Bulletin Night

It is roughly 11 pm. I have just spent most of the last nine hours selecting hymns and working on church bulletins: thirteen of them, so we now have bulletin files for the next four Sundays, with Ash Wednesday and a Choral Evensong for good measure. The liturgical texts are in place, and all of the music except the prelude and postlude for 11:00 on March 16.

I won't go into the (very good) reasons why we need to get so far ahead, but I do want to note the problem with this approach. I get confused, and my work is not up to standard. I forget which service is at hand, and put the wrong music in the wrong place. Or the wrong liturgical text. Or I leave stray Alleluias hanging on into Lent.

The worst error (at least that I caught) was when I started with the March 9 bulletin for 11:00 to adapt it into March 16 (with some changes: on March 9 we do the Great Litany, on March 16 the Penitential Order and Trisagion). But I did not save it as a new file; I saved it right over the March 9 file. When I had completed the bulletin and could not find it as a March 16 file, I realized what I had done. Of course the bulletin I had overwritten (March 9) had a complicated structure with cut-and-paste music notation, etc. It took about a half-hour to re-create it, when all I wanted to do was to go home and go to bed.

Bulletins are perhaps the most time-consuming part of my work. Today was unusual, but this week I have spent more than twice as much time on bulletins and the liturgical decisions behind them as I have on the organ bench, including the playing of services.

I can only hope that today's work will somehow be to the glory of God. Right now, I don't see it.

Doctor's Orders

I visited my primary care physician for a routine examination yesterday. His prescription began with these two items, in writing:

1. Alcohol: 1 or 2 servings daily
2. Antioxidants, especially Dark Chocolate: 2 or more squares daily

One can only wish that all medical advice was so pleasant!

My doctor's specialty is Internal Medicine, and this was my first visit to his office since 2006. He has aged noticeably in these eight years, and is nearly seventy, cutting back on his practice. That means that he has enough time to Do It Right rather than rushing from patient to patient. He was with me for over an hour, doing a thorough and careful examination and observing me throughout, even as we discussed aspects of Healthy Living such as exercise and diet. I gather that this is is one of the most important aspects of primary care, simply taking the time to See and Listen to the patient in order to get a sense as to how he is doing. Does he seem well? Does something seem “wrong” or “off”? I suspect that it is not often done properly in American medicine.

If it is eight years before I visit a doctor again, I suspect I will have to find a different one. I will miss him.

Obviously, I am pleased to receive a Clean Bill of Health. It is a gracious and undeserved gift from God, for which I am grateful. And it is an obligation: so long as I have health and strength, I must use it for the service of God and his people.

To celebrate, I had a beer with supper: “For medicinal purposes,” I told my wife. And I had the requisite two squares of dark chocolate for dessert.

Upon reflection, I think that I will ignore the first of my prescriptions. While there are health benefits to moderate alcoholic consumption, there are also dangers. The men in my family have tended toward alcoholism, and I am mindful of the advice of R. E. Lee:

“My experience through life has convinced me that, while moderation and temperance in all things are commendable and beneficial, abstinence from spirituous liquors is the best safeguard of morals and health.”

The Ascent of Mount Carmel

I have begun reading “The Ascent of Mount Carmel” by St. John of the Cross, and so far, I am appalled.

... every pleasure that presents itself to the senses, if it be not purely for the honor and glory of God, must be renounced and completely rejected... [If one cannot avoid encountering something pleasant,] it suffices that, although these things may be present to his senses, he desires not to have this pleasure. And in this wise he will be able to mortify and void his senses of such pleasure, as though they were in darkness.

This is so wrong! It is ungrateful to thus despise the gifts of God.
Better advice comes from Moses:

And thou shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house; thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you. (Deuteronomy 26:11)

And from the Preacher:

There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God. (Ecclesiastes 2:24)

And St. Paul:

Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer. (I Timothy 4:1-5)

I am not prepared to call the writings of St. John of the Cross “doctrines of devils,” for he does have an important point. If any desires, any possessions, any persons, any things whatsoever come between us and God, they “weary the soul and torment and darken it, and defile it and weaken it.”

But the path he describes can easily end in a narrow, bitter, solitary death of the spirit, destroying one's self and everything that one touches. One sees this, I think, in the Spanish Catholicism of his day, which bore its most characteristic fruit in the work of the Inquisition, and the enslavement of the native peoples of Latin America. But then one must consider Tomás Luis de Victoria. And El Greco. They are the other side of that dark and oppressive age.

Perhaps what St. John is after, or at least what I would say of such things, is that desire takes us out of the present moment, the Now which is the only opportunity we have to walk with God. We hunger, we lust, we covet, and we are immediately out of the Now, longing for some imagined future when our desires are sated. Or an equally imaginary past when we had that which is no longer with us (e.g., “the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick” of Egypt [Numbers 11:8]).

But I would submit that the Now should be a joyful thanksgiving, not a dreary blinding of the senses and spirit to what surrounds us. "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need." (Philippians 4:11-12). One might say: "Desire nothing; enjoy everything."

I will continue with St. John of the Cross, for he is one of the great spiritual masters. Perhaps he will make more sense as I proceed, or (as he suggests early on in the book) upon a second reading.

We are not off to a good start.