Posted by Eric (April 25, 2006 at 2:29 pm)
Today, the Feast of St. Mark, I cantored solo for only the second time at St. George Church in Aurora. The first time was last week, when the regular cantor called me while I was driving to the Church to say he wouldn’t be there.
I tripped up fewer times today than last week. My biggest speedbump today was that I went astray in the middle of the Exaltation (“The angel declared unto her . . .”), having hit the wrong interval somewhere. I don’t think it sounded bad—I didn’t slip into another key or really depart from the character of the piece, but it took me a while to find my place again.
[Continue reading this entry »]
Posted by Eric (April 17, 2006 at 2:24 pm)
I tuned into Scrappleface this morning, right after Bright Monday Matins and Divine Liturgy, to discover a lamentable (and somewhat ambiguous) satire of Pope Benedict XVI. Scrappleface author Scott Ott described a scene in which Benedict XVI took off his golden vestments and, in the style of a Protestant pastor, offered a sort of “heart felt” sermon in which he called himself a sinner and “regular Joe,” while the crowds in St. Peter’s Square rapidly dispersed, apparently interested only in “pomp and circumstance,” not the person of Christ.
[Continue reading this entry »]
Posted by Eric (April 11, 2006 at 12:06 pm)
“. . . because without beer, things do not seem to go as well.”
—Brother Epp, Kansas, 1902
This morning I kegged the second of two batches of beer I brewed a couple weeks ago. I had hoped at that time to do some “brew blogging,” but a series of brew-day crises made that impossible. (The beer pictured here is from my last beer, brewed for Thanksgiving 2004. I seem to have lost my notes for that beer; apparently it was an American ale—look at that thick, rich head!)
[Continue reading this entry »]
Posted by Eric (April 7, 2006 at 3:27 pm)
Here is pictured one of the towers of Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago, a sight I cannot behold without some feeling of sorrow.
I took this picture a couple of weeks ago when I happened to be passing through the Chicago neighborhood that is home to several Eastern Christian churches. Only a few blocks away from this church, which is the cathedral church of the Diocese of the Midwest of the Orthodox Church in America, is St. Nicholas Church, the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Same liturgy, same spirituality, two Cathedrals
[Continue reading this entry »]
Posted by Eric (April 4, 2006 at 3:54 pm)
Twice this past weekend I caught the end of a segment on the public radio program This American Life which was apparently some kind of retelling of the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. I happened to tune in right at “the Fall”—an appropriate moment here in the thick of Great Lent.
The piece, what I heard of it, sounded irreverent, even somewhat mocking, but it was interesting nonetheless, especially lines like this one, where Adam is reminiscing about the Garden long after the banishment:
“When you ate the fruit in Eden, it was like eating God,†he would say, “and God was delicious. When you wanted him, you just grabbed him.†Now when he ate fruit, he could only taste what was not there.
[Continue reading this entry »]
