Raise Thou our hopes of endless light

As with rosy steps the morn,
Advancing, drives the shades of night,
So from virtuous toil well-borne,
Raise Thou our hopes of endless light.
Triumphant saviour, Lord of day,
Thou art the life, the light, the way!

Organists: the best people ever

Our church secretary called twelve organists last week. A church up the road from us has been without accompaniment for over a year. And I have to add fifteen years of not practicing to the greatest regrets of my life. I'm a dang idiot. Beloved church, I am sorry.

Organists and pianists of the world, I salute you and respect you and thank you, thank you, thank you. Every hour of your practice is paid back individually to each person who benefits from your one hour of playing each week. Blessed are we, because you worked hard. We're not worthy.

(And thanks also to the wife of the organist who sits without him, and the friends of the organist who sit with her kids.)

Music, recommended: Learn By Heart Bible Songs

I grew up listening to GT and the Halo Express on these weird plastic rectangles. Those little ditties had some staying power, and I have been grateful all my life for the way they implanted the Word in my brain. But I hesitated to pick them up for our kids because the Scripture memory songs are interspliced with narrative featuring goofy angels and Evangelical piety. I recently found that CPH has solved the problem for me with the Learn By Heart Bible Songs CD ($9.99) and Songbook (on sale for $14!). We've added it to our bedtime music repertoire. There are lots of good verses on there (including many of my GT favorites), and every song includes the reference. The singing is of the "Maranatha genetically-spliced" variety, which wears on the brain, but that's my only complaint. This would be a good resource for Sunday School or VBS, too.

More for the CSPP playlist

Girl, you're already a picture of my will

Do you ever find yourself suddenly awake and wondering how on earth this life happened to you? Good Old War knows your husband. He helped them write this song. And now you know.

Contemporary philosophers on cultural dress

I should have known Flight of the Conchords could handle the issue addressed a few posts south far better than I.

Sycophant rock

Listen, girls (the music starts @ 2:30, if you'd like to skip the blah, blah, blah).



Theme song material, that. ;D

PS -- sorry about The View. :P It was the only full recording I could find of this song.

Songbook and CD, violently recommended: Sing the Faith

I harbor a bit of hostility about all the junk songs from my youth taking up space in my long term memory. What I wouldn't give for that mental real estate to house something more substantive than tune by Fisher Price, lyrics by Keebler songs about how God made wrinkly rhinos and is a peach of a Savior. So I'm very particular about the music we listen to at home, and the children's music our church uses.

I was impressed when our kids started bringing home CDs from CPH's Growing in Christ Sunday School curriculum which included hymns, liturgy, and Scripture and catechism memory songs. I could do without the fluff Jesus-ditty section the CDs also include, and some hymns are more equal than others, but they're good overall. (RM, I have some more for you since we're now getting them in triplicate.)

Even better, you can get a CD of all the Small Catechism songs from those CDs--the entire Small Catechism set to music (Gauntlets, please tell your middle miss to watch her mailbox). Best of all, here's the music for you to play yourself. I'm planning on using selections from this along with some hymns for our VBS this year. I'd like to personally thank Cantor Magness for this whole project, which is great, and especially for making some of it easy enough that even a repentant piano dropout like myself, now consigned to the humiliating ranks of musical dilettantism, can plunk through a few songs without too much difficulty and may become somewhat serviceable with practice. I am definitely going to be purchasing more copies of both for family, friends, godchildren, and church. You should too!

Opera for your Friday

German and English from here. Sorry for the French subtitles, but this is the best one and you deserve the best.

Papageno
Klinget, Glökkchen, klinget! Bringt mein Weibchen her,
Bringt sie her! Mein Mädchen her! Mein Weibchen her!

Ring, little bells, ring! Bring my little wife here,
Bring her here! My maiden here, my little wife here!

3 Spirits
Nun, Papageno, sich dich um!
Now, Papageno, look around you!

Papageno und Papagena
Pa-pa-pa, pa-pa-pa-Papageno/Pa-pa-pa-, pa-pa-pa,-Papagena

PAPAGENO
Bist du mir nun ganz ergeben,
Have you now yielded to me?

PAPAGENA
Nun bin ich dir ganz ergeben.
Now I have yielded to you.

PAPAGENO
Nun, so sei mein liebes Weibchen!
Now, then be my dear little wife!

PAPAGENA
Nun, so sei mein Herzenstäubchen,
Now, then be the dove of my heart,

PAPAGENO
Mein liebes Weibchen, mein Herzenstäubchen,
My dear little wife, dove of my heart!

PAPAGENO UND PAPAGENA
Welche Freude wird das sein, Wenn die Gotter uns bedenken
Unsrer Liebe Kinder schenken So liebe kleine Kinderlein, Kinderlein
So liebe kleine Kinderlein.
Erst einen kleinen Papageno
Dann eine kleine Papagena,
Dann wieder einen Papageno
Dann wieder eine Papagena,
Papageno, Papagena, Papageno, Papageno, Papagena, Papageno
Es ist das hochste der Gefuehle,
Wenn viele, vie der pa-pa-pageno(a) Der Eltern Sorgen werden sein.

What joy that will be if the gods think of us, And give us children of our love
Such dear little children, little children, Such dear little children.
First a little Papageno,
Then a little Papagena,
Then again a Papageno,
Then again a Papagena
It is the highest of feelings, if many [of them] to Papageno(a) will be In the care of their parents.

Pop Exegesis

A friend introduced me to the music of Sara Groves awhile back. I’d never heard of her: she’s a Christian “acoustic pop” artist, and neither pop music nor contemporary Christian music gets much airtime around here. But her CDs (at least the two I have, “Station Wagon: Songs for Parents” and “Add to the Beauty”) make for nice housekeeping music from time to time, IMHO. Here’s the title track of “Add to the Beauty”:



(Excerpted):
Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out the best of who we are…
This is grace, an invitation to be beautiful
This is grace, an invitation
Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces
Calling out our best
And I want to add to the beauty
I want to shine with the light
That’s burning up inside.

What I love about this song, aside from its rather poetic definition of grace, is how I can use it for my own purposes to exegete a verse that gets so many people bent out of shape:

Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control. (1 Timothy 2:15)

[Disclaimer: To the best of my knowledge, Groves is neither C nor PP (though to date, she is the mother of 3). Nor does she actually mention the verse in question. So all conclusions drawn here are my own, not necessarily those of the artist, her label, etc., etc.]

Hermeneutic Possibility A: The verse describes how wives/mothers manifest the saving grace that they have received as they persevere in their vocation as Godly wives/mothers. And indeed, we at CSPP find grace, redemption even, in what seems to the rest of the world to be the smallest and strangest of places: the secret world of the womb; the murmur of a nursing newborn. The orderly chaos of a well-used kitchen, the freshness of laundry just off the line. The jumble of shoes in the back hall and the wad of washcloths dripping in the tub. Rocking chairs at midnight; pace-worn floors at dawn. The curve of infant cheeks; the plump competence of toddler fingers; the world through preschool eyes…

Hermeneutic Possibility B: The verse can/should be translated/understood as “she will be saved through THE childbearing” (or so I’ve been told…I’m no Greek scholar). In the strange places of Nazareth and Golgatha, in the small spaces of the blessed Virgin’s womb and the beams of a cross, salvation comes to women, as to all humans.

[Hermeneutic Possibility C: If you’ve dismissed this verse as a typically chauvinistic Pauline statement mandating some sort of evil subjugation of women, or think it means that women who don’t have kids won’t be saved, you’re probably not even reading this blog, or are determined to misread it, so we shall summarily disregard you.]

Now, we could quibble the implications of “calling out the best of who we are” vs. drowning the Old Adam by daily contrition and repentance. But this is True: in unexpected places and overlooked spaces, we receive grace, an invitation to be beautiful—to be conformed increasingly to the startling loveliness of our Lord’s own image.

More for the CSPP soundtrack

Ps. 16:6 The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

(Submitted by Sane Self)

This is the song that never ends

Sometimes I have to resort to my secret weapon--badly made-up song lyrics set to much despised tunes--to convey important points around here. For instance:

Sing to tune for The Song That Never Ends

I have a family that will not clean up its own mess!
I'm not 100% why, but I think I can guess:
They do not bother to clean up because they know that I
Will get to it eventually, though it may make me cry.

Repeat as long as necessary. Results guaranteed.

Music for the Play-Doh hour

Some selections for the family with a mom who loves her kids enough to spend every waking moment with them (and quite a few sleeping ones), but not enough to listen to Baby Beluga.

1. Nothing new here, but this particular CD has Peter and the Wolf, Carnival of Animals, and A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, so I give it a Good Value award.

2. We have two so far from the Classical Kids series and like them both. The Bach one has a nice, if truncated, Wir Eilen in English. I'm not crazy for the Papagena/Papageno translation on Mozart's Magic Fantasy, but that's my only objection (the Queen of the Night's hellish wrath is toned down for the young'uns).

3. The productions in the An Introduction to the Classics series aren't as imaginative as Classical Kids. They just go through the lives of the composers, but they are still engaging and have lots of good music, and the kids like the one we have. Papa Haydn was a funny dude; who knew? Best of all, they are crazy cheap--$2.98 each!

And unrecommended, IMHO, is the Sing Along Symphony series. I don't want stupid words to plague me all of my days when I hear these timeless masterpieces (and again, my ability to tolerate the music is the most important thing here). I'm confident the kids will be able to put names to compositions later in life without gimmicks.

A Song for Rebekah

Well, it's just one line from a song. And I'm not clever enough to have written the lyrics myself, like she did awhile back. Nonetheless, I've found this line from Over the Rhine's "Lookin' Forward" stuck on repeat in my head lately....

"I'm lookin' forward to lookin' back"

Someday, we too will be among those people tellin' the youngsters struggling with their kids to "enjoy every minute, these are the best days of your life." (Really? Will we really? Will we too be afflicted--perhaps blessed--with selective amnesia? Well, at least we'll have some great moments to look back on, and (DV) a passel of grandchildren to share them with...)

Don't have a clip of this song, but if you want to hear "Drunkard's Prayer" (the title track from the same album), go here (Album, recommended.)

A song for Reb. Mary

I found this cheery little ditty running through my head the night before #4 was induced and did my best to distract myself from panic during the drive to the hospital by putting CSPP words to it. I hereby dedicate it to my friend and yours, Reb Mary.

Just before the battle, Mother,
We are thinking most of you
While in cyberspace we're watching
With your baby coming due
Comrades brave are round you blogging
Filled with thoughts of home and God
For well we know that on the morrow
You may have a pea ex-pod.

And again with the footprints

I can't think of anyone more likely to appreciate the poignance of this than the parent of a 15-21 month old . . . which, come to think of it, Bach may well have been when he wrote it. Talk about CSPP! Anyway, translation included for anyone whose German is as nonexistent as mine.

Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten
O Jesu, o Meister, zu helfen du zir.
Du suchest die Kranken und Irrenden treulich.
Ach! höre, wie die Stimme erheben, um Hülfe zu bitten.
Es sei uns dein gnädiges Antlitz erfreulich.

We hasten with eager yet faltering footsteps,
O Jesus, O Master, for help unto Thee.
Thou faithfully seekest the ill and the erring.
Ah, hear us, we pray. Our voices exalt Thee, for succor we pray Thee.
Now grant us Thy gracious and merciful favor.