Sacred Music Friday: My Song Is Love Unknown
Posted: February 28, 2014 Filed under: Music Leave a commentMy Song Is Love Unknown – King’s College, Cambridge
imagine
Posted: February 26, 2014 Filed under: Music, Religion, Society, Spirituality Leave a commentA couple of the news feeds I get in my RSS reader are from Religion Dispatches. At the end of January they published a commentary by Candace Chellew-Hodge about what millennials might create given the chance to form their own religion. When she teaches a community college comparative religion course she has students embark on this exercise as a class project. When doing this exercise with a group of millennials she noted the absence of clergy, other leadership, and regular worship. She writes that what intrigued her the most was the fact that
not one of the religions crafted by the student groups included a concept of hell, or any form of punishment for not following the prescriptions of the religion.
What surprises me is that she found that noteworthy. I have no idea of Chellew-Hodge’s age, but surely she must know John Lennon. I don’t know what a survey of baby boomers on this subject would reveal today, but certainly if you asked them the question when they were the age of today’s millennials they would have given much the same response.
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Perhaps it’s simply my being the age I am, but to me this seems pretty obvious.
yard work
Posted: February 25, 2014 Filed under: Exercise, Things domestic Leave a commentI wrote last October about how I had terminated the services of our gardener. In short, he didn’t understand that the yard waste toter was booth food waste and yard waste, and he would throw food waste, which we put in paper bags, into the recycle toter. There are certain things for which I have zero tolerance, and one of those is polluting the recycling stream. The decision saved us $60 a month, which is a particularly good thing in these days of Terry’s anemic commission checks, but still I wondered whether I was cutting off my nose to spite my face. After four months I can say unequivocally that I was not.
The exercise has definitely been good for me. My former primary care physician was fond of reminding me that in addition to aerobic exercise, about which I am quite diligent, I should be doing strength training and stretching. Yard work offers both.
In the first several weeks after that decision, I was kept busy each weekend taking care of the falling leaves. Once the trees were bare, there was less to do, and I could get by with mowing the lawns every two or three weeks. Then there’s those extraordinary projects, in the sense of extra-ordinary.
The second year we were here we had a contractor landscape our back yard. Part of the flora included in the project was crepe myrtle tree, which is directly in view outside my loft office window. The first few years we loved it, though as it matured the annoyance with the shedding flowers nearly outweighed our enjoyment of them earlier in the season.
Working from home I see the crepe myrtle all day long. This year the dry seed pods stayed on the tree all winter, and I didn’t know how the new growth would arrive in spring. Assuming, of course, that the tree is still alive. The citrus in the neighborhood is not doing terribly well in this disturbingly dry winter.
I decided that this task needed to be tackled, which I did last Saturday. I pulled out the ladder and the long-handled pruning shears. I wasn’t sure I would be able to get the highest branches in the back, but by the time I was finished I managed to get them all. I now have a much improved view outside my loft window, and the crepe myrtle, has, I hope, a chance at coming back.
Not to mention the fact that I got my stretching and strength training in. In addition to the actual lopping of the branches, there was, of course, the gathering of the branches from the ground and cutting them to fit the yard waste toter. Plus I mowed both lawns and swept up a few stray leaves. I took an ibuprofen Sunday morning, but it was, without doubt, a worthwhile effort.
The Last Enchantments
Posted: February 24, 2014 Filed under: Books Leave a commentThe Last Enchantments
Charles Finch
St. Martin’s Press, 334 pages
This is the first novel I have read in s few years. That’s not quite true. I read Snapper last year, but it was represented as autobiographical nonfiction when I heard the author interview on Science Friday, and I read it that way. It was only later I later learned was published as fiction. I also took a shot at Pynchon’s Vineland last year, but abandoned it as I got tired of its North American version of magical realism, something I relished in the mid and late 1970’s. But The Last Enchantments was my first conscious, complete foray into fiction in quite some time, and it was a pleasure.
The protagonist, Will, worked on the losing John Kerry presidential campaign along with his girlfriend, Alison. While they had made plans to build a life together, Will applied for, and was accepted into, a year at Oxford. Most of the novel is set there, with some flashbacks to the campaign.
The novel describes Will’s classmates at Oxford, the community of the surrounding town, including Blackwell’s Books with which I spent a lot of money in my undergraduate days, and some of the ancient, arcane Oxford University ceremonies which continue today no matter how hoary.
In the course of the novel, Will makes a lot of stupid decisions about the women he chooses to sleep with, his relationship with Alison, and his career. Nonetheless, I found the plot believable and the characters engaging. I loved the portrayal of graduate student life at Oxford.
A happy ending there was not, and I was seriously ticked at Will for being such a dumb-ass. Regardless, I am delighted to have read The Last Enchantments.
Sacred Music Friday: Light Everlasting
Posted: February 21, 2014 Filed under: Music Leave a commentLight Everlasting by Olaf Christiansen, sung by the St. Olaf Choir
reading it right
Posted: February 20, 2014 Filed under: Language Leave a commentIt’s time for another blog entry on language.
I noticed the following note in the church worship bulletin:
dates can be shared
Certainly if you take I-10 east from Los Angeles to Palm Springs and Indio, you can stop on the way at Hadley Orchards and buy a big box of dates. You will probably want to share them rather than keeping the whole box to yourself. Then also, when I was in high school, a double date was well-accepted practice.
What the worship bulletin was talking about was that there were still open weeks for donating altar flowers, that the suggested donation was $45, but that two families could split that amount and be recognized for donating flowers on the same Sunday.
It helps to read the paragraph starting at the beginning.