the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it

This is my favorite Christmas hymn, both for the chant and for the text. It sums everything up so beautifully.

Of the Father’s love begotten

Ere the world began to be

He is Alpha and Omega

He the source, the ending he

Of the things that are, that have been

And that future years shall see

Evermore and evermore

_____

Oh, that birth forever blessed

When the virgin, full of grace

By the Holy Ghost conceiving

bore the Savior of our race

And the babe, the world’s redeemer

First revealed his sacred face

Evermore and evermore

______

This is he whom seers in old time

Chanted of with one accord

Whom the voices of the prophets

Promised in their faithful word

Now he shines, the long expected

Let creation praise its Lord

Evermore and evermore

_____

Let the heights of heav’n adore him

Angel hosts, his praises sing

Pow’rs, dominions, bow before him

And extol our God and King

Let no tongue on earth be silent

Ev’ry voice in concert ring

Evermore and evermore

—Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius—

east coast/west coast

While my brother is living it up in Istanbul for Christmas (Hagia Sophia, people! Envy, lots of it…), I am living a decidedly quieter life in the cool and sometimes rainy surroundings of Tempe, AZ.  Because of church services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I’ve decided to stick around here for the festivities, after which I will depart to cold, cold Pittsburgh Pennsylvania to join Brian for a few days…I’m looking forward to wearing winter hats and scarves and gloves. Then we’re both flying back to the west coast  where we’ll spend a few short days in the Bay Area at New Years with my parents. Quite the whirlwind trip, but schoolteachers don’t get very many days off at the holidays…not like us lazy graduate student types. :-)

guten tag!

I promise this blog won’t turn into entries of my favorite youtube videos. However, I couldn’t pass this one up. Ha!

-LY

I never saw The Electric Company when I was a kid, but the humor of this clip probably would have been lost on me at that age anyway.

fish out of water

I’m listening to Chanticleer’s Christmas cd “Let it Snow”, released last year.  Some of it is good, and some it is awful.  I mean really awful. And this is saying a lot, because Chanticleer is, hands down, my favorite professional choral group. Better than The King’s Singers.

For goodness’ sakes, when you’re known for beautiful performances of classical choral music, why try to go pop? Why?!?

This is wonderful.

This is terrible. Feliz Navidad? Really?

upside-down turkey and other adventures

In the spirit of American gluttony, I had two Thanksgiving dinners this year—the first as a guest and the second as the cook. Brian’s coworker and her husband invited us over on Thursday for a meal with various other musicians, mostly of the Phoenix Symphony string-player variety. Surprisingly, conversations around the table were mostly NOT about music. I know this is hard to believe, but it’s true.

On Friday, Amy and I cooked a full traditional Thanksgiving meal—stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, roasted asparagus, candied yam souffle, gravy, and…turkey! I’ve cooked a turkey with my mother before, but Amy had never done it before. Alton Brown has an interesting video on foodnetwork.com that we used as a loose guide. Browning the turkey at 500 degrees for half an hour worked well, except that it smoked. A lot. Once we turned the oven down to 350, though, it was fine. However….  Long story short, we put the turkey in upside down and consequently the meat thermometer was in the wrong place and recorded the turkey done much sooner than it was supposed to be. We ended up eating our Thanksgiving meal sans turkey while it finished, right-side-up this time, in the oven. The turkey was fine at the end—moist and quite flavorful—but since I’m not a fan of turkey to begin with, four days of turkey meat and turkey soup was not my thing.  And since my apartment now smells like turkey, I’m doubly over it. No turkey cooking next year for me!

As a nice added bonus to the long weekend, I had a little visitor with me. Borrowing darling Olga Gigi from her mom and dad while they’re out of town is so much better than having a dog of my own because I can give her back, kind of like a grandparent. She was quite Put Out at first that Elise and Jeremy left her, suddenly, in the car with me when I dropped them off at Sky Harbor, but she got over it after a day or so.  She is indeed a darling dog, but even she has her faults. Her chief fault is snoring like a machine gun. It’s amazing how such a little dog can make such a loud noise. But despite this, it was very nice to have a little inquisitive dog following me around all weekend.

Genius is…

…forgetting to buy the pecans for the pecan pie I made this evening. I realized the dearth of pecans in my apartment when I got to the part of the recipe that instructed me to add them, prompting a mad dash to Sunflower before the corn syrup and butter congealed. I am so brilliant.

Surprisingly, the grocery stores are not full of crazy, panicked people buying last-minute ingredients for dinner tomorrow. Perhaps something to do with the economy?

if you can’t say anything tasteful…

Holy cow. I thought Bush’s gaffes were bad, but this guy takes the cake.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7715016.stm

relief

In all honesty, a small part of my Obama-jubilation comes from the fact that come January, I will no longer feel compelled to run out of the room or quickly leap for the tv remote and change the channel when our illustrious current president is speaking. Totally irrelevant to the issues, but this was my gut reaction yesterday when all the networks started announcing that Obama won. A president who can actually speak eloquently in public is sooo important for general morale and my sanity after these last four [edit: eight!] years of cringing.

my dear country

A post about online political talk seems apropos for this day before Election Day. I have to say that I’ve become increasingly frustrated about comments and conversations on various blogs and Facebook pages I’ve read in the last few weeks—mostly those of the conservative evangelical community—which inherently connect the candidate one supports with whether or not one is a good Christian. (Whatever that means, anyway—isn’t the concept of a being a “good Christian” solely based on one’s actions rather theologically ridiculous? Ok, maybe I’m being too Calvinist. But I digress.) I think this attitude is grossly irresponsible. Voting for either Barack Obama or John McCain does not automatically give anyone the right to judge another person’s Christianity. In my case, voting for a candidate who is pro-choice even though I am (with a few exceptions) not in favor of abortion because I believe that there are greater issues at stake does not make me a bad Christian. It makes me a thoughtful Christian.

Last time I checked, being a Christian was about following Christ in love, not adhering to a rigid set of moral standards. So if you’ve thought through the issues (notice this is a plural word) at stake and come to a thoughtful conclusion then I will respect you, even if I vehemently disagree with your choice of a candidate. I will not, however, respect you if your choice is a knee-jerk reaction to how your community feels you should vote. And I will especially disrespect you if you equate someone’s Christianity with how they vote.

God gave us working minds to attempt to understand the complexity of this world he created. There are no perfect solutions to the economical problems we are facing right now, and no perfect compromise for the social and moral conflicts that face our nation. There are, nethertheless, people of God who can think carefully about the issues and vote responsibly, understanding that neither candidate can make the US a perfect nation.