Of Slavic choral music and spiritual warfare
News
Congratulations to my friend Matthew! My Girlfriend the Witch-Queen, the first book in his new series, releases May 1. I had the great fun of doing line edits and proofreading on this sci-fi romance between a Catholic lumberjack and the tyrant of the whole world. It gets five stars for sure (even after I read it three times in two weeks. Yes, it's that good.)
There's still time to come to the Catholic Writers Conference in Chicago, May 30-June 2! I'll be hearing pitches for both OSV (my day job) and Chrism Press (my freelance gig), and hanging out with old and new friends.
I started cataloguing our home library, because yes I'm a nerd. I went for simple and straightforward, and so far I'm finding the app My Library to be precisely what I needed.
Food for Thought: Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil
My only hobby that isn't related to books (besides a few mediocre attempts at embroidery) is singing. I've done church choirs and cantoring, but this past year I joined a relatively new group: the Joshua Chorale. Based here in Detroit, we take sacred music into secular spaces, and over the past year we've sung everything from Hanukkah folk songs to Mozart's Requiem to, this past Friday, Rachmaninoff's epic choral work, the All-Night Vigil. The composer took fifteen texts in Old Church Slavonic from the Orthodox Liturgy of the Hours and blended Greek and Kyiv chants with his own unique style. The end result is both incredibly beautiful and insanely challenging to sing! And, as it turns out, a recipe for spiritual warfare.
Any time one attempts to bring the good, true, and the beautiful into the world, there's an inevitable clash with evil. Take a large Catholic choir, sacred music, a concert for peace in the Ukraine, and a gorgeous secular building known as "the cathedral of finance", and...yep, you guessed it, conflict with the devil. This is something that pops up all the time in Catholic book publishing as well, and it seems to be the rule that the more good a project is destined to do, the more the devil will try to squash it.
As stressful as the spiritual warfare around this week's concert was, it served as a visceral reminder not only of the constant battle between good and evil, but also of the victory of heaven, already brought about by Our Lord's Resurrection. The choir prayed together for the intercession of St. Michael the Archangel, patron saint of Kyiv, and the captain of the angelic host came through with a vengeance!
Sometimes, difficulties are just difficulties. But sometimes there's more to the picture, and we can either be scared or encouraged by the reminder of the supernatural impact of our ordinary acts.
I'll leave you with the last movement of the All-Night Vigil, a hymn of praise to the Blessed Virgin:
Heaven-elected chieftain of triumphant hosts,
since thou hast saved us from evil,
hymns of glad thanksgiving do thy servants offer unto thee,
thou who bearest God!
Do thou, to whom God hath given might invincible,
deliver us from every ill;
then shall we cry:
hail to thee, O Bride and ever Maiden!
Good Books
If you're ever stuck finding reading material, the website What Should I Read Next is a delightful tool for discovering new favorites. (It works better for more well-known titles, since it's all reader-generated.) I actually don't remember which title I put in this time, but I ended up discovering a delightful trilogy of YA fantasy novels which I am now recommending to everybody who will listen. Dragon Slippers, Dragon Flight, and Dragon Spear by Jessica Day George are the kind of adorable, funny, and occasionally profound books that I love the most. The story follows fifteen-year-old heroine Creel as she stumbles into the middle of an ongoing conflict between dragons and humans, all while trying to set up shop as a dressmaker.
And I've already mentioned My Girlfriend the Witch-Queen but here's your reminder to go read it!
What are you reading these days, as winter maybe finally turns the corner into spring? Send me your recommendations!
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All opinions are my own, and are not endorsed by Our Sunday Visitor, Chrism Press, the Order of Preachers, NaNoWriMo, the Catholic Writers Guild, or The Joshua Chorale.