Motets Instead of Mohammed

From the comments, a video:

Praise the Lord!
Sing to the Lord a new song,
his praise in the assembly of the godly!
2 Let Israel be glad in his Maker;
let the children of Zion rejoice in their King!
3 Let them praise his name with dancing,
making melody to him with tambourine and lyre!
4 For the Lord takes pleasure in his people;
he adorns the humble with salvation.
5 Let the godly exult in glory;
let them sing for joy on their beds.
6 Let the high praises of God be in their throats
and two-edged swords in their hands,
7 to execute vengeance on the nations
and punishments on the peoples,
8 to bind their kings with chains
and their nobles with fetters of iron,
9 to execute on them the judgment written!
This is honour for all his godly ones.
Praise the Lord!

Ritamalik also says, in response to the Muslim cleric who hates music:

I waste no time by arguing to this fanatical Muslim Neanderthal, but instead I let the great Johann Sebastian Bach answer him with Psalm 149 about how the REAL God feels about music!

Indeed. Even those who do not share her religious beliefs still share her enthusiasm for Bach’s rendering of Psalm 149. My Gregorian Chant music director would often remind us that the Psalms are songs and dances,and that singing them is praying twice.

It is difficult indeed to warm to anyone who, for reasons of dogma, hates or reviles music. That is just one reason the Chinese will always be several steps ahead of Islam’s plans. For them Western music is an important facet of educating the whole child.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if China became the repository of Western culture’s art forms? Just as the barbarians saved Roman and Greek knowledge, it can only be partial, but that is better than obliteration. All that Islam comprehends is obliteration.

11 thoughts on “Motets Instead of Mohammed

  1. Let the anti-music muslims hear Verdi’s Dies Irae and relish the Wrath of God !

    • Amen! That is what I am fighting for too!

      I recently had a conversation with my pastor who is from Germany. He was expressing many pro-refugee sentiments in the recent weeks. So I decided to pay him a visit and try to speak some sense into him.

      Amongst other things I asked him: “Pastor, do you not care that as the result of this massive migrant influx into your country, your wonderful language and culture will be wiped out in a few generations, or maybe even sooner if this keeps up?”

      To my surprise he said: “No! This is all vanity! My citizenship is somewhere else, in the kingdom of heaven! Helping people in need is worth the sacrifice!”

      At this point I, an Iranian, born thousands of kilometers away from Germany, started to feel a nut in my throat and had tears in my eyes!

      I asked him: ” So you don’t care that in a few generations the Arabs will be the majority in your country, and will be in positions of power and, if a church organ where Bach used to play on would need renovation they would not find it a worthwhile spending item and not only they would withhold the funds, but they might even dismantle the whole organ and use its material for other things?! Would that not bother you at all? Since it bothers me, an Iranian, very very much!”

      He said again:”No! These are all vanities! Our final destiny is somewhere else!”

      Then I asked him: “But, pastor, as long as we are stuck here on this earth shouldn’t we be safeguarding those cultural expressions that raise our minds to the divine and give us a glimpse of that heaven, that very final destination that we are aiming for?”

      To that, he did not have an answer!

      To his credit though, by the end of our conversation, which lasted a long time, he mostly came around and understood that those for whom he is ready to sacrifice his cultural patrimony, are not in any real need, and that he is making this sacrifice utterly in vain, and that we can help those who really are in need, in much wiser, and more cost-effective ways which does not require self-immolation and the wholesale destruction of our cultural and ethnic heritage here in Europe.

      It is amazing how the Media have managed to brainwash the people into thinking that this mess and chaos and “refugee” mayhem is the ONLY way to help the people who are displaced because of the Syrian war! It is amazing how they could bamboozle so many otherwise intelligent people into thinking that if they don’t sacrifice their past, present, and future, in order to receive these “refugees” as new fellow citizens, then they are going to condemn them to immediate death and utter misery! The power of propaganda is a scary thing!!

      • So right. I think this pastor suffers from vanities in that he is willing to sacrifice future generations from hearing the Word to feel good about himself.

      • Rita, I am moved by your testimony. My family is partly Far Eastern, and we also love the glories of traditional Western sacred music; even as we also love what is good from the Far East. Maybe I will one day find a good calligrapher to do some scrolls of some of our favorite Psalms in the Chinese version to hang in our house.

    • That video is one of my favorites. I have learned to stop at each face for a moment – or maybe longer just to contemplate the differences.

      In a nutrition book by Catherine Shanahan she devotes a chapter or two to the genetic components of natural beauty across all cultures…with good nutrition for mother during pregnancy and for child in first two-three years, children are naturally beautiful, especially if pregnancies are spaced sufficiently apart. On a webpage she discusses why the younger of the Middleton girls shows signs of relative maternal deprivation – i.e., not enough healing time had elapsed when she became pregnant with her second girl:

      http://www.drcate.com/kate-middleton-versus-pippa-who-is-the-more-beautiful-sister/

      “Both beautiful girls, the youngest does show signs of (relative) maternal nutrient deprivation.

      Just one year apart, these two highly attractive women could almost pass for twins. Still, the younger, Pippa, lacks the powerful dynamic symmetry of the elder Kate whose face features many elements now seen more often in older siblings of closely spaced children: broader forehead, higher cheekbones, wider jaw, and stronger chin (in comparison to her still very pretty younger sister). Pippa does benefit from the “more experienced uterus” phenomena, and has a slightly more feminized lower jaw. For more examples of Second Sibling Syndrome, click over to the celebrity album.

      These minor changes can have major health consequences. I recently met a couple of close-spaced sisters in their early 70s. The older one was medication free, and the younger, while still very healthy, was on several prescriptions and since she had been born with a slight twist to her spine (scoliosis), she was dealing with a lot more pain than her healthier elder.”

      Her book is on the URL above, or here:

      Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food

      I think the beautiful women in that series in the video were blessed with good maternal health and with good nutrition, too. As Dr. Shanahan points out, the basic pillars of nutrition are present in all cultures, though they take on different appearances…

  2. “Wouldn’t it be ironic if China became the repository of Western culture’s art forms? ”

    Asians (real Asians I mean) already are. The music competitions and universities are full of gifted and extremely hardworking Asian musicians. Few western young people still seem to have the stamina to put in the years of hard work it takes, even if they have some talent.

  3. Psalm 144 is also apropos:

    7 Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children;

    8 Whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of falsehood.

    9 I will sing a new song unto thee, O God: upon a psaltery and an instrument of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee.

  4. I love the Psalms, and I love Bach. I think King David and Old Johann Sebastian are hitting it off fine up in Glory.

    Come to think of it, I greatly miss the old German hymnody and the metrical Psalms (Bourgeois, Goudimel–and even Rous). We Protestants really shot ourselves in the feet with the Ira-Sankey genre, followed by the “Jesus, Jesus” instead of “baby,baby” genre.

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