First Published: 2022 October 2
Habakkuk 1:2a “How long, O LORD, must I cry for help and you do not listen?”
Today’s readings call us to remember the cost of discipleship. These are not the costs that have been coming up in prior weeks: temporal pain and hatred, loss of material wealth, and so on. Instead, these readings remind us that the Lord’s ways are mysterious, and we are called to remain steadfast in spite of, and perhaps due to the trials of faith.
Habakkuk asks the same question that has plagued non-believers for ages: if the Lord is all-good and all-powerful, why is there suffering in the world? More to the point, why is there suffering among the faithful. I’m sure we can all understand how the Lord, especially as seen in the Old Covenant, would allow suffering for the faithless, but why the faithful.
These readings don’t seek to answer that question. We are given pieces of it, certainly, as in the Psalm, where the response calls us to keep from hardening our heart when the Lord speaks. We are directly compared to the Israelites at Meribah, where they questioned the Lord’s goodness even as he brought water from stone. As ridiculous as it seems to be dubious in the face of such an obvious miracle, how often does that happen to us?
White light sent through a lens diffracts into a rainbow of colors because each wavelength moves slightly differently through a medium. How wonderful is it that we were given such a world to work in, where we can see what colors everything shining are made of? How often do we forget the beauty in the natural world because it’s been buried under layers of dry material?
Christ himself tells us in the Gospel that even when we do all that we are commanded, that is no cause for reward. Instead, we have merely done what is expected of us. In what we are expected to do is see the Lord’s Creation without a hardness of heart. Seeing the beauty of the world He created is certainly something that I need to work on.
First Published: 2022 October 1
Hooray! We made it another month.
My goals were:
Blog daily
Stretch daily
Manage to run the entire doctoral dash
Continue keeping up with my BiaY buddy
Write a poem every day
Journal every day
Lets see how we did:
Nope! I wrote 12 blog posts. Oof.
Again, I stretched maybe once.
I did it! Woo! It was kind of fun in retrospect.
I’m now something like 60 days behind oof.
I wrote 10 sonnets, and started another song. Let’s call that an even dozen.
I didn’t journal even once. Whoops.
Moving forward into next month:
Blog daily. Eventually this goal will happen.
Stretch daily. I’m going to stretch right after this, just so I make sure to do it.
Figure out how to repair/improve my accordion case. I made some notes today, and I think I should be able to get some of it done by the end of the month.
Write a poem every day. I did feel like the poems I wrote helped me ease into sleep, and they certainly help me write songs better.
Finish the newest song I’m working on.
Make progress on catching up for BiaY.
Fill in at least 3 more items on my 24 for 24.
That seems like a nice set of goals. Let’s see how it goes!
First Published: 2022 September 26
As I mentioned about a month ago, I wrote and shared a song with some friends. Last Monday, I performed the song for the first time in public. It was a good time, even though it didn’t go exactly how I’d hoped.
That is, the tempo got a little messed up between me and the other band members, and the mic placement wasn’t quite right. Still it was very rewarding to share something I wrote, as terrifying as it is. After the show, I realized that the concern I had about being booed was completely unrealistic. Even if the song had been horrible1, the vibes at the open mic are very supportive generally.
The song was reviewed as incredibly sad, which is a little funny to me as I think about it more. Certainly the lyrics are sad, and I performed it in a sad way2, but when played, even at tempo, on an accordion or piano, it’s very clear that the piece is just in a standard major key. My friends told me it was enjoyable, and that’s nice.
One of them sent me a message after the show saying that it was brave of me to play the song, which was nice. Anyways, I’m excited to keep playing with this band in the future.3
First Published: 2022 September 25
Luke 16:25 “Abraham replied, “My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.””
Every so often as I read the Bible, I somewhat understand where the prosperity gospel comes from. Then you get readings like today. It’s hard to think of a harsher condemnation of that heresy, even coming more than a thousand years earlier. This Gospel tells the tale of Lazarus, a poor man, and a rich man.
We know nothing about why Lazarus was poor, or why the rich man was rich. It’s possible that the rich man made all his wealth only in the most noble of ways. The rich man never chides Lazarus in the parable. He never says a single thing ill to him. It’s not even clear in the parable if Lazarus ever even asked for aid from the rich man.
At the end of the day, however, all that only leads to further the message of the parable: it is not enough to give when you are asked. If there is a hungry person at your door you are to feed them. When you see the sick, you are to care for them. It’s both an incredibly simple and incredibly difficult command from the Gospel today.
And yet, for as radical as that command seems, we see that it is not a new command from Christ. The First Reading today is from the Prophet Amos, who speaks similarly about the rich in Zion.
To tie this back to the beginning of my post, the prosperity gospel tells us that the rich are beloved by the Lord and the poor deserve their lot. Richness is an implication of holiness, and poverty of wealth is a sign of poverty of Grace. Yet, this reading tells us in no uncertain terms that this claim is utterly contrary to the Lord’s Will.
First Published: 2022 September 13
Today I started juggling again after a long hiatus. I started practicing on my walk to work, and it’s much harder to relearn juggling while walking1 than I really thought it would be.
I also learned my first trick! It’s called Sky High. Literally all you do is throw one of the three balls higher each time it comes around. I’m currently learning the trick tennis, where one ball gets thrown differently, but that’s much harder than I expected.
When one of my friends watched me juggle, they commented that it seems that I am constantly showing new skills that they never knew I knew. It remains strange to me that people don’t have more hobbies and skills than they have time to practice in a day. I realized and remarked to a different friend that my life would be easier if I had fewer things I was interested in learning, so I could actually devote the time that any of them deserve. Instead, I think I’ll continue juggling until I misplace the balls, then not for a few years again.
Still, I think it’s worth remarking on what got me into juggling. In high school I went to a theatre camp. One of the breakout sessions was learning how to juggle. While I didn’t learn it perfectly there, I learned enough that I could teach myself when I had time.
That summer I was working at the city pool. The pool had2 a tube slide, and a lifeguard needed to stay at the exit to make sure the tubes get out safely. That summer there were many days that were cold enough that not many people wanted to go down the slides, and fewer lifeguards wanted to wait in the water. So, I had hours on end to sit and practice juggling with the rocks in the pool. I still feel kind of like I’m cheating when I juggle with bags or balls that are the same size and not jagged rocks.
Anyways, juggling is in many respects like most any other skill that I’ve learned. The second you start demonstrating even the most basic competence in it3, people are amazed at the skill you learned. It’s always weird to me, because I’m pretty sure it took me like an hour of dedicated time to get to that stage the first time I learned how to juggle. But, equally as exciting, a few other people will comment on how they juggle4, and it’s really fun to bond with others over shared hobbies. Also, the basic skills are fun and the advanced skills often look easier for all that they’re significantly harder.
First Published: 2022 September 12
Today I started working on the actual presentation portion of my presentation, rather than just the content. I really like the images showing how graphs of x=cos(at), y=sin(bt) change for different values of a and b. As a result, I spent most of the morning learning how to make gifs in python.1
Of course, then I had a bunch of pretty traces, and I am nothing if not easily distracted. So, I now all of the a=b+1 for odd a up to 99. They look really pretty, but they definitely distracted me from my actual goal, which was getting slides prepped. Also, I’m remembering now that Kepler points to regular polygons for his analysis of shapes, which means I might have wasted all this time. Eh, c’est la vie.
it’s shockingly easy↩︎
First Published: 2022 September 11
Exodus 32:9 “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are, continued the LORD to Moses. ”
This week is one of the prodigal son readings. The priest gave a really good homily that I’m going to shamelessly steal large portions of today’s reflection from.
First, the context for the parable is clear in today’s Gospel. Christ is speaking to sinners and scribes alike today. He begins with a parable about a herdsman with sheep.
Of course, losing a single sheep temporarily would be an everyday occurrence, so it would not be worth rejoicing over to find a lost sheep to your neighbors and friends. Yet, the Lord rejoices in our return. Again with the coin, finding a lost coin is not cause for an average person’s rejoicing to the community.
Then we get to the parable that my brother hates and I always loved: the prodigal son. Something the priest pointed out today that I’d never noticed, the second son doesn’t inherit. And yet, when he asks for an inheritance, his father loves him so much that he gives to his son something he does not deserve.
Too, our Lord gives us so many gifts that we in no way deserve or could ever hope to earn. When he returns contrite, the father dresses him in fine clothes, symbolizing that he is the favored son. Seeing this, it’s easy to understand why my brother dislikes the reading. Why does the elder son, who has been nothing but dutiful, not receive more than the sinful brother?
Again, this was being addressed to both Pharisees and tax collectors. The message of the parable is two-fold. First, for the sinner and the lost, it’s a reminder that no matter how low we are, how depraved our sin, there is nothing the Lord rejoices in more than our return to Him. Second, for the legalistic, the Lord’s Love and Justice are not man’s justice.
Something that a friend and I were discussing once were the two concepts of mercy and justice. He saw them as two distinct pieces the Lord gives out, where justice is sometimes withheld for sake of mercy. I disagreed with that then, and disagree with it now. There is no weighing scales in the Lord’s mercy and justice. Rather, His justice is mercy.
When we repent, the evils we have committed against the Lord are gone. The Sacrament of Reconciliation truly frees us from what is otherwise an unbreakable cycle of failures. And yet, that’s not how the temporal world works, or maybe even should work by some interpretations.
Certainly, it was wrong for the younger son to demand an inheritance he did not deserve and spend it on a life of sin. And yet, his father saw him from a distance and ran to embrace him. Even after being told that his son wanted nothing to do with him, his father still held out hope for his return. When a sinner repents, the choirs of angels and saints rejoice with the Lord, for one more child has come home
First Published: 2022 September 9
I finally went to the library for some of the books that I need to write the talk I’m giving. While there, I browsed around and found another 8 books that seem interesting, if not relevant. Time to go read!
First Published: 2022 September 7
Today was the first day of the new semester and academic year. Unlike my last post about a new semester, I didn’t see friends. I also didn’t have any class today.1
Instead, I started my day by TA’ing, which looks like it’ll be fun. I’m helping with the graduate instrumental course, which I’m very excited for. Tomorrow I have my first actual class period, which I’m also pumped for.
In other exciting news, I got free breakfast2 and lunch3 from different organizations giving things to students today. I also gave blood, and got a t-shirt for that, along with other various knick-knacks from a fair.
Of course, there were some not bright parts of the day. On my walk to work I saw some horrible anti-semitic hate chalked brightly and in large letters in a central campus location. That didn’t really set me up for a happy day. While giving blood they missed my vein and wandered around for a while, jabbing the muscle more than once.4
But, I’ll move on from the less than happy and back to the joyful. I found out my band is planning to play a song I wrote next Monday!5 I got a free donut from someone whose birthday it was, and I got to go to a meet-and-chat with the person who discovered pulsars. I also finally placed requests for the different books which explain early thoughts on the harmony of the spheres.
All in all, this semester is shaping up to be a fun one!
First Published: 2022 September 6
Pre-reading note: It’s been nearly a month since my last post about this. There’s about a month until the talk. I need to do better at prep. Also, very rambly. Be forewarned
On to the actual post:
My talk is titled1 “Understanding the Musica Universalis, the Harmony of the Spheres”. What is the Musica Universalis? As a quick anglicisation, we end up with the Universal Music, or the Music of the Universe.
This concept is also referred to as the harmony of the spheres. The spheres2 refer to the Greek and general ancient belief of the multiple levels of the universe.
There’s the most obvious sphere, earth. Philosophers have known for millenia that the earth is round.
Above that is the sky, and above the sky is the rest of space. Most translations will say the heavens, and I see no reason not to. Anyways, before I get too distracted on this tangent, time to move on to what I’d planned to talk3 about.
In a modern context, especially one outside of academic music, harmony is generally understood as a vertical concept. That is, harmony refers to the immediate sounds we hear. (If I have access to a piano like I think I will, I’ll start to demonstrate). As an example, think of a chord. For those of you unfamiliar, this4 is a C Major chord. Without getting into what that means, I hope that all of you can hear5 that there is more than one note in that sound.6
There is another way to think of harmony, though, which is to think of the harmony as the notes being used over time. That is, just like this (block CM) is a chord, so is this (arpeggiate). Now that we understand what harmony is in music, how does that relate to the planets and universe?
As some of you probably already know, sounds as we hear them come from waves in the air. In general, most of the musical sounds we hear come from stacked integer multiples of a single base frequency, known as the harmonic series. The harmonic series shows up all over the place in modern physics, especially in quantum systems, where positions and energies are quantized to integer multiples of some value. This is also where the connection between music as we think of it today and the music of the universe comes in.
Ancient and pre-modern philosophers saw the regular orbits and rotations of heavenly bodies and thought that they must be moving to some primal music, far slower than our ears can hear. It’s not hard to see why. Take the most fundamental cycle we can observe: the sun’s rising and falling. Every day we see the sun make a full lap around the earth. Every six months we have exactly 12 hours of sunshine. Every year the cycle of equinoxes and solstices are repeated.
Next we could look at the moon. The moon goes from dark to light every 28 days.
As we continue to add celestial bodies, it’s not hard to see how this harmony keeps filling in more and more.7
That’s about as much time as I think I can justify as an introduction before I get into the actual meat of the talk, going through historical views and such. Then again, maybe I should tie that in like this and spend more time by just introducing the development of views.
Ideas include:
Setting sin generators at different frequencies of orbits to show how planets make a nice chord
Above but with other phenomena, esp. as early thinkers had it.
Make sure to hit on how when we say 2:3 in music we can mean a wide range, not exact to mathematical meanings.
Maybe have a drifting fifth for above
Making sure to talk about how the concept of the universe as a beautiful thing is inherent to early thought.