words written and sung

Occasionally, Fr. Jonathan Tobias reminds the rest of us writers that our words are but mortal, but his, dear reader, well...

Here he writes of his words to a group of mourners preparing for a first Nativity of that dreadful lack:

There is no terror from the spirits, and the bitterness is sweet. Incompetent hands, now, brandish the carving knife and cannot make the gravy in the roasting pan. The laughter, too, is shy, experimental. And the trials lead, like drama, into reminiscence and story, narrating the old lesson of time: first there is fellowship, then there is remembrance, and the memory grows like an oak out of an acorn’s dream, and the eternal memory of God is sung through the soft murmur at the Table.

Read the whole post. As one of many who reads Auden's For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio each Nativity, Fr. Jonathan's words help to frame a right posture in preparation for a personal ritual which accompanies the Feast, in the sense that they are a first antiphon to that yearly reading. Knowing that he is a reader of Auden leads me to think that he would allow for the antiphonal relationship of such varying textures of tragedy and hope and holy waiting and the remembering that is a human life.

On another note, my dear wife told me this week that for her to love a cd as much as she loves An American Christmas by The Boston Camerata, is simply irrational. We have a few cds we listen to each Nativity fast and feast seasons, and this is one of them. 18th and 19th Century American Christmas music. Shape note, including some Sacred Harp, and other things. It is catching. Quite popular for an ochlophobist to listen to, but sometimes, by accident, such things sell well. It makes for merry sounds in the home, and anyone who disagrees with my wife, a woman who has so few strong opinions, each a careful one, is almost certainly wrong, even if she deems said opinion irrational.