#new liturgical year

[amplexi]

"From Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem." -- Isaiah 2:3

Happy First Sunday of Advent!

[lionofchaeronea]

Golgotha, Anthony van Dyck, 1630

[ameretat]

At that time, Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

— Luke 4:16

[sadsongsandwaltzes]

What was the best part of your Christmas?

I actually really didn’t do much for Christmas this year because of the weather. Christmas Eve we had a small gathering of those who could make it, but most couldn’t because the roads were bad. Christmas Day, weather hit bad AGAIN so we didn’t do ANYTHING. And I was dog sitting for a friend this weekend while they were gone visiting family, and since it was snowing and I knew there was a decent chance I wouldn’t be able to get back there in the evenings because of the roads, I just stayed at their house. So I spent Christmas Day at my friends house alone with her pets lol. But I watched a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day service on Facebook from one of my Twitter mutuals church — and having people like that in my life, even if only online, who will help me with my faith and pray for me is another thing I’m so incredibly thankful for!

And then Monday another few of us had supper at grandmas.

But this weekend both my brothers are coming home so we’ll have our small little Christmas gathering at my parents this weekend! Hopefully the weather holds out.

But thank you for asking, and I hope you had a very merry christmas!

[indynerdgirl]

[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Madonna - Like a Prayer 1989

"Like a Prayer" is a song by American singer Madonna and was released as the lead single from her 1989 fourth studio album of the same name. Written and produced by both Madonna and Patrick Leonard, the song heralded an artistic and personal approach to songwriting for Madonna, who believed that she needed to cater more to her adult audience. Along with the parent album, "Like a Prayer" was a turning point in Madonna's career, with critics starting to acknowledge her as an artist rather than a mere pop star.

"Like a Prayer" is a pop rock and gospel song that also incorporates elements of funk. The lyrics contain liturgical words, but they have been interpreted by some people to have dual meanings of sexual innuendo and religion. "Like a Prayer" was acclaimed by music critics upon release and was a global commercial success, becoming Madonna's seventh number 1 hit on the US Billboard Hot 100, topping the Hot 100 for three consecutive weeks and also topping the charts in many other countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain and the UK. It was Madonna's fifth number 1 hit on the Eurochart Hot 100, and stayed at number one for 12 weeks.

The accompanying music video for "Like a Prayer", directed by Mary Lambert, shows a white woman being sexually assaulted and subsequently killed by a group of white men, but a black man is arrested for the crime. The video depicts a church and Catholic symbols such as stigmata. It also features the Ku Klux Klan's burning crosses and a dream sequence about kissing a black saint. Leon Robinson was hired to play the role of a saint; the part was inspired by Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mixed-race people and all those seeking interracial harmony. The Vatican condemned the video, while family and religious groups protested against its broadcast. They boycotted products by soft drink manufacturer Pepsi, who had used the song in their commercial. Pepsi canceled their sponsorship contract with Madonna, but allowed her to retain the $5 million fee.

While most TV stations banned the music video, MTV notably continued to air the video on heavy rotation. The controversies leading to her "Like a Prayer" video introduced the concept of free publicity and became a turning point where Madonna was viewed as a shrewd businesswoman who knows how to sell a concept. At the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards, the video for "Like a Prayer" was nominated in the Viewer's Choice and Video of the Year categories, winning the former. It was number one on MTV's countdown of "100 Videos That Broke the Rules" in 2005, and for the channel's 25th anniversary, viewers voted it as the "Most Groundbreaking Music Video of All Time". In addition, the video was ranked at number 20 on Rolling Stone's "The 100 Top Music Videos", and at number two on VH1's 100 Greatest Videos. In a 2011 poll by Billboard, the video for "Like a Prayer" was voted the second-best music video of the 1980s, behind only Michael Jackson's "Thriller". According to Screen Rant, "Like a Prayer" is one of the most used Madonna's songs in movies and television, most recently notably featured in the 2024 film Deadpool & Wolverine.

"Like a Prayer" received a total of 87,9% yes votes! Previous Madonna polls: #18 "Who's That Girl", #184 "Live to Tell".

[literallyjusttoa]

Apollo Music Headcanons

As a god Apollo’s singing voice can be whatever he wants it to be, but as Lester I imagine it as a strong tenor (he can’t hit a lot of low notes and it pisses him off) with a bit of a rasp in it. He sings like he’s been classically trained, but with enough confidence to bend the rules in order to get the right feelings out of the song. In one word, I’d describe Lester’s singing as raw. It’s not perfect, but the imperfections seem planned in such a way that they touch you even more than perfection would.

There are multiple languages that Apollo has learned solely so he could perform the most popular songs of the era. Italian, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and a couple more throughout the years. This is also how he learned English.

He uses vocal warmups as a form of stimming. Meg wakes up some mornings and hears him going “oooOOOOooooOOOOooo” and just has to deal with it. He pulls them from all over too. Sometimes it will be professional warmups that opera singers use, and other time he’ll be whipping out “mama made me mash my m&m’s” from middle school chorus

Leto has a lullaby she used to sing to Apollo and Artemis while she was still searching for a place to safely give birth. To this day, it’s the first song Apollo plays on every new instrument he picks up.

Apollo is scarily good at impressions, even as Lester. He has so much vocal control that impersonating the sounds of others comes easily. He can also throw his voice really well.

He has songs that he connects to other people. Will’s song, Meg’s song, etc. when he’s lonely on Olympus, he listens to them on repeat.

Apollo is the god of music, not the god of good music. You could bang two trashcan lids together and have a screaming raccoon as lead vocalist and he’d probably still add it to a playlist. He unironically listens to some of the most hated songs of the last few centuries. Ironically, he’s also the worst person to pass the aux to in the car. If he really cares about you, he’ll cater the music he chooses to your taste. If not, you’re getting the whiplash of the next biggest K-pop hit followed by the liturgical chants of Hildegard von Bingen. Enjoy!

[sixteenseveredhands]

Doodles Made by a 6-year-old Boy Named Onfim, from Russia, c. 1240-1260 CE: created nearly 800 years ago, these drawings were scrawled onto the homework/spelling exercises of a little boy in Novgorod

Over the last 75 years, excavations in and around Novgorod, in Russia, have led to the discovery of hundreds of documents dating back to the Middle Ages. These documents were made using pieces of bark from the local birch trees; they include letters, notes, spelling exercises, shopping lists, receipts, and legal documents, among other things.

The most famous examples are the panels that contain the writing exercises of a 6-7 year-old boy named Onfim, whose work was often accompanied by drawings of knights, fantastical beasts, battle scenes, and depictions of himself in various forms.

These are just a few examples:

Birch-Bark Document no.199: on the back of a panel that had been used for his spelling exercises, Onfim drew this picture of himself as a wild beast, writing "I am a wild beast" in the center of the drawing; the beast is also shown holding a sign that says "Greetings from Onfim to Danilo," likely referring to a friend or classmate.

Birch-Bark Document no.200: Onfim began writing the Cyrillic alphabet at the top of this panel, but he then stopped to draw a picture of himself as a warrior on horseback, labeling the figure with his name; the drawing shows him wielding a sword while he impales his enemy with a spear.

Birch-Bark Document no.202: the boy's mother and father are depicted in this drawing, which accompanies another writing exercise.

Birch-Bark Document no.206: Onfim began to copy a liturgical prayer (the Troparion of the Sixth Hour) onto this strip of bark, but he apparently got distracted after writing just the first few words, and started drawing a row of people along the bottom of the panel instead.

The examples above are just a few of the many documents that have been unearthed in Novgorod (now known as Veliky Novgorod) and its surrounding areas. More than a thousand birch-bark manuscripts and styli have been found throughout the region, suggesting that there was a high rate of literacy among the local inhabitants. Most of these documents were created during the 11th-15th centuries, when Novgorod served as the capital city of the Novgorod Republic; they had been buried in the thick, wet clay that permeates the local soil, in conditions that allowed them to remain almost perfectly preserved for hundreds of years.

I know that Onfim's drawings are pretty well-known already, but my most recent post involved a very similar writing exercise/doodle from a child in Medieval Egypt, so I just thought I'd post some of Onfim's work, as well.

Sources & More Info:

Institute of Slavic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences: Birch-Bark no.200, no.199, no.202, no.203, no.206, & no.210 (the site is in Russian, but can be translated)

Institute of Slavic Studies: Full Database of Birch-Bark Documents

The New York Times: Where Mud is Archaeological Gold, Russian History Grew on Trees

Russian Linguistics: Old East Slavic Birch-Bark Literacy - a history of linguistic emancipation?

[cryptfly]

All I ever want to do is play dress up with my dollies. Here’s Rinsea, my ESO main, in some various ceremonial garbs she’s picked up during her adventures. More info under the cut.

Champion of Vivec

She would rather you think of her being the City’s champion than the God-King’s, but here we are. I obviously based it on the Buoyant Armiger’s glass armor. She’s not officially a Buoyant Armiger or anything, but she does get some fancy glass armor pieces for official occasions which she does not attend. This is also partially based on Bajoran liturgical wear because I like it very much.

Champion of Sotha Sil

Technically she’s the champion of the Clockwork City but that was very long to put on her picture lmao. I don’t think Seht would have gotten her any ceremonial wear honestly, but since it’s basically a standard Clockwork Apostle outfit, I like to think that one of that order got her this, something fine and suited to the environment as a thanks for saving their sadboi God. Drawing the armor pieces was really fun and satisfying and they turned out way better than I was expecting.

Champion of Almalexia

Once again I changed the actual title given to fit the picture. Almalexia actually named her a Hand! However as we all know, a Hand of Almalexia is a specific kind of Ordinator and Rin is not actually inducted into that order. She’s a Hand because Ayem says so but that doesn’t actually give her any rank or anything. Instead of giving her Ordinator armor, I gave her a fancy gown. I think Ayem did this with a touch of vanity-isn’t my Hero so beautiful, a true Daughter of Morrowind I am such a proud Mother. Also, I really wanted to draw a pretty dress and no one can stop me. I based some of the details off Kirkbride drawings of Almalexia herself.

Urshilaku Clanfriend

In my personal canon of the story, the Vvardenfell quest happened first for Rin and took around little over a year and in that time she became a Clanfriend among Ashlanders. Her father, Gares, had been an Ashlander until he was forced to flee with his infant daughter and when she returned on what seemed to be Temple business, they were wary of her. But she made herself useful and was unfailingly polite and she was folded into much of their life. I like that while the other outfits look designed and tailored to suit her, her Ashlander gear almost looks like hand me downs and mended pieces. She wasn’t given new and special clothes, she was trusted with clothes worn by the tribe, inviting her into the family itself. These clothes look nice but also like something she work in side by side with the Ashlanders.

[argyrocratie]

"In “Memory Voids and Role Reversals,” Palestinian political science professor Dana El Kurd writes of her jarring experience, hearing of the October 7th massacres by Hamas while visiting the Holocaust Tower at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She notes the historic irony of Holocaust survivors seeking security from future oppression by expelling another people from their homeland by the hundreds of thousands, ghettoizing them in enclaves enforced by military checkpoints, and controlling them with collective punishment.

The irony of a state formed as the “antithesis” to the ghetto using ghettoization as a strategy of control is not lost on Palestinians. This infrastructure of coercion went hand in hand, of course, with ever-present physical violence — imprisonment, home demolitions, air strikes and more.

She quotes Aristide Zolberg’s observation that “formation of a new state can be a ‘refugee-generating process.’”

This is not only true of Palestinians. The Westphalian nation-state, which has been the normative component of the international system since the Treaty of Westphalia, necessarily entails (especially since the post-1789 identification of nationalism with the nation-state) the suppression of ethnic identity to a far greater extent than the expression of any such identity. Every constructed national identity associated with a “State of the X People” has necessarily involved the suppression and homogenization of countless ethnicities present in the territory claimed by that state. At the time of the French Revolution, barely half the “French” population spoke any of the many langue d’oil dialects of northern France, let alone the dialect of the Ile de France (the basis for the official “French” language). The rest spoke Occitan dialects like Provençal, or non-Romance languages like Breton (whose closest living relative is Welsh). The same is true of Catalan, Aragonese, Basque, and Galician in Spain, the low-German languages and now-extinct Wendish in Germany, the non-Javanese ethnicities of Indonesia, and so on. Heads of state issue sonorous pronouncements concerning the “Nigerian People” or “Zimbabwean People,” in reference to multi-ethnic populations whose entire “identity” centers on lines drawn on a map at the Berlin Conference.

When I say official national languages were established through the suppression of their rivals, I mean things like the residential schools of the United States and Canada punishing Native children for using their own languages. Or schools around the world shaming students with signs reading “I Spoke Welsh (or Breton, or Provencal, or Catalan, or Basque, or Ainu, or an African vernacular instead of the English, French, etc., lingua franca). And so on.

And when we consider the range of artificial national identities that were constructed by suppressing other real ethnicities, we can’t forget the “Jewish People” of Israel. Its construction occurred part and parcel with the suppression of diasporic Jewish ethnic identities all over Europe and the Middle East. The “New Jewish” identity constructed by modern Zionism was associated with the artificial revival of Hebrew, which had been almost entirely a liturgical language for 2300 years, as an official national language. And this, in turn, was associated with the suppression — both official and unofficial — of the actually existing Jewish ethnicities associated with the Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic languages.

The centuries-old languages and cultures of actual Jewish ethnicities throughout Europe were treated as shameful relics of the past, to be submerged and amalgamated into a new artificially constructed Jewish identity centered on the Hebrew language. 

Yiddish, the language spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe — derived from an archaic German dialect and written in the Hebrew alphabet — was stigmatized by Zionist leaders in Palestine and by the early Israeli government. According to Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language, the “very making of Hebrew into a spoken language derives from the will to separate from the Diaspora.” Diasporic Jewish identities, as viewed by Zionist settlers, were “a cultural morass to be purged.” The “New Jew” was an idealized superhuman construct, almost completely divorced from centuries worth of culture and traditions of actual Jews: “Yiddish began to represent diaspora and feebleness, said linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann. ‘And Zionists wanted to be Dionysian: wild, strong, muscular and independent.’” 

This “contempt for the Diaspora” was “manifested . . .  in the fierce campaign against Yiddish in Palestine, which led not only to the banning of Yiddish newspapers and theaters but even to physical attacks against Yiddish speakers.” From the 1920s on, anyone in Palestine with the temerity to publish in Yiddish risked having their printing press destroyed by organizations with names like the “Battalion of the Defenders of the Hebrew Language,” “Organization for the Enforcement of Hebrew,” and “Central Council for the Enforcement of Hebrew.” The showing of the Yiddish-language film Mayn Yidishe Mame (“My Yiddish Mama”), in Tel Aviv in 1930, provoked a riot led by the above-mentioned Battalion. After the foundation of Israel, “every immigrant was required to study Hebrew and often to adopt a Hebrew surname.” In its early days Israel legally prohibited plays and periodicals in the Yiddish language. A recent defender of the early suppression of Yiddish, in the Jerusalem Post, argued that Diasporic languages threatened to “undermine the Zionist project”; in other words, an admission that actually existing ethnic identities threatened an identity manufactured by a nationalist ideology.

If this is true of Yiddish — the native language of the Ashkenazi Jews who dominated the Zionist settlement of Palestine — it’s even more so of the suppression of Jewish ethnic identities outside the dominant Sephardic minority. Golda Meir once dismissed Jews of non-Ashkenazi or non-Yiddish descent as “not Jews.” 

Consider the roughly half of the Israeli population comprised of Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern communities (including those living in Palestine itself before European settlement). Although the Mizrahim are trotted out as worthy victims when they are convenient for purposes of Israeli propaganda — the majority of them were expelled from Arab countries like Iraq after 1948, in what was an undeniable atrocity — they are treated the rest of the time as an embarrassment or a joke, and have been heavily discriminated against, by the descendants of Ashkenazi settlers. For example former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion described Mizrahim 

as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education.” Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: “We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora.”

Current Prime Minister Netanyahu once joked about a “Mizrahi gene” as his excuse for tardiness. And an Israeli realtor ran a commercial appealing to “there goes the neighborhood” sentiments by depicting a light-skinned family having their Passover celebration disrupted by uncouth Mizrahi neighbors.

Nationalism and the nation-state are the enemies of true ethnicity and culture, and built on their graves. There’s no better illustration of this principle than the Zionist project itself."

-Kevin Carson, "Zionism and the Nation-State: Palestinians Are Not the Only Victims"

[queerprayers]

Today is (for many of us) the feast of Christ the King, and I wanted to take a moment to honor that. I was baptized on this feast, and I've always been drawn to it. Originally instituted by the pope in 1925 as a response to growing nationalism and secularism, making it the newest element of the liturgical year, most Lutherans and other liturgical Protestants also honor this day.

I have differing opinions on secular rule/the separation of church and state (and evangelism, for that matter) than the founders of this feast did, but I can appreciate the yearning for more world leaders/political groups/religious groups to recognize our true callings as human beings--to each other, to Love. And I love the concept of combating nationalism with allegiance to a higher power!

"King" has a lot of political implications, and mostly negative associations for anyone like me, so I wanted to point out how the original encyclical describes this title of Jesus's, by quoting Cyril of Alexandria: "Christ," he says, "has dominion over all creatures, a dominion not seized by violence nor usurped, but his by essence and by nature." Today is the reason I'm not a monarchist--there is no earthly ruler that has my allegiance. There is no earthly rule established without force. My allegiance is to Christ, the ruler of the only valid kingdom; to God's house, the only state without lines on a map; to Love which is the universe, the only empire that includes people by embracing them rather than conquering them.

We can only understand so much of who God is. We separate out God's roles; we can only focus on one tiny piece of the universe at once. (This is why we have holidays--to honor pieces of our religion in human time.) The king we are called to serve is only called "king" because that's one of the closest words we have in our language to describe what we're talking about--the old-fashioned meaning of king, one born for the role and called to die for the role. A romanticized meaning perhaps, one that has never been true in any society, one that has caused so much harm, but nonetheless one used throughout centuries to get across one of the ways we approach God--along with "father" and "friend" and "bridegroom" and "creator."

We pray for God's kingdom to come because that's an idea we can understand--we can logically process that a new kingdom coming, a new empire conquering, means everything changes, the rules are turned upside down. We hold this language while acknowledging there is so much more to it. If you can't stomach using these words, if they are filled with violence for you, I encourage you to sit with that truth, consider what it would be like to take earthly ideas and fill them with Love, and also acknowledge you do not have to use this language. We try to hold God with our words and fail over and over. We come to God from our culture and language and time and we squint at the universe. We see in a mirror dimly, for now.

As we encounter earthly nationalism and imperialism and colonialism and warmongering, as we see people claim that their nation-state is chosen by God, we honor power turning on its head today. We see Jesus revealing what kingship, what ruling, what power is when Love is the center of the universe. Jesus, who had more power than any human, fed the hungry, hung out with the oppressed and misunderstood, threatened the powerful without violence, was killed by earthly empire, and conquered death with life.

May we, as members of God's kingdom, under Jesus's rule--by choosing this as our practice--serve the only king who has ever deserved our allegiance. We work to bring our communities and religious groups and, yes, our nation-states, closer to the image God has set for us, but ultimately we know we are creating and navigating human-made borders between things that will one day be one.

You already know what God has asked of you. It's not a democracy but neither is it a monarchy, really--it's something else. Something you have to opt in to, but don't really get a choice in. Something you can run from but never escape. Something that once you see clearly, you'll never be satisfied without. You are technically free to abandon the work, but you would be abandoning the only thing that will make us whole. Call your government representative. Go to a protest. Give money to the person by the side of the road. Read a book. Hug your lover. Feed the birds. Denounce your country in favor of your community and every single human being. You are a citizen of the universe, which is God, which is love. Christ the King, the reign of Christ, means what rules us is Life.

(We look down the road to Advent--to new year, rebirth, apocalypse. "Apocalypse" meaning unveiling, revelation, disclosure. We see in a mirror dimly, and then--thy kingdom come--we see face to face. All at once, awfully, blindingly, daylight after years of darkness. Christ the King says, what if New Year's Eve was a surrender to time and power? What if before you even remembered Christmas exists, you were confronted with the reality of your calling? This is the feast of victory to our God. Alleluia!)

[iridiss]

Laurance sings. Not masterfully by any means, he’d never be well-renowned for the beautifully trained technique of his voice, but he grew up in a bustling trading port town with a constant influx of seafarers, fishermen, even pirates—mariners from all over the planet, from every possible town and culture, and with them they brought their songs. Sea shanties of every breed and variety. And as the Head Guard of Meteli, he would be there to manage all the trades and imports, so he’d be right there on the docks, hearing every song that comes in and out of town and gleefully listening and learning to sing along. He’s a mariner boy, he grew up right by a channel into the sea, he has dozens of sea shanties memorized in-and-out and will sing them regularly, just to entertain himself and others around him. Aphmau, Garroth, and the others grow used to hearing Laurance bust out sea shanties all the time on their travels, like singing 99 Bottles of Beer On The Wall while you’re on a road trip, but like. The medieval equivalent of that

Vylad is in the same boat. After he faked his death, he ran off into the wild world of Ru’aun And Beyond to have a life full of constant adventure, and most of those ended up being overseas. Vylad became a swashbuckler of sorts, a petty thief with egregious debts to the local crime guilds that he never paid, the kind of person who would show up one day for a heist, and completely disappear off the face of the planet the next. Vylad was a pirate. Maybe not a grand or well-known one, maybe only for 7 months out of every year, but he’d stowaway on a number of ships just to get across channels and off to new places. At least a few times, he worked as part of a crew in order to get some coin, and one time, he was Captain—before his ship and the fake identity he took went up in flames only weeks later. Vylad knows a wide list of sea shanties, and he still sings them from time to time. It’s a comforting reminder of his humanity. It keeps him grounded, prevents him from forgetting the past and getting too lost in the chains of being a Shadow Knight.

Zane sings. Very differently from Laurance & Vylad. Zane was a High Priest, which means he held & organized church, regularly. Churches usually have music, and his religion is heavily based off of Catholicism, so it’s very likely that he was the one to arrange the O’khasis church’s liturgical choirs. It’s likely that singing in church was part of the regular routine that everyone present would partake in, including and especially their High Priest. There’s no way he doesn’t know how to sing, very much in that kind of Medieval-Classical-Latin-Catholic Choir vocal technique/style. It has a very different sound from Laurance and Vylad’s more…”free-balling seaman” style, but he was professionally trained on how to sing since he was young, and can sing quite well. (Also, Kestin is a good singer, which is an added bonus)

Zenix could not sing to save his life. His regular speaking voice is already very rough and sandpaper-like, and his singing voice is even worse. He’s tone deaf, if you heard his singing voice, which sounds more like a dying, extremely strained screeching wail, you may never want to hear anything ever again. It’s just a very naturally unpleasant sound. And that’s fine, he’s never really been much of a singer or that musically inclined. He’s more arson-inclined, frankly. However, I can picture him channeling his destructive energy into being a good percussionist, by way of “needing to hit stuff” + getting down a good sense of rhythm = producing a pretty decent beat. Maybe he also beatboxes? Zenix has enough “hyperactive boy” energy to be a beatboxer, that’d suit him well enough.

Gene has a luscious singing voice. Gene could sing lullabies that’d put a rhino to sleep. Gene’s voice is the kind of sexy, buttery-smooth voice you feel reverberating in your core. Gene sounds like he’d sing Frank Sinatra, or old classic Christmas songs for a record that’d make millions. He does it so infrequently though, especially ever since he became a Shadow Knight, and mostly uses it now to lull other people into a trance, or when he’s bored. You can’t exactly pursue a musical career when you’re serving as the General of Hell for the rest of eternity. Zenix and Sasha have both heard him sing, at least a few times. In the past, it relaxed Zenix like no other.

Sasha used to sing. She used to have a very pretty voice that Laurance and Cadenza would stop and listen to at any given opportunity. Cadenza would encourage her to push past her shyness enough to sing for her while she worked on sowing her next design (sapphic sasha x cadenza melodies,,,). But after her death by falling into lava, she sustained a certain level of damage both to her body and to her psyche that made her shut down her love for singing entirely. She has not sung once since she died.

Kiki sings to her animals and to Leona all the time.

If Garroth did sing, he would probably have a very similar vocal technique/style to Zane’s, simply by being raised under the same religious roof as him. I don’t think “learn how to sing in a choir” would be part of the Princely/military training Garte would put him through, though.

Zoe and Levin like to sing together for fun sometimes.

In my main rewrite au, the Shadow Knight Rebellion includes Laurance, Vylad, Zenix, and Zane begrudgingly working together as a team. They like to sing together. Laurance and Vylad connected easily and quickly over their shared love for sea shanties, and eventually the three of them managed to bully, bug, and peer pressure Zane into singing with them, and were surprised by just how well he could sing. Laurance and Vylad asked Zenix to join in. Zenix got through the first three notes before Laurance told him to please stop.

The four of them end up making an unexpectedly merry band together. Laurance and Vylad sing, Zane sings sometimes, and Zenix would provide the accompaniment, like a rag-tag improvised a capella group that formed from the cracks in the pavement. They make an anthem for the Rebellion and teach it to all the hundreds of soldiers that join over time. When the SKR eventually reunite with The Phoenix Alliance, the people of the Phoenix Alliance are very perplexed by the band and their musical connection.

[sgiandubh]

Sunday sounds: Palm Sunday. Revolution

As it did during Advent, this page is going to walk with its readers this last stride towards Easter, for the entire Holy Week. If this is not your jam, please ignore these posts. Even if this blogger is Catholic, the focus here is on personal thoughts, not doctrine. And everyone is welcome.

Many things are celebrated in remembrance, this Sunday, and since this is a 'B' liturgical year, we do have Mark's reporter-like version to meditate upon. All the events and all the critically important people for what is bound to happen next week are presented to us, along with the apparent denouement.

But first, there's the Jerusalem Crowd and its spontaneous, instinctive Joy: 'and many spread their garments in the way: and others cut down branches off the trees, and strawed them in the way' (Mark, 11:8). The poorest of the poor are now placed, by the course of events, upfront and centerstage. And never forget: this is what we piously call 'the Classical World', where these people do not have a voice, nor a message. History was never written by them: it simply served to keep track of and eternally praise the military campaigns of despots. This Joy is nothing short of revolutionary.

Some of this energy is melancholically translated in this old Transylvanian Palm Sunday Carol. It reminds us of the Dawn of a New World, we often seem to totally forget about.

[nym-wibbly]

wait, you hadn't seen spn when you posted the good omens wip? the language with the angels is so similar and everything?

Nope. Pratchett fan of many years, completely new to Supernatural these past three months (with the exception of Cas' love confession, cuz I think everyone on the internet who didn't know to duck and cover in advance got sp*ilered for it that night in 2020.) Something of a lifelong thing for fictional angels, though.

I went with a quasi-Judeo-Christian-theological, liturgical, and poetic vocabulary for the Heaven and Hell/angel and demon stuff. More straight-up/slightly unintentionally ironic for Aziraphale, who wants to take it all at face value (even when he can't); more filtered through the questions of Milton's Paradise Lost, and more despairing and hurting, for fallen angel Crowley.

Muriel's dialogue has a touch of the innocence and wonder of catechism - a discovery, a flowering that opens up to them through the spoken and written word. They question without hidden motive.

Metatron's got a smidge of the manipulative certainty of commercially-driven televangelism: clinical, cynical, tailored for maximum impact on his target audience (Aziraphale). A performance.

I'd guess the Supernatural writers did much the same, cherrypicking for whichever aspect bolstered their storyline or character at the time! Throw a rock at the English language and you'll hit a Judeo-Christian concept somewhere, somehow. "Grace", "vessel", "the Michael Sword" and so on - that stuff paints a lyrical picture that "essence", "body", and "archangel's avatar" couldn't, because it pulls hard on sources rooted so deep in English prose and poetry that we infer deeper meanings without, necessarily, ever giving them a moment's thought before. I'd guess that Good Omens itself influenced Supernatural, too?

A lot of scriptural and liturgical vocabularly and cadence is hardwired into the lyrical use of the English language via influential sources like the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

"I'm the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition," tells us a boatload about Castiel's mindset before he even reveals to Dean that he's "an angel of the Lord". Then he's taken aback when Dean doesn't believe him - challenges him and keeps on pushing back; Cas expects this shit to be hardwired into Dean's brain and for Dean to respond accordingly by bending at the knees. Shock and awe using language.

They spend most of season 4 in that state of disconnect, barely communicating even when they both try, because Dean's just not doing "because it's God's will/because I say so", not for anyone or anything; he won't respond to that portentous vocabulary and Cas struggles to adapt to that (not least because he gets brutally punished when he tries).

Put 'em away Cas.

[that-catholic-shinobi]

Also Happy Liturgical News Years Eve to my fellow Catholics

[natequarter]

frankly the idea that putting services into english was for "the good of the people" and that medieval people did not understand religion due to the use of latin feels rather insulting; it seems to suggest that the christianity of the (protestant) educated elite was the correct form of worship and that a more popular [in the sense of 'of the people'] form of (at least in medieval and tudor england) catholicism was a wrong of the uneducated that needed to be righted - despite the fact that the average medieval/tudor person would not exactly have been unaware of the religion that pervaded their life. there were other ways to reinforce the messages of christ to an illiterate or monolingual populace beyond translating scripture into english: mystery plays; paintings; preaching; parables; holy days; literature; pilgrimage; and, of course, more. particularly in england this tends to be an aspect of a protestant narrative of history - that protestantism's return to scripture and vernacular bibles would encourage a better, personal understanding of faith, and that being able to understand the bible and communion was for the good of the people. yet if the western rising was anything to go by, many people actually objected to the intrusion of english worship on latin as the liturgical language of the church - part of this may have been due to cornish being the native of language of many of the rebels and therefore making english an incomprehensible intrusion as much as if not more so than latin, but the fact remains that plenty of ostensibly uneducated and illiterate people saw the possibility of worship in a language they understood (the rebellion was centred in cornwall and devon, so many rebels would have spoken english) and rejected it.

the idea of translation and returning to scripture was also not the sole property of protestants - renaissance humanism was the domain of many catholics as well, including the famous erasmus and thomas more, who also saw the virtues of returning to the latin and original greek! the new testament was even translated into english by catholics in 1582 - less than fifty years after the first complete bible in english was published in england, itself hardly renowned for being protestant despite being heavily influenced by william tyndale's translations. one of the problems lies in the fact that henry viii's faith was largely idiosyncratic and doctrinally conservative despite his genuine interest in reform; the second lies in the fact that before the second half of the sixteenth century, catholic and protestant were not coherently defined ideologies or positions, and in fact the words catholic and protestant did not exist. the history of vernacular translations and its relationship with the catholic church and heresy is complicated, but there exist translations of the four gospels as early back as the tenth century; alfred the great ordered the translation of the ten commandments and the laws from exodus; richard rolle translated the psalms into english in the 1340s. the suggestion that the catholic church forbade vernacular translation throughout its history first of all rather misses the point - at the point that the vulgate bible was written, latin was a vernacular language. this is why the latin bible is known as the vulgate - vulgate comes from latin vulgātus, and literally means 'broadcast, published, having been made known among the people[/common]'. it also ties into the idea that the medieval catholic church was a backwards institute which wished to repress... every form of learning? which is obviously false - the catholic church wished to condemn and repress heresy, as it indeed did when john wycliffe produced the wycliffe bible, notorious both for being an early translation of the bible into english and for wycliffe's association with 'proto-protestant' ideas. medieval and catholic are not synoymous with backwards!

insert conclusion here about how patronising it is to assume that all working class english catholics were simply ignorant to the truth and discovering protestantism would instantly make sense to them and how frustrating it is when people conflate commonly held protestant ideals with Things Catholics Never Do. the end