The Imperials Live 1984--Bread Upon the Water

This is old, old Christian rock the way it should be. Rich, my friend, since you've posted some Christian rock at your site, this one's for you. Eldest Daughter found this performance for me on-line and included the audio track on my oldies Christmas present CD. It's a faster tempo than the studio version I already have, and of course the improvisation on the electric guitar is going to be different every time. Good old Armand Morales with his bass voice, beloved of all old Imperials fans.

Dig those haircuts! What were we thinking to wear our hair like that? I, of course, being a girl, never wore my hair like that. Enjoy. But don't bother listening if you hate old Christian country-rock.

Christmas presents and miscellaneous notes

I got an unexpected present yesterday. Eldest Daughter made me a CD with some oldies (by which she means, songs from the 1980's) on it. No playlist, which actually made it better, as every song is a surprise. She included "I Will Be Here," which I knew but didn't have on a CD. Just in case you aren't familiar with it, here it is.



A relative also sent us this CD, which I highly recommend. It's mostly settings of scripture and Psalms to music by Ortega himself with several wonderful hymn settings. I'm usually hidebound about new tunes to old hymns, and some of the hymns on this (like "All Creatures of Our God and King") are sung to their old tunes, but Ortega's new ones are beautiful as well.

It was a wonderful Christmas, very quiet, except when we were playing Mannheim Steamroller or Go Fish. (Go Fish has a great version of "White Christmas," but they should ditch the semi-rap version of "Little Drummer Boy"!) Faith's new Dover coloring book (from me) was a big hit with her older sisters and me as well. It has must-color pages, so I photocopied a page for all of us. (Ssshhh. Don't tell.) We sat around and colored last evening listening to music. I recommend it--if you have girls. I suppose boys wouldn't do it.

During the course of the day yesterday, probably inspired by Mannheim Steamroller's folk-type music, I got thinking about an instrument I lost about thirty years ago. It was a wonderful little thing. A man came to our high school, invited by our music teacher, and sold them to all the students for twenty dollars apiece. Twenty dollars was enough to pay, especially for my parents, that I shouldn't have lost it, but it was affordable if you tried. He called it a shepherd's pipe. It was the easiest thing to play in the world. When I'd been in grade school, I'd suffered trying to learn the recorder, which was all the rage with music teachers just then. Not only was the recorder hard to play--even for someone like me who can play the piano and read music--but to my ear it didn't sound all that good. The shepherd's pipe was wonderful. Mine was nickel plated and had a high, sweet sound a little like a piccolo. You simply played up the scale by covering the holes successively, and half-steps were played by half-holing. Nothing could be simpler. I left it lying in the ladies' bathroom at an evening school event, in the custom-made case my grandmother had sewn, and I never saw it again. It's bugged me ever since. When I've googled or asked music stores about a shepherd's pipe, I've gotten the proverbial blank stares. (Yes, Google can give you a blank stare.)

But, I've now made up my mind: It's a penny whistle. I don't know how many nickel-plated penny whistles there are out there, or if that's even important, but I'm convinced now that's what it is. Come better weather, when driving is once more simple and easy (along about May, I'm guessing), I'm going to try to find time to go to the big music store around here and ask if they have penny whistles or tin whistles. They're still only about twenty dollars. Could be fun.

Merry Christmas!

Though skeptics try at times, in the service of their own silly parallelisms, to imply that the December 25 date for Christmas is somehow essential to Christianity, most Christians know that this is not true. We don't actually know what time of year Our Lord was born.

But I think that those men who decided--whoever they were--to celebrate it in December were wise. Of course, they didn't foresee the spread of Christianity to the antipodes, where all is topsy-turvy and this time of year is warm, with long, sunny, days. Our brethren Down Under will have to forgive us for celebrating that whole, wonderful, awe-inspiring cultural structure that has grown up around the (probably deliberate) decision to celebrate the Feast of the Nativity at the time of the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the time of darkness and cold.

Many beautiful carols have arisen out of this choice, but one of my favorites is "Lo, How a Rose," and in all of it, my favorite line in the English translation is

She bore to men a Savior, when half-spent was the night.

The allusion here is double. First, the line alludes to the quotation from the apocryphal Book of Wisdom which is used in the introit to the Mass for Christmas:

While all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, Thine almighty Word, O Lord, leaped down from heaven from Thy royal throne.

But the phrase also alludes, probably, to Romans 13:12,

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.

By a happy accident, if it was an accident, of the translation, one can take the statement that the night was half-spent to mean either that the night was half over or that the night was half exhausted.

The time, in our world and in our country, is not bright. We may indeed feel that we are deep in the night, that the night is half-spent, and that our civilization, too, is half-spent, exhausted, its vital force and will to live running out.

The message of Christianity, embodied in the choice of the darkest time of the year for the celebration of the birth of the Light of the World, is that it is at just those times that God acts. Ever since Adam fell mankind has been in darkness. But St. John tells us that the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness was not able to overcome it. Into this, our dark world, God sent His Son, made of a woman, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

Thanks be to God.

Rifqa update

See longer version at W4 here. Short version--good news for now, but the hearings continue, and there is no clear end in sight or vindication of her right to be free of her family short of her 18th birthday.

"Break Forth O Beauteous Heavenly Light"--Glad

I'm Glad to have figured out how to embed this song. It might have been made for the group. I love this song. He is our peace!

Merry Christmas--Straight No Chaser

Enjoy.



I've never known what that song about Africa means--the one they turn into a Christmas song at the end. The SNC Christmas version is a lot better.

Fun, fun link. See also Bill Luse's post with a video of SNC in a Hardees restaurant here.

HT to my Facebook friend George.

And a blessed fourth Sundy in Advent. I hope to be able to write something more serious later this week!

Gaudete Sunday

A blessed third Sunday in Advent to my readers. Today is Rejoice Sunday. There is (at least for me) a small and interesting liturgical puzzle about it, which I wrote about here.

This morning we sang in church "How Bright Appears the Morning Star," another Nicolai-Bach hymn and a great success. I defy anyone to be gloomy while singing "Incarnate God, put forth thy power. Ride on, ride on, great conqueror, till all know thy salvation. Amen, amen. Alleluia, alleluia, praise be given." And so forth.

My readers, especially my Protestant readers unfamiliar with this song, should note that it gives the whole Gospel. The words are great--note especially the second verse. And the line in the third verse (my favorite), "With praise ye sinners fill the sky." Not "with praise ye angels" or "with praise ye people" or anything dull like that. It's the sinners who are to fill the sky with praises to Christ for our redemption. (Reminds me of an old Philips, Craig, and Dean song, "Favorite Song of All," which contains the line, "His favorite song of all is the song of the redeemed."

Here are the words to "Wie Schon Leuchtet Der Morgenstern" (How Bright Appears the Morning Star).

How bright appears the Morning Star,
with mercy beaming from afar;
the host of heaven rejoices;
O righteous Branch, O Jesse's Rod!
Thou Son of Man and Son of God!
We, too, will lift our voices:
Jesus, Jesus!
Holy, holy, yet most lowly, draw thou near us;
great Emmanuel, come and hear us.

Though circled by the hosts on high,
he deigned to cast a pitying eye
upon his helpless creature;
the whole creation's Head and Lord,
by highest seraphim adored,
assumed our very nature;
Jesus, grant us,
through thy merit, to inherit
thy salvation;
hear, O hear our supplication.

Rejoice, ye heavens; thou earth, reply;
with praise, ye sinners, fill the sky,
for this his Incarnation.
Incarnate God, put forth thy power,
ride on, ride on, great Conqueror,
till all know thy salvation.
Amen, amen!
Alleluia, alleluia!
Praise be given
evermore, by earth and heaven.

And as a bonus, here is an organ version. It starts a little slow, but wait--it picks up after the introduction.

Climategate bon mot

Heh. This is good. From a reader at VFR:

I'm pretty sure that there's nothing in my e-mail that would make me look like a member of a self-serving cabal bent on defrauding the global scientific community. But maybe that's just me.

Advent miscellany

Today was Bible Sunday. Here is the great collect:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our
learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and
inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may
embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which
thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Written by Thomas Cranmer, it has that wonderful, Tudor Anglican sound. There is a hint of the rigor of the Puritans in its somberness and plainness, but only a hint. And only Cranmer could give us the justly famous phrase "hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them."

We sang Philipp Nicolai's wonderful hymn "Wake, Awake, for Night is Flying." The tune here is at least accurate though played too fast. If you can get the music, try to introduce it to your church. The Bach harmonizations, with the moving inner parts, are wonderful. It took me a while, but I finally found the translation used in the 1940 hymnal, much better than several other translations I've seen. It seems to me that this song should be sung in churches all over America, not just Anglican churches, and certainly not heretical Episcopalian churches, where they certainly aren't preparing like any virgins wise! But in Baptist, Bible churches, and evangelical churches, in Catholic churches, and in Methodist churches. Come on, let's get moving and get our lamps burning!

1. Wake, awake, for night is flying:
The watchmen on the heights are crying,
Awake, Jerusalem, arise!
Midnight's solemn hour is tolling,
His chariot wheels are nearer rolling,
He comes; prepare, ye virgins wise.
Rise up, with willing feet,
Go forth, the Bridegroom meet:
Alleluia!
Bear through the night your well-trimmed light,
Speed forth to join the marriage rite.

2. Sion hears the watchman singing,
Her heart with deep delight is springing,
She wakes, she rises from her gloom:
Forth her Bridegroom comes, all glorious,
In grace arrayed, by truth victorious;
Her Star is risen, her Light is come!
All hail, Incarnate Lord,
Our crown, and our reward!
Alleluia!
We haste along, in pomp of song,
And gladsome join the marriage throng.

3. Lamb of God, the heavens adore thee,
And men and angels sing before thee,
With harp and cymbal's clearest tone.
By the pearly gates in wonder
We stand, and swell the voice of thunder,
That echoes round thy dazzling throne.
No vision ever brought,
No ear hath ever caught,
Such bliss and joy:
To raise the song, we swell the throng,
To praise thee ages all along.
Amen.

By the way, I was just reading I Thessalonians 4 today. I saw someone say on-line a while ago--I forget if it was a Lutheran or a Catholic--"________s don't believe in the rapture." Well, it sure looks like St. Paul did!

Now, from the heights of Nicolai and Bach it's a little bit of a come-down to this far plainer tune, but the words...! I can never come to this verse without a stiffening of the spine.

But the slow watches of the night not less to God belong,/And for the
everlasting right the silent stars are strong.

Well, okay then, I guess we aren't allowed to despair, right?

Great Climategate cartoon

See Madeleine and Matt Flannegan's blog, here. Heh.

Incidentally, if my readers want to conjecture: What do you think? Will man-caused global warming still be taught to school children as fact thirty years from now?

Confusing new reports about Rifqa's legal situation

Evidently some sort of plan for Rifqa was filed in Ohio court yesterday by FCCS. See here and here. I'm sure Pamela Geller is working to try to get a copy of the actual plan (I hope she is, anyway), but so far, we have only these two news stories to go by, and they present confusing and conflicting information. This is doubtless a result of the fact that newspaper writers can't write clear stories anymore, but that's a complaint for another day.

The Fox news article uses the phrase "when she goes home" but then later says that the plan also envisages the possibility that Rifqa may never go back to live with her parents. So which is it?

The Columbus Dispatch article implies that the kumbaya pow-wow the plan insists on between Rifqa and her parents will occur before a decision is made as to whether she is to be returned to them and as part of the attempt to reunite her with them. Rifqa herself has said that she doesn't want to meet with her parents.

One thing is pretty clear: She is almost certainly going to be forced to have a meeting with them, though the circumstances of that meeting are unclear. The Franklin County social worker who presented the plan has decided that what is needed is greater "understanding" between Rifqa and her parents. The Dispatch article quotes the plan as saying that Rifqa's concern is that her parents don't "understand" her Christianity. Uh, no. She's afraid she'll be killed or dragged back to Sri Lanka and there imprisoned, forced into a marriage, etc. I gather that the plan does later use the word "fear" for Rifqa's feelings. But "understanding" is the word of the day. She and her parents must get together--either before or after she is returned to them--and "hear each other out."

The plan evidently considers relatives with whom Rifqa might live if not returned to her parents. Bad move, of course, as if she has any other relatives (I hadn't heard of any before this) they will just be part of the same Muslim community and could easily be involved in returning her to Sri Lanka or in other plans against her well-being. The plan also asks what other non-relatives she might stay with. But since she is now staying with non-relatives in foster care, what is the point of that? It appears to be to get her off the hands of Franklin County Children's Services.

I haven't read the plan, but I'll bet dollars to donuts it says nothing whatsoever about preventing her from being taken out of the country if she is taken out of foster care. The clueless Dispatch writer says confidently that she will "be on her own" after she turns 18. Not if she's in Sri Lanka! But we're not talking about that, right?

The Dispatch article says that the goal is to reunite her with her parents before her birthday next August 10. Great. Statutorily, my understanding is the FCCS is bound to consider it to be their goal to reunite children with their parents. I gather this is boilerplate in most states. But children's services also have a great deal of latitude in interpreting their duties relative to this goal and are permitted to decide that it can't be fulfilled, as the child would plausibly not be safe at home. Without reading the plan, I have little evidence (besides the general folly and injustice of FCCS's actions so far) as to whether this reference to a goal of reuniting the family before Rifqa's birthday is a mere gesture to the formal statutory framework or is really a serious indication that FCCS is bound and determined to return her to her parents, even against her will. Even the text of the plan might not be at all clear on that point.

Atlas is now referring to the December 22 hearing as a dependency hearing, though her previous statement had been that this is a hearing on the "incorrigible child" matter. Have the two issues been rolled together in court procedings? No one has said. But in any event, the next date we know of is December 22.

Rifqa post at W4

See here.

Comments are being directed here.

The new W4 post contains an address where we can try to send Rifqa a Christmas card. My defeatist self wonders if they will be delivered, but I have sent a card. It's definitely worth a try.

See also a discussion here by Jamal Jivanjee of the way in which he was given the runaround when he tried to visit Rifqa. He has some e-mail addresses for Rifqa's lawyers and suggestions for writing to them, asking them to remove part of the excuse for the runaround. She should at least be able to see some Christian friends while waiting to learn her fate. It's just incredible the way they are blatantly isolating this girl. It really looks like an attempt to break her.

We can only keep praying, but I've posted these updates to give a few practical suggestions as well

Advent Sunday

Tomorrow is Advent Sunday. We're starting another church year. It's a wild thought. (I love Trinity season, but it gets a bit long. This year it wasn't even the longest, because Easter wasn't particularly early. Still, six months out of the year of Trinity. I suppose I should be grateful that it isn't just called "ordinary time," as I hear is now the case in the Roman Catholic Church.)

Last year, I find, looking through the archives, I wrote a really good, long, detailed post on Advent and on the ways in which Protestant Christians can and should celebrate it. Have a look at it if you're interested.

Let me add here that if you are going to celebrate Advent, you strongly consider using the real collects for Advent. Here is a page that has them all. For three out of four of them, I cannot even imagine any Baptist or other Protestant having the slightest theological scruples about anything in them, and for the fourth, the only scruples would arise from a particular interpretation of Calvinism rather than from Protestantism per se. But if you're gonna do it, do it traditional as much as possible. I once saw a bunch of "Advent prayers" that were totally modern and had nothing to do with the traditional weeks of Advent. Here, briefly, are the emphases of the collects/Sundays:

First Sunday--General Advent Sunday--emphasis on Jesus' first and second comings and on preparing for His second coming.

Second Sunday--Bible Sunday--emphasis on thankfulness for Holy Scripture and the way we should read and digest it to prepare for Jesus' coming.

Third Sunday--Gaudete Sunday--emphasis on joy, collect emphasizes prayer for ministers that they may prepare the hearts of the people for Jesus' second coming.

Fourth Sunday--Request for God's power to help us run the race that is set before us.

If you light candles, there should be three purple, one pink, and one white. One purple candle the first Sunday, two the second, two purple and the pink the third (Gaudete), and all the candles but the white one the fourth Sunday. The white candle, the Christ candle, is a symbol of Jesus, the light of the world, and is lit on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day.

And here, just because I love it so much, is the collect for Advent Sunday:

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

Recycling is great (Happy Thanksgiving)

Ha! Bet you never thought you'd see me say that.

I mean recycling posts.

I've looked at last year's Thanksgiving post and decided I cannot better either the post or the photo. The prayer is the general thanksgiving for morning prayer from the Book of Common Prayer.

A happy Thanksgiving to my dear readers.

There's no place...

I left New Orleans for home yesterday in the rain. To be fair, the weather had been sunny until then. But yesterday morning the view from the twenty-ninth floor of the hotel was gray. Through the window drops I could see below the giant, unreal-looking palm trees marching down Canal Street, already wrapped in Christmas lights, and the narrow, straight streets of the French Quarter laid out like a map to the edge of the Mississippi, a bend of the Mississippi so huge I had at first mistaken it for the ocean.

The taxi to the airport smelled like a memory of cigarettes, and there was a Niagara pouring through a leak in the overhang at the unloading dock outside the Delta Airlines doors. I paid the taxi driver, gathered my bags, took one last look at the dirty, dark, day, and plunged into the airport for a full day's imprisonment.

All that day, the outdoors could only be seen--through tiny windows, through huge plate-glass windows. Sunny in Detroit, but a picture only, untouchable, unsmellable. The food courts in the airports smelled appetizing but too warm and overwhelming, yet not quite able to overcome the distinctive smell of airports--some sort of disinfectant common to all airports in the country. The last leg of the journey, the little flight from Detroit to my town, seemed airless. There had been a definite, disturbing smell of exhaust fumes at the beginning, which no one else could sense. Even when that dissipated, the air itself was exhausted, oxygen-poor, hardly worth the trouble of breathing. One could hardly believe that fifty souls could live and move and have their being with only that air in that narrow metal tube.

Then we banked, and looking past the girl by the window, I caught a glimpse of home. Fields like chess squares, surrounded by maple woods, mostly now leafless, looking like brown fur from that height, here and there spiked by a last, leaping flame of autumn color. The plane landed, and we waited an eternal, gasping, last few minutes before the door opened. By the grace of God, there was no jetway this time, just stairs down from the door. I stepped out, and the sky opened overhead in an infinite vault, robin's-egg blue, paling to almost white at the edges. The sunset air was clean and chill. I could have stood for ten minutes on the tarmac, just breathing, but the children were waiting at home.

This morning, I pulled the drapes back from the big, southern window in the dining room. Frost rimed everything--all the grass and the last few leaves. Just across the street, to the southeast, the cold, blazing sun topped the neighbors' fifty-foot blue spruce, looking like some improbable, out-of-scale Christmas tree star.

This afternoon I raked the leaves.

It's good to be back.

Rifqa Bary being denied visitors

And, Atlas has learned, her laptop has been confiscated. The court clerk appears to have been instructed to lie to inquirers and tell them "no information" exists on the next date of her dependency hearing. (The Nov. 16 public hearing was canceled.) As lawyer John Jay points out in the linked entry at Atlas, court cases don't just float in limbo like that. There is always a paper trail and a court date scheduled for a continuing case. The public is being kept in the dark, probably illegally, so that Rifqa's supporters cannot show up to show support for her at any hearings and cannot keep sunshine on the process.

I have somewhat limited computer access right now but hope to get this up at W4 soon, perhaps this evening, as well as a link to an interview I had on various other subjects on the James Allen Show last Saturday.

Good info. on Christians under the PA

The next time some anti-Israel acquaintance starts whining at you about the wrongs suffered--somehow--by Christians as a result of the Israeli "occupation of the West Bank," I suggest you give him this link.

I'm certainly going to be tempted to do so. Though I must admit to the feeling of weariness at the thought of trying to get people to see reason. If there are Arab Christians who are really anti-Israel, not just pretending out of fear (and I'm afraid there are), they are apparently ignoring some facts. Dhimmitude will do that to you. But apparently the people whispering the truth to American pastors in their own homes don't have that problem with reality. The article tells how Christians in the West Bank are much worse off ever since the Palestinian Authority has had some autonomous rule there than they were when the Israelis kept more of a hand on things. Yet plenty of Christian liberals (and what I call "paleo-leftists") want us to give the "Palestinians" a whole state with even more land and complete sovereignty. And they tell us to do so in the name of our Christian brethren who are, they claim, being deprived of "their land" by the fact that Israel still has some degree of oversight in the West Bank. Sounds like a plan to me.

But let's not let facts get in the way of ideology.

HT Israel Matzav

Thank you, God, for everything

When I was a little girl, my parents frequently reminded me to thank God that I live in America. They rightly pointed out all the blessings we enjoy as Americans that are not enjoyed by other people in many other countries. My mother was especially emphatic, and rightly so, about the poor treatment of women in many non-Western countries and about my blessings in being a woman in America.

To my mind, that is a pretty decisive point in favor of international adoptions from such countries. That is, assuming that the parents adopting the child are good and loving. I'm even willing to throw in the assumption that the adopting parents are serious Christians and hence that the child will not trade the ills of his country of birth for all the moral evils of a secular and perhaps decadent upbringing in the West. But on those assumptions, I believe that children internationally adopted should be at least as thankful as those of us born here for the opportunity to be Americans.

This is all apropos of a blog debate here on the subject of adoption. I'm astonished at how far my interlocutor, a blogger named Laura Wood, is willing to go. She even implies that we Americans are doing something wrong if we adopt intelligent orphans from some non-Western country, thus taking those bright children out of "their" country and "altering cultural dynamics" in the country of origin. She goes so far as to imply that when such children grow up they will have a legitimate complaint of "callousness" against their American parents for having harmed the "cultural harmony" of the country in which they were born by not leaving them in an orphanage there and by giving them a loving, two-parent home in America instead. I find it astonishing that anyone would make such an argument.

Just makes me all the more grateful to be an American.

And by the way, let's not forget to pray for Rifqa Bary, that she too will have the opportunity to be an American and to have, as an adult, the religious freedom for which our country stands. Pamela Geller's rally for her was duly held today in Ohio, but because today's public dependency hearing was canceled, we still have no idea what will happen to her or even what is happening to her. It appears that she is still in foster care at the moment, but as I reported here, a blackout has been placed on her case by the court, leaving open the possibility that she could be returned to her parents without public knowledge.

Yup

How depressing, but true. And yet there's something so satisfying and even rather darkly amusing about having someone else say it.

If a group called Muslim Jihad Warriors to Destroy the West set off a nuclear bomb and destroyed a city, Bob Schieffer would interview Lindsey Graham and Graham would say in his stupid sentimental voice, "Muslims have served in our armed forces, and some have died. These are good people," and Schieffer would add that of course Christians have done all kinds of terrible things, and they would both agree that it's crazy to blame Muslims for this, that such thoughts have no place in America.

Rifqa Bary update--secret court proceedings taking place

Rifqa Bary's hearing on the 16th (this is the hearing on her parents' claim that she is an incorrigible child) has been postponed to December 22nd. However, there is no guarantee that the date will not be changed again or a final decision made on returning her to her parents at some undisclosed time. Pamela Geller has learned somehow that hearings of some kind have already been taking place on Rifqa's case in Ohio with the public unable to know anything about them. Pamela has evidently been unable to learn what has happened at these hearings or whether Rifqa could now be secretly returned to her parents without the public's knowledge. Could she perhaps even be whisked away by her parents to Sri Lanka without our knowing? It does not seem so far-fetched, given the secrecy thus far. So not only is Rifqa herself unable to communicate what is going on, the public seems unable to find out either and shed a light on proceedings. This is very bad.

Pamela's rally on Rifqa's behalf on November 16 will take place as planned.