Lost Causes

 

Friend Xerxes writes of his efforts to feed a hummingbird stranded in the BC interior during the recent severe temperatures. He tried keeping his hummingbird feeder operational with various heating options. But eventually the hummingbird stopped coming. No doubt it froze to death.

Nevertheless, Xerxes concludes that such “lost causes” are worth pursuing.

I disagree. Realistically, unless he could trap it and bring it inside, that hummingbird was going to freeze to death. In the course of nature, most hummingbirds die in their first year. So what did he hope to accomplish? It seems to me Xerxes was not being noble, but only indulging his whimsy. More cruelly, I might accuse him of trying to play God.

You might accuse me of just not caring about animals. I do—I am a committed vegetarian, have been for going on thirty years.

But unreasonable, purely sentimental concern for animals can be a cheap way to feel virtuous. Xerxes’s actions did little or nothing to benefit the hummingbird; only his image of himself. Jung once observed (paraphrasing from memory) that “sentimentality is a superstructure concealing brutality. “ Hitler himself was a dog lover and a vegetarian.

Because God made all creatures great and small, all is good. Evil exists simply as an inversion of values: a lesser good treated as a greater good. 

Such efforts invested in the hummingbird look like an example of this. It is putting hummingbirds before humans. There is something wrong when you expend so much effort on a doomed bird at the same time the same weather is causing homeless to freeze on the streets in East Vancouver. Close enough to Xerxes that he can hardly be unaware. 

One might object that we pay taxes to take care of that. But the fact that there are homeless demonstrates that the government is not, in fact, taking care of that.

One might object that these people are addicts. They are responsible for their own predicament, and they will just use any money to buy drugs or alcohol.

Some are addicts; many are mentally ill, abandoned by the system, who cannot take care of themselves. Many are adolescents fleeing abusive families. With the current cost of housing, their numbers are growing.

It is not a time to be playing with hummingbirds and lost causes.

Happy New Year

 

A Carnegie Hall Christmas

 

Jesus Comes to E Street

 

Springsteen Christmas

 

Lego for Adults

 

At first glance, this looks really cool. A partial solution for the high cost of housing?

Predictions for 2022

 

Surrender, Dorothy!

A cautionary note: the prediction most likely to come true is a prediction that things will continue more or less as they are. Sudden change is the exception. Slow change is not generally perceptible year upon year. Any prediction other than this is most likely to be wrong.

But saying things will continue more or less as they are is hardly a prediction at all. You would stop reading at this point. 

So what sudden changes seem most likely?

I’d like to predict that the COVID pandemic will be over by the end of the year. Without interventions, the Spanish flu burned out after 2-3 years. Surely with our vaccines and all, we can do as well. Signs are that omicron is milder than previous strains, and is driving them out. I really expect it to be all over but the shouting by February. People will stop being scared of catching omicron. But I have been consistently over-optimistic

If the pandemic ends, I expect the world economy to come thundering back. A pandemic does not affect fundamentals. It is hard to see any lasting economic damage from the Spanish flu pandemic. I expect a season or more of optimism and growth.

The US has mid-term elections coming this fall. Everyone expects the Democrats to get trounced, and they only have a small majority in Congress now. A spanner in these works might be the end of the pandemic. Just as Trump was unfairly blamed for the pandemic, and FDR might have been unfairly credited with the end of the Depression, the Democrats might benefit from the resulting mood of general optimism. The economy should also boom in recovery, and Dems will be able to cite those stats as though they were their doing.

On balance, I’d say the odds favour the Republicans re-taking both houses. The opposition party usually gains ground in midterms, and the Dems only had a thin majority. And inflation looks like a real problem, that probably will not go away soon. But I don’t expect a blowout.

Things look unsettled in China. There are signs of a leadership struggle. The economy is getting hit hard, and Xi Jinping seems to be making it worse—a crazy move if he is not acting in mortal fear for his position. China is facing a heating shortage, an energy shortage, and a food shortage this winter. Not to mention a new outbreak of COVID. Xi might start a war out of desperation, in a bid to rally support behind him. But I think this is unlikely. It seems obvious that Xi himself does not want a war and is not preparing for one. To fight a war and lose would be suicide, and Chinese diplomacy is doing all the wrong things if it intends to win a war—provoking multiple possible enemies at once.

I’d say there’s a better chance that someone other than Xi will be in command by the end of the year. I think the party turned to him and threw him his extra powers because they were already in a desperate situation, and were looking for a man on a white horse. If visible improvement does not come within a reasonable time, if things instead seem to be getting worse, such a leader can fall suddenly.

North Korea also looks unstable, although what is really going on there is opaque. There are renewed rumours that Kim Jong Un is near death. Regardless, his policy of blowing up subordinates is probably not wise in the long run. Will some group of officers or officials sooner or later decide to band together secretly and move quickly to take out Kim before he kills them all? One of these days, something like this could happen.

Some are talking about civil war in America, or separation. Left and right seem to live in two different realities, and do not agree on the most fundamental principles. 

I think it is more likely that we are at a tipping point, and the general population and Overton window is about to lurch. I think of that old saw, “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you’ve won.” There might yet be a bigger fight, but the result is not in doubt. Insanity must over time collapse in the face of sanity. 

The core issue is abortion. It looks as though the Supreme Court is about to roll back Roe v. Wade to the extent, at least, that individual states will be able to impose significant limits on abortion. I suspect that this will draw down much of the pressure, like lancing a boil. A compromise will have been reached, at least temporarily.

Sudden and successful popular uprisings never seem to come in the most obvious countries at the most obvious time. Who expected Tunisia to kick off the Arab Spring? Were the Thirteen Colonies really the most oppressed part of the world in 1775? 

It is not the oppressive or cruel regimes that fall to popular uprisings, but regimes perceived to be incompetent.

There is a general mood everywhere that the “elites” have failed, wear no clothes, and are corrupt. So almost any state currently fills the bill. Who can say where this will reach the ultimate flash point? 

We might be in store for another year like 1848. Militating against that, however, is the fact that the populations in most countries are rapidly aging. Revolutions and civil unrest generally come from the young, who feel their way upwards blocked. An older population sees less value in upending the boat for possible future rewards.

So, on the whole, nothing very unexpected is going to happen next year.

A Warm and Sunny Christmas

 

A Million Dollar Christmas Chorus

 

Go Tell It on the Mountain

 

Musical Meditations

 

Feeling feverish and incoherent today. I suspect COVID, which complicates my reservation for a booster shot. I guess that’s not happening. Real life sucks.

Unable to sleep last night, I began playing my favourites list of YouTube music videos. Not necessarily my favourite songs: this is a category reserved for music I love that does not fit under some broader classification.

First up. Elvis Presley, “His Latest Flame,” with a selection of shuffle-dancing babes. I love rhythm. Early rock and roll is great for rhythm; later rock lost it, and lost my interest. I also cannot get enough of watching beautiful girls shuffle dance. “His Latest Flame” is based around a simple endless two-note riff. I could listen to it forever. My brother Gerry used to scorn rock and roll as too simple. That’s just what I like about it.

Next up, Madonna singing “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” Rather the opposite. The Webber melody is no doubt complex enough to satisfy my brother. The lyrics, too, are dense, and there’s not much rhythm. Tim Rice is clearly influenced by W.S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan. But he uses erudition not for comic effect but, here, to express a philosophical world-view in verse. This strikes me as a fantastically hard thing to do, and deserves some kind of award. He also deserves an award for making Madonna relatable. I’m impressed at a rhyme of “existence” with “distance,” “illusions” with “solutions,” or the line. “All dressed to the nines/ At sixes and sevens with you.’ 

 “The Sidewalks of New York” – three versions; none of them quite hits the mark. My grandmother used to sing this to me, and it can sometimes evoke tears. The lost world of childhood—hers more than mine.

W.C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues.” This is a purely instrumental version performed by the composer himself. I love the tone of world-weariness. Sad music is cathartic. The blues is eternal.

Playing for Change, “Guantanamera.” I’m crazy for rhythm. I love Latin rhythms. I love the format of Playing for Change, picking up participants across the world. The words do not make much sense, and are in Spanish, but there is great strength in that simple refrain, 

“Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera

Guantanamera, guajira guantanamera.”

Guantanamo girl. Guantanamo country girl.

I know what he means.

A simple cry of aching appreciation for random beauty. This is not a love song; he does not know her name. The verses make sense as a spontaneous meditation on what he could possibly say to this girl, knowing nothing of her. 

“I am an honest man from the land of palms…”

“My thoughts are light green, yet burning incarnadine.”

She is his muse. Perhaps she is everyone’s muse; beauty itself.

Norah Jones, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” I do not like modern jazz. I find it pretentious, emotionally superficial, and self-indulgent. Yet I love the vocal stylings of Norah Jones, Willie Nelson, or Diana Krall. When their jazz cool is used on a song with deep emotional tones, the counterpoint is painfully beautiful.

Yo-Yo Ma, Kathryn Stott, “Over the Rainbow.” I’m not big on show tunes as a rule, because they usually seem canned and artificial. But this one speaks of a deep universal yearning. It is in the end the yearning for heaven that each of us is born with. This version is instrumental, and seems even better for it, given that the words are in my head. The imagined song is more perfect tha the song heard with the ear.

Emmylou Harris, “Spanish is a Loving Tongue.” The lyrics are the main attraction here. They started out as a stand-alone cowboy poem, and it is a fine example of the genre. Harris, being a woman, must sing it in the third person. But that seems worth it for the sake of her beautiful country voice.

The Highwaymen, “City of New Orleans.” Willie Nelson is singing on this one, and the others strumming. The lyrics are finely crafted. But this is another rhythm song. It is the rhythm of the rails; you can almost feel them rumbling ‘neath the floor.

I have no connection with this part of the world—the American Midwest, and down the Mississippi. I don’t have wide experience with trains, other than watching them pass by for hours without me on them. But I can almost feel I am there. A perfect slice of Americana.

Willie Nelson with Paula Nelson, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” A beautiful black-and-white atmospheric video. I love the song in its apocalyptic simplicity. I think it was the plainness of Creedence Clearwater in particular over which my jazz-loving sibling and I differed. Willie’s cool voice feels like the cool rain falling. 

Jordan Bickhart, “Brownsville Girl.” Dylan’s songs are usually better performed by someone else. It is not that he has a bad voice, so much as that he abuses it and goofs around. I think it is because he finds the songs too emotionally meaningful, too revealing.

“Brownsville Girl” has almost no melody; it is a tone poem. Not a rhyming poem either; blank verse. There is a narrative, but disjointed. A lot of it is just Western atmospherics. There ought to be little to hang your hat on here, but not so—Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize for Literature. He knows the trick of associating images, the same trick that made Yeats’s later poems so great.

The Brownsville girl makes the narrator think of Western movies, which fade in and out of his own remembered life. This is what she was to him: some promise of heroic perfection, somewhere over the rainbow, or across the Mexican line.

Like “Guantanamera,” it is mostly a coyote howl at the moon of beauty, always visible but just out of reach: 

“Brownsville girl

with your Brownsville curls, 

teeth like pearls 

shining like the moon above

Brownsville girl

Show me all around the world, 

Brownsville girl, 

you're my honey love.”

Deliberately not polished poetry. Just one man trying to express the universal feeling in his heart. The incoherence is part of the point. We are here, and do not understand. Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.

That’s the way I feel today.

A Dunning-Kruger Christmas

 

Diana Krall for Christmas

 

Canticle of the Turning

 

This is my favourite Advent song, and I totally forgot to play it this year.

But it also works for New Year's.

How Do I Know Which Religion Is True?

 

There are so many different religions. How do we know which one is true? 

This, C.S. Lewis says, prompted his own adolescent atheism. It is a problem still posed by the new atheists: “You don’t believe in Zeus, do you? You yourself are atheist about a thousand gods. So why arbitrarily believe in this particular one?”

It is, in part, Lewis notes, a false problem. Because it is always the case that, on any given topic, only one theory will be true. The rational conclusion is not that they are all false.

What remains is how to decide that X is the correct theory, and not any of the others.

Let’s do the exercise. 

Begin with paganism. Dawkins and the like are ignorant to claim that Christians do not believe in Zeus and other pagan gods. We do. But they are amoral and ill-disposed towards mankind. Real pagans will agree.  They are, in other words, ambient spirits, daemons, genii. The great thing about our god, Yahweh is that cleaving to him alone takes care of possible harm from them.

And the proof is in the pudding, and was historically: when was the last time you were demonically possessed?

So sticking with paganism when Christianity is on offer is like seeing your house in flames, and refusing a fire extinguisher. Paganism is simply untenable, and melts like the winter snow, wherever Christianity appears.

What about Judaism? A Christian has no reason to argue against Judaism: Jesus didn’t. Judaism is a covenant between Yahweh and the Jews. It remains in force; God does not break promises. But Christianity is the covenant offered to all mankind; there is no Jew nor Greek in Christ. So if you are not born Jewish, why not embrace it instead, while continuing to honour and enjoy your own cultural traditions? Even leaving aside the good news of the incarnation.

What about Buddhism? Buddhism properly has no cosmology, and no dogma. The Buddhist dharma or “truth” is a set of spiritual practices. You do them, and experience reality for yourself. There is no call for a Christian to agree or disagree. One can, as Leonard Cohen demonstrated, be both a devout Jew and an ordained Buddhist monk. Just as anyone in China can be at the same time a Buddhist, a Taoist, and a Confucian.

Hinduism is similar. It is simply a selection of hypotheses about the divine. It has no dogma. A Christian is free to agree with some things and disagree with others, just as is a Hindu. I read the arguments, and come down on the side of the devotional Vaishnavites—the Krishna cycle looks to me like a hypothesis of the Christ. Ramakrishna’s argument for devotional monotheism, “I want to taste sugar, not to be sugar,” I find powerfully persuasive.

Confucianism is a moral code. I can, as a Christian, endorse it completely.

Leaving the pachyderm in the smoking room: Islam. Here there needs to be a straight choice. Either Islam, with its insistence on the indivisibility of God, is right, or Christianity is with its Trinity and incarnation. For Islam arose more or less in direct dissent from Christianity, after it.

A Turkish tour guide volunteered to me that Islam has the best claim to truth, precisely because it arose after all the other major religions. Like science, religion has progressed. 

But, as I did not respond, not wanting an argument, by this standard, Islam too must defer to Bahai, or Sikhism, or Mormonism, all of which arose after Islam. And, of course, if truth keeps progressing, this necessarily means we never arrive at truth.

There is something to be said, instead, for the test of time. Most recent is not best in the Humanities generally: Stan Lee is not proven to be better than Shakespeare because he wrote more recently.

If the argument is that these more modern faiths are less likely to be true because they are so much smaller than Islam, then size becomes the standard. And Islam must cede the field to Christianity, which has twice the number of adherents.

It seems reasonable at first thought to suggest that unity is a necessary essence of the godhead; but, as Hindu philosophers too have realized, unity is meaningless without diversity. And a God that did not include both in his own essence, is therefore not a supreme being. He is an incomplete being.

A Muslim will cite the Quran as authority that God is one and indivisible. But that is of course circular: one accepts the Quran’s authority only if you are already a Muslim.

The Muslim will respond, perhaps, that the supernatural beauty of its language, and its ability to accurately prophesy subsequent science, serves as proof of the Quran’s divine origin. I have seen the short monographs repeatedly making this argument.

I cannot judge for myself the beauty of the language, not reading Arabic. While beauty is an aspect of the divine, I think we all accept, including Islam, that the Devil too can use beauty for his purposes. Consider the image of the female “vamp.”

Lilith, the lovely mother of demons.

And if its ability to accurately prophesy things it cannot know by natural means is the test, surely it is disproven if it is inaccurate on things it could know. For example, the Quran is under the misapprehension that the Christian Trinity is Father, Son, and Virgin Mary. It further apparently thinks that the mother of Jesus was Mary, the sister of Moses.

William Lane Craig bases his rational Christianity on the empirical evidence for the resurrection. I can agree with him that in historical terms the evidence for the resurrection is strong. But that still feels to me faint praise: the empirical evidence for anything in the ancient world is slight. The last two mass readings, from Luke, speaking of Jesus’s birth and childhood, both include the note “Mary pondered these things in her heart.” This is a reminder that everything we are reading here depends on only one witness, Mary. Not strong evidence in court. While the evidence for the resurrection is much stronger, it is still surely open to forgery over the ages.

My thinking instead is as follows: first, it is undeniable that God exists. This can be proven in a dozen different ways, with a dozen sound logical arguments. Second, God must by definition be all good. Third, an all-good God would not leave us without guidance. He would want to incarnate among us to show himself to us. He would, fourth, not hide the truth: he would make it obvious to anyone who sought sincerely. Accordingly, the best claim to truth is held by the expression of his intent that is most widely geographically distributed and advertised as such. 

Which leads us to Christianity, and, more specifically, Catholicism.

At the same time and by the same token, other faiths, such as Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, or Taoism, must have enough of the truth to be sufficient for the sincere seeker, as not everyone will have been exposed to Christianity.

And, as we have seen, they mostly agree.

The Little Match Girl

 

https://www.surlalunefairytales.com/h-r/little-match-girl/little-match-girl-tale.html

Christmas at Red Butte

 

https://americanliterature.com/author/lucy-maud-montgomery/short-story/christmas-at-red-butte

Up She Goes!

 

An Irish-American Christmas

 

An Irish-Canadian Christmas

 

An Irish-American Christmas

 

The Newborn King

 

JMJ

 

Yesterday was Holy Family Sunday, and the second reading was one of the most controversial in the Bible. So controversial, I suspect, as to explain the fact that a second, alternate reading was offered.

Wives, be subordinate to your husbands, as is proper in the Lord.

Husbands, love your wives, and avoid any bitterness toward them.

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord.

Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they may not become discouraged.

That sounds like endorsing male supremacy. It also seems to require children to submit to an abusive parent without recourse.

I disagree. This is framed as a contract or covenant, with responsibilities on both sides. Compare God’s covenants with Abraham, Noah, Moses, or mankind. If the Jews or mankind do not keep their side of the bargain, God is not bound by his side.

Compare again the Lockean social contract, expressed in the American Declaration of Independence. One is morally obliged to be subordinate to the government so long as the government is doing its proper job of protecting one’s rights to life, liberty, and property against criminals and outsiders. If government itself infringes on those rights, one has the right and even the duty to oppose the government.

If a husband does not show love to his wife, and acts in bitterness towards her, she is under no obligation to subordinate herself. If she will not subordinate herself, conversely, he is under no obligation to show love to her. If parents provoke their children, their children need not obey. If they will not obey, the parents may provoke.

Not incidentally, “so that they may not become discouraged” is an astute description of the result of abusive parenting. “Discouragement” is the essence of what we call “depression.”

The feminists will no doubt still object, since the suggested norm remains that the wife should subordinate herself to the husband.

But not to have a clear chain of command, in any social group, is a recipe for conflict and chaos. Someone must make the final decision. In deference to the fact that the man must provide for the family through his labour, it ought in justice to be him. Otherwise, he is a slave.

A Newfoundland St. Stephen's Day

 

An Irish St. Stephen's Day

 

Happy St. Stephen's Day

 

Peace on Earth

 

There is a Christmas carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” its refrain from Luke 2, the announcement of the angels at Christ’s birth as per the King James Bible: “Peace on Earth, good will to men.” And the singer goes no to lament that there is, in fact, no peace on Earth.

And in despair I bowed my head

"There is no peace on Earth," I said

For hate is strong and mocks the song

Of peace on Earth, good will to men

So shame on us, right?

But then again, isn’t that also shame on God? Were the angels lying, then, when they promised that the birth of Christ would bring peace? Apparently: for it is not just the millennia of wars since; even immediately after Jesus’s birth, came the slaughter of the innocents. The life of a sincere Christian is hardly without conflict. Just the reverse: much of the world is set on crucifixion.

But by this interpretation, the Bible contradicts itself. In the gospel, Jesus says, “I bring not peace, but the sword.” St. Paul tells us to fasten on our buckler and gird up our loins to “fight the good fight.” The Apocalypse imagines salvation history as a war of good and evil.

The problem seems to be in a mistranslation of the original Greek. While the King James Version has it as “peace on Earth, good will to men,” the New International Version has “peace to those on whom his favour rests.” The American Standard Version has “peace among men in whom he is well pleased.” The Revised Standard Version has “peace among those whom he favors!” Douay-Rheims has “peace to men of good will.”

It looks as though King James’s translators were cooking the book. Many people no doubt want the message of the Bible to be universal peace and reconciliation. This is especially useful for those in power. It retains them in power. But this is not the Christian message.

The “peace” of which the angels sing is not the absence of external strife, but the absence of internal strife. It is peace of mind. It is the assurance that God is here, and has not forgotten us, and all will turn out well for the good in the end.

It is not at all an assurance of peace for the unrighteous in power, as Herod immediately recognizes.

It is urgent for the sincere Christian to read the Bible and the Catechism closely. The Devil himself can quote scripture for his purposes. 

The Queen of Galilee

 

A special favourite of mine. I once wrote and directed a little Christmas pageant based on it.

RIP Ted Byfield

 

A persistent of reason in Canada.

The death of Ted Byfield is another reminder that so many of the voices of moral clarity are gone.

This seems a useful way to define the difference between left and right in both politics and culture. The right is for moral clarity; the left is for ambiguity, for blurring the edges. This seems to me to have been true at least since the 1960s. It was obvious in a debate I recall between Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan circa 1967. It was obvious in the contrast between Goldwater and Johnson in 1964. Perhaps it is the most consistent definition of the two tendencies. 

Another way to look at it is that the left sees man’s natural tendencies as unambiguously good. The right sees man’s natural tendencies as tending at least at times toward evil. The right therefore wants checks and balances, boundaries. The left wants to tear them down; it wants spontaneity.

On this definition, I am on the right. I crave moral clarity—I hunger and thirst after righteousness. And I believe deeply in original sin.

A Merry Canadian Christmas

 

Make My Wish Come True

 

Cohen for Christmas

 

The Huron Carol

 

Unconditional Love

 

Xerxes proposes that there are two competing images of God: for some, God is “unconditional love.” For others, he is a “ruthless judge.”

This is a neat example of the fallacy of the false alterative: it implies that, if you do not believe God is unconditional love, you believe he is ruthless. You are therefore driven to accept that he is unconditional love.

Yet he clearly is not, if by “unconditional love” you mean that he sets no conditions. He does from the very beginning, with not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s love is expressed as a series of covenants: he has obligations, man has obligations, and if man does not meet his obligations, punishment can be swift and severe.

Caritas or agape, divine love, does not mean overlooking faults and flaws; any more than married love does. It means keeping contracts, and at all times wanting the best for the other. It also implies respecting the other’s moral agency. A “love” that demands nothing of the other does not. That would be seeing the other as an object. It is the sort of love one might have for a good steak. It is a form of hate.

This is why the Bible says “One who spares the rod hates his son, but one who loves him is careful to discipline him.”

So is God a “ruthless judge”? The flaw here is in seeing justice as in opposition to love or mercy. Perfect justice is the ultimate mercy.

Jennifer Nettles Canadianizes the Evening

 

Celine Dion's More Subdued Version

 

O Holy Night

 

It is now after dark on Christmas Eve. I cannot let the evening pass without the ultimate Christmas Carol, from Mariah Carey.

Bluegrass Jingle

 

Jingle Bells--North Pole Version

 

Billy Gibbons' Christmas and the Heart and Soul of Rock and Roll

 

We Need to Talk about Santa

 

The kids came to me in great agitation after school one year near Christmas. Other kids at school had taunted them with the claim that Santa Claus was dead, and buried under a pile of turkeys.

Surely the realization that one has been lied to about Santa is one of the great traumas of childhood. Surely others remember, as I do, that moment of realization, that one’s simple childhood faith had been taken advantage of by those you trusted the most, apparently in order to mock you for trusting them. And isn’t it sinister that adults get their jollies out of doing this?

Who is this guy Santa, anyway?

The official story is that he is Saint Nicholas of Myra/Bari—“Saint Klaus.” Saint Nicholas’s feast day is December 6, so he seems to fit as part of the Christmas season. On the other hand, he has no particular connection with the Christmas story, and we know very little about him. Why has he become so prominent?

One answer is the many miracles that have been associated with him, and his relics. This can witness to a saint’s importance in heaven, even if he was not well-known in life. Nicholas was also said to be from a wealthy family, and to have distributed his inheritance to the poor.

There is, on the other hand, an unsettling tale of his slapping some Arian at the Nicene Council. This, whether true or not, suggests Nicholas was not good at restraining his impulses.

The modern Santa, fat, jolly, and red of complexion, indeed suggests a Falstaffian figure. The conventional English “Father Christmas,” who may not have anything to do with Saint Nicholas, is explicitly such, going door to door with his wassail bowl advocating general inebriety. The modern Santa seems to encourage just such self-indulgence. He serves to make “getting stuff” overshadow the spiritual aspect of Christmas. He seems, in this sense, an anti-Christ.

“Nick” is actually a German term for a demon, or even for the Devil; you sometimes hear the Devil referred to in English as “Old Nick.” Has this resemblance in name associated the Devil himself with the reverend Saint Nicholas over time?

Why is his home at the North Pole? Why is this Mediterranean resident associated with the cold and the Far North?

There is another figure whose home is at the North Pole: the pagan god Cronus, aka Saturn, who is said to rule over the Hyperboreans. Cronus is often identified with Time, and so his appearance at end-of-year festivities makes sense. And Saturn’s old pagan feast, Saturnalia, a time of unbridled self-indulgence, corresponds more or less with the Feast of St. Nicholas. 

The most important story associated with Saturn/Cronus is that he ate his own children as they were born. Not a cheerful association for Christmas, the birth of the Christ child. In ancient times, the Greeks used to kill their children in his honour. So did the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, and the Canaanites. He would perhaps correspond in the Christmas story to King Herod, who ordered every child under two years old slaughtered, in hopes of never being supplanted.

A 19th Century depiction of Cronus as "Father Time."

He represents the implicit and rarely acknowledged hostility of adults towards each new generation.  A selfish adult can look in their child’s eyes and resent the knowledge that the child will live on after the parent is dead.

I think Santa as we honour him today is the bad guy. He is the face of narcissistic parenting.

Merry Christmas.

Mary Margaret O'Hara's Blue Christmas

 

A Phil Spector Christmas

 

Christmas Ball Blues

 

The Tree of Night

 

What’s with the Christmas tree? Why do we bring a pine or spruce tree into our homes for Christmas?

The conventional answer is that it represents the night sky over Bethlehem, when Jesus was born. 

This works very well. Those round ornaments we conventionally hang in the branches: these are the planets. The Christmas lights are the stars. The silver garland is the Milky Way.

Trees are sacred almost everywhere, because they represent the night sky—the cosmic order.

However, the star on top of the tree is not really the Star of Bethlehem. The Star of Bethlehem moved. “The star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was.” Understand the tree as the spinning night sky, and the star on top is at the very point where it does not move. It is the North Star, and the trunk of the tree is the North Pole. It represents God the Father, around whom all creation revolves.

Christmas is at least in large part a celebration of the Winter Solstice, and of the turning of the year. Not that this means it is at root a “pagan” festival—there is nothing non-Christian or pagan about a reference to nature. Nature, after all, is God’s creation, and is an important way in which he speaks to us.

Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

The turning of each year is a divine parable of salvation history. Jesus’s birth is the birth of the light, corresponding to the Winter Solstice. “I am the way, the truth and the light.”

A Christmas Letter

 

Jesus's Blood

 

This piece premiered in London in December 1971, and I think of it as a Christmas, or Advent, song.

Dickens' Dublin

 

A Daughter's Gratitude

 

Some years ago, my daughter drew a card for her Mom on Mother’s Day. It was brilliantly done, and I shared it on Facebook. She has immense artistic talent.

But it drew two disturbed comments from female friends. Posted publicly, apparently with no thought that my daughter would see them. One wrote “Uh-oh. There’s something wrong here.” The other accused my wife of abusing her.

For she had written on the card, “thank you for not aborting me.”

I explained to the friend who saw this as proof of child abuse that, so long as abortion was legal, it was simply a fact that every Canadian woman made a conscious decision whether to abort a child or not. Our daughter, being an intelligent child, surely just realized this.

“But,” my friend countered, “she should have been reassured that she was loved, and would never have been aborted.”

But abortion happens before the mother meets the child, and knows anything of their personality. If her life was spared, it was only by either her mother’s good morals or by her good luck.

In the Philippines, where abortion is illegal, nobody was troubled by the card.

My friend concluded by declaring me “delusional,” unfriending me, and never speaking to me since.

I think the experience shows that Canadian women often have a guilty conscience over abortion. And that the human tendency, when made aware of a wrong or injustice, is most often not to right the wrong, but to object to its being mentioned in polite company.

Mon Pays, C'est l'Hiver

 

Il Est Ne

 

Chanson de Noel

 

A Child Is Born

 

Theologically, Easter is more important than Christmas. In the cycle of the year, it would also seem that at Easter we have more to celebrate—the return of Spring. Yet Christmas holds a special magic.

I think because it is about the birth of a child—ultimately of all children. In the mystery of consciousness, the entire universe is born again whenever a child is born: it is born in his or her eyes. Each child, at his birth, redeems the universe.

In the Puranas, we read that one day the friends of the infant Krishna alerted his mother that the baby had eaten mud. Yasoda ordered him to open his mouth. When he did:

She saw all of outer space in all directions, mountains, islands, oceans, seas, planets, air, fire, moon and stars. Along with the moon and the stars she also saw the elements, water, sky, the extensive ethereal realm along with the ego and the products of the senses and the controller of the senses, all the demigods, the objects of the senses like sound, smell, taste, touch, and the three qualities of material nature. 

And she saw within his mouth all living entities, eternal time, material nature, spiritual nature, activity, consciousness and different forms of the whole creation. Yasoda could find within the mouth of her child everything necessary for cosmic manifestation. She finally saw, within his mouth, herself taking Krishna on her lap and having him suckle at her breast.  

Merry Christmas.

A Nazi Christmas

 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nazis-fought-original-war-christmas-180961513/

Carol of the Mee-Mees

 

Christmas Is Coming

 

In the Bleak Midwinter

 

Courage

 

This image should need no caption for any Canadian

C.S. Lewis gives a pre-eminence to courage among the virtues: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” Without courage, one goes with the flow, goes along with everyone else, avoids making moral choices.

Not that courage guarantees that the choices made will be moral. Hitler was a courageous man; the Fascists made a cult of courage. It is necessary, but not sufficient, for general morality.

This has interesting implications. If a society has grown decadent—which is to say, if it has succumbed to vice—it will devalue courage. Courage becomes a threat to the social consensus. Conformity will be valued instead.

Accordingly, a decadent society will scorn the military—contributing to its eventual collapse. It will scorn the cowboy, the entrepreneur, the eccentric; a moral society will celebrate them.

It will also scorn men, inasmuch as courage is a peculiarly masculine virtue. Women too can be courageous—witness Margaret Thatcher, Madeleine de Vercheres, or the Virgin Mary’s “behold the handmaid of the Lord.” But the more common expression of female courage is in cleaving to and supporting a courageous man against the world. Just as men most naturally manifest kindness by cleaving to and supporting a kind woman. The two operate as a team.

All of this sounds like a condemnation of the current state of our society, doesn’t it?

It is Foolish to Envy the Extremely Intelligent

 

https://www.quora.com/Do-smart-people-tend-to-be-rejected-by-society-because-of-jealousy

Bad Christmas Music

 

Some Christmas songs I do not like:

“The Rebel Jesus”

“The Rebel Jesus” urinates on the season. The singer declares him or herself “a heathen and a pagan.” So shut up, then. Not your holiday. And he sings:

“But if anyone of us should interfere

In the business of why there are poor

They get the same as the rebel Jesus.”

 

This suggests that Jesus came only for political and economic reasons. And that poverty is a problem that can be fixed, and fixed by some “business” we are refusing to do. A thing that is done to people. Conceptually, it cannot be fixed, as Jesus points out: “the poor you will have always with you.” Poverty is a relative measure; a poor man in Canada would be rich in the Philippines, or rich in Canada a hundred years ago. So long as any one person is making more money than the next, that next person will be “poor.” But the wealth of the one is not a problem for the other, barring the sin of envy.

“Christmas in the Trenches”

“Christmas in the Trenches” is unfair to the men who fought in the First World War. It ends:

"For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war

Had been crumbled and were gone forever more

My name is Francis Tolliver. In Liverpool I dwell

Each Christmas come since World War One I've learned its lessons well

That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame

And on each end of the rifle we're the same"

 

A trite observation, that supposedly deep last iine―as if this were not perfectly clear to most if not all of the soldiers at the time. As if they were all both selfish and stupid. They knew it was a fratricidal war, and the men they were shooting at were just men like themselves. Read All Quiet on the Western Front. Soldiers rarely or never fight because they have some abiding animosity towards the stiffs on the other side. They shoot because they are being shot at. They fight to protect their honour, their buddies, and the women and children at home.

Nor is it fair to say that the ones who called the shots took no risks. The British officer corps was decimated in that war. Winston Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty to serve on the front lines. Lord Kitchener, the British War Minister, drowned at sea by enemy action. Loss in war can lead often enough to execution for the top leadership.

The song tries to impose a Marxist interpretation on the war, that it was fought for the interests of the rich at the expense of the working class. This is a lie, not too far from the Nazi “stab in the back” lie. The war may have been a catastrophe for all concerned, but if a small nation is attacked by a larger one, it is immoral to stand aside, just as it is immoral to stand by and watch a woman being raped.

“Little Saint Nick”

Brian Wilson is a musical genius. But the Beach Boys’ lyrics are often embarrassing. I’d like to blame Mike Love; I hope Brian isn’t responsible. “Christmas comes this time each year” is not a profound thought. Neither is “Run, run, reindeer.” To refer to Saint Nicholas as “Little Saint Nick” seems deliberately demeaning.

There; now I feel better.

Mon Pays, C'est l'Hiver

 

It seems to me that Christmas and Christmas music is something of a Canadian specialty. Canadian musicians always have Christmas shows and Christmas albums. Perhaps not surprising, since Winter is so significant a part of the Canadian experience.

It Being on Christmas Morning ...

 

The Boar's Head, As I Understand

 

Is Preferring White Meat Prejudiced?

 

“Friend Xerxes writes”—this has become the usual start to my Sunday sermons.

This week, friend Xerxes writes that “prejudice – racial or otherwise – can be defined only those on the receiving end.”

And he cites as example an incident that proves the opposite. He had three Jamaican guests to Christmas dinner, and asked if they wanted white or dark meat. They all chose dark meat, thinking he was referring to their skin colour.

In fact, prejudice can never be reliably defined by those on the “receiving” end; because prejudice speaks to motive, and none of us can read minds.

Only the person accused of prejudice knows for certain whether the charge is true. 

Xerxes goes on to say “I can never know if I’m expressing unrecognized prejudices unless someone points them out to me.”

Yet I do think we all must know when we are being prejudiced. Prejudice violates the essence of morality, which is the awareness of human equality (“do unto others”); we are all capable of understanding this simple principle, and we all have a conscience. 

It is close to a perfect contradiction to suggest we can be unaware of our own prejudices—that we can think a thought without knowing we are thinking it.

Of course, there is real prejudice in the world—lots of it. One good example is the claim that only “white” people can be prejudiced. Another is that certain groups are “indigenous.” Or that only “black lives matter.” Or that “men” cause violence. Or that this ethnic group owes reparations to that ethnic group. Or that fetuses are not human.

And so it goes, generation to generation.

Shepherds, Why This Jubilee?

 

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Advent Music

 

One of my favourites.

For Advent

 

The Mandate of Heaven

 

Abortion laws by country. Red = fully illegal. Blue = legal. 

To an atheist, the thought that heaven is intervening in world affairs is no doubt fanciful. But once you accept the existence of God, or even, as with the ancient Greeks or Chinese or Hindus, of cosmic justice, the assumption that God is directing history is inevitable. Miscreant societies may do mysteriously well for a time—the Devil has his powers too—but heaven will in due time strike down a Carthage or a Nazi Germany or a USSR in dramatic fashion.

Over time, the good guys usually win. One may protest that this is only because the history is written by the winners. This is not true. Losers usually survive to write their own histories, and history is based on documentary evidence by which one can arrive at the truth of things. In most wars, there is a good side and a bad side, and the good side wins. Is there any obvious counter-example?

That being so, the wholesale acceptance of abortion, by America and by most other developed countries, is the surest possible indication that they have lost the moral high ground, and so are due for decline or sudden collapse. It is the same sin that finished Carthage, or Canaan.

The puzzle is who might rise to replace them? Ibn Khaldun had a useful theory, that a decadent civilization would inevitably and rather suddenly be replaced by “barbarians” from the fringes, just beyond their direct control. They would be a group disciplined by adversity, not some established rival power.

The regime that is set to replace the USA as world leader will not, if Ibn Khaldun is right, be China. China shows at least the same level of moral depravity—as demonstrated by legal abortion—as the US. It will not be Russia. It will not be Japan. It will not be Europe, East or West.

If we use where abortion is and is not legal as a guide to moral health and strength, the best candidates for new leadership seem to be Subsaharan Africa, the Muslim world, Latin America, and the Philippines.

In that group, I would put my money on Latin America and the Philippines. They combine this ethical core with a form of the philosophy of liberal democracy which made Britain, France, and America seeming favourites in God’s eyes over the past few centuries. They seem to fit Ibn Khaldun’s description best as the barbarians just beyond the gates. The Africans and the Muslims seem more peripheral to America; and less united among themselves.

You might scoff that they are poor and disorganized. But the ascension of a new power can happen suddenly. Spain launched her world empire in 1492, the very year she finally drove the Moors out of the homeland. The Dutch began their world empire even as they were fighting a war of independence from Spain. Such current adversity can build solidarity and social cohesion.

Together, the Philippines and Latin America have the demographic weight. The Philippines alone has a larger population than Britain or France.

The transition will need to be sparked by some new ideology, I imagine—something not apparent now. Liberation Theology and Friere’s critical pedagogy look like attempts at this, but duds. Marxism is not a viable platform; it is unethical. And the US might recover, if, as anticipated, the Supreme Court dismantles Roe v. Wade.

A Journal of the Plague Decade

 

The amount of empty shelving at the local supermarket has become alarming. Picking up weekly needs has become hit and miss. For a time I was trying to make up the difference by visiting two or three supermarkets a week. But with Omicron raging, and of uncertain potency, I’m not sure it is worth it any longer. My estimate is that the weekly food bill has gone up 30%.

For Advent

 

For Advent

 

For Christmas

 

A Depressed World

 

The problem faced by governments now is a good model of what depression is all about. Not a “mental illness,” but a rational reaction to there being no good options available.

The Covid lockdowns are causing increasing economic devastation. The attempt to keep everyone afloat financially through them is causing increasing inflation. Government debt has piled up to the point that governments cannot afford measures to fight inflation. And yet, just as the end seemed again in sight, here we have another wave of the virus, more virulent and, as far as we can tell so far, as deadly. And resistant to the vaccines. If we do nothing, many may die, and we will have just the sort of chaos in the health system we wanted to avoid all along. As if all our effort until now was for nothing—we might as well have gone ahead and let the original virus spread. 

And whatever the governments do, they are going to get blamed for the situation. They will be told they should have done the opposite.

And we have seen hopes dashed repeatedly. We thought we could end it all with the vaccines. Just as we seemed poised to have the virus under control, the Alpha variant popped up; and then the Delta variant. After Omicron, there may be yet another variant, and another wave.

This is just how depression develops—false dawns, hopes repeatedly dashed, and in the end, no good options. Blamed for whatever you do.

This most naturally comes about in a family situation in which a parent has made one or more child the scapegoat.

But here we see it happening naturally. My wife suggested, “It is as if God hates us.” And that is just what it looks like: like the situation of the hated child.

Christmas Music

 

Advent music

 

For Advent

 

Karma Comes to Call

 

Fuseli

I recently speculated on why Hollywood, the media, and big tech seem bound on committing suicide. All are doing things counter to their financial interests or indeed to preserving their credibility. I thought it might be a delusion caused by postmodernism’s claim that we can make our own reality. Or it might be a hysterical reaction to seeing their power and influence slipping away.

Here is another possibility.

It might be the voice of conscience catching up to them. The powers that currently be are terminally morally compromised. One word: abortion. In the cause of sexual pleasure, they have endorsed an ongoing mass murder. 

The Erinyes must be satisfied.

The activity of repressed conscience is often observed in serial killers. They start taking bigger and bigger risks. They return to the scene of the crime. They start sending clues to the police. They want to be caught. One famously left the message at a murder scene, “For God’s sake, stop me before I kill again.” Ted Bundy started his killing spree in the Pacific Northwest, but ended it in Florida—one of the few states at the time that had the death penalty. When finally arrested, his comment was, “What took you so long.”

And, when murderers are caught, their first night in a cell, reputedly, they usually sleep like a baby. 

The current elites are crying out to be replaced. The nobles in pre-revolutionary France did something similar, insisting on deferring to the Third Estate.

In this we also see the hand of God—or, if you are a pagan Greek, the gods, punishing hubris. In the Old Testament, the principle is laid down that a depraved culture, specifically one which murders its own children, must be and will be overthrown, including divine intervention if necessary. This is what happened to the Canaanites, to Sodom, to Gomorrah. The Egyptians were scourged for killing the firstborn of the Hebrews. This is also what happened to the Carthaginians at the hands of the Romans. Such a depraved culture must be defeated, even if this requires salting the earth.

Disturbingly, we are in such a culture, almost world-wide. Being visited by fires, floods, and plagues may be part of the story. As the Chinese would say, the mandate of heaven has passed.

Let’s hope we can turn things around before they get to the salting the earth stage.

For Advent

 

For Advent

 

With a country feel ...

Adds a Certain Sense of Anticipation

 

Advent Music

 

Advent Music

 

Advent Music

 

A Very Public Suicide

 

Like the media and big tech, Hollywood seems intent on committing suicide. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is reputedly opening to disastrously small audiences; soon after Seth Rogan’s TV series Santa Inc. crashed and burned. Following the Star Wars franchise.

Any reasonable person should have seen this coming. Yet Hollywood is shovelling hundreds of millions of dollars into these projects.

West Side Story apparently features a fair bit of dialogue in Spanish; yet Spielberg refused to allow subtitles. As a result, he intentionally restricted his audience to those who are bilingual in English and Spanish.

He also insisted on casting, as Latinos only actors who were actually Latino. This reduced his talent pool, the film’s star power, and it is a measure rarely taken for other ethnic groups. Brad Pitt, Leonardo Di Caprio, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, for example, have all played Irish leads. The point of being an actor is that you act; you pretend to be somebody else. Of course, a Swede would have trouble being convincing as a Zulu, or an African as Anne Boleyn (ahem), but Latinos are a racially mixed group who do not look different, on average, from Southern Europeans generally.

As for Santa Inc., who could have thought that an animation criticizing the world’s most popular holiday would pull in enthusiastic family audiences at Christmastime? Do adults want to watch a Christmas animation without their kids? Who exactly is the intended audience? Did anyone think of the intended audience?

Similarly, space opera, the Star Wars genre, is most appealing to younger males. As is the concept of Ghostbusters. A great idea, then, to suffuse it with female leads and feminist messages?

The traditional news media are similarly self-immolating by violating all the standards of journalism in order to push a political agenda. And the high-tech oligarchs, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Google, seem to be forcing customers to competing platforms with censorship of political opinions they disagree with.

What can explain this? Why are hitherto competent and successful businessmen throwing money away like this?

One possible theory is that they are terminally deluded by the postmodern fantasy that one can create one’s own reality. A lot of businessmen buy into the Power of Positive Thinking idea; this is just a few steps further.

Another possibility is that they see their power to influence, such as it is, slipping away, and they are reacting hysterically. Those who covet money are also liable to be people who covet power.

But the clearest element of it all is what looks like deliberate contempt for the possible audience; a contempt for the general public. A contempt so powerful that it cannot be restrained even by obvious self-interest.

For Gaudate Sunday

 

For Advent

 \

Pope Francis Downplays Sexual Sin

 

Lust sleeps with Eros

Pope Francis has just caused more confusion over the faith. To reporters on a flight to Greece, he explained that sins of the flesh are not the most serious. Pride and wrath are worse.

One can understand where he is coming from: otherwise good people can easily be tempted into sexual sins. We all are.

But then, the same is true of pride, or wrath.

Francis is sometimes justified as a “pastoral” pope rather than a deep thinker, in order to justify his sometimes theologically dubious comments. But it is precisely on the pastoral side that his comments are a problem. The prime responsibility of a shepherd is to guide the sheep, not to let them wander. Directions must be clear.

Strictly speaking, there are only two kinds of sin: mortal and venial. Put as simply as possible, a venial sin is one that does not in principle turn away from God; a mortal sin is one that does. A sexual sin, like any sin, can be either—it is all in the intent and motive, not in the act itself. Accordingly, one cannot say that a sin against the sixth commandment is more or less serious, in itself, than a sin against another.

However, the traditional listing of the three temptations is “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” Our Lady of Fatima revealed to Saint Jacinta in visions of hell that “The sins which cause most souls to go to hell are the sins of the flesh.”

It is hard to reconcile this with what the Pope just said. Who you gonna believe, the Pope or the Virgin Mary?

I side with Jacinta and Mary. It is precisely because sins of the flesh are so tempting to good people that they are dangerous. Among sins, they are a “gateway drug.” This is why lust is one of the “Seven Deadly Sins”: not because they are worse in themselves than other sins, but because they are addictive. They become a settled vice, and a vice causes us to turn away from God altogether.

Francis’s comments are, to put the best possible face on them, unhelpful. Who does he serve here?