Thursday night, Friday morning

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant... (Philippians 2:5-7)

Therefore we before him bending
this great Sacrament revere:
types and shadows have their ending,
for the newer rite is here;
faith, our outward sense befriending,
makes our inward vision clear.
(Thos. Aquinas: Hymn 329/330)

On this day, all the “types and shadows have their ending.” The atonement foretold in the Passover (“When I see the blood, I will pass over you”) and Yom Kippur looked toward this day. As the Epistle to the Hebrews explains, the blood of bulls and goats cannot atone for our wickedness (10:4); they were shadows of a greater redemption that was to come, and now is. The veil of the temple is rent (St. Matthew 27:51), and we can now “enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Hebrews 10:19-20).

Last night at the Maundy Thursday service, the sermon emphasized the footwashing and the New Commandment. It was left for the Celebrant to emphasize the Institution of the Eucharist, the other great focus of Maundy Thursday, as recounted in the Collect for the Day and the first two Lessons (Exodus 12:1-14 and I Corinthians 11:23-26), and the white altar paraments and vestments. She did so by singing the elaborate Mozarabic chant appointed for the Preface of Eucharistic Prayer D in the American BCP (based on a Greek Orthodox model; the chant is found in the Altar Book, but I had never heard it done until this night) and by her careful celebration of the Eucharist. One of the virtues of her work at the altar is that she always acts as if this thing in which she is participating, the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, is the most important thing in the world – which it is. This was especially evident last night, and the sung Preface was overwhelming in its splendor.

She had a bit of trouble in breaking the bread. For reasons I will not here recount, a “real” loaf of bread is used for this service, an un-sliced loaf purchased across the street at the store. Suffice it to say that she was using this loaf out of obedience, not from free choice. She did the best she could with it. And that brings me to another side of the Holy Sacrament: it is glorious beyond all imagining, but it is also lowliest of all, humblest of all, “obedient unto death.”

The Rector concluded the overnight Watch with a brief distribution of the remaining bread and wine at 7 am, drawn from the Form for Communion under Special Circumstances (BCP p. 396). He finished up and went his way. It was left for our retired priest, Fr. H., to clean up. He is in his eighties and does not get around very well. But he got on his knees behind the Altar and picked up the crumbs, which were many, by moistening his fingertip so it would pick them up from the floor, then eating them. Once I realized what he was doing, I helped by going along behind the altar rail and doing the same. “Therefore before him bending, this great Sacrament revere...”

We all shirk the consequences of our actions; the inconvenient little details of our lives that we wish would just “go away” can often be passed off to others, to the “servants” (e.g., members of the Altar Guild, or the Sexton). But the buck has to stop somewhere. There has to be someone sufficiently low, to whom all the dirty work, the consequences of our actions, has to fall. It might be slaves in China who make the electronic gadgets and clothing that we buy in the stores. It might be someone in our family who always cleans up after us. It might be the people in America driven into poverty so that the “one percent” can remain comfortable. It might be the Latinos who butcher our meat and harvest our crops. J.F. told me recently about an economics class she is taking: the class discussion turned to such matters as the Greek “austerity” and the increasing inequality in this country. The professor summed it up: “Someone has to suffer.”

Someone did. He who is Highest became Lowest, drinking the cup of our wickedness to the last of its most bitter dregs.

Lamentations: the mystery of Providence

Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. (St. John 2:18-19)

In the Daily Office, we have been reading the first chapters of the Second Book of Moses, and for Holy Week we turn to the Lamentations of Jeremiah. In their different ways, both are examples of the Hand of God at work in the course of history. Indeed, much of the Old Testament can be read as an exploration of Divine Providence in the details of history.

I have heard clergy, including some whom I respect, scoff at the idea of God “micro-managing” the universe. They scoff at the simple folk who often attribute the small doings and events of their lives to God's direct intervention (as I do, though I have learned to keep such thoughts to myself in the place where I work). They apply this especially to circumstances where (for example) someone has suffered an accident or tragedy, or a natural disaster has struck. The clergy of whom I am thinking would say that the idea of God “willing” suffering or injustice or tragedy on someone is preposterous.

I am not so sure.

Jeremiah struggles with this in the Lamentations. He describes what has happened to the Daughter of Zion, and cries out to God: “Why????”, even though he knows very well why. He has delivered the word of the LORD to the people from his youth and they have steadfastly refused to listen, in the end throwing him into a pit to die. He concludes with these verses (5:19-22), leaving the question open:

Thou,O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.
Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned;
renew our days as of old.
But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.

I am inclined to side with Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, of blessed memory. Staunch Calvinist that he was, he attributed his successes on the battlefields of Virginia to the “gracious hand of Divine Providence.” But he also freely acknowledged the hand of Providence when it was seemingly against him – most of all in his friendly-fire injury at Chancellorsville, which resulted in his death. At the distance of almost one hundred fifty years, one can to a small extent guess at the workings of Providence: had Jackson been on the field at Gettysburg later that summer, his army corps would almost certainly have driven the Federals from Cemetery Hill behind the town on the first day of the battle before they could dig in, sealing a victory. At that moment, there sat on Lord Palmerston's desk at Ten Downing Street a bill that would formally recognize the Confederate States of America. Palmerston was sympathetic to the Southern cause and had expressed the opinion that an independent Confederacy “would afford a valuable and extensive market for British manufactures.” He was awaiting news from Gettysburg. Should the Confederates win a victory, he would proceed, and Great Britain would enter the war on the Southern side.

But Jackson was not at Gettysburg. Was his injury and death a random chance of war, or was it in some manner Divine Providence, or “God's will?”

The most obvious and central example of Divine Providence stands before us in the next week, and is indeed at the center of the universe: the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. The liberal theologians teach that (a) the Passion accounts as recorded in the Four Gospels are pious fictions with no relationship to what actually happened, and (b) “Rabbi” Jesus died on the cross, crushed by the Romans, and that was that. They delight in pointing to the short ending of Mark's Gospel, wherein (as they emphasize) there are no encounters with a risen Lord. None. Just a handful of women, running in terror from an imagined vision of angels. Naturally, they view this as the most authentic account of the so-called “resurrection.”

This fits nicely with the notion that our Lord's betrayal and death were, in essence, unfortunate accidents. It does not, however, fit at all with his teachings:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly. (St. Mark 8:31-32)

Divine Providence immediately raises the related question of Free Will. This, too, has its clearest answer in the events of the Passion: “Not my will, but thine be done.” The workings of Providence are most fully evident when our wills are fully aligned with God's. Very often, our wills are not so aligned; we insist on having it our own way. But the hand of Providence cannot be thwarted. If we refuse to do our part in furthering the Lord's will, he will get it done in another way.

Jeremiah weeps and we weep with him, because—if we are thoughtful and perceptive—we can see all of Jewish history in the dirges of Eichah [Lamentations]. This is the challenge of Tishah B'Av: [the day on which both the First and Second Temples were destroyed, also the day when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492] Can we realize that it is not merely a day of tears, but of challenge and hope? [from the Artscroll Chumash, footnote on p. 1274]

Returning to the example of the War Between the States, it seems clear that it was no more God's will that a whole race of people be enslaved than it was that (for example) Jerusalem be levelled to the ground, with its children within it (St. Luke 19:41-44), or Jerusalem's children of a later generation be slaughtered in the camps of the Holocaust. Both are cases where a great many people persisted over long spans of time in insisting on their own way, leading to vast suffering. And yet... in the end, God's will cannot be thwarted. Chattel slavery in the U.S. came to an end as one of the results of that war; the demonic regime of Nazi Germany likewise came to an end, and Hitler's goal of a “final solution” failed. Another hand was at work in this, beyond the workings of Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt and their armies.

Unless we are to abandon the conception of Providence altogether.... all events are equally providential. If God directs the course of events at all then he directs the movement of every atom at every moment; “not one sparrow falls to the ground” without that direction... This may sound excessive, but in reality we are attributing to the Omniscient only an infinitely superior degree of the same kind of skill which a mere human novelist exercises daily in constructing his plot... (C. S. Lewis: “Miracles,” pp. 174-5, quoted in “The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind 'The Lord of the Rings'”, by Peter J. Kreeft, pp. 60-61)

Providence extends well beyond the “important” events of the wide sweep of history, as described by Lewis in the extract above, and as one sees fictionally in Tolkien's novel, the most beautiful depiction of the workings of Providence that I know. If we accept the concept of Providence at all, it must extend to all events, down to the tiniest. Does this overturn the laws of Nature? Of course not; it is by the very laws of Nature that Divine Providence normally works. Without Providence, there would be no laws of Nature.

One of the great Names of God is El Shaddai, generally translated as “Almighty God.” “All-sufficient God” would be another rendering. Or “the God who can and will do whatever it takes.” When He first revealed Himself by this Name “when Abram was ninety years old and nine,” he said:

I am the Almighty God [El Shaddai]; walk before me, and be thou perfect. (Genesis 17:1)

It is in this way, by walking before God (that is, in awareness of God's presence with us and in constant companionship with him in prayer, song, life, and work – and the bearing of one's cross) and thus being “perfect,” that we align ourselves with the Divine Providence. Jesus expressed it very simply: he said “Come, follow me.” And when we do so, we find with St. Paul that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). We find as well that what had seemed chance was not that at all, but was part of the Story from the beginning: “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” (8:29)

This is the God of Divine Providence, the Author whose Story is most decidedly going to come to the eucatastrophe, the “happy ending,” that he foresaw before the foundation of the world.

I don't have time for this

Our parish observes the Stations of the Cross on the Tuesdays of Lent at 12:15. Today, it was especially inconvenient.

Tuesdays are always a hard day, the one day of the work week which I regularly dread. The morning is normally consumed by staff meeting, plus a follow-up meeting of the clergy and musician (me). After that, there are often many loose ends that must be promptly addressed. Today, with the Rector returning from a fortnight away and Holy Week looming ahead, there were more than usual. And what I want and need to do is Practice.

Noon found me mired in e-mail “conversations” concerning this Sunday's bulletin for the middle service and its music. I looked at the little clock in the corner of the computer screen, saw that it was 12:14, and rushed upstairs to the church, where I was to lead the service, leaving my work in shreds, loose ends and stray parts hanging about.

Part of the problem is copyrights. The musicians leading this service had suggested a song which one of them realized Sunday night was unsuitable; they sent me an alternative this morning, in PDF form. I got it pasted into the draft (after returning downstairs from the Stations), and opened our account with our copyright licensing service to record the modifications. But this PDF song is not covered under our license. It is an Oregon Catholic Press song, and we have the GIA license. These two companies are cutthroat competitors for the huge Roman Catholic market, and most decidedly do not cooperate with one another. So I had to get back to the group and request yet another replacement song; we shall see how that goes.

I hate copyrights. I hate the “Mickey Mouse” copyright law with which the Disney Corp. and its puppets in the U.S. Congress have saddled us. But it is the law of the land, and as Christians we must obey it: “Render tribute to whom tribute is due.” I equally hate it that the more “contemporary” (meaning “since 1960, and involving guitars”) side of church music has become so overtly about the maximization of Profit, ever since the publishers realized that there was serious Money to be made here if they could enforce their copyrights.

In the midst of all this: Stations of the Cross. “I don't have time for this,” I thought as I went up the stairs two steps at a time and rushed into the church at the stroke of 12:15. One lady was there; she and I have been the normal congregation for the Stations this spring; another gentleman (not from our parish) joined us about halfway through. He had come last Tuesday, and this week he sat, or rather knelt, in one of the pews in silence rather than following us around from station to station.

It is all highly inconvenient.

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –
(Emily Dickinson)

Our Lord Christ found it highly inconvenient too. “Father, save me from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour” (St. John 12:27). The inconvenience is, I am learning, one of the chief spiritual benefits of observing the Stations. It brings me crashing to a halt right in the midst of my most hectic and frustrating work day when there is never enough time, shakes me by the scruff of my neck, and makes me look at what we have done, what I have done.

'Twas I, Lord Jesus,
I it was denied thee:
I crucified thee.
(Hymn 158: Ah, holy Jesus)

J. S. Bach, Thomas Ken, and the Queen

Today, March 21, is the birthday of J. S. Bach. In his honor, my fellow organist M.S. played an all-Bach program for the noontime Lenten recital at the Congregational Church today. Her playing is elegant, secure, and splendid. I wish that I could hear her more often, but on Sundays, she is on the bench at the Presbyterian Church and I am at the Episcopal Church. If one is a musician, one must often sacrifice the opportunity to hear others play in order to be faithful to one's own rehearsals, practicing, and services.

Today is the Feast of Thomas Ken, Bishop. One of his Office Hymns applies to the above:

Redeem thy misspent time that's past
And live each day as if thy last;
Improve thy talent with due care,
For the great day thyself prepare.

This is the second stanza of the morning hymn “Awake, my soul, and with the sun,” number 11 in the Hymnal 1982, and unaccountably omitted from the hymn by the Editors of that book. It is the best part of the hymn, except perhaps for the final stanza, of which more shortly. I have copied it into my hymnal, and posted a written-out copy of it on my door as an admonition.

Bishop Ken was, earlier in his life, Chaplain to King Charles II. He got himself shuffled off into a bishopric and out of the King's household because he continually rebuked the King for his dissolute manner of life.

And that brings me to the current Queen. Yesterday she addressed the joint Houses of Parliament in Westminster Hall on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee.

She has conducted herself with integrity these many years. Twelve Prime Ministers have come and gone; she has been the constant throughout. I believe that her presence has made possible the British Commonwealth, a family of nations encompassing (as she observed in the speech) one-third of the world's people. Had she been a worthless scoundrel like Charles II, it is hard to say what would have become of Great Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century.

My first taste of Bishop Ken came from a time when I knew nothing about him, not even the hymn of which the following is the final stanza. But this stanza was a staple of some of the churches I served, and has spread as widely perhaps as any bit of hymnody in the English language. For many years, I was unable to play an improvisation without landing in the key of G Major, ready to launch into the Doxology:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heav'nly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.

[Edited to add: I learned at Evensong tonight that this is no longer the Feast of Thomas Ken in the American church. According to the revised calendar, "Holy Women, Holy Men," this is now the feast of Thomas Cranmer, who was martyred on this day in 1556. Ken was pushed back a day to March 20, which in turn pushes Cuthbert off of his traditional feast day. He is now combined with Aidan of Lindisfarne on St. Aidan's traditional day, August 31.

I much prefer the old arrangement, wherein Cranmer was combined with Latimer and Ridley on the day of their martyrdom, October 16. But it matters little; all of them are saints, and all of them have reached their heavenly rest in the presence of the Lord. May we do likewise.]

Die blaue Blume

The Blue Flower

This afternoon, after playing the Liszt Weinen Klagen, I received at my office a vase of blue irises, with a note. It was from the organbuilder, C.H., who was at the concert on this instrument that he designed and installed, thanking me for a “masterly reading and interpretation,” with reference to the “blaue Blume” as a Romantic ideal, claiming that I “achieved that ideal today...”

I do not recall anyone ever sending or giving me flowers after a performance. It made me as giddy as a teenager. I still am, several hours later: I put the flowers out in the choir room for all to enjoy.

Die blaue Blume

Ich suche die blaue Blume,
Ich suche und finde sie nie,
Mir träumt, dass in der Blume
Mein gutes Glück mir blüh.
Ich wandre mit meiner Harfe
Durch Länder, Städt und Au'n,
Ob nirgends in der Runde
Die blaue Blume zu schaun.
Ich wandre schon seit lange,
Hab lang gehofft, vertraut,
Doch ach, noch nirgends hab ich
Die blaue Blum geschaut.

(Joseph von Eichendorff, 1818)

Via Crucis

On March 6, I am playing Liszt's Via Crucis, a series of meditations to accompany pilgrims through the Fourteen Stations of the Cross.

Only today have I gotten serious about preparations for this, having just now completed four hours of work on it. I played it once before, back in 2005, and the piece offers few technical challenges. But it calls for considerable intensity of emotion. I had forgotten how powerful it is.

There is an introduction, quoting Vexilla regis (“The royal banners forward go”), and fourteen short meditations. I have only a few minutes, so I will not go into detail beyond mentioning three striking moments:

--- the Sixth Station: St. Veronica wipes the Face of Jesus. Liszt gives the chorale “O Sacred Head sore wounded,” or with the German text, O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, with a most amazing eight-bar coda.

--- the Eighth Station: the Daughters of Jerusalem. One hears the wailing of the women, and at the last, a terrifying eight-bar Allegro marziale on full organ, as Jesus envisions the imperial legions coming to destroy and kill.

--- the Twelfth Station: Jesus dies on the Cross. This is one of the longest movements of the work. There is a recitative-like section where He speaks the Eli, Eli, lamma sabacthani, and then In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum. There follows another most amazing passage, passing through several major keys for the first time in the work, to the words: Consummatum est – It is finished. Finally, the chorale O Trauigkeit.

There is a lot of music this weekend. I am playing the B minor Prelude and Fugue of Bach for Sunday morning, and the Bach setting of O Lamm Gottes from the Eighteen Chorales for Evensong. The adult choir is singing the Evensong psalmody in unaccompanied plainsong: Psalms 22 and 23, for the Fourth Evening. The youth choir has a South African freedom song which we sang at last summer's RSCM: Bawo, Thixo Somandla. And there is much more – the Howells “St. John's Cambridge” Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, the Smith Responses, good anthems for the adult choir at Eucharist and Evensong.

I must get back to work on these things.

A visitor at choir practice

During choir rehearsal, an elderly fellow came by for some help and encouragement. He has been out of prison for about six weeks or so, and has been sleeping on a friend's floor. He has a minimum wage job at a fast-food restaurant, and has been trying to put his life back together. We have helped him a couple of times in small ways – mostly, giving him quarters to do his laundry, because he has to show up in a clean uniform to keep his job.

Tonight, he was in a fix. The landlord found out about him staying with his friend, and threw him out; his friend almost got evicted too for breaking the lease. He stayed last night in one of the Occupy movement tents – but it happens that they, too, are being evicted tomorrow. He cannot stay in the homeless shelter because he was in a fight there some years ago and has been banned for life. We gave him a little bit of money, not enough, and suggested that he can take a shower at the recreation center before going to work tomorrow evening. I think it meant more to him that we cared about his dilemma.

As soon as he left, we turned to the next item in our rehearsal, the Psalm for Sunday. Almost immediately, we encountered this:

For he does not despise nor abhor the poor in their poverty;
neither does he hide his face from them;
but when they cry to him he hears them. (Psalm 22:23)

I don't know what is going to become of this fellow. He probably has a tent over his head tonight, but not tomorrow. It is still winter. The United States has become a hard and unfriendly country where the arrogant rich who run the place care nothing for the poor. And there are a lot of them, more all the time.

But God cares: When they cry to him, he hears them.

[Edit, in April: He now has a roof over his head -- he was arrested recently for breaking and entering, and charged additionally with failure to register as a sex offender. He is in jail, awaiting trial.]

Addendum: Liszt and Bach

When Liszt sought a way to express his spiritual yearnings after the death of his son Daniel in 1859 and his daughter Blandina in 1862, yearnings that found their artistic form in the “Weinen, Klagen” Variations, he turned to J. S. Bach for a model.

Liszt worked in Weimar through the 1850's, and there came under the influence of Bach, who had likewise worked there in his day. Bach's music was still not widely known, though Mendelssohn had done much in Leipzig to remedy that.

It is impossible to consider Bach's music apart from its spiritual context. And it is impossible to contemplate Bach without recognizing his steadfast faith in God. “The Fifth Evangelist,” some have called him. I would add that if St. Paul can be seen as the “Apostle to the Gentiles,” Bach could be viewed (or heard) as an “Apostle to Musicians.” He proclaimed the Gospel of Jesus Christ his Lord in a form peculiarly appropriate to musicians and lovers of music, of whom there have been none more devoted than Liszt.

He was one of the many people who heard that proclamation, more than a century after Bach's time. It is an example of how our works in the Lord's service may lie dormant, eventually springing forth and bearing fruit in ways we could never have imagined.

Preparing for Liszt

Over the last three weeks, I have been practicing for the Liszt “Weinen, Klagen...” which is to be played at the Congregational Church on March 14. Most of the work has been at the piano, and a large share of it on one twenty-measure passage (measures 163-183). My lessons from Distler at Christmas have been helpful here: I have been working this up with the metronome as I did with parts of the Distler piece, four measures at a time, and there is a fair chance that it might be ready in time.

My first rehearsal across town at the church is scheduled for Friday, and I will only have perhaps one additional session before the recital – the minister over there has decided (sensibly) that we organists make too much noise for him to hold counselling sessions in his office, so Fridays are no longer available. This one is, because he is out of town. The other practice days which are available, Wednesdays and Thursdays, do not work very well for my schedule.

So, I need to use this Friday efficiently.

I became familiar with the instrument last year, and have the stoplist that I carefully noted down, with the locations of all the stops and the combination pistons. More importantly, I have a good sense of how the individual stops and combinations sound. So, an experiment: I spent about three hours today working out a fairly detailed registration scheme in my office. It will doubtless need tweaking when I hear it in the church, but that will take less time than creating the scheme from scratch.

There are between thirty and thirty-seven registration changes in this twenty-minute piece. Some of them can be made by hand; most of the rest can be made with manual pistons and adjustments to the couplers. I think I can get by with one general piston, which is used at the beginning and at two subsequent locations in the score. But I will be making heavy use of all of the manual pistons, setting them up from softest to loudest for each division. There are several places in the piece where Liszt intends a gradual crescendo from a fairly soft dynamic to pretty much full organ: the manual pistons will make this possible, along with judicious use of the Swell pedal.

Lessons from Liszt? The construction of a registration scheme such as this is one. Another is the pianistic nature of the piece, which has been good for my technical development. Perhaps most of all, there is the need for an all-out Romantic engagement with the music, full of rubato and expressiveness in a manner that makes Franck or Brahms or Mendelssohn (composers of the period with whom I am more comfortable) seem positively reserved. Liszt poured his soul into his music, and the performer must do the same.

Many moments in the piece feel Wagnerian, which would please Liszt. He was a staunch supporter of Wagner from the earliest days to the end, and arranged for the first productions of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin at a time when it was not at all a given that Wagner could get these operas performed. Liszt's daughter Cosima ended up as Mrs. Richard Wagner, though in a manner with which her father was not at all pleased: she jilted her husband (and Liszt's close friend) Hans von Bülow to run off with Wagner, doing this while von Bülow was preoccupied with trying as music director and conductor to bring Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to production, a monumental undertaking even now, and more so then when such music was beyond anything that had been experienced. Liszt refused to attend their wedding, though in the end he died at Bayreuth, Cosima (rather unwillingly) at his side.

I share Franck's suspicion of Wagner – Franck procured a copy of the score to Tristan, and after studying it scrawled across the first page “This is poison.” But Wagner did have a religious streak of sorts, as can be heard in Parsifal. Liszt had even more of one, and this piece, the “Weinen, Klagen...”, is one of the strongest expressions of it. As I work on this, I sense that Liszt was like many of us – full of conflicts and doubts, very far from perfection in morals or manner of life, but casting himself upon the mercy of the Lord, much like the publican: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

In the Via Crucis, an organ solo version of which I will be playing at our parish as part of the March 6 Stations of the Cross, the vocal score ends with repeated cries of Ave, crux... and Crux fidelis, spes unica. In this, I join Liszt: there is no other hope for any of us. I will try to pour my soul into the “Weinen, Klagen” as he did, trusting in its final affirmation: Was Gott tut, daß ist wohlgetan.

The Promotion of Christian Knowledge

In the U.S. church, today is the feast of St. Thomas Bray, priest (d. 1730). He was appointed in 1696 by the Bishop of London as Bishop's Commissary for the Maryland colony, made one visitation to the colony in 1699, and worked for the benefit of the American colonies after his return to England, raising money for mission work and encouraging young priests to go to the colonies.

As part of his work, Bray founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the SPCK, which still exists. Appropriately for his feast day, I had an opportunity to Promote Christian Knowledge this morning: a visitor at Matins.

She was new to the Daily Office, so we did an "instructed Matins." I was so flustered by having a visitor that I forgot that today was Wednesday and thought that it was Friday, so we read the wrong Lessons. I showed her the Lectionary and how it worked and took the pericopes from there, rather than going to my bookmarks in the Bible, which would have put me in the right place. I thought at the time "aren't we skipping something?" but did not stop to ask what day of the week it was, or check my pocket calendar. The visitor corrected me when I got to the Collects and was about to read the Collect for Fridays. "Isn't this Wednesday?" she asked. It may have been providential, because Friday's lesson from Genesis is considerably more edifying than today's, and let us sing the fine Wesley hymn "Come, O thou Traveller unknown," which we did with enthusiasm.

Still, she got an introduction to the Daily Office. The equivalent moment years ago changed my life. I hope it might be equally valuable for her. And I hope she comes back.

It was, also, my first experience of saying the Office with someone who was following the texts from her telephone. I believe that Father Bray would be pleased; any way to get the texts of Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer in front of people is good.