HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

Is it worth it?

And it for this Word, that Lives and Calls, and reaches down to heal me, and anyone who would hear it...that I wander the streets, beaten and bruised from throwing myself against the walls of my doubts, my pride, searching the city, calling for my Beloved...

      

For this is all my hope, this my life, this my salvation,
this my pipe, my harp. And bearing it I come,
and having from its power received the gift of speech,
I too, with the angels, sing:
    Glory to God in the Highest; and with the shepherds:
    and on earth peace to men of good will.

From: St John Chrysostom’s Sermon on the Nativity

Some days, I question; some days I lose faith, some days I lose hope, some days I think it makes no sense to continue down this path that has broken me body, heart and soul, splintered relationships, and left all that I thought I needed in this world for a "happy life" a pile of ashes...and then I run to and fro looking to fix it all-believe for half a minute those who tell me it doesn't matter what "church" you go to, that  you can love God and find Salvation anywhere if you "really want to".
I "really want to"; but it doesn't take to much wandering outside the boundaries of the the Orthodox Church, to remind me there had only been one place that, in spite of how much I mess up, how much I would want all those "other things', my soul, my Salvation, severing the bond to Christ would be the price;

As much as I wish it weren't so, there has been, this is no other place I have heard, recognized the Voice of my Shepherd, and found any hope of healing.

So, like Psyche, I am doomed to try to to convince those who see "nothing" when I point to the Palace of King in which I dwell, the Table the I Feast at daily, and that the One whom my heart loves is near, even in the darkest and loneliest night.

And I stand mute when they taunt and ask (for I have no words that will ever satisfy their question)

"How is your beloved better than others,
       most beautiful of women?
       How is your beloved better than others,
       that you charge us so?"

There will always be days when I torment myself with such questions, convinced it is all just my imagination, sprung from pride, spite, false hope or self delusion...and again, I will wander past the boundaries, looking, doubting, listening to voices claiming they speak in the name of my Shepherd, that I cannot trust my own heart;

 But it always ends the same; I do not recognize the voice they claim is His; I see nothing no matter how loud they shout="there He is"; the place I stand, which they call "His Kingdom on earth" is filled with an ugly devouring tempest that sucks the life out of every living thing and drains the light and color from everything, right down to the last leaf on the last twig and all becomes a place so familiar; the    vast, endless desert, a chaotic wilderness whose only inhabitant is my dried up soul.
And again I am alone, wandering through its streets and squares...in will search for the one my heart loves.

And when I admit defeat, He finds me and leads me back to where He dwells;

And the wonder of it all, that even as He leads me back once again, in His Great Mercy He forgives my divided and broken heart, when like Lot's wife,  I turn and look back and grieve for that I must leave again;
And the only sign of salt is is my own tears-which by now stand as a pillar to my doubt and His Mercy.

Yet I know that He knows it will not be the last time we travel this well worn Sisyphean road; He will never fail to call me back when I wander.

Any failure, to listen, to hope, to believe, or not to realize the Value of that Pearl of Great Price will be mine, and mine alone; I can fail in a million other ways, in a million other things; but this is the only one that will strand me forever in darkness.

I behold a new and wondrous mystery!
My ears resound to the Shepherd’s song,
piping no soft melody, but chanting full forth a heavenly hymn.

The Angels sing!
The Archangels blend their voices in harmony!
The Cherubim hymn their joyful praise!
The Seraphim exalt His glory!

All join to praise this holy feast,
beholding the Godhead here on earth, and man in heaven.
He who is above, now for our redemption dwells here below;
 and he that was lowly is by divine mercy raised.

In the muddied stream of life’s anxious daze....He is here

"Yes! God is with us – not up there in the blue tent of the sky

Not beyond world after world stretching to infinity,

And not in malicious flame, nor the breath ragged with rage,

Nor in the sleep-smothered burial-ground of a past age.

He is here, here now: in the fuss and futility,

In the muddied stream of life’s anxious daze,

In your hands already the joyous mystery’s ablaze:

God-with-us: evil has no sting, and we never shall die."



Vladimir Soloviev
trans: Dominic Rubin

ht/ +Seraphim

The Ground Has On It's Clothes....

Snow

Snow,

blessed snow,

comes out of the sky

like bleached flies.

The ground is no longer naked.

The ground has on its clothes.

The trees poke out of sheets

and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

I bite it.

Someone once said:

Don't bite till you know

if it's bread or stone.

What I bite is all bread,

rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

Today God gives milk

and I have the pail.

"Snow" by Anne Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Toward God.

This is gonna bring me to my knees....

This is gonna bring me to my knees, I just wanna hold you close to me, originally uploaded by Lacking
Focus.

Lament (Whom will you cry to, heart?)

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
your path struggles on through incomprehensible
mankind. All the more futile perhaps
for keeping to its direction,
keeping on toward the future,
toward what has been lost.

Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry
of jubilation, unripe.
But now the whole tree of my jubilation
is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow
tree of joy.
Loveliest in my invisible
landscape, you that made me more known
to the invisible angels.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Say: Ye faint-hearted, take and fear not: behold, our God will come and save us

Dom Dominic Johner OSB

on the COMMUNION for the Third Sunday of Advent

 

Photo:From The Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary Feast celebrated (8 Dec) at Holy Incarnation with Bishop MARK, our diocesan Bishop, presided at both Vespers and Mass

COMMUNION (Isa. 35: 4)

1. Dicite: Pusillanimes confortamini, et nolite timere:
2. ecce Deus  noster veniet, et salvabit nos.

1. Say: Ye faint-hearted, take and fear not:
 2. behold, our God will come and save us.

A mere glance at the melodic construction tells us that we are here treating of something out of the ordinary.
If we first carefully recite the text alone and then sing the melody with it, we shall discover that the melody is not only a fine garment for the text, but that the text and melody form one whole, an entity as closely united as our intellect and will and feeling.

The song begins quitely, but soon with jubilant upward flight it strives to banish from the soul all fear and solicitude, tries to lift it above all things mundane
and carry it up to that new world in which the angels sing a new canticle of peace and redemption.
On Christmas night we shall hear them saying to the shepherds: Nolite timere—"Fear not; for be- hold, I bring you good tidings of great joy. . .This day is born to you a Saviour" (salvdbit).
Hence this Communion, in a way, introduces the feast of Christmas, just as in Matins for Gaudete Sunday the Invitatory ran: Prope est jam D&minus—"Already the Lord is nigh." With all its jubilation, however, the melody follows a definite plan: confortdmini, resting on the dominant of the mode, divides the first phrase into two halves.
Timere repeats the motive of nolite, and then closes a third lower, paralleling the final neums of (confortdmi)-ni.

These are formulas expressive of calm, but at the same time they advance the melodic thought. Now comes the joyful news: ecce, solemn and resolute, as one antiphon has it: veniens veniet—"He will surely come."
Here the melody in a way makes a conclusion on the tonic; but it adds another very significant thought, and introduces it with a major second below the tonic and the F-major chord built on that note: "Behold, this God will be your Saviour."

PLAINCHANT...it is direct as the words of a child to its father, plain and simple as the evening prayer of an innocent soul

 

Let Dom Johner Be Your Advent Narrator

Dom Johnerby way of Jeffrey Tucker at NLM by way of Aristotle Esguerra at Cantemus Domino....

I don't know how he manages this, but Aristotle Esguerra at Cantemus Domino, who always seems to be ahead of the game, is posting the magnificent commentaries by Dom Dominic Johner, who wrote his encyclopedic treatment of the proper chants in the 1920s, proper by proper. Aristotle is posting them in clean HTML.

It is great experience to both read and sing these pieces from the Gregorian repertoire. The hardcopy of the book is here. I recall the first time I discovered this resource and realizing what a kick comes from singing music in our own parish that has been sung for 1000 years, and enjoying reading a learned monk's reflections on the same pieces of music. He will nearly always enlightened you, and there is a special sense of something that comes when you notice something that he didn't, which happens from time to time. It is excellent work to make all these available in short pieces week by week.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I have grown to love the Gregorian Chant that is part of our Western Rite Divine Liturgy.  At first, on the surface, it seems to have very little in common with the Eastern Rite Orthodox Divine Liturgies I have attended. 
Time, attentiveness  and letting go of the former expectations of what Worship and Liturgy should "do", I have stopped "using" Liturgy as a way of "approaching  God", an old habit from former days, and instead first seeking to through regular personal prayer to seek Union with Christ as a preparation to join with the Whole Church through the Liturgy and watch, wait, pray for God in His infinite Mercy to approach us.
And as with all things Holy, in Paradox God never fails to bend down the Heavens to touch Earth and at the same time raise us up His earthly creation to meet Heaven.

+++++++++++++++++++

from the Introduction of The Chants of the Vatican Gradual

'"Liturgy, however, directs all things to God and is governed by reverence for God. The goal of plain chant, therefore, must primarily be the glorification of God and not the reaction it has on man's ideas and sentiments. Hence it depicts reverential worship of the majesty of God, wonderment over His beauty, amazement over His divine deeds for us, trustful hope in Him whose impenetrable Wisdom guides all things—and then again a fervent, even joyful, gratitude for His love.

"Plain chant, therefore, knows no exuberance of sentiment, no predominance of mood in the face of quiet and serene reasoning. For this it is altogether too intimately connected with its text.

"It is prayer devoid of external manifestation and false pathos; it is direct as the words of a child to its father, plain and simple as the evening prayer of an innocent soul."

Liturgical prayer and chant differ greatly from private devotion. Liturgy, according to its very name, presupposes a fellowship of spirit.

This naturally demands a restraint of the purely personal element and a renunciation of those traits which correspond to the inclinations and experiences of the individual.'"

Taken from The Chants of the Vatican Gradual by Dom Dominic Johner, translated from the German by Monks of St. John’s Abbey. St. John’s Abbey Press, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1940. A PDF scan of this book may be downloaded for free from the website of the Church Music Association of America.

He also included audio recordings of the chants (in Latin) courtesy of St. Benedict’s Monastery, Sao Paolo, Brazil.

The Conception by Righteous Anna of the Most Holy Mother of God

Feast hymn
The Conception by Righteous Anna of the Most Holy Mother of God

Today the bonds of barrenness are broken,

God has heard the prayers of Joachim and Anna.

He has promised them beyond all their hopes,

To bear the Maiden of God

By whom the Uncircumscribed One was born as mortal man,

Who commanded an angel to cry to Her:

Rejoice, O Full of Grace, the Lord is with You!

St. Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, was the youngest daughter of the priest Nathan from Bethlehem, descended from the tribe of Levi. She married St. Joachim, who was a native of Galilee. St. Anna was childless, but after twenty years, through the fervent prayer of both spouses, an angel of the Lord announced to them that they would be the parents of a daughter Who would bring blessings to the whole human race.

The Orthodox Church does not accept the teaching that the Mother of God was exempted from the consequences of ancestral sin (death, corruption, sin, etc.) at the moment of her conception by virtue of the future merits of Her Son.

Only Christ was born perfectly holy and sinless.

The Holy Virgin was like everyone else in Her mortality, and in being subject to temptation, although She committed no personal sins.

She was not a deified creature removed from the rest of humanity.

If this were the case, She would not have been truly human, and the nature that Christ took from Her would not have been truly human either.

If Christ does not truly share our human nature, then the possibility of our salvation is in doubt.

The Conception of the Virgin Mary by St. Anna took place at Jerusalem.

The many icons depicting the Conception by St. Anna show the Most Holy Theotokos trampling the serpent underfoot.

There are also icons in which St. Anna holds the Most Holy Virgin on her left arm as an infant.

On St Anna’s face is a look of reverence.

A large ancient icon, painted on canvas, is located in Russia.

From ancient times this Feast was especially venerated by pregnant women.

Commemorated on December 9

Antiochian Orthodox Website

Icon by Tatiana Grant

My Home Parish, Holy Incarnation Orthodox Church
Welcomes His Grace Bishop MARK, tomorrow evening to begin the celebration this feast.

Remember the weak, you who are strong--you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful

Prayer to St. Raphael, Angel of Happy Meetings

O Raphael, lead us towards those we are waiting for, those who are
waiting for us!  Raphael, Angel of Happy Meetings, lead us by the hand
towards those we are looking for!  May all our movements, all their
movements, be guided by your Light and transfigured by your joy.

Angel guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet
of Him on whose unveiled Face you are privileged to gaze.  Lonely and
tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of earth, we feel the need
of calling to you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so
that we may not be as strangers in the Province of Joy, all ignorant of
the concerns of our country.

Remember the weak, you who are strong--you whose home lies beyond the
region of thunder, in a land that is always peaceful, always serene, and
bright with the resplendent glory of God.
Amen.

photo:Preah Veaere