Showing posts with label Russian Easter Overture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russian Easter Overture. Show all posts
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Passover, a Blood Moon, and a Debt
Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Passover, a Blood Moon, and a Debt
On Passover, we will see a (gasp) Blood Moon in the sky, and so the world is coming to an end again. On the ‘net there’s a picture of a real big Blood Moon behind the Moscow Kremlin, so it must be so.
Yes, the End Times are back, according to Reverend 1-800-501C3 on the Orwellian telescreen, so send him money. The End Times are always hanging around, leeching onto you like that fellow who approaches you in the parking lot and tells you he ran out of gas on his way to his mother’s funeral in Waco. The next time you see him he’s taking his child (cue the sad child who knows darned well to keep his mouth shut or else) to the hospital in Houston and the car’s transmission went out, and brother, can you spare a twenty God bless you sir?
The year 1999 was an especially profitable season for End Times, what with mysterious glowing chupacabras in the sky spelling out 999 (which is even worse than 666) in Babylonian hieroglyphics, coded signals from Fred Phelps’ basement, and crudely-illustrated Jack Chick pamphlets telling you that you’re going to (Newark) anyway, so don’t even bother trying.
Hey, why read the Bible when you’ve got Jack Chick, eh?
When the sun rose on 1 January 2000, some folks climbed down from their roofs, consulted The Voices, whapped themselves on the forehead (“Wow, I could have had a Julian calendar!”), and said, “Oh, wait – we miscalculated. 2000 is the end of the millennium, so, like, the end of the world is coming next year. Really!”
Anyway, on the ‘net this week somebody said that somebody said that somebody else said that we’ve got a tetrad coming. Whatever a tetrad is. And so with the tetrad comes the End Times, and this time – or end time - they really mean it, okay?
And yet – and yet Easter will come again this year. The Altar will be set right after the grim Triduum, and on Sunday morning spring flowers and morning sunlight will supplant the darkness of Good Friday. Local ministers and priests (Chaucer’s “parsouns”) will tell again a 2,000-year-old story because they look to God, not to Hi-Def images of Reverend 1-800-501C3, for the truth.
After the liturgy there will be merriment, dinner on the grounds (which really isn’t on the grounds, but in the hall), and an easter-egg hunt (which really is on the grounds, unless there is rain, in which case it will be in the hall).
The nice man who mows the church lawns will mutter for months (for this now is effectively a part of the liturgical calendar) about the lawnmower blades finding undiscovered plastic eggs and, worse, real eggs in an advanced state of malodorous decay.
But it’s all told much better in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture (except for the undiscovered eggs ripening through Ordinary Time), the sequence from Good Friday through Holy Saturday to Easter morning, followed by a happy feast.
In the evening we can again watch Charlton Heston lead the children of Israel out of the brickpits and into the desert, still fascinated even though we know how it ends. Great stories are like that.
Easter – or Pascha, if you prefer - beats superstition, including the laughable blood moon, all hollow. And you don’t have to send money to anyone – in every way, the debt has been paid.
-30-
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Russian Easter Overture
Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Russian Easter Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral piece “Russian Easter Overture” premiered during Christmas of 1888. This is not necessarily an irony since, as the old saying goes, there is no Easter without Christmas and no Christmas without Easter.
REO lasts about as long as “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” that once well-known whine about the local and the temporary, but is a sound poem that celebrates the universal and the transcendent. REO begins very solemnly with echoes of Russian Orthodox hymnology as an image of the grimness of Holy Saturday: Jesus has been murdered and all is darkness and waiting. The music then transitions to the glory of the Resurrection on Easter morning, and finally in the third part is light and frivolous, symbolizing the innocent fun of feasting and merriment that is fitting and proper in its time and place.
The progression of the piece, then, is mourning, joy, and secular delight, all sanctioned by God.
But here’s a problem: to understand the Russian Easter Overture in any of its parts one would have to know more about the Easter than plastic Easter eggs made by slaves in China toiling under their argus-eyed masters.
This is not to deny that Easter eggs should be hunted, even though whole forests have been leveled by Republican (no doubt) chainsaws so that bleak, humorless scriveners sourcing Jack Chick comics could write newspaper articles (their number is legion) denouncing Easter eggs as pagan.
Well, they probably are.
And so are Christmas trees. And, come to think of it, marriage pre-dates Christianity too.
But as St. Teresa of Avila said, there is a time for penance and there is a time for partridge, the partridge part meaning a good, merry meal with lots of jokes and laughter.
I am sorry that I can’t remember anything else St. Teresa said; I should have paid better attention in Sunday school.
Our parents taught us that dessert comes after the meat-and-potatoes. First we eat a good, solid, no-nonsense meal so that we may enjoy good health, and then, if we have been good, we are permitted ice cream or cake. Easter is like that, and so is Christmas. First comes the sense, and then comes the nonsense, and both are good in their proper sequence.
One reads of such events as community Easter egg hunts being held not after Easter morning, but before, and even on Good Friday, and that is teaching our children that they may gorge themselves on candy and not bother with the meat and vegetables at all.
And speaking of vegetables, you may have noticed that most of the secular calendars and even some Christian ones have been bullied this year into recognizing next Friday as Earth Day, which is silly at best. On this planet every day is an earth day, just as on Venus every day is a venusian day. C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant A Preface to Paradise Lost, observes that in Milton’s brilliant poem Adam and Eve, who became too proud to bow to God, ended up humbling themselves before a tree, a really large vegetable. Enviros have never met any created life form, including an amoeba or paramecium, to which they are unwilling to degrade themselves and sacrifice other humans.
Rimsky-Korsakov remembered what he was taught in Sunday school, and so did not write the “Russian Earth Day Overture.”
-30-
Mhall46184@aol.com
Russian Easter Overture
Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral piece “Russian Easter Overture” premiered during Christmas of 1888. This is not necessarily an irony since, as the old saying goes, there is no Easter without Christmas and no Christmas without Easter.
REO lasts about as long as “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie,” that once well-known whine about the local and the temporary, but is a sound poem that celebrates the universal and the transcendent. REO begins very solemnly with echoes of Russian Orthodox hymnology as an image of the grimness of Holy Saturday: Jesus has been murdered and all is darkness and waiting. The music then transitions to the glory of the Resurrection on Easter morning, and finally in the third part is light and frivolous, symbolizing the innocent fun of feasting and merriment that is fitting and proper in its time and place.
The progression of the piece, then, is mourning, joy, and secular delight, all sanctioned by God.
But here’s a problem: to understand the Russian Easter Overture in any of its parts one would have to know more about the Easter than plastic Easter eggs made by slaves in China toiling under their argus-eyed masters.
This is not to deny that Easter eggs should be hunted, even though whole forests have been leveled by Republican (no doubt) chainsaws so that bleak, humorless scriveners sourcing Jack Chick comics could write newspaper articles (their number is legion) denouncing Easter eggs as pagan.
Well, they probably are.
And so are Christmas trees. And, come to think of it, marriage pre-dates Christianity too.
But as St. Teresa of Avila said, there is a time for penance and there is a time for partridge, the partridge part meaning a good, merry meal with lots of jokes and laughter.
I am sorry that I can’t remember anything else St. Teresa said; I should have paid better attention in Sunday school.
Our parents taught us that dessert comes after the meat-and-potatoes. First we eat a good, solid, no-nonsense meal so that we may enjoy good health, and then, if we have been good, we are permitted ice cream or cake. Easter is like that, and so is Christmas. First comes the sense, and then comes the nonsense, and both are good in their proper sequence.
One reads of such events as community Easter egg hunts being held not after Easter morning, but before, and even on Good Friday, and that is teaching our children that they may gorge themselves on candy and not bother with the meat and vegetables at all.
And speaking of vegetables, you may have noticed that most of the secular calendars and even some Christian ones have been bullied this year into recognizing next Friday as Earth Day, which is silly at best. On this planet every day is an earth day, just as on Venus every day is a venusian day. C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant A Preface to Paradise Lost, observes that in Milton’s brilliant poem Adam and Eve, who became too proud to bow to God, ended up humbling themselves before a tree, a really large vegetable. Enviros have never met any created life form, including an amoeba or paramecium, to which they are unwilling to degrade themselves and sacrifice other humans.
Rimsky-Korsakov remembered what he was taught in Sunday school, and so did not write the “Russian Earth Day Overture.”
-30-
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