Ringing the Changes

I'd said I'd lighten up, but there's just too much to think about at this time in history that is not light in weight or wave length. Sometimes it is terrifying, but overall it is fascinating, don't you think?
And we are inside it.
What do we see? What do we do?

I did a Christmas thing!
Abby, the puzzle volunteer, is one of those people who is always going to events around town, scouring out free or cheap ones. I've always turned down her invitations because I don't generally like entertainment for its own sake, and she generally goes to entertaining things.

I accepted one to a hand bells Christmas concert, however, because I knew nothing about hand bells (which Abby plays in her church--one of her many civic engagements). It's not entertainment, it's education!

I went with her yesterday evening, and the bell playing really was fascinating, like watching a multipart organism:
fourteen bell-ringers at their stations = ONE musical instrument.
Besides ringing the bells, the players thumped them on the table, tapped them with mallets, and set them singing round their rims like Tibetan bowls.
It was cool to see the close coordination--the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Also, it sounded nice.

That was an effort to lighten up for the holidays.
The concert was in a Lutheran church in a rich suburb, Edina. (My mostly-quiet neighborhood drifts that way--that suburb is just a few miles from me.)
A respite, I thought.

But before it started, the mayor of Edina gave a little speech, meant to be inspirational?
He told us that a few weeks ago, a man with mental illness had stabbed a local man to death at a bus stop.
"We have an epidemic of untreated mental illness and lack of services," he said, "so people ride public transportation to keep off the streets, and that's how this man came to be in Edina. We need to be more empathetic and address this issue..."

Merry fucking Christmas, ya'll!

The troubles I see everyday at work make their way into wealthy, white, supposedly safe enclaves like Edina too. Of course they do.
So I was thinking about that during the concert--
How do we live in times of enormous change?

How did other people live in times of enormous change?
Or create change themselves?
I didn't set out  to read about reformers, but it only makes sense that as I read more nonfiction, I'm encountering them. They make the news.

I'm reading a fantastic book now, The Reformation, by Patrick Collinson (Modern Library, 2004). I know only the scantiest about the topic--and what I know is mostly about Henry VIII and his six wives, which is a side branch.

Oooh--look at these good Dutch covers of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy:

Collinson reminds me of Hilary Mantel in that, like her, he reminds us that people never know what's coming next––what now seems inevitable was in its time one of a swirl of possibilities ––
and, that the main players who created the modern world were not themselves modern people.

Theological niceties that are remote and seem ridiculous to us were as real to them as our debates about, say, Covid vaccines or the Confederate flag.

And, "It is the beginning of wisdom" he writes, "to understand that the Reformation was not, in its own eyes, a novelty."
Luther was not a Lutheran any more than Christ was a Christian. Luther amplified changes already in play, which would lead to the modern world, but he himself, says Collinson, had the mind of a late medieval Catholic.

Collinson is funny too:

"Ignatius Loyola, a soldier recovering from his wounds, was converted by reading religious books (there being nothing else to read) and this was followed by a series of intense religious experiences, out of which the Society of Jesus [the Jesuits] was born.
What if he had been killed in that battle, or had found some novels to read?" [ital. mine]

He's talking about historians in this quote below, but it's an invitation to anyone in history, which is everyone:

"It is not so easy to change the ... structures within which we historians operate, although they must not be allowed to become airtight boxes in which we cease to think."

As I fall asleep over the book, I am reminded that reformers (usually) have tremendous ENERGY.
Surely some bumbled into it sleepily though, like Ferdinand the Bull...
Examples?