What I am doing for the rest of the day

Aside from trying to find a birthday present for Gran: she has requested a pack of 'pretty' patience cards, as she believes that German ones are nicer. As the only deck of patience cards I've found so far was a dead boring set from Ravensburg, this might be tricky.

ETA: the pale yellow option was chosen because I've sometimes heard the theory advanced that black-on-pale-yellow is easier on the eyes than black on white. Anyone have any thoughts as to whether this is true?

[Poll #1150845]

(no subject)

St Matthew Passion with the Freiburg Bach Choir under Hans Michael Beurle excellent, tremendously moving even giving the people who insisted on whispering through the quiet bits. Three, or near enough, very intense hours, and as always, the Passion Chorale made me tear up. Possibly one of the most moving bits of music ever written (it is the music: 'American Tune' has the same effect on me, and I'm not a patriotic left-wing American).

It struck me forcibly how oddly the SMP ends, though. Not, I mean, that it stops at Christ being laid in the tomb - that's logical, given the original performance context, and is definitely not to be read as a secret sign of Bach's doubt as to the truth of Christianity - but all the business in the final aria about laying Christ in one's heart, and chasing out the sinful world so that he can rest there for ever. Followed by the Evangelist describing how the authorities had the tomb sealed, and a final recitative in which the chorus mildly and rather sentimentally wishes Christ peace, promises to weep over him, and calls the holy sepulchre a soft resting place for the frightened conscience.

But Christ does not stay in the tomb: and there's a strange parallel between the wish of the authorities to kill this rebellious troublemaker and keep him out of sight, and the pious determination of the believer in the aria to make Christ at home in the tomb. Life and love comes into the world - uncompromising good, which will not use the weapons of the will to death and destruction, even to oppose it, for in the end 'those who live by the sword perish by the sword'; an uncompromising love which the structures of power and all the easy lies and half recognised compromises with which we make ourselves at home with injustice cannot endure it. So love is killed, and how could it not be, if it will neither make its peace with evil nor try to fight back in its own way, and those - like the voice at the end of the SMP - who had almost begun to hope that there might be another way to live are heart-broken, and yet perhaps almost relieved. The world goes on as it must, idealism must give way to pragmatism. But we are people of fine feeling, and rich enough to allow ourselves to be sensitive: so we take love and wrap it in white linen and costly spices, and we weep over it, and lay it away, and sometimes we remember its sad beauty and are touched. But it is safely dead; it makes no demands on us; we protect it from the dirt of the sinful world, and retreat to it when we feel bruised and dirtied by what we need to do out in the world.

Thus religion may be, and if it is thus, then for all the fine sentiment it is only a covering, a shroud for the will to death, for complicity in the warped nature of the world, for acceptance of the world as it is, rather than as it should be.

But love, life will not stay dead, and Christ breaks free from the tomb, and opens the sealed chambers of our hearts to the world and its needs, so that we may live and love with him in the world he has made, and so renew it.

It's not as tidy, but I always felt order was overrated.