felix hominum

you'll grow into it

Everyone who has had a Christmas present knows well one of the ancient litanies of the season:  "you'll grow into it."  You get that sweater, or shirt, or pair of pants that is held up against your minuscule limbs, and you hear the authoritative declaration: "You'll grow into it."

It is a line I heard as a child, and since parenthood, I've discovered the usefulness of those four words.  It's what you say when you see that there is an obvious discontinuity between the size gift and the size of one who has received the gift.  The gift is not going to shrink. The one receiving it needs to grow.

"You learn to trust God by trusting God". 

I heard that line at an event a number of years ago.  I don't remember any other stuff from that event, but that one line has been etched into my memory.  I've been thinking a bit about it over the last little while.  It seems to me that the great "post Christmas" challenge is to grow up as Jesus grows up.  "The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.”   We have been given a gift (the Christ), and this gift is not going to shrink.  Rather, the Christ will continue to grow, until everything in creation is beneath his dominion, and the world is a footstool for his feet, and his is "all in all".  This gift is too large for me.  When the Christ is held up against me, he doesn't fit. 

I need to "grow into" it.

In my many less pious moments, I like to think that the exercise of "faith" should begin slowly, evoking memories of my grade 9 track coach.  I was a distance runner, and I can still recall some of the progressions of training that went along with that.  What can be terribly frightening when I read the gospels is the fact that Jesus often jumps straight into large challenges of faith with his disciples.  Get out of the boat and walk on water.  You feed this crowd of 5000.  Can't you cast out demons and heal sickness?

These few examples serve to remind me that the "leap of faith" is sometimes less a matter of belief than of action.  It is in acting that we learn what faith is.  And more often than not, it seems that Jesus does not give his followers a chance to warm up to the idea;  he simply tells them to act.  More often than not, Jesus' demands for faith seem to big.

You'll grow into it.

briefly updating

a blog which, I hope, will be helpful in following some events when Peter Rollins comes to town for a few conversations in early February.  Schedule of events should be up soon.

There has been a slight hindrance as one of the younger members of the felix clan has succumbed to the norovirus for the last few days...

Virgil the Aeneid; pt 13 book VII: the Latins & the golden age

see entire post series on the Aeneid here

Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo,
sponte sua, sine lege fidem rectumque colebat.

Golden was sown that first age, which,
without coercion and laws,
spontaneously nurtured the good and the true.

Ovid Metamorphoses
I.90

When I first read these lines from Ovid many years ago, I think there awoke a sense of the universality of the memory, or perhaps the desire, for paradise. That place where the good and the true arise effortlessly, built into the very fabric of the earth.  Though we live in a fallen world, there are many who look longingly to Eden.  Paradise is not a creation of the Christian religion (though I would say it is a creation of the Christian God).  This is a larger memory of a time and place when humanity chose the good and the true.  What kind of place it was I will leave for others to consider.  For myself, I see in the ancient idea of the "Golden Age" a human awareness that the present experience of the world is not what it was, nor what it was intended to be.  And if memory is also a close cousin to the faculty which looks forward (for it seems to me that the capacity of memory can move in two directions - we merely think of its capacity to look behind, but it can also look ahead) then this idea of the Golden Age is also a foretaste of something yet to come.

King Latinus echoes these sentiments to the emissary of Aeneas:

Know that our Latins
Come of Saturn’s race, that we are just –
Not by constraint or laws, but by our choice
And habit of our ancient God
VII.268

There is such a perfect balance of nature and reason in Latinus.  It is still the golden age for them. When Aeneas' men tell Latinus that they have come by the will of Fate, Latinus himself immediately recognizes the truth of their claim.  He recalls a prophecy given by old Faunus, and instantly "knows" that this Aeneas is the man about whom the prophecy was spoken:

This is the man…by fate appointed
Called to reign here with equal authority
The man whose heirs will be brilliant in valor
And win the mastery of the world
VII.342

This is paradise - an unmistakable knowledge of the divine will, and a desire to see it accomplished.

[unfortunately, paradise is lost, as other tasks call, and I'll try to return to this book later on this evening]

a boxing day thought

He doesn’t fit
Too small (said some)
Too large (said others): He’ll take up all the space
until there’s no room left for me.

I wonder if there is still time to return Him
In exchange for something more...
comfortable

Sharon's Christmas prayer

She was five,
sure of the facts,
and recited them
with slow solemnity
convinced every word
was revelation.

She said
they were so poor
they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
to eat
and they went a long way from home
without getting lost. The lady rode
a donkey, the man walked, and the baby
was inside the lady.
They had to stay in a stable
with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)
but the Three Rich Men found them
because a star lited the roof.
Shepherds came and you could
pet the sheep but not feed them.
Then the baby was borned.
And do you know who he was?
Her quarter eyes inflated
to silver dollars.
The baby was God.

And she jumped in the air
whirled around, dove into the sofa
and buried her head under the cushion
which is the only proper response
to the Good News of the Incarnation.

– John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected

I had forgotten how much I loved this poem, until I read it recently on T19.  

the two kinds of christmas sermons

I've decided that there are two basic species of Christmas sermon.

The first one is sort of like having tea with a distant relative whom you visit once a year.  Christmas is, after all, often that time when we see people we haven’t visited all year long.  Sometimes it is grandchildren or grandparents who live far away, maybe some cousins or aunts and uncles.  We come over to their place and make the effort to “fit them in” for a Christmas visit.  I recall a particular aunt on my father’s side of the family, whom we would visit on particular occasions.  I think maybe she had some money or something, and maybe there was the hope that if we came to visit every once in awhile, there would be something in it for us at the end of the day. 

There is a sort of Christmas sermon which wrestles, to a greater or lesser extent, with this reality.  We really haven’t seen Jesus all year long, but it’s time to drop in for a visit and see if He is still there.  God is rather like the elderly aunt whom we humor with our presence, and hope that someday we will get some kind of inheritance when the time is right.  The kids all have to behave, and you are not allowed to touch anything when you are visiting, and for God’s sake don’t do or say anything embarrassing.  We can exchange some pleasant conversation, and then return home, having checked off one more thing from our Christmas “TO DO” list.  We might visit once a year, but this person has no real importance in our lives for the other 364 days, and there is no need to do otherwise. And on the side of the elderly aunt,  the preacher thinks “Make the visit pleasant, and maybe they will come back again.”

The second species of sermon is an attempt to trump up Jesus beyond all the distractions of the rest of the season, lament about the fact that there is no Christ left in Christmas, and try to lay out the whole plan of God’s salvation, explain in 10 minutes or less all the jargon of the Christian life – sin and grace, redemption and eternal life, prayer and repentance, joy, peace and love, what it means that Jesus is “Lord and Saviour”, and give everyone a chance to have a conversion experience in less than one hour.  Preachers with a lot of expertise and the gift of communication can squeeze the whole Christian faith into one sermon on Christmas eve.  I don’t’ have that particular expertise.

I have, I believe, one particular area of gifted expertise.  I am a guy.  I have been a guy for at least 4  decades.  And I am a parent.  I have been a parent for almost 10 years.  Therefore, my “guy skills” are greater than my “parenting skills” by a ratio of almost 4 to 1.  Christmas is about that thing that frightens guys more than anything else in the universe, except for a local playoff blackout – Christmas is about birth. 

Yes, Christmas is about birth.  Now I am at a disadvantage when it comes to this topic.  Because what I know about birth really comes only second hand.  Something I have discovered over the last 10 years is that holding a baby is an acquired skill – at least for guys.  Guys are not natural baby holders.  Guys know how to hold things: BBQ utensils,  remote controls, seasons tickets.  But guys learn how to hold babies only by comparing babies to footballs.  You sort of cradle it in here and tuck it like this so that no one can tackle you and take it away.  That is how guys learn to hold babies.  It’s just not natural for us. 

It’s an acquired skill – it takes practice, and sometimes we would rather just hand off the baby to someone else.  It makes us feel self conscious – am I doing it right?  What if I drop it or it starts to cry?  And the question which is most often on guys’ minds in these situations;  “Do I look stupid?”  That is the ultimate question which governs the lives of guys.  And at Christmas, we can get like that with Jesus.  We really don’t know what to do with Him. We don’t know how to hold Him.  We are afraid that if we actually try to hold him, we will look stupid.

It's an acquired skill.  In church they call it "grace".

I've discovered a few other things in the parenting process.  For instance, there is the birth announcement.  Guys are usually excited, but don’t know what to say.  If you are lucky, you get a few phone calls, you might even go whole hog and put something in the paper.  Not this baby.  What does His Father do for a birth announcement?  Let’s put a star up in the sky, and get a few singers: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace”. 

And then there is the question every guy ponders – so what’s he going to be when he grows up?

“For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this.”

Got high hopes for your boy, do you?  Yes, yes, God is beyond gender, but you can see His Divine Guyness coming through:  my Son is going to accomplish something.   It just won't be the way mortal guys think.  If we come back to visit Jesus at Easter, we will see that He is grown.  Sometimes we are amazed when we haven’t seen someone for a while.  Then we come for another visit and we see how they have grown.  God not only has high hopes for his boy, He has high hopes for you and me.  Higher hopes than we have for ourselves.

After they  all come home from the hospital, guys discover one more thing about babies that they had never considered before.  Something that they knew about, but had never really given much thought to.  Something so mysterious and awful and stupendous that most of the guys I know, myself included, simply pretend that we don’t know how to do it.  And here it is.  It’s called change. 

Where ever there are babies, there are going to be some of these – diapers.  Babies and diapers go together like... – well, let’s just stop right there.  Babies are all about change.  As a father of 4, I can say that babies are about constant change.  Everyday.  Small changes, and big changes.  Some changes are easy to deal with.  Some are rather messy.  The highest level of alert in our house is called a “hose down”.  

The good news about this baby – Jesus – is that you don’t have to change Him.  Instead, he is going to change you. Big messes, small messes, daily messes.  Change is a necessary part of this whole picture.  What kind of change does God want?  God became like us – Jesus was born,  so that we could become like God – we can be reborn. 

the final layer is going on the rink today

And I suspect that by 6 o'clock tonight ti will be ready for the annual Walker Backyard Hockey Classic.  A five on one game in which a man tests his mettle against a woman and 4 children. I think last year I lost 13-3. 

This year I'm taking no prisoners.

thinking about the 4th sunday of advent

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary.  And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."  But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 

The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.  He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.   He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?"

The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.  And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 

For nothing will be impossible with God."

Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

"For nothing will be impossible with God".  It strikes me that this is the turning point of the entire venture.  I believe it no accident that this line, this thought, this sentence which turns the world upside down, is found at the beginning of the Gospel.  Everything else which follows depends upon that one thought:  for nothing will be impossible with God.  If I do not believe that one sentence, nothing else to follow in the Gospel will be believable.  There will, of course, be no virgin birth.  Neither will there be miracles, or healings, or transfigurations, or resurrections.  Neither will there be hope.  Nothing else in the Gospel will make sense, or come to life, or invite me into the story, if my picture of God leaves out the impossible.  And as soon as I have eliminated this aspect of God, I realize that it is not God, but my imagination of God, that I am worshiping.

Perhaps impossibility was the first thing turned away from the inn.  There is no room, no space, for the God of impossibility in this place.  We tend to send him away time and time again:  in our own lives, in our relationships, in our churches.  No room for a God of impossibilities here.  We don't want the God of impossibility.  He would be too upsetting, too illogical, too threatening, too... transformative.

My advent prayer is that the God of the impossible would again break in upon our lives, even when we cry "no room".

ps - for a good Advent 4 sermon, see this at Nova Scotia Scott's place.

Retracing the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem

I decided today had to be the day that donkey number three and I would part ways. The last few legs of the trail had provided wonderful scenery, but there had been some tough climbs through the hills on the way.  The donkey was also now in unfamiliar territory and would have to walk close to busy highways, something she was not used to.

BBC correspondent Aleem Maqbool is walking from Nazareth to Bethlehem, retracing a journey made by Joseph and Mary in the Christmas story told by Luke in the New Testament.  You can read his notes here.

so one other Christmas eve the doorknob fell off

in my hands.  It sort of happened this way.  We had bought an older house with the idea that we would slowly do renovations on it bit by bit.  One particular Christmas Eve a few years ago, we were getting ready to go out.  I had been doing a little bit of fooling around with locksets on the door.  Nothing major, just a little bit of tinkering and replacing.  All the kids were in the car, Mrs. Felix was in the car, and they were just waiting for me.  I had a service to do at 7 pm.

I had a few loads of things to take out, and I still had a few necessary things in the house.  I pulled the back door closed.  I looked down and saw that I had pulled the doorknob out.  I heard the gentle sound of pieces falling on the other side of the door.  Even now I cannot find words adequate to describe the sensation -  the feeling which goes right down to the bone - of realizing that somehow I had not only locked myself out of the house, but I was standing there in minus 20 weather with a doorknob in my hand.  I had no way back in, and time was getting on.

Well, what else could a person do?  My sermon was sitting nicely on the printer downstairs, my fabulous props for the kids' story were in a box in the basement.  I, on the other hand, was merely an object of immense tragedy, or perhaps comedy. 

Doorknob in hand, we went off the the service.  I improvised a bit, suspecting that if one looks carefully enough, one can find God's message in all things.   So I explained the mystery of the incarnation in terms of my doorknob.  I'm sure Mrs. Felix was wondering greatly why I was bringing it to church that evening.   Christmas?  Doorknob? 

We've pulled the door shut;  we've closed it from our side.  And we've done such a job of it that there is no way, from our side, that we can get back in to the other side - to our home.  We can't get there from here.  The only hope is that there is Someone on the other side who will come to where we are. 

We could not get into God's world, we have closed the door from our side.  But He could get into our world, and in that stable he opened the door from His side.

Incarnation.

Virgil: the Aeneid pt 12: book VII; the poet's "greater task"

(see entire post series on Virgil's Aeneid here)

Be with me, Muse of all Desire, Erato
While I call up the kings, the early times...
Immortal one, bring all in memory to the singer's mind
For I must tell of wars to chill the blood...
A greater history opens before my eyes,
A greater task awaits me.

VII.47

Virgil invokes a new Muse at the beginning of book VII.  This new invocation serves to let us know that there will be a new direction in the poem.  There is a shift in the poet's task, and in the tasks of Aeneas as well.  Remember that by the end of book VI (the underworld) Virgil has given us a vision of the ideal of Rome as the eternal city:  to rule the world by rational principle of law.  This was the fate revealed to Aeneas in his journey to the underworld.

Now Virgil is faced with a "greater task".  Why exactly is the bloody history of combat and kingship greater than all that has come before this point in the Aeneid?  Well, to borrow from Christian terminology, it is the problem of the "word made flesh".  It is a greater task for Aeneas to take the idea of Rome and make it a reality in time and space.  This is why he needs to invoke a new muse, and this is the greater task ahead of him.  This particular problem is one of the great difficulties of ancient thought.  How can Plato take the ideals of the philosopher king and make them a reality in the Republic, in the actual lives of citizens?  Of course, Plato tells us that his Republic will fall - the ideal will not always be reflected in the events of time and space, in the actual history.  What Virgil is attempting is a vision of a city which can be truly everlasting:  a city in which the ideal (fate - fatum) is worked out in the practical affairs (fortune - fortuna).  If those two principles can be wedded, then there would be no reason why Rome should not continue forever.  The ideal and the practical must meet together.  This is the greater task.  To have either side without the other is inadequate, as all of us see in our own contemporary experience.  An ideal which can never find flesh in the world, unconnected to actual events and human history, will be impotent.  It will remain unconnected from our lives.  On the other side, mere "activity" is insufficient, without the divine destiny or fate to guide it.  It will be unstable, unsustainable, and will eventually just return to a chaos of "doing things" without knowing why.  Human activity must be guided by the Divine;  only then will it have eternal meaning.  And so in this second half of the poem, Virgil wishes to give us his vision of how these two sides can be united.

There are many introductions in book VII.  We get a cast of characters for the second half of the Aeneid.  We meet Turnus, Latinus, Lavinia, and a few more beside.  Juno (represting fortuna as opposed to fate) pops in again.I will look more closely at each one of these in turn.  But for now, the stage is being set for the action of the rest of the poem.

Peter Rollins coming to Edmonton

According to his speaking schedule, he will be here Feb 4-9. His blog is here.

You can get a glimpse of his writings here.  I'll say a bit more when I have a minute.  I'm currently working on a few other projects, and I have to go shovel snow...

repost: one story from Christmas eve

Prelude

I've had my share of events on Christmas eve in years past.  I think over the next week I'll try to post or repost some of them.  This one is about one Christmas eve about 5 or 6 years ago.

Aria

I write many sermons, as I have written much of  this one, in a coffee shop on Whyte Avenue.  There are no administrative calls or knocks on the door to disturb me.  But there are other things to disturb me there.  People.  If it is difficult to preach a sermon isolated from people,  it is perhaps more difficult to write one isolated from people.  On Wednesday mornings at nine o clock there is a group who get together to share their stories of misery or happiness, more often the former than the latter.  They struggle with addictions. I have become the informal “chaplain” of that group.  One of their number is a 45 year old man we shall call Steve.   Steve came from a rather unfortunate past and carried that misfortune into his present.  He had been from time to time a carpenter – he was trained as a furniture maker.  I asked him almost a year ago about a gift for Alisa, my wife – perhaps an anniversary present. I had the idea of a chest, something into which our family could place our  various treasures in  the years to come.

He drew a sketch of a wooden chest, I asked him to build it for me.  He described the wood, the size, the time it would take to build and finish, and the cost.   It wasn’t quite ready for our anniversary, which was in August.  Throughout the fall Steve continued to work on it sporadically, and I from time to time would visit him in his small shop and check on the progress.   As October and November came around,  I was beginning to panic, hoping that it would be ready for Christmas.  Not having an anniversary or a Christmas present in the same year would be bad news for any husband.   In the days leading up to Christmas, I was in my new parish, thinking of all the details I needed to tidy up for the festive season.  In the back of my mind was the horrifying thought that my Christmas present to Alisa would not be ready, and that I would be in the domestic doghouse for quite some time.  Steve and I traded messages on the 22nd, and 23rd and the morning of the 24th of December.  In St Andrew’s that evening  we had a wonderful Christmas Eve service at 7 pm.  Alisa’s sisters had come home from the States and the house of God was a full  place that night.  We all drove home, the kids were in bed, everything was perfect.

At 10:30 pm this past Christmas Eve, as many were either drifting off to a happy and excited sleep, or dressing up for an extravagant midnight celebration of the birth of a King,  I went to meet a carpenter in his shop.

Steve had finished the wooden chest.  It was ready.  He told me with  pride all the details of the craftsmanship;  how to care for the wood, how to oil it so its colour would radiate, how it would  last, as he said, to give to my grandchildren.  He was proud of his work.   We sat in a small  room and I handed him a Christmas card,  and small box of chocolates, which he said he couldn’t eat because of his diabetes, which was complicated by his drinking.   We drank some coffee and chatted. There are four churches within a stone’s throw of Steve’s place.  I told him about our Christmas service at St Andrew’s, about God and Jesus, about love and prayer.   We chatted some more.   He told me that he had been to church a few times as a boy,  and he had even met some members of the clergy.  His experience of ‘church’ had not moved  him.  I did not convert Steve.

Instead we loaded the wooden chest into the back of my Jeep Cherokee, and I drove off to place it among a large pile of gifts in our living room.   I went back to the companionship of a loving wife, with two beautiful children, and a house full with anticipation of the large extended  family feast we would have the next day.  Steve went back into his shop and closed the door.

It was not the first time a carpenter had been abandoned by one who called himself a  disciple.

“He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Postlude

While I was away at a church camp a year and a half ago, Steve died.  I found out about his death a month after it happened.  I don’t know what Steve was thinking at the hour of his death.

If there is room for another thief or two on a cross to be with Him in Paradise, I hope it’s Steve and me.

a sermon on repentance in Advent

is a terrible thing to write.  Especially if it actually challenges the one who is trying to write it to recognize his own need for repentance. 

I think one of the greatest barriers to my own growth as a Christian is the lack of depth in repentance.  An experience of the  richness of God's mercy, and the joy that I know it brings, seems to me to be tied somehow to the depth of my own repentance.  Inviting Christ to peer deeply into one's soul is a terrifying business.  I think that the first gift given to the prodigal son on his return journey must have been some form of courage.  For cowardice and courage seem to me to be part of the process of repentance: shallow or deep. 

A shallow repentance merely looks at the outward life.  It is the kind of repentance which is necessary and obvious to all who follow any kind of moral code.  It is an exercise in comparative law:  I have offended against this, or against that.  A deeper repentance takes a spade and a pick, and digs deep into the core of who one is before God and one's fellow human beings.  It uncovers the underworld caverns in the soul which are too often covered above with green turf.  It is difficult work, not least because I would rather not dig;  I would be content with a shallow repentance.  And at a certain point I am incapable of digging further.  I grow weary of it.  Yet there is a strange grace by which Christ leads us on our own journey into the underworld, like Dante traversing the Inferno.  We are called to see the true shape of our sins and the roots of our sinfulness, deep below the surface.  It seems to me to be the place where our desire for a deeper repentance cannot be matched by our own ability to accomplish it.  I think John Donne has shown us something of what this place is.

It is the place where the gates of hell do not prevail, and it is never of our own doing.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

Patristics Carnival XVIII - posts from November, 2008

Patristics Carnival XVIII - November, 2008 is up over at HYPEREKPERISSOU

As usual, there are a variety of interesting topics covered, and a great selection of posts for your holiday patristic reading.  Posts on church fathers, textual things, Jewish studies, apocrypha, book reviews & lots more.  Come early and read it all!

Conservative Anglicans Create Rival Church

In a history-making gesture, conservative evangelical Anglicans, deeply alienated by the decline of the U.S. denomination, sounded a shofar to herald the creation of the Anglican Church of North America.

On a snowy Wednesday evening, about 1,000 worshipers, mostly from the U.S. and Canada, gathered in Wheaton, Illinois, for a worship service to celebrate the creation of the new entity, which comprises 656 congregations, 800 clergy, 30 bishops, and 100,000 people in regular worship. They represent the evangelical, charismatic, and Anglo-Catholic traditions within Anglicanism.

read the whole article at Christianity Today

Related articles from the Anglican Journal:

Anglican Church in North America: new church or new province?

Creating a new province will take years, says Archbishop of Canterbury

for the one who reads me like no other

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

e.e. cummings

(happy advent, mrs felix)

on opening the gift of joy, or how I scrapped my Advent 2 sermon

For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy

One of the Christmas traditions that arose in our house had to do with Christmas Eve.  Somewhere along the line it became the custom in the Felix household that you could open a gift early – on Christmas Eve. And somehow opening that early gift became a part of the bigger celebration of Christmas that we had.

One of my favourite scenes in the New Testament is when Mary (carrying Jesus) greets Elizabeth (carrying John the Baptist).  I often have the typical picture of John the Baptist as the last old testament figure - preaching repentance and calling people to account for their sins.  But what was John's first recorded action in the New Testament?  Leaping for joy at the presence of Jesus.  Can you picture John the Baptist leaping for joy?  Ever?  Can you picture yourself leaping for joy?

All through the season of Advent, John the Baptist calls us to repentance.  But don't forget what his first act as the prophet of the Messiah was:  jump for joy.  Like that early Christmas present we used to open before the big celebration, I think that John would also encourage us to open the gift of joy now.  Today.  This moment.  That's the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the gift he gives when he "baptizes with the Holy Spirit".

I am now scrapping what I had intended to deliver as my Advent 2 sermon, and I'm going to encourage us all to be like John in that first Advent:  accept the gift of joy at the presence of Jesus.

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From Ian's Messy Desk

Calculating the date of Christmas & the myth of pagan origins

A fascinating article by William Tighe (Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania):

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations” that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

Read the full article here.  (H/T Mere Comments)

Update:  other important and contentious origins will be dealt with on this blog, including the origin of the bagel.  This important topic is most recently addressed in:

The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread
Maria Balinska, Yale University Press

Virgil: the Aeneid pt 11: Aeneas, the underworld, and the destiny of Rome

view entire post series on Virgil's Aeneid here

The geography of the Roman underworld is a rather fascinating, (and I admit, morbid to some) study.  There's a kind of cool map here by Carlos Parada.  Aeneas is guided by the Sibyl.  This need for a companion and guide to the underworld is something which Dante will pick up on when Virgil himself accompanies Dante into the regions of the Inferno.

Aeneas took the opening: swiftly he turned away
From the river over which no soul returns (VI.573)

Virgil’s underworld is a strangely familiar to us, not in the least because many of the ideas he transmitted to western culture are either broadly recognizable in a variety of cultures, or because of the influence he had on subsequent millennia.  Or both.  Upon venturing only a few steps, Aeneas hears the sounds of “the souls of infants wailing” (VI.576), and the souls of those who were “falsely accused, condemned to die”(VI.580).  Next to these he sees the suicides, and Dido among them.  Aeneas tries to move her, and in a pitiable scene she refuses to acknowledge him, “Her face no more affected than if she were Immobile granite or Marpesian stone” (VI.632)  Over all this “Minos reigned as presiding judge” (VI.584). 

No underworld would be worth a story if it did not feature judgment.  Judgment in the proper sense of the word is really simply discernment between good and evil.  This is visualized as a fork in the road:  the Sibyl tells Aeneas

Here is the place
Where the road forks: on the right hand it goes
Past mighty Dis’s walls, Elysium way
Our way;  but the leftward road will punish
Malefactors, taking them to Tartarus
(VI. 726)

Aeneas begs the Sibyl to tell him more about the realm from which he hears such groans and cries.  This, Aeneas is told, is where the Cretan Rhadamanthus is appointed judge.  He brings all the sins of the offenders to light.  Those who put off atonement in their earthly life are merely “thieves of time” (766);  they put off amendment of life “until too late, until the hour of death”.

There is a certain logic to the underworld, and here we can see at least some of the logic by which Dante arranged the punishments of the Inferno in the Divine Comedy.  Dante of course added much more detail, and followed Augustine’s dictum from the Confessions that “every man’s inordinate affection becomes his own affliction”.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again. What does Aeneas learn as he goes?  First we have those of the old race – the Titans – who rebelled against the Olympians.  Rebellion against the Olympian gods is the first offense.  The old forces of nature and chaos are plunged deep into Tartarus.  Next we see Salmoneus, who committed blasphemy by “mimicking Jove’s fire” (VI.787). 

After those who directly offended the gods come those who “held brothers hateful, beat their parents, cheated/ Poor men dependent on them” (VI. 814).  These have offended against the basic structures of family and community.  Next we have men “killed for adultery” and those who betrayed their lords – oathbreakers, whether of the marriage vow or the civil vow.

We are also told of those who broke the laws of the city – ones who “set up laws or nullified them for a price” (VI.831), and then those who broke the laws of nature – “another entered his daughter’s room to take a bride forbidden him” (VI. 834).

The lesson is clear:  “Be warned and study justice, not to scorn the immortal gods” (829).

But it is Aeneas’ fate to walk through the Elysium fields, that region of “happy souls” (895).  Again, in a fashion related to the punishments for vices, we have in lines 870 to 890 a set of virtues which have earned these souls a place among the blessed.  They are ones who honoured the gods (“chorused out a hymn praising Apollo), were faithful to their vows (“in battle for their country”) or built up the civic and familial order.  It is in this region that Aeneas meets the shade of his father Anchises, but the embodied man cannot grasp the spirit of his father, which is “weightless as wind and fugitive as dream” (942).

Anchises gives his son some instruction about the nature of the soul and the body (VI.973ff).  For Virgil the soul is "imprisoned in the darkness of the body" (987);  there is a process of purification by which souls are freed from the "deathliness which comes from flesh" (985);  purity is achieved (proto-purgatory) and souls may rise again to earthly existence.  It is quite a contrast with the view of flesh and body which will become part of the Christian story only a few decades later.  For Virgil, the Incarnation would be an unthinkable horror - an impossibility.

Next Aeneas sees the souls of the future leaders of Rome.  And it is here in the underworld that we see the genius of Rome and the key to her destiny: "Illustrious Rome will bound here power with earth/ Her spirit with Olympus" (VI.1047).  This is the Incarnation of Rome:  the joining of the earthly and the heavenly in the rise of Empire under Augustus. 

Caesar Augustus, son of the deified
Who shall bring once again the Age of Gold (1064).

Rome will bring about a new kind of kingdom:

Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples – for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud”
(VI. 1151)

You can almost hear a faint echo of the hopes of Christian messiahship.  Virgil’s humanist vision of the message of Isaiah:  every valley raised and every mountain made low.  It can make one think about the Christian phrase "In the fullness of time".  With Virgil and with Christ there are competing visions of body and spirit, kingdom, empire, eternal city, son of the deified...

"People with disabilities remain the most oppressed people of this world"

Vanier was in Durham partly to promote his new book, Living Gently in a Violent World, co-authored with Duke Divinity professor of theological ethics Stanley Hauerwas.

Much of Vanier's message makes the connection between loving the people whom society has cast aside as unlovable and the struggle to create a more peaceful world.

"The fundamental principle of peace is a belief that each person is important," Vanier writes in Living Gently.

"People with disabilities remain the most oppressed people of this world," said Vanier, a tall man with a voice so soft it is often hard to hear. "Many feel that they are not entirely human."

Vanier says his focus on those with disabilities is rooted in Scripture, especially the Gospel stories in which Jesus embraced the mentally and physically ill and other outcasts.

"I just sense the hand of Jesus" in the growth of L'Arche, Vanier said. "The building of L'Arche has been a story of transformation."

That transformation has happened in the form of committed relationships in which people with and without disabilities become like family, Vanier said.

"These people are very precious, and if we live with them, and communicate with them, and enter into a relationship of mutuality with them, we will change.

"People need to be understood," he said, adding that to listen to a person gives him or her dignity, and it is a form of holiness to do so."Our ministry is founded on broken bodies. When you live with people with disabilities, you must be in community."

full article here  (h/t T19)

One of my favorite events of the year is the annual L'Arche Christmas pageant.  if there is a L'Arche community in your neck of the woods, find out if they are doing one.  You might see the Christmas story in a whole new way.  Or do some volunteering - you might see humanity in a whole new way.  Our own SJ has, I am sure, transformed and challenged our own family in many ways.  I think one of her greatest gifts is the challenge to live in a way which connects with the heart, rather than (as is too often the case) only through the intellect. 

There are many layers to this.  In Lent I'll be giving an address (as part of the Prayer Book Society lecture series) on the topic: "Thanksgiving After Childbirth:  Choosing Sarah in an Age of Options".  March 22, at St. Timothy's.