Just bits and pieces today, about literature and life, not so much related....
Matthew 5:38-48 in N.T. Wright's translation:
"You heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you: don't use violence to resist evil! Instead, when someone hits you on the right cheek, turn the other one towards him. When someone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your cloak, too. And when someone forces you to go one mile, go a second one with him. Give to anyone who asks you, and don't refuse someone who wants to borrow from you.
'You heard that it was said, "Love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you: love your enemies! Pray for people who persecute you! That way, you'll be children of your father in heaven! After all, he makes his sun rise on bad and good alike, and sends rain both on the upright and on the unjust. Look at it like this: if you love those who love you, do you expect a special reward? Even tax-collectors do that, don't they? And if you only greet your own family, what's so special about that? Even Gentiles do that, don't they? Well then: you must be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect.'
...and some of his commentary...
"The shocking thing about this passage in the Sermon on the Mount is that we are told to watch what our heavenly father is doing and then do the same ourselves. Here is the puzzle: Israel, the chosen people, are challenged to realize that God doesn't have favourites! What sense can we make of that? If they are chosen, doesn't that mean they are God's favourites?
"The answer to the puzzle is found earlier in the Sermon. Israel isn't chosen in order to be God's special people while the rest of the world remains in outer darkness. Israel is chosen to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Israel is chosen so that, through Israel, God can bless all people. And now Jesus is calling Israel to be the light fo the world at last. He is opening the way, carving a path through the jungle towards that vocation, urging his followers to come with him on the dangerous road.
"And dangerous it is. Not only has Israel in Jesus' day got many enemies, pagan nations who have overrun the land and made the people subject to harsh rules and taxes. There are just as many dangers within, as movements of national resistance spring up, fuelled by anger at the increasing injustice and wickedness. And, within that again, the divisions within Jewish society are becoming more marked, with a few becoming very rich and the majority being poor, some very poor.
"These were all pressing issues for the people listening to Jesus. How did his kingdom-message apply to them? How can it then apply to us today?
"Jesus offers a new sort of justice, a creative, healing, restorative justice. The old justice found in the Bible was designed to prevent revenge running away with itself. Better an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth than an escalating feud with each side going one worse than the other. But Jesus goes one better still. Better to have no vengeance at all, but rather a creative way forward, reflecting the astonishingly patient love of God himself, who wants Israel to shine his light into the world so that all people will see that he is the one true God, and that his deepest nature is overflowing love. No other god encourages people to behave in a way like this!
"So Jesus gives three hints of the sort of thing he has in mind. To be struck on the right cheek, in that world, almost certainly meant being hit with the back of the right hand. That's not just violence, but an insult: it implies that you're an inferior, perhaps a slave, a child, or (in that world, and sometimes even today) a woman. What's the answer? Hitting back only keeps the evil in circulation. Offering the other cheek implies: hit me again if you like, but now as an equal, not an inferior.
"Or suppose you're in a lawcourt where a powerful enemy is suing you) perhaps for non-payment of some huge debt) and wants the shirt off your back. You can't win; but you can show him what he's really doing. Give him your cloak as well; and in a world where most people only worse those two garments, shame him with your impoverished nakedness. This is that the rich, powerful and careless are doing. They are reducing the poor to a state of shame.
"The third example clearly reflects the Roman military occupation. Roman soldiers had the right to force civilians to carry their equipment for one mile. But the law was quite strict; it forbade them to make someone go more than that. Turn the tables on them, advises Jesus. Don't fret and fume and plot revenge. Copy your generous God! Go a second mile, and astonish the soldier (and perhaps alarm him 0 what if his commanding officer found out?) with the news that there is a different way to be human, a way which doesn't plot revenge, which doesn't join the armed resistance movement (what's what verse 39 means), but which wins God's kind of victory over violence and injustice.
"These examples are only little sketches, like cartoons to give you the idea. Whatever situation you're in, you need to think it through for yourself. what would it mean to reflect God's generous love despite the pressure and provocation, despite your own anger and frustration?
"Impossible? Well, yes, at one level. But again Jesus' teaching isn't just good advice, it's good news. Jesus did ti all himself, and opened up the new way of being human so that all who follow him can discover it. When they mocked him, he didn't respond. When they challenged him, he told quizzical, sometimes humorous, stories that forced them to think differently. When they struck him, he took the pain. When the put the worst bit of Roman equipment on his back - the heavy crosspiece on which he would be killed - he carried out of the city to the place of his own execution. When they nailed him to the cross, he prayed for them.
"The Sermon on the Mount isn't just about us. If it was, we might admire it as a fine bit of idealism, but we'd then return to our normal lives. It's about Jesus himself. This was the blueprint for his own life. He asks nothing of his followers that he hasn't faced himself. And, within his own life, we can already sense a theme that will grow larger and larger until we can't miss it. If this is the way to show what God is really like, and if this is the pattern that Jesus himself followed exactly, Matthew is inviting us to draw the conclusion: that in Jesus we see the Emmanuel, the God-with-us person. The Sermon on the Mount isn't just about how to behave. It's about discovering the living God on the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly."
Some more great children's literature we have been listening to on library CD's:
A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck
During the Depression, a family in Chicago is split up when they lose their apartment, and the teenaged daughter goes to small-town Illinois to live with her rather colorful, self-supporting, and unaffectionate grandmother. Her year in such a tiny town where everyone knows everyone's business is quite extraordinary. The large snake in the attic falling on the nude postmistress posing for the New York artist who is renting a room in Grandma's house is only one of many AMAZING and uproarious scenes. Story telling at its finest.
Ice Whale by Jean Craighead George
A bowhead whale is born in the Arctic in 1848. The young boy, Toozak, who sees his birth from his canoe names him Siku. This novel follows Siku until the last sighting of him in 2048, as well as several generations of Toozaks, whose lives are bound to that whale. It follows the commercial whaling of the late 1800s which decimates the whale populations, as well as their slow recovery after whaling falls apart. And it follows the change in Native cultures from subsistence to dependance on Western interventions, as well as the building of the Artic Research Station in Barrow, Alaska. It ends on a hopeful note, and is full of love. Love for humans. Love for animals. Love for plants. Love for land- and water-scapes.
On the Far Side of the Mountain, also by Jean Craighead George
This is the sequel to another book we have not yet listened to. Two teenagers have left home and are living off the land in the Catskills. Their wilderness survival skills are awesome, and their careful observations of the land, plants, and animals around them allow them to use what they need while living peaceably with their surroundings. They have adult friends nearby - a librarian, a university professor who lives in a cabin, a farm owner... This story follows the confiscation of the boy's endangered falcon by a wildlife ranger, and a pair of long, interrelated treks through the mountains, using special wilderness communication skills. Just as in Ice Whale, there is a lot of love. Love for people, animals, plants, and the landscape. Also, history.
Recently neighbor lent Anne the Ramona Quimby books, and I have read her two of them so far. I remembered not liking them very well as a child, and now from my adult perspective I can understand why. Ramona is such a real, wonderful child, with such big feelings, and frankly, most of the grownups around her don't make much effort to understand her and despite their sympathies toward her, pretty much feel that children should be seen and not heard. She is loved dearly by her family, but her insides are pretty much a mystery to her parents. I think Anne can really relate to her, and is LOVING reading them.
Also, I am loving the little bit of homeschooling we've been doing. We have started math, handwriting, and phonics (in addition to cello), and because we started in late June, I feel no pressure to hurry through anything. So we do one or two or three subjects most days, and if we miss something here or there, it's totally fine.
...Here's a post I put yesterday on facebook, if you're not on there:
What a group class week! Lots of learning and fun. Plus...our musicians experienced the unfinished studio space, noisy work by a trio of electricians, a visit from a city inspector (who it turns out is a singer in his off-hours and was beyond tickled to be serenaded on the job), and a visit by a service dog who tried very hard not to chase all the tennis balls bouncing around during Dalcroze. Our musicians capped the week by playing an inspiring pop-up concert under the trees at the neighborhood park. Their program:
Chocolate Drops by Will Marion Cook
Sonata IV by Isabella Leonarda
Duchess of Devonshire's Reel, Marianne's Reel, and Just So in the North by Ignatius Sancho
The Boom & Birds at Sunrise by Stanley Fletcher
...and three folk songs: All My Little Ducklings (which they also sang in English and German), Go Tell Aunt Rhody, and Suzuki's 1st Twinkle Variation
A little about the composers on the program:
Will Marion Cook grew up in D.C. and Chattanooga. A fantastically talented young person, he attended Oberlin Conservatory to study violin at age 15, studied in Berlin for two years, and attended conservatory in New York where he studied composition with Antonin Dvorak. Much of this was sponsored by Frederick Douglass, who was himself (I did not know this!) a violinist. Working as a Classical musician, Will faced a lot of discrimination as a Black man, so he ended up turning to popular styles and writing for the theater, where he was more accepted.
Isabella Leonarda, a Baroque composer, lived her whole live in Novara, Italy, where she was quite famous as a musician. She entered the convent there at the age of 16, and spent the rest of her long life there. She composed extensively, and also likely taught the younger nuns music lessons. She wrote an entire set of twelve Sonatas for two violins and violone. There are recordings and scores available. They each have several movements which are through-composed. If you're looking for the female Vivaldi, my fellow violinists, she's the one. The Sonatas are all up on imslp.
Ignatius Sancho... it is hard to tell his story without wanting to break down and bawl. He was born on a slave ship off the coast of Africa, which can only mean... His very pregnant mother had just been kidnapped and forced onto a horribly crowded, unsanitary boat and was being shipped overseas to work as a slave. She somehow managed to give birth with very little or no medical help, and she and the tiny newborn survived the voyage to South America. As a toddler, Ignatius was again put on a boat and shipped across the ocean to England - with or without his family? I don't know. This tiny boy is then sold to a family in England who held him captive, although they did choose to educate him as well. He was eventually freed. Due to his force of personality, I can only imagine, he survived all this and was quite prolific in publishing papers on abolition and was the first Black man in England to vote in an election and to have his music published. The fiddle tunes we played all date from the late 1700s. By the way, I found his music in the amazing new book Music by Black Composers, Volume 1. It's got music suitable for Suzuki book 2-4 students, and can be played as duets, or with the piano. I can't wait for the second volume to come out!
And Stanley Fletcher. Well, all I have to say to my violin readers is, if you have never watched the Paul Rolland videos, it is more than well worth the $200 to purchase The Teaching of Action in String Playing. That thing is a gold mine. Truly life-changing. Watch it. And watch it again. And then some more.
Coming up:
My dad is arriving on Tuesday to do some more electrical work on the garage conversion for us. This is very exciting! With the two studios out back totaling something around 358 square feet, our 840 square foot house is going to feel SO MUCH MORE MANAGEABLE. Next week we also are rehearsing the Brahms C Minor Piano Quartet with Adam for our upcoming August 2nd house concert. And next weekend is Jared's and my 13th anniversary, which we will celebrate by loading our poor little car to the gills, and dragging the children all the way across the state to the desert to teach at the Walla Walla Suzuki Institute next week. I am hoping to figure out how to do something slightly more fun, but the logistics of travel and childcare and rehearsing and teaching are a bit daunting...
