Yet More Music Links from Trinity

The Organ Series at Trinity Wall Street is in its second year at Trinity; it's a pretty interesting story as to why this is going on at all:

When the Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ at Trinity Church was damaged by dust and debris from the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the church dismantled the instrument and planned to either restore or replace it. For the short term, the church installed a “virtual pipe organ” that uses digital samples of real pipe organ timbres, played through a computerized audio system and nearly 100 speakers hidden behind dummy pipes.

To organ purists who have had epochal debates about whether organs with electronic keyboards can equal the more time-honored pneumatic action, and to organ agnostics who simply have a soft spot for traditional instruments in historic settings, the notion of replacing Trinity’s Aeolian-Skinner with a “virtual” instrument was a horrifying sign of the times.

But the digital organ, built by Marshall & Ogletree, has had a thorough workout since it was installed in 2003, and its performance has persuaded the church’s music office, as well as a good number of visiting organists, that it is worthy of its setting. Trinity has now decided to make the Marshall & Ogletree its permanent organ, and to commission a second for St. Paul’s Chapel. On Tuesday, the church announced that it would sell off the parts of the lamented Aeolian-Skinner.

Here's a whole section about this organ at the Trinity Wall Street website. This year the American Guild of Organists New York Chapter was meeting at the same time as Cameron Carpenter's concert (see yesterday's post), and AGO members filled the pews for his recital. The archives from last year are still available, though, and here's Cameron Carpenter's recital from last year. What a mad boy he is!

But I really wanted to provide this link to the wonderful Brasil Guitar Duo who played for the Concerts At One series. Here's the Duo's own website, and here's something about them. (More videos can be found in the archive pages as well.)

And don't forget: you can listen to James Alison speak, and Archbishop Tutu, too. I haven't yet, but they're on the list.

I know you're thinking, "Doesn't she talk about anything but Trinity, Trinity, Trinity and music, music, music?" Well, no: not really....

Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, "the chief eunuch of Nebuchadnezzar II"

From the Telegraph:

The sound of unbridled joy seldom breaks the quiet of the British Museum's great Arched Room, which holds its collection of 130,000 Assyrian cuneiform tablets, dating back 5,000 years.

But Michael Jursa, a visiting professor from Vienna, let out such a cry last Thursday. He had made what has been called the most important find in Biblical archaeology for 100 years, a discovery that supports the view that the historical books of the Old Testament are based on fact.

Searching for Babylonian financial accounts among the tablets, Prof Jursa suddenly came across a name he half remembered - Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, described there in a hand 2,500 years old, as "the chief eunuch" of Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon.
Prof Jursa, an Assyriologist, checked the Old Testament and there in chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, he found, spelled differently, the same name - Nebo-Sarsekim.
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Nebo-Sarsekim, according to Jeremiah, was Nebuchadnezzar II's "chief officer" and was with him at the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when the Babylonians overran the city.

The small tablet, the size of "a packet of 10 cigarettes" according to Irving Finkel, a British Museum expert, is a bill of receipt acknowledging Nabu-sharrussu-ukin's payment of 0.75 kg of gold to a temple in Babylon.

The tablet is dated to the 10th year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 595BC, 12 years before the siege of Jerusalem.

Evidence from non-Biblical sources of people named in the Bible is not unknown, but Nabu-sharrussu-ukin would have been a relatively insignificant figure.
"This is a fantastic discovery, a world-class find," Dr Finkel said yesterday. "If Nebo-Sarsekim existed, which other lesser figures in the Old Testament existed? A throwaway detail in the Old Testament turns out to be accurate and true. I think that it means that the whole of the narrative [of Jeremiah] takes on a new kind of power."

Cuneiform is the oldest known form of writing and was commonly used in the Middle East between 3,200 BC and the second century AD. It was created by pressing a wedge-shaped instrument, usually a cut reed, into moist clay.

The full translation of the tablet reads: (Regarding) 1.5 minas (0.75 kg) of gold, the property of Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the chief eunuch, which he sent via Arad-Banitu the eunuch to [the temple] Esangila: Arad-Banitu has delivered [it] to Esangila. In the presence of Bel-usat, son of Alpaya, the royal bodyguard, [and of] Nadin, son of Marduk-zer-ibni. Month XI, day 18, year 10 [of] Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.

Affirming Catholicism

They have at last updated their website! And an interesting note: there is to be a conference in Seattle this fall at which James Alison will be a speaker:

Fall 2007 Conference Update

The October 2007 Conference in Seattle is in its final stages of preparation.

Pre-registrations accepted now!!

TOPIC: Orthodoxy: Living Communion in Worship and Belief

SPEAKERS: James Alison
The Rev. Diane Butler Bass
The Rev. Kenneth Leech
The Rev. Elaine Farmer, retreat leader

DATES: October 21-25,2007

LOCATION: Seattle, Washington

HOST PARISHES: St. Thomas, Medina
Trinity Church, Seattle

COST (of Conference ONLY): US$525

You will be notified about details of lodging and meals when these have been finalized.

Affirming Catholicism conferences begin with a day of retreat to form a praying community. The conference then continues in the context of a community of prayer and liturgical celebration.

Inchoherence

The incoherence of "church teaching" on the topic of you-know-what, that is. It's from the James Alison article *Christopher linked in comments on another post:

Please notice that there are two logical barriers which the ecclesiastical argument cannot jump without falsifying it’s own doctrine. The first is this: The Church cannot say “Well, being that way is normal, something neutral or positive, the Church respects it and welcomes it. The Church only prohibits the acts which flow from it”. This position would lack logic in postulating intrinsically evil acts which flow from a neutral or positive being. And this would go against the principle of Catholic morals which states that acts flow from being – agere sequitur esse. The second barrier is this: the Church cannot say of the homosexual inclination that it is a desire which is in itself intrinsically evil, since to say this would be to fall into the heresy of claiming that there is some part of being human which is essentially depraved – that is, which cannot be transformed, only covered over.

Faced with these two barriers, ecclesiastical logic did a backward double-flip worthy of an Olympic gymnast so as to arrive at the following formulation: “The homosexual inclination, though not itself a sin, constitutes a tendency towards behaviour that is intrinsically evil, and must therefore be considered objectively disordered.” With this phrase, the Vatican Congregations sought to maintain the absolute prohibition of the acts without describing the desire as intrinsically evil. Nevertheless the price of this definition is very high. It obliges its defenders to insist that the homosexual inclination, independently of any acts flowing from it, is something objectively disordered. And the kind of objectivity they have in mind is deduced not from what can be known through experience, but is an a priori which depends on the Church’s teaching concerning marriage. That is to say, the a priori of the intrinsic heterosexuality of all human beings. In other words, from the presupposition of the intrinsic heterosexuality of all human beings, it is deduced that the person whose inclination is towards those of the same sex is a defective heterosexual.

Well, let us not delude ourselves here. This characterisation of the gay or lesbian person as a defective heterosexual is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the prohibition, as the authors indicate with the “must be considered” of their phrase. The problem is that, for the characterisation to work properly within the doctrine of original sin and grace, it would have to be the case that the life of grace would lead the gay or lesbian person to become heterosexual in the degree of his or her growth in grace. That is to say, in the degree to which grace makes us more patient, faithful, generous, capable of being good Samaritans, less prisoners of anger, of rivalry and of resentment, just so would it have to change the gender of the persons towards whom we are principally attracted. The problem is that such changes do not seem to take place in a regular and trustworthy way, even amongst the United States groups which promote them with significant funds and publicity. As the senior representatives of such groups indicate: at most, and in some cases, a change in behaviour is produced, but the fundamental structures of desire continue to be towards persons of the same sex. [3]

This then is the conflict: for the prohibition of the acts to correspond to the true being of the person, the inclination has to be characterised as something objectively disordered. However, since the inclination doesn’t alter, unlike desires which are recognisably vicious, the gay or lesbian person would have a desire which is, in fact, intrinsically evil, an element of radical depravity in their desire. And we would have stepped outside Catholic anthropology. Or, on the other hand, the same-sex inclination is simply something that is, in which case grace will bring it to a flourishing starting from where it is, and with this we would have to work out which acts are appropriate or not, according to the circumstances, and we will have stepped outside the absolute prohibition passed on to us by tradition.

I'm still reading - James Alison's writing often takes days to get through - but it's another great one. Even just the above snippet has already, in exposing the contradictions inherent in Catholic doctrine (which is, let's face it, the product of centuries of massive intellectual tradition, and way beyond most of what we see from the Anglican side these days) started to whisper to me: "This argument is just about over, folks; they really haven't got even a thread of a leg to stand on."

The intro is truly chilling, too, and I can't wait to see how he ties it all together....

Tradition Nine

From the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, published by Alcoholics Anonymous. The Traditions are, again, the spiritual principles by which A.A. groups and A.A. as a whole have learned, and continue to believe, they ought to function in order to be successful in carrying the message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

Tradition Nine
A.A., as such, ought never be organized; but we may create service boards or committees directly responsible to those they serve.

WHEN Tradition Nine was first written, it said that "Alcoholics Anonymous needs the least possible organization." In years since then, we have changed our minds about that. Today, we are able to say with assurance that Alcoholics Anonymous--A.A. as a whole--should never be organized at all. Then, in seeming contradiction, we proceed to create special service boards and committees which in themselves are organized. How, then, can we have an unorganized movement which can and does create a service organization for itself? Scanning this puzzler, people say, "What do they mean, no organization?"

Well, let's see. Did anyone ever hear of a nation, a church, a political party, even a benevolent association that had no membership rules? Did anyone ever hear of a society which couldn't somehow discipline its members and enforce obedience to necessary rules and regulations? Doesn't nearly every society on earth give authority to some of its members to impose obedience upon the rest and to punish or expel offenders? Therefore, every nation, in fact every form of society, has to be a government administered by human beings. Power to direct or govern is the essence of organization everywhere.

Yet Alcoholics Anonymous is an exception. It does not conform to this pattern. Neither its General Service Conference, its Foundation Board,* nor the humblest group committee can issue a single directive to an A.A. member and make it stick, let alone mete out any punishment. We've tried it lots of times, but utter failure is always the result. Groups have tried to expel members, but the banished have come back to sit in the meeting place, saying "This is life for us; you can't keep us out." Committees have instructed many an A.A. to stop working on a chronic backslider, only to be told: "How I do my Twelfth Step work is my business. Who are you to judge?" This doesn't mean an A.A. won't take advice or suggestions from more experienced members, but he surely won't take orders. Who is more unpopular than the old-time A.A., full of wisdom, who moves to another area and tries to tell the group there how to run its business? He and all like him who "view with alarm for the good of A.A." meet the most stubborn resistance or, worse still, laughter.

You might think A.A.'s headquarters in New York would be an exception. Surely, the people there would have to have some authority. But long ago, trustees and staff members alike found they could do no more than make suggestions, and very mild ones at that. They even had to coin a couple of sentences which still go into half the letters they write: "Of course, you are at perfect liberty to handle this matter any way you please. But the majority experience in A.A. does seem to suggest . . . " Now, that attitude is far removed from central government, isn't it? We recognize that alcoholics can't be dictated to--individually or collectively.

At this juncture, we can hear a churchman exclaim, "They are making disobedience a virtue!" He is joined by a psychiatrist who says, "Defiant brats! They won't grow up and conform to social usage!" The man in the street say, "I don't understand it. They must be nuts!" But all these observers have overlooked something unique in Alcoholics Anonymous. Unless each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant. His drunkenness and dissolution are not penalties inflicted by people in authority; they result from his personal disobedience to spiritual principles.

The same stern threat applies to the group itself. Unless there is approximate conformity to A.A.'s Twelve Traditions, the group, too, can deteriorate and die. So we of A.A. do obey spiritual principles, first because we must, and ultimately because we love the kind of life such obedience brings. Great suffering and great love are A.A.'s disciplinarians; we need no others.

It is clear now that we ought never to name boards to govern us, but it is equally clear that we shall always need to authorize workers to serve us. It is the difference between the spirit of vested authority and the spirit of service, two concepts which are sometimes poles apart. It is in this spirit of service that we elect the A.A. group's informal rotating committee, the intergroup association for the area, and the General Service Conferences of Alcoholics Anonymous for A.A. as a whole. Even our Foundation, once an independent board, is today directly accountable to our Fellowship. Its trustees are the caretakers and expediters of our world services.

Just as the aim of each A.A. member is personal sobriety, the aim of our services is to bring sobriety within reach of all who want it. If nobody does the group's chores, if the area's telephone rings unanswered, if we do not reply to our mail, then A.A. as we know it would stop. Our communications lines with those who need our help would be broken.

A.A. has to function, but at the same time it must avoid those dangers of great wealth, prestige, and entrenched power which necessarily tempt other societies. Though Tradition Nine at first sight seems to deal with a purely practical matter, in its actual operation it discloses a society without organization, animated only by the spirit of service--a true fellowship.

*In 1954, the name of the Alcoholic Foundation, Inc., was changed to the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous, Inc., and the Foundation office is now the General Service Office.

James Alison writes to his friends

From "Letter of response to friends in the aftermath of the Vatican Instruction of 29 November 2005":

....I must say that I am most struck by something about which I’ve seen little comment. The instruction appears to regard “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” not only as an objective disorder (with which empirical judgment I disagree). Much more strikingly, and I think rightly, its authors appear to regard such tendencies as an objective fact about a person. But this means that someone who hides the fact that he is gay, instead loudly proclaiming his undying loyalty to the current magisterium of the Church, is no more suitable to be a seminarian or a seminary rector or instructor than the visibly gay person who expresses some reservations as to the sanity of agreeing with everything the magisterium says all the time.

In other words – and this does seem to me to be important – the document has bitten the bullet of the fact that we are talking about what people are and not about their ideological position. This means that the instruction cuts at least as far to the right as it does to the left. I’m rather afraid that in recent years many, many young men of a conservative bent have been swept up into places of very conservative formation where piety and an ability to hold and defend implausible magisterial positions were the true hallmark of the John Paul seminarian. Such people were given the impression that the rigorous maintenance of ideological correctness would trump inconvenient details concerning who they might be.

Well, that impression was false. Who you are is an objective truth about you which, irrespective of your ideological standpoint or your delicacy of conscience in admitting to it, bars you from being a seminarian or teaching in a seminary. Heretofore a capacity for a certain dissemblance about who you are was a sign of suitability in conservative circles, as though being gay were properly a subjective matter of the internal forum. But that is no longer tenable. Now that same dissemblance about who you are merely compounds an already insuperable and objective unsuitability.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

Another very interesting to note about this is that at last, people are starting to recognize that "gay" is an essential characteristic. ("Essential" in the sense that it is part of who a person is, that is.) That has been a long time coming, actually! And BTW, once it's acknowledged that there is such a thing as "a gay person" - how can there not be such a thing as "gay culture," and how can the Church denigrate it per se, or forbid it to "gay people"?