Psalm Tones for Night Prayer: Psalm 85(86) - Tone II

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction. - 2 Cor 1:3–4 

Apparently it was about 4 years ago that we were “getting there”, with the penultimate psalm tone that the Lutheran Liturgical Prayer Brotherhood deemed appropriate for the psalms and canticles of night prayer. Ho ho. I didn’t stop singing night prayer with Noemi, but having committed two psalms to memory, one slipped out of it, and I struggled to get the third in, so I needed a rethink.

I investigated strategies for commiting verbatim texts to memory, and found one or two things. I’ve used the idea and tool here extensively. In this case, rather than use them to actually memorise all the psalms I need, I just use it as a concise reminder for the psalms and scripure readings: that way I can fit what I struggle to remember for night prayer on two sides of A4 and turn the light off after the scripture reading – Jurassic Park.

So here’s the table again, and now I’m doing the last tone.

Day	Tone	Tone for 2nd Psalm	Nunc Dimittis
Sunday 1	VIII	VIII	III At last, all-powerful Master...
Sunday 2	VIII He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High...		III
Monday	II Turn your ear, O Lord, and give answer...		III
Tuesday	VIII		III
Wednesday	I	VIII	III
Thursday	I Preserve me, God, I take refuge in you.		III
Friday	V Lord my God, I call for help by day;		III

So that’s tone II, another one that only comes in one version. Now, it’s been a while: you could look back at the first post in the series for a complete explanation, or perhaps the last tone I posted for a very superficial reminder.

Marking some of the words up for the final stresses that we need:

Turn your ear, O Lord, and give ánswer*
for I am poor and néedy.
Preserve my life, for I am fáithful:*
save the servant who trusts in yóu.

You are my God; have mercy on me, Lórd,*
for I cry to you all day lóng.
Give joy to your servant, O Lórd,*
for to you I lift up my sóul.

O give your strength to your sérvant*
and save your handmaid's són.
Show me a sign of your fávour†
that my foes may see to their sháme*
that you console me and give me your hélp.

My example MP3, and all the MP3s, is here, and this is a one-page PDF summary of all the tones.

And … that's it. I had talked about doing the others tones to make up all eight, but at this point I think not!

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Mnemosyne

I suppose there’s an outside possibility that you won’t find this very interesting, but I’ve found some new spaced repetition software! Woo!

I was using MemoryLifter for a long time, and I like knowing the methodology involved, but the software had a couple of disadvantages: I could only use it at home (difficult with toddler), and there was no way of using it to learn various things together or apart e.g. you either lump Greek and Italian vocab together or manually switch between different ‘learning modules’ – way too clunky.

With Mnemosyne, on the other hand, you can install it on a USB stick and use it wherever the hell you want, and though you would put everything in one ‘module’, it lets you tag your subjects, so when I’m working I can use it only for work-related things, and on breaks or between jobs whatever I like.

Not sure how I feel about the algorithm, but I shall see how it goes. I feel another attempt at learning New Testament Greek coming on! I believe I shall also use the services of TypeGreek.com, which I wish I’d known existed before.

Salve Regina for Night Prayer

Hi there.

I was labouring for some time under the delusion that Night Prayer includes the Lord’s Prayer, and was thinking about blogging a musical setting of that. Then I looked, and found that this was not the case. What do feature in Night Prayer are the Marian anthems, which I must admit I’ve never included, probably because you have to go to another page, and I find it always seems a bit late to turn to another page at that stage – I expect my canonisation is in the post.

Anyway, I can remedy that if I commit an anthem to memory, as I’m trying to do with the psalm tones, so I shall. There are four anthems, for various periods of the year, but I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, so I was planning on learning the one which seems to correspond to the most “ordinary” liturgical period (first Vespers of Trinity Sunday until None of the Saturday before Advent!), the Salve Regina.

An mp3 (no. 545) is available courtesy of the Adoremus Hymnal site.

I intend to memorise some of the psalms in Italian, since my daughter is Italian (100% British, 100% Italian – a bit like the hypostatic union) and I shall have a go at learning this in the Latin original. In fact, loads of people here seem to know it off by heart already, and it might be the same for English Catholics for all I know. Well, I don’t know the words, what they mean, or the melody! Here’s the chant notation, with the Latin, and a literal translation that I lifted and modified:

Hail, Queen, merciful Mother,

[our] life, [our] sweetness, and our hope, hail.

To you we cry, exiles, children of Eve,

to you we sigh, mourning and weeping

in this vale of tears.

O, therefore, our advocate,

turn your merciful eyes toward us;

and Jesus, blessed fruit of your womb,

to us, after this exile, show.

O kind, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.

Now, here's a thing I've done for my own benefit, a learning module for MemoryLifter. I like plugging MemoryLifter, since it helped me to learn a lot of Italian vocabulary despite my lousy memory. Anyway, my module has the text broken down as above: you try to remember the next line. I've also inlcluded the literal translation, audio and the notation above. With any luck it should all trickle into my brain together, and since I made it for myself I've put it here too.
Follow @MarkTsoapm

More #twitterangelus



I know I know...

I shall blog about something else at some point. In any case, I shall be brief. I've been praying with #twitterangelus in Italian, and though no Italians seem to have joined us, some obliging anglophones have been praying in Italian with me.

So, as a gesture of goodwill I offered to make a recording in Italian in an attempt to "incarnate" the prayer a bit. And here it is, rushed off quickly yesterday after Noemi's bedtime and before ours. As always happens when you record yourself, I think it sounds horrible, and I can hear myself fluffing it in various places but never mind.

It's the Angelus proper, as we return to ordinary time soon (Monday?) and leave the Regina Caeli for other times; that's part of the reason I thought I'd do a quick recording now, so people could hear it in advance of praying it.

So that's that. Ta ra.

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My Music

I'm pleased to say that my mp3s now have a (hopefully permanent) home again:

The Ego Pegs
What I want from Idiosyncracy
Misc

St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Again

I thought I'd blog something I was interested in which just happens to be topical. A little while ago James was criticising something that Archbishop Vincent Nichols said in an interview with the Catholic Herald. When I looked at that interview, I noticed this:

[B]y avoiding personal Confession do Catholics miss out on a unique encounter with Jesus himself?

Of course they do. [...]

I've been assured that when the relics of St Thérèse come then one of the things we must be prepared for is a huge increase in personal Confession. There were a couple of hundred youngsters up at the Brightlights festival in north London last weekend. At one time there were 15 priests there hearing Confessions on and off during the Saturday.

So there is something very precious about Confession and I think Catholics realise that. One of the things it is is a profound human truth, because all sacraments bring together the human realities and the divine intervention. It's a profound truth that we have to confess, that we have to face and name what we have done that is wrong. Otherwise the human process of healing, which grace builds on, doesn't begin. Sooner or later we have to do that.

I heard more about St. Thérèse's relics coming to the UK on Sunday last weekend; unfortunately you won't be able to hear that now, as they've had another transmission since then. They said the same thing about the spiritual fruits that her relics are bearing, the increase in confession etc.

It so happens that I've been meaning to read her Story of a Soul for some time. She's a Doctor of the Church, which means that it has been officially declared that through her writings the whole Church has derived great advantage. She's known for her "Little Way", a recognition that heroic deeds and great acts are not necessary to achieve great holiness but love can be lived out in the least of actions. Though she undertook the religious life, the "Little Way" has proved especially helpful for the laity.

So where am I going with all this? Well, the wonderful people at Librivox have just made Story of a Soul available in audio format. This is good for people like me, who like the fact that, say, Project Gutenberg has the text online, but would rather gouge out their own eyes than read a book from a monitor.

So, Librivox's Story of a Soul is here, and comes with helpful listening options (MP3s to download directly, individually or zipped, RSS feed, iTunes subscription, Chapter-a-day).
It's slightly less conveniently here in MP3 as well, at Maria Lectrix.
Or if you're a real glutton for punishment, you could read it online at Project Gutenberg.

Well, I hope I didn't just waste my time typing that. I'm really looking forward to listening to it myself.

Lent, The Bishop of Lancaster and the Web

James recently did a post on a talk given by Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue of Lancaster Diocese to the Newman Society at Oxford University.

He says a lot of choice things about the pitiful state of English catholicism, and subsequently gives a lot of suggestions for a personal response. I thought it'd be a good way to approach Lent, so I'll post it here with some handy links.

I want to propose to all of you here tonight the following acts of sacrifice to counter the trials and troubles I have just outlined to you.

Embrace the Tradition of the Church.

To counter the rejection of the past, I want you to sacrifice the modern compulsion for novelty and fashion through embracing the Tradition of the Church, which is nothing more than the source of God's revelation, along with Scripture.

I want you to re-discover the joys and beauty of personal prayer, as well as family and community prayer. Also, to re-discover liturgical prayer, to counter an undue focus on our own human activity. So often the sacred is swamped by the volume of words, noise and activity!

I want you to re-discover the devotions of the Church, such as praying the rosary, the Stations of the Cross, Benediction. I want you to embrace the discipline of praying the daily Office of the Church; the practice of regular confession. The Holy Father goes every week, so why not us also. I want you to know the four Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council inside out, start with the wonderful Constitution on revelation, Dei Verbum.

Some helpful sites for personal prayer are here:

• Sacred Space - a web-based aid to prayer run by Irish Jesuits
• Pray-as-you-go - substantially the same thing, but available in mp3 form (also by podcast)

For the Office, I haven't found anything better than Universalis.

The Constitutions of the Second Vatican Council are as follows:

• Dei Verbum (Word of God) - on Divine Revelation
• Lumen Gentium (Light of the Nations) - on the Church
• Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) - on the Church in the Modern World
• Sacrosanctum Concilium (Sacred Council) - on Sacred Liturgy

Embrace obedience to the teachings of the Church.

To counter the infiltration of secular ideas such as relativism, utilitarianism, and hedonism into the Church, sacrifice the automatic assumption that your ideas about doctrine and morals must be right, and the Church's 2,000 years reflection on God's revelation must be wrong.

I want you to take a leap of faith, based on trust in the person of Jesus Christ, and start from the assumption that the Church has good reasons for teaching the doctrines and morals that she teaches. Search out those reasons, make the Bible and the Catechism of the Catholic Church the most thumbed and creased books in your libraries. Go, read the Fathers of the Church and St Thomas Aquinas' Summae, with a good guide. Go, study the books and homilies of Pope Benedict XVI, and other good Catholic literature.

And if you hear any Catholic say or teach something that goes against the teaching and discipline of the Church, as safe-guarded by the Pope, politely, but firmly, challenge them, be they a lay catechist, teacher, deacon, priest or even a bishop.

If, for some reason, you want to read the Bible online, BibleGateway works.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is available in its entirety online. To put it briefly, it summarises the teaching of the Catholic Church. It is both offical and relatively up-to-date.

The homilies (sermons) of Benedict XVI are also available online.

A passion that – as Cardinal Newman puts it – the truth is spread to a wide extent among this people of Great Britain.

It is a sad truth that many people are so alienated from the Church, the language of the Bible, and their need for salvation, that they are either indifferent or violently allergic to Christianity. Also, it is heart-breaking to admit that the behaviour of some Catholics, such as paedophile priests and the failure of some in authority in the Church, has damaged the credibility of the Church.

I am convinced that in order to evangelise this generation we must follow the advice of Newman and de Foucauld and concentrate our missionary efforts on showing the unconditional love of Christ for suffering humanity though practical acts of justice and peace. In particular, we must act in solidarity with the poor and all those on the margins of society, migrants, drug addicts, alcoholics, men and women in the sex industry, those suffering mental illness.

We must do this without any ulterior motives, such as seeking converts. We must only undertake this work to show them the love of Jesus Christ.

It is only when or if they ask us why we do this work, that we can gently begin to talk to them about Jesus, and only at the pace that they want. If they reject Jesus, but accept His practical love through our actions, we must be content with that.

The News from Lake Wobegon...

...where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

I was introduced to Garrison Keillor through BBC 7 radio, who started broadcasting his shows, a mix of music, storytelling, sketches and other shenanigans a little while ago in England. He is an American with a very soothing voice, and one of my favourite sections of his shows was The News from Lake Wobegon, where he talks about the goings on in his hometown.

Now it's available as a podcast. Hooray!

Finished uploading my music.

I've just finished making all the MP3s I intend to available for download:

www.gordonroad8.plus.com

Just to re-iterate - if anyone at 8 Gordon Road actually does want this web-space, I'll get off it, just let me know. In the meantime - waste not want not. Or possibly the other way round.

Enjoy.

More Music

I've just put more music to download on the page. Again, it's here:

www.gordonroad8.plus.com

My Music

Well, I've finished converting my music to mp3. Now all that's left is a bit of administration really, to let you listen to it. I've decided to put a few tracks on now, and I'll add the rest later. It's here:

www.gordonroad8.plus.com

If anyone's put out by the fact that I'm using webspace that I'm not paying for, do let me know, but I'd appreciate a bit of time to allow people to download my stuff. I mean, as it's there, and no-one was using it...

Monica got me an iPod for my birthday, which I've really been enjoying since. I understand that Emma may have just got one, and the other day, Luke was asking me how you found podcasts. I thought I'd blog about podcasts I've been enjoying.

In answer to Luke's question, I remembered that Jeff Miller reviewed some podcasts he had listened to here, so I just tried to find those articles and see what sounded interesting. They're here and here. The only other thing I know to do is to search iTunes podcast directory - so that's all I have to say about that.

From Jeff I started listening to Rosary Army, which sounds like a cult, but is actually quite a homely sort of show about life in general with a married Catholic couple, Rock Solid from Mark Shea, which is a kind of though-for-the-day deal, Catholic Answers Live which is a call-in show whose content varies from day to day though it tends towards the apologetic, The Cardinal Arinze podcast, by one of our cardinals, though unaccountably this guy with a strange accent always talks for a bit before conducting a sort of interview with the cardinal himself, The Saintcast, which is, as its name suggests, a podcast about the saints and Praystation Portable, which is a daily selection of readings and prayers, mostly from the psalms.

So that's plenty to be getting on with, but a few of those shows are part of a network called SPQN, who cross-promote each other, so I'm already listening to another amusing married couple on a show called Catholic in a Small Town (the theme tune is pretty catchy, which is disturbing, as it's country) and I daresay I'll try out a few more in time.

Pray As You Go is another one I've tried, which is a series of brief meditations on a passage from the gospel, but it's designed for daily use, and I can't update my iPod on Monica's computer so regularly as that. I believe it's in the Ignatian tradition. I seem to recall the word Jesuit being used in association with it.

It's not going to be so easy to find links for the other ones and it's close to bed-time, so I'll sum up briefly. I've recently subscribed to a few poetry podcasts, as poetry is something which always seems worthwhile, put is oddly difficult to fit into one's schedule though small. I forget what they're called.

The Guardian has several podcasts. I've subscribed to the music one, but I'm not sure whether I'll continue with it. It's hard to take pop music so seriously as they do.

Also, much to Monica's disgust, I was subscribed to the Big Brother podcast, but I've just unsubscribed from that one. There is, I can safely say, less point in a Big Brother podcast than there is in the show.

So that's about it really. I like podcasts - they're free!

---

Oh, I forgot about the Chris Moyles podcast, which is how I mostly listen to him these days, and cuts out all the rubbish music. I also subscribe to some programmes on Rai so that I can hear som real Italian as regularly as possible.

Also, the Radio Times reccomends podcasts. So that's another way of finding them.

I made a sort of joke adventure game once, which James used to host on his blog. I asked if he could dig it out for me, 'cos I wanted to show it to Monica, and here it is.