Tea at Trianon: Life as Prayer

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Life as Prayer

From NPR:

In the cloistered world of classical music recordings, there is great interest in choral music by Catholic nuns these days. In the past year, two separate albums by a group of monastic nuns shot to the top of the classical charts.

Now comes the Mother of the Eucharist, a community of nuns outside of Ann Arbor, Mich., that is releasing its debut album Tuesday. It's titled Mater Eucharistiae.

For three carefully chaperoned hours last week, I was invited into the quiet confines of their community. For afternoon Vespers, the sisters — dressed in white habits with long rosaries — filed into the ornate chapel, stood in their individual choir stalls and opened their breviaries. The ethereal purity of their voices resonated inside the vaulted chapel space, seeming to make time come to a stop with the reprise of these ancient Latin chants.

"Usually when we're singing, it's just us and God," says Sister Maria Suso, 26, a native of Clearwater, Fla., who's studying to be a secondary teacher of English and biology. "But with the CD, we were able to bring other people into that space of prayer when we're singing. And that's something that is humbling and makes us a little vulnerable. These are our special songs." (Read more.)