Kivrin

I wanted to post an Advent mix last night, but I got bogged down in looking for a good recording of one piece in particular. Turns out that if you listen repeatedly to a dozen 30-second samples of "Creator of the Stars of Night," not only do they all start to sound the same, they all start to sound like CRAP. It doesn't help that I best know CotSoN as an anthem for three voices with alleluias between each verse, and so I feel frustrated with recordings that do it in austere plainchant style. Even though that's most traditional.

Tell me (if you're so inclined) your favorite pre-Christmas music!

( what I wrote about St. Mark's when I went the first summer I lived in Philadelphia )

***

Today
Last night I went to evening prayer at St. Mark's again. I was the only person there, aside from the lay officiant who was leading, which was nerve-wracking until I'd bobbled a few times and realized he wasn't going to be annoyed, but would just prompt me and keep going. I don't know if he fluffed the Magnificat because I rattled him or simply to make me feel better, but we grinned at each other across the chancel, backed up and started again. I'm still not best pleased with the pace they seem to favor taking things, because it feels like the very worst evangelical nightmare of liturgy when people start muttering "hailmaryfullofgracethelordiswiththee" as if the subtext is "I say these words not because they have any inherent meaning but because the repetition has some kind of magical effect... A-men." When I had a handle on things, though, it was lovely, our two voices in the dim vaulted church.

I'd like to say, for the record, that I was already deeply ambivalent and rather apprehensive about the forthcoming Narnia movie before I discovered that the firm that came up with the creepy, church-conscripting, journal-spamming, "spontaneous" word-of-email marketing for Mel Gibson's painfest filmic thing will be handling the publicity for what they're calling "[The Other Film] for kids".

*puts head down on desk*

Some of my anxiety is purely aesthetic. A satisfying Narnia film would be difficult to achieve, and I don't in the least trust Disney to produce one. I fear something like the first Harry Potter movie - a movie that's been crammed with episodes from the book without regard to pacing or overall story.

Visually, I think Narnia would be harder to render than Middle Earth, because the source doesn't have the same depth of detail to the description. In Peter Jackson's LOTR films, even if something isn't rendered as you pictured it, you can often still understand how it might be like that. (That's also the case with some of the storytelling choices. Not all, but some.) My Cair Paravel and your Cair Paravel, however, are probably much further apart than your Hobbiton and my Hobbiton.

(I'll just interject here that for years I pictured Turkish delight as looking like fried chicken. I don't know why; I didn't even like fried chicken. Still don't.)

So, even among people who like TLTWATW on any level whatsover, there's vast potential for disappointment. And everyone who's ever felt offended by, attacked by, or just plain annoyed with Lewis is going to feel rubbed raw all over again. And the evangimental salesfolk are going to go into overdrive about the Tremendous Sales Sharing Opportunity!! And I am not at all looking forward to hearing the rants or reading the paeans.

I go to a Methodist church that's part of something called the Reconciling Ministries Network. That's modern Methodese for "being gay-positive and also interested in fostering diversity within the church and social justice everywhere." It's a big mandate, but my little church makes a strong effort, no thanks (so far) to me on the second half. (I do my merry lesbian best on the first part.) This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the congregation formally identifying itself as "Reconciling," and to that end there've been some special services, and a one-man show about one man's journey through ex-gay-dom to ex-ex-gay-dom. (I really wanted to see that, but I was out of town - no, not in Russia, in Albany. It was for work. There... well, maybe I'll write a post about that later. Anyway.) This past Sunday was the Official Twentieth Anniversary Service, with a guest pastor giving the sermon and a potluck lunch afterwards.

The sermon made me more uncomfortable than any sermon I have witnessed live since I went to church with Denise sometime in 2002 and heard a lot of gratuitous and ignorant statements about the Koh-Ran and the Tally-Ban. It was a combination of the I'm-So-Good/Poor-Me!Sermon, the This-Is-The-Way(but-I-have-no-reason-why)!Sermon, and the Get-A-Load-Of-The-Sinners-Over-Yonder!Sermon (which I'd been fortunate enough to never encounter, in the wild, in such a pure form.) Not at all what I expected in a service about reconciliation, from a speaker the regular pastor (a less neurotic but still sympathetic version of Anne Lamott) introduced as a great friend and like-minded person.

The sermon boiled down to "I'm Soooo Good because I don't even think of myself as a liberal for believing that gay people can and should participate fully in the life of the church! You and I see the beauty of a kiss, because we're not like the fundamentalists, who are evil evil evil and wrong wrong wrong! I'm not going to offer any elaboration on or explanation of that, but just assert it! Because GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!"

God is on our side.

That's a direct quotation.

God. Is. On. Our. Side.

No matter who says that, or in what context, it's going to make me want to head for the hills. ( Read more... )

I was reading in Salon the other day (here, in fact) about how Mel "The Pope is Too Liberal" Gibson and whoever is crazy enough to distribute his [sadomasochistic masturbatory fantasty] *ahem* religious film have enlisted the evangelical megachurches to do... well, things like comment-spamming ljs with 'hey i liek ur site. check 0ut this Passion of the Christ movie! [link]!" It doesn't actually say anything about livejournal in the article, but I've heard tell.

My big question is how Mel got the Bible Belt on board since one of the more serious irritating things common among evangelical Protestant sects is an irrational anti-Catholicism. Even in the church I used to attend, where senior members issued invitations from the pulpit to join a group that's dressing up to go see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, this sort of Catholics-are-bad came up - so I don't know where he found enough folks to sign on. PARTICULARLY since the ickier, bloodier bits of the film are apparently drawn not from the scriptural accounts, but from the visions of a medieval saint. And a lot of non-liturgical Protestants, even the apathetic ones that I grew up going to church with, get hives about saints. You should have heard the scene at coffee hour when the Minister of Education dared to tell the kids at the children's moment about All Saints Day.

Oh! And another thing - if Mel's all pre-Vatican-II, what's he doing playing nice with the Protestants? Pre-Second Vatican Council, it was a sin for a Catholic to enter a Protestant church.

I'm remembering that the Thompson sisters sing the last verse of 'Amazing Grace' with "sing life's praise" instead of "sing God's praise" and it is irking me, though it's hypocritical of me to be irked. After all, when I sing along to 'Gentle Arms of Eden' I always sing "rock me, Mother" instead of "rock me, Goddess." And if by some bizzare chain of events I came to ever sing that song in public, I would probably still sing it with "mother," and so how can I be cranky about the Thompsons doing the same to a much older song that exists in many, many forms?

I sing "rock me, Mother" because... well. 'Gentle Arms of Eden,' like everything Dave Carter wrote, comes from a place of such truth, as I once said to breadandroses. It's rare for me to sing along with any of his songs and not feel them - mean them - pray them. And I... to address a prayer to Goddess, or a goddess, is... for me it's not helpful. My god is the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God who was made human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and that God is neither male nor female but having aspects of both. In my thoughts, in my prayers, 'God' is not a gendered term any more than 'author' is a gendered term, and for me to say 'Goddess' feels as divisive, belittling, and silly as saying 'authoress' or 'poetess' or 'deaconess' or any other cutesy Victorian man-as-default terms.

To say 'Mother,' though, is to contemplate an aspect of God, an aspect of my relationship with my God. It's not a mode of address that I use often, but it's one that I'm comfortable with, one that feels true for me in a way 'Goddess' doesn't.