mastodon 4.4.3Orthodox Christian deacon, long-ago exvangelical. Husband, dad, cat dad. #Gardening, #hiking, #cooking, #cocktails, #ClassicalMusic. Central #NorthCarolina, USA. Occasionally a choral music arranger/composer. English/Spanish bilingual; dabbles in Greek, Church Slavonic; faint smatterings of various other languages.
If religion offends your sensibilities, I suggest that you not follow this profile.
Cry out, O sinner, with all your might; for your Lord is merciful and loves those who repent. As soon as you return, your Father will come out to meet you. He will slaughter the fatted calf, clothe you in a fine robe, and rejoice in you.
— St. Ephraim the Syrian, from “A Spiritual Psalter”
That last boost (from one of my alt accounts, on which all posts must be in iambic) is yesterday's wonderful discovery in the world of classical music. I bought a disc of three Marko Nikodijević compositions on a whim, never having heard of him, and I can instantly tell this is going to be in regular rotation. He is a contemporary composer who grew up in Serbia but now lives in Germany.
He blends a lot of modernist ideas (including, but not limited to, 12-tone serialism) with a strong sense of melodic flow. I believe this is the only commercially available recording of any of his works.
@mcmullin@musicians.today and @Cognessence@social.linux.pizza, you two should check him out.
Today is such a gorgeous day that I am working from the front porch while listening to various opera overtures by Luigi Cherubini, one of the most overlooked composers of the Beethovenian era.
(I would nominate Louis Spohr as another forgotten Beethoven contemporary who deserves a lot more listens.)
Holy Week involves being at church a LOT around a lot of other people. This is highly rewarding but very draining.
My wife, who knows me very well yet still somehow manages to love me, bought me this shirt. I inaugurated it today, wearing it under my cassock.
It is the custom among the eastern Slavs to read the prologue of St. John in many languages during the Paschal liturgy. (By contrast, those in the Greek orbit read the gospel appointed for Paschal vespers in many languages instead.) I think we had over a dozen languages; Danish was a new addition this year. Before I became a deacon, I used to read in Cherokee — someone my mom knows in Tahlequah, Oklahoma made me a recording so I could at least approximate the tonal aspect of the language. Nowadays I skip reading so I can conserve my energy to make it to the end of liturgy.
Last night was the first time we’ve had a sign language interpreter for it, which I thought was really cool.
A dear friend sent me this quote tonight:
“When we began our Christian life, we were full of enthusiasm. Without it, we would have been like an engine without steam, or a rundown clock, and in the end gotten nowhere. But we had our enthusiasm, we had our spiritual father, we had the writings of the Fathers, we were helped by the grace of God, and so we made some progress.
But slowly, little by little, the difficulties set in, the failures, the compromises, the sins, the temptations, thoughts of stopping, of turning back. Our life, which till then had been like a happy song, became a cross. But it is then, my dear friend, that your martyrdom begins. When your Christian life begins to be difficult, when it seems like an intolerable cross, then you must stand as steady as a rock. That is when you are a martyr. Say to yourself: ‘Let us stand aright’. Stand fast, steady and unmoving. Say, like the prophet, ‘Here I am, O Lord, I stand here ready to do your will‘ (Isa 6:8). Be like the Theotokos, who said, ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to your will‘ (Lk 1:38).
If you endure, the storm will pass, and you will emerge into the calm; your life will once again become a celebration, a feast day. But now you will have the experience of spiritual struggle, you will have acquired experience. After this trial, after having taken up your cross, the flames of divine love will be ignited within you, and you will acquire the most beautiful, the most powerful, the purest, most angelic love, the love of God.”
— Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra
Getting ready to start vespers for Palm Sunday. A joyous feast to all tomorrow, whether you are starting or finishing Holy Week!
This is Lazarus. He is celebrating the eve of his feast with me on the backyard swing.
The truth is that without mystical union with Christ, following His moral law in one’s life is impossible, for it is beyond mankind’s power to fulfill.
— Archbishop Averky (Taushev)
One of the prophecy readings for the Annunciation is the account from Exodus of the Burning Bush. The bush is seen as a foreshadowing of the conception; for as the bush was burning without being consumed, so the Virgin received the Divine Fire into her womb without being consumed.
I have been a classical music nut since I was 10 years old. For years I had just assumed that Bruckner was given to the same histrionic excesses as Mahler, so I never bothered listening, until about a month ago, when I found used CDs of his 5th and 8th symphonies. Now I’m trying to make up for lost time.
Yesterday I got to church at 8:45 in the morning, left shortly after 1pm, headed out to a friend's house about 30 minutes away, sat around alone in the cool outdoors for 45 minutes, and then made wood-fired pizza for the youth (and their parents) until 7pm. I was completely fried by the end, went to bed shortly after 9, and slept until 8:15 this morning.
The shirt you see me wearing here is entirely apropos.
Tomorrow is the day when we remember St. Basil (Vasily) Martysz, a 20th century Polish new-martyr, a small portion of whose relics are in our altar. We realized too late to plan any services for him tomorrow, but we will be singing a hymn in his honor this morning.
Because he was a missionary priest in the USA and Canada early in his ministry, we North Americans have a special attachment to him. He also served as a military chaplain in the Polish army, and is thus particularly dear to veterans and those who serve in active duty.
I failed to post this link yesterday: “Rejoice, O Bethany,” a paraliturgical hymn from the Syrian tradition, on the subject of the raising of Lazarus, here sung in English.
Today, the Wednesday of the fourth week of the Paschal season, is the feast of mid-Pentecost: the midpoint between Pascha and Pentecost. The gospel reading for today from John 7 mentions Jesus going up to the Temple “in the middle of the feast” and preaching. That feast was Sukkot, the “feast of booths,” which falls in September; but Jesus’s teaching is entirely applicable here too.
On this day it is customary to bless the fields — though, having never lived in a heavily-Orthodox rural area, I have never seen this done.
For my friends of the Roman persuasion… one of the lovelier hymns in the Gregorian repertoire.
Last night I was able to get the new release of the Dillo browser to compile on my work MacBook for the first time. Homebrew does not yet have version 3.3.0.
Unfortunately I discovered that none of the navigation elements on my personal site are visible.
Here's the secret invocation:
brew install fltk openssl
CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/lib" CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" ./configure --enable-experimental-fltk
American converts to Orthodox Christianity, particularly those coming from parishes following east-Slavic practice, often feel a real affinity with American shape-note hymns. They seem like the closest thing we have to an indigenous chant tradition. So it was inevitable that eventually someone would set the central hymn of Pascha to a shape-note-ish melody and harmony; Vlad Morosan did so in 2013. I’ve seen several YouTube videos from Russia where small choirs have joyfully embraced this setting, in a sort of reversal of the Russian evangelization of Alaska.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOnGFc2F8A
PDF of the music: https://www.stnicholasendicott.org/files/XB-American.pdf
Thanks be to God, we now have...
... DRUM ROLL ....
The first book of the Metal Translation Bible!
https://christianmetalministrymusic.com/product/1260543-metal-translation-bible-genesis
/me runs in shame to a dark corner
Today we remember with sorrow the incineration of the relics of St. Sava, first archbishop of the autocephalous Church of Serbia, by Sinan Pasha of Belgrade in 1594.
St. Sava, the son of Serbian Grand Prince Stefan Nemanja, was responsible for setting in order the church of Serbia, as well as for re-founding the Monastery of Hilandar on Mouth Athos, which to this day is largely a Serbian monastery. He also restored many churches and monasteries that had fallen into disrepair.
700 years before that, Saint Sabbas the Sanctified, who had founded the Mar Sabbas monastery in the Judean desert, prophesied that one day a monk from a western land, bearing his own name, would come, and should be given Sabbas's own pastoral staff. This came to pass when St. Sava visited. The staff itself, made of ebony and elephant tusk, is preserved on Mount Athos in a cell which is a dependency of Hilandar.
The site of the burning of St. Sava's relics is now the church of St. Sava in Belgrade, which is one of the largest church buildings in the world.
For more reading:
https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2012/08/the-pateritsa-staff-of-st-savvas.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Sava