Hymn of the Week--Take my Life

"And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee."

Thus the Prayer Book, echoing, of course, Romans 12: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service."

And that biblical passage was certainly in the mind of Francis Havergal when he wrote "Take My Life."


Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee;
Take my hands and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love.

Take my feet and let them be
Swift and beautiful for Thee;
Take my voice and let me sing,
Always, only for my King.

Take my lips and let them be
Filled with messages from Thee;
Take my silver and my gold,
Not a mite would I withhold.

Take my moments and my days,
Let them flow in endless praise;
Take my intellect and use
Every pow’r as Thou shalt choose.

Take my will and make it Thine,
It shall be no longer mine;
Take my heart, it is Thine own,
It shall be Thy royal throne.

Take my love, my Lord, I pour
At Thy feet its treasure store;
Take myself and I will be
Ever, only, all for Thee.

Hymn sing night tonight at my home, and someone picked that, as someone usually does. We don't have all those same verses in our hymnal, but we have most of them.

I know, it's just a goal. One says, "Hey, here's a thought. Tomorrow I start out with that in mind. I say only those things Christ would want me to say. My voice is his voice. My lips are his lips. My hands are his hands, and so forth. What a concept." And, as Lewis said, within half an hour we are back in some old irritation or temper. Yet, that's the call. So we heed the call. Let us pray one for another that we may heed it well.

Bein' lazy this week

Dear friends,

After catching up on my sleep from the Belgium trip, I felt absolutely wonderful. I went bouncing around for a few days, unable to contain my joy at being home and my sense of well-being.

All good things come to an end. Which is to say that I've been down for the count with a bad cold starting Friday morning. Yesterday it was at its worst. Today I can breathe without struggle, which is an improvement, but tomorrow we'll probably be on to the coughing stage. I resent in excelsis the fact that suddenly in the last two years exceedingly minor illnesses like colds are a big deal. I used to be much tougher than this. What's going on? (It couldn't be that I'm getting older? Could it?)

During this time I've kept up with W4 and with reading Secondhand Smoke (now a First Things blog). If you don't regularly read Secondhand Smoke and are interested in life issues, especially stem-cell research, euthanasia, and suicide, you should. I can't recommend it too highly. My only mild gripe is that Wesley tries to avoid posting much on the subject of abortion, though he does occasionally post on it, especially on late-term abortion and infanticide, and he even had one post arguing that human life begins at conception. I could conjecture the reasons for this reticence but won't. But don't let that put you off. It's an essential blog for information on issues that should be of concern to all men of good will.

Oh, and a Happy Father's Day to all the fathers in readerland. We have tried to give Esteemed Husband a happy father's day here, as well.

Signing off...

Belgium trip--little details

Over at W4 I've put up a post on my Belgium trip. It's good to be home, though the conference was great.

I got to see a little bit of Leuven while walking to and from the conference. Lots of cobbled streets and narrow sidewalks. Watch out for the bicyclists! There was a park we walked through going to dinner and to and from the hotel, and there was some sort of beautiful bird song going on there every time we walked through. I asked several people who lived or had lived in the town what it could be, but no one seemed to know. It sounded a bit like recordings of a nightingale that I have heard, but if so, there are an awful lot of nightingales in Leuven, they sing all day long, and they are very loud. I never caught a glimpse of it. But it would be nice to think that I've now heard a real nightingale, as we don't have them on this side of the Atlantic.

I missed my chance to be shown the little cathedral (as cathedrals go) on the first full-length day of the conference. I had arrived with a bad backache from a combination of the previous Friday's horseback riding lesson and a very long plane ride on Monday-Tuesday. So when a local student offered to conduct a bit of a tour of the town over lunch on Wednesday, I had to decline. I don't know that there would have been time for both lunch and the tour in any event. By Friday, the last day, I felt more like doing a little extra walking and wanted to see the inside of the Cathedral, but at 9 a.m. when we tried the door it was locked, at lunch we barely had time to catch lunch and get back, and at 5:30 p.m. when we tried the door it was locked. So I missed out on that but did get to see genuine flying buttresses on the outside and saints in their niches all up and down the sides of the town hall just across the square. I also heard (from the same student) the story of how and why the Nazis burned the university library there in Leuven to punish the Belgians for resisting the Nazi invasion, on the orders of their king and as a matter of principle.

We met likable philosophers, brilliant philosophers, interesting philosophers, and curmudgeonly philosophers, but if I start giving descriptions, they might read them sometime and be embarrassed, even if the descriptions are complimentary.

Airplane travel is absolutely not my bag. By the time I got to sleep last night, I felt like I had in actuality awakened from a slightly boring nightmare in which one walks endlessly along long passages and around huge halls, looking for something undefined, sits forever in dingy rooms on uncomfortable seats, and answers never-ending security questions. The feeling of having no true privacy or relaxation for something on the order of fifteen or more hours is unbelievably difficult, I find.

So all in all a very successful conference, and I hope to write some papers on the strength of its inspiration and hope to keep in touch with some of my new friends. I just wish the next one could be at Notre Dame!

I'll Fly Away

A blessed Trinity Sunday to everyone. I don't know if my Catholic readers have Trinity Sunday. If not, it's a shame. Comes right after Pentecost, which makes sense. Then this whole next six months or so is the "Sundays after Trinity."

Here's a wonderful country version of "I'll Fly Away." I'm sufficiently ignorant of country that I can only say, "I think that's a banjo." Lots of fun. It contains a verse I'd never heard anywhere else: "Oh, how glad and happy when we meet. No more cold, iron shackles on my feet."

Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss--"I'll Fly Away"

Ill Fly Away - Gillian Welch

And as it happens, I am flying away, but not to heaven yet (as far as I know). This week we will be at a conference on Formal Methods in the Epistemology of Religion in Leuven, Belgium.

Dale Peeke-Requiescat in pacem

I got word a few hours ago by e-mail that a friend of ours named Dale Peeke died this morning. Dale was a member of my church, St. Patrick's Anglican Catholic Church. He has requested that there be no funeral.

When I first came to St. Patrick's fourteen years ago, Dale was one of its most colorful members. As I recall it (my memory gets worse all the time), he actually drove up on his motorcycle at that time--a big, rough-looking guy, often wearing a leather jacket that said "Christian Motorcyclists Association" on the back. It was funny at a certain time of year, every year, to read a note in the bulletin, put there by Fr. Stephens (may he rest in peace), announcing the CMA "Run for the Son"--this very un-Anglican event. The announcement would always end, "Our own Dale Peeke is very much involved," which for some reason made me want to giggle.

Dale took a delight in each of my daughters--first as babies and then as they got older. He was often ill as time passed, and sometimes when he had been gone from church for a while and came back, he would look at Eldest Daughter and shake his head: "She just gets prettier all the time."

As time went on, he became not only a church friend but also, in a manner of speaking, an ally. The back-story there is of a kind that Trollope or perhaps even Sayers could fit into a novel with great humor. It boils down merely to the fact that musical tastes differ. I, being from a Baptist background, have in my role as organist tried to insinuate some old Baptist or Gospel hymns into the prelude (once we started preludes, about nine years ago, by my reckoning). Dale shared my taste for these, but not everyone else does. Whenever Dale was there I would feel more free to put in something that he would recognize, even if most of the other members didn't, and he would come back afterwards and tell me that he had enjoyed it. One of his favorites, one he mentioned every time I played it, was "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus." He called it "The Heavenly Vision."

Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.

A couple of months ago I learned that Dale was in hospice care and had been given only six months to live. By then he hadn't been able to get to church for some while, and at that time I conceived the plan of recording some hymns for him, including of course "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus." But the whole process was clunky, and all the while I had in the back of my mind a kind of embarrassment--wouldn't it sound incredibly amateurish? Wasn't it a little silly to record myself (and ED) singing things and to put it on a CD? Would he like it? I mentioned the plan to him over the phone once, and he seemed pleased. Nonetheless, I dithered. We got a recording device with quite a good quality mike about ten days ago and used it for a concert ED attended with her dad. It sounded good. Still I didn't actually make any move to record us singing.

Then on Sunday we learned that Dale had accidentally started a fire with his oxygen tank and was in the burn unit. This morning he passed away.

Now he doesn't need to hear "The Heavenly Vision." He has something better to do by far--enjoying the heavenly vision. I think I'm the one who lost out by not being more on the ball.

Rest in peace, Dale. I hope Our Lord gives you a new motorcycle and leather jacket someday to go with a new body that never, never needs an oxygen tank. And maybe we can sing some of those songs when we meet again.

The things which belong unto thy peace

[This is a re-post from a few days ago at What's Wrong with the World. It was prompted by some of the posts it links from Wesley J. Smith's incredibly important blog, Secondhand Smoke (now at a new location as part of the First Things blog family).]

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation."

We humans usually don't know what's good for us. Jesus addressed the City of Peace and said that its inhabitants would not know the things that belonged unto their peace.

It is often said by conservatives, and rightly, that ideology is a great danger. The ideologue gets hold of one truth and makes it into the only truth, the only thing that matters. He sacrifices all else to that one thing. That one ideal might be equality, beauty, health, or love, but when one makes second things first, the second things always turn vicious, and horrors follow.

But there is another point, compatible with that point, that must be made too: When second things are made first, they destroy themselves. The ideologue does not even know what is best for the ideal he professes.

Take love, for instance. It's been said times without number that the sexual revolution wasn't really about love. But there were people who thought it was. If you had told them that the revolution they were founding would ultimately destroy love, even romantic love, even sexual love, they would not have listened. They would not have believed. Yet it was true, as numerous broken-hearted, broken-bodied men and women, men and women who have tried sex without honor can attest.

And now, in this our day, health is another god, another second thing made first. In the name of health we harvest the dead, we destroy embryos, our scientists promise us cures of all diseases if only we will dispense with ethical limitations on research. They are wrong, of course, and much of the promise is hype. But beyond that, we are in the process of losing all sense of what actually constitutes health. Doctors are under pressure to cooperate in the destruction of unborn infants as part of their profession. How is that serving health? Suicide on demand, for any reason whatsoever, assisted by doctors, is all the rage. What does that have to do with the medical profession's job of helping people to be healthy? Yet restless people whose relatives have had trouble finding people to cooperate in their suicide would actually like writing suicide prescriptions to be mandatory upon doctors. Bodily mutilation of healthy limbs is being considered as a "treatment." This is not serving bodily health and integrity.

In other words, the utilitarian attempt to elevate health as a good above innocent human life and above all ethical restraints has turned out to be profoundly anti-human and, consequently, is undermining the medical profession and the very notion of health itself.

If human beings knew the things that belong to their peace, then their perception of some good--love, health, beauty--would guide them to do the right thing. But they don't. They never seem to see it coming--the self-destructiveness of topsy-turvy priorities. They never seem to realize that when second things are made first, you end up with nothing, not even the second things.

It is time to ask ourselves what things belong to our peace. If we believe in healthy bodies, love, beauty, and human joy, we cannot serve these things best by treating the human body as mere matter. We will lose it all, and our house will be left unto us desolate.

What I've been up to--new horseback lessons

Just in case you all out there in readerland ever say to yourselves, "I wonder what Lydia McGrew is up to in her personal life lately," the latest fun thing is horseback riding lessons. It's still not absolutely clear that I'm going to be able to keep them up, but it's a case of so far so good. I have some minor back trouble that might have flared up and prevented it, but last week I recovered rapidly from the lesson and this week--we shall see. I feel fine just coming home now. Just a little stiff.

I rode a lot of Western trail riding when I was a kid, but there's nothing really "to" Western trail riding. You sit on your horse, and it follows the horse in front of it. If they trot or gallop, you hold the saddle horn. At age 10, I had a few English riding lessons, a very few, until Mom and Dad couldn't afford them anymore (understandably enough). Then it was just going riding with the church youth group now and then, hardly any riding at all, for years and years. And about twelve or thirteen years ago, I foolishly told an acquaintance that I knew how to ride, was given a horse I couldn't handle, and got myself thrown with the horse falling on top. Nobody hurt badly, not even the horse. But not fun. So after that I concentrated on raising children and not getting killed, and I haven't been back on a horse until last week. We're starting English riding from the very beginning.

I'm very fortunate to be having one-on-one lessons with a really good teacher. Last week we used one of the "school horses" from the farm, until she saw that I'm not scared of the horse or likely to freak out. Jake was very calm, but a little hard-mouthed, and with a fast, choppy trot that I could neither sit nor post. So today we had Hailey (sp?), and that was much nicer. Hailey is a tall Appaloosa and a pleasure to look at and ride. She has that long-legged walk straight down from the shoulder to the ground that always somehow reminds me of a lady in high heels. She has a lovely, smooth trot (as smooth as a trot can be, that is) that Barb, her owner and my teacher, calls a "Western" trot. I can sit it or post it, though I was still holding on to keep my balance while posting by the end of the lesson. I expect to be stiffer tomorrow than I was last week. Posting is a workout for a nerdy, sedentary type like me.

My mom called me a couple of days ago. She's nervous about the riding lessons. Ever since "what happened to Christopher Reeve," she says. Thanks, Mom. I told her I'm in far more danger driving to the lessons on a windey road where all the drivers push you if you're two miles below the speed limit than I am up on the horse. And that's the truth.

Hope to be able to keep it up this summer. Should be lots of fun if so.

Blessed Ascensiontide

Well, golly, I wrote such a great post for Ascension Day last year that I'm strongly inclined just to link to it. It's here.

And here are the wonderful collects. We get two, because Ascension has an octave:

Grant, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.


O God, the King of glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven; We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.


For any of you who are Peter Wimsey fans, the first of those (the one actually for Ascension Day) features in my favorite of all favorite Wimsey novels, The Nine Tailors. As you'll recall (if you've read the book), Wimsey first came to the small fen town in the story back in the winter, on a nasty, snowy New Year's Eve, rang a peal with the ringers (because several had fallen sick of the influenza epidemic and Wimsey had turned up providentially to ring bells for nine hours overnight), and left the next day. But just after Easter, a body is discovered unexpectedly, and the rector, Mr. Venables, writes to Wimsey asking him to come and help investigate. So Wimsey is back in the fens in the spring. He is inspired to guess the location of the mysterious emeralds (yes, there are mysterious emeralds) by the rector's sermon on the collect for Ascension Day.

One of the things I like about Ascension as an Anglican feast is that it's the kind of thing a person with a Baptist upbringing and sympathies can be enriched by without changing one whit of doctrine. It's just a set of ideas that simply never occurred to you before: Jesus took our human nature back to the Father's right hand. Jesus reigns with God, so God and man are on the throne together. We sit with Him in heavenly places. He intercedes for us with the Father. If you are familiar with Scripture, all of that comes back. But if you don't have a liturgical background, you usually didn't think of associating it with Jesus' ascension. But that's when that all started. And of course, as Jesus' words to the disciples just before ascending refer to the promise of "the Gift," the Holy Ghost, so the Feast of the Ascension looks forward to next week, Whitsunday, Pentecost.

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in!

Lemon-roasted chicken

Okay, enough serious stuff. I offered this recipe on Facebook and had several takers, so here it is. Hopefully, the style will be more interesting than that of the ordinary cookbook. If you are not cooking challenged, pleased excuse the unnecessary details. (Recipe modified from one published in Reader's Digest donkey's years ago.)

Get one (dead) chicken, 4-6 lbs., and 2 fresh lemons. Bring them home.

Put the chicken somewhere where it won't matter when all that gross blood runs out all over everything, and cut open the wrap. Take out all the icky stuff in the body cavity--the giblets-in-a-bag and the neck--and throw it away.

Grab one of the fresh lemons and stab it all over with a sharp knife. Put the lemon into the body cavity of the chicken.

Put the lemon-stuffed chicken into some sort of roasting pan big enough to hold it. (Oh, pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees.)

Cut the other lemon in half. Squeeze the juice of half of the lemon all over the chicken. (Tip: If the lemon half doesn't want to squeeze, make several small cuts in the edge of the skin around the rim of the lemon half.)

Shake dried basil and dried oregano generously all over the lemon-juiced chicken.

If you feel like being fancy, tuck the wing tips of the chicken under its back. But if you don't know how to do this and don't mind the fact that the wings will pretty much be dried up and inedible if you don't do it, don't bother.

Make sure your oven racks are far enough apart to fit the pan with the chicken in it.

Place the chicken in the pre-heated oven and bake for one and one-fourth to one and three-fourths hours, depending on the size of the chicken. While it cooks, clean up the mess from opening up the chicken, etc., with hot soapy water.

Test the chicken for doneness using an instant thermometer stuck into the thick meat of the chicken somewhere (like on the breast). It should read 180 degrees. Or saw off a leg right at the thigh and see if it looks completely cooked and white with clear juices, not pink at all.

Serving suggestion--Serve with Uncle Ben's long grain and wild rice.

Oh, cut up the other lemon half into slices for people to squeeze over their chicken meat and rice.

Enjoy.

Finding leads to losing

About thirty years ago in Chicago I went to a live concert by Ken Medema, a blind Christian pianist and singer. Ken was in rare form that night, and it hardly mattered that we were crowded into an auxiliary room watching on closed-circuit TV. He did the inimitable "Moses" and I think one or two others of his classics, but for the most part his concert was one long ad lib on the life and miracles of Jesus. In the course of it he kept coming back to this little chorus with doggerel rhyme, that I now half suspect he made up on the spot:

Finding leads to losing;
Losing lets you find.
Living leads to dying;
Life leaves death behind.
Losing leads to finding;
All that I can say.
No one will find life another way.

I lost count of the number of times he went back and sang that in the course of the evening. It is, of course, a paraphrase of the words of Christ: "He that saveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for my sake and the Gospel's, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

The tune has stayed with me all these years, and I can almost hear the guys from the youth group--not a very reverent lot, truth be told--singing it over and over again in the van on the way home.

And somehow, today, I had it going through my head in an entirely different context, a context which may be quite unrelated. (The temptation to blog sometimes has a negative effect on one's logical faculties.) But here is what I thought: The Internet has made it possible for me and for many others to find many friends that we would not otherwise have found--likeminded people, men of integrity whom we respect. Ideological loneliness is a real thing. We Christian conservatives, especially those of us who are traditionally minded, are not in a majority in our country or our world, and so we naturally reach out to allies and new friends, and the Internet has proven a great resource for this purpose. But that finding of friends also means that there are that many more opportunities to lose touch with people. It needn't be a matter of a falling out at all. Someone retires from blogging; a given blog closes down; people become understandably and rightly busy with real life. But just as it is a sad thing to lose touch with an old friend one has known in high school, college, graduate school, in person, it is also a sad thing to contemplate possibly losing touch with a person one has known only on the Internet.

So finding leads to losing. But in the end, whatever happens in cyberspace or physical space, we are not bound to the circles of the world. And in heaven, I think that even those we have never seen, whom we would not now recognize if we passed them on the street or in the store, we will recognize.

So losing leads to finding after all.

Zippy Catholic: Pax

Songs to Die for (and oldies): Amy Grant

I fear that only a small segment of my already-small readership will appreciate this post, but that's as may be. I am self-consciously dating myself here. This first song came out originally, I learn from Youtube, on the album Age to Age in 1982. That was the year I graduated (young) from high school. Amy Grant was considered rather radical in my fundamentalist crowd, a fact Eldest Daughter thinks is absolutely hilarious now. Yet we all listened to her. I have recently learned that she is only five years older than I am and am shocked to think how very young she was in 1982. Anyway, out of the blue today I found myself singing "In a little while we'll be with the Father," and I came home and introduced it to Eldest Daughter, who has found some of Grant's music already through the Internet. Favorite line: "We're just here to learn to love Him. We'll be home in just a little while."

In A Little While - Amy Grant

And then there's "Straight Ahead":

Straight Ahead - Amy Grant - Straight Ahead

The value of gun-ownership

More self-defense stuff: Kudos to the (for some reason) unnamed college student in Georgia who saved himself and his fellow students from murder and the females among them from rape by two armed intruders. The student pulled a gun out of his backpack, shot at one bad guy (driving him out of the apartment), ran into the room where the other bad guy was with the women, and shot him. One girl was shot accidentally but is expected to recover completely. And if I were she, I'd be thanking my defender 'til the day I died.

HT VFR

New issue of The Christendom Review now on-line

A new issue of a relatively new journal called The Christendom Review is now on-line. Bill Luse and I both have articles in it about Terri Schiavo, and those of my readers who are interested in legal issues will, I hope, be especially interested in my examination of the legal issues surrounding Terri's murder. I haven't had a chance myself to read many of the other pieces, but I already knew about the visual art of Timothy Jones and am pleased to see some of it highlighted in this issue. I especially like Bleu Cheese and Beer. (One thing I don't quite understand is where the section of Timothy Jones's page went that used to show his whole gallery, including paintings already sold. Some of them were very lovely, and it was great to be able to see them all.)

Anyway, check out the new Christendom Review, and hearty and insufficient thanks to Todd McKimmey for all the work he does and the space he provides to make each issue possible.

Update: Ah, here it is: Timothy Jones Fine Art (I was forgetting to try .net as well as .com) He should have this link front and center on all his other pages. I especially like Strawberries & Cream.

Don't let this be you

I'm going to touch on a touchy subject--the subject of race.

Larry Auster links and discusses a horrifying recent story of a young mother, out shopping with her baby, who was kidnapped at gunpoint and raped. She did not take precautions against her attacker because she "didn't want to seem racist." Ponder that. Anti-racism is now a religion, and people think that they must risk suffering and death for it. This woman could easily have been killed. As it was, she was "only" kidnapped and raped and lived to identify her evil attacker.

Don't let this be you or one of your beloved female relatives or friends. Whatever you may think of the religion of anti-racism, don't be a martyr to it. This woman saw a black man loitering in the parking lot of (of all places) Babies "R" Us, wearing a tattered coat. She felt uneasy and suspicious about him, but she simply walked to her car as usual, past him, because she "didn't want to seem racist." He came up behind her with a gun and threatened to kill her baby if she didn't drive away with him to wherever he directed her.

What else could she have done besides stifling her misgivings and going to the car? She could have gone back into the store and shopped more, checking from time to time to see if the suspicious man was still in the parking lot. She could have used the cell phone that almost everyone has to call her husband or a friend and ask to be met at the store. Best of all, she could have gone back into the store, told the manager about a loiterer who made her feel uneasy, and requested a male escort to her car. She could have done many things. But instead, she walked straight into the trap. And this is by no means the only incident of this kind that has occurred.

Use your brains, your knowledge, and your instincts. Don't stifle them as wrongthought. Better safe than sorry.

Sheep-herding performance art

This is cool:



The dogs are so impressive.

HT: Secondhand Smoke

Welcome, Happy Morning

I haven't had a hymn post for a long, long time. This morning we sang "Welcome, Happy Morning" to the catchy tune "Fortunatus" by none other than Arthur Sullivan. The text is a translation of the ancient Easter hymn by Venantius Fortunatus, which some of you may know in its incarnation as "Hail Thee, Festival Day." Call me a Philistine if you will, but I like the Sullivan version better than the Vaughan Williams one! Perhaps this is partly because "Hail Thee, Festival Day" is a stinker to play and for the congregation to sing, jumping back and forth as it does on the hymnal pages. But I also prefer the text translation that goes with the Sullivan tune. Here are the words:

“Welcome, happy morning!” age to age shall say:
“Hell today is vanquished, Heav’n is won today!”
Lo! the dead is living, God forevermore!
Him, their true Creator, all His works adore!

Refrain

“Welcome, happy morning!”
Age to age shall say.

Earth her joy confesses, clothing her for spring,
All fresh gifts returned with her returning King:
Bloom in every meadow, leaves on every bough,
Speak His sorrow ended, hail His triumph now.

Refrain

Months in due succession, days of lengthening light,
Hours and passing moments praise Thee in their flight.
Brightness of the morning, sky and fields and sea,
Vanquisher of darkness, bring their praise to Thee.

Refrain

Maker and Redeemer, life and health of all,
Thou from heaven beholding human nature’s fall,
Of the Father’s Godhead true and only Son,
Mankind to deliver, manhood didst put on.

Refrain

Thou, of life the Author, death didst undergo,
Tread the path of darkness, saving strength to show;
Come, then True and Faithful, now fulfill Thy Word;
’Tis Thine own third morning; rise, O buried Lord!

Refrain

Loose the souls long prisoned, bound with Satan’s chain;
All that now is fallen raise to life again;
Show Thy face in brightness, bid the nations see;
Bring again our daylight: day returns with Thee!

Refrain

I've been slow all these years: I just this morning realized that "Come, then True and Faithful, now fulfill Thy Word" refers to Jesus' predictions before His death of His own resurrection.

As you can see, this is one of those Northern Hemisphere hymns. Having a reader from New Zealand particularly brings this home to me. Christianity originated in the hemisphere where it is dark and cold at Christmas and getting to be spring at Easter. In fact, the whole dating of Easter in the Western church calendar is predicated on the connection to spring. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the first day of spring! And so many hymns reflect this, particularly during Advent, at Christmas, and at Easter, from the gorgeous "Lo, How a Rose" ("She bore to men a Savior, when half-spent was the night...") to the one above.

The incorporation of the seasons into Christian symbolism, liturgy, history, and hymnody has been incredibly enriching. But I do have to admit that it must be harder to appreciate if you have lived all your life in a country where the seasons are the opposite, where it is just getting to winter at Eastertide and is the height of summer at Christmas!

Ugly clothes

In less than two months, Esteemed Husband and I will be winging our way to Belgium for a short conference in Leuven. This is a Big Deal, because we almost never travel. Fortunately, we have found someone nice and efficient to stay with the girls, and Eldest Daughter will be a great co-babysitter as well. So we're going.

I wanted another skirt for the conference, and after shopping fruitlessly on-line, I ordered one from Lilies Apparel, which I have mentioned before. The skirt should be pretty, though I've never ordered a skirt from them before, but I won't see it for a few weeks. Ordering a skirt from Lilies is a little like ordering a book from Lulu. They don't start making the physical item until you order it. This is nice, because I got mine customized for length and waist size. I think it will come in time, though.

It's a bit pricey, and after ordering it I was seized with a sudden qualm: What if unbeknownst to me my local Meijer superstore had in the meanwhile started selling nice women's clothes and had a skirt I could have bought for much less?

But I needn't have worried.

I had to go to Meijer for something else and took a gander at the women's clothing section. With the exception of a few shelves of T-shirts, all the clothes there had been made in strict accordance with standards provided by the Federal Bureau of Ugly Clothes. I'm sure there is such a bureau, and if you doubt it, go look at the women's clothes at a local superstore sometime.

They were absolutely hideous. I'll start with the skirts, because that was what I was shopping for. The only ones I really looked at were the super-long ones, because the only other kind were the super-short ones. Nothing in between, of course. The super-long ones were called "peasant skirts," but any self-respecting peasant woman would, I'm sure, rather wear a garment made out of a cornmeal sack. They were made of something that I believe is called "crinkle cloth," and it looks just like you would think something called "crinkle cloth" would look--like the tissue paper that comes out of a gift bag and has been wadded up and then partially smoothed out again. Somehow this "crinkle" appearance made even white look like a dirty color. The other colors were a flat, dusty black and various shades of industrial sludge. And on top of everything else, they were see-through. How nice: A pseudo-modest skirt so long that it places a woman in danger of falling flat on her face when she walks while at the same time making Superman's X-ray vision superfluous for purposes of seeing through her clothes.

(While I was looking at these skirts, a young woman was wailing over the radio overhead, "I get so emotional, baby!" Over and over. Should she maybe see somebody about her problem?)

On the way to the skirts, I caught sight of the tops. I see these on women all the time. Most of them are what I would call the maternity camisole look, only often they are brown, which isn't a usual camisole color: Exceedingly immodest, thin little straps or a halter top, deep cleavage, and an ugly sort of bunched-up bodice-formation, with a maternity-style loose skirt underneath the bodice to form the rest of the top. Or, for the squeamish among us, there is the "wear your underwear on top of your clothes" look: The foregoing maternity camisole with a still rather plungy T-shirt sewn underneath it.

Who thinks of these things? Who would actually want to wear them? I suppose some women wear them because they can't find the T-shirt shelves or perhaps even because they buy their clothes without thinking. But the clothes are so, so ugly. The ugliness is in some ways even more striking than the immodesty.

So, reluctantly, I tore myself away from the women's clothing section, muttered something under my breath about the emotional girl on the radio, and took myself off home.

Excellent rant against PC-speak

Do you hate PC-speak? Do you hate all the deceptive, cloying, mind-befogging, euphemistic mental manipulation to which the self-styled Guardians of Culture want to subject you by means of telling you how you must talk?

You will love this post. It's a rant. It's a self-styled rant. Warning: It uses one bad word in the course thereof, once. (He says he will hereby redefine it, since language changes and we can make words mean whatever we want them to mean.) It's hilarious. Here are just a few quotes, but you will want to read the whole thing:

Unless you can tell me, off the top of your head and without looking it up, the name in any Eskimo dialect for a Virginian, I suggest your concern for their concern for our names for them is illegitimate...

...

Maybe if I video-taped myself with a kidnapped and innocent civilian journalist, one to whom I’d falsely promised safe conduct, and battered in his skull with a thurible while dressed in miter and alb all the time singing GLORIA IN EXCELSIS DEO, my tender feelings would be nourished and guarded. Or is it only the deadly enemies of their own culture the death-cult members of the death-culture Left wish to see lauded, aided and abetted?

Let me explain that I regard political correctness as worse than a lie.

A lie is a straightforward attempt to deceive a victim. It [is] almost honest by contrast. Political Correctness is a corrupt attempt to poison thought and speech, and to impose upon the nobility and courtesy of its victims to get them to deceive themselves. A frequent side effect of PC jargon is that it renders rational conversation difficult, indirect, or even impossible.

Innocent and well meaning people are actually fooled by this simple trick. Sad to say, most people think like magicians. They believe in the rule of true names. They think (or rather, they feel) that when they are calling one thing by another name, that the actual nature of reality changes. They put themselves in a position where they can no longer talk about real things. Words are severed from referents.

...

If you successfully substitute the word 'Inuit' for 'Eskimo' on the grounds that 'Eskimo' is an insult, you will have successfully convinced the next generation that all their forefathers who used the word 'Eskimo' deliberately meant and fully intended an insult, or were foolish or negligent enough to utter an insult by accident. That conviction will be false, a lie, and you (in a small way, one more straw on the camel's back) will have helped to perpetrate it.

And there's more. Yes, he gets to feminist revisionist language, too. No one is spared. It's a tour de force (a few misspellings notwithstanding).

Bonus link: If you have never read P. J. O'Rourke's glorious rant on this same subject (politically correct language), the one containing the sentence, "I feel a spate of better writing coming on," do yourself a favor and read it, too.

HT: Scott W. at Romish Internet Graffiti

Y.D. on Infinity

Tonight at supper, Youngest Daughter (age 5 1/2) asked me, "What is the name of the biggest number?"

With some excitement, I told her, "There isn't one! If you name any number, there is always a bigger one." After talking about this for a while, and using the word "infinity" a few times, I asked her, "Do you understand?"

"No," she said, fairly cheerfully. End of subject for the time.

After supper, she got out a pencil and paper. "I'm writing the numbers up to infinity," she told me.

"But you can't!" I said. "It's not possible."

"Yes, I can," she insisted. "I have a paper and pencil, and I'm going to write them." A little later, she added, "I'm going to write the numbers up to 500."

"That's not infinity," I said. "Do you know what 'infinity' means?"

"No."

"If a thing goes on forever, that means it goes on to infinity. Numbers go on to infinity, and that means they never end."

A little later, she told me that she was trying to write, "The fact is that things go on forever. They never end." But, she added, she couldn't remember how to spell "things." I suggested that "numbers" is easier to spell than "things." We talked for a bit about how to spell "numbers."

Then I said, "Besides, it depends on what things you're talking about. Some things do come to an end, but others don't."

"Cups come to an end!" she said.

"That's right. Cups come to an end. But numbers don't."

Next stop: Actual and potential infinities.

Bill Luse's great Easter Youtube

I don't do enough linking from here to my friends' blog pieces. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I'm not promising amendment of life. It's sometimes hard enough to put up something original of my own. (Hey! Maybe I don't have to, if I fulfill my sense of blogging responsibility at this personal blog by linking more frequently to other people's neat posts. Gotta think about that one.)

But it suddenly occurred to me that, since I enjoyed Bill Luse's Youtube video for Easter so much--and I e-mailed the link to a couple of people who definitely wouldn't have seen it otherwise--I should link it from here for any of my readers who don't go over to Bill's page regularly.

I won't tell you what the song is ahead of time. See how many of the people in the pictures you can identify. I got dry-eyed as far as Terri Schiavo.

Enjoy.