Brahms Requiem

Prof. Tim Pope of the Modern Languages Dept. read these words of Brahms' Requiem at our memorial service for the victims of Virginia Tech today.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.
They go forth and weep, and bear precious seed, and shall come again with rejoicing bringing their sheaves with them.
For all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass.
The grass withers, and the flower falls.
Be patient, therefore, beloved until the coming of the Lord.
The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads:
they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days;
let me know how fleeting my life is.
You have made my days a few handbreaths, and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight.
Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.
Surely everyone goes about like a shadow.
Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
they heap up, and do not know who will gather them.
And now, 0 Lord, what do I wait for?
My hope is in Thee.
How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!
My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.
Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise.
Ye now are sorrowful; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice,
and no one will take your joy from you.
As a mother comforts her child so will I comfort you.
For here have we no continuing place, but we seek one that is to come.
Behold, I show you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed;
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the hour of the last trumpet.
For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.
Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
0 death, where is thy sting? 0 grave, where is thy victory?

There was a very big turnout and many people signed the memorial pages that we will be sending down to Virginia Tech. One of our community who has a friend who works at Virginia Tech had made ribbons in the maroon and gold school colours which we all wore.

Let the pain take you where you need to go

My cousin, Tim, just sent me the following piece by Ron Rolheiser. It is a very counter-cultural message but one that resonates with my own experience. It takes a similar view to Eugene Peterson's wonderful article "To Care and not to Care" (which is included in his wonderful book Subversive Spirituality).

Let the pain take you where you need to go
In Exile
By FR. RON ROLHEISER, omi

During my last years of seminary training, I attended a series of lectures given by a prominent Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski, teaching at the time at the University of Alberta. He had written a number of books around a concept he called "positive disintegration."

Positive disintegration. Isn't that an oxymoron? Isn't disintegration the opposite of growth and happiness?

It would seem not. A canon of wisdom drawn from the scriptures of all the major world religions, mystical literature, philosophy, psychology and human experience tells us that the journey to maturity and compassion is extremely paradoxical and that mostly we grow by falling apart.

Ancient myths talk about the need sometimes to "descend into the underworld," to live in darkness for a while, to sit in ashes so as to move to a deeper place inside of life; the mystics talk about "dark nights of the soul" as being necessary to bring about maturity; Ignatius of Loyola teaches that there is a place for both "consolation" and "desolation" in our lives; the Jewish Scriptures assure us that certain deep things can only happen to the soul when it is helpless and exposed in "the desert" or "the wilderness" and that sometimes, like Jonah, we need to be carried to some place where we'd rather not go "in the dark belly of the whale"; and, perhaps most challenging of all, we see that Jesus was only brought to full compassion through "sweating blood in Gethsemane" and then dying a humiliating death on the cross.

All of these images point to the same deep truth, sometimes in order to grow we must first fall apart, go into the dark, lose our grip on what's normal, enter into a frightening chaos, lose our everyday securities and be carried in pain to a place where, for all kinds of reasons, we weren't ready to go to on our own.

Read the rest here.