Category: Christmas

Tender, nostalgic or otherwise pertinent seasonal (Advent and pre-Epiphany) memories, meditations, random seasonal observations, readings, and all that supports one soul’s longing for a blessed, Christ-centered, humanity-elevated sense of peace, rebirth and renewal in a secularized, spiritually exhausted Christ-adverse, zealously commercialized, angry world.

THE BIRTH

It must be concluded…that Jesus was born between the years 8 and 4 –most probably in the year 6 -before the Christian era as now dated. As for the actual date of his birth, universally now celebrated on December 25th, it can be said at once that this is purely a tradition. In the 3rd Century A.D., Clement of Alexandria chose April 19th; other suggestions were May 29th and March 28th. The Eastern Church for a long time celebrated January 6th. It was only about the year 350 that our own traditonal date gained general acceptance. Some have associated it with the feast of Mithra which the Roman calendar fixed at the beginning of the winter solstice ( December 21st) and there are certainly plenty of known instances where the Christian calendar has taken over pagan feasts. Gregory the Great himself advised his missionaries to “baptize the customs of the holy places of the heathen” and our All Saints Day (November 1st) and feastof St. John the Baptist (Midsummer Day) undoubtedly originated that way. For us December 25th is sanctified forever: it does not commemorate the persian god or the sacrificial bull, nor even the sun regaining his power over the darkness of the night, but that other star of which Malachi wrote: “…unto you that fear my name shall the sun of rigthtousness arise…. (Malachi iv, 2.)

Christ And His Times,Henri Daniel-Rops ( 1901-1965)

(translated from the French by Ruby Millar), 1954.

(This is a great, much neglected treatise and history on the life of Christ by a devout former agnostic, late, prolific and renowned French historian and member of the French Acadamy, probably a genius, decidedly odd-looking( at least based on photographs — looking sort of like Alfalfa of Our Gang fame, and always with his eyelids at half-mast. In one surviving photograph, you see him lighting up a cigarette, probably one of those strong French numbers, leading me to speculate on causes leading to his death at 65.

As for Christ’s birth, and, for that matter, death…

We must consider whether, ultimately, it matter when He was born–and simply marvel at the fact that He might actually have been born and died in the same month (April). That would be a reason to think of the springtime of April as every bit as special as the cosseting twilit advent of winter in the month of December.

For all that really matters is that he WAS born. And I, like millions, prefer to mark the time of the coming of The Light within days of the nadir of light, the season of darkness ( The winter solstice). This simply seems very right. We’ve got plenty of light of a physical kind in April and May, and blooming flowers to mark and brighten the rebirth that is the Resurrection. We’ll always keep the season of birth in early winter. The Light came in Darkness.

Winter is a better for darkly meditative thoughts about who or what might deliver us from our mess. Our darkness.

And, well…Bing Crosby never could have sung about a White Christmas in spring. (A whimsical consideration, to be sure, but, I, like millions, cherish the association of Christmas with snow, sleigh rides, jingle bells, Frosty, Rudolph,etc.)

I should point out that among the religious congregation at St. Benedict Center in Still River, Massachusetts are scholarly consecrated brothers who can make a good historic and astronomical case why Christ was, indeed, born December 25th. I’m sure they’re not alone in making that case.

But, again, what does it really matter? If He was and is who He says He was and is (I Am Who Am), He is born everyday, every hour, ever minute — and never dies, unless (as in the original story) we shut Him out or kill Him.

Let’s not do that. Let’s make room at the inn.

And let’s jingle all the way!

Amen.

THE CAVE

It’s the Yuletide again. Good time, amid all the red and green festivities, to ask some pertinent questions.

Who was this person who was, Christians believe, both human and divine– God, second person of a mysterious Trinity and known as Jesus Christ?

Who, again I ask, was He?

There IS significant evidence that a man named Jesus Christ exited, a carpenter’s son who himself became a carpenter. But it is a fact that no ancient historian, at least for a very long time, took great note of the purportedly earth-shattering events surrounding his birth, his life as a healer, or execution at age thirty-three (to summerize: birth in Bethlehem, early, mostly hidden life in the backwater Nazareth, execution and death in Jerusalem. And Christians believe he rose from the dead — all this in the first century A.D. — or even prior to that, because certain anomolies in counting up the years suggest Christ was actually born around 6 B.C..)

Let’s stick with his birth, since this is that season. The Resurrection story can wait until Easter.

There are a number of false, pious gospels — called apochrypha — that add spectacle and power to the nativity events. But we’ve come to celebrate, instead, the extremely humble nature of the birth of the God/man regarded by millions to have been –and remain –the Massiah. The ancient Jewish world had been waiting for a messiah for centuries — someone who would right every wrong done to that race of people. There had seemingly been someone claiming to be a messiah on virtually every corner for much of the millenia before that quiet, paradoxical dirt-poor birth among beasts, dung and hay just outside the village of Bethlehem in the Judean hills.

His family — earthly mother and father-were required to travel to Bethlehem because history and scripture record that a decree had gone out from the Emporor Caesar Augustus ordering everyone to respond to a census being taken over the vast Roman Empire , also requiring every citizen to return to their ancestral homes to be counted. That was Bethlehem in the case of the couple named Joseph and Mary. (There was also an ancient prophesy that a future ruler of Israel would be born in Bethlehem. So, as one writer puts it, “external obligation and divine design” were intersecting, acccording to the Christian nativity story.)

Now, wait a minute!

Why a bloody, damn census? Upending everybody’s life, putting them on the roads of the vast continental Empire? Well, for tax purposes, among other things (what else?), and so the powers in Rome could know where to go to fill in the ranks of the Roman Legions. Empires need armies. Fresh young bodies.

(With all those people traveling at the whim of the Roman boss, small wonder there was no room at the inn.)

So far, so good. But –something that’s always intrigued me: where exactly was that famous stable/birthplace? Do we really know?

Multiple spiritual writers and modern scriptural historians, not to mention archiologists, give us the following information:

There is, among other sources, testimonial evidence in the writings of the saint known as Justin Martyr that there was, for a very long time , a site in or around the town of Bethlehem where Jesus Christ was believe to have been born — “a certain cave”.

I don’t just want to take a Catholic saint’s word for anything, but Justin’s evidence is interesting and credible because he was local and nearly a contemporary.

The saint tells us locals venerated that cave from a very early date and apparently preserved it in order to preserve the memory of the nativity. That cave, we’re told, was greatly talked about, even among enemies of the faith. (It is, presumably, the site that now sits under the grand Basilica of the Nativity located in the middle of a Middle Eastern zone of perpetual combat and which itself was beseiged in the year 2002. So much for Peace of Earth in that neck of the woods! But there’s always hope. Christmas is supposed to be all about hope.)

Actually, it must be noted that little of the touching simplicity of the nativity story would seem to have been preserved from that time of the building of that magnificent edifice. I have not had the privilege of visiting it, but I’ve read that you approach it as if it were a fortress. There is a gigantic encircling wall breached by a massive tower. It is Byzantine in the way it conveys a powerful impression of majesty. And, as noted above, it has been the scene of warfare, contemporary as well as in the deep past. Indeed, in 1873 it was the scene of a physical assault by the supporters of the Ordhodox Church on the Catholics. Such virulent divisions among Christians presumably professing faith in the same God are disheartening, and never-ending.

And that cave noted by the saint/witness is now said to be the sacred sight reached by a long and narrow subterranean crypt.

Oh, how , passing down that crypt, I would long for that former, simple cave! But then, they don’t build houses of worship over, say, Paul Revere’s house. This is just the way of religions.

St. Justin speaks not just of “a cave” but of “this cave.” He had in mind a certain cave. Justin himself was born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Flavia Neapolis (today called Nablus), some forty miles north of Bethlehem. ( I told you he was local.) He knew the area and the people quite well. Apparently, a century after that stable birth, the cave was still known and being preserved.

The Church of the Nativity was built over it –presumably they had the right cave — in 326 A.D., at the order of Constantine, the first Christian emporer and, according to some accounts, at the urging of his mother Helena, a devout Christian who obviously had considerable influence on her son.

Some anti-Christians, and also what I would call anti-Christian Christians, like to say Constantine “founded” Christianity. That’s another kind of warfare that gets waged over the body of Christ: historical/theological revisionism.

And for the ancient early Christian apologist and scriptural scholar named Origen, as well as for the evangelists before him, there is a verifiable particularity about the facts of Jesus’s conception and birth in that cave, and His subsequent infancy.

All this, they say, happened, not “once upon a time,” (as in a fable), but “in the days of Herod, King of Judea,” when “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” the emporer. The big guy in Rome. (Luke 1:5,2:1).

Herod was the local authority around Bethlehem, Judea — and, from all accounts, an utter monster. He’s part of a Christmas story –a negative part. But the story needed every part, good and bad, to seem true to life. We’ll skip over Herod for now. It suffices to say that you didn’t want to cross him.

So -it all began, in earthly terms, with taxes, the Roman bureacracy, a vile local Roman functionary, and a noisome government decree. It began “upon a midnight clear” and persists and summons our souls and imaginations to this day.

As for all the messy circumstances leading up to — and away — from it: sounds like real life as we know it.

Whatever the case, we know that a pregnant young woman and her spouse, with their donkey, sparse belongings and weary ( ultimately, many believe, saintly and, in Christ’s case, divine) bodies and souls, wound up spending the chilly Judean night among the hay and dung and livestock of a cave — reviled, rejected, alone.

I guess that cave is also the birthplace of what for much of the world remains a supreme, incredible earthly irony: the most important soul in history — according to the beliefs of billions –was born in a cave.

Also born that night: endless wonder. And there was something about a star, too. And shepherds, and choirs of angels.

And Magi. (We’ll talk about them later.)

CHRISTMAS GIFTS,”FOR US, LIKE SHEEP,” LONGING TO BE CONTENT, SECURE, HEALTHY, AND, ABOVE ALL ELSE, DIVERTED, AS WE SEEK A STAR IN OUR MOMENTS OF BLIGHT, WARS, ANXIETY AND DARKNESS

This day, in the city of David, a son has been born to you, a Savior….

And so, dearly Beloved, I am sending you on this special occasion…

A Black Falcon 4K drone (imagine it’s a star); a Muama Enence (turns you into a native speaker of 36 languages in seconds); Pro Power Save (cuts your energy bill by 90%) Synoshi Power Spin Scrubber (genuine Japanese inventions that cleans everything in your house); Stealth Raptor Airplane (the perfect gift for kids) Clear Pik Dental Descaler (instantly removes ugly, stubborn dental plaque);Flex Vision (If you’re over 50, try these revolutionary glasses); Adien Atom (the world’s first hearing aid for less than $100)….

..let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened.

Alpha Heat (heats up any room in minutes and saves hundreds in the electric bill); Kailo (futuristic patch that uses nanotechnology to relieve pain; The PhotoStick Omni (find and protect all your memories in one click); The Chill Pill (a hand-held device that helps you fall asleep in minutes)….

...field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star…

Auto Air (car tire pressure need never again be low); VolteX Heated Vest (NASA-inspired technologogy to keep you warm and cozy this winter); SpaceScope (see everything miles away as if y ou are s tanding next to it); TurboDrive RC ( irrsistable toy car that keeps kids off their phones and computers; NuuBu (a centuries-old solution for stress, anxiety and low energy); DermaBolt IPL (the ultimate hair removal device); Flight Path (the world’s most advanced golf tee. Boosts your golf drive by a notable 10-20%.

...and behold the star which they had seen in the east led them until it came and stood above the place where the child was…

Noel!

CHRISTMAS MORNING, 2022

I woke at 2 .a.m..Silent night, Holy night….a cold breeze is gently playing the wind chime in the carport.

Darkness. A cossetting darkness one could welcome for the grace and the memories at the heart of it; an easier time to remember that “Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day (I’m singing it within, that traditional carol, so seemingly politically incorrect and exclusive in our divided time, “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen…” Rest us all).

It might, in fact, have been April that He was born, the same season in which He died, and this merely the solticial period when the sun was at it nadir and the pagan’s brightened with their torches and their ceremonies to penetrate and enliven that darkness before He came, and so the feast of our deliverance seemed a light-giving substitution in human hearts and minds. Traditionals will give you meterological and other reasons to believe December 25 is, in fact the day. But it does not matter. He is born everyday — and dies for us everyday. But there needs to be THIS day of our joy and remembance.

Of course, the other kind of darkness is always with us, that “heart of darkness” — and it was with me even as my sleep was interrupted and I rose in the heart of Christmas darkness. It was time to fight off that darkness and recall that He came “to save us all from Satan’s pow’r when we were gone astray….O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy…. ”

It is colder than it’s been in decades on this morning in Florida, the thirties, freezing. But I welcomed it, freedom from the sultry, endlessly sunny and sticky months.

Did I pray? I go soon on a Christmas Day journey, (having attended the holy sacrifice of the mass last afternoon). It will be, God willing, an easy five hour journey in a country that is tortured by severe, paralyzing, dangerous weather. Thank you, my Blessed Lord, for sparing me that challenge. Protect and comfort my family. May we never forget you, the whole day long, or ever. And I do, so often.

I did go back to bed for that “long, winter’s nap…”

Merry Christmas! To young and old, the living and the dead, to all God’s children, as we seek and so easily forget, “the wonders of his love….”

Another carol, that. Let us sing.

ADVENT: THE PURPLE JOURNEY, WITH MINTS….

….and suddenly, joy on that journey. The night of the Third Sunday, Gaudete Sunday, when the color goes from penetential purple to rose, for joy. Joy on the journey.

That journey to Bethlehem: After so many barren and desolate places, where only a few clumps of purple anemones or cyclamen showed life and color among the scrub, it must have been comforting to see the little white town perched on its twin hills. Beyond it, the land descended, a pitted gray expanse like boiling lead suddenly frozen in the bubbling state, plunging down toward the Dead Sea. But surrounding the town were orchardds, blooming fields and olive groves…

Henri Daniel-Rops (translated from the French by Ruby Millar), 1954.

Why does no one read this great writer anymore? Or perhaps they do. I do. I share, above, his vivid evocation of the Holy Family’s journey to that birth that changed the world. Sunday night.

The Christmas golf cart parade went by my place tonight. All part of the journey.

Someone threw me a bunch of peppermint mints. I appreciated that.

ADVENT AGAIN

The endless beginnings: “the ways deep and the weather sharp… (“Journey of the Magi”), or, for me for the last three years: the way flat (because I dwell in Florida), and the weather soggy (because it is the sub-tropics). It is still a hard journey. There, now and then, comes a chill, a deep cold, a wind, a soul-scouring inner storm and turmoil. In Advent, we pray for sun and calm and we hope….

I was glad when they said to me: ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ So, accordng to Psalm 121, did the pilgrims of old chant as they approached the holy city of Jerusalem.

Those journeys, to Bethlehem, to Jerusalem, were always hard.

I’ve just had another birthday. I’ve gone far in this journey. I’ve been lazy, strayed from the path, only to find the way harder than it most certainly would have been had I stayed the course, stuck to the pilgrim path. The Way……

On 12/1/14 at 10:09 p.m.. I wrote of a “crisis of will.” On 12/13, hour unknown, probably night, I d bright-yellow highlighted in a book the need to be “attentive to our personal prayers.” In 2013, hour unknown, I’d noted the danger of ” the dwindling and cooling of our desire for sanctity.”

Saintliness? Must I? Me? Get real!

Yeah. And that’s the point: Reality. Life on life’s terms and God’s terms…

The reality of our situation in this vale of tears, this valley of darkness. (“You better watch out. You better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why…..”)

Love saves us. Love and mercy. Advent. He is coming….

Year after year, season after season, I fail to vault over big, abiding obstacles in my life. I thought it would be last year. Last year, I thought it would be the year before. And so on and on, that mountain an infinite regression in my rearview mirror….and the years have passed….

In this season, since childhood, into adulthood, the culture’s inflatable images of Santa, Old Saint Nick, are, of course, a kind of a subliminal stand-in for the true Deliverer, That babe of humble estate. For millions, both the babe in the manger and the Big Fellow in the Red Suit coming down the chimney are myths of equal incredulity. In England, and probably here, non-Christians now greatly outnumber believers. Don’t we know it. The evidence of our faithlessness is all around us. Well hidden is that One encountered in prayer and crisis, forever King, forever merciful, but expecting much of us, Our Father, full of love and mercy., so we are told, so we must believe, and begin to believe when we consider all the bitter, empty other possibilities.

Now, to my ears and written down before my eyes, all the above reads and sounds like vapid, prayerbook pretend-piety. Small wonder no one is listening. At my church, much as I love much that I see and hear and all whom I meet there, I cringe when we sing the “modern” Gloria. It’s in 3/4 time, like a waltz, and accompanied by the pipe organ in up-and-down herdy-gerdy carnival style. The herdy-gloria Gloria. (Don’t mean to be such a critic, but, in my experience, the deepest piety is inspired by solemn, polyphonic, decidedly serious but no less joyous and ancient chords, either sung or merely heard. But — I must be humble, charitable and open. That just my preference. In a way, it might be best to encounter God in silence. It’s all about grace….and a soul-healthy ‘fear of the Lord…’

Fear of the Lord. Advent. You better watch out….

And love, of course. God is love. So we are told and so I believe. For many years, as a late teenager, I doubted it all. Then I was told that a thousand difficulties do not constitute one single doubt. (accoding to St. John Henry Newman). We have only to keep chipping away at the difficulties, as we might at a rock or any other obstacle in our path. I know I made this point to my late sister, who always seemed to insist she could not delve far into the faith, “because I question” I think she feared her probing would somehow confirm her doubts, that there was no possibility it might, instead, affirm or give birth to her faith. I told her much of St. Augustine’s Confessions was written in the form of questions. She never seemed to be convinced — not in this life. Now, unlike me, she knows the answer to every question. Her earthly birthday was at the outset of Advent: December 1. I pray for her and, throughout November, prayed for all the faithful departed.

But back to that prayerbook of mine….

I would read, paragraphs later in that prayer book, “for he is to come, he will not delay” among the Advent Antaphons. In 2012, I read that the growth of our Christian life is obstructed and hindered by the rocky obstacles that are “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” I John 2:16.

I’ll say!

Believe. Look at us, helpless, pitiable… Waiting. For centuries, waiting.

What I recall, year to year, is everydayness, things unchanged in all those centuries. I just took out the garbage again. I stay mired in…Situations. In sin. In cowardice and damnable life habits of thought and action. In garbage.

On a bookmark dated Christmas, 1987, from friend and mentor, Rev. J.L. Donovan wrote: “St. Paul tells the Ephesians 2:14 “He” is our peace. He reconciles our unconsious and conscious. He speaks to us from within ourselves. I hope this book becomes a “vade mecum” of your own quest for Peace.”

The book for which this was the bookmark was a collection of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ( a 19th Century Jesuit whose works are celebrated by poets of every era since, be they secular or religious). In Hopkins’s poems we find examples of the depth-charging syntax he used over and over to write, for instance, of “God’s Grandeur”, “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil/ It gathers to greatness, like the ooze of oil. Crushed.”

G.M. Hopkins died in 1899 and is buried in Dublin. J.L. Donovan died in 2019 and is buried in the hill above the grave of parents, sister and brother-in-law in Boston. Both the poet and the priest told us we will live forever. It is what Christ told us.

But for now — we are’ ‘on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.” Old Matthew Arnold amid his prolong doubt and despair could not fathom the isolated piety of the monks sequestered far up in the Alps at the Carthusian monastery of the Grand Chartrreuse (yes, where the monks make the yellow liqueur). Arnold went on wandering between two worlds, the one dead/The other powerless to be born. The year was 1855.

We’ve gone on wandering between those two worlds, through two World Wars, living in fear of a Third.

Advent. When Frosty and Santa appear on lawns, sometimes in illuminated plastic, hard or inflatable; sometimes (especially or Frosty) in great white balls of Styrofoam.

Joy. Sin all around. We are children forever; forever williing to be awed by the delightfully kitchy. And that’s good.

About this time last year, a young girl cut me off in traffic and responded to my gentle toot with an obscene gesture which she kept displaying for about a block. She’s a year older now. I wonder if any wiser. Am I? Do such things still bother me? Do I do such things myself?

It was Advent. I wanted to break her finger. I silently wished her a Merry Christmas she could not hear.

All civilizaton, all history is Advent. He Is Coming, sometime. Coming always.

Sin and evil abide, like traffic. Like surly, obscene, embittered teenagers.

Abides in me. Am I wrong that some of the worst crimes I remember were committed in Advent? Again, all time is Advent. The Evil One is always busy, and busiest in holy seasons. So my mentors Hopkins and Donovan would remind me.

He is coming….

Enough. Pray like crazy. Get ready. Again. Change. Above all change. Pray I change. I’ve already had one sinful argument this morning.

Yes, I’m talking to myself. I was talking to myself as I took out the garbage — again.

But it’s Advent again.

I go on talking to myself, but I must make that talk into prayer.

Pray. Pray….without ceasing. Persevere to the end.

It’s Advent again.

EPIPHANY MOMENT

Before I and everyone else packs up our creches for another year, some thoughts on the Magi — and that Star.

It’s nearly little Christmas.

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of the the Star, and the Magi who followed it. How many were there? It’s not known, but legend has it they bore three gifts and they may represent, among other things, the three stages of life, or the three branches of the human race, semitic, white, black (which, of course, omits the Asian and therefore is beyond imperfect). The Magi were a once-powerful priestly caste of the Medes and the Persians, as recorded by Herodotus and others. They studied astrology and the divination of dreams.

How did they know about the blessed event? How far did they have to travel to Bethlehem?

They could have met with a very harsh fate had the brutal and crazed dictator Herod known they had ignored his request to report back to him the birthplace of savior. They could not have known, initially, of his terrifying and murderous reputation.

They were also said to be descendants of the great soothsayer Balaam. Nothing indicates that they enjoyed any great power at the time of the birth of Christ.

What about the star?

Identifying the star — that Star — is a thorny issue. How could these men, working with only the naked eye or the most rudimentary scientific instruments, have made astronomical observations of any precision? This is pretty much, word for word, the observation of that renowned and now mostly forgotten late French Catholic scholar Henri Daniel-Rops, writing in his marvelous book, Jesus and His Time.

It could have been a “nova” similar to the new star that appeared in the Consetllation Aquila in 1918 or that was noticed in 1572 after the massacre of St. Bartholeomew’s Day. But no writers on those times in question recorded such an appearance.

Halley’s Comet, when it appeared on January 10, 1910, was visible in Jerusalem, its light observed to pass rapidly from east to west, becoming difused in the east and reapparring in full visibility to the west, as indicated in the Gospel Story. But Halley’s Comet could only have passed over the sky of the countries in question during the year 12 B.C. and not the year 6 B.C., when it is most often speculated that Christ was born. Other comments recorded by Chinese astronomers in the years 4 and 3 B.C. tell us it would not have been visible in Western Asia. Also, a comet, being subject to their diurnal orbit like other stars, could not indicate a precise location, much less a particlar house in a particular town.

Kepler thought that this celestial pheonmenon might be a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn as occurred again recently. His calculations suggest this could have occurred in the year 6 B.C., even though this date was not yet considered the most probable date for the birth of Christ. Interesting.

And the word “star” as used in scripture does not mean the stars ordinarly visible, but indicates some astronomical phomenon.

On the borderland of science and legend, as Daniel-Rops puts it, is Russian poet Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s theory that the “star” of the Gospel was a rare celestial phenomenon, an equinocrtial passage of Aries through Pisces which would signify to the Babylonian Magi, haunted by the idea of a recurring deluge, the an announcment of the end of the world and a new age in the history of the human race.

St. John Chrystosom, though pre-scientific, knew that stars don’t do what the star of Bethlehem was said to do — that according to Catholic convert and scripture scholar Scott Hahn.

Stars in the sky were often identified with angels in heaven. The philosopher Philo of Alexandria speculated that the stars “are living cratures, but a kind composed entirely of mind.”

Thus John Chrystosom concluded that this was an appearnace of a Christmas angel. Those celestial messengers are forever being caught up in the cosmic drama, from the creation of the world. Good and bad angels are, to the devout mind, what accounts daily for all that is communicated to us in our universe. They are everywhere in the Christmas story.

My patron saint, Gregory the Great, according to Scott Hahn, accepted the angelic interepretation. He also observed the great difference beween the way God dealt with the shepherds and how he dealt with the Magi. The shepherds, though uneducated members of the lowest rank, were still members of the chosen people. They’d been hearing all their lives the prophesies of liberation destined for the Jews. So it was, says Gregory, that God announced Christ to them with angels.

“But a sign, not a voice, guided the gentiles,” writes Scott Hahn. He quotes Gregory’s homily on the Ephiphany, asserting that the Magi ” they were not prepared to make full use of reason to know the Lord.”

In other words, as Scott Hahn notes, when it came to understand the meaning of Christmas, “the simplest of pious field hands were better equipped than the most erudite scholars.”

But those scholars, to their eternal credit, came in an ardent search for the truth. “That’s something the angels could see — and work with,” writes Hahn.

And, it should be noted, they ultimately got their share of important angelic knowledge: an angel apperared to them in one of their dreams in time to steer them clear of Herod who might (God help us!) have tortured them to extract the knowedge they now posessed of the Infant Jesus’s whereabouts.

Thank you, angels.

And so, like those truth-seeking foreign gentile travelers, we must let the angels work with us and guide us now and to the end of our own desert journeys.

.…This Birth was/ Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death…

T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

Yet the poet has his lone Magi, reflecting long after that journey and the witnessing of that birth, proclaim that he and his fellow travelers were afterwards no longer at home or at peace in their native lands (w)ith an alien people clutching their gods.

I know how he feels.

And so I say a wistful goodbye for another anxious year to those fellow travelers.

God willing, I’ll see them — we’ll all see them — again next year, in peace and joy.

A TENNYSON CHRISTMAS

From “In Memoriam” in which, the poet, deep in mourning, over hundreds of stanzas, gropes for the light over three Christmases, as time slowly closes over the loss of a dear friend and faith slowly covers over his mourning. Christmas and a new year were the milepost at every painful turning. November is the month in which we especially remember the dead. December, and Christmas, are when we miss them the most.

FROM STANZA XXVIII

The time draws near the birth of Christ.

The moon is hid, the night is still;

The Christmas bells from hill to hill

Answer each other in the mist.

FROM STANZA LXXVIII

Again at Christmas did we weave

The holly round the Christmas hearth;

The silent snow possess’d the earth

And calmly fell our Christmas-eve.

The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,

No wing of wind the region swept,

But over all things brooding slept

The quiet sense of something lost.

FROM STANZA CIV

The time draws near the birth of Christ;

The moon is hid, the night is still;

A single church below the hill

Is pealing, folded in he mists.

A single peal of bells below,

That awakens in this hour of rest

A single murmur in the breast

That these are not the bells I know.

Like stranger’s voices here they sound,

In lands where not a memory strays,

Nor landmark breaths of other days,

But all is new unhallow’d ground.

FROM STANZA CV

Tonight ungather’d let us leave

This laurel, let this holly stand:

We live within the stranger’s land,

And strangely falls our Christmas-eve.

FROM STANZA CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying clouds, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

FROM STANZA CXXXI (CONCLUDING)

That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.

1850

Just fragments in which earth and mortals regenerate, mid-way in a century that was struggling to retain the “old” faith. Tennyson, nonetheless moves from despair to hope. Tennyson is not my poetic soul-mate in many particulars, out of sorts — along with the likes of Charles Kingsley — with the important Oxford Movement, in which Saint John Henry Newman was about to remove himself, and lead other churchmen, out of the slowly sinking barque of Anglicanism.

But he knew Christmas for what it was and must always be for us, however great the darkness.

2021

MELVILLE’S CHRISTMAS

It was not Dickens’s Christmas, that’s for sure. The chapter in Moby Dick entitled, rather ironically, “Merry Christmas” has no holly or warmth of the hearth nor warm memories. The Pequod has just set out from New Bedford and our narrator Ishmael writes….

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.

Did Melville’s Calvinism come between him an even the slightest bit of yuletide sanquinity? Or is this merely the harsh reality of the whaling voyage — assorted pagans and long-suffering, dour Christians thrown together in ice and danger and commerce? Scrooge would have been at home here, though perhaps terrified and seasick.

Contrast this cold, grim seaboard Christmas moment with Christmas Eve at old Fezziwig’s where The Ghost of Christmas Past has borne Scrooge so he might see again how the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug and warm, and dry, and bright a ballroom as you would desire to see upon a winter’s night.

And the dancing commenced — while aboard the Pequod, crewman Bildad, hands at the windlass, roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, that being an early 19th Century sailors’ haunt in a depraved neighborhood of Liverpool — or so I have read.

And while Dickens’s Scrooge, in roughly this same era, was found awakening, a man reborn, to the glories of a London Christmas morning, Melville’s Ishmael , on his “Merry Christmas”, tells us the cold, damp night breeze blew…a screaming gull flew overhead…we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

Oh, well…as Dickens has Tiny Tim observe, God Bless Us, Every One!