This is gorgeous–and very American, you know? Quilts. 🙂

The Visitation? I can find no explanation as to why the video’s uploader chose this (Mariotto Albertinelli’s Visitation) for Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins, but hey, it’s (almost) appropriate. (Just a day late!)

music & thoughts, st cecilia

This morning I attended a mass for the feast of St Cecilia, patroness of musicians, organised by the local liturgical music committee. I was surprised, I think given that the reason we were all there was because we were musicians, to find that the texts in the lectionary were not about music at all. Instead, there was one reading from the book of Isaiah, about how the LORD would bring Israel back to himself, and one from the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the foolish virgins. I realised, then, that while all this patron saint business is lovely and good–and I’d be the last to dismiss it–St Cecilia is a saint and a model in the Christian life not because she was a musician (because… she probably wasn’t) but because she lived a life of heroic virtue and faith. Today, then, we who look to her for intercession particularly as our patroness, must remember that we are first Christians, and thus strive to live lives worthy of our universal vocation to holiness, before  we think of ourselves as musicians.