Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg:
let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
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Let the extortioner catch all that he hath;
and let the strangers spoil his labor.
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Let there be none to extend mercy unto him:
neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
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Let his posterity be cut off;
and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.
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Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD;
and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.
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Let them be before the LORD continually,
that he may cut off the memory of them from the earth.
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Because that he remembered not to show mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart.
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. Below is the trailer to the 1987 movie WALL STREET. Though it's been almost 25 years since it came out, the truth of the movie's message rings like a bell now. . . "Do you recognize the bells of truth When you hear them ring?" . Leon Russell "Stranger In A Strange Land" .
The beginning of the evolution of the Hebraic concepts and ideals of a Supreme Creator dates from the departure of the Semites from Egypt under that great leader, teacher, and organizer, Moses. His mother was of the royal family of Egypt; his father was a Semitic liaison officer between the government and the Bedouin captives. Moses thus possessed qualities derived from superior racial sources; his ancestry was so highly blended that it is impossible to classify him in any one racial group. Had he not been of this mixed type, he would never have displayed that unusual versatility and adaptability which enabled him to manage the diversified horde which eventually became associated with those Bedouin Semites who fled from Egypt to the Arabian Desert under his leadership.
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Despite the enticements of the culture of the Nile kingdom, Moses elected to cast his lot with the people of his father. At the time this great organizer was formulating his plans for the eventual freeing of his father’s people, the Bedouin captives hardly had a religion worthy of the name; they were virtually without a true concept of God and without hope in the world.
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No leader ever undertook to reform and uplift a more forlorn, downcast, dejected, and ignorant group of human beings. But these slaves carried latent possibilities of development in their hereditary strains, and there were a sufficient number of educated leaders who had been coached by Moses in preparation for the day of revolt and the strike for liberty to constitute a corps of efficient organizers. These superior men had been employed as native overseers of their people; they had received some education because of Moses’ influence with the Egyptian rulers.
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Moses endeavored to negotiate diplomatically for the freedom of his fellow Semites. He and his brother entered into a compact with the king of Egypt whereby they were granted permission peaceably to leave the valley of the Nile for the Arabian Desert. They were to receive a modest payment of money and goods in token of their long service in Egypt. The Hebrews for their part entered into an agreement to maintain friendly relations with the Pharaohs and not to join in any alliance against Egypt. But the king later saw fit to repudiate this treaty, giving as his reason the excuse that his spies had discovered disloyalty among the Bedouin slaves. He claimed they sought freedom for the purpose of going into the desert to organize
the nomads against Egypt. .
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But Moses was not discouraged; he bided his time, and in less than a year, when the Egyptian military forces were fully occupied in resisting the simultaneous onslaughts of a strong Libyan thrust from the south and a Greek naval invasion from the north, this intrepid organizer led his compatriots out of Egypt in a spectacular night flight. This dash for liberty was carefully planned and skillfully executed. And they were successful, notwithstanding that they were hotly pursued by Pharaoh and a small body of Egyptians, who all fell before the fugitives’ defense, yielding much booty, all of which was augmented by the loot of the advancing host of escaping slaves as they marched on toward their ancestral desert home.
had separated it from the other monotheistic traditions.
The First Crusade of 1096-99 had been the first cooperative act of the new West, a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarismknown as the Dark Ages.
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. The new Rome, backed by the Christian nations
of Northern Europe, was fighting its way back onto the
international scene. But the Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion. During the eleventh century, the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Cluny and its affiliated houses had tried to tether their martial spirit to the church and teach them true Christian values by means of such devotional practices as the pilgrimage.
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The first Crusaders had seen their expedition to the Near East
as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but they still had a very primitive conception of God and of religion. .
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Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury, and St. Demetrius
figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. .
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Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders
rather than as the incarnate Logos: he had summoned
his knights to recover his patrimony - the Holy Land - from
the infidel. As they began their journey, some of the Crusaders resolved to avenge his death by slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley. This had not been part of Pope Urban II's original idea when he had summoned the Crusade, but it seemed simply perverse to many of the Crusaders to march 3,000 miles to fight the Muslims, about whom they knew next to nothing, when the people who had - or so they thought - actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorsteps.
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During the long terrible march to Jerusalem, when the
Crusaders narrowly escaped extinction, they could only account for their survival by assuming that they must be God's Chosen People, who enjoyed his special protection. He was leading them to the Holy Land as he had once led the ancient Israelites. In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible. .
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When they finally conquered Jerusalem in the summer
of 1099, they fell on the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city with the zeal of Joshua and massacred them with a brutality that shocked even their contemporaries.
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Thenceforth Christians in Europe regarded Jews and Muslims as the enemies of God; for a long time they also felt a deep antagonism toward the Greek Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, who made them feel barbarous and inferior. . From A HISTORY OF GOD - The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Karen Armstrong .
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. Pope Urban II - The Motivator of The Crusades . Urban II's crusading movement took its first public shape at the Council of Piacenza, where, in March 1095, Urban II received an ambassador from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081–1118) asking for help against Muslim Turks, who had taken over most of formerly Byzantine Anatolia. A great council met, attended by numerous Italian, Burgundian, and French bishops in such vast numbers it had to be held in the open air outside the city. At the Council of Clermont held in November of the same year, Urban II's sermon proved highly effective, as he summoned the attending nobility and the people to wrestle the Holy Land and the eastern churches generally from the Seljuk Turks. .
. There exists no exact transcription of Urban II's speech which was given at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095. The five extant versions of the speech were written down quite a bit later, and they differ widely from one another. All versions of the speech except that by Fulcher of Chartres were probably influenced by the chronicle account of the First Crusade called the Gesta Francorum (dated c. 1102), whose author also gives a version of the speech. Fulcher of Chartres was present at the Council, but his version of Urban's speech was written 1100-1106; Robert the Monk may have been present, but his version dates about 1106. . Fulcher of Chartres has Urban say: "I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to perse all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present, it meant also for those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it." .
. The chronicler Robert the Monk has put into the mouth of Urban II: ."...this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. God has conferred upon you above all nations great glory in arms. Accordingly undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the Kingdom of Heaven." . Robert further claims: When Pope Urban had said these things in his urbane discourse, he so influenced to one purpose the desires of all who were present, that they cried out 'It is the will of God! It is the will of God!'. When the venerable Roman pontiff heard that, [he] said: "Most beloved brethren, today is manifest in you what the Lord says in the Gospel, 'Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.' Unless the Lord God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry. For, although the cry issued from numerous mouths, yet the origin of the cry was one. Therefore I say to you that God, who implanted this in your breasts, has drawn it forth from you. Let this then be your war-cry in combats, because this word is given to you by God. When an armed attack is made upon the enemy, let this one cry be raised by all the soldiers of God: It is the will of God! It is the will of God!" .
. "All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ! With what reproaches will the Lord overwhelm us if you do not aid those who, with us, profess the Christian religion! Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time, have been robbers, now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward. Let those who have been wearing themselves out in both body and soul now work for a double honor. Behold! on this side will be the sorrowful and poor, on that, the rich; on this side, the enemies of the Lord, on that, his friends. Let those who go not put off the journey, but rent their lands and collect money for their expenses; and as soon as winter is over and spring comes, let them eagerly set out on the way with God as their guide." . It is disputed whether the famous slogan "God wills it" or "It is the will of God" (deus vult in Latin, Dieu le veut in French) in fact was established as a rallying cry during the council. While Robert the Monk says so, it is also possible that the slogan was created as a catchy propaganda motto afterward. . Urban II's own letter to the Flemish confirms that he granted "remission of all their sins" to those undertaking a "military enterprise" to "liberate the eastern churches." . From Wikipedia .
. Hildegard von Bingen - visionary, poet, composer, naturalist, healer, and theologian - founded convents; corresponded with secular and ecclesiastical leaders, as well as a vast range of people of lesser rank; and ventured forth as a monastic trouble-shooter, consultant exorcist, and visiting preacher. Even more remarkable for a woman of her time was the body of written work she produced. Its range - from natural history and medicine to cosmology, music, poetry, and theology - surpasses that of most other male contemporaries; it also possesses great beauty and witnesses to Hildegard's intellectual power.
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Born at Bermersheim in Rheinhesse in 1098, the tenth and last child of noble parents, Hildegard showed early signs of exceptional spiritual gifts. Looking back, she placed the onset of her visionary experiences in early childhood, although at that stage she did not understand their significance. . .
Her parents, Hildebert and Mechtilde, although wealthy and engaged in worldly affairs, were not unmindful of the gifts of the Creator and dedicated their daughter to the service of God. For when she was yet a child she seemed far removed from worldly concerns, distanced by a precocious purity). The life they chose for her was that of a companion to Jutta, daughter of Count Stephan of Spanheim, who lived in a cell near the church of the Benedictine monks at Disibodenberg. Jutta instructed her young charge in the recitation of the Psalter, teaching her to read and (by no means an obvious corollary at the time) to write. In subsequent years Hildegard was always quick to point out how limited her formal education had been, emphasizing that she had been taught by an "indocta mulier" (unlearned woman) and, consequently, that any insight she gained into theological or secular matters was divinely inspired.
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The reputation for holiness of Jutta and her pupil soon spread throughout the district, and other parents sought to have their daughters join what was developing into a small Benedictine convent on the site of the monastery of Disibodenberg. By the time Hildegard was fifteen the process seems to have been complete, for at that time she took the veil from the hands of the bishop of Bamberg.
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The visionary experiences that set her apart as a child had continued, as had her recurrent illnesses. That there was a link between her visions and her state of health was recognized by Hildegard herself (some modern commentators claim that the visions were occasioned by a migraine condition). By this time, however, Hildegard had learned to conceal the visions. She confided them only to Jutta, who in turn informed the monk Volmar of Disibodenberg, who was to become Hildegard's teacher, trusted assistant, and friend until his death in 1173.
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Between the time other profession as a nun and the death of Jutta in 1136, when Hildegard was unanimously elected to head the convent, sources give only the most conventional descriptions of the kind of life she led. Within a few years, however, this situation was to change. She recalled the turning point in her life, the vision that suddenly enabled her to penetrate to the inner meaning of the texts of her religion:
"And it came to pass in the eleven hundred and forty-first year of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, Son of God, when I was forty-two years and seven months old, that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming.... And suddenly I understood the meaning of the expositions of the books, that is to say of the Psalter, the evangelists and other catholic books of the Old and New Testaments ...."
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More important than this sudden access of understanding was the command that was part of the vision: Hildegard was to say and write what she learned in this way. When she hesitated to start writing, doubting that she was equal to the task and fearful of the reaction of her male contemporaries, she fell ill. She interpreted this phenomenon as a sign of God's displeasure and confided at last in Volmar. With his encouragement, and the permission of Abbot Kuno of Disibodenberg, she began recording the visions that formed the basis of Scivias (Know the Ways [of God]. 1141 -1151), a work that took her ten years to complete.
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by Sabina Flanagan
University of Adelaide
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"Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne.
Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honor. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground, and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself, but because the air bore it along. Thus am I, a feather on the breath of God."
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Hildegard von Bingen
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At the heart of Hildegard von Bingen's extraordinary creativity was her accomplishment in music. In the poetry and melody of her songs, she reveals the full authority, intelligence and striking originality of her genius. She wrote profusely as no woman before her. Even though she received no formal training in music, her talent and motivation drove her to write 77 chants and the first musical drama in history, which she entitled "The Ritual of the Virtues." She writes in her autobiographical passages: "I composed and chanted plainsong in praise of God and the saints even though I had never studied either musical notation or singing." Unlike the mild, mainstream music of her day, her lyrical speech breaks into rhapsodic emotion; her zesty melodies soar up to two and one half octaves, leaping and swirling into flourishing roulades which leave the singer breathless. Hildegard's music can only be fully understood, however, in the light of all her work.
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THE WIDE COMPASS OF HER MUSIC
The beauty and depth of theme found in Hildegard’s theology, philosophy, cosmology and medicine can all be found condensed in her music as in a jewel. For Hildegard, music was an all-embracing concept. It was the symphony of angels praising God, the balanced proportions of the revolving celestial spheres, the exquisite weaving of body and soul, the hidden design of nature's creations. It was the manifest process of life moving, expanding, growing towards the joy of its own deepest realizations and a profound unity of voices singing the praises of God here on earth. It was beauty, sound, fragrance and the flower of human artistry. Over 300 times in her writings, Hildegard uses music to illuminate spiritual truths.
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SYMPHONIA
Hildegard combined all her music into a cycle called The Symphony of the Harmony of the Heavenly Revelations. This title refers not only to the heavenly inspiration of her music but to the place music held in her schema as the highest form of praise to God. She believed that many times a day, we fall out of sorts, lose our way or find ourselves off center. Music was the sacred technology which could best tune humanity, redirect our hearts toward heaven and put our feet back onto the wholesome pathways of God.
"Symphonia" was a key concept in Hildegard's thought and meant not only the joyful harmony achieved in blending voices and instruments but the spiritual field of unity we all long for when we sing. In singing and playing music, we integrate mind, heart and body, heal discord between us, and celebrate heavenly harmony here on earth. According to Hildegard, this becomes our "opus" – the epitome of good work in the service of God. .
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HILDEGARD AS A COMPOSER
Musically, the most important thing that Hildegard experienced as a child in the monastery was the opportunity to take part in the Divine Office. According to the Benedictine rule, monastics sang the Office eight times each day, beginning in the dead of night at 2.a.m. and concluding around 9 p.m. Every three hours, she listened to the musical interplay of words and tones. Musician and scholar Christopher Page puts it very well when he says, "life was spent singing the words of the liturgy and reading the words of the Latin Bible until the fabric of [her] memory was dyed with them to the deepest, to the most irremovable, tint." Thus, we see that Hildegard was immersed in music from the start.
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The women's cloister had two windows, one that opened to the outside and one that opened into the church from a small choir where the nuns sat and participated in the liturgy. Through this window, Hildegard heard the form of the music, deciphered the eight modes and absorbed the subtle match of text and sound. Singers might also read notes from one large manuscript book called the Graduale.
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Every day, the sisters sang during the Divine Office and at the celebration of the Eucharist. This means that the nuns chanted for almost four hours a day. For Hildegard the composer, the monastery provided an ideal situation. It had a scriptorium where experienced copyists could pen her music; a skilled and practiced performing body to sing it; and liturgical occasions for its performance.
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Dr. Nancy Fierro, CSJ
Mount Saint Mary's College, Los Angeles
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Instruments
We do not know whether or not Hildegard used instruments to accompany chants at the monastery. We do know that she affirmed the use of instruments and considered them a means to soften the heart and direct it toward God. She gave certain instruments a special function and meaning.
Tambourine – inspires discipline. The skin of the tambourine is spread tightly over the frame, like that of a fasting body.
Flute – with its seductive and intimate sound reminds us of the breath of the Spirit.
Trumpet – clear, strong, wakeful, like the voice of the prophets.
Strings – correspond to the earthly condition of the soul as it struggles back to the light. The sounds of the strings stir up the emotions of our heart and lead us to repentance.
Harp – instrument of heavenly blessedness. It brings back thoughts of our holy origins and helps us remember who we are and who we are called to be.
Psaltery – a plucked instrument with strings stretched over a soundboard and played by one or two plectra. It represented the unity of heaven and earth since it was played both on the top and bottom strings.
Organ – as an instrument capable of playing harmonies, it helps create community. .
. Spiritus Sanctus Vivificans Vita . O Holy Spirit who bestows life to all, who brings movement to all, you are the breath of all creatures. You wash them clean of all impurities, you anoint and heal their wounds. . You are the fire that awakens our spirits, you are the light that guides our way, may all praise you. . Translation by Joanne Asala .
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