Monday, December 18, 2006, week of Advent Three
18/12/06, week of Advent Three
Collect:
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings:
AM Psalm 41, 52; Isa. 8:16-9:1
PM Psalm 44; 2 Pet. 1:1-11; Luke 22:39-53
Meditation from Forward Day by Day:
2 Peter 1:1--11. For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self--control, and self--control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
These lines from Peter are part of the summary of his teachings. This is the ethical part. The "what" we should do, "need" to do, and "how" to do part. Our faith may be child--like, but it can not be childish. Our faith must be active in our lives. Peter tells us how. It takes action on our part. Faith isn't easy. Once you have it, you have only started the journey.
Peter didn't mention a thing about decorating, shopping, or cooking, but in the past that was all I was doing during Advent. He did mention self--control, endurance, and love. Those are my goals for the holiday season. Self--control in two areas, eating and spending. Endurance in personal care of my mind, body, and spirit. Love in holiday giving to others that I might not even know. We can make that work in our 21st century lives. Our faith makes this all possible.
Anglican Cycle of Prayer: Kwara - (Province of Ibadan, Nigeria) The Rt Revd Segun Adeyemi
Advent calendar: Ways to help others:
4. Tell others. Give talks. Show & discuss videos. Join SLOw Down Network at www.simpleliving.org/indexoth.php?place=slowdown.php
Advent Calendar: Open Wide the Doors To Christ by Elizabeth Bookser Barkley
MONDAY (Nm 24:2-7, 15-17; Mt 21:23-27) Accept life’s ambiguities. Life is not clear-cut, neither are the answers we seek in prayer. Jesus responded to his challengers’ question with another question, one that made them think more deeply. Often it is in the questions of life that we are pushed to find truth and direction.
From From John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., Tradition Day by Day: Readings from Church Writers. Augustinian Press. Villanova, PA, 1994.
Our need for a savior from Athanasius (296 - 373), bishop of Alexandria, was the principal defender against the Arians regarding faith in the divinity of Christ.
God saw that the human race was perishing and that it was under the reign of death because of its corruptibility. He saw the firm hold that corruptibility had on us as the penalty for our transgression and that it would be monstrous for the law to come to nothing before ever having been fulfilled. He also saw the unseemliness of what was happening, of his own creatures ceasing to exist. He saw the excessive wickedness of the human race and how little by little it was mounting up against us and becoming intolerable. He saw that all human beings were subject to death.
Therefore, he had mercy on our race and in his pity for our weakness he descended to our corruptible condition. He could not allow death to have the mastery, for fear that creation should perish and his Father's work for the human race come to nothing. And so he took a body for himself, a body no different from ours. For he did not wish simply to become embodied and to make himself visible. If he had wished merely to become visible he could have manifested himself by means of some nobler instrument. But no; he took a human body, and took it moreover from a spotless, immaculate virgin, without the intervention of man. He who is powerful and who created the whole universe fashioned for himself in the Virgin a body to be his temple, making it his own as the instrument through which he could be known and in which he could dwell.
God Rest Ye Merry
On Celebrating the Darker Meaning of Christmas
A number of years ago, our friend Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, made a nice observation about his experiences of successive Christmases, one that has stuck in my mind as equally true for me, and perhaps for many of us. He observed that every year there seems to be a particular Christmas carol that grabs his attention early in the season, often because one particular line or image in that carol suddenly opens itself, revealing a fresh meaning that he’d never before noticed.
I’ve had the same experience. I remember being struck a couple of years ago when, in listening to the French carol we call “O Holy Night,” a song I always tended to find both schmaltzy and tedious, I noticed the words “Long lay the world in sin and error pining,/ Till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”
Maybe it was just a quirk of timing, but those last six words hit me with unexpected force, and I wondered why I had never noticed them before, even though I’d long ago committed the lyrics to memory. It could have been partly because there are several extant “translations” into English, which vary in the way they render that phrase (and bear little resemblance to the French). But the more general point stands. And I now listen to “O Holy Night” with new respect.
I believe others have similar tales to tell, of carols that somehow come suddenly to life for them. The experience of hearing and singing and sharing these familiar carols every year, year after year, is like the best experience of liturgy, in its combination of familiarity and fresh moments of discovery, when universally known words that have for years passed through one’s lips in rote repetition suddenly blaze forth with meaning, vividly and achingly true.
Like the oldest and best liturgies, these songs are no one’s personal property, time and usage having wiped away nearly all distracting fingerprints of authorship and “originality.” Instead, they belong to all of us. They are old friends to us, and like the best old friends, they are comfortable and reassuring, and yet also full of mysteries and surprises and strange, hidden delights. Our Christmas carols are among the most precious shared possessions of our fragmenting, fraying culture, and for all that we abuse them and demean them, they seem to remain imperishable.
This year, somehow it’s been “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” that has stuck in my brain, and particularly these words, in the first verse: “To save us all from Satan’s power/ When we were gone astray.” We move through these sibilant words so quickly and rhythmically. I know I always have. And yet how plainly those few words sketch in a somber background, a whole universe of presuppositions without which the song has a very different, and diminished, meaning.
The merriness being urged upon the gentlemen (one should always remember that, in the lyrics, there is a comma between “merry” and “gentlemen”—they are not “merry gentlemen” being encouraged to “rest”) comes amid a great darkness, a darkness that never disappears, that beckons and threatens, a darkness whose presence is subtly conveyed by the minor key with which the song begins and ends. The black ship with black sails lingers on the far horizon, silent and waiting.
Dark Reminders
There are constant reminders of this darkness, if one has ears to hear them, running through the great liturgy of our Christmas carols, with their memorable evocations of bleak midwinter, snow on snow, sad and lonely plains, the curse, the half-spent night. The spooky and antiseptically sterile depiction of winter in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and its cinematic adaptations is, in that sense, very close to the spirit of the older carols, and to the biblical account of the matter—much closer than the hearty merriment of rosy-cheeked seasonal songs like “Sleigh Ride” or “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.”
The older lyrics are laced with just such evocations of darkness. They help us remember why it is symbolically right, even if historically wrong, to celebrate Christ’s birth in winter.
We are constantly reminded to “keep Christ in Christmas” and to remember “the reason for the season.” And of course we should. But, if I may be permitted to put it this way, we must also keep Satan in Christmas, and not skip too lightly over the lyrics that mention him.
For he and the forces he embodies are an integral part of the story. It utterly transforms the way we understand Christmas, and our world, when we also hold in our minds a keen awareness of the darkness into which Christ came, and still must come, for our sake.
Later in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” the visiting angel tells the shepherds in the field that Christ has come “To free all those who trust in him/ From Satan’s power and might.” Being subject to that “power and might” is, as we are likely to put it these days, the default setting of our human existence. But the Christmas story plays havoc with all such defaults.
It reveals the putatively normal and settled features of our world to be something very different: the ruins and aftereffects of a great and ancient calamity, the tokens of a disordered order. It lifts the veil of illusion about who we are and what we were made to be. Which means that the “comfort and joy” of which the song speaks are not merely outbursts of seasonal jollity.
Captives’ Gratitude
They bespeak the ecstatic gratitude of captives and cripples who recognize that, in and through Christ, the entire cosmos has been transformed, and their lives have been made new. Nothing can ever be the same again.
The darkness does not go away. Not now, not yet. But the light that shines into it can make even the bleakest midwinter into a landscape glistening with promise. So may it be for each of us, this and every Christmas.
—Wilfred M. McClay
THE PERFECT TREE
It seemed like something I should ask my daughters about. Not for permission, exactly. But not exactly not for permission, either.
What would you think if Q and I had a smaller tree this year? One that could sit on the table in the bay window?
I think it's a great idea, Corinna said. We were sitting in a row at the school Christmas concert -- Madeline's last one. Madeline, her older sister Rose, their aunt, their mom -- all of them performed in it. I've been going to this concert for a long, long time.
It's such a pain getting a big one in the door, I explained, although I hadn't gotten an argument.
Yeah, said her husband, needles all over.
I don't mean like tiny, I hastened to reassure no one in particular. You know, maybe four feet, instead of eight.
This will mean that not all of our ornaments will be on the tree, I guess. This is a little hard on me -- I feel a certain obligation to old Christmas ornaments. I imagine them lying in their boxes through the long, hot summer, their excitement as their annual gig approaches. I would hate to deny it to any of them. I do have some codependency issues. And a little trouble remembering that inanimate objects are inanimate.
It seemed I had convinced Corinna. I called Anna.
What would you think if Q and I had a smaller tree this year? I said. And put it on the table in the bay window, instead of on the floor in the dining room?
She was finishing up the baking of eight dozen perfect cookies for the annual cookie swap with her girlfriends, while her fiance was getting into things: embarassing old pictures of Anna and her friends. She was multi-tasking: talking to me, shaping cookies and yelling at Chad.
Yeah. I think that's a good idea. You get out of there!
I just thought it would be nice to simplify things a little.
Don't you dare look at that!
So you wouldn't mind, or anything? It seemed clear that she would not.
I gotta go, she said, and we hung up.
So today we'll go and get a little tree, I think. They're never hard to find, not like their glorious perfect taller cousins. We'll carry it right in, without having to move furniture. All I have to do is move a lamp and we can set the tree up right on the little table. And maybe I can find other places to use some of the ornaments that don't make the cut, so their feelings aren't hurt.
I used to feel sorry for older people who downscaled Christmas. I would visit them, look at their little ceramic Christmas trees studded with colored lights, their candy dishes on the table with their medicine bottles, the Christmas cards set up on a shelves, and I would be sorry that the bustle of the season had left them behind now. Surely they must experience this as a great sorrow, I thought.
Now I am not so sure. Smallness and quiet call me, now, and something deep within me answers with joy, untinctured with even the slightest wistfulness. Perhaps the joy of Christmas lies not in its specialness. Perhaps what is special about it is precisely that it is an ordinary day, an ordinary day in which heaven comes to earth and transforms it, so that henceforth no day, however ordinary, is untouched by holiness.
So that there need be no letdown after Christmas day. Because it is afterward that the blessing of it walks the world.
Copyright © 2006 Barbara Crafton - http://www.geraniumfarm.org
Collect:
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings:
AM Psalm 41, 52; Isa. 8:16-9:1
PM Psalm 44; 2 Pet. 1:1-11; Luke 22:39-53
Meditation from Forward Day by Day:
2 Peter 1:1--11. For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self--control, and self--control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
These lines from Peter are part of the summary of his teachings. This is the ethical part. The "what" we should do, "need" to do, and "how" to do part. Our faith may be child--like, but it can not be childish. Our faith must be active in our lives. Peter tells us how. It takes action on our part. Faith isn't easy. Once you have it, you have only started the journey.
Peter didn't mention a thing about decorating, shopping, or cooking, but in the past that was all I was doing during Advent. He did mention self--control, endurance, and love. Those are my goals for the holiday season. Self--control in two areas, eating and spending. Endurance in personal care of my mind, body, and spirit. Love in holiday giving to others that I might not even know. We can make that work in our 21st century lives. Our faith makes this all possible.
Anglican Cycle of Prayer: Kwara - (Province of Ibadan, Nigeria) The Rt Revd Segun Adeyemi
Advent calendar: Ways to help others:
4. Tell others. Give talks. Show & discuss videos. Join SLOw Down Network at www.simpleliving.org/indexoth.php?place=slowdown.php
Advent Calendar: Open Wide the Doors To Christ by Elizabeth Bookser Barkley
MONDAY (Nm 24:2-7, 15-17; Mt 21:23-27) Accept life’s ambiguities. Life is not clear-cut, neither are the answers we seek in prayer. Jesus responded to his challengers’ question with another question, one that made them think more deeply. Often it is in the questions of life that we are pushed to find truth and direction.
From From John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., Tradition Day by Day: Readings from Church Writers. Augustinian Press. Villanova, PA, 1994.
Our need for a savior from Athanasius (296 - 373), bishop of Alexandria, was the principal defender against the Arians regarding faith in the divinity of Christ.
God saw that the human race was perishing and that it was under the reign of death because of its corruptibility. He saw the firm hold that corruptibility had on us as the penalty for our transgression and that it would be monstrous for the law to come to nothing before ever having been fulfilled. He also saw the unseemliness of what was happening, of his own creatures ceasing to exist. He saw the excessive wickedness of the human race and how little by little it was mounting up against us and becoming intolerable. He saw that all human beings were subject to death.
Therefore, he had mercy on our race and in his pity for our weakness he descended to our corruptible condition. He could not allow death to have the mastery, for fear that creation should perish and his Father's work for the human race come to nothing. And so he took a body for himself, a body no different from ours. For he did not wish simply to become embodied and to make himself visible. If he had wished merely to become visible he could have manifested himself by means of some nobler instrument. But no; he took a human body, and took it moreover from a spotless, immaculate virgin, without the intervention of man. He who is powerful and who created the whole universe fashioned for himself in the Virgin a body to be his temple, making it his own as the instrument through which he could be known and in which he could dwell.
God Rest Ye Merry
On Celebrating the Darker Meaning of Christmas
A number of years ago, our friend Joseph Bottum, editor of First Things, made a nice observation about his experiences of successive Christmases, one that has stuck in my mind as equally true for me, and perhaps for many of us. He observed that every year there seems to be a particular Christmas carol that grabs his attention early in the season, often because one particular line or image in that carol suddenly opens itself, revealing a fresh meaning that he’d never before noticed.
I’ve had the same experience. I remember being struck a couple of years ago when, in listening to the French carol we call “O Holy Night,” a song I always tended to find both schmaltzy and tedious, I noticed the words “Long lay the world in sin and error pining,/ Till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”
Maybe it was just a quirk of timing, but those last six words hit me with unexpected force, and I wondered why I had never noticed them before, even though I’d long ago committed the lyrics to memory. It could have been partly because there are several extant “translations” into English, which vary in the way they render that phrase (and bear little resemblance to the French). But the more general point stands. And I now listen to “O Holy Night” with new respect.
I believe others have similar tales to tell, of carols that somehow come suddenly to life for them. The experience of hearing and singing and sharing these familiar carols every year, year after year, is like the best experience of liturgy, in its combination of familiarity and fresh moments of discovery, when universally known words that have for years passed through one’s lips in rote repetition suddenly blaze forth with meaning, vividly and achingly true.
Like the oldest and best liturgies, these songs are no one’s personal property, time and usage having wiped away nearly all distracting fingerprints of authorship and “originality.” Instead, they belong to all of us. They are old friends to us, and like the best old friends, they are comfortable and reassuring, and yet also full of mysteries and surprises and strange, hidden delights. Our Christmas carols are among the most precious shared possessions of our fragmenting, fraying culture, and for all that we abuse them and demean them, they seem to remain imperishable.
This year, somehow it’s been “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” that has stuck in my brain, and particularly these words, in the first verse: “To save us all from Satan’s power/ When we were gone astray.” We move through these sibilant words so quickly and rhythmically. I know I always have. And yet how plainly those few words sketch in a somber background, a whole universe of presuppositions without which the song has a very different, and diminished, meaning.
The merriness being urged upon the gentlemen (one should always remember that, in the lyrics, there is a comma between “merry” and “gentlemen”—they are not “merry gentlemen” being encouraged to “rest”) comes amid a great darkness, a darkness that never disappears, that beckons and threatens, a darkness whose presence is subtly conveyed by the minor key with which the song begins and ends. The black ship with black sails lingers on the far horizon, silent and waiting.
Dark Reminders
There are constant reminders of this darkness, if one has ears to hear them, running through the great liturgy of our Christmas carols, with their memorable evocations of bleak midwinter, snow on snow, sad and lonely plains, the curse, the half-spent night. The spooky and antiseptically sterile depiction of winter in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and its cinematic adaptations is, in that sense, very close to the spirit of the older carols, and to the biblical account of the matter—much closer than the hearty merriment of rosy-cheeked seasonal songs like “Sleigh Ride” or “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.”
The older lyrics are laced with just such evocations of darkness. They help us remember why it is symbolically right, even if historically wrong, to celebrate Christ’s birth in winter.
We are constantly reminded to “keep Christ in Christmas” and to remember “the reason for the season.” And of course we should. But, if I may be permitted to put it this way, we must also keep Satan in Christmas, and not skip too lightly over the lyrics that mention him.
For he and the forces he embodies are an integral part of the story. It utterly transforms the way we understand Christmas, and our world, when we also hold in our minds a keen awareness of the darkness into which Christ came, and still must come, for our sake.
Later in “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” the visiting angel tells the shepherds in the field that Christ has come “To free all those who trust in him/ From Satan’s power and might.” Being subject to that “power and might” is, as we are likely to put it these days, the default setting of our human existence. But the Christmas story plays havoc with all such defaults.
It reveals the putatively normal and settled features of our world to be something very different: the ruins and aftereffects of a great and ancient calamity, the tokens of a disordered order. It lifts the veil of illusion about who we are and what we were made to be. Which means that the “comfort and joy” of which the song speaks are not merely outbursts of seasonal jollity.
Captives’ Gratitude
They bespeak the ecstatic gratitude of captives and cripples who recognize that, in and through Christ, the entire cosmos has been transformed, and their lives have been made new. Nothing can ever be the same again.
The darkness does not go away. Not now, not yet. But the light that shines into it can make even the bleakest midwinter into a landscape glistening with promise. So may it be for each of us, this and every Christmas.
—Wilfred M. McClay
THE PERFECT TREE
It seemed like something I should ask my daughters about. Not for permission, exactly. But not exactly not for permission, either.
What would you think if Q and I had a smaller tree this year? One that could sit on the table in the bay window?
I think it's a great idea, Corinna said. We were sitting in a row at the school Christmas concert -- Madeline's last one. Madeline, her older sister Rose, their aunt, their mom -- all of them performed in it. I've been going to this concert for a long, long time.
It's such a pain getting a big one in the door, I explained, although I hadn't gotten an argument.
Yeah, said her husband, needles all over.
I don't mean like tiny, I hastened to reassure no one in particular. You know, maybe four feet, instead of eight.
This will mean that not all of our ornaments will be on the tree, I guess. This is a little hard on me -- I feel a certain obligation to old Christmas ornaments. I imagine them lying in their boxes through the long, hot summer, their excitement as their annual gig approaches. I would hate to deny it to any of them. I do have some codependency issues. And a little trouble remembering that inanimate objects are inanimate.
It seemed I had convinced Corinna. I called Anna.
What would you think if Q and I had a smaller tree this year? I said. And put it on the table in the bay window, instead of on the floor in the dining room?
She was finishing up the baking of eight dozen perfect cookies for the annual cookie swap with her girlfriends, while her fiance was getting into things: embarassing old pictures of Anna and her friends. She was multi-tasking: talking to me, shaping cookies and yelling at Chad.
Yeah. I think that's a good idea. You get out of there!
I just thought it would be nice to simplify things a little.
Don't you dare look at that!
So you wouldn't mind, or anything? It seemed clear that she would not.
I gotta go, she said, and we hung up.
So today we'll go and get a little tree, I think. They're never hard to find, not like their glorious perfect taller cousins. We'll carry it right in, without having to move furniture. All I have to do is move a lamp and we can set the tree up right on the little table. And maybe I can find other places to use some of the ornaments that don't make the cut, so their feelings aren't hurt.
I used to feel sorry for older people who downscaled Christmas. I would visit them, look at their little ceramic Christmas trees studded with colored lights, their candy dishes on the table with their medicine bottles, the Christmas cards set up on a shelves, and I would be sorry that the bustle of the season had left them behind now. Surely they must experience this as a great sorrow, I thought.
Now I am not so sure. Smallness and quiet call me, now, and something deep within me answers with joy, untinctured with even the slightest wistfulness. Perhaps the joy of Christmas lies not in its specialness. Perhaps what is special about it is precisely that it is an ordinary day, an ordinary day in which heaven comes to earth and transforms it, so that henceforth no day, however ordinary, is untouched by holiness.
So that there need be no letdown after Christmas day. Because it is afterward that the blessing of it walks the world.
Copyright © 2006 Barbara Crafton - http://www.geraniumfarm.org
posted by Gloriamarie Amalfitano @ 9:12 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home