The difference between listening and pretending to listen,
I
discovered, is enormous.
One is fluid,
the other is rigid;
one is alive, the other is stuffed.
Eventually I found a radical way of thinking
about listening:
real listening is a willingness
to let the other person change
you.
~ Alan Alda in Never Have Your Dog Stuffed
O that warning cry obey!
Now prepare for God a way!
Let the valleys rise to meet him,
And the hills bow down to greet him.
~ from Comfort, Comfort Ye My People
I hesitate to post the words to songs because reading them without having the tune in your head is just not the same experience as humming the tune (inside or outside your head) while you read the words.
And I just love this tune.
Cyberhymnal is a great resource, but there are times when I have a hard time getting over the tin or the reverb sound. Besides, on this one, ahem, they don’t have the “correct” tune, meaning the one I prefer! 
(Which is Freu Dich Sehr with a syncopated rhythm)
I just tried to record the tune on our piano – it sounded disastrous!
I guess y’all are just going to have to trust me. Enjoy the words….
Christmas at King’s College through yourmusic.com: $27.96/free shipping
While we’ve enjoyed special programs of King’s College,
we’ve never had a Christmas CD (let alone four!) of them to enjoy.
This jewel came in the mail while I was on my road trip.
Let the (choral) music soar throughout the rooms!
Cleaning toilets/ironing/making meals with this music is a privilege!
My throat has more lumps than gravy.
If I were a cat, I’d be purring…
What is your most delicious Christmas music?
I’m home after a glorious, perfect-in-it’s-splendidness road trip. A girls road trip! A trip to solidify plans for my friend’s son’s wedding.
Highlights:
• the minute-by-minute variations in the light from inky black to pale blue
• car conversations, the kind that follow rabbit-trails, hither-and-yons, and interruptions
• a lingering lunch with two lovely friends at my favorite restaurant in the world: West of Paris. Between us we savored “An American in Paris” salad, Terrine de canard, and onion soup…succulent and salubrious!
• an afternoon in the personal library of my dreams. My friend’s husband is an author and professor, and his library was just the kind of reading room I’ve envisioned in my home in heaven. Floor to (twelve foot) ceiling shelves, comfy chairs, good lighting, wood floor, framed art, books placed on shelves in such a way that you knew they were read. This was no antiseptic, perfectly-lined-up collection. I had permission to browse and graze to my heart’s content. It was so fun to recognize books I owned, to look at new ones, to dip into curious looking titles, to just Stand. And. Gaze.
• a lingerie shower with a sparkling group of young (and middle) women. One woman thought I looked familiar and started asking questions. After we established the identity of our mutual friends, she asked me “now, do you know the [my brother’s last name]?” Uh, just slightly…
• brimming-with-joy hearts as piece after piece of the rehearsal dinner puzzle fell into place
• listening to a disc of The Omnivore’s Dilemma
• passing through lonely, undulating hills covered with snow, leafless trees covered with snow, scenes from Currier and Ives. The beauty of the stark white-on-white vista was piercing. We just kept holding our index fingers and thumbs in a frame and clicking the air, pointing to the red-tail hawk on the highway sign, to the stand of birches, to the river, to the patchwork fields curving with the topography, to the farmhouse…and clicking on our “air” camera.
• waiting for my friend’s cancer check-up appointment; seeing her face afterwards; hearing the joy in her voice; praising God for his sustaining care over the past several years.
• in the car, again, in the darkness, this time with two gifted young women in the back seat and two old fogies in the front. We sang the last hour before home, beginning with “O Holy Night.” What have we lost when we take our personal DVD players, headphones, books on tape, and CDs on car trips? We have lost the once familiar folk art of singing together; the fulfilling act of making beautiful music in the dark; improved skill while working out harmonies and rounds; the most enjoyable way of memorizing. Singing in the car – worthy of it’s own blog post.
In the first place, I always find it hard to realign my stack to reality.
For instance, look at all the beautiful books which are NOT on my list!
I didn’t it find it hard to get a stack of books going.
There are some gaps for books to read with my son and my neice.
I have some borrowed books in the picture below
and one lender reads this blog. Uh-oh!
There are the good lenders, the friends who share your taste
and thrust a book into your hand with promises that you will like it.
I’m a book-thruster from way back. It’s one of my vices.
My husband keeps trying to curtail my book-thrusting tendencies.
Because….there are the books which are thrust upon you almost,
umm, against your will. You know what I mean?
“I really want you to read this book,” the well-meaner says.
One of these books fits that category, but I can’t say which one.
But I digress…
I’m reading My Antonia
I’m trying to read Wives and Daughters
The Intellectual Life: I suppose I’m the last one on this bus.
The Lives of A Cell – Poiema wrote so compellingly about this title.
A Natural History of Latin delights me. I must finish it…and return it….yesterday.
If you are new to Magistra, you might not know that
my husband and I are taking a trip to Scotland and England next spring.
Almost every event in life requires a book to read first, agreed?
Come on! How many of us read
What to Expect when we were expecting?
I’ve never traveled over the ocean, so I’m delighted with these books.
“The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history,
like an ancestral portrait.”
~ Anatole Broyard
This month the daily poetry readings are from A Widening Light
I am ga-ga over this book. It has many poems by L’Engle and Shaw, The Nativity by C.S. Lewis (I promise to post it soon) and many other names which may or may not be familiar; I’m highlighting one of the poems in our Christmas letter. This collection will come out again at Eastertide.
Here are the last two stanzas from the opening poem by Myrna Reid Grant:
Transfixed with thanks, folded in love,
I cannot adore enough. I cannot speak.
Like trees and snow and stars and street,
I too am silent in the widening light.
I’m getting excited about a Christmas project we’re doing for our grandson Gavin who is almost three years old. We are buying him children’s books and making CDs of Papa and Nana reading the books. His folks asked us not to give him toys this year (he has so many already); with a mischievous grin said that he liked books. As if books weren’t my favorite gift in the world to give. As if. Curt said, “I get Yellow and Pink
I try to read 50 pages a day. It’s a baseline I’ve decided on, just like trying to drink two quarts of water daily. During these dark winter nights I run into this problem…
The house is all in darkness except for this corner bedroom
where the lighthouse of a table lamp is guiding
my eyes through the narrow channels of print,
and the only movement in the night is the slight
swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing,
and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand.
Is there a more gentle way to go into the night
than to follow an endless rope of sentences
and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page
into the first tentative flicker of a dream,
passing out of the bright precincts of attention
like cigarette smoke passing through a window screen?
All late readers know this sinking feeling of falling
into the liquid of sleep and then rising again
to the call of a voice that you are holding in your hands,
as if pulled from the sea back into a boat
where a discussion is raging on some subject or other,
on Patagonia or Thoroughbreds or the nature of war.
Is there a better method of departure by night
than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,
the sole companion who has come to see you off,
to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?
I can hear the rush and sweep of fallen leaves outside
where the world lies unconscious, and I can feel myself
dissolving, drifting into a story that will never be written,
letting the book slip to the floor where I will find it
in the morning when I surface, wet and streaked with daylight.
It’s Advent and I’m angry annoyed. (Sigh) I’ve been constructing a flaming jeremiad in my mind all weekend. What began as a peculiar oddity – a mild embarrassment -, a massive inflatable Grinch next door, grew with the addition of a huge plastic inflatable Santa across the street, and has now gathered into an avalanche of lawn kitsch. Apparently, bad taste is expanding. The cheap, plastic, lighted inflatables now come in groups: Santa bands (Santa in sunglasses, a penguin drummer, saxophone-playing reindeer, and a polar bear cradling a guitar) and Santa trains are proliferating along the block.
We had a blizzard yesterday. While the wind howled and blew the darling Santa band onto their backs, I stood at the window and prayed imprecatory psalms. This morning the deflated pieces sit in a puddle of plastic waiting for their owners to come home and blow them up. How I have longed to blow them up myself.
I’m trying to “put the best possible construction on the situation,” a phrase I learned in Bible school. My neighbors want to celebrate. They enjoy a good party. It’s just that their plastic Santas are such a cheap imitation. Who wants margarine after you’ve tasted butter? Peter Kreeft (pronounced Krayft – I have to keep reminding myself) reminded me this weekend that evil cannot create, it can only imitate.
looking for a quote and realized that I need to give this book about popular culture a slow and thorough reading.
Meanwhile the best antidote to the very real frustration I experience is humor. I need a way to look out the window and laugh instead of grimace. It’s just plastic, for Pete’s sake! I need to turn the music up, keep the good smells wafting, read through my collection of Advent poems, and remember it’s a season of joy.
If I can laugh at this video, thanks KGB, which slaughters a great hymn in a number of ways, I surely can laugh at the Santa Band. (Why would anyone pair Christ the Lord Is Risen Today with Amore? That is beyond the beyonds.) Any other suggestions? *A great post by Nancy Wilson relevant to the subject*
† † †
We listened to an excellent lecture by Peter Kreeft
which BTW is pronounced “Krayft”:
10 Uncommon Insights into Evil from Lord of the Rings.
A friend sent this to us in May and unfortunately it got buried in my inbox.
After I began it, I realized that we all needed to listen together.
This is worthy of your time whether you are a LOTR fan or not.
Cogent, articulate, penetrating, clear, enjoyable.
Caveat: it is 48 minutes long.
Bonus: it is a free download.
Go ahead and listen to a few minutes…
† † †
My grandson Gavin, satisfied in his Opa’s (great-grandpa’s) lap.
Gavin is a joy-bringer, a smile-maker, a contentment-holder.
Gavin is great at
…spontaneous vocalizing
…making silly faces by raising eyebrows contorting his mouth
… standing outside the loo and conversing with the occupant
…loving babies (he takes after his daddy)
***Dover Books has another sale. All titles are 25% off
through Monday, December 3rd with $40 order.
Coupon Code: CZ25
~ Song of Mary
We are learning to sing the Magnificat set to Thomas Tallis’ Dorian Service. It is so foreign to our ears, so difficult to get the right notes even remotely at the right time. It will be beautiful when we are on the far side of the learning curve.
I chose this study because the pencil strokes and homely stained paper capture some of the mystery in what is one of the most mysterious, astonishing, mind-boggling events in history.
A Living Pencil 