A (mostly) Musical Maundy Thursday Round-up
A few songs and some links to usher in the Easter Triduum….
Kyle Cupp brings us this Missy Higgins song for Holy Week:
Davey Henreckson has some tracks and thoughts on Elvis Perkins, son of the late Anthony Perkins:
The timing turned out to be perfect—this album is the perfect complement to the narrative of Holy Week. Perkins’ first release, 2007’s Ash Wednesday, was moving, dark, and heartfelt. His personal history is marked with tragedy: his father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS, and his mother died in one of the hijacked planes on September 11th. In an interview on NPR, Perkins admitted that his songs are almost all the musical grandchildren of his parents. Many songwriters put on affectations of suffering. The self-pitying artist is a familiar cliche. Perkins’ own personal history gives perhaps more justification for this than the typical post-bourgeois indie artist can claim. He had the ethos to pull off tragedy, and he did so to much acclaim in Ash Wednesday. And this is exactly why the progression from Ash Wednesday to this new album is (wonderfully) surprising.
Over at dotCommonweal we learn a little about images and The Last Supper, and Stewart K. Lundy, at the Front Porch Republic, discusses Holy Week and the image of the Phoenix:
Birth, life, and death is the natural life cycle. The resurrection marks not merely birth (natality) or the denial of death (mortality) but rather the fullness of life (maturity). As Adam was born as a mature man, so Christ was resurrected as a mature man. The pediatric and geriatric stages of life are merely part of the life cycle. The promise of the Phoenix is not the “new child” but the “new man.” The reborn Phoenix does not learn again how to fly, but leaps instantly into heaven blessed with a body glowing golden, transfigured by the very flames of death which destroyed it. While death destroys the “old man” once and for all, it creates the “new man” once and for all. The fires of death are the very radiance of the Phoenix’s new life. The Phoenix marks our re-incarnation in the new heaven and the new earth, the atonement to Innocent Being.
Joshua Land revisits The Passion:
One of the ironies of the reception of Passion among American audiences is that it was primarily Protestant evangelicals who came to the defense of this very Catholic film. The particularly Catholic nature of Passion is most obvious in the prominence of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the film (another element possibly drawn from Emmerich), compared to her limited role in the Gospel accounts, but Catholic theology is also crucial to the film’s deep structure. Writing about the influence of classical art on the film, David Goa aptly describes Passion as “a series of tableaux vivants…of the Stations of the Cross,” a Catholic devotion dating back to the 12th century that prompts believers to meditate on the human suffering experienced by Jesus in the hours before his death, in keeping with the Christian belief that it was the suffering and eventual death and resurrection of Jesus that opened the possibility of redemption for humanity.
Pope Benedict XVI’s Homily for the Chrism Mass:
Praying is a journey in personal communion with Christ, setting before him our daily life, our successes and failures, our struggles and our joys – in a word, it is to stand in front of him. But if this is not to become a form of self-contemplation, it is important that we constantly learn to pray by praying with the Church. Celebrating the Eucharist means praying. We celebrate the Eucharist rightly if with our thoughts and our being we enter into the words which the Church sets before us. There we find the prayer of all generations, which accompany us along the way towards the Lord.
Ross has some links, too.
