Où mon maître est?
Courtesy of dotmike, I have a copy of "St. Francis in the Americas: A Caribbean Mass." So if you are an anti-piracy agent reading this, keep that under your hat.
The thing about the piece is that it holds a lot of significance for me, personally.
When I first heard/saw the piece, it was my freshman year.
Being in the throes of my fervent "conversion" to Catholicism [I was going through Confirmation, of a sort], I was eager to see what blasphemy this "A Caribbean Mass" was.
Then, I heard it in Slagle Hall and was pretty much shut the hell up.
I was so impressed by the arrangement and the use of the Mass that I went to hear it again, in Sioux Falls. I took my art-school friend, April, who was a fervent Protestant to the performance at the Lutheran church [the one they broadcast out of every Sunday]. She was equally as impressed as I was.
Then, my sophomore year, I became an resident assistant.
In that need to ingratiate myself the way as mandated by Greek houses, but on a more insidious plane with my new-found colleagues, I partook in a late-night bull session about heaven with my former RA Tony and another RA/friend Jenny. For some reason -- perhaps my own self-obsession -- I cannot for the life of me, remember what they had to say about the matter.
But I remember coming out with my own idea of heaven that I'd been formulating for awhile.
I still hold it true, especially after the year I've had, that heaven is a place free from all doubt.
There's a lot you go through in life, make a lot of mistakes, sing a lot of "coulda, shoulda, wouldas" and generally learn and grow from the experiences; but, depending on your ability to "Let Go and Let God," there's still a part of you that either rags on the mistakes or tells that pit in your stomach to twist into high gear at the slightest memory of something you'd rather not remember.
It's the human condition.
I believe in a heaven in the Christian sense that if I earn my way there, I will be in full communion with God.
And one of the things I have always looked forward to is the removal of all doubt. Not just the pacification of that doubt, but the complete and utter absence of it. Where every feeling you have, every thing that you may be able to do and say is in absolute certainty that there is nothing wrong.
To a lesser extent, it's the whole, "I believe that heaven is LOVE and it's tangible, like a BLANKET and Jesus just wraps you up in it!" with a sprinkle of, "Look bitch, I've had a hard life, I need a little more to keep me going."
In heaven, it's not a great city of crystal and gold, but I see it as an abstract feeling with accompanying imagery. It is what you make it, much like hell. Heaven to me is that moment when you realize that not only is God in your heart, but you are in His and it brings you to tears, just trying to grasp a wisp of the feeling in your small, human mind's vain attempt to understand.
I think I got a sneak-preview of that my junior year in college.
Brittany and I went to Mass at the Newman when they were repairing the roof. So it was held in the multi-purpose room, metal folding chairs, bad acoustics and all.
Then, we came to the Agnus Dei part of Mass and as Mike drove the piano into overdrive, trying to uplift every soul in the room, an immense feeling of both intense sorrow followed by an even more intense feeling of gratitude and certainty overcame me. As the tears flowed from my eyes, I looked over to Brittany and she stared back at me with the same tear-stained face. We'd felt something. What it was, we couldn't be sure. You could call it The Spirit, I like to think of it as an MPAA Rated G Preview.
And A Caribbean Mass basically sums up how I feel about my life, in the spiritual/religious sense.
Especially the dichotomic "Gloria" with its use of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Amazing Grace." I've often thought about using the piece to stage a sort of self-aggrandizing, Yes-I-had-you-pay-cash-money-to-sit-through-this-form-of-therapy-piece-of-shit production with key points in the "protagonist's journey" marked by the songs. But I don't have half the education to make it work as anything other than an overblown self-healing exercise.
So, I listen to it when I'm feeling not quite right, tear up when it comes to last "Altissimo" and leave it at that.
I'd be more keen to simply say that all this vomit about spiritual meaning in a choral work could be better expressed in liturgical dance, but I didn't even make it to page 18 of "The Rebel" today and realized that I am not so much the holdout-with-a-cause, but just a resentful ass with the inability to look beyond himself.
Wikipedia was right, Existentialism is a good method to enhance cognitive-behavioral therapy.
I'm calling myself on my bullshit with every page of Camus!
The thing about the piece is that it holds a lot of significance for me, personally.
When I first heard/saw the piece, it was my freshman year.
Being in the throes of my fervent "conversion" to Catholicism [I was going through Confirmation, of a sort], I was eager to see what blasphemy this "A Caribbean Mass" was.
Then, I heard it in Slagle Hall and was pretty much shut the hell up.
I was so impressed by the arrangement and the use of the Mass that I went to hear it again, in Sioux Falls. I took my art-school friend, April, who was a fervent Protestant to the performance at the Lutheran church [the one they broadcast out of every Sunday]. She was equally as impressed as I was.
Then, my sophomore year, I became an resident assistant.
In that need to ingratiate myself the way as mandated by Greek houses, but on a more insidious plane with my new-found colleagues, I partook in a late-night bull session about heaven with my former RA Tony and another RA/friend Jenny. For some reason -- perhaps my own self-obsession -- I cannot for the life of me, remember what they had to say about the matter.
But I remember coming out with my own idea of heaven that I'd been formulating for awhile.
I still hold it true, especially after the year I've had, that heaven is a place free from all doubt.
There's a lot you go through in life, make a lot of mistakes, sing a lot of "coulda, shoulda, wouldas" and generally learn and grow from the experiences; but, depending on your ability to "Let Go and Let God," there's still a part of you that either rags on the mistakes or tells that pit in your stomach to twist into high gear at the slightest memory of something you'd rather not remember.
It's the human condition.
I believe in a heaven in the Christian sense that if I earn my way there, I will be in full communion with God.
And one of the things I have always looked forward to is the removal of all doubt. Not just the pacification of that doubt, but the complete and utter absence of it. Where every feeling you have, every thing that you may be able to do and say is in absolute certainty that there is nothing wrong.
To a lesser extent, it's the whole, "I believe that heaven is LOVE and it's tangible, like a BLANKET and Jesus just wraps you up in it!" with a sprinkle of, "Look bitch, I've had a hard life, I need a little more to keep me going."
In heaven, it's not a great city of crystal and gold, but I see it as an abstract feeling with accompanying imagery. It is what you make it, much like hell. Heaven to me is that moment when you realize that not only is God in your heart, but you are in His and it brings you to tears, just trying to grasp a wisp of the feeling in your small, human mind's vain attempt to understand.
I think I got a sneak-preview of that my junior year in college.
Brittany and I went to Mass at the Newman when they were repairing the roof. So it was held in the multi-purpose room, metal folding chairs, bad acoustics and all.
Then, we came to the Agnus Dei part of Mass and as Mike drove the piano into overdrive, trying to uplift every soul in the room, an immense feeling of both intense sorrow followed by an even more intense feeling of gratitude and certainty overcame me. As the tears flowed from my eyes, I looked over to Brittany and she stared back at me with the same tear-stained face. We'd felt something. What it was, we couldn't be sure. You could call it The Spirit, I like to think of it as an MPAA Rated G Preview.
And A Caribbean Mass basically sums up how I feel about my life, in the spiritual/religious sense.
Especially the dichotomic "Gloria" with its use of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Amazing Grace." I've often thought about using the piece to stage a sort of self-aggrandizing, Yes-I-had-you-pay-cash-money-to-sit-through-this-form-of-therapy-piece-of-shit production with key points in the "protagonist's journey" marked by the songs. But I don't have half the education to make it work as anything other than an overblown self-healing exercise.
So, I listen to it when I'm feeling not quite right, tear up when it comes to last "Altissimo" and leave it at that.
I'd be more keen to simply say that all this vomit about spiritual meaning in a choral work could be better expressed in liturgical dance, but I didn't even make it to page 18 of "The Rebel" today and realized that I am not so much the holdout-with-a-cause, but just a resentful ass with the inability to look beyond himself.
Wikipedia was right, Existentialism is a good method to enhance cognitive-behavioral therapy.
I'm calling myself on my bullshit with every page of Camus!