Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Friday 28 September 2012

Was Christ a "Creature"?

Taken aback before Mass this morning, reading a mediation in Magnificat from Francois Mauriac:
Like all creatures, Christ is transformed by the person who is attracted to him.
Idiomatically, I would infer from this that the writer means Christ is a creature.
Maybe the original french has no such implication?

Vocal inflection would help.

"Like ALL creatures, Christ..."

Bad.

"Like all CREATURES, Christ...."

Good.

Tuesday 11 September 2012

Overheard in Church

Mass this morning was even chattier than is usual on a weekday, (more crowded, solidarity with 9-11 victims, I believe.)

A woman sitting perhaps five feet from me spoke, (I will assume in charity she thought she was whispering....,) for a good twenty minutes straight before Mass, about me .

Since she referred to me by name, critiqued what I was wearing, and got enough details about me and Himself right, I am possibly not mistaken that I was her target, although I don't know her.

She at first, (this was a year ago,) misled by my hat and towering height, (that's right, five feet four and change,) thought I was a "man with a pony tail."

She likes my voice okay.

She thinks I keep my mother prisoner in her house, that I'm "in charge," prevent her going out to lunch with her friends, etc.

Mom's hearing is bad enough that she did not notice any of this, thankfully.

But I feel quite like Tom Sawyer, or was it Huck Finn? at his own funeral.

This made me cry...


Someone sent me this article on where pianos go to die.
Pianos and their thousands of moving parts can be expensive to fix, requiring long hours of labor by skilled technicians, whose numbers are diminishing. The market is filled with ... digital pianos and portable keyboards that can cost as little as a few hundred dollars.
I know if my rich patron hadn't paid for moving her grand to me, I could not have accepted the gift.
(The little spinet we had at the old homestead, we offered free to any interested young person, and it took forever to find a taker, and he had to do some finagling to get a truck and several brawny friends of his father's to make it feasible.)

Tuesday 4 September 2012

So much for "the Great"

At the parish where civic holidays always trump sacred ones, we naturally did not celebrate the feast of Pope St Gregory, much less hear any chant, other than the tunes that run in my head.(On the other hand, we were also not asked to join in God Bless America, despite the rather vocal entreaties of a woman seated near me, so all in all, it was a great Mass, musically speaking...

But in this year of all years, wouldn't it be nice to have prayed this:
Through the intercession of Pope Saint Gregory, endow, we pray, with a spirit of wisdom those to whom You have given authority to govern
as a community?