“Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self contained whole. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man.”
J Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (via sonsofscotland)I-5 Bridge Collapse Over Skagit River in Washington Sends Cars, People Into Water
This is where I go to work every day. I drove over this bridge at 5:15 tonight.
“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch.
Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.
You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.
If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.
Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference.
Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary.
” Julien Smith (via ceedling)
(Source: perfectthewayyouarerightnow)
Reblog if you are in a secondhand fandom.
Secondhand Fandom: When you do not actually watch/read/are really interested in said fandom or object of the fandom, but you know enough about it that you can hold an intelligent and involved conversation with someone in the fandom.
It’s like dying from lung cancer because you live with a chain smoker, but you yourself have never touched a cigarette in your life.
that is so painfully accurrate
My current top secondary fandoms are Elementary, Jennifer Lawrence being hilarious and that girl from Downton Abbey making fun of a guy named Jon Snow.
I have so many.
Alec is all grey now.
“116. The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services.” - Sacrosanctum Concilum, Vatican II.
Why do you think that “contemporary” music (which is a very broad term) is necessarily less Mass-appropriate? While I agree that chant is beautiful and definitely “suited to the liturgy”, that doesn’t mean that it’s the only music we should use. (And neither does the cartoonist, or he/she wouldn’t have drawn an organ.) We should keep in mind that all music was contemporary at one point, and furthermore, a lot of music that’s fine in most conservative churches today was considered scandalous at the time it came out. I think if a contemporary song truly helps the congregation to worship better, then that’s reason enough to use it.
It’s not “contemporary” (as opposed to “old”) that I criticize (and I think it’s clear to most people that “contemporary music” is a recognizable genre of music used in church, usually having to do with an understanding of worship as musical expression. You know what it means when you see “contemporary service” on a church sign.
Some older music that is played in churches sometimes can also be inappropriate (Bach’s Mass in B Minor, for instance, is incredibly beautiful and spiritually meaningful, but probably inappropriate for use in an actual Mass). That said, I do single out “contemporary music” for criticism. It comes down to what you said: does it “help the congregation to worship better”? And making that judgment depends on a theology of worship. I’ll share the two points that matter the most to me.
1. (Nearly all) contemporary music was not made for and with the liturgy. The Roman rite has its own repertoire of songs, texts, and tonalities that were built up over time to fit together as a whole. For instance, there’s a proscribed text called the Introit that goes together with the Mass propers for each day. We’re supposed to sing/chant it at the beginning of Mass, but instead we usually sing some other hymn (if we’re lucky) or worship song (if we’re not) that vaguely has to do with whatever day or feast it is — and is probably one of the same ten or twenty songs that we sing over and over. Some of these songs might even come from a completely foreign theological and liturgical tradition (Protestantism). This is supposed to make our participation at Mass more genuine, but I’m not sure that it does. I think it impoverishes it in a real way. It very well may not be “helping us worship” in any way particular to the worship we should be doing at Mass.
2. Contemporary worship music comes out of a musical culture of “expression.” What I mean by that is, it comes out of a musical tradition from the late 20th century where the artist’s expression of an interior feeling is seen as the only basis for the value of the music created and performed. We intuitively know this. It’s the reason “old music” is seen as fuddy-duddy and meaningless — because old music was framed as something different. (Music as expression has a much older history than the late 20th century, including its use in church, but it wasn’t conflated with “the music of the people” or whatever. Ordinary people’s music was still seen as something drawn from a larger framework: biblical texts, folk songs, etc; it wasn’t expressive.) I think the “expressive” mode, when it’s allowed to take over our understanding of what worship is, breaks down a healthy practice of ritual and actually makes us worse at worship.
I was raised in evangelical Christianity, where it wasn’t even considered that worship could or should be anything other than expressive. When I come across Catholics who have tried to co-opt the musical tradition of Protestantism (and late 20th c. evangelicalism) for Catholic worship, I’m really depressed. There’s a reason to the way we worship. I think there can be a place for expressive and contemporary music among Catholics, but probably not in our liturgies.
Mad Men this week!!
(Source: yourburden)
