Hymns to the Guardian Angel – sing-prayer.org

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O Holy Angel At My Side
Anonymous	Louis Bourgeois, (1510-1559) Old 107^th
O Holy Angel at my side, go to the church for me, Kneel in my place at Holy Mass, where I desire to be. At Offertory, in my stead, take all I am and own, And place it as a sacrifice, before the altar throne.	At Holy Consecration’s bell, adore with seraph’s love My Jesus hidden in the Host, come down from Heav’n above. Then pray for those I dearly love, and those who cause me grief, That Jesus’ Blood may cleanse all hearts, and suffering souls relieve.
And when the priest Communion takes, oh, bring my Lord to me, That His sweet Heart may rest on mine, and I His temple be. Pray that this Sacrifice Divine, may mankind’s sins efface; Then bring me Jesus’ blessing home, the pledge of every grace.	Amen.

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All music on this site is © William Keevers except those commonly attributed to prior arrangments. (This is so I can’t be deprived of the ability to play, correspond about and continue my own work.) Most music arrangements on this site are unique pairings of text to tune made and recorded by the proprietor. Any arrangement you’ve never previously heard is probably covered.
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Those who sing well, pray twice. Some accounts portray God as singing creation into existence. Implicit in the listing of the two main Divine attributes, knowing and loving, is the ability to render thought into speech; our sharing this intellectual attribute with God and His angels is one of mankind’s greatest gifts. A people who do not fully exercise speech by intoning it in song frequently in their daily lives are in the process of losing the abundant life of thought, intention and praise of God. If you don’t sing every day, your voice is being stilled, to the great pleasure of the enemy of souls, and you are allowing a vital means of our fullfilling our commission to persuade those at the ends of the earth about The Truth to atrophy into uselessness. (The shrewd and clever who serve the enemy are not remiss in using music to do their dark work.)
     In Mike Aquilina’s book How the Choir Converted the World: Through Hymns, With Hymns, and In Hymns, it is shown that the normal vehicle for catechizing converts in the early Church was song.
     Some passages in the New Testament are clearly poetry, song. (John Senior asserted that prior to 1750, all didactic content was versified.) If you want to help the Church to recover from the destructive legacy, the liturgical sabotage of Rembert Weakland’s "Hootenany Masses", you need to sing every day, in your home life (¿What, you’re not singing “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring, The Old Man is Snoring”, “This Old Man…Knick-Nack Paddywhack” and “There Was a Dog that Had a Bone and B.I.N.G.O. Was His Name-O” with your children around the table?), and include song in your prayer life–on this site, "sacred-vernacular" hymns in English replete with traditional catechetical depth. (Children 18 months to 4 years use song as their primary vehicle for cogitation, before they get told “shut up that noise, stop singing”.) Your essential humanity is hard-wired to sing. You cannot foster restoration of the Church’s priceless cultural patrimony without giving it a living home in your own members as it was intended by our Blessed Creator.
     Common people prior to the displacement of active culture by the passive consumption of radio & talkies, had the customary, frequent habit of singing popular, folk and classically-informed home music. (Middlebrow culture, modestly informed by high culture.) Simply stated, before radio, if you wanted music, you “had” to make it, and most people, except the deaf and tone-deaf, did with unforced enthusiasm, having fun “doing it themselves” on a self-determined basis which programmed school handicapping today makes extremely unlikely to recover. In the decade prior to the end of World War One, there were 300 piano brands in the U.S. alone, annually there were an average of ten million-selling sheet music issues, the average person could, and did, sing the lyrics to 200 songs, in three or four parts. Whereas, even highly cultivated aficionados today of some particular music specialty are not known to crack their voice with a single song, for decades of their lives.
     The time a century ago was no idealilzed "golden age", yes, it was heavily, commerically-marketed and, indeed, much of the music was rather silly–and the people knew that full well. But they shared in common with other periods, stretching back into the mists of folk music pre-history, the fact of everyone singing everyday, in their ordinary lives, in all times prior to our own.
     To get the sense of a common activity that everyone did, consider that 50 years ago, every man took a vital interest in sports scores. Today, nearly everyone cooks a personal specialty dish. But a century ago, everyone shared in a strong social-cultural stream, in song. “The ‘Audience’ were the ‘Performers'”.

The ‘Audience’ were the ‘Performers’

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     A century ago, the love of music was active, the love of singers, those who lived song. Everyday singing was the default cultural condition, a widespread social habit more ingrained than just a hobby, a full dimension of interpersonal life completely atrophied today, but at that time casually practiced by nearly everyone.
     Today, the corrosive effects of consciousness emulation by electronic technologies, artificial algorithms emulating nearly to extinction, echoing to the point of sensory snow-blindness, our once-original activity, are threatening to dispense entirely with our own involvement, as they enslave us into device-dependent thralldom. (Computers will always be able to flawlessly perform feats of mere technical prowess much more efficiently than humans, but computers are only soulless shells, never able to originate creative works under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost–but computers can be made to enslave humans with indolence and lower their gaze from the stars, pedaling narcotic divertissements denatured at their core of spiritual essence.)
     We have been rendered as cultureless automatons, because we don’t practice culture, we merely consume with indifference the “content” of past ages which did actively practice culture, allowing our receptors of active culture to be deceived with ersatz quasi-cultural glitz.
     A century ago virtually everyone sang, on a frequent basis, in their personal, social, cultural lives. Prior to the rollout of radio and sound film from 1923-1930, common people had long, routinely practiced a vigorous home song-culture – unknown to today’s techno-media consumers.
Culture isn’t something you consume, it’s something you practice.     The ordinary, common people a century past, prior to the expulsion of active personal culture in the period 1923-1930, were possessed of a surprisingly high average culture level. The average person was highly engaged in active musical culture, at some level, high or low, to an extent completely unsuspected today.
     Hundreds of old films, even into the 1950s, portray average people in this last period of active song decades prior, as engaged in an active choral life in homes, restaurants and pubs, civic spaces and churches. These are portrayals of active, casual, personal and social music practice not as a novelty, but as backward-looking nostalgia for an actual historical period decades prior that would never return.
     People today are completely oblivious to the fact of their having come up, in a culturally strangulated environment, raised as passive spectators, cultural pate de foie gras, completely disconnected from their own culture by decades of techno-gadget history.
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