L is for Lent

Every time Jesus mentioned the equivalent of a church tradition, the Torah, he qualified it with something like this: “The scriptures say thus and so, but I say…”

christianLeftI realize it’s rather late in the season of Lent. But I’m endlessly fascinated with it. Much of my favorite music is associated with the season.

Why DO we give up something for Lent?

Today we know Lent as a season of conversion: we acknowledge the ways we have turned away from God in our lives and we focus on turning our hearts and minds back toward God.

A piece someone wrote recently – I no longer remember who – has stayed with me:

I have a question for my friends who are giving up something for Lent: chocolate, Facebook, etc. I used to give up sweets etc. too. It just occurred to me, though, that instead of “giving up” something, if we all did MORE random acts of kindness (being extra kind or extra considerate, holding doors, letting people pull ahead of us, etc.), the world would be really great for those 40 days.

And who knows, maybe it would continue beyond that. And I think God would like that a whole lot more. I know the reasoning is to deprive ourselves. What if we deprived ourselves of being selfish or snippy or judgmental? Just a thought. I’m going to go eat chocolate now.

My church has expanded the season to Lentecost, from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost, to agree to take on service activities, such as our Author/Illustrator Day in April with a local school, the home repair & rebuilding program, and the FOCUS Breakfast Program, among several choices. Here is the FOCUS Churches Lenten reflections, created by forty men and women from the community of partner congregations, of which my church is one; I’m sure it’ll still apply AFTER Easter as well.

The religion page in the Huffington Post features a good read, WWJD: What Would Jesus Do? Do You Really Want to Know? It begins:

Once upon a time, a mother made her son a wristband. On it was written: WWJD? This, of course stood for: “What Would Jesus Do?” She instructed her son to look at the wristband before making decisions on how to live his Christian life.

A week later she was shocked to see that her son had become friends with prostitutes, was hanging out with ‘sinners’ — even buying people who were already drunk yet another round of beers!

I was also taken by a piece in Salon. Despite its probably polarizing title, Why conservative Christians would have hated Jesus, and some finger-wagging narrative, it did have some points that I could buy into:

Every time Jesus mentioned the equivalent of a church tradition, the Torah, he qualified it with something like this: “The scriptures say thus and so, but I say…” Jesus undermined the scriptures and religious tradition in favor of empathy. Every time Jesus undermined the scriptures (Jewish “church tradition”) it was to err on the side of co-suffering love… Every time Pope Francis sides with those the Church casts out he is closer to Jesus…

Perhaps what we need to give up is some of our rigidity about what God looks like.
***
Why I’m Coming Out as a Christian. “I’m not scared that non-believers will make me feel like an outcast. I’m scared that Christians will.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 16

If I wrote “I can’t breathe,” you’d probably misunderstand

Amy Biancolli will talk about “Living and writing in Smalbany: A love story” on April 25 at 1:30 at the Washington Avenue Branch of the Albany Public Library.

respiratorysystemI’ve been feeling crummy all week. It’s probably bronchial.

Missed church Sunday. In fact, I never even got out of my pajamas.

Muddled through work on Monday and Tuesday. But Tuesday night, the sound of my own coughing and wheezing, plus a sore throat, kept me awake most of the night.

By Wednesday, my condition was too aggravating, not to mention exhausting. I went to see my doctor, who gave me DRUGS. Sorry, pharmaceuticals, including one that helped me to sleep for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon, and gave me a decent sleep on Wednesday night. Sleep is GOOD.

Thursday morning, I had an irritating coughing jag. Take more medicine; good thing I take the bus to work, because operating heavy machinery is off the table. It’d be nice to finally pull out the bicycle from storage, but I’d likely be pulled over for riding while impaired, and rightly so.

Hand-eye coordination is iffy. The talking to self is up, way up, just to remind me to turn off the burners on the stove or put the milk back in the fridge. I managed to knock nearly a whole cup of ginger ale onto my computer keyboard.

If I haven’t visited your blog yet this week, especially the ABC Wednesday folks, I will, eventually. I left a lengthy comment on this interesting post by Arthur, which I obviously failed to submit properly, and I’m presently too tired to rewrite it.

I haven’t worked on that poster for the Friends of the Albany Public Library for that talk by Amy Biancolli, “Living and writing in Smalbany: A love story” on Saturday, April 25 at 1:30 at the Main Washington Avenue Branch of the Albany Public Library. That’s preceded by a luncheon at noon for $20 at the University Club. Hey, I’ll get to it.

The worst part of this condition is that it’s Lent when we often perform my favorite music, but I am unable to sing. I try, but I hear myself go flat. Which I suppose is better than NOT hearing myself go flat.

The only post I wrote all week wasn’t even for this blog. It was about a girl I know who had her wheelchair stolen; a fundraiser generated the $5000 to get it replaced.

Finally, something I found interesting about Dick Nixon at fivethirtyeight.com: Let’s Be Serious About Ted Cruz From The Start: He’s Too Extreme And Too Disliked To Win. That Ted Cruz who failed to protect his name domain.

A chart there, which I’ve copied here, shows that Nixon was a flaming liberal compared with the bulk of Republicans who’ve run for President in the past 40 years. Make of that what you will.
conservative-datalab-cruz-1

Lenten music Friday: Barber Adagio

Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” would be played at the state funerals of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Samuel_Barber Thomas Larson called Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” “the saddest music ever written,” and he may be right.

NPR describes the premiere performance on 5 November 1938 with conductor Arturo Toscanini leading the NBC Symphony Orchestra, broadcast to millions of radio listeners.

From This Day in History:

Adagio for Strings had begun not as a freestanding piece, but as one movement of Barber’s 1936 String Quartet No. 1, Opus 11. When that movement provoked a mid-composition standing ovation at its premiere performance, Barber decided to create the orchestral adaptation that he would soon send to Toscanini.

In later years, the piece would be played at the state funerals of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, taking its place as what one observer has called “the semi-official music of mourning.”

It is an adaptable piece, which has been arranged for solo organ, clarinet choir, woodwind band, and, as Agnus Dei, for chorus with optional organ or piano accompaniment, among others.

9/11 tribute. Leonard Slatkin, conductor. LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL IN ENGLAND – 2001.

September 11: 10th-anniversary memorial concert, Steven Schneider, organist. St. James’ Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA.

The Lydster, Part 132

She gets a thrill when she gets a question right on JEOPARDY!

Lydia.NYCThis is probably true: the Daughter will be taller than her mother, and quite likely, her father. She’s about 5 feet, 4 inches tall, which is about 1.6 meters.

She is generous of spirit, contributing her money to causes, especially those involving dogs and cats.

She relishes being helpful. She teaches me about current music, even as I share with her the Beatles and Motown.

She is quite good in math, instinctively, though the showing of the work, especially with those bar charts, is tedious for both of us.

She LOVES reading, but some of her “compare and contrast” writing assignments suck the joy out of it.

She gets a thrill when she gets a question right on JEOPARDY!, and at least once she got an answer that none of the three contestants could come up with.

She probably watches the news too much, though I was the same at her age. (But the news didn’t seem so grim then: Cold War and racial tension, whereas now it’s terrorism and ethnic tension.)

She went to two funerals this year, one for a person she cared deeply for.

She still likes it when her mother and/or I watch the scary parts of the movies with her, e.g., in Brave, when the mama bear was in peril.

She still loves her papa, and he’ll always love her.

MOVIE REVIEW: Still Alice

“The film Still Alice doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact.”

stillaliceThe Wife and I saw the movie Still Alice the Saturday after Julianne Moore won the Best Actress Oscar.

I didn’t see the other nominees in the category, save for Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything, but she was fine. Great, actually, as linguistics professor Alice Howland, who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

Alec Baldwin plays her husband John, somewhat self-absorbed with his own academic career; Baldwin’s played this type of character before.

Kate Bosworth is the annoying married daughter Anna. The guys playing her brother and her husband were mostly ciphers because they didn’t have that much to do.

The key family relationship is between Alice and her youngest daughter, an aspiring actress named Lydia (good name, that), played by Kirsten Stewart. I had NEVER seen her in any movie. The Twilight series actress was surprisingly not bad, though, as a friend of mine who happened to attend the same showing, she has a tendency to mumble.

Weeks later, I’m still trying to figure out why this movie, based on a book I have not read, felt a bit distant to me. I’m not sure, but here are some observations:

*There’s a scene that is out of focus, save for Alice. I KNOW it was showing her feeling disorientated, but it LOOKED as though perhaps she was going blind, and that was a distraction.

*Perhaps the emotional center was a speech, which came more or less in the middle of the movie, a time I actually teared up.

*The bathroom scene at the summer house was the most painful.

*The scene involving the video of Alice’s younger self almost played as a very dark comedy.

*The family, save for Lydia, seemed so shiny and put together.

This Spectator review says it better than I:

“The film doesn’t so much progress as fade away, leaving only the memory of its central performance intact. Still Alice thus joins a growing band of movies… which seem plucked into existence solely to fatten up a single performance for awards season, while everyone else — the rest of the cast, director, crew — goes on a starvation diet. The people around Alice are sketches.”

My mother had some sort of dementia in the months before she died, and of course, the disease manifests itself in many different ways. She was far older than Alice, not as well educated, not as self-aware. All of that probably colors the movie for me as well.

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