O Virgo Virginum

O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be?
For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after.
Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me?
The thing which ye behold is a divine mystery.

This is different than the others. There is no "veni", no request to come; and this is addressed very specifically to Mary. But there is an answer, of sorts. I've been thinking about Mary a fair amount since Sunday, partly due to the influence of various bloggers and Sunday's readings, and partly because of the Collect:

God our redeemer,
who prepared the Blessed Virgin Mary
to be the mother of your Son:
grant that, as she looked for his coming as our saviour,
so we may be ready to greet him
when he comes again as our judge;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

As far as preparation goes... well, I've done a lot of contemplation and prayer. But I haven't managed to really be ready for some of the practical details of Christmas. Let's just say I'm hoping folks will take a broadly ecumenical approach to the arrival of various gifts.

I understand from Wikipedia that the practice of adding this antiphon is a mediaeval English thing. Common Worship has moved back toward only using seven, but I like this one too.

O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

How do you draw a picture of hope? How do you draw a picture of Emmanuel, of "God with us"? How do you depict salvation? What does freedom look like?

I couldn't settle on this at all. No photograph seems to capture it; it's like picking up pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but not being able to fit them all together, and having lost the lid to the box. I'll only ever be able to see part of the picture, but I know there is one.

I tried putting about 25 different photos in but that was no good, either; I don't have the skill to pull off the "contemplative calm amidst chaotic busy-ness" effect in a visual medium.

Only one more!

O Rex Gentium

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

cf Isaiah 28.16; Ephesians 2.14

I struggled to find appropriate visual material for this. I've stuck with fairly churchy artwork so far, stained glass and that sort of thing, and I wanted to continue with that. But I also wanted to find a symbol of kingship that also implied unity, but without actually depicting Christ. I wanted to make it clear that in Isaiah's time people didn't have the images we have now, images of a narrative that has been told and re-told. I suppose a stained glass image of the cornerstone at the top of an arch would have worked, but I couldn't find one, and I'm not a graphics wizard so couldn't conjure one up out of mere pixels and imagination. So you get this instead.

It's about ineffability, I think, and timelessness. Eternity. We observe Advent knowing what is coming, or thinking we know what is coming. Same liturgical cycle every year, right? There's this temptation to think "the created world was one way, and then Jesus came, and then the world was another way." But I've never been able to swallow that. I've never thought God is limited by linear time that way, at least not when I actually stop and think about it. We're so used to being time-limited beings that we tend to view everything as historical. But even the Nicene Creed says that Christ is "of one Being with the Father; through him all things were made." The doxology, that staple of Christian liturgy, makes a similar statement: "As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be." And even if Common Worship has done away with "world without end" I find myself adding it in my head.

I look like I'm talking at cross purposes with myself, first talking about the not-knowing-what's-next of Isaiah's time and then asserting that Christ is eternal. But saying that God is not bound by linear time does not mean that we humans are also free of it. Our story is a historical narrative: the historical narrative of God's revelation to us, through time.

I'm not a cessationist, so I think that revelation keeps going. But it's as important to keep telling and retelling the narrative we've been given as it is to watch and wait and look for continuing signs. Else, how will we recognise it?

Speaking of linear time, I've managed to get this up a bit earlier than the previous ones, but must stop now to go and teach. It's snowing thickly in this bit of London and the pavements are going to be quite lethal, but I'm reasonably sure-footed, having grown up with this sort of weather, and I do enjoy it, the sheer wasteful abundance of so many snowflakes, all different, all beautiful. All cold and wet, but that's what hot chocolate and water bottles are for. Maybe I'll be able to make snow angels in my own garden after all!

O Oriens

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness
and the shadow of death.

cf Malachi 4.2

This does seem especially appropriate for solstice. In the Northern hemisphere, from here on the days get longer again.

My favourite part of Morning Prayer, incidentally, is this:
In the tender compassion of our God •
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,

To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, •
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

These antiphons don't belong in Morning Prayer -- they're an Evening Prayer thing, sandwiched around the Magnificat. But this one reminds me of morning prayer, and the just-before-dawn, forward-looking feel of much of the liturgy around this time.

O Clavis David

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

cf Isaiah 22.22, 42.7


I've been recording these at Nearest Church. I'm there some mornings to practise the organ anyway, and the acoustic is far more forgiving than the less resonant atmosphere in my carpeted music room at home.

This morning, try as I might, I could not get the door to the church unlocked. Other people have complained about that door, but I've usually been able to use it with no trouble. But this morning? Twenty minutes of wrangling with the lock, and I still wasn't in. I was late for my next appointment so abandoned the project until later in the day... when the lock worked quite easily for me.

The other thing this antiphon puts me in mind of is the mental prisons we so often create for ourselves. We build little walls for ourselves, meant to protect us from situations which are uncontrollable or frightening. That works very well for a time, but eventually the walls we build can trap us. Perhaps that is the prison from which we wait to be freed.

Or perhaps, yet again, it is late and I am tired...

O Radix Jesse

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

cf Isaiah 11.10, 45.14, 52.15; Romans 15.12

Earlier this week I was thinking about my own impatience and the last line of this antiphon. But it is late, and I am tired, and so I'm not going to offer any commentary. Suffice to say that I had a wonderful day on many counts and feel much better for it.

O Adonai

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

cf Exodus 3.2, 24.12

The second of the Advent Antiphons. I didn't sing as well as I'd have liked, but I'm only allowing myself three takes of each and the other two were worse.

I was going to write something more in-depth this evening, but I'm really very tired again. And anyway, Chantblog has got all you could ever want to know.

O Sapientia

Hopefully these will get better as I get better at using the software.

Excuse any horrible pronunciations of the Latin; I haven't taken the time to study these as much as I'd have liked.

More over the next several days, I hope!

Search by Melody

I am very grateful for this post which points at this resource - a tool where you can search for chants by melody. Okay, you need to have good enough relative pitch to be able to notate the melody; it's not at the point where you can just sing into a microphone and have the computer work things out. But it's a big step on from anything I've seen yet, and it does handle transposition, so relative-but-not-perfect-pitch thinkers like me don't have to remember the name of the starting pitch, just the relationship between the notes...

Remember this post where I was wondering about hospital chaplaincy and being able to find hymns that people could only remember bits of? That's a much bigger project: there are metrical considerations, and copyright considerations, and a constantly-expanding repertoire. But this is a start.

Pretty shiny, eh?

Placeholder post

Too many things to think about, let alone to post about! My brain, at the moment, is all about big ideas, general concepts, broad careless strokes of a chunky brush dipped in searingly bright colours. It's in my practising, my teaching, even composing (such as it is) is coming at me in big forms and harmonic structure rather than melodic line and fine nuance.

Typical, then, that this week in my academic work I need to write a report on Big Project, a meticulously detailed report of what I learned and how I learned it, complete with appendices, tables and charts. As someone who normally does that sort of learning in a more organic and intuitive way, I'm struggling a little to identify these things, but as a teacher and a musician I can do self-scrutiny well enough; as someone who thinks the structure of the assignment is not actually that helpful to the learning process I'm resentful of having to jump through the hoop. But the biggest problem is really that I keep getting distracted by big ideas.

The way I usually work through ideas is to talk about them or write about them.

Things I would like to write about, right here and right now, but for which I really haven't got the spare brain cycles:

-How my spirituality/beliefs relate to teaching music; how I can be more generally supportive of the families I work with, through music teaching and not in any overtly religious framework; how to pray about teaching
-I've touched on it a bit before, but more on music performance and spirituality and my current understanding of the relationship between the two
-Chronic pain and how I deal with that and various other physical and mental health difficulties. I'm not actually sure I can do this without turning it into a whinge-fest or completely destroying the fragile anonymity I'm trying to maintain here.
-Words and meaning; images and meaning; sounds and meaning. In the beginning there was the Word, we're told--but do we mean the word, or do we mean meaning itself? And how does this relate to our being made in God's image, and being creators of meaning ourselves?
-Psalmody and how/why it seems to work so much better for me when chanted or sung; the line between speaking and chanting, and between chanting and singing. I'd quite like to do lots of research into chanted/sung psalmody in the Jewish tradition and how that relates to the worship patterns of the early Church. And I'd like to get to know it all so much better, and find or help create an authentic, aesthetic and accessible sung/chanted Psalmody for English translations. Yes, lots of work is being done on this already; I'm essentially playing catch-up, in an academic sense. Meanwhile I keep singing them in Morning Prayer, and one day indeed pours out its song to another as in Psalm 19 this morning.
-Material poverty (of others) and asceticism (the temptation to it in myself, and a certain pointlessness). I really haven't ironed out my thoughts on this.
-FaceBook, Twitter, blogging, other ways of keeping in touch and building communities online and how I see (and how I use) these various tools.
-Food and prayer and (especially shared) meals, and an assortment of thoughts I've been having on these recently; Eucharist and sacrament within and without standard liturgy; this also relates to creating a welcoming home, and to being spiritual/religious in a pluralist/secular society, creating rituals that can be shared and meaningful without excluding anyone or making them feel uncomfortable.

The assignment will have to come first, I'm afraid. And I've got a busy week in other terms as well, so need to be careful not to commit to too much yet. But I might be able to write about one of these by Saturday-ish. Which would you like to read?

Itch-a-Sketch

I'm meant to be working on an essay today, it's due tomorrow. Organ improvisation and DuPré's Vespers Op. 18, and how he communicates the text (bits of Song of Solomon, Ave Maris Stella, and Magnificat) in the music, in case you're wondering, but most of you aren't! The potential to get sidetracked into Gregorian chant is very high in this essay but I've got most of an outline done, just need to keep fleshing it out with more detail until I get to my required number of words.

So, since I'm meant to be working on an essay, I've actually been thinking profoundly deep theological thoughts pissing about on teh internets.

Things I've been thinking:

A post at Questioning Christian has made me think that maybe we humans go about this whole "repent and be saved" thing the wrong way around. A strong sense of the existence of God and an acute sense of my own imperfection don't seem to be enough for me to actually improve: perfectionism takes over, and I get stuck. A sense that God loves me, a sense that God's love is abundant and freely given and absolutely unconditional, has the opposite effect. I worry less about getting things 'right' or 'perfect' and just try to love the world as much as I can, with God's help. The perception of God's love in my life right now is fairly embryonic, I'd say. My conscious awareness of it can be fleeting and I am most unaccustomed to feeling this way. But it's there sometimes, and it seems to be growing. And I think that is good. And I think, maybe, that is making it easier to improve.

I read a lovely webcomic called xkcd. This comic has been stuck in my head since it was posted last week. I keep thinking, "Hey, there's a cross in the etch-a-sketch, what does that mean?" and I know it's just how the thing works, nothing deliberate, and I'm pretty sure the author didn't mean any reference to Christianity. But...it itches. There's a cross in the etch-a-sketch. I feel that way about Christianity in general, I think: I know it fits somewhere in my life, but I'm really not sure about the how and where of it. Perhaps could fit somewhere is more accurate: I'm still not convinced it has any truth to offer that other major religions do not touch on in some way, and many of the reasons I feel drawn to Christianity now could very well be social and personal rather than based on any profound spiritual uniqueness. But the etch-a-sketch could have had a triangular mechanism, and the reasons it doesn't are pragmatic, not aesthetic. Maybe it's okay for some of my approach to spirituality to be pragmatic, too.

I'm not sure how those two things relate to one another, but it does feel like there's some connection.

Pragmatism says it is well past time for me to eat lunch.