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Sarah Masters reviews the audio CD

Salve Regina

The Benedictine Monks of the Abbey of Saint-Maurice and Saint-Maur, Clervaux, France, express beautifully in this CD the layered textures of plainchant. Some of the more easily understood chants of the liturgy are included in this recording. The Abbey Monks chose Gregorian chants with only one or two notes for each syllable of chant and selected hymns composed in different centuries.

The chants range from three appropriate to the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, a ceremony whose popularity dates from the late Middle Ages when worship of the Sacrament was separate from Mass, to a chant that is sung during Vespers. Salve Regina provides solemn, serene and spiritually enriching background music for Chaplains in meditation.

Gregorian chant is considered to be church music written in a similar style throughout the centuries, from the early Middle Ages forward to modern times. But David Hiley, author of Western Plainchant: A Handbook, observes that for individuals who absorb the mystery and beauty of Gregorian Chant, there is “infinite variety in a single line.”

Completed: 1987
Running Time: 47 Minutes
Phillips Classics Productions

If you are interested in purchasing this film, you can do so at www.hartleyfoundation.org. Just click on “Sacred Sounds” on the homepage for more information. The cost of the film series is $9.99 for a DVD.

Book Review

Rabbi Dr. David Zucker reviews

Blue Shoe

This novel centers on the messy story about Mattie, in her mid-to-late 30s, divorced, a caring, committed and church-attending Christian woman who is rearing two children on insufficient funds, and having at the same time to face her mother’s initially slow, but increasing and inexorable decline into dementia. It is about Mattie in love, and Mattie, almost against her will unpacking the truth about her late father, a man she idealized, and now she finds to have been very flawed. This well-crafted, well-written book reads like real lives, which often are messy and rarely are orderly.

This is a novel about a family failing, and flailing, and finally coming together.

It is about divorce and single-parenting, adultery, pedophilia, lusting and longing and hope. It is largely about hope.

It is about the long road to dementia, and how grandparents who are supposed to be loving can instead be vacant and lost within themselves.

It is about struggle and search and there are wonderful flashes of wit throughout.

Lamott describes well the understandable ambivalence felt by family caregivers. “Mattie . . . thought of the words of Teresa of Avila, who said, ‘The Lord doesn’t so much look at the greatness of our works, as the love with which they are done,’ and this sounded fine except when it came to Isa [Mattie’s mother.] There was so much stuff marbled in, all the memories of their lives together: years of anger and revulsion . . . So she asked herself, If you’re as loving as possible when you’re with your mother, does it count if there are other parts too – hands, for instance, trembling with rage?” (p. 178).

Mattie and her brother struggle with the thought of placing their mother in a nursing home, “this gawky, tremulous woman with a badly pleated memory, working hard to keep living independently . . . cadging coupons so she could pay her own way and not have to ask her skittish children for help.” (p. 182)
As someone whose chaplaincy is centered in Long Term Care, who works on a daily basis with residents and residents’ families, I attest to the accuracy of Lamott’s description of Isa, Mattie’s mother, and her uneven slide into Alzheimer’s Disease-like mental illness as she suffers several little strokes, turning her brain more and more into mush. I confirm how Lamott correctly describes the conflicting demands on family life, where and when to opt for a nursing home, all those painful decisions that tear at a family’s hearts and emotions.

This is a wonderful and emotionally difficult book to read. I recommend it highly.

Blue Shoe. Anne Lamott, ( New York: Riverhead/Penguin Putnam, 2002), 291 pp.

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