Undusted Texts

  There is an appeal in simplicity, in sparseness, in the few beautiful things of a Japanese teahouse, the joyful tidiness of Marie Kondo; this is the “classical” beauty, of bare white marble, free of pigments. (A historically inaccurate view of those once-garishly-painted Roman statues, but an accurate account of how they live today.) Taken to its extreme, there are the starkly nude walls of a Calvinist church, of “thou shalt not make unto thee any grave image” distilled to its highest proof, of (paradoxically) angelism incarnate. Yet, like most things, when not taken to such an extreme, there is a truth in simplicity and sparseness. This denuding, for instance, is a key to meditation, of any kind, from the clearing of the mind prior to lectio divina , to the imageless noetic prayer of the Greek Fathers, to—again, an extreme—the absolute mind-emptiness of Buddhist meditation. There are times when distractions must be cleared away, when a well-swept room is needed for focus. ...

My girlfriend's grandmother died last night, and I have been praying for her soul.  We are called to pray for the dead in general, for they cannot pray for themselves once they have passed, and we usually especially pray for those who are close to us. One way I pray for the souls of the faithful departed is by listening to a musical setting of a Requiem Mass, the beautiful prayers of the Church for all her departed children.  While listening, I pray for the recently deceased (I often do this whenever someone I know dies).  While I have a soft spot in my heart for the works of the famous Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, the setting I usually pray with is the setting by the famous Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi.  Though Verdi was an atheist, he felt inspired by the sacred prayers of the Church found in the Requiem Mass, and his recently-deceased friend Alessandro Manzoni (a poet and novelist famous for The Betrothed ) was Catholic, so he felt inspired to compos...