Death? Apostasy?

For the first time, my eyes watered when I watched this video of the Introit and the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor (by the way, the melody of the Kyrie comes from Händel [Source]). Perhaps a bit of it was in reaction to seeing dry branches. O Lord, consume them not in a fire of destruction. Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance, for thou knowest their names.

Exaudi, exaudi, exaudi orationem meam. My God, turn thine ear unto thy servant even when I haven’t the emotions all there. Let the requiem be my prayer for words that I have not. Hear, O Israel, YHWH your God, YHWH is one, and the One Only-Begotten Son is thy Saviour.

Kyrie Eleison

Kyrie eleison in Greek means ‘Lord, have mercy’, if this isn’t the umpteenth time you’ve seen me use these words. The Psalmist says,

Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness:
 thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress;
 have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.

And again,

O YHWH, rebuke me not in thine anger,
 neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.
Have mercy upon me, O YHWH; for I am weak:
 O YHWH, heal me; for my bones are vexed.
My soul is also sore vexed:
 but thou, O YHWH, how long?
Return, O YHWH, deliver my soul:
 oh save me for thy mercies’ sake.

This is why we say these words as the Church: in this present evil age, our help is in the Name of YHWH, who made heaven and earth, who rules all by his Wisdom and providentially directs events by his Spirit, who will raise us up at the last day. The Church sings to the Lord from the depths of her heart and the midst of the world’s pain:

This will become especially important as Christmas gets closer and we long for Christ to come fix what’s been broken too long. Our cry for the Lord’s mercy is mixed with that of the martyrs. ‘So help us God.’

Nerd Notes (sort of):

On the one hand, these words should be the words of the people, never to be taken away from them. On the other hand, complex polyphonic settings of them are often good to hear in worship in order that the prayer of the people may be given a beautiful form. One way I can think of is for the people to chant the words as plainchant and for a small choir to sing the polyphonic setting. If there are three distinct polyphonic sections of a Kyrie, the people can chant each of their three parts twice before the choir expresses the prayer of the whole people.

UC Fee Hikes

Guys, there are some obvious principles at work. There is no money voodoo: either money must come from somewhere, or the operation must be scaled down.

Sources of money: the state budget, donors, you (I’m assuming Pell Grants and the like are negligible to the bigger system, though obviously very important for poorer students). The state no longer has money, and alumnus-donors are feeling the pinch because of their own kids, so either you have paid in taxes or you must pay now. Corporate donations are anyone’s guess, but I suspect too much – if too many strings are attached explicitly or implicitly – will crucially undermine the premise of the public university.

Ways to reduce costs: cut department funding, cut the number of students, cut admin. For the sake of the world, UC Berkeley department funding should be cut as little as possible. Perhaps UC really should bite a bullet this year and let in only as many people as the law requires it to. And frankly, I’d prefer to cut the admin people who have to prove their (lack of) worth by shifting things around and making people write reports: let’s not waste faculty time here, ok? Alas, this last one is nearly impossible. Instead, departments suffer cuts because the admins don’t know what’s an appropriate expense to have to pay.

So, other people need money too, eh?

Unrelated: Wow, a couple minutes ago I thought I’d lost my passport. I prayed briefly (as I tore up the room looking for my passport) in desperation at the prospect of being deported (although, wouldn’t that be a free trip back to America? as long as they didn’t drop me off in Mississippi). Turns out it was too safe, inside a pocket in my binder. Figures.

Innocence

[The other side of Marc’s post.]

What is innocence? We say Adam and Eve in the garden, before their sin, were innocent, because they had no knowledge of good and evil, since God’s gracious gift to them was a supernatural rectitude. Yet we also say, in a different sense, that Christ was innocent, not for lack of knowledge about sin but for sinlessness.

For Adam and Eve, eventually maturity would have demanded knowledge of good and evil, but they chose to eat, judging themselves to be worthy already of the gift despite God’s having forbidden it. For this they died, and our innocence was prematurely lost: this innocence, once lost, will not be regained. The tragedy is not the loss of innocence but the inappropriate time and manner in which it happened. Now that Christ is come, we want maturity, not pre-Fall, Edenic innocence.

But there’s the other kind of innocence to reckon with, upon which is pronounced the verdict of ‘not guilty’, a word which raises even the dead. When Adam sinned and was condemned, he and all his race, he incurred upon us the wrathful verdict of ‘guilty’. This state, sin, is incompatible with the holy nature of God and thus with the laws that govern our existence: sin is an anomaly. Death, which comes with sin, is the condition of this anomaly. For this, we do need innocence, of the second kind.

For peace, for happiness, for love – whose opposite is the anomaly of sin, of evil, of death – Christ the innocent Lamb of God has died in our place and bought glory to Man. All who are in him, all who are counted part of him by a lively faith, have his status: grace, life, glory. So is innocence had, and so corruption begins to be undone.

So when sexual innocence is lost, what then? Shall we fear all lost and take as an article of faith that all innocence is forever lost, that there will be no spring where now has come desert and winter? No, according to Luther: ‘Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.’ But why rejoice with these scars? Because the Lord, when the waters of baptism pour over you, promises to heal them from your soul at the resurrection of the dead, and week by week you will taste his healing fellowship in a morsel of bread and a draught of wine.

Admission Numbers

And this explains part of why I couldn’t get into Penn linguistics last admissions cycle:

Increased number of applications, halved number of offers of admission.