Posted on 12/23/2001 6:16:25 PM PST by damnlimey
| MONDAY DECEMBER 24 2001 |
| Bread of life |
| 'Let us now go even unto Bethlehem' (Luke ii, 15) |
| When in 1840 Frederick Oakeley translated the Latin hymn, Adeste fideles, for the congregation of Margaret Chapel in London's West End, he gave us one of our best loved Christmas hymns, O come all ye faithful! At its centre is the theme of Incarnation, the wonder of the God who gives Himself freely into human life, who stoops in humility to be born as one of us. It is that astonishing reality that causes the armies of angels to fill the heavens with their praises, and draws shepherds from guarding their flocks in the cold fields to find a young mother and her newborn child laid in the pricking straw of a feeding trough for animals. The ikons of the East and the music, the art, the cribs and the mystery plays of the West are prayers of the Christian imagination which draw us to worship. Rise to adore the mystery of love, which hosts of angels chanted from above. The insistent invitation to the shepherds is an invitation to us also, O come ye, O come ye, to Bethlehem. Bethlehem was the City of David. When the Gospels of Matthew and Luke locate the birth of Jesus there it was to affirm His identity as the promised Messiah, the one who fulfilled the longing hope for deliverance of the people of God. When the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity in the 4th century he built a church at Bethlehem on the site of the present Church of the Nativity to mark the place where Jesus was born, and still in that church pilgrims descend to the cave at its heart where a silver star bears the words “Jesus Christ was born here.” Christianity is a faith rooted in a particular time and a particular place. At its heart are not speculative ideas about ultimate reality, but God revealing and showing Himself to us in the fragility of a human life. God addresses us in the only language which makes sense to us, the language of a vulnerable, self-giving love. The Creator chooses to be one with His creation, to be carried in the womb and brought to birth. The imaginative wonder which understandably and necessarily surrounds the Christmas story springs entirely from the discerning of that love’s meaning in the life, the teaching, the healing ministry, and above all the death and the triumph over death of that child born at Bethlehem. In Matthew’s account of Jesus’s birth, in which the homage of the eastern astrologers, later transmuted into kings, is a central theme, that visit of the Magi is followed by the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Holy Family fleeing as refugees to Egypt. Jesus relives exodus and exile and so fulfils the history of the people of God. This year, as we celebrate Christmas, we cannot do so without being aware of the darkness and evil of which human beings are capable, and of which what happened on September 11 is a potent symbol. The conflict of light and darkness, good and evil, is all too evident. So too is the present reality of Bethlehem in a land at the heart of bitter conflict. God chose to come to us not in tinsel but in the travail of human suffering, and lived out the way of love to the point of being nailed to a cross. That love, that life, so lived is a life that is offered to us, the love of Jesus Christ, which is triumphant over death and which alone has the power to transform human hatred and human sin into the love which feeds the hungry, shelters the refugee, and confronts violence and power with humility and service. Bethlehem means “the house of bread” and so it is that generations of Christians have found their Bethlehem in the broken bread of the Eucharist and have known the heart and the strength of Christmas in the worship of the Midnight Mass at which the child in the manger is the bread of life given into our hands to feed us and into our lives to transform us. O come let us adore Him, Christ the Lord! |
See you very soon!
Bless you, Dukie, for the bump to such a lovely post; and to damnlimey for posting it.
God addresses us in the only language which makes sense to us, the language of a vulnerable, self-giving love.
Now please forgive me, Dukie: I do find myself wondering sometimes about whether the "massman" as defined by the present popular culture any longer can interpret a "language of vulnerable, self-giving love" in any kind of way that refers to his own true good or to the good of the society of which he is a part.
If anything, these days people are trained at great taxpayer expense to the idea that anyone who thinks that "vulnerable, self-giving" anything is a positive value for society at large must be a lunatic, a moron, a mental deficient; a wife beater, child abuser, tax evader, member of the VRWC, etc., etc.
Oh we do live in interesting times.
If these seem somber thoughts for a Christmas time, well, 2001 has been a very difficult year in many ways from MPOV.
Believe it or not, I am of good Christmas cheer right about now. It's been a wonderful day spent with my two families....
At the end of the day, it seems to me that God, country, and family (in whatever order) are the basic constituents of any just society. All historical "systems" so far -- and I do mean ALL -- that have tried to establish a political order on some other framework have been abysmal failures. Objectively speaking, that is.
And I do admit I know that man is not capable of self-perfection/redemption. Eric Voegelin has entirely persuaded me to his view that all the modern and post-modern political systems of human self-salvation (e.g., Marxism, Bolshevism, Fascism, Mass Democracy, Social Welfarism, "Rainbow Coalition" efforts at "constituency building," the "Save-the-Whales" movement [I love whales], and -- here's the really good joke -- the extirpation of all "sex [or 'gender']-specific categories" after about 30 years of more or less officially licensed "sexual freedom," etc.) are predicated on a man-centered, rather than a God-centered, universe, trying to pass for "law."
My hope and prayer for the New Year is that God will give a whole lot of American people the grace and the light to see through our nation's current, urgent problems; that America might prevail against bodies "foreign and domestic" who do not wish the American people well. And that the people will recover the Constitution -- by expending some effort trying to understand it.
And it ain't rocket science, kids: Though the lawyers' guilds will always try to tell you otherwise, the Constitution belongs to the People; it is the child of the People from the very inception of the American constitutional republic. (My citation here is the Preamble.)
Or maybe I should say it is the child of a people -- a particular people formed and informed by a particular culture. To say the people entails a recognition of public consensus; which is arguably what America now seems to lack.
The Constitution is the product of an astonishly great culture, by any measure. Yet the basic premises and appreciation of that culture are not presented to young minds at all in the contemporary public school. Whether this results from accident or design who can know for sure?
Yet to the extent that people do not understand the foundational principles of the Constitution in terms of its culture and history, the Constitution becomes "easy pickings" for talented wizards like Bill Clinton. 'Nuff said.
The people who framed the Constitution of the United States of America, and founded a nation thereby, were people who were steeped in classical/Christian culture. They were, on all evidence I've seen, the most eminent, even aristocratic, exponents of that culture -- a culture (as the late Russell Kirk theorized) rooted in four historical cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. [Kirk's excellent book, The Roots of American Order, is destined to become a classic of American historiography IMHO. Now available at amazon.com.]
God bless you all at Yuletide, and throughout the coming New Year. -- bb.
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