Unto us a Child is Born

The Nativity of Our Lord
Christmas Day

Shepherds, Nativity at Our Saviour, Ocala

Beloved in Christ, in this Christmastide, let it be our care and delight to hear again the message of the Angels, and in heart and mind go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which has come to pass, and the Babe lying in the manger.

From "A Bidding Prayer" Festival of Lessons and Carols

Ia Orana Maria - Paul Gauguin

This little Babe, so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan's fold;
All heel doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak, unarméd wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field
His named breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh his warrior's steed.

My soul, with Christ join thou in fight;
Stick to the tents that he hath pight;
Within his crib is surest ward,
This little Babe will be thy guard;
If though wilt foil thy foe with joy,
Then flit not from this Heavenly Boy.

From "New Heaven, New War" by Robert Southwell

The Holy Family, Nativity at Our Saviour

Of the three Wise Men
Who came to thy King
One was a brown man,
So they sing.

Of the three Wise Men
Who followed the Star,
One was a brown king
From afar.

They brought fine gifts
Of spices and gold
In jeweled boxes
Of beauty untold.

Unto his humble
Manger they came,
And bowed their heads
In Jesus' name,

Three Wise Men
One dark like me –
Part of his
Nativity.

"Carol of the Brown King" by Langston Hughes

The Magi, Nativity at Our Saviour, Ocala

May Christ, who by his incarnation gather into one things earthly and things heavenly, fill you with joy and peace.


May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne





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Christmas Reading

Annunciation, Fra Angelico



Friday, the Third Week in Advent

Well, if I try very hard, I may get this blog done. Earlier this week I got both a flu shot and a pneumonia shot. The nurse warned me there might be a reaction from the later. There was. My arm has hurt like crazy for two days and now every joint in my body aches. I feel like I've run a marathon, and then been run over by a cement mixer. Ugghh!

Back again. I didn't get the blog written. I got as far as "ugghh," lay down and woke up eleven hours later.


So here's a review of a few Christmas books. The first two are daily devotions for Advent through epiphany. God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas contains wonderful pictures of great art along with readings by Scott Cairns, Emilie Griffin, Richard John Neuhaus, and Greg Pennoyer with material my Kathleen Noris and Eugene Peterson. Its from one of my favorite publishers, Paraclete Press, the publishing arm of the Community of Jesus, an ecumenical monastic community in the Benedictine Tradition.




In the evening I'm reading (well, not last evening which was utterly lost to consciousness, but on other evenings) Watch For The Light: Readings For Advent And Christmas with readings from numerous authors including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Donne, Meister Eckhart, and T.S. Eliot. This was originally published by the Plough Publishing House, the publishing arm of the Bruderhoff, a Christian community with some ties to the Mennonite Tradition. Some years ago they suspended their publishing enterprise, but some of their books. Including this one, were picked up by by Orbis. Both books are worth reading to put Christmas in a proper perspective.



In addition to these devotionals, I like to read a work of Christmas fiction. For many years my choice was Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. It's a classic. In my perverse view, however, Ebenezer Scrooge was a much more interesting character before the three ghosts took the vinegar out of him. I also love to see the film version with Alastair Sim. He captured Scrooge in an way no one else has. I avoid the musical version, Scrooge. Somethings just don't lend themselves to music, although I occasionally enjoy the cartoon version, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, with it's song about razelberry dressing.





About 20 years ago I saw a British TV program of The Box of Delights based on the book by John Masefield. The acting was bad and the special effects even worse, but it's a great story. The English in particular seem to be able to interweave fantasy into stories without you seeing it coming. It's a great story of a boy, Kay, and his battle against the evil Abner (posing as Father Boddledale of the Ecclesiastical Training Centre) who is trying to steal the wondrous Box of Delights and while he's at it prevent the 1,000th Christmas Eve service at Tatchester Cathedral. Unfortunantely, the book ends with the corny "it was only a dream" device. Boo.


The book I'm reading again was given to me by my cousin Darlene a few years ago. It's The Christmas Mystery by Norwegian author Jostein Gaardner and illustrated by Rosemary Wells. It's about a magical Advent Calendar and a journey back through history to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.








Murder for Christmas is a collection short stories of "seasonal malice" by authors including Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, and Ellery Queen. And as an added bonus, macabre illustrations by Gahan Wilson.






One last book, The Autobiography of Santa Claus, by Jeff Guinn by My sister Karen gave this to me as a talking book of this performed splendidly by John H. Mayer who is able to do an amazing range of characters with variations in his voice. The premise of this fictional account is that the present-day Santa Claus is not only real, but the same as the real St. Nicholas, fourth century bishop of Myra, who has been alive for the past 1600 years. In that time he has accumulated a bunch of helpers including Leonardo Da Vinci, King Arthur, Ben Franklin, and Atila the Hun. It's a clever story of he history of Christmas as well as the history of the world.

Have a happy Christmas. Enjoy family and friends, fun and feasting, but remember the Blessed Savior Jesus who was born for our sake.

A blessed Advent to you.

May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne




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Chicago Vacation Pictures

St. John the Baptist, Donatello


Friday, the Second Week in Advent

Hi kids! My vacation pictures just came back from being developed, so I'll post a few. In the olden days they had to bore people with slide shows. Now we can do it with blogs online.






"My kind of town, Chicago is." (Thanks, Frank.) This is the Chicago Skyline taken from the north at Fullerton Avenue Beach. Usually they take skyline shots looking west from Lake Michigan, but then you have to be out in a boat, and that costs money. The rest of the pictures are from the Lincoln Park Zoo or Lincoln Park Conservatory

It was fall and the trees had begun changing their colors.

Here's my special artistic-type photo of autumn leaves (cue piano player).

The Conservatory Palm House. There's nothing better than
walking in here on a cold day and imagining you're in the tropics.

This was the special show for the fall-a garden around a pagoda. Very artsy.

Giraffe or GY-raff as my father would have pronounced it.

The gorilla of my dreams (or nightmares).

Boy, this is the best picture of a tiger I've ever taken.
Of course it's been enhanced and cropped with Photoshop,
but I have to do something since I use a old camera
that takes pictures on film.

A blessed Advent to you. May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.


Wayne






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MORE BOOKS -- POSTMODERNISM

A

The Cestello Annunciation, Sandro Botticelli

Friday, the First Week in Advent

More books, but this is going to be a lot heavier than the last. I’ll start by observing that there have been a lot of changes in my also 60 years in this world. Technology, of course, has been a major change, but there is a whole change in world-view or spirit or ethos or something. I’ve seen it in terms of religion. I had always thought the church would go on pretty much as I knew it as a kid, but that just isn’t true. The church I knew is pretty much a relic of pre-historic times and I am one of the dinosaurs becoming extinct with it. For a while I thought maybe the mega-church models with their contemporary worship would be the wave of the future, but now I’m convinced that they are a passing fancy.

A year ago I started reading about the emerging church movement. I think they are on to something even though I’d have a lot of trouble fitting in to it. This year I’ve been trying to get at the roots of the problem so I can understand what might need to happen even if I can’t provide the right leadership. At the least, I don’t want to be in the way. The heart of the issue seems to be Post-modernism.” This is a weaselly sort of term that embraces a variety of things that are only loosely tied together. As the word implies, post-modernism is what follows modernism. I think the meaning is clearest in architecture which is where I first encountered the term.

Modern architecture is all those steel, concrete, and glass structures that fill our cities. The Sears Tower is modern, for example. The World Trade Center was modern. This is machine architecture, stripped down to essentials, no ornament. Purely rational architecture: “Form follows function,” but the stuff is so uniform, you can’t tell what any given building might be used for. Each floor looks the same. There is no top, just an end to the building. Sometimes you can’t even figure out where the door is. The post-modern architects wanted to humanize architecture again, put back form, color, ornament, human scale and so forth. And sometimes just have fun. Philip Johnson, one of the leading modernists suddenly to a post modern turn in his design for the AT&T building with a top like a broken pediment so it looks like a huge Chippendale cabinet.

I follow the architectural development, but post-modernism goes far beyond that. So I picked up a neat little book, Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian. by Heath White. White begins by tracing two worldviews that preceded postmodernism. The pre-modern world was hierarchical, based on authority. The modern worldview challenged authority and was based on reason. Postmodernism rejects reason as a solution to things. Of course, it’s all a lot more complicated than that, but I’m only putting out a few ideas from some books.

Here’s where I find myself in two camps. I don’t think pure rationalism has worked. Marxism was supposedly scientific, rational approach, but it was a disaster. Freud thought religion would disappear because reason would replace it. It didn’t happen. I think the fault of modernism was the assumption that people would actually become more rational. So far, they haven’t. But I am not convinced that we can abandon logic just because people don’t use it. I am not ready to abandon a pursuit of The Truth.

Moving along, one Christian who has tried to cope with the postmodern worldview is Brian McLaren who sets his agenda with his book A Generous Orthodoxy. Maybe the subtitle gives the whole substance of the book: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/Protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, Biblical, charismatic/contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian. Well, there you have it. Like many of the emergents of which he is a spiritual father, McLaren came out of a conservative evangelical tradition who rejected the narrow aspect of evangelicalism while still embracing it’s fervor and commitment. Emergents draw on a whole range of Christian sources from traditional Catholicism to radical Anabaptist thought.

I think the is a lot to be said for McLaren’s point of view. I am aware that many evangelicals condemn him outright for deviating from rigid doctrinal positions. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox will find him too firmly rooted in the Protestant traditions. Mainline Protestants would be puzzled what to think of him because his communities don’t look like traditional churches. I appreciate McLaren’s approach to renewing Christianity, yet I wonder long term where it will lead. I know only too well that the history of Christianity has had a number of reform movements that only end up producing another denomination.

This emerging church response leads in a very unexpected direction–the new monasticism, which happens also to be a the title of a book by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and the subject of one of the sections I attended at the annual meeting. The new monasticism is movement where people live together in community, although almost always it is a mixed community of men and women, married couples with children and celibates. In the last 50 years there has been a rebirth of traditional monastic communities among Protestants especially Anglicans and Lutherans, but now also Methodists. The most notable one is probably Taizé. (One of my unread books is A Community Called Taizé by Jason Brian Santos published by Intervarsity Press, a surprising source until you understand the new monasticism. More recent have been the new intentional communities that borrow elements of traditional monasticism as well as an emphasis on caring for the poor, but are rooted in the evangelical tradition. Many of the members of these communities come from very conservative backgrounds, but like McLaren have moved away from that tradition. Their inspiration lies in the various Mennonite, Amish, and Hutterite communities, the ideas of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together, in addition to Benedictine and Franciscan practice.

The most intriguing group that I have read about is the Community of the Transfiguration located in Australia. In the book of the same name Paul R. Dekar lays out the story and ethos of what can only be described of as a Baptist Monastery. I look at the pictures of the group in a setting that looks like an Anglican Benedictine establishment, but the theology and church affiliation is Baptist. It's hard for me to imagine such a thing in the United States, at least in the Southern Baptist tradition.

I have a couple more books on the same subject which I have not yet read:Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism by John Stock, Tim Otto, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove; and School(s) for Conversion: 12 Marks of a New Monasticism edited by The Rutba House (one of the new monastic communities in Durham, NC).


One of the papers I heard and one of the books mentioned Alasdair MacIntyre's book After Virture. The superficial link to the new monasticism lies in the final sentence of the book: "We are waiting not for Godot but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict. But the true link is much more substantial, for MacIntyre set out 25 years ago to propose an ethic for the postmodern world. He insists that the modernists attempts to develop rational ethics. Neither utilitarian ethics (where morality is judged on the basis of the result of an act) nor deontological ethics (where morality is judged on the basis of performing one's duty) are adequate. Instead he believes we must return to a pre-modernist ethic based in virtue, the approach taken by Aristotle. I admit this is a difficult book for me to plow through (and I have a B.A in Philosophy). I'm rather out of practice studying complex philosophical theories and have had to consult other works to make sure I have some grasp of the background. The subject is of great interest to me. As I have written in other blogs, I believe we have lost a great deal by not teaching virtue to our young people. I want to see, however, how complete an ethical theory MacIntyre is able to develop. The great short coming of virtue-based ethics is that it doesn't tell you how to resolve conflicts between virtues. It's much the same problem as the conflict of duties in a deontological system or the difficulty in arriving at a satisfactory calculus for measuring non-moral good in a utilitarian system. My personal inclination is some system that combines duty and virtue. I am much more skeptical of utilitarianism because of its "end justifies the means" approach.

What's next? I have five books on my "to read pretty soon" list. Here are the titles. Silence, Solitude, Simplicity: A Hermit's Love Affair with a Noisy, Crowded, and Complicated World; Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life; Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith; Spiritual Formation as if the Church Mattered: Growing in Christ through Community; and The Mystical Way of Evangelism: A Contemplative Vision for Christian Outreach.

A blessed Advent to you. May the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne







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