Feeling needed

For the University's trip to Chicago yesterday for a solemn high requiem Mass, I decided to fill my bag with some potentially useful items (for myself and the group at large - roughly 80 people!). I sent 20 chapel veils with the campus ministry employee to hand out as needed, which left me with the following in my bag:

-1 black chapel veil (mine)

- 1 missal

-1 bag of cough drops (lots of colds going around)

- The Privilege of Being a Woman (Alice von Hildebrand): my current spare-time reading (hopefully a post will be forthcoming about this fantastic book)

- The Holy Mass (Dom Prosper Gueranger); the book was given to me over the summer, and I absolutely treasure it. It's a wonderful explanation, succinct but thorough, of the Tridentine Mass. Perfect for study or meditation during Mass itself (though the section on sequences wasn't quite long enough to get me through the Dies Irae last night).

- 1 in-progress scarf (worked on in the car, not in church)

After Mass, the gentlemen in my immediate company wanted to go mingle without their books, so I added to my collection 2 more missals and a Breviary. And no, lest you ask, my bag isn't really that big. It was quite bulging with leather-bound books and I attracted lots of funny looks as I walked through the church. I wish I had taken a picture of it, but you'll notice that a camera was not on my list because my purse-sized camera was forgotten at home last time I was there.

A Little Something For My Christmas List ...

Dear Nina,

This book is dedicated to you because you are my goddaughter and godmothers are made to bring everything that there is about God to their godchildren as far as they are able.

Of course, you know the story of the boyhood of Christ in the Bible, the most beautiful story in the world. I have copied this music and painted these

pictures because they make it come real.

The music is called Gregorian music. It is the true music of the Church. It very nearly got lost and it pretty badly got spoiled and this is the reason why -

If you want to know, it is the reason why everything gets spoiled. It was pride that spoiled it. There came a time in the turning of this funny world when men became pompous (that time is called the Renaissance), when men went back to what the Greeks had done, and the Greeks were worshipers of the body. After that, Church music that you could sing and I could sing, and painting and architecture and all the beautiful things to do with God, lost their spirituality and

became humanistic. That is why a Fra Angelico Blessed Virgin looks to be a Heavenly Soul and the Boy is all pure and kingly, while a Raphael one is just a

good human mother with a good, fat baby boy.

Now the music again. That is why they wove patterns all around the simple music - because they thought it needed to be more grand. It was beautiful music but it all became so complicated that they had to have special singers to sing it and, just like the Raphael Madonnas, it became good, human music and gradually lost its spiritual quality. And it became so difficult that it moved upstairs into the organ loft and that is why you and I just sit downstairs and listen.

Gregorian music is not like the music you know ... It hasn't any chords and the words are very important. They can't be translated because translation makes the words get out of place. This music is like the flight of a bird - on important words, like God or Mary, it will rise and hover in the air a minute as though it were holding its breath - and then come quietly down and slip off peacefully before you know it.

Thus begins the opening letter from Auntie Lauren (Lauren Ford) to her goddaughter, Giannina in the book The Ageless Story. I read about this intriguing book on someone's blog (I'm sorry, but I've lost track of where) and requested it from interlibrary loan. In 1940 this book won a Caldecott Honor Award for it's beautiful illustrations, but it's the combination of the chant and these peaceful paintings that make it such a treasure!

All Souls' Day

Eternal rest, grant unto them, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them. May their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

Patron Saints are coming!

I've already received a few excited emails! The most popular Sodality event, the patron saint drawing for the coming year, will begin on November 15. 2010's patrons are thematically connected to the Year of the Priest.

Image source: World Gallery of Art

For all the saints

As you may have noticed, the Church Ladies are all fans of Our Lady's football team. (I am a convert- I was raised in Ann Arbor.)

If you saw last night's game against Washington State, you heard the commentators say "When is a Hail Mary pass not a Hail Mary? When it's thrown to Golden Tate."

Here you can find everything you wanted to know about Hail Mary passes.

A nice surprise

She looks well to the ways of her household...
[Pv 31, 27]

One of my favorite authors, Tracey McBride, has a website! Actually, three of them: Frugal Luxuries, Frugal Luxuries by the Seasons, and Frugal Luxuries Foods.

Many of you may remember Amy Dacyczn, author of the Tightwad Gazette, as the face of frugality in the early nineties. While she had many good ideas on saving money to reach financial goals through gradual changes, some of her more radical ideas were mocked by the public. I strongly support Amy's work, and think she was just too far ahead of the times. Fifteen years later, I have seen some of her ideas, like Freezer Soup, in mainstream publications like Better Homes & Gardens.

Tracey McBride has a slightly different approach to frugality. She believes in transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, to "live content with small means...to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion."

Here is my favorite of Tracey's ideas for saving money & enhancing your life:
Enhance the Ordinary. Serve even the humblest meals attractively. Bean soup with cornbread looks charming when garnished with parsley and the cornbread served on its own saucer, with a pat or swirl of honey butter. The same holds true for beverages. Our dinner table often features a pretty glass or silver pitcher filled with ice water, and garnished with a few citrus slices.

The Domestic Monastery

Carlo Carretto, one of the leading spiritual writers of the past half-century, lived for more than a dozen years as a hermit in the Sahara desert. Alone, with only the Blessed Sacrament for company milking a goat for his food, and translating the bible into the local Bedouin language, he prayed for long hours by himself. Returning to Italy one day to visit his mother, he came to a startling realization: His mother, who for more than thirty years of her life had been so busy raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private minute for herself, was more contemplative than he was.

A monastery is a place set apart. It's a place to learn the value of powerlessness. It's a place withdrawn from the world. A place in tune with the “monastic bell” calling you to drop whatever you’re doing and immediately respond to it’s summons, thereby helping develop the discipline to look beyond your own schedule to God’s agenda.

The principles in this article can apply to anyone in any vocation, but if you happen to be a young mother who longs for a consistent moment of prayer each day and wonders if you are making any spiritual progress in your hectic stage of life, I especially recommend that you print a copy and leave in your bathroom. Fortunately it's short, and you just may get two private minutes there to read it. :-)

Convent of San Marco Photo Credit: Web Gallery of Art

Onward to victory!

"You never really know what scarlet and crimson really are until you see them in their perfection on an October hillside under the unfathomable blue of an autumn sky. All the glow and radiance and joy at earth's heart seem to have broken loose in a splendid determination to express itself for once before the frost of winter chills her beating pulses. It is the year's carnival before the dull Lenten days of leafless valleys and penitential mists come."

-Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Golden Road