Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
Prologue
Christmastide are the days on both sides of Christmas Day, which is also called The Mass of the Christ, The Feast of Christmas, and The Feast of the Nativity. Christmastide consummates the Season of Advent and anticipates the Feast of the Transfiguration.
In the Latin Church, the tenor and accouterments of Christmastide as modernly known are treasures bequeathed to the Church by Franciscans and by Martin Luther.
Into this stream of devotion in English-speaking churches, commercial and legal interests and, later, Victorian sensibilities injected moralistic sentimentalism, inspired by the commercial calculations of merchants, and creations in fiction, from the pen of the English novelist Charles Dickens.
As commercial and legal interests became increasingly knowledgeable and skilled in propaganda/conditioning techniques, new mythologies, designed to enhance commercial outcomes and juridical perquisites, were inserted into the stream of sacred sweetness that is Christmastide.
Now ordinary citizens of the orbit of the Latin Church, even members thereof, consider market conditioning by Victorian fiction and moralistic sentimentalism to comprise the content of Christmas.
Remarkably, however, even in the commercial propaganda the name Christmas has been retained despite strenuous efforts to replace it. And when a substitute for it was sought, the Christmas tone of happiness was maintained along with the recognition of a holy day (e.g., the greeting “Happy Holidays”). This is a signal triumph of a central Feast of the Christian Liturgical Year, to survive skillfully meretricious deformations in the direction of un-Christian and anti-religious scrupulosity and self-promotion.
Apparently Christmastide expresses too deeply to be denied essential yearning in the human spirit. The wish to go home, perhaps? Perhaps also the wish to see creation restored to its essential goodness.
The academic propaganda regarding Christmastide (and by implication the Christian Liturgical Year) has been to a more final purpose. Rather than merely deforming Christmastide, academic propaganda aims to break it and throw it out into the cold of winter to die miserably and utterly. The hatred of modern academe for Christianity, especially from the liberal arts faculties, could not be nastier or more vigorous. It exudes the odor of insanity.
However, no one outside alienated academe, and especially the liberal arts faculties and their minions of authoritarian anarchists, is going for their agenda.
It will take a complete Mohammedan domination by deconstruction of academe for that to happen, something the liberal arts faculties and some others at this time welcome because it would accomplish, they believe, the goal they cannot, namely, humiliation and destruction of the Latin Church.
Even that action, however, were it possible, and it is not, would be stopped short of completion. Neither academe nor merchants nor the ruling fools who own them can own the power of God.
And that, of course, is the message of Christmas.
Historical Notes
Christmastide in the United States has an improving history. There are two strands of it, reflecting the dominant theologies brought to the regions settled by the early immigrants.
Initially there were two regions, northern and southern. The northern region was settled primarily by Calvinists with strong commercial and legal abilities and interests. In New England Unitarianism, a Calvinist heresy, early gained credence, especially at Harvard Divinity School, and promoted legal, psychological and public-relations skills. In New York there settled a strong Sephardic presence skilled in finance and medicine. The north was a bustling, perfervid region.
The southern region was settled primarily by Catholics (Anglicans and Romans) and secularists with strong cultural and agricultural abilities and interests.
Both regions, but especially the southern region and especially Episcopalians and Sephardic Jews, supported the development of Freemasonry, which had no special interest in Christmas because it traced is descent from Egypt rather than Kashmir (Judaism), Tibet and India (Christianity) or Christian Prophets of the Middle Eastern deserts (Islam).
Westward expansion established a third region of the country and this was accomplished primarily by Methodists, Lutherans, and Freemasons, all of whom mix Calvinism, Catholicism, and secularism to deploy proactively rigorous programs of individual responsibility and social development. Methodism, Lutheranism, and Freemasonry were ideal theologies for the requirements of exploration and economics beyond the frontiers of comfort and security but with a stable and productive system behind those frontiers.
Christmas did not mean much among Calvinist, Unitarian, Jewish, and Freemason settlers. All four of those traditions are vigilant about lapses into idolatry and Christmas as observed in the catholic churches is rife with opportunity for idolatry and its consequences, all of them untoward. Calvinists insisted every day is equally holy and should be dedicated to God and the observance of moral living just as much as any other. Their point here is impossible to fault.
But when Jews and Calvinists saw commercial potentials in catholic Christmas celebrations, they summoned their skills for exploitation and the modern American Christmas, full of myth, sentimentalism and mooching, stood up.
Episcopalians, Lutherans and Roman Catholics brought Christmas to the Americas and have tried with uneven success to maintain its essential power and meaning in the life of the polis. It has not been easy, nor will be.
What Is It About Christmas?
Christmas is about the central paradox of existence and life.
Christmas is the season of remembrance of the intense tragedies of life and the in-breaking of divine Light in Grace upon the expanse of personal and historical struggle and desolation. It is not a happy Feast. It is a somber Feast featuring a paradoxically happy phenomenon. The power and meaning of that phenomenon is lost when awareness of the tragic conditions in which it occurs is.
Christmas and Good Friday belong together. They have the same tone and go to the same meaning. They are the most important moments of the Christian Liturgical Year.
The Church classically and not wrongly takes Easter as the central Feast and most important moment of the Christian Liturgical Year. I am not arguing with that estimate. I do regard it as incomplete and a little too obvious. Certainly it is not the focus of Christian monastic piety, which is the engine of the Church, or changing the metaphor, its live battery. The Birth and Crucifixion of the Christ is the focus of monastic piety, both Latin and Greek.
The Cross is the focus of the Church and Her central symbol expressing Her identity and mission. Easter, which is the experience of the Living Christ despite his death, the triumph of the meaning and power of being despite the machinations and attacks of non-being, is given in the symbol of the Crucifixion. Monastic piety focuses correctly in Christmas and Crucifixion. Sentimental exuberance focuses trivially in Easter.
The acceptance of death gives the triumph of life. Or, expressed from the point of view of Christmastide, the appearance of Divine Frailty in the jaws of human tyranny gives the triumph of character and the defeat of cowardice. This is God’s way of conducting business. It is the central paradox of life and history. When ordinary experience is consulted with an open, skilled and penetrating mind, it is apparent that this paradox aligns the actual phenomenology of events and expresses the profoundest aspirations, the yearning of every creature and all creation.
Delusion easily takes over the happy phenomenon inside Christmas, a fact Calvinists rightly noted and so they avoided making a fuss about Christmas. The great and tragic drama of history, which is the setting of the Christmas phenomenon, is necessary sitz im leben of its reality. Without Caesar, Herod, Priests, and Pharisees (modernly, Lawyers and Professors consumed by political protagonism), there is no Christmas, no need for it. But there are Caesars, Herods, Priests, and Fanatical Lawyers and Professors, there always are. They are as near as one’s next door neighbor and as far as one’s utter unequal.
Christmas does not make sense in a beautiful or polite world, in “a wonderful life.” It does not make sense if man is the master of his fate and always has happy endings. It is meaningless if man can or should do anything he wants, fulfill any dream he cares to engender, resist and defeat any negativity he meets on his journeys, fulfill all commitments he makes and are imposed on him and impose whatever obligations he is able to affix. Christmas is without reason if man is free to do as he pleases, make what he wants, be what he sets his heart on becoming, expect what he intends to happen.
Christmastide is the Christian Liturgical Year’s first condemnation of man’s pretense of self-fulfillment, self-salvation and self-realization. It is a lethal arrow aimed at self per se. Christmas is a profoundly negative message relative to man’s ego. It is a profoundly positive message relative to man’s essential nature, the one which is all but dead, buried and silenced beneath the dreams, demands, pretenses, struggles, cares and woes of personal and corporate existence.
Calvinism is correct in asserting that the world and history are sinks of disease, desperation, demonry, despair, and others ungodly processes from which and in which God meets man in the Light of Grace to call him home to reunion in Him, so he may endure and triumph over the pains and challenges of life and existence.
Content Of The Christmas Story
Christmastide reflects the Christmas Story, which is given directly in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and indirectly in the Gospels of Mark and John and the Letters of Paul.
True to its evangelical nature, the Christmas story highlights the Light of Grace in a personal birth at a moment of historical struggle which is now also, by God’s prevenient Grace, a moment of historical fulfillment.
The story itself, however, is not nor is it intended to be history in the sense of chronos, clock time. It is history in the sense of kairos, a consummation of power and meaning driving by divine guidance throughout the processes of history to an actual phenomenon, a denouement, a telos, in this case a human birth which is also a divine self-manifestation.
There is the paradox. The mixing of the Unconditioned with the conditioned, of Infinity with finitude. This makes no sense whatsoever to ordinary thinking and expectation. It is not meant to. It is, as St. Paul remarked about its twin, the Crucifixion, scandalous, an outrage against convention, law and morality.
The paradox that is Christmas and Good Friday is the core message of Christian preaching and practice. It is the power of God on earth. That is why Christmas is considered a happy Feast, though a somber one in consideration of its context.
That context comprises an array of specific negativities:
- domination by a foreign power and an illegitimate priesthood
- political repression, corruption and fleecing taxation
- ecclesial repression, exploitation and fleecing taxation
- parental poverty
- ostracism for bastardy
- denial of ordinary hospitality
- birth in the circumstances of a common animal
- prey of assassins
- a massacre of innocent children
- secret comings and goings
- flight with parents from personal persecution
- denial and evacuation of birthright
With credentials like these, who would expect anything noteworthy to be there? No one of common sense, apparently. Yet these credentials are the context of the subject of the Feast of Christmas. Not an auspicious beginning or proclamation for a self-revelation of God, much less a fresh prodigy of soteriological cosmogenesis.
No wonder Mohammedans, whose worldly affections are indomitable, wrote the fiction that Christianity deformed the one true religion of God, the religion which preexisted Christianity and all other comic religions, namely, Mohammedanism. Christianity has nothing to offer in the place of 72 private, perpetual virgins, male or female.
Mohammedans get a better deal than Christians do. No one can argue with that. And it matters not what sort of life they lead so long as they pay the mosque tax and obey the “mosque police.” The brothels of Europe, Asia and the Americas, boys and girls, bear fulsome wet and high-born testimony to that reality.
In all the filth and cynicism of worldly attachment, the Light of Grace, a self-revelation of God, a New Being, a “rescue ship,” appears as by kairotic fortune as an unwanted infant, an apparent bastard, a helpless nobody in a violently contested country administered by ambitious men and jealous women. Nothing is going for it and everything is going against it.
This is Christmas. Christmas cheer is an in-spite of “intrusion” of Divine Will in the sordid conditions of history. Christmas is a symbol of God’s directing creativity on behalf of his friends and playmates.
Summary
The context of the Nativity Story as given by the Gospels and Prophets makes hope significant. Count that context’s tangible negativities. They are numerous and vivid, in principle countless and blinding.
To include hunting and slaughter of children — indeed proto-genocide. Hardly giving them stockings and presents.
Estranged from that context hope is sentimentality, anti-spiritual, driving away from God.
The context is emphasized to highlight the improbable importance and important improbability of the Nativity. It should be still.
Hard on the context, soft on the hope.
Hope is a little, frail, helpless, tenuous, even uncertain experience of yearning in the context of life and history.
Rather like a physician facing the taxonomy of disease, a theologian the taxonomy of estrangement, a virus the primordial furnace.
Hope has not a hope in hell. Is not that the Gospel?
Christmas belongs with Good Friday in recognizing the negativities of life and history that make the Transfiguration and Easter meaningful.
Epilogue
Christmas is a feast of defeat with a foundation of victory but not a development of it.
It contradicts and condemns Victorian sensibility and Dickensian sentimentality. It offends by running against bourgeois taste and manners. Christmas evacuates and condemns perversions of itself by both commercial and communist missions and values.
Christmas is God’s language, not man’s. This is the world’s most beautiful, hopeful and helpful language, bearing the world’s sweetest experience. All of that because Christmas is Divine language and experience. Christmas is a miracle, mysterious and ecstatic.
Merry Christmas!
14 December 2008
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: Good News: Celebrating The Mass in Latin at North American Martyrs Catholic Parish, Edmonds, WA, by the The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Petri).
Update 2: Glenn Reynolds: Me, then: I love lawyers. I am a lawyer. But there are plenty of places where the role of lawyers should be limited, and war is certainly one of them. Nothing has happened since to make me think I was wrong.
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA