“Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart” performed by the Tapestry Chamber Singers of Ft. Loudon, Penn.
“Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart” is a moving prayer that I hope hasn’t been completely forgotten by today’s church members. It was written by Catholic minister George Croly (1780-1860) of Dublin, Ireland.
This recording skips the fourth verse given here, which is the most challenging verse of the five. It asks the Lord for the grace to put ourselves aside and trust Him even though he doesn’t respond as we want Him to.
1 Spirit of God, descend upon my heart; Wean it from earth, through all its pulses move; Stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art, and make me love thee as I ought to love.
2 I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies, no sudden rending of the veil of clay, no angel visitant, no op’ning skies; but take the dimness of my soul away.
3 Hast thou not bid us love thee, God and King? All, all thine own, soul, heart, and strength and mind. I see the cross– there teach my heart to cling: O let me seek thee, and O let me find.
4 Teach me to feel that thou art always nigh; Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear, to check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh; teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.
5 Teach me to love thee as thine angels love, one holy passion filling all my frame: the baptism of the heav’n-descended dove, my heart an altar, and thy love the flame.
Amazon’s Middle Earth series, The Rings of Power, will begin September 1 and run into October. I don’t know much about it, but I hope to enjoy it if we still have a Prime membership (which seems to come and go regularly of late).
Because of the series, I intend to read The Silmarillion soon. I know I read about half of it before, but I don’t remember where I stopped. One of the chapters, perhaps thirteen, dragged on about geography about as warmly as a fifth-grade social studies text. I aim to push past those parts and enjoy the stories beyond them.
I don’t know if I will attempt to blog about the series if I’m able to watch it near the release days. I probably wouldn’t have enough thoughts to share.
Notes from Underground, Poor Folk, and The Brothers Karamazov are among the must-reads. The Double and The Gambler are on the list for reading after the must-reads. Uncle’s Dream and The Permanent Husband are only for the most dedicated readers.
“I won’t be exaggerating,” she says, “when I say [The Brothers Karamazov] brought me back from abyss. It might not work the same way [for you as] it did for me, but there is an obvious need for more people to read and understand the beautiful intricacies of life and its fallacies, to love life in its entirety.”
Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
Social Media: “How teens use social media often drives how everyone uses social media.” YouTube is the most-used social media platform and the second most-used search engine.
For Love of a Hero: Mo Ghille Mear (My Gallant Hero), performed by The Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin.
Photo: March Mobil Gas, Mount Clemens, Michigan. 1986. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Max Strong works as a baker in a diner in the small town of Essex (which I learned, about half way through the story, is in Minnesota). That’s not his real name, though. He’s in the federal witness protection program. He has a history in organized crime that’s not clearly explicated. But he’s trying to make a fresh start, to keep his nose clean. He likes the place and the people. That’s the setup for the thriller, Shaking the Tree.
One of the people Max likes is his roommate Stevie, an inveterate runner who is nearly beheaded by a briefcase falling from the sky, one morning out in a country road. When he gets the case open, he finds it contains millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, a man’s body is found impaled on an apple tree in a farmer’s orchard.
Suddenly a shady DEA agent and a Russian hit team show up in town. The local sheriff, who’s involved in cooking meth, is trying to figure a way to keep the heat off his operation while locating the missing money for himself. He will lie, bully, torture or kill to make his pile and get out of this town.
Innocent people are going to die. And that will make Max Strong mad.
There was a lot about Shaking the Tree that intrigued me. The story was complex, and the shifting points of view through which it was told were well-realized.
But I found the book hard to like. It was grim, grim, grim. Noir-ish in the sense that sin is punished brutally. It reminded me of No Country for Old Men. I didn’t like Max Strong well enough to care about reading the next book.
There are odd, obscure references to the Bible through the story, but I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of them.
Cautions for language, violence, and mature themes.
I finally got around to watching Chris Pratt’s critically panned but commercially popular miniseries, The Terminal List, on Amazon Prime. In case you’re even slower on the uptake than I am, I’ll review it here.
James Reece (Pratt) is a Navy Seal lieutenant whose platoon is cornered and nearly wiped out in a botched operation. Returning home, he learns that the other survivor has been killed, and an attempt is made on his own life. At the same time, he starts noticing problems with his memory – blank spots and certain recollections of things that apparently never happened.
As he grows increasingly frightened of threats to his family, he starts to believe he’s the object of a conspiracy – but can he even trust his own thinking?
The Terminal List is violent and loud and full of dramatic tension and pathos. Critics have panned it, but the audience loved it, and I agree with the audience. I strongly suspect the critics reacted to Chris Pratt’s politics rather than to the story itself. Government conspiracy stories have been common since the 70s, after all, and many have come from filmmakers on the left. What the production lacks, I think, is the obligatory sermons about Woke doctrines that are expected in today’s productions.
I was expecting the final surprise, I must admit, simply based on the process of elimination.
Recommended, for adults with high tolerances for violent scenes and language you’d expect from the military.
When you enter Gatorland, the first wildlife you see is—Spoiler Alert—alligators. A buttload of alligators, dozens and dozens of them on wooden platforms surrounded by water. They are sprawled haphazardly, often on top of each other, as if they’re having a wild reptile orgy, except that they are not moving. Some of them look like they have not moved since the Reagan administration. It’s like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but with alligators.
I spent 11 years of my own life in Florida, so I feel a certain ownership in the place. Thus I share with Dave Barry the slight pang that comes when I read yet another story about “Florida Man,” the archetypal doofus who does something magnificently stupid and self-destructive in the sun. In his book, Best. State. Ever., Barry provides both an apologia for, and an appreciation of, the state where he’s made his home. And, oh yes, it’s also very funny.
Most of the “Florida Men” you read about, Barry notes, actually come from someplace else, and it’s Florida’s misfortune that having water on three sides makes it difficult for them to find their way out. But that doesn’t alter the fact that strange things do go on in Florida. He proceeds to provide “A Brief History of Florida” and then to report on personal visits to a series of tourist sites that I, though I lived there a while, never got around to myself:
The Skunk Ape [Research Center]
Weeki Wachee and Spongeorama
Cassadaga
The Villages
Gatorland
Lock & Load Miami
LIV (a Miami nightclub that was hot at the time), and
Key West.
The book is, as mentioned, very funny, featuring Barry’s signature style of strategic exaggeration. It might have been funnier if it were crueler, but Barry seems to genuinely like the people he meets, and he has no intention of humiliating them.
The most striking part of the book, for this reader, was the description of The Villages, a group of large, planned communities for the elderly. All the houses look alike, and all the people seem to be alike too – they live for golf and early bird specials, and they dance – a lot – like nobody’s watching. It almost comes out sounding like a pleasant gulag, where dying people go to deny their mortality.
Kind of the perfect finale for Baby Boomers, when you think about it.
Best. State. Ever. is a very funny book. Cautions for language, drugs and mature themes.
Heist movies have many examples of criminals slipping into a crowd and becoming essentially invisible. Either there are too many similarly looking people to spot the ones the cops want or there are too many people period. Without an identifier of some kind, the criminals have gotten away without consequences, at least for the moment.
In H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, a gifted chemist works out his theory for making things invisible. Recklessly, he applies his experiment to his own body and becomes an inhuman and invisible man.
His glassy essence, like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep.
“Measure for Measure” Act 2, scene 2
When the invisible man tells his own story, you see his arrogance runs deep. He attempts to live without any social obligations, taking food or clothing for himself without payment, assuming these things would simply disappear like he has. He quickly learns it won’t work that way, because he isn’t an incorporeal ghost; he’s a naked man that no one can see. If he weren’t such a hot-tempered fool, he might have worked more methodically and converted a set of clothes into invisibility before converting himself.
After a few months of experimental living as an invisible man, the chemist wants to terrorize people. He wants to pursue his scientific interests without having to earn anyone’s favor or deal with normal social pressures. He probably blames his father, his old boss, and all of his research colleagues for his jaded view of the world, but I think Wells may intend these people to represent everyone. There are no contrasting noble characters in this story. Even the chemist’s closest friend may have been just as self-seeking as everyone else.
Wells provokes readers to ask what anyone would do if he or she could be invisible, or to put it another way, what would you do if there were no consequences to pay? Would you plagiarize? Steal someone’s research? Slander someone’s character to get rid of them?
I continue to follow Dennis Carstens’ Minneapolis-located Marc Kadella series of legal mysteries. I also continue a kind of love/hate relationship with the books. The writing doesn’t impress me a lot, but the storytelling is good, and I generally like the characters.
Marc Kadella, as you may recall, is a Minneapolis attorney. He is now engaged to Maddy Rivers, the uber-hot private detective. In Fortuitous Justice, we pick up several plot threads, which had appeared to be tied up, from the previous book, Twisted Justice. That book involved a group of former Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders who’d formed a prostitution ring, and who found themselves way out of their depth when they became a security risk to some of the richest – and most ruthless – movers and shakers in Minnesota politics (which means, in case you’re not familiar with my state, Democrats. It’s not stated in so many words in the book, but that’s the way it is).
At the end of Twisted Justice, Burt Chayson, a local political fixer who knew too much, was reported dead, an apparent suicide. But now the police say murder, and they have their eyes on one of the Housewife Hookers, Hope Slade, the last person seen with him. Hope had enough on her plate already with prostitution charges and public humiliation. Her husband has left her. Now she’s facing Murder One. She goes to Marc Kadella for defense.
The investigation will be complicated, really scary hired guns will come to town to shut people’s mouths, and the final resolution will be a surprise.
As a mystery, I thought Fortuitous Justice was pretty good. I was annoyed by too many typos (a common problem these days, alas), and by Carstens’ habit of inserting paragraph breaks at unexpected places in the midst of chunks of dialogue, leaving the reader wondering who’s talking now.
I was also peeved when one unpleasant character was identified as a member of the “far right religious bunch.” That peeve turned to utter confusion as the character was later identified as a Democrat. (Insert image of Leonard Nimoy here, with one eyebrow cocked: “Highly illogical.”) Honestly, I think the author just lost track.
Not a great book, Fortuitous Justice was entertaining and fun. Cautions for language and mature themes.
(Religion News Service:) Frederick Buechner was asked on numerous occasions how he would sum up everything he had preached and written in both his fiction and nonfiction.
The answer, he said, was simply this: “Listen to your life.”
That theme was constant across more than six decades in his career as a “writer’s writer” and “minister’s minister” — an ordained evangelist in the Presbyterian Church (USA) who inspired Christians across conservative and progressive divides with his books and sermons.
Buechner died peacefully in his sleep on Monday (Aug. 15) at age 96, according to his family.
A part of the encampment at the Crow Wing Viking Festival. My tent is the one with the red frame, behind the guy with the white tee-shirt at the picnic table.
Good weekend. Brainerd, Minnesota is only a 2-hour drive from my home, so road time wasn’t bad. The weather wasn’t postcard perfect, but when you’re a medieval reenactor, cool temperatures and cloudy skies are just what the barber-surgeon ordered. A high in the 70s is rare in Minnesota in August, and we appreciated it. I had a very nice host with a lovely home, who made me welcome and grilled hamburgers. And I sold almost all the books I brought.
This was, I think, the third Crow Wing Viking Festival. It was the second held at the Crow Wing County Fairgrounds. I drove to the fairground site Friday night, and the young people helped me unload my tent and set it up, as some of them were planning to sleep in it. Kids these days seem to think that sort of thing is fun. Considerate man that I am, I brought a green plastic tarp for them to use as a ground sheet, at no additional charge.
Saturday morning we all set up and the public started showing up. Attendance was steady through most of the day. When I’d sold out my whole stock of Viking Legacy, I looked at the time and found it was only 1:30 p.m. I was sure it had been longer, not because I was bored, but because I’d been busy. Lots of people had questions, and the lucky ones came to me with them. Not long after, I sold out the last of my The Year of the Warrior too. It all wrapped up at 4:00 p.m.
The saddest thing, for me, was some people (whom I will not describe in detail) who came as spectators in Viking costume, hoping to fit in. Some had clearly spent serious money assembling their kits, but the costumes were purely out of their imaginations. I think they were hoping for admiration and cries of “Welcome, brother!” They were disappointed, I expect.
Here’s a tip: If you want to be a reenactor, join a group first, and learn their guidelines. Get advice. Unless you’re already a historian.
There were battles, enjoyed by enthusiastic crowds.
There were also craftspeople and vendors. Here, for instance, is a guy making wooden bowls with a pole lathe.
Thanks to all who participated in the event. I call it a success, which ought to settle the matter.
Courtesy of our friend, Dale Nelson, here’s a video of poet/priest Malcolm Guite (whose taste in clothing seems unnervingly similar to my own), reading some of C. S. Lewis’s poetry in Lewis’s very study, in his home — the Kilns, Headington Quarry, Oxford.
