone apart from a niece (mutual loathing) and a younger colleague who dropped in once a week or so. Not fun.

Update: It was Doris Lessing, who wrote The Diary of a Good Neighbour under the pseudonym Jane Somers.

 

On poping, from the roots of Anglo-Catholicism

I am bound to state plainly what I feel and have felt, since I was a Catholic, about the Anglican Church. I said, in a former page, that, on my conversion, I was not conscious of any change in me of thought or feeling, as regards matters of doctrine; this, however, was not the case as regards some matters of fact, and, unwilling as I am to give offence to religious Anglicans, I am bound to confess that I felt a great change in my view of the Church of England. I cannot tell how soon there came on me,—but very soon,—an extreme astonishment that I had ever imagined it to be a portion of the Catholic Church. For the first time, I looked at it from without, and (as I should myself say) saw it as it was. Forthwith I could not get myself to see in it any thing else, than what I had so long fearfully suspected, from as far back as 1836,—a mere national institution. As if my eyes were suddenly opened, so I saw it—spontaneously, apart from any definite act of reason or any argument; and so I have seen it ever since. I suppose, the main cause of this lay in the contrast which was presented to me by the Catholic Church. Then I recognized at once a reality which was quite a new thing with me. Then I was sensible that I was not making for myself a Church by an effort of thought; I needed not to make an act of faith in her; I had not painfully to force myself into a position, but my mind fell back upon itself in relaxation and in peace, and I gazed at her almostpassively as a great objective fact. I looked at her;—at her rites, her ceremonial, and her precepts; and I said, “This is a religion;” and then, when I looked back upon the poor Anglican Church, for which I had laboured so hard, and upon all that appertained to it, and thought of our various attempts to dress it up doctrinally and esthetically, it seemed to me to be the veriest of nonentities.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! How can I make a record of what passed within me, without seeming to be satirical?

Newman, Apologia, Note E, “The Anglican Church”.

I was moved to tears (admittedly not hard) by Jeffrey Steel’s post on the reason for his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism just a couple of months ago. Have a read. I have come to the conclusion that it really is hard for Anglicans, however Catholic they think they are, to “get” it (and yet the remarkable M. Evangelista gets it, and the Pope-is-an-Antichrist Cath also gets it, in a different way), and that “getting it” is not actually a requirement for being a Catholic. Vide the beatificandus quoted above.

 

Confession XI