The Hammock Papers: sacred

Showing posts with label sacred. Show all posts

28 August 2022

Covenant.

Jense-Klint, Grundtvig's Church, 1926

If I am right, then enjoying music involves a kind of outward-going sympathetic movement. In music, as in sex and architecture, the relation between subjects can be uprooted and replaced by an arrangement of objects. And in a hundred ways the result of this is a culture of idolatry, in which freedom and personality are obliterated by intrusive images, clamoring for an addictive response. There is every reason to see this result as a “fall,” and the great story told in Genesis reaches forward to incorporate these new and troubling facts. The Fall did not occur at a particular moment in time; it is a permanent feature of the human condition. We stand poised between freedom and mechanism, subject and object, end and means, beauty and ugliness, sanctity and desecration. And all those distinctions derive from the same ultimate fact, which is that we can live in openness to others, accounting for our actions and demanding an account from them, or alternatively close ourselves off from others, learn to look on them as objects, so as to retreat from the order of the covenant to the order of nature.

Sir Roger Scruton, from The Soul of the World

01 August 2022

Reclaiming.

31 July 2022

Ceremony.

Under what circumstances do we eat -- that is, what, if any ceremony prevails? Is it sitting or standing, walking down the street, in the car while driving? While watching television? At a meal with others, and if so, is it stressful or enjoyable? Is there a meal prayer? The saying of grace? Do we offer thanks, gratitude, blessings? Or is eating merely an opportunity to fill up the tank as quickly as possible so as to get on with the day? Or perhaps it's an opportunity for numbing, dispelling the gnawing inside? Ceremony or ritual can structure our awareness to be awake and aware, to be alert, knowing that without our conscious focus, we could find ourselves prone to disorder, to being swept away. Having ceremony can mean having a place at the table, and feeling welcome there can be an immense gift.

Lacking any formal or traditional ceremony, we often generate our own unconscious habits, such as eating while driving or in front of the television. And often these habits fall short of providing the well being that the greater structure of more traditional ceremony provides. Our default behavior gets us through without necessarily nourishing the body, mind, and spirit. What's nourishing about ceremony is not just the food, but our kind, caring, respectful awareness attuned to the activities that give life to life.

Thirty years ago the Wall Street Journal reported that "even canned corn stumps modern cooks." The article described how one company took the directions off their canned corn but then got so many complaints that they put the directions back: "Put the corn in a saucepan on heated burner." One friend queried me further: Do you drain the corn or not? A companion article discussed how people will pay not to cook -- that is, to have the same raw ingredients already prepared for you. The conclusion was that people would pay three to five times as much. By now it's probably a great deal more.

Ceremony? Put the food in the oven or microwave and listen for the timer to go off. Again, it's ceremony on the fly that does not provide the opportunity to learn how to stabilize and focus our awareness on relating with the material world; instead we fall prey to expediency.

Edward Espe Brown, from No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice

27 May 2021

Believe.

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men; - I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art, is consecrate to Her for ever, and never can deny Her; - I believe that through Art all men are saved.

Richard Wagner

30 July 2018

Sacred.

Roger Scruton and Hamza Yusuf discuss sacred truths ...

22 April 2018

Victoria.

Simon Russell Beale continues his Sacred Music journey in this special celebration marking the 400th anniversary of the death of the great Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria. In exploring the extraordinary world of this intensely spiritual man - musician, priest and mystic - Simon's travels take him to some of Spain's most stunning locations, from the ancient fortified city of Avila, with its medieval walls and glorious cathedral, to the magnificent El Escorial palace, where Philip II would listen to Victoria's music though a small door leading off his bedroom directly to the high altar of the Basilica.

In Madrid, Simon explores the dramatic religious paintings of Victoria's contemporary El Greco in the Prado Museum and visits the convent of Las Descalzas Reales, named after the barefoot nuns who worshipped there and where Victoria spent the final three decades of his life as choirmaster and organist.

The music is specially performed by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen in the church of San Antonio de los Alemanes, a hidden baroque jewel built in Victoria's lifetime in the heart of Madrid.

22 May 2017

Happy birthday, Wagner.

Richard Wagner was born on this day in 1813.

If we are to make sense of the great Wagnerian dramas, we must understand the currency in which they trade -- the currency of the sacred.

Roger Scruton

Claudio Abbado leads the Orchestra of the Festival of Lucerne, performing the Overture to Lohengrin ...

24 February 2017

Gratitude.

30 December 2016

Face.

Hall, Gibbon Meadow, Yellowstone, undated

The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL