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Wednesday, May 16, 2012



 A  Sermon  for  Whitsunday   2012

               Our Lord concluded his earthly mission with the rejection of himself and all that he stood for by the already chosen people who he had cherished, including the fulfilling of innumerable specific prophesies, themselves elements of a divine revelation which came from all three Divine Persons in the tri-une God. This included the whole purposeful historical background. As we know from all the evidence from the genesis of the physical cosmos, the Holy Spirit had himself been sent, fully consenting with the Father and the Son to preside over it. At the beginning there was a purposeful sequence in the passage from the creation of the physical material world, which carried with it the stamp of the activity of a benign creator. And it was the Holy Spirit who presided over the primeval waters, according to the writing of Genesis, before all the other developments of the realms of living things: the plants, animals and finally man. His form can be seen as bringing a final perfection to a development by his intellectual soul. He was allowed to master the Creation under God, and with the original man and his female soul-mate he was to master this creation and firstly by regenerating it in a higher, transcendent mode, in the knowledge of the Man and the Woman. So already he was spiritualising nature in himself.    The man and the woman were spiritualizing their paired nature by a knowledge which was to become a setting for the homeliness of culture and civilisation. So his creative presence anticipated the appearance of man, and he breathed the spirit of life within an inert and purely physical scene, for which the man and the woman and their seed would become co-creators under him. Always what happens to the lower raises in relation to what is higher, so assuring the stability and order of what takes place. History is meant to be the exploitation of good developments in creation.
               But there were other beings present in the spiritual order which made a rising complement to the physical earth. Spiritual beings choose their way forward from within themselves within the gift of freedom. Called into being to effect the stability of creation, from within his own machinations, a high spirit took the false step of pursuing his own good, not the good which God intended. What was good he regarded with jealousy. So the spirit twisted and deformed his nature as he infected the original   pair with the desire to be self-regarding and self-seeking. But the uncreated divine Spirit could not be displaced from his controlling role. With angelic help a people was eventually chosen who could be trusted to want to progress in a pursuit of the original aim. They had a sense for the Holy Spirit, and they established under God a spiritual religion. Eventually the Holy Spirit, in total freedom and goodness, brought about the conception in an immaculately pure daughter of Abraham of the Son of the Father in a perfect human form, who would effect a recreation of the Cosmos including the human creation. As the three divine Persons lived in a transcendental and heavenly harmony, so the fruit of the union of the pure woman - Daughter of Zion - was to live in the closest religious and social closeness with men and women, to bring them back from that inherited twisting caused by the jealousy and malice of a fallen spirit, rashly trying to communicate the spirit of revolt and the distancing from God to all creation.          Twice the Holy Spirit intervened: at the Annunciation when he descended on Mary in the cloud of Glory to bring about a physically painless conception and birth of Jesus the human nature adopted by the Son of the Father. After surrounding the mission of the Son in preaching and healing, he sustained that human nature also with the support of the Trinity of Persons through the human pains of opposition, when the cruellest handling ended with a death at which nature darkened itself.
               After three days the human Christ was raised through the single nature of the Triune God. After Forty days the humanity rose to join the essentialist presence of the perduring and changeless divinity, when together the Son with the Father who begot him timelessly, even during his timebound existence, would jointly spirate the Holy Spirit, as already the Son in Jesus had spirated the gift to the Apostles of the forgiveness of human sins in relationship to the dispositions of those who asked.
               The full gifts of the Holy Spirit were the same gifts as were promised to the Messiah as Prophet, Priest and King (Is, 11), passing from the highest most godlike gift of Wisdom, through a descending hierarchy of charisms, down to the "fear of the Lord": the reality of conversion leading an ascent through the others. These gifts were personal to the recipients, but they also received the power to communicate gifts, both spiritual and physical to others. They also received the power to communicate in other languages so that the religious and cultural world which they brought into being as a spiritual and mystical presence of Christ in heaven united with the entire body of believers. So eventually all men, awaiting the ultimate return of Christ to judge, would be able to respire within the clarity, peace and force of Divine Love communicated from the divine Trinity and uniting the entire body of believers, through and in the Holy Spirit, would make up a people united in its spiritual and moral Way of life, in the Truth which brings all things into a beneficent order under God, and all within a single Life, formed in identity with the spiritualised human life of Jesus.
All mediated, as was his own life, through the immaculateness of his Virgin Mother. Amen.





Perhaps you recognize this photograph ?

It was at the head of our old web-site (www.simnet.is/e.booth) which was

effectively closed down in mid-Advent

when the handler declined to accept material

in the programme which we were using.

We received no warning ...

We are experimenting with a Google Blog programme, and the new address is


edward-booth.blogspot.com


This is an experiment with a sample collection of texts, on which we will improve It will remain in place for some time. The editor and his address remain the same. 

Could you tell him whether you are receiving it ? Send an Email to: 

Father Edward Booth O.P.:  

booth.edward@gmail.com




Here we offer you two recent poems:


That Mary was raised above all the Celestial Spirits

The condition of heaven entailed that Gabriel
was not the first to give the adoration of his spirit to Mary.
He had entered a time in which time dominates all things of nature.
In heaven even his movements were related to a time
which is dominated by its realities,
among which were the hierarchies of Spirits above and below the angelic ranks.
For what is in minds transcends its correlates in matter.
In its entirety the heavenly unity was subject to the Triune God and its created Spirits
with its consequences on their subjected time -
measuring the non-physical time in angelic sending
by its ultimate truth.
The earthly nature is touched by individual selves,
but also, celestially, before, as and after from heaven.
However dear the homeliness of earth
the celestial spirits transcend it by the intensity of their thought,
and the power of their transcendent movement in its higher mode.
That entire phalanx, time subjecting,
is subjected to the sway of Mary
having merited it by her transcendent purity and power,
in unceasing adoration and subjection to the living Spirit:
multiple yet not departing from its eternal unity
to which the Spirits offer the power of their simplifying  minds,
their whole being suffused with reflected Light outgoing !



Ommagio musicale for Pope Benedict XVI from Presidente Giorgio Napolitano
         on VIIth anniversary of his Pontificate (11 May 2012)

For the fifth time
the Italian state offered its homage
to Benedict XVI,
In view of his function, "alta e ardua",
as successor of Peter
within this "cara nazione".
That functioning over two millennia
was more ultimate and universal
than the Mefistofele of Verdi's librettist, Boito,
as an aesthetic fusion of Germanic and Italian,
already judged a failure by the Italians,
down-thumbing Nerone, its sequel.  
President Napolitano introduced
an Ommagio entirely Italian:
directed by Maestro Riccardo Muti
with chorus and orchestra of the Roman Opera
with works of Vivaldi and Verdi:
A Magnificat of the first,
and from Verdi's manuscripts alone
a Stabat Mater and  Te Deum;
using instruments for the first from a Cremona collection:
a harpsichord, an organ and perhaps more,
with a Stradivarius violin.
Italian culture stretched over break in form and tonality
of the first holding with faith in surest hands
a brilliant sequence of catena'd units
held by God in him as an earthy another;
humanly expounded by this Venetian,
not questioning but answering.
For the second the intervening history had replanted
the ordered garden with intellectual and emotional questionings, so
his Italian soul was extended to express in music
an artistic reach from an ordered past
to a new discovered opening to questioning and feeling
from romantic currents and expanded mind-sets,
exposed at depths not to have coexisted
with the troubleless, insistent force of Vivaldi.
To both the responsive audience gave general enthusiasm,
with precisely measured, spontaneous applauding:
qualitatively just, short, not indulging and indulged
as by performers of other nations.
The Maestro, with perfect mastery,
followed out the meticulous style of both,
self-effaced by the music in his soul,
strong but modest in his facial and digital expressions.
The matching was connatural,
gave joy matching expectancy.

The Magnificat was a continuum
of discontinuous elements
each jewel-like and varied,
sustained by enthusiasm human and heavenly.
The chorus was chorus-like, unanimous;
the soprano found a string-like but natural vibrato,
expounded the grace-noted sequences
with streaming precision and with clarity.
She found pathos - and corresponding looks and voice -
bringing depths to Mary's praising.
The chorus found a reflection of the world
in the drawn-out, slow-repeating "a progenie in progenies",
and of eternity in the brisker and briefer "in saecula saeculorum" -
the aesthetic grasp of eternity expressed for a world that passes.

But how to find words for Verdi's union
comprehending ordered elements, empathetically thinking
beyond the border of words
yet accepting their linkage?
What energies must follow out transitions
to where impression falls behind the thinking
of universal mind,
Experimenting in isolation
its personal and selective insights
in true keeping with productions for worship from the Christian past
with praise channelled through not wordy dogmatics
to later times and ethoses!
with transient wordlessness,
sustained in articulateness for its overall and regular best.

The Stabat Mater is a medieval hymn which
the composer framed with genius.
Like a frame this must be contrasting,
but catching the artistic fire of the picture,
united with it in its own mode, yet
with a spiritual affinity to what it frames.
This strong framing is most evident at the end
of the dogmatic praise of Te Deum.
The audience (in part] applauded at the penultimate end
to be rebuked by the Maestro´s swift back-hand waive.
The true finale was a transition to utter silence - as before the divinity,
the finality to which humanity must aspire.
Slowest-moving  bow-strings at lowest audibility
were allowed by the Maestro to protract to their ultimate, unconducted.

So music fell silent, entailing
that the whole exposition was an instructive introduction in balance.
The Maestro removed his glasses to reveal
a spirit transferred into silence complete.

Benedict too clapped slowly,
his face suffused with deepest thought.

But he must come to the union of celestial and terrestrial
and deliver his thanks to the President and his wife.
as also to Mario Monti (both were applauded),
with the brilliant assembly, ecclesiastic and lay.
Vivaldi's sacred music is "poco nota".
God shows himself in "uno 'stile' diverso da quello dell'uomo ... per dare speranza".
So the composer rises at "Et misericordia ...
con audaci armonie, ricche con improvvise modulazioni
per invitarci a meditare sulla misericordia di Dio".
With Verdi "il regulo cambia" ...
La musica si fa essenziale ...
Per esprimerne nel modo più intenso possibile il contenuto."
With the Te Deum "l'attenzione ... al testo sacro è minuziosa."
Benedict thinks more of the final words "In te, Domine, speravi".
He adds that these were Verdi's last two works:
"egli devrebbe voluto essere sepolto con la partitura del Te Deum."

Stykkishólmur
15 May 2012




Thursday, November 17, 2011

Mazury

Nie ma poczty w pobliżu jezior:
Cisza, ryzyko wspomnień odrzuca ją.

Leśne ścieżki i świeżo pomalowane domy
z palisadami przepełnionymi kwiatami –
mimo że izolowanymi w środku
zasępionego horyzontu rozrzuconych jezior.

Natura, powolna i nieustępliwa, powróciła
Ziemia walk sprzed wieku
(oprócz tych wciąż, pogrzebanych,
znanych Bogu)
gdy Goci wyrzucili Słowian w upale lata,
i w śniegu w środku zimy
zaatakowani fałszywą nadzieją na ostateczny sukces.

Nowe drzewa z pąkami zginają się w formy pokoju,
Pokorny mech wszystko wygładza.
Łódki są nowe:
Jak stare i czyje są te połamane huśtawki?
This website contains sermons preached in the Chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in three languages: English, Icelandic and Polish - these are the three languages currently most used in Iceland.

It will be a good idea to publish regularly good sermons on the internet, particularly in different languages. These will guide the faithful to integrate the proclamation of the Good Message in their daily life. May the Lord bless this initiative and make it fruitful !
in Christ,
+Péter Bürcher Bishop of Reykjavik

The psalmist speaking of the Truth that comes to us from the apostles, sings,
"Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world" (Ps.19v.4). I commend the apostolic work on the Internet of our brother Edward Booth OP and pray for Christ's blessing on him on all who use this web site.

John Farrell OP Prior Provincial

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