Season
Christmastide (Anglican Communion, Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic)
Saturday, January 4, 2020
The Eleventh Day of Christmas
Memorial
Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint (Catholic, Episcopal)
Our Daily Work is to do the Will of God Remarks by Elizabeth Ann Seton at a Conference
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Twelfth Day of Christmas
Monday, January 6, 2020
Epiphany
Memorial
Brother André Bessette, the first Catholic saint since Canadian Confederation
Brother André was a porter at Notre Dame College in Côte-des-Neiges, Quebec, with additional duties as sacristan, laundry worker and messenger. “When I joined this community, the superiors showed me the door, and I remained 40 years,” he said. Bessette died in 1937, at the age of 91. A million people filed past his coffin.
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Memorial
Dominican Friar Raymond of Penyafort (Catholic)
Most Famous Miracle – Forbidden by King James I of Aragon from leaving an island, Friar Raymond turned his cloak into a ship’s mast and sailed to Barcelona. In awe of the miracle, the king gave up his mistress, did penance, and lived a good life.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Memorial
Episcopalian deaconess and missionary Harriet Bedell
Posted to the Whirlwind Mission in Oklahoma, Bedell worked with the Cheyenne, caring for the sick and poor while performing religious services and teaching women and children. During her 10-year ministry among the Cheyenne, she learned to appreciate their culture, and was adopted into the tribe.
Thursday, January 9, 2020
Memorial
Episcopalian Julia Chester Emery
Julia Chester Emery served as National Secretary of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Board of Missions for forty years, starting at the age of 24. In the course of her work, she visited every Episcopalian diocese in the U.S. The United Thank Offering that she started to raise funds for missionary work collects and gives away over $1 million annually.
Friday, January 10, 2020
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Blessed Among Us
Gospel musician Blind Willie Johnson was born around 1897 near Brenham, Texas. He wanted to be a preacher from a young age. He was blinded at the age of 7 when his step-mother threw lye in his face in retaliation for his father’s infidelities. For a few years in the 1920’s he became one of the most popular blues musicians in the country, however the Depression saw him to busking on street corners. Despite a lifetime of hardships, Johnson never wavered in is devotion to God, dying at 48 from pneumonia while sleeping in the wet remains of his house, which had burned down.
Literature
Holy Sonnet XIV by John Donne
Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Music
Beethoven String Quartet, op. 130 Cavatina performed by The American String Quartet
Blind Willie Johnson, ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground‘
The Cavatina is one of a series of string quartets Beethoven wrote late in his career, after he was deaf. It is recorded on the Golden Record, a record of Earth’s sounds, languages, and music sent into outer space in 1977 on the Voyager probes. It immediately follows after the gospel blues song “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” by Blind Willie Johnson, a blind and a deaf musician side by side. Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in 2012; Voyager 2 in 2018.
Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’ was used on the Oscar-nominated soundtrack to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s classic film, The Gospel According to St Matthew, in scenes where Judas Iscariot laments betraying Christ. It is a song that can move mountains, and has inspired nearly every blues artist since. It has been described it as “the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music.”
“Dark Was The Night” is structured after the English hymn “Gethsemane by Thomas Haweis.”
Dark was the night, and cold the ground On which the Lord was laid His sweat like drops of blood ran down In agony he prayed
Art
A Cup of Tea, Lilla Cabot Perry, American Impressionism, 20c.
