Ditch Doc

The language and music of the liturgy use our minds and bodies to express God’s love of man and our love of Him. Although visual art expresses the same thing, it does so with an inanimate medium, and so has a secondary place in worship.

That is why you can kneel in a beautifully decorated gothic Basilica untouched by the iconoclasm of the last forty years, in misery over the sickly-sweet vapidity of “Peace is Flowing Like a River.” And it’s why you can be brought to tears by a small congregation confidently singing the Kyrie in a cramped, misshapen church. You have entered the cave in Bethlehem, where the faithful have found the Lord in unworthy surroundings and come to do Him homage. The first scene recalls instead the Temple in Jerusalem after the veil was rent, when the great edifice still stood to the glory of the Lord, but the Lord had left. It is among Christ’s greatest mercies that he will never leave the tabernacle to escape bad music.

You are to understand that the next quotation is from our tiny, constantly smiling, soft-spoken anatomy prof with the white hair and the gentle very English voice.

“Now these muscles are the dilator muscles of the mouth, and they have very strange names. My favourite one is this one: the levator labii superioris alaeque nasi. It doesn’t even sound like a muscle. It’s more like a… a blessing.” And then he intoned it, to uproarious laughter on all sides.

Ecumenism is a Hasidic Jew singing reggae in praise of Hashem and reigniting your zeal to say the Rosary in public. Enjoy.

Jerusalem - Matisyahu

And if this doesn’t work, tell me. I want you hear this guy.

The liturgy is the primary way by which we come to know God. God is three Persons. So go ahead and adjust the language, music and symbolism of the Mass to make them totally understandable on the first go. But only if you have previous experience of coming to know, completely, three people in the space of an hour. If, on the other hand, you’ve found that even your non-divine friendships continue to deepen for as long as they last, then give me a liturgy that I can chew on for eighty years or so.

To all my Californian friends: here, in the words of Stan Rogers, is why I don’t move down there to be with all of you.

“In a few more years I won’t remember what it was to play,
The music of old friends who need to live so far away,
But can I once taste Northern waters, then forsake them for the South,
To feel California’s ashes in my mouth?”

P.S. I’ll never forget what it was, Stan notwithstanding.

I was just starting to think that I was having a pretty successful violin practise when I took a break and noticed that the kids playing on the grass outside had started howling like dogs.

The ancients thought of music as a branch of mathematics, which makes most of us say: “What a boring, stilted way to look at music.” But why not: “What a sublime way to look at math!”

Romantic country song:

She was the picture of grace and beauty, but she left me.

Romantic pop song:

She was the picture of grace and beauty, but I cheated on her.

The Book of Proverbs:

For the lips of a harlot are like a honeycomb dropping, and her throat is smoother than oil. But her end is bitter as wormwood, and sharp as a two-edged sword.

Romantic Irish song:

She was the picture of grace and beauty, and then she stole my clothes and sold me to the English.

The hostel’s heating system had broken during the day, so we sat in our coats in the second floor kitchen, watching a bitterly cold Edmonton wind tear down the dark street below. A greying Newfoundlander, eyes droopy with sixty years and one very hard night, weakly swayed in his chair and rambled aimlessly across the steel strings he’d forced upon a tiny classical guitar. An enormous smooth-headed Djiboutian, wrapped to the chin in a new pea coat and matching black scarf, sat back with his hands in his pockets, quietly observing from across the table. Between his smattering of English and mine of French, we exchanged names and a few broken sentences before lapsing into silence. The drunken rambling took on words and direction: it had become an improvisation on love, directed at the only dedicated audience member, whom I now knew as Pierre. Pierre flashed a black Cheshire grin and chuckled. “I love you too.” We exchanged an amused smile as the Newfie struck out on the theme of a heartbroken girl. Pierre felt around for the right English: “He makes up his own music…directly,” he said. The singing stopped. “No, no…” slurred the musician. “It’s ahff de coff.”

As everyone knows, if you break the ice off the top of a puddle and kick it across the parking lot, it makes a noise like a rather musical ceramic tile sliding across the same surface. This works best if the ice is dry and about an inch thick. What’s less obvious, but more fascinating, is that as you continue to kick the ice, and pieces chip off it, the sound rises in pitch through wind-chimes, broken glass, and the edge of human hearing. Then the smallish piece that’s left makes about the same noise as a rock.