Music for summer thunderstorms

I was distracting myself this afternoon from a paper I had to write (ahem). I felt restless and peevish and was looking for some good, strong, intense classical music to play to get some of my jitters out.

As I was looking around, I thought I'd see if I could find a piece I'd heard a friend play at his piano recital years and years ago. All I remembered was the name of the composer, but I had been utterly blown away by the piece at the time and I'd never heard it again after that. Sure enough, I found it.

Before you listen, here's the story behind this piece: apparently, Scriabin wrote this while on his honeymoon, watching a huge thunderstorm sweep up across the Black Sea. Knowing that, you can close your eyes and picture the intensity of this storm. You can also tell he was loving every single minute of it!



Is anyone else familiar with Scriabin's music? I think his work is often coupled with Chopin's, but I don't know much more than that.

Jack Kemp, RIP

I saw this article in the New York Times this evening, and I had to post the link.

I don't have many memories of his campaign with Bob Dole for the White House in 1996 (probably because I was in college at the time and therefore completely cut off from any and all current events). I'm not into football and I wasn't even alive when he played. My eyes glaze over at the mere mention of the word "economics" (whoa -- sorry. *rapid head shake*) so I am completely ignorant of (and mostly uninterested in) the details of the Kemp-Roth legislation that Reagan used to cut taxes in the early 80's.

So why do I care that Mr. Kemp has passed away? Well, while I didn't know him, I've spoken with several of his friends and colleagues, often at somewhat inconvenient hours, and I feel a vague sense of connection to the man.

Jack Kemp and I had the same cellphone number.

Well, yes -- more accurately, Jack Kemp had the number, changed his number, and the old number was given to me when I moved out to DC four years ago. Details, details. The important bit is that it was a detail which was evidently not passed along to everyone in Mr. Kemp's phone book.

The phone-number changeover must have happened fairly quickly, since it was only for my first year in DC that I fielded these calls for him. Of course, it took me a long time to figure out whom I was fielding calls for. Usually, the conversations ran like,

"Hello, is Jack there?"

"I'm sorry, you have the wrong number."

"So sorry." *click*

After a few months of this, I started informing people that, evidently, this used to be "Jack's" phone number (whoever he was), but it was mine now, and perhaps they could inform other people of that fact. This went on until one morning when I received a call for "Jack" at the gorgeous hour of 7am. I was polite but firm; the fellow on the other end of the line was oddly cheerful and talkative -- especially for early morning -- and thought the circumstances required commenting on.

"Wow. So this isn't his number any more. They must have reassigned it to you!"

"Yes, I suppose so." (What a blindingly brilliant observation, I thought. Please go away.)

"Well, this is hilarious." (Not really.) "Do you know whose phone number you have?"

"Some guy named 'Jack', evidently." (Why is this guy still talking?)

"Right. Jack Kemp."

Here, my brain finally woke up and clicked into high gear; I sat up straighter, a look of alert intelligence came into my expression, and I said,

"Jack who?"

There was an audible *snort* on the other end of the line. (This man just snorted at me! It's 7am! He woke me up, and he's snorting at me!)

"Jack KEMP. You know, football star? Vice Presidential nominee in '96?"

"Oh, yes! Of course! Jack Kemp..."

Well, I was mildly impressed. Anyway, it made for a fun conversation with my roommates over breakfast and almost made up for being wakened by a garrulous stranger. So, now that he's gone, I feel mildly sorry.

At any rate, sorry enough to say a prayer for his soul. Requiescat in pace.

Photo for the day

I often forget to follow some of my own "favorite links", so a lot of posts flow under the bridge before I think to drop by. I did a little browsing this morning, though, and found this shot from Today's Photo.

I was definitely an Andrew Wyeth fan before, but this guy's photos of the house where Wyeth produced so many paintings are starting to rank pretty highly for me, too! Beautiful.

Thanks

I wanted to pass along something I came across this morning reading C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain:

I must add, too, that the only purpose of this book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching patience and fortitude I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that, when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

My very deep thanks to everyone for their "human sympathy", which has been more than just a little. In my experience so far, I think he's absolutely right. I have been given so much help and support from family and friends that I'm able to face the prospect of continued suffering in the future with much less dread. I know that you all will be there with me.

More randomness

A great remix of an old Reagan-era commercial...



To make this even cooler, the actual footage of Sarah Palin is taken from a filmed meeting she had with the guys from American Chopper, who are making a motorcycle to commemorate Alaska's 50th Anniversary as a state!

[h/t Conservatives 4 Palin]

Happy feast of St. Joseph the Worker!

My favorite image of St. Joseph to date, commissioned for the chapel of the Catholic Information Center in D.C. (Aside from the refreshingly masculine portrayal of St. Joseph -- not a lily to be found! -- I just love the sight of the Christ Child in a football hold.)

Meditations from Holy Saturday

I had meant to write about this earlier -- in fact, I had, and then I deleted it. I'm still struggling with how much to say here, whether these ramblings about my life right now are of any interest to anyone or just a form of spiritual navel-gazing, but I've decided to see it as a tracking of the movement of grace and a personal reminder to myself of what my focus should be. If it's of no interest to anyone else, to me it deserves noting and meditating on. (And, finally, it's my blog. Deal with it.)

I had mentioned before that I thought Holy Saturday would be a significant day for me, and it was. I went to St. Matthew's Cathedral for confession that morning, and as I sat in the pew in front of the open, empty tabernacle and looked around at the statues hidden by heavy purple cloth, I suddenly felt completely relaxed and at home: "This fits. This is right for me." It's hard to explain that in a way that doesn't seem morbid, but the fact was that, at that specific point in the liturgical year, everything was congruent with my spiritual life. It felt utterly peaceful to think about Jesus in the tomb -- knowing with certainty that the Resurrection was coming, but for now, "God is asleep", as it says in the Office of Readings for the day.

I was finally able to meet for spiritual direction with Father Donahue this afternoon, and he encouraged me to stay there. "I think it's true that our lives reflect different aspects of Our Lord's life," he said. "You've been given the chance to go down into the deep end -- into the darkness, but into the heart of the Redemption." We talked about St. John of the Cross and his explanation of why God will sometimes remove all sense of His presence from a soul and all of the person's powers of thought and imagination in prayer. "It's to get rid of the notion that we have any power at all to come to God ourselves. It has to be all Him." His advice: stay there in the peaceful, dark quiet and let God do all the work.

One last thought from Father that I'm hanging onto: "I'm willing to bet that you'll finish your degree. Whatever you're dealing with physically right now, I predict it's not going to stop you. If you have to do therapy from a wheelchair, you could do that. But whatever you're going through now is going to mold you into an amazing psychologist." I can hear this from a man who walks with the aid of two canes, who is in pain every day, and whose schedule is so busy it takes a month to get in to see him.

****

Some meditations from the day:

"Exploration into God is exploration into darkness, into the heart of darkness. Yes, to be sure, God is light. He is the light by which all light is light. In the words of the Psalm, “In your light we see light.” Yet great mystics of the Christian tradition speak of the darkness in which the light is known, a darkness inextricably connected to the cross. At the heart of darkness the hope of the world is dying on a cross, and the longest stride of soul is to see in this a strange glory. In John’s Gospel, the cross is the bridge from the first Passover on the way out of Egypt to the new Passover into glory. In his first chapter he writes, “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” The cross is not the eclipse of that glory but its shining forth, its epiphany. In John’s account, the death of Jesus is placed on the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, precisely the time when the Passover lambs were offered up in the temple in Jerusalem.

[...]

Here on Calvary’s hill, all is fulfilled. It is the glory of Jesus’ cry, “it is finished.” The cross is the moment of passover from the old covenant to the new. Weeping at the cross, Mary is both the mother of sorrows and the mother of hope. The resurrection glory is discerned in the way that Christ dies. Now the reason for the whole drama becomes clear in the Son’s unqualified obedience to the Father, even to death, and the Father’s promise to glorify the Son. John says nothing about the risen Christ appearing to his mother. The other disciples discovered the resurrection glory at the dawn of the third day. Mary had already discovered the glory in the cross. There she took “the longest stride of soul.”

“In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” declared the nineteenth-century hymn writer John Bowring. It seems a strange, even bizarre, glory. “We have beheld his glory,” St. John wrote, meaning that he was there, with Mary, beholding the final and perfect sacrifice. In the churches of Asia Minor that were founded by John, Easter was celebrated not on Sunday, as with the other churches, but on 14 Nisan, the anniversary of Christ’s death. This was his “hour” of glory. The resurrection ratified and reinforced what was already displayed on the cross. When John, therefore, places Mary at the cross, he is placing her at the very center of salvation. She was there, with him, beholding a glory different from, even the opposite of, everything ordinarily meant by glory. It was God’s glory, which is love.

This is the light in which we are to understand those exultant passages in I John. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.” (Mary and I, we saw it!) John continues: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” “So we know and believe the love God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

In the cross we see that of which humanity is capable: self-transcendence in surrender to the Other. All the evidence to the contrary, we are capable of love."

Father Richard John Neuhaus
--from Death on a Friday Afternoon

"Lord, when clouds gather on the horizon and everything seems lost, when we find no friend to stand by us and hope slips from our hands, teach us to trust in you, who will surely come to our rescue. May the experience of inner pain and darkness teach us the great truth that in you nothing is lost, that even our sins – once we have repented of them – come to serve a purpose, like dry wood in the cold of winter."

--Thomas Menamparampil SDB
Via Crucis at the Colosseum
Rome
Good Friday 2009