stood up

When I was in college, occasionally instructors were late for class, and students were required to wait a certain length of time for them to show up, depending upon their status. If he (or she) were a professor, it was ten minutes. If a doctor, then twenty.

We waited fifteen this morning for our celebrant, who never did arrive. My guess is he forgot... there's a lot of that going around, especially here at our convent. But on Sunday, and on this, the first Sunday after Christmas, it was a bigger deal than usual. Our sister in charge of music had to forego all of the Christmas hymns she had planned, as we scrambled to make do with a modified "deacon's" mass. However, a couple of us had specifically requested a certain hymn, so after communion we all opened our books to 112... In the Bleak Midwinter... that haunting poem by Christina Rossetti. 

At breakfast I was saying that there are actually two versions, although only one appears in the hymnbook. Except I couldn't get the tune we'd just been singing out of my head. So I searched on YouTube. Most everyone sings the Hymnbook version, but I found a couple of the other one I remembered. Here you go...

How do you measure a year?

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear...
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure... measure a year?

Happy Anniversary to Me :)

fifteen seconds of fame

Yes, I know I didn't tell a soul what we were doing. (It was a secret sort of) But yesterday we helped celebrate Whoopie Goldberg's birthday on the TV show The View.

You do remember the movie Sister Act?!?

They were nice enough to send us a picture. Here we are:

If you want to see the show here's the link. We're in segments 2 and 5.

a night to remember

My best friend took me to a concert tonight.

You aren't going to believe it... I sat in the 7th row in the Allen Room at the (relatively) new Jazz at Lincoln Center facility... soaking up the sounds of k.d. lang. It was the final night of her Lincoln Center debut as she promotes her new album Watershed. She sang every one of my favorites... Helpless by Neil Young, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and (what else?) her best seller from the 90's Constant Craving.

She of course premiered songs from the new album and in general brought down the house. You can read about it here. I could say eat your heart out, but that would be rude. I cannot tell you how nice it is to have friends in high places. I am a very blessed girl.

Here's a You Tube sample of the amazing lady (again)

The Dark Night of the Soul

Okay, I know this is a major cop out as blogging goes... but we are still all sickly here. We have an array of symptoms that range from the common cold to the flu to bronchitis. (Not a pretty sight.)

The other day I posted a song by Loreena McKennitt from her album Book of Secrets, and I also found this one from the writings of John of the Cross, called Dark Night of the Soul, from her album Mask and Mirror:

selective memory

I think unless you have a photographic memory or enhanced auditory memory (where you can repeat entire conversations verbatim) that your memory would have to be selective. I have no clue how much RAM my brain contains, but the older I get the more data I lose. Now, only when something triggers an old memory can I call it up.

This happened just recently. Out of the blue I received an email from someone I knew a long time ago. I hadn't exactly forgotten him, but I certainly don't dwell on his memory every day. Woosh! Suddenly I remembered all kinds of things... how well he played guitar, how he sounded a lot like Neil Young when he sang, how he carefully wrote out the lyrics for me to a song I'd never heard before. I remember his little sports car that needed to be hard-wired to get it started, the long letters he wrote me, the return address on those letters, and a dozen more personal, intimate things about him I don't need to go into. (Sorry... some things are just none of your business.)

The point is this. I had not thought about him in ages. Now I can't stop. In addition to all the little specific details... I wonder what happened to him over all these lost years, and I guess I wonder why I wonder. He and I were a flash in the pan as relationships go... we weren't in love, but we were close as empty-hearted people sometimes find each other and become close. For a brief period in time we connected and buoyed each other up. It didn't work out and we both moved on.

So why does my heart ache now?

Here's something I found (I guess you have figured out that You Tube is my new favorite online toy) to enhance all those misty watercolor memories:

Dante's Prayer

I posted a few days ago about my trip to Ireland in 1998. A friend asked to see the composites I had made in the depths of my despair... over a multitude of things... living here and not there, suffering the inattentions of a boyfriend with no clue, unemployment with no job looming on the horizon, and in general, the post-mountain-top-experience blahs.

I played Loreena McKennitt's Book of Secrets over and over (continuous loop) until I knew every word of every song on that album... but whenever Dante's Prayer would cycle through, I'd stop whatever I was doing on the computer and sing along:

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me...

So... for what it's worth, here are five of the original six composites (one got lost a few years ago)






I also found a You Tube video of the song if you're interested. What this song has to do with Legolas Greenleaf or Orlando Bloom is beyond me, but it was the only decent one I could find:

Transcendence, Darkness, Self-Indulgence

I visit a number of blogs on a regular (if not daily) basis, and came across a post by Melissa with a You Tube video of Jeff Buckley singing "Hallelujah." As a result, I researched the song; original words by Leonard Cohen (changed slightly by everyone else who's ever recorded it).

I listened to it about a million times... all the variations I could find on You Tube. The most haunting was a version by K. D. Lang. Jeff Buckley got my vote as the closest runner-up for most moving rendition.

Music can (and will) open me to the transcendent. I'd forgotten that somehow in the busy-ness of being quiet.

We keep a good deal of silence in our house most of the time anyway, but during Lent it intensifies. This silence is something I had to learn to love, but now take for granted. I put away the few CDs I brought to the community; they became distracting. But having wallowed in this particular song yesterday, I realize how much I've missed by eliminating this particular path to transcendence.

The other interesting piece of all this is we give up Alleluias for Lent. It's a liturgical practice of the church, not just our community. During Lent, the words of the mass: "Alleluia, Christ our passover has been sacrificed for us..." begin simply with "Christ our passover..." It gives a starkness and clarity to the worship. It also requires us to actually pay attention to what we're saying. (So easy to go on autopilot when the words are familiar.) So... having given up Alleluias, why was I so compelled to immerse myself in a song that has thirty-four Hallelujahs?

One easy answer: This song speaks to the brokenness of all our attempts to relate to God.

Lent, even though we're essentially still in the first few days, is a time for examining darkness from all the angles. It's so seductive to believe that we have it made simply because we understand God through the lens of Jesus Christ. No more need to ask questions, to grapple with injustice, to come to terms with what we've done (and keep doing) to His creation.

In my Lenten Meditation book there's a Lenten Action suggestion for each day. Yesterday's said to give up "just one self-indulgence for the day". Not such a bad idea, to ease into it. (You have to start somewhere.) But self-indulgence comes in many shapes and sizes. What if believing we're one of the 99 good sheep is a self-indulgence? What if... the cold and broken hallelujahs are actually the only ones that matter to God?

Frozen Grand Central

Only in New York