Sic Transit

Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
(Chesterton, Lepanto)

And so the third and penultimate year of my college career draws to a close. The time of tribulation has past; exams are but a fading memory, and the three-month reign of peace and requiescence is at hand.

I remember being in elementary school and thinking about the seemingly interminable succession of school years standing between me and adulthood, the latter being (to my naive imagination) infinitely preferable to my present state insofar as it involved being able to set one's own bedtime.

Needless to say, I now find myself somewhat disillusioned... it seems so long ago now, although recent years have of course been flying by. No doubt the hectic college lifestyle is to blame. College didn't even enter into my understanding back then- the realization that four more years of formal education lay beyond twelfth grade would have been a crushing one to my young and impatient mind. Now, of course, these four years seem all too short- not because I fear their impending end per se, but because they're so short a time in which to do all that should be done. Ah well.... but enough, before I try to pass off these unoriginal sentiments as some sort of deep philosophical insight.

Tomorrow I'm off to Bolivia on the Choir tour, report to follow upon my return.
O fortes peioraque passi mecum saepe viri, nunc vino pellite curas; cras ingens iterabimus aequor!

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I dreamed a dream

The following is the text of an email I just sent out to those going on the Williams Choir Tour to Bolivia next week.

Last night, I dreamed we were in Bolivia, but apparently tensions among the populace were running high and we were recommended not to leave our hotel. After about a week Brad decided it was hopeless and that we had better leave the country in case anything bad really happened, and told us to be packed up by a certain time so that we could depart ahead of schedule (in case anyone was planning to try to stop us). I remember being disappointed that we didn't get to sing any concerts. What a waste of time! And here we are trying to sneak out (like we're in the Sound of Music or something, escaping over the mountains to Peru?) For some reason (not the kind that makes sense) we all decided to wander out to the town square in search of food and cheap souvenirs before we left. Unfortunately, we were quickly spotted as foreign tourists and rounded up. A policeman somehow guessed that we were planning on leaving early and in an apparent attempt to delay us, ordered us to circumambulate the square, stopping at certain "stations" along the perimeter which he pointed out to us. We had to go one by one, and no two people were allowed to be at a station at the same time, nor were we allowed to rush from station to station. It seemed a rather strange way of holding us up, but effective nonetheless as we figured it was better to go through with it then cause trouble. Maintaining a cautious distance from the person in front of me, I arrived at the first of the stations and realized that they were the Stations of the Cross, so I knelt in prayer before continuing on to the next. Things continued in this way until a couple of stations later, when the policeman approached me as I was kneeling in front of a station partially obscured by a street vendor's display. In unaccented English, he asked me if I was upset...

"No," I told him, "Should I be?"
"I'm upset that your friends have been buying cheap souvenirs and destroying the rainforest," he said, shoving some kind of gaudy native handicraft in front of me, much like those being displayed by the street vendor. It was labelled 'Not harmful to the rainforest.' "They say that they're not harmful to the rainforest," he told me. "But they are!"
"I'm sorry to hear that," I told him. But he wasn't listening. He was pointing at a faded mural on which I could make out the words "National Geographic" and a splash of the magazine's signature yellow. "I saw your friend reading National Geographic," he said. "Do you read National Geographic?"
"Sure," I told him, "I used to read it all the time."
"National Geographic is destroying the rainforest!" he shouted. Grabbing me by the neck, he said, "Are you upset that I made you all walk around the square?"
"Not really," I answered, honestly, a little worried that things were about to turn ugly, but unwilling or unable to put on a good show of being upset for his benefit."You're not upset enough!" he screamed, tightening his grip on my neck with one hand and drawing back with the other-

At this point my extremely vivid recollection of the dream ends, and I suspect things did indeed turn ugly, but my subconscious sees fit to spare me the details- which is uncommonly thoughtful of it, I think, and probably for the best. Anyway, just something to put you in the mood, and no, I didn't make any of this up. You were probably hoping that I would admit something of the sort, so that you could write off as feeble humor what you now have no choice but to acknowledge as the surreal hallucinations of a dangerously unbalanced mind. I'll understand if you are never able to take me seriously again. I myself gave up on that years ago.

But please, leave your National Geographics at home.

Joe

On a related note, I need to start taking my malaria pills this week. Side effects are reported to include vivid dreams...

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Pentecost

Happy Birthday to the Catholic Church!

"When Pentecost day came round, they had all met in one room, when suddenly they heard what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven, the noise of which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech.

Now there were devout men living in Jerusalem from every nation under heaven, and at this sound they all assembled, each one bewildered to hear these men speaking his own language. They were amazed and astonished. ‘Surely’ they said ‘all these men speaking are Galileans? How does it happen that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; people from Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya round Cyrene; as well as visitors from Rome – Jews and proselytes alike – Cretans and Arabs; we hear them preaching in our own language about the marvels of God.’" (Acts 2:1-11)

A year ago today (liturgically speaking) found me sitting at the organ in the choir loft of the Sebastiankirche, on a hill above a small village in Austria. Today on this anniversary of sorts I shall be doing much the same thing, albeit closer to home, in St. Patrick's at 4:30. Maybe I'll celebrate by pulling out all the stops for the last verse again (literally, of course!) .

Veni, Sancte Spiritus...

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Chesterton Quote of the Day

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: "Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is." Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother's knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals. (Orthodoxy)

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Catechism Rock

There's a place you'll go if you die in a state of grace
but the temporal effects of your sins have not been erased
What's it called?

Listen to the MP3
Catechism Rock brought to you by Victor Lams.

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Brought to you by the letter I and the number...

A few tidbits from the Globe and Mail's Social Studies via Mirabilis via Dappled Things.

Father Reginald (Reggie) Foster, a Wisconsin native, is the Pope's senior Latinist, reports The (Milwaukee) Journal-Sentinel. The renowned Latin teacher and fluent speaker of complex Ciceronian Latin has served four popes over 36 years, despite a curmudgeonly temperament and intemperate outbursts of personal opinions. When Karol Wojtyla began signing papal documents in Latin as "Joannes Paulus II," instead of "Ioannes Paulus II" after being elected pope 26 years ago, Father Foster quickly pointed out to a papal adviser that there is no letter "J" in Latin. "I said, 'By the way, friend, there's no J,' " he recalled. "And the answer kind of came back that the pope said 'Well, now there is.' Well, fine, fine. He's the boss. And if you look at his tomb, the J is gone. One of my brethren said, 'Well, he enjoyed his J for 26 years, and now it's gone.' His tombstone has 'I'. "

Remember that part in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? "The Word of God. Only in the footsteps of God will he proceed... the Name of God... Jehovah!" (proceeds to step on the "J") "But in the Latin alphabet, "Jehovah" begins with an I!" Apparently the guardians of the grail anticipated future changes in orthography to foil the unworthy.

616: "A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups and television evangelists have got the wrong number," reports The Independent on Sunday. "Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616. The new fragment from the Book of Revelation, written in ancient Greek and dating from the late third century, is part of a hoard of previously unintelligible manuscripts discovered in historic dumps outside Oxyrhynchus in Egypt."

Oh snap! The folks at Remnant are going to have to redo all their calculations! Shouldn't be a problem though, they seem to have too much time on their hands already...

And so do I, apparently...

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Speaking of Limericks...

Happy birthday to Edward Lear, famous writer of limericks and other "nonsense lyrics". Few poets have attempted- much less achieved- so profound an expression and depth of feeling, so keen an understanding of the eternal questions of mankind; the quest for the unknown and the insatiable thirst for understanding, the perennial themes of abandonment and unrequited love, and of course the baffling transience of human existence. Fewer still can boast so nimble a command of wit and whimsy at the same time.

'How pleasant to know Mr Lear!'
Who has written such volumes of stuff!
Some think him ill tempered and queer,
But a few think him pleasant enough.

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Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

For anyone who's ever had to slog through the real thing, as I should be doing at the moment:

CHORUS: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

The opening of "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy" by A.E. Housman, whose "Loveliest of Trees" has also been on my mind of late, it being the proper season for such sentiments, though I have sadly outgrown it as of last Thursday.

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"Behold, I make all things new."

If all things are always the same, it is because they are always heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power- the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean -- an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great -- a great war or a love-story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire -- of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that men have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by Nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks there have been such things as children. To people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes... the world is always the same, because it is always unexpected.

G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

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Oh, and...

my 21.005479...th birthday party last night was a blast, even though nobody wanted to take me on in Jenga. Probably because of my reckless tactics which tend to intimidate opponents... I can't really explain my fascination with Jenga, seeing as I'm normally given to caution and careful deliberation, whereas put a Jenga tower in front of me and I go straight for the most difficult and structurally significant blocks, trying to bring the tower to the brink of collapse and hoping that I won't be the one to actually bring it down. This is incomprehensible to the people who think Jenga is meant to be a game of teamwork and cooperation, which is probably why I ended up playing solo. We did, however, have an excellent game of Scrabble:

"Look, I can spell "tough" phonetically: T-U-F."
"You can also spell it with your O, G, and H."
"Oh."

"Fin? Isn't that French?"

And that, my friends, is a Williams education in action.

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Glorious!

Normally, in a spirit of charity and common courtesy, I keep my speakers turned down to a reasonable level when listening to music in my room. But occasionally, on those rare and wonderful nights like tonight, the party down the hall is so loud anyway that I can gleefully crank up the volume and listen to (for example) the sixth movement of Dona Nobis Pacem in all its glory.

For as the new heavens
and the new earth...

Current Music: Vaughan Williams: Dona Nobis Pacem
Current Mood: awash and reveling

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Should I be disturbed...

...that my 'blog is currently the #1 result on Google for profane limericks? I'm afraid that whoever stumbled upon it via such a search was disappointed... though they might take consolation in the "p-hysics" limerick posted by Emily in the comments of my previous entry.

Down to one week of classes remaining. Last night was the Choir concert, which went well despite being a bit longer than the audience (and, for that matter, the singers) might have liked- but it was a good program, featuring a variety of Mass settings (Machaut, Palestrina, Desprez, Martin) along with other pieces by Brahms, Poulenc, Whitacre, Barber and Ives, whose Psalm 90 was a satisfying conclusion complete with string ensemble and local church bells. And now remaineth Sunday's Chamber Choir concert at the Clark, the 'Bethans recording session, and the Choir tour, but the greatest of these is the Choir tour. Bolivia, here we come- though our ability to sing effectively at high altitudes has not yet been proven. Should be interesting...

Passing through Greylock later last night I was waylaid by Mel ("Joeey?") who persuaded me to pay a visit to the choir party which was currently in occupation of 4th floor Carter, much, I'm sure, to the dismay of any residents who had their hearts set on a good night's sleep. Even Brad made an appearance, and soon gathered a crowd (in various stages of inebriation) eager to discuss details of the concert, reminisce about (and in some cases, fabricate) past choir memories, and (inevitably) decry the proliferation of a cappella groups on campus. Singing along to techno (the system is down!) and drifting between this and a few side conversations (involving, among other things, my personal views on alcohol consumption, the relationship between morality and common sense, and the centrality of ethnicity to Jewish identity) I finally decided around 1:30 that it was past my bedtime (considering I was getting up at 6:30 for Mass) and headed home. Not a wasted time (pun not intended) by any means, though. I'm belatedly getting to know a fair number of choir people this year, now that I see some of them outside rehearsals (and not just at drunken parties) which is nice. Mel informed me at lunch a few days ago that I was her "Surprise Friend of the Year." (Kind of like being on the cover of TIME magazine?)

In other news, Hue will be back from her semester in Spain in a week or so, just in time to distract me from my final exams- but of course, if I really want to approach my exams honestly, I should refrain from any sort of studying beforehand, since they ought to measure how much I've really learned from my classes, not how much I can cram immediately before and forget immediately afterwards, right? Well... I suppose it also depends on whether I really believe solely in education for its own sake, or whether I secretly care about grades as well. But you'll just have to ponder that question on your own, because I'm certainly not giving it away...

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Dies Natalis Mihi, or 5+5+5=21

In accordance with what I have been led to believe since childhood, or as Chesterton would say

"Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment,"

I am forced to conclude upon noticing today's date- the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the new millenium- that on this date, the anniversary of my birth I am now twenty-one years of age, with all the attendant rights and privileges thereof (however few of which I have any intentions of exercising in the immediate future). Birthdays have a habit of sneaking up on me- or maybe it's just that I'm at Williams where everything does- and I tend to be rather nonchalant about their observance, probably a holdover from my middle school days when divulging one's birthday meant certain humiliation at the hands of over-enthusiastic teachers. Far preferable was being woken this morning at 5:55 by the horn of the Birthday Honk-Honker high up Mt. Zorn:

And the voice of the horn cries loud as it plays:
"Wake up! For today is your Day of all Days!"

at which, I'm sorry to say, I merely rolled over and went back to sleep for another half hour, because I don't live in Katroo. At any rate, I anticipate a relatively quiet and uneventful day- sitting around pondering How did I get so old so soon?- but on the plus side, I am aware of no apocalyptic predictions centered on this date (though I must say that my sixteenth birthday was somewhat anticlimactic after all the hype of planetary alignment, polar shifts and worldwide catastrophe.) Be that as it may- now that I've quoted Chesterton, referenced Dr. Seuss and alluded to a conspiracy theory (and an outdated one at that!) attentive readers will conclude that we are rapidly nearing the end of this post. And I'm certainly not going to disappoint you, attentive readers. Nunc dimittis, then, until next time.

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Speaking of Socks

A relic from high school English, loosely inspired by Chesterton's brilliant Variations on an Air. Points if you can identify some or all of the references.

White socks glinting in the rays of the sun,
as they’re put out with the washing when the laundry has been done,
and the socks upon the clothesline were as banners in the breeze,
for the wind is blowing westerly and whispers in the trees.

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,
four and twenty black socks baked in a pie,
When the pie was opened, the socks began to sing;
Wasn’t that a pretty dish to set before the king?

There are footprints in the sod,
where the feet of men have trod,
and they leave their footprints everywhere they go;
Feet in socks and socks in shoes,
white socks, black socks, reds and blues, but
whose socks were the blue socks I don’t know.

To be or not to be, that is the question;
whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or to take up socks against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing mend them.

On the feet of kings and princes are the socks of high renown,
and they wear their socks upon their feet as proud as any crown;
The socks upon their heraldry are sable as the night,
but the socks upon their feet are glinting golden in the light.

If all the world were paper,
and all the sea were rocks;
If all the trees were bread and cheese,
what would we do for socks?

I don’t want to open the drawer with my socks,
I’ve got it closed up now with all kinds of locks;
I do not trust it, whatever it is,
Timeo Danaos et soccos gerentis.

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,
I smell the socks of an English-mun;
And now our tale is over and done.

Finis

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Thanks be to God for

the odes of Horace, augmented sixth chords, dandelions, palatalization of velar stops before front vowels, the mountains at sunrise, climbing trees, flying kites, Renaissance polyphony, conspiracy theories, the color blue, socks, Carolingan minuscule, the melancholic temperament, hyperbole, plagal cadences, walking home to Mission in the afternoons, old memories, railroad tracks, prepositions, and the birds on my walk to church this morning-

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Check it out

In keeping with our longstanding commitment to pleasing graphic sensibility and miscellaneous profound content, we here at The Sacred and the Profane (and we use the plural loosely) feel it's high time we directed our patrons to the website of Jonathan "Jono" Dowse and his clickable IPA chart. (Never mind that the IPA is a sinister Freemason plot, the modern-day equivalent of the Tower of Babel- more on that later.) Lacking only a flash intro and a hideous array of animated GIFS, the "bunch of related pages" that comprise jbdowse:web float serenely in the sea of the world wide web like an archipelago... an archipelago of quality. Check it out! And remember to (1) read the Postscript if you want to or (2) not read the Postscript if you don't want to.

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De Trinitate

May 1st- Feast of St. Joseph the Worker (ora pro nobis!)

Today's Gospel (Sixth Sunday of Easter)
"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. "I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him." (John 14:15-21)

At dinner the other night I was asked to explain the Holy Spirit. Dutifully I explained that the Holy Spirit was the third person of the Blessed Trinity, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the three being consubstantial but distinct as persons. The Old Testament makes it clear that God is One; from the New, we deduce that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are somehow equal sharers in the Divine Nature, and between the two we derive the Trinity. In a way it seems so simple, even obvious; after all, it is not as if we professed One God who was also Three Gods, or One Person who was also Three Persons, either of which (though suitably mystical and mysterious) would be a blatant contradiction and affront to reason; no, it's a simple matter of God being three with respect to the Divine Persons and one with respect to the Divine Nature. And how fitting! Thus (and only thus) can we say, not as a mere platitude, that God is love, for love can exist only between persons, plural; thus God can say "Let us create man in our image" and create two persons whose love begets a third.

Simple, even obvious? Then why was I surprised to hear from my questioner that this was the first explanation he had ever heard which made sense? More than that- why was I just as surprised that my explanation had made sense as I was that the explanations of others had not? Granted, the latter is (sadly) all too believable. But the former- how could I have so easily explain what has baffled the minds of theologians for centuries? The answer is of course, that I didn't. I was only stating the facts. We know, through reason and through revelation, certain facts about God, and the Trinity is what fits these facts, or more properly what these facts fit. Faith assents to it, reason raises no red flags of contradiction; but to explain it, to understand it- there we run up against the mystery; it is utterly beyond us. St. Augustine, it is told, was walking along the seashore trying to understand the Trinity when he saw a small boy trying to empty the ocean with a seashell into a hole in the sand. One can no more comprehend the Trinity, he realized, then pour the ocean into the sand. Which puts me, or anyone trying to explain it, in the awkward position of trying to explain something that cannot really be understood in the way that any questioner might reasonably want to understand it. Sure, we can admit that it's beyond human comprehension- in fact, if we're honest, we must- but of course that sounds suspiciously like a cop-out. We might say the same thing about a God who is Three Gods, the only difference being, of course, that the Trinity does not actually violate reason, it merely transcends it. A crucial difference, though a subtle one. But this gets into faith and reason, which will be the subject of future musings, so for now, (lest we forget) back to the Holy Spirit:

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium,
et tui amoris in eis ignem accende;
Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur/Et renovabis faciem terrae.

"I have a far more solid and central ground for submitting to Christianity as a faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is this; that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of the shape of the cross some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of the mitre. One fine morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before." (Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

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