The New Year

I got tired of people posting nonsense about 2020 being a cursed year and how they were glad it was over. So I wrote:   

Please stop acting like years are magical or cursed and everything that happened to you was 2020's fault. The same shit that happened on December 31st is the same shit going down today.

Now here's the thing: that's some logic I absolutely agree with, and yet, in the midst of troubles which threaten to overwhelm me with anger or worry of depression, I had to stop and catch myself. Yes, we are four days into a new month and four days into a new year, really at its very first business day. And I am thinking of all the troubles tha come from an addle witted father wielding his dead wife's bankbook and the ability to pay for my mother's funeral seeing as, in her selfishness, she never took out a life insurance policy. In many ways I very much feel held hostage to the past. 

When my mother died, I did not feel like she was in heaven. I did not feel her presense. I did not know where she was. I couldn't quite imagine her in heaven, not only because I can't imagine heaven but because I couldn't imagine her wanting to be there. In those days I had vague belief in her going on because I needed to. This is sort of how I feel with this belief in the new year. I believe in its goodness because I need to believe in it. At Yule, not the other day, but on the 21st, we began the celebration of the New Year with food, with drinking, with prayer, with the list of days that led up to and away from Christmas. Now they New Year is under way and I HAVE to believe that it means something, that I am renewed. I have to believe that the salvation of Christmas is not some very tired salvation from sins so I can go to a world in the future that is better, but salvation how from all the shit that surrounds me.

This is the time of Epiphany, as we move the magi across the room, closer and closer to the stable, it is like a game, but it is like the oldest games which in themselves are sacramental and have great meaning. As we move them we move with them and resolve to gain a little wisdom and come closer to the stable at Bethlehem. We continue to take the road to Jesus.

The Days Between and an Ensign

 

We are in the days between the Octave of Christmas and Epiphany. These are waiting days. For the first time we have taken out the Three Elders, or Three Kings or Three Wise Ones, incensed them and petitioned them. They are on their way to Bethlehem. We are in this hard world where anything might happen where there is, to be sure, much suffering and it is easy to say there is no God. Indeed, by any normal bar there seems to be no God, no one protecting us from ourselves or from the random evil of men. It is as if anything could happen and anything does. In the magical world, knowing this, we call upon our allies, the ancestors and spirits, the small gods and the great ones, the elements and the Mighty One to be our defense. Thinking of this whole time of year, the year's beginning and its ending,we ask where God is and see in the Christ Child the God who consents to be born into the midst of this mess and madness. He is witness and participant in this. What it means, what this does--which often seems to be very little--is the mystery of Christmas

There is the general and primal agreement that the purpose of Christ is deliverance, redemption from sin and the door to heaven by his sacrifce. I do not believe this and those who gathered around the celebration of Christmas saw the same thing, for on the pole of Christmas, the redemption of the world is that Christ has entered it, the redemption of human beings, that he is one of them, the door to heaven opened when he came from into the Virgin's womb. We experience not only resurrection, but re birth. The two are one. As the Marys came to anoint the body of Jesus and found him gone, so the Magi come to give him gifts and then bed him be gone. In the midst of this ruined world, the Christ Child has set his court.

“And in that day there shall be a Root of Jesse, Who shall stand as a banner to the people; For the Gentiles shall seek Him, And His resting place shall be glorious.”

Isaiah 11. 10

When I imagine this ensign, this banner, it is ragged. It stands above a ruined battle field and calls out to a few people. It is not mighty, but betokens mighty beginnings from all these ashes.

The Road to Bethlehem

Tonight is a writing night. There's a lot on my soul that I have to get out before the morning. This is the time of the Hag, time to seek blessing from the Great Crone. I've been ordering presents for Three King's Day, and its going to be a good one, really the first one. When my mother was around I didn't have the energy to celebrate this day. It couldn't live up to Christmas and quite frankly, I was too broke to. Now, in this new world where we are making our own Christmases, having our own holidays, all a little bereft, needing to stoke the fires, I am ready to finally celebrate Epiphany, a holiday I have largely ignored.

Why do we get presents? What is the significance. Am I remembering what the wise men did for Jesus? Or am I just engaging in pleasures? I think I'm becoming a child again, and I think at Christmas we finally seek the wisdom and power of the Child. We sheltered him, looked at him, adored him, but now we beseech him. It seems wrong, undignified, un grown up. Now we ask the Child to help us and turn to the Child in us. We delight ourselves with gifts and songs as I will surely do.

But the truth is, I don't know what's going to come in Epiphany. I've never celebrated it. Before I grimly came into winter, now, having passed through much grimness, having endured death, I come into it with something that is more than hope.This Ephiphany I will learn what it means to come to the King and to follow his way. I will learn a little.

Tomorrow, we will take the magi out and cense them for the first time, set them on their journey. We will pass from that first phase of Christmas as we passed out of Advent, and move to the present, accepting whatever grace we are given.

Saint John, the Innocents, Saint Anne the Hag and the Business of Remaking the World

 By the light, by the light, by the light of Saint John the Beloved, may we truly see.

ENTRANCE ANTIPHON           Wis 18: 14-15

Dum medium silentium tenerent omnia, et nox in suo cursu medium iter haberet, omnipotens sermo tuus, Domine, de caelis a regalibus sedibus venit.

When a profound silence covered all things

and night was in the middle of its course,

your all-powerful Word, O Lord,

bounded from heaven's royal throne.

I woke up in a bad way. After the reasonable gloom of Holy Innocents, we return to the Feast of Saint John, but something has happened and I’m going to remember it in the future because it always happens with Octaves. After the third day, the energy peters off. It seems as if an Octave should really occur in three phases, two three days and the last three days each going into something new.

 

But I’ve talked a little about that and today I thought how low we are on imagination. The Gospels, our theology, our legends, were spurred by imagination as what our childhood faith. Presumable many of us had imaginations, but then these were crushed out, often by religious authorities. What is needed is a reclamation of the religious imagination. I am thinking of the story of the Holy Innocents. What if we were to reclaim it? What if we were to retell it. Not untell it, for the telling has a great meaning, to retell it, fill in holes, make it right? Doing this in the modern day is doing what our ancestors did for centuries in a faith that was far more vivid than the one we live in. The Gospel writers who told the Gospel their own way, who saw their own face of Christ, the theologians and folktellers who shaped the stories we know, knew also, better than we, the meaning of “God putting such power into the hands of men.”

 

Imagine another story. Imagine that the Wise Men really are wise and they don’t need visions and dreams to know to leave a different way. They already understand the wickedness of Herod. They didn’t know much about the Roman Empire, and Herod, knowing these were Parthians and powerful men didn’t have the nerve to shadow them to closely.

 

Joseph’s wisdom may be attributed to angels in dreams, but this time the dreaming messengers are the Magi who tell Joseph he must flee. Joseph waits a day. So much to pack. The angel confirms his fears. Consumed by fear as he is, Mary is full of spirit and reason.

     “Has it occurred to you?” she asks, calmly, “that if Herod does not find our baby, he might not stop and killing EVERY baby?” This has been in her mind already, since the Magi arrived. She grew up in Jerusalem. She knows Herod.

     But they did not travel alone. Why does everyone assumed they came to Bethlehem alone? In this time it is Anne as the wise crone, good Saint Anne,who says, perhaps with cousins, perhaps with Joachim, “You must go. You must go right away.”

     “But, Mother—”

     “We will go, your father and I will. We will move through the town—it is a small one—and warn the women to hide their children.”

     Not all the women listen, or are able to hide their children. The slaughter of the innocents, which medieval artists in their desire to portray bloodbaths and make an army of infant martyrs, are wrong. In the end the number of children dead is around three. This is why it’s never reall talked about anywhere but Matthew.

     Only three, well then why the business about a loud cry in Ramah? But listen, is the death of three or two or one child, the wailing of one family nothing?

 

Why do the work of changing the story, or adding to it. Because this is the work religious people have always done, because to add to this story is to add to how we see God working in the world the story portrays, to add to how we see ourselves working to bring about grace as well. To tell a story where Mary is thoughtful, the wise men wise and Anne saves as many people as possible if far different from the brief slaughter house tale we get in Matthew and the God is different and the world as well.

 

Here into this story I have introduced the Hag, Anne as the Grandmother of the World. The Hag of Winter is an important person we have overlooked, and now we come to her. In this next wheel of the Octave, as we go deeper and deeper, we seek winter wisdom from the Hag.

At this point in Christmas, we must go beyond the Bible. We have to go beyond the Gospels and the originating Christian theology, because Christmas was a thing that invaded Christianity. The birthday of the Lord was not something that was celebrated naturally, and it’s always been a bit of trouble to Christians. Can we hold onto this thread of the Nativity. See where it leads, what it tells us?

 

Christmas is the celebration of a very small and fragile beginning. To celebrate is to observe, the keep, to hold. To celebrate is also to maintain a light for the little light, to foster it. The lantern Joseph carries is the lantern shielding the Christ Light, the light of the Christ Child for extinction. A little child shall lead them, but when he does, what a strange following, an almost doomed following. This fragile beginning looks like the end. Much is the same. Not only is old Herod still king, but he has the power to slay. The shepherds have the message of a child born to be shepherd of all, but what can this child do? Mary’s message is one of expectant pain. The peace on earth, though a declaration is one scarcely heard and seldom obeyed and the angels cannot be seen by those not looking. The miracle is easy to miss and not only easy, but missed. Belief is to travel beyond your own mind, well, in keeping this feast I am traveling beyond my own mind, my own sight, my own ability. I strike the wall of grief, despair, boredom and then must move past it with faith. And faith is not some dumb belief in facts, but the active moving into another state. It is good to remember that, right now, we are in the business of remaking the whole world.

After Holy Innocents

 

Medieval image representing the Great Work

It is called the Work because it is hard and the Great Work, presumably, because the work is constant. This is hard work. Easy work if work at all is having one day of Christmas and celebrating. But the work of, in the modern world, keeping the festival for eight days, examining its many nuances, returning to the altars and the liturgies with new questions, is a work indeed, the work of doing this in a world where no one else really is, that is a work too. The work of digging deep down to find and remember your own power… all of this is work. The work of finding a different joy in Christmas which is not the exact joy of Christmas Day… all of it work.

     The Gospel of Thomas says: Jesus said: He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.

     He does not say, but implies, that when you are troubled you are onto something, and in these days I come a wall and am troubled. It is as if the first round of celebration is over and I must go deeper. The first things are not enough, the first ways of celebrating, of thinking, or hoping and praying are not sufficient. The questions I began to ask but which had no answers are not enough. Some answers are required. Some questions must change. Who is the God of this season? The Little Child, the Holy Child? What does that mean? What good is this Child to me?

     The Child is made by me. Everytime we draw the circle, lift the chalice up and bring it down, place the dagger in the chalice, have the communion cup we are bringing the Child into being. This is an old teaching. All of our magic is the Holy Child, the marriage of our will with the divine will, earth joined to heaven, the presence of God in the midst of our workings. This is the totality of magic. Christmas is the magic moment, the moment when we must see that God is the high priest of this ritual and the world is altar. When I work it, I work in memory of him and under his leadership. When I bring the Holy Child into my world in the seemingly small ways, I am participating in the huge universal way he is doing this himself.

     The Holy Child is also the reminder that this is the beginning of things, the start of the working. When we come to the altar that is the Nativity of things. Be patient. The world is beginning again, but the old world has just passed. We can still smell the brimstone of it. We still remember the deaths. These days of Yule, also called Christmastide, are a constant reminder to renew, to leave the old world behind.

 

It seems that many years we skip over Saint John’s Day, but Holy Innocents is always there, and there at that right time when the cycle of first joy from Christmas is turning into something old, something that makes us sad, something where the holiday’s gloss is gone and promise unfulfilled. Holy Innocents is absolutely about a promise unfulfilled. It is the after story of Epiphany, so to speak. The Wise Men, not being particularly wise, are fooled by Herod and go to Bethlehem to worship Jesus. In the story they are warned in a dream not to go Herod, but they don’t seem to tell Mary and Joseph about this dream. They also seem to have no intuition. Next, Joseph is told by an angel, assumedly Gabriel, to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt. Is this on the same night? Who knows? Was Egypt essential? Was Herod this obsessed with a baby? According to this story he was. He wakes Mary and Jesus, they feel to Egypt with all symbolism. Herod, enraged, kills all the children in Bethlehem two years and under, though it seems like a few three years old would have been bopped off too.

    

Are we to take this story as fact? It’s only in one Gospel. We celebrate Epiphany, though, and it is, after all, in a Gospel, so we sort of have to honor it. Regardless of the factuality of this particular story, the story is true. Innocent, children and otherwise have been killed. The little town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie, is cursed by the coming of Jesus and experiences a blood bath. The Catholic Church with its love of martyrs, uses its antiphons to spin meaning from the tale, but the truth is this is a story about the failing of God because the people of God fail. The wise men are not wise. Joseph does not think of other children or other women who may be in danger. The Blessed Mother and Jesus whom we turn to for protection and—it seems who often fail in this department—are merely a girl and a baby fleeing the scene of danger.

 

Holy Innocents does demand the question that a few days of Christmas would? What Child is this and of what use is he? By now it’s fair to ask this question. Or, put another way, who is the God of this Feast? Who do we cry out to. The Child cannot help us, not yet, the Child of our longing must be fostered. The mother is just a girl, even she is in no position to help. Who do we cry to? The angelic guardians, older mothers? Wiser fathers? Saint Brigid the burning fostermother of the Lord? Even Hermes/Adonay the shepherd. What of the ox and the ass? Who are these? While we adore the Child in the manger, we look about the manger for those Lord who assist, who are hidden behind words and statues and songs.

 

And so we go deeper.

Sunday in the Octave of Christmas: the Mystery of the Beginning of the New World

 

The day after Christmas is euphemistically called Boxing Day, and I think this is because it was the day when people put used food and old gifts into boxes and distributed them to the poor so they could have a Christmas too. I love Boxing Day. I love that a day is dedicated to being the Day After Christmas. The day of sleeping in and eating leftovers and doing very little. The day of listening to the radio and watching movies and recovery.

But Boxing Day is the Feast of Saint Stephen, protomartyr. Poor Stephen has the same fate as everyone born on the day after or the day before Christmas. We sleep through his day. There is a lesson in his day, the lesson of the joy of the Christ Child’s birth,  which had made the whole world new being linked with the same old killing of things good and pure, the lesson that Stephen has the hope of heaven in his death and his death is not in vain and yet, being so close to Christmas the ultimate lesson of Christmas swallows up Saint Stephen’s Day. The joy of the new birth swallows up the sad story of death and makes a sort of mockery of it.

So instead we have Boxing Day. Christmas was bright and full of light, blue sky over white, sparkling snow. Christmas Eve the sky was pale purple with snowclouds. Saint Stephen’s Day is grey and tells us to go back to sleep. There is good news and a new world, but we cannot comprehend it right now, so please have another sandwich, a nap and a beer. This is the day that Mary and Joseph and shepherds who had heard a strange tale were also left unable to comprehend and could only do what we humans do to live, eat, breathe, rest, be kind to one another, muddle through, put vast decisions and meditations off for another day until we have the resources to understand a little more.

In these first few days I am trying to understand this hope in my heart, trying to realign my prayer and my working the light of hymns which are homely as well as majestic, hopeful as well as deeply sorrowful, tracing my way through the holy darkness of the midnight mass where light has sprung. I live in hope, unable to articulate the dimensions of this hope, and away from the liturgical celebrations, eating and feasting and sleeping and enjoying the days, I cannot explain the hope either. So I turn to silence and writing.

John F Baldovin points out that in an octave feast like Christmas or Easter the point is we are all in one great day. Christ was not born Friday at midnight a day ago or almost two days ago as it nearly eleven pm on Saturday. Christ is born today. He is born as this evening we repeat the midnight service at five while light goes to darkness. We are still coming to understand this extended day. We will never stop coming to understand it, not really. And this day is still going on and will still be going on Monday morning when the normalcy of life takes over, when the aggravations come. This day does not stop being this day even when the full force of the sorrows of the world enter and, of course, this makes sense, for this is the day not only that the Lord made, but that he chose to come into. That is the blessedness of Christmas, that the world is blessed because God proclaims it blessed. He does not consent to come into it, but longs to come into it. This life we are so indifferent to or that we despise, he is drawn to. This life, this world is hallowed not only because he enters it, but because he declares it hallowed by desiring to enter it.

For the last month we have celebrated waiting for the Lord. Now we celebrate that the Lord has come. Up until Yule we celebrated the closing of the year and the ending of the world. Now we celebrate the birth of a new one. And yet, the world before and the world after looks something the same. Feels the same. Is the same. How they are not the same, how we can look into the world we’ve always seen and know a new one is the mystery of Advent and Christmas.

Yule Thoughts

 The Yule King: Michael Kerbow

On the longest night of the year I listened to a horrible lessons and carols. I surrounded my self in other stories I hadn’t heard and gired myself with light and food. They say we are going into the time of darkness, though for months now every night was dimmer and every night was darker, you have to pull the weights off your back. They say winter is on its way and hardship may come but they don’t know the hardship has happened. You make merry to chase this winter away, but you sing to remember you’re still here. Remember every day the white snow falls is every day the day grows longer, remember the you that you were and look at the you you are, remember how impossible resurrection seemed and then look at the scars all on your hands and see printed in your palms something like rejoicing.

 

In Hinduism and Sikhism as well as some forms of Buddhism and Jainism, the festival of Devali sweeps across India. Southeast Asia does what we have forgotten we did as well in the west. The festival exists before the religion explains it. The coming of the new religions alters it, often adds to it so that the festival is not exactly the same for all celebrating it. But it is the same festival and we are all celebrating it together and in this world we live in, the one time of year which has inherited this is the season called Christmastide or Yuletide. I saw a group of heathens who had done a Yuletide gathering which looked very fun but nothing like Christmas, and this is great for them, but for my Yule and Christmas are basically one. There is honoring of the Yule Ones, or the Jolnir, but this is also the first night the Christ as the Child on the Back of the Stag is brought out, the beginning of moving from waiting to contemplation, the first midnight service, the first sunrise one.

            Last night, in the mellow midnight darkness, as the frankincense burned we sang: What Child is this? And that is the question I am confronted with. What child is this? What is this celebration? What is happening to me? To us?” The first answer and the quickest one is that he is Himself, a mystery to be lived in and not a thing to be solved. The Child is whom he shows himself to be and we must sit before him awhile. He is difficult to contemplate so we rush past him.

            The Child is useless to us. The child shows up outside of the Bible, and inherited icon. The theological explanation moves us from contemplating the Child to his growing up and being crucified and rising, being a grown up and therefore useful God. We want to use the Child. I want to use the Child. How long can you adore a child? Frankly, I’ve never had much use for babies. What do I do with one even if it’s God? What does it mean? What does it mean when Christ comes into this world? What in the world are the lessons a baby, no matter how divine, can teach?

            Krishna at least walks and talks and is blue and does precocious things. The little lord Jesus? We must take his lordship on faith. He is no fake baby. The Child is a Child. We need not answer the questions just yet, but it is worth taking a stab at them eventually. We need not come to the right conclusion or conclusions. To be open is enough.

 

On Yule the world ends and the world begins again. The new world we wake up in has all the residue of the new one. If we remember from the old stories this is how it always was. God created the world from chaos, Noah and his children stepped out onto a world ravaged by the Flood. This year there is the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, a shining star, something worth taking as a sign. We are solemn in prayer, merry in celebration. Both things are necessary. The new world ought to be celebrated. Without celebration there is no energy to create the new world. The newness is the Child. The world is new because of the Child. The Child is the very blessed Presence that seemed beyond us, quietly in our midst. Later, in the Gospel of Mark when Jesus heals a paralytic, we will thank God for putting such power in the hands of men, but right now we are amazed that God has put himself in the midst of us. The earth, called the dirt, called lowly, has met with the dew and they have both brought for the Just One. That the Child is Son of God and Son of Man, is a great mystery, a joy. We do wrong when skip past that moment to the Crucifixion and the Passion, We do wrong when we skip them. We miss the meaning of both when we ignore one and do not live with the other.

            The idea that Jesus died for us, the strange idea of substitution sacrifice which is the invention of later Christians more than of the Gospel, is a shame to God and to us. The idea that Jesus was walking to his death, knowing that was the result of doing what he must do, taking the stand he was required to, is wonderful, meaningful, bears truth and seems to be the point of the Gospel of Mark. But even this is eclipsed by Christmas, We are not saved by his hanging nor are we saved by our doing and following. We are saved, heaven and earth are made one, the angels are seen to sing, by this being born in the flesh. The other things are what we do as a result of this miracle, not something meant to bring it on.