Tuesday 30th November - Music of Eternity Day 3

Day 3; Eternal love brooding over creation

That sounds more ominous than it needs to. Maybe 'brooding' is better thought of as 'watching', or 'mulling over', or even just providing warmth and safety like a hen sitting on her eggs?

For me the real nugget comes at the end, in these paragraphs on prayer, how to respond to this Eternal Love;

In prayer, my soul and God draw near – His fullness to my emptiness. If I realise a little of His Spirit working in my deeps, His action is most directly felt. All my prayer must be penetrated by this sense of my helpless imperfection, quiet abandonment of my formless soul to the Spirit brooding on the waters, bringing order, if I yield to His action. Without God’s grace I’m chaos. With that grace I’m a tiny bit of the Spiritual World being organised for His service. Come! Creator Spirit! Fill with grace the hearts You’ve created. 

So, what matters most in my prayer is not my desires, feelings, asking, efforts – not even my poor little bit of worship: but God, Who calls forth these stirrings of life. God, the Master of the Tides, changing and creating me, bringing, out of my unpromising depths, surprises of His wisdom and love; because my tiny will has made a slight response to His Mighty Will. ‘You have fashioned me behind and before and laid Your hands on me’ (Psalm 139.5). 

Now we turn to souls with whom we’re linked, for whom we must pray. We see them, too, without form, void; they often seem empty of love, trust and adoration; turbulent, uneasy, lacking meaning and loveliness – given over to ceaseless activity; at the mercy of every wind and current; and in their restlessness, so unpromising, so recalcitrant to God. Such easy subjects for our pessimistic indifference, but they too are part of Your raw material. Infinite possibilities are hidden in their deeps. There, too, Your Holy Spirit is brooding with cherishing power, bringing forth unrealised possibilities of life. Keep in my mind Your invisible action and Presence, where it’s most difficult to see – in the callous, greedy, earthly minded, flippant, cocksure; check my arrogance, intolerance, lack of patient, confident love. 

Keep in my mind the boundless possibilities of life, power and beauty hidden in every soul: and Your untiring, loving patience. I’m ignorant of these restless lives surrounding me. You’ve taken the turbulent, unharmonious, sinful, rebellious; and have created Your saints. Teach me to await Your creative action on other souls, and especially in those I’m tempted to dislike or neglect. Teach me reverence for all that unformed human nature on which Your Holy Spirit rests, which You can penetrate, transform, make holy, and in which You did deign to be incarnate, and showed us the Father’s glory.

Tuesday 30th November - The Music of Eternity 2

 

Day 2; Mighty Symphony of the Triune God

And once again there is so much in the Chapter that I've ended up skim-reading, just waiting for the phrase that will 'ping out'...

Or phrases - and here they are;

Right at the beginning;

Welcoming God will involve shifting focus from 'Mine' to 'Ours', for we're all linked as we respond in worship to our Triune God'..... We are drifting towards a religion which consciously or unconsciously keeps its eye on humanity rather than on Deity - which lays all the stress on service, and hardly any of the stress on awe: and that is a type of religion, which in practice does not wear well...in those awful moments when the pain and mystery of life are most deeply felt...It does not lead to sanctity. 

  and later;

We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have and to Do... forgetting that none of these verbs has any ultimate significance, except so far as it's transcended by., and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing is the essence of a spiritual life.

Furthermore;

Dante says that directly a soul ceases to say 'Mine', and says 'Ours', it makes the transition from the narrow, constricted, individual life to the truly free, personal, creative, spiritual life; in which all are linked together in one single response to the Father of all spirit, God. 

At this point I stopped highlighting the text... quite soon the whole chapter would be turning yellow. 

At first sight I might think that I was being asked to simply focus on our awesome God, whose power and capacity to create, save, forgive is constantly rehearsed in the Psalms.

However the emphasis on 'Mine' becoming 'Ours' as a response to this worship speaks of a mirroring of the Three Persons in the Trinity being combined together as 'Ours', not completely separated individuals each with their own 'Mine'.

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image of the Holy Trinity from and Antiphonary

  

 

Monday 29th November - The end of the day!

 At first I couldn't understand why I was feeling so 'done in' by the end of today. Then I thought back...

In the morning I sorted out some books for the charity shop, clearing about three feet of much needed shelf space upstairs in the bedroom. I've easily got that amount of books stacked all over the place downstairs, and it will be a relief to shelve them at last. That took an hour I suppose, by the time I had reorganised the other books as well.

Monday is the day I clean the bathroom. So I did that. 

Downstairs; yesterday we nipped outside just before going to bed to rescue my pelargoniums and cuttings from the garden after seeing how the temperatures were forecast to plunge overnight.

They needed sorting out today; no way could we keep them on the table forever and ever. This house is slowly silting up with stuff from the edges of the room towards the middle.

I snipped cuttings from the pelargoniums but couldn't plant them as the earth was so cold! So I have left them in water upstairs on the back bedroom windowsill, with the pots of earth nearby, and will plant them tomorrow. Everything else has gone into the cold frame in the garden.

I'm working on a picture for the Advent trail round the village which our church is organising. I ws meant to be drawing a wreath.

The day before yesterday I did all the black ink; 

Yesterday I tested how I would manage the sky and the stars, using blue ink and gold marker pens. I also had a go at putting in the other houses, but they went a bit blurry. Today I tried again when the background was properly dry (the church and house nearby)

Today I added the sky and the windows, and also painted the cave in the bottom left, where I shall put a silhouette of a Nativity scene. The pictures have to fit a 45cm square window pane, and be ready by Wednesday. Did I say this was meant to be a wreath? I'm not quite sure what happened there. I checked with the organiser this morning and luckily it doesn't seem to matter that I'm doing something different! 

I found the idea from scouring google - the original has no cave, but Father Christmas in his sleigh against the moon. Too tricky for me!

Then I taught two piano lessons to two tired year 7 children, who both spent from Friday to Sunday involved in swimming galas. They are both very tired and teaching them was quite hard - Next week will be the last lesson and I sincerely hope they will just play easy Christmas carols from now on! 

I shall now cast off the green scarf, even though there is still some yarn left. It is about 5 feet long which will do nicely.

That will do for today, I reckon. I shall do much less tomorrow, for sure!  

Monday 29th November - The Music of Eternity 1

This one of the two Advent books I will be reading between now and Christmas.

The Music of Eternity - Meditations on the writings of Evelyn Underhill, by Robyn Wrigley-Carr. It is the choice of the Advent Facebook group I joined several years ago.    

It is fascinating to see what the other members 'find' in each chapter. I plan to put my 'take-aways' here, if I remember. We don't all post everyday.

The book starts on the first day of Advent, which was Sunday. I hadn't realised this, so already I am one day behind! Never mind, the other book runs from the first to the twenty-fourth of December so I have a day to catch up.

Day 1 - God's Perpetual Coming

There is so much packed into each day's reflection that it is hard to know where to start...

I'm still reeling from this;

'Attention to God is the primary religious act.....If we put His worship last and our needs first, all proportion goes'.

But I have the attention span of a goldfish...

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Sunday 28th November - Pause in Advent 1

 

This year I am ruminating on the subject of Prayer.

Here is George Herbert's poem called 'Prayer (1)', taken from the Poetry Foundation Website

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,

God's breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

As a starting point this provides plenty of choices! At the moment I am wondering what prayer as 'the church's banquet' might mean - choices, who is there, sharing, being fed,

picture from creative commons

Action - I will make a donation to a charity which provides food at Christmas to those who would otherwise go without.

Thursday 25th November - Chit chat, this and that

 My poor little Christmas cactus is making a valiant attempt to flower. I have neglected it all through the Summer, and was on the verge of chucking it out several times. Only laziness on my part saved it.

 I've moved it to the kitchen windowsill where I hope it will have a better chance of survival.

I got my new glasses yesterday. As I had hoped, they are making it easier for me to read the music and teach. They are large and fairly round so the lenses are bigger which all helps. And lookee lookee at the wonderful case they came in! Sparkly! That was a nice surprise.

Several of my piano students have gone severely off the boil as regards practicing. Sometimes it is because they are 'stuck' and become discouraged over a particular piece, sometimes they have too much on at school, especially with Christmas coming on, sometimes they are tired of everything except their phones and computer games.

Strategy Number 1; 'as soon as you have done three practices, sent me a text or email and I will post you a postcard.' She has chosen this one, and I have set it aside for her. 

Strategy 2; for a very competitive student 'We can do a practice challenge together; we will each do scales, sight reading, a new easy piece and and get on with learning a 'proper piece' each day'. Oh, hang on, that means I've got to start practicing every day too. Here's my chart (I only started on Tuesday).  

Strategy 3; 'Just do a tiny amount every time you practice - one bar of your Bach, and as soon as you've played it twice you can move on, and the next phrase of the other pieces, left or right hand, and any scale you like played twice, and a Christmas Carol from your easy-peasy book. Then you are done'.

Let's see where that gets us.

The secret is in the word 'play' - as in 'playing' the piano. Now, do you suppose it would help if I called it 'houseplay' instead of 'housework' and had a star chart?

(probably not!)