Veni, Veni

Your light will come, Jerusalem. The Lord will dawn on you in radiant beauty.

--Responsory, Morning Prayer, December 19th

For Mary and Joseph

Blessed Woman,
Excellent Man,
Redeem for the dull the
Average Way,
That common ungifted
Natures may
Believe that their normal
Vision can
Walk to perfection.

--W. H. Auden

Joseph

If the stars fell; night's nameless dreams
Of bliss and blasphemy came true,
If skies were green and snow were gold,
And you loved me as I love you;

O long light hands and curled brown hair,
And eyes where sits a naked soul;
Dare I even then draw near and burn
My fingers in the aureole?

Yes, in the one wise foolish hour
God gives this strange strength to a man.
He can demand, though not deserve,
Where ask he cannot, seize he can.
But once the blood's wild wedding o'er,
Were not dread his, half dark desire,
To see the Christ-child in the cot,
The Virgin Mary by the fire?

--G. K. Chesterton

Epiphany and the Past

I don't believe in time.*  Not in the sense of the passing of one second providing a magical break for all the world, especially a moment arbitrarily marked by pagan emperor's centuries ago.  Within the liturgical year there are many moments of new beginnings and times for reflection--the new liturgical year beginning with Advent, Lent which is a time for self reflection and sacrifice, and even Christmas.  Yet these are the opposite of clean breaks and instead invoke the past and the future.  Even Christmas, the celebration of the beginning of Christ's life on earth also invokes His end in the gifts of the kings.  As Chesterton says;

There were three things prefigured and promised by the gifts in the cave in Bethlehem concerning the Child who received them; that He would be crowned like a King; that He should be worshipped like a God; and that He should die like a man. And these things would sound like Eastern flattery, were it not for the third.

Enjolras wrote last New Year about the falseness of new beginnings, how resolutions cannot change your past--and perhaps that is why they usually fail to change the future.  New Year's resolutions foster the myth of advancement, the future must be better because of the unstoppable march of progress and time.  Christianity tells us the opposite, that because of the fall we will never achieve perfection on earth.

This is not meant to be a depressing or defeatist thought.  In fact, the proper response to this realization is to keep working towards peace and a world where everyones right's are protected, dignity is affirmed and basic needs are met, but the knowledge of original sin protects us from despair when this most assuredly does not happen.  But this knowledge that the future will not necessarily be better than the past also reminds us that a checklist of personal self-improvement projects are not enough--we also need reflection, study and knowledge but most of all we need the little baby born in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago.  And this is the lesson Christmas teaches as opposed to New Years, for as Chesterton once again says;

Christmas is an obstacle to modern progress. Rooted in the past, and even the remote past, it cannot assist a world in which the ignorance of history is the only clear evidence of the knowledge of science. Born among miracles reported from two thousand years ago, it cannot expect to impress that sturdy common sense which can withstand the plainest and most palpable evidence for miracles happening at this moment. . . .Christmas is not modern; Christmas is not Marxian; Christmas is not made on the pattern of that great age of the Machine, which promises to the masses an epoch of even greater happiness and prosperity than that to which it has brought the masses at this moment. Christmas is medieval; having arisen in the earlier days of the Roman Empire. Christmas is a superstition. Christmas is a survival of the past.

*This is why this post is a week and a half after New Years and also misses Epiphany and the end of the Christmas season entirely, not because I have been lazy and too unmotivated to write.  

It came just the same

“And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow,
stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons.
It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.
And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before.
What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store.
What if Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”

The House of Christmas

Merry Christmas!

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.


--G. K. Chesterton

Journey of the Magi

Child of the Snows

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain,

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.

- G.K. Chesterton

The Everlasting Man

For Christmas, here's a quote from one of my favorite passages in G.K. Chesterton's, The Everlasting Man:

Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique not is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, or gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and drama. There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only hangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapour from the exultant explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savour is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaw’s den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicings in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky.

There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace. This is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave. Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world. It was in truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it raised a revolt. Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud moulded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs.

The Stars look down on the meak and lowly

"And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests." Luke 2: 8-14

I've always loved this passage, imagining the confusion and terror of the shepherds as their peace is broken by the hosts of heaven. This scene, however, is repeated on an almost nightly basis. All you have to do is go out on a clear night and gaze at the heavens. Stars, which are so often seen as synonymous with angels, look down as they dance through the heavens. The Angels coming at the birth of Christ was enough to shake people from their sleep and draw their eyes upward, while the quiet twinkling of stars every night is a reminder of this mystery and evidence that all of creation sings God's praise.