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My boy, don’t you ever forget what I’m going to tell you. You mustn’t study Beethoven’s music. You must reincarnate it.
Anton Grigorevich Rubinshteyn
Russian composer and pianist (1829-94)
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here’s some of Rubinshteyn’s music… it IS Romantic in the Beethovenesque sense, no?
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This has relevance for us as Orthodox Christians today. There are konvertsy running about, telling all and sundry how learned and educated they are. Let’s not put too fine a face on that… it’s utter and unabashed bullshit to the core. They’re trying to tell us that they’re qualified to speak on the Faith without having any real experience in it. We speak of baptism being “enlightenment”… if that’s true, one has to discount all reading, study, and experience prior to reception. It’s an inescapable conclusion… if one was blind, how could one distinguish colour?
These people are fond of gabbling about their prowess in the Fathers. I’d say that the Fathers were Christians who wrote only after long and serious involvement in Orthodox Christianity. The Fathers steeped themselves in prayer and the liturgy so much that it wasn’t only second nature; it was as unconscious as breathing is. None of the konvertsy are at this point… it takes YEARS to acquire such a grounding (don’t forget Paffhausen was a shake n’ bake abbot who only spent one year as a rank n’ file monk… you can see why he failed, and why he failed utterly and without mitigation), and one can’t acquire it on one’s own by reading this-or-that willy-nilly. You MUST “live the life” under obedience to a real spiritual master to even get a glimmer of it (pseudo-gurus such as Gleb Podmoshensky, Aleksandr Schmemann, or Panteleimon Metropoulos don’t count).
You need to incarnate Orthodoxy… and that’s not a task of a day… or of a year or two. That’s why you can’t take anything posted on Monomakhos as credible… they’re all toddlers with shitty nappies who’ve broken into Pop’s muscatel and gotten pie-eyed. I’ll confide… I’m not the only person who feels this way. Think on this for Lent… it’ll be a fruitful meditation; I guarantee you that.
BMD
