the lexical form

Hello! I am nearly Catholic and read Latin literature at college. I like lying in bed, puppies, chocolate, music, sacred art, nice stationery and plain wheat bread. (:

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This is gorgeous--and very American, you know? Quilts. 🙂

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oh, in general

“Does anyone even read the comments down here?”

Times are busy, as always; so they’re not really that busy, but I’ve been quiet (here anyway). I spent many years of my life never having listened to the Milk Carton Kids, but I’m awfully grateful that I’ve done it now. It’s like… magic.

What else?

Been reading an awful lot of…

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Love Letters, Tara Fallaux To illustrate how she feels about love letters herself, Fallaux quotes one of the young men from the documentary, who says that writing a love letter is akin to sharing a diary.

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music: ‘if we were vampires’ If we were vampires and death was a joke We'd go out on the sidewalk and smoke…

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St Francis de Sales

St Francis de Sales

Today’s saint, St Francis de Sales may have been one of the first post-Reformation saints that I hesitatingly read about (you see, it’s one thing for a Protestant to say he admires St Francis of Assisi or St Anthony the Abbot, and quite another to profess an interest in a Doctor of the Church known for his effectiveness against Calvinism). And I think the principal lesson that has stuck with me…

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this week's reading

this week’s reading

It seems almost unbelievable that we’re already 11 days into the new year! Soon enough it will be Easter, and Pentecost, and Advent again.

The year has gotten off to a quiet start, mostly, and I’ve had ample time to read (books in their own section here). The last few days’ articles have included:

The secret music composed by medieval nuns, Michael White in the Catholic Herald / “Reciprocally,…

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abide with me

So pleased to finally find a recording that doesn’t drag.

This hymn came into our choir’s rotation in Ordinary Time, being a favourite of one of the priests. The first time I heard the tune was in relation to Parry’s wonderful chorale prelude, and I was in a stark moment disappointed to hear during rehearsal one of the choristers…

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rachmaninoff, all-night vigil

https://open.spotify.com/album/7gjXCjmDMTQvcdzHdwjJZ8

It’s the Vigil of All Saints–time for some celebrating!

I perhaps already mentioned it, but I was so #blessed (haha) to catch The Philharmonic Chamber Choir (with Sonoko Mizukami and Julian Gregory) performing this in August.

The Wikipedia article links to this gem, Description of a “Real” All Night Vigil (1911) by Mikhail Skaballanovich:

When…

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Christ the King

gratias agentes Deo Patri, qui dignos nos fecit in partem sortis sanctorum in lumine: qui eripuit nos de potestate tenebrarum, et transtulit in regnum filii dilectionis suæ; in quo habemus redemptionem per sanguinem ejus, remissionem peccatorum: qui est imago Dei invisibilis, primogenitus omnis creaturæ: quoniam in ipso condita sunt universa in cælis, et in terra, visibilia, et invisibilia, sive…

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Nouwen on silence

Abba Tithoes once said, “Pilgrimage means that a man should control his tongue.” The expression “to be on pilgrimage is to be silent” (peregrinatio est tacere), expresses the conviction of the Desert Fathers that silence is the best anticipation of the future world. The most frequent argument for silence is simply that words lead to sin. No speaking, therefore, is the most obvious way to stay…

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vasily kalinnikov, symphony no. 1

vasily kalinnikov, symphony no. 1

[A computer recommended this to me today.]

It’s delightful! Of note is the nationalistic flavour (or maybe I’m the only one still hearing Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigilin my mind) and the twinkly-eyed yet grave bass and cello passages in the first movement. The photo is pretty great too, and much more pleasant than staring at people…

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lead kindly light I remember fondly the desk in our lab, along the wall in the room splashed with sunlight, where I sat that summer, when (even more than matrix multiplication and superpositions) all that occupied my mind was the tentatively joyful walk in the dark that is conversion.

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Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us! “God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.

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te deum / cochereau From the comments comes the assertion that the alternatim between congregation/choir and organ is in fact, taking place between congregation and the angelic choirs (to which the organ is only accompaniment). How lovely a thought. (And this is very, very good singing!)

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For St Maximilian Kolbe.

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animal, vegetable, mineral On Friday I'll be going to watch an opera at Victoria Theatre (if work allows, sigh), and found this lovely piece of trivia:

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bbc: tudor monastery farm

bbc: tudor monastery farm

This is how I’m going to spend my free time for the next few days, I think! From the end of the intro: “This is the untold story of the monastic farms of Tudor England.”

What.

From the BBC’s website:

Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold turn the clock back 500 years to the early Tudor period to become…

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