Firstly… testing,
testing. Timothy Foster, are you out there?
Had to get that out of
the way.
Tonight I was smoking,
drinking coffee, lighting candles, shopping online and listening to Christmas
music. While hearing Once in Royal David’s City, I was put in mind of the old
lessons of church, the dour fear of Christmas and joy where we were told that
this was Advent and we should be listening to Advent hymns, and concentrating
on waiting for Jesus, not joyful celebrating. I remembered he very last church
I was a member of, the liberal Episcopal one that was, in its way, much more
dour than any Catholic church I’d ever attended. There the pastor who loved for
things to revolve around him declared with a smile on his face that helped me
to leave organized religion forever, that there would be no Christmas carols
till Christmas, no decoration till Christmas. This was Advent.
But there are few problems with this. One is the problem of
theology. The old hymns point to a weighty and glorious mystery, and it is very
much a mystery because churches do not approach it until the 25th of
Dccember and then we pack it away with Epiphany. Every Mass celebrates the
Crucifixion and the Resurrection, but this suspect and pagan nativity,
Christianity has always been uneasy with. The mystery of the Roebuck and Child
is allowed in, tentatively, at the end of December, and quickly it is put away.
There is another problem with
the winter mystery, and it is that a mystery is a living and eternal thing.
Jesus does not only die on Good Friday and he does not only rise on Easter, and
the things we are waiting for now, we will cease hoping for on the 25th.
The time to celebrate and rejoice in the mystery of Christmas is now. We cannot
wait. There is no time to wait.
So I continue listening
to those hymns.
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