Daniel Pinkham: Christmas Cantata

 

I. Quem visdistis pastores?

II.  O Magnum Mysterium

III. Gloria In Excelsis Deo  

Quem Vidistis Pastores? 

1 Whom did you see, shepherds? Speak
and tell us: who has appeared on earth?
R.We saw the new-born and choirs of angels
praising the Lord, Alleluia.

2 Tell us whom you saw
and announce to us the birth of Christ.
R.We saw the new-born and choirs of angels
praising the Lord, Alleluia.

3 Today, the day of our redemption hath shone upon us;
today true peace hath descended upon us from heaven.
Today, for us from above, the skies are made to flow as honey.
 

4 We see Christ the Saviour, born of a virgin
We see Mary and Joseph,
prostrate suppliants upon the earth
and in humble adoration:
thanks be to God, who delivered to us victory
through Jesus Christ, our saviour.

5 For a child is born to us,
and a son is given to us,
and the government is upon his shoulder:
and his name shall be called
angel of wondrous counsel.] 

II. See earlier post of the text.

III.  Glory to God in the highest and peace to people of good will, we praise you we bless you we worship you we glorify you . . .

 
The Stanford Chamber Chorale, under the direction of Stephen M. Sano, with organist Robert Huw Morgan, and The Bay Brass, performs Daniel Pinkham's "Christmas Cantata" ("Sinfonia Sacra").

O Magnum Mysterium - Thomas Victoria

 

O magnum mysterium,

et admirabile sacramentum,

ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,

iacentem in praesepio!

Beata Virgo, cujus viscera

meruerunt portare

Dominum Iesum Christum.

Alleluia!

O great mystery,

and wonderful sacrament,

that animals should see the newborn Lord,

lying in a manger!

Blessed is the virgin whose womb

was worthy to bear

the Lord, Jesus Christ.

Alleluia!

 

Anyone who reads my blog knows I like animals. I think they, oxen and donkeys, specifically, being mentioned as the witnesses to the birth of Jesus was to show that all flesh was included in the covenant, just as God told Noah that they were included in the one at the end of the arc narrative. Though that is where God also is said to have allowed the eating of animals for the first time. But God didn't require it in the story. 

 

I think with Covid-19 being just the latest human pandemic disease that started in the animal husbandry industry, the cruel and notorious wet-markets in China this time instead of some pig operation in Kansas or Iowa or some egg factory in Maine or elsewhere, the strain of Covid-19 that mutated in the cruel and notorious mink industry in Denmark and the United States, we're on notice about the consequences of cruelty to animals and keeping them in concentration camp death camps.

I am overwhelmed, for the third time in the past seven years in my family there has been a wrenching death in the two weeks before Christmas, in two cases completely unexpected, in the third after a month of terrible illness. I'm beginning to think the Christmas season is out to get us. This latest one on December 24th is terrible, with a young child left without her father who was the support for her and her very ill mother.

I am assured that my help isn't needed, for now at least so I will resume with writing. Hoping that 2021 isn't as terrible as this one has been.

If the Republicans try to monkey wrench the Electoral College certification, Nancy Pelosi should get all of them on record and refuse to seat the members who expressed distrust of the elections in their states. Hard ball is called for, it's what the Republican-fascists are doing to the poorest of the poor and those right above them in the stratified system of economic cruelty in the United States.

This is what we have gotten from the Constitution and the deified founders.

I Can't Finish What I'd Started To Write For Today So I'll Repost This

"Medieval People Set Aside December 24 As The Feastday of Adam and Eve."

Of course I believe in evolution, or, rather, that the physical evidence as subjected to modern physics and geology and genetics and cladistic analysis points to it as the most likely means by which the present day and past diversity of life came about.  That's a far cry from avowing that on the basis of what was known about that in Britain in 1859, which filled in just about everything from that list of science - excepting contemporary geology and a different system of classification than is used now  - with the atrocity of Malthusian economics and the greatest wishes of the aristocratic class under the British caste system that controlled science got it right in natural selection. 

I say that because it is certain that all right thinking secular, moderny people will be scandalized, shocked and infuriated by what Marilynne Robinson said at the end of her great and long essay, "Darwinism" from her great book,  The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.  I worked my way back from the ending and the essay is so great, such a brilliant line of thinking, it was hard to decide where to break into it.  I started here. . .

I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project.  Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking that it has displaced.  Daniel Dennett scolds Judeo-Christianity for Genesis 1:28, in which humankind is given dominion over all the earth,  as if it licensed depredation [I will post more about that after Christmas].  Notions of this kind go unchallenged now because the Bible is so little known.  In the recapitulation of creation that occurred after the waters have receded in the narrative of the Flood (Genesis 9:1-4) people are told, as if for the first time, that they may eat the flesh of animals.  It would appear the Edenic regime was meant to be rather mild.  And of course the most reassuring images of the lordliness of God in both Testaments describe him as a shepherd.  Over against this we have Darwin and Nietzsche and their talk of extermination. 

If it is objected - and there would be grounds for alarm if it were not objected - that the passages I have quoted from Darwin and Nietzsche are misread by those who take issue with them,  their defenders must make some little effort  to be fair to the context of Genesis.  It may be true historically that people have justified brutal misuse of nature on the authority of Genesis 1:28, but it is surely true that they have taken a high hand against the whole of creation on the pretext offered them by "the survival of the fittest" or "the will to power."  The verse in Genesis 9 that permits the eating of animals is followed by a verse that forbids the shedding of human blood, pointedly invoking the protection of the divine image  This is the human exceptionalism which Dennett and the whole tribe of Darwinians reject as if on a moral scruple.  But its effect is to limit violence, not to authorize it. 

In nothing  is the retrograde character of modern thought more apparent.  These ancients were never guilty of the parochialism of suggesting that any ambiguity surrounds the word "human," or that there is any doubt about human consanguinity, though such notions would be forgivable in a people surrounded by tribes and nations with which their relations were often desperately hostile.  To say this is to grant what is clearly true,  that they often failed to live up to their own most dearly held beliefs.  This can be looked at from another side. however.  They were loyal over many centuries to standards by which they themselves (though less, no doubt, than human kind in general) were found guilty and wanting.  This is a burden they could have put down.  It is the burden Western civilization has put down, in the degree that it has rejected the assertion of human uniqueness.  Darwin's response to objections to the idea of kinship with monkeys was, better a monkey than a Fuegian, a naked savage. 

History is a nightmare, generally speaking, and the effect of religion, where its authority has been claimed, has been horrific as well as benign.  Even in saying this, however, we are judging history in terms religion has supplied.  The proof of this is that,  in the twentieth century, "scientific" policies of extermination, undertaken in the case of Stalin to purge society of parasitic or degenerate or recalcitrant elements, and in the case of Hitler to purge it of the weak or defective or, racially speaking, marginally human, have taken horror to new extremes.  Their scale and relentlessness have been owed to the disarming of moral response by theories authorized by the word "science," which quite inappropriately, has been used as if it meant "truth."  Surely it is fair to say that science is to the "science" that inspired exterminations as Christianity is to the "Christianity" that inspired Crusades.  In both cases the human genius for finding pretexts seized upon the most prestigious institution of the culture and appropriated the great part of its language and resources and legitimacy.  In the case of religion, the best and the worst of it have been discredited together.  In the case of science, neither has been discredited.  The failure in both science and religion are effectively lost to us in terms of disciplining or enlarging our thinking. 

These are not the worst consequences, however.   The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it.  But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality.  It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth.  It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic.  And this is more or less where we are now. 

"Worship" means the assigning or acknowledging of worth.  Language, in its wisdom, understands this to be a function of creative, imaginative behavior.  The suffix "-ship" is kin to the word "shape."  It is no wonder that the major arts in virtually every civilization have centered around religion.  Darwin, always eager to find analogues and therefore inferred origins for human behavior among the animals, said that, to a dog, his master is a god.  But this is to speak of religion as if it were mere credulous awe in the face of an apparently greater power and wisdom, as if there were only one natural religion, only the Watchmaker.  The relationship between creation and discover - as Greek sculpture, for example, might be said to have discovered the human form, or mathematics might be said to have discovered the universe - is wholly disallowed in this comparison .  

Religion is inconceivable because it draws on the human mind in ways for which nature, as understood by Darwinists, offers no way of accounting.  Collaboratively, people articulate perceptions of value and meaning and worth, which are perhaps right and wrong, that is, profoundly insightful, or else self-interested or delusional at about the rate of the best science.   We forget that it is only fairly recently that the continents have been known to drift.  Until very recently the biomass of the sea at middle and great depths has been fantastically underestimated,  and the mass and impact of microbial life in the earth has been virtually unreckoned.  We know almost nothing about the biology of the air, that great medium of migration for infections agents, among other things.  The wonderful Big Bang is beset with problems.  In other words, our best information about the planet has been full of enormous lacunae,  and is, and will be.  Every grand venture at understanding is hypothesis, not so different from metaphysics.  Daniel Dennett attributes the brilliance of J. S. Bach to the fortuitous accumulation of favorable adaptations of his nervous system.  Bach, of all people, is not to be imagined without a distinctive, highly elaborated conception of God, and life in a culture that invoked the idea of God by means of music.  That is why his work is profound, rather than merely clever.  And it is profound.  It is not about illusion, it is not about superstition or denial or human vainglory or the peculiarities of one sensorium. 

We try now to establish  value in economic terms, lacking better, and this has no doubt contributed to the bluntly mercenary character of contemporary culture.  But economic value is extraordinarily slippery. Buying cheap and selling dear is the essence of profit making.  The consumer is forever investing in ephemera, cars or watches that are made into symbols of prosperity, and are therefore desirable because they are expensive.  So people spend a great deal of money for the advantages of being perceived to have spent a great deal of money.  These advantages are diminished continuously by the change of styles either toward or away from the thing they have bought, which is either commonplace or passé.  

Or manufacture is taken from a setting in which adults work for reasonable wages and there are meaningful protections of the environment, and moved into a setting where children work for meager wages and the environment is desolated.  This creates poverty among workers in both settings and destroys the wealth that is represented in a wholesome environment - toxins in the air or water are great destroyers of wealth.  So economic value is created at a cost of the economic value of workers who are made unable to figure as consumers, and of resources that are made unsuitable for any use.  A few people may get rich, but the transaction altogether is a loss, perhaps a staggering loss.  A global economy organized on these principles will be full of poor, sick,dispirited people, and shoddy goods, since they will be cheapened to suit the dwindling prosperity of the workforce, who are also the buying public.  An objective accounting of value would find disaster here.  Human limits to the exploitation of people would solve the problem, but that would interfere with competition which is the great law of nature, supposedly, and which therefore functions as a value, because "science" has supplanted religion. 

How much misery and premature death (most of it out of sight, granted) do we agree to when we accept this new economic order?  Is it in any way an advance on colonialism?  Do we imagine, as the colonists sometimes did, that we are bringing benefits of civilization to the far reaches of the world?  Are we not in fact decivilizing ourselves as we decivilize them?  Why is there no outcry?  Is it because we have cast off the delusion of human sanctity?  I think we should study our silence for insight into other momentous silences of recent history. 

This is not the worst of it.  Now that the mystery of motive is solved - there are only self-seeking and aggression, and the illusions that conceal them from us - there is no place left for a soul, or even the self.  Moral behavior has little real meaning, and inwardness, in the traditional sense, is not necessary or possible.  We use analysts and therapists to discover the content of our experience.  Equivalent trauma is assumed to produce more or less equivalent manifestations in every case, so there is little use for the mind, the orderer and reconciler, the artist of the interior world.  Whatever it has made will only be pulled apart.  The old mystery of subjectivity is dispelled; individuality is a pointless complication of a very straightforward organic life.  Our hypertrophic brain, that prodigal indulgence, that house of many mansions, with its stores and competences, and all its deep terrors and very rich pleasures, which was so long believed to be the essence of our lives, and a claim on one another's sympathy and courtesy and attention, is going the way of every part of collective life that was addressed to it - religion, art, dignity, graciousness.  Philosophy, ethics politics, properly so called.  It is a thing that bears reflecting upon, how much was destroyed, when modern thought declared the death of Adam. 

Answering An Argument

I don't know if there's ever been any speculation on this point but as well as the implication at the beginning of Luke's gospel that aspects of the infancy and youth narrative may have been gotten either from Mary or someone who knew her ("She kept these sayings in her heart,") it's possible that Luke, the author of the Gospel and, it is widely asserted, Acts, may have gotten some of it from someone who may have known Mary and Jesus very well, James, "the brother of Jesus" as he is called in some sources. As James is one of the most important figures in Acts, one of the foremost leaders of the Jerusalem church, and as Luke obviously knew of him, perhaps knew him, himself, that's a possible line of transmission of those parts of the story.

If anyone knows of anyone who has posed that as a possibility, I'd like to know.

Note: As I finished this, I found out of a sudden death in my family. I won't be posting anymore for several days.

Now Trump Is Using The Power Of The Presidency To Incite His Fascist Fan Boys To Insurrection In Washington DC - Or What Free Speech Absolutism Gets Us

AS a long time skeptic of polling, if even those companies that try to make a show of following allegedly scientific methods to do polling came up with a number of how many of those who voted for Trump have been turned off by his and his cronies antics in the weeks since the election, I wouldn't trust the number. 

 

But I'd like to have a real one because that number would give us the more important number of what percentage of Americans want a criminal fascist TV character strong-man as the dictator of the United States.  Because that's what Trump has proven himself to be, this week.   That number would be a real indication of just how dangerous the promotion of fascism by the media, TV, movies, hate talk radio, hate talk internet has been. And there is really no lying about that, Donald Trump is the second president in the post-WWII era who is the creation of entertainment media, Ronald Reagan, whose administration used to have the distinction of the most criminal administration in our history, his predecessor in Republicans giving us an As Seen on TV president.

Now that Trump has left Washington, perhaps for good, setting up a riot he may hope will spark an insurrection or just a major disaster that President Biden will have to deal with, mayhem by the Proud Boy types and other organized and disorganized fascists who should be investigated as organized criminals and their associations wiped out, groups that are already making plans to bring guns to the streets of Washington, DC on the day that the Congress is to put the final touch on the disgustingly baroque process of the Electoral College, we will be left with this as just more of the wreckage he has wrought.

Who knows what kind of crimes the febrile stupidity of Trump's major fan boys will cook up. I have thought of several that they could use to impose at least Republican rule on us even short of installing Trump against the result of the election, something that the fatheaded, slave-holding and thug financier founders reached out of their graves to do by law through the Electoral College.

I won't specify which methods I think might occur to the Proud Boys and other criminal gangsters - empowered through the stupid language of the First Amendment and Second Amendment - because if we're lucky enough for them to have not occurred to these upper-class, mid-brow, low-lives I won't take the chance that they might get the idea from me. 

 

Let me say that there are things they could do that would not be undone and that's thanks to the evil of our political system as set up in our Constitution, too. It wouldn't happen in a parliamentary system anywhere near as easily because of how that is structured. Our system is fraught with opportunities that the idiotic overriding system of our Constitution would hold to be totally legitimate. I may point that out after the new administration and the Congress is in place but not now, not with Trump trying to gin up an armed insurrection of angry white boys in a majority Black city where I'm sure many of them would just love to kill many civilians.

This is on the Republican Party, from the worst of the worst to the least of the worst who still remain in that party but it is also on our Constitutional system and not least of which by those parts of it which are most revered as sacred writ by the most equality and democracy loving liberals around. This is the last warning we are going to be given about the dangers of, first and foremost, allowing the mass media, "social media," total license to lie and gin up anti-equality, anti-democratic lies and to allow fascists, Nazis and other anti-equality, anti-democratic groups another chance to do what they have done before. I have noted here that far from it not being able to happen here, it most certainly has happened here and over centuries. It happened mostly to People of Color, the genocides of the Native Americans, the enslavement of Black People, the oppression of Women, the wage slavery of workers. All of that, to varying extents was it happening here, though our history, mostly the product of affluent white, straight, men will not call it that.

 

I will say, again, that any alleged liberal, leftist, moderate, center-right person who holds that the First Amendment means we must always allow the American Nazis, the KKK, the white supremacists, the anti-equality gangsters who do, in fact, govern many states in the United States, who have a near stranglehold on our politics even during Democratic presidencies now, whose enablers have been on Supreme Courts even during, perhaps most damming of all, during the Earl Warren years, another chance to make it happen here, yet again, is too stupid to grant respectability to. 

 

I would guess that that idiotic idea that bleats out "we MUST allow them the full benefits of the First Amendment, else we may be silenced," will be the reaction to that statement, I've had it thrown at me since the first time I pointed out how stupid it was to think that egalitarian democracy owed it to its enemies the chance of them organizing to destroy egalitarian democracy. That is, I think, the product of idiots who live in comfortable bastions of liberal politics and an upper-class milieu which feels itself unendangered from fascist goons, on the basis of their economic class, their racial and ethnic identities.  A lot of them are faculty at those factories of unreality, universities and colleges.   It is certainly nothing that any Black Person, any Native American or any member of any group which has been the beneficiary of that benevolence on behalf of violent fascist gangster thuggery should have any trouble seeing through. When some white "liberal" "civil liberties" type starts in on that, what they really mean is "they should have another chance to kill and enslave YOU."

Nothing Lighter Than Ususal Is Planned

Another blogger whose posts I read off and on is complaining that the Christmas-New Year slump in hits on her blog has started early this year.   I don't get revenue from hits so I never much bother to notice things like that.   I will probably just keep plugging away, politics getting in the way of festivities, I can't wait to see what Trump puts in his kids and cronies stockings the next few days,  I think him letting off those guys who lied or stonewalled for him and the four Eric Prince mercenary murderers off is just the start.  It's going to get dank, dark, filthy and disgusting before this term ends.   I doubt the Supreme Court will allow anything like overturning of corrupt pardons and other things.   I feel safe that I'll never have to eat that sentence.

I will clarify that that reference to a pirated DVD of The Regard of Flight refers to the collaborative clown show by the wonderful Bill Irwin, Michael O'Connor and Doug Skinner.  A good part of the text is a spoof of serious academic, pseudo-intellectual babble about theater.   By the time they'd made the show I'd long concluded that was BS, I think it was by the third month of my Freshman year in college when I concluded that. And I'm older than they are.  I did like the ventriloquist skit but lots of it was pretty funny too.   I'll watch it again before I give the disc back.  The music was pretty good, too.  I wonder what they'd make as a radio drama.  

O Emmanuel - Plain Chant - Peter Hallock

 

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,

expectatio gentium, et Salvator earum:

veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, our king and lawgiver,

the desire of all nations and their salvation:

come and save us, O Lord our God.

Latin: plainchant

English: Peter Hallock

Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Cincinnati 

 

Finding new settings of this one on YouTube was hard because there must be a googleplex of O Come O Come Emmanuel renditions there.   I tried one after another ever more specific search but was reduced to typing individual composers names in.  So much for the sophistication of search engine aphorisms being artificially intelligent.  More on that on the Feast of Adam and Eve or of Creation, as I prefer to think of the 24th.

 

I'm Asked What I Think Of The Trump Pardons

I have been warning people that the friggin' founders were a bunch of sleeveens who hated democracy and equality and the document and form of government they gave us were deeply corrupt and we're finding out with the most corrupt person to ever hold the presidency just how bad those documents are.

Every constitution human beings are capable of writing will at times be liable to the kind of corrupt interpretation that has brought us here, not all of that corruption has come with elected politicians, a lot of it came with corrupt, morally degenerate and rather stupid "justices" and judges and a few law clerks who installed things like "corporate personhood" into the habits of law. I strongly suspect we're on the verge of findout out just how corrupt, morally degenerate and willfully stupid the Supreme Court is when it claims that a corrupt, law breaking president can either pardon himself or issue pardons to those who protect him and his corrupt family and cronies from legal consequences for their crimes. When you turn a constitution into a sacred object, its writers into demi-gods you will find it very hard to correct it.  It took a terrible civil war to get just legal slavery out of the one those scumbags wrote in Philadelphia in 1787, I doubt we'll find getting rid of the worst of what's left will be anything except near impossible.

And that is the crux of the problem, that I the goddamned Constitution is an idol of secular civic religion, one mindlessly believed in by uninformed and stupid people and those who are fully informed and too stupid or cowardly to admit that it is the problem. It took me a long time to get to this point, witnessing the law breaking of Nixon, the Ford pardon, the crimes of the Reagan and Bush I regime, Bush I's ass-covering pardons at the end of his term, the quarter century of Republicans trying to gin up crimes to remove Bill Clinton and then to destroy him and Hillary Clinton, The Bush family installing Bush II - through rigging the Electoral College through the corrupt state of Florida governed by Jeb Bush, with help from FOX and Bush cousin John Ellis, the massive corruption of the Bush II regime, its lying us into one of the worst military operations inour history which killed hundreds of thousands based on a lie, his domestic corruption, that of the Cheney crime family, the Bush II economic disaster, the corrupt election of Trump with the help of James Comey bringing the fruit of the quarter of a century smear campaign of Republican-Republican-fascist media and allegely respectable media (Thanks to Supreme Courts saying the Constitution required allowing the media to lie with impunity) and getting Trump in through the electoral college . . . Somewhere in that half century of witness of the Constitution in action, I came to the conclusion that it was the problem, the anti-democratic aspects of it, the Electoral College, the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian constitution of the Senate, the anti-democratically constituted Senate given confirmation power, the power to totally obstruct in the way that Mitch McConnell has, nullifying the election of Barack Obama, and with such stupid things as the stupidly inspecific pardon powers granted to presidents - I will remind you that George H. W. Bush already abused them to cover up his criminal liability - with the help of William Barr, something that was not corrected in the intervening decades. 

The cult of the Constitution is an artificial habit of culture, one that would never have been so widely and successfully installed if it wasn't a document that served the interests of the rich and powerful over the interests of the large majority of humanity.   Ours is an instrument of privilege for the rich and the disadvantaging of the poor and powerless, the original thing envisioned only those with property would be allowed to so much as vote. 

It's only going to get worse. The next Republican-fascist president will see the way carved out by his predecessor criminals and he will push it farther, or perhaps she will. The media will not act as any kind of inhibition on it anymore than they have with the previous line of Republican criminal regimes. And it won't happen unless Democrats start playing the hardest of hard ball politics, punishing states where a controlling majority are all-in on this kind of corruption, blocking farm bills, etc. meting out punishment to states that run corrupt elections, etc. And attacking the media as it is a full partner in this corruption.

You Get Rid Of Stories You're Going To Find Yourself With Very Little In The Way Of Human Culture

Just a quick follow up to yesterday's posts.   Looking at David Bentley Hart's translation of Luke's Gospel, it struck me how the text, at least twice, heavily implies that the narrative of Jesus' birth, the visit of the Shepherds, right up till she and Joseph find Jesus in the temple at the age of 12, wowing the scholars and Rabbis with his erudition are based on "sayings" that Mary "kept in her heart."  So it's obvious that at least Luke was relying on her testimony or testimony she passed on to someone who told it to him.  As for the Magnificat clearly being inspired by Hannah's own song of praise, why shouldn't a Jewish woman be familiar with it  and having it called to mind when her own life reminded her of it?   

I don't know if any of that happened through first hand knowledge but that's true for 99.9999999999+ percent of the past and present that falls outside of my personal witness or which has multiple attestations or evidences.   

I meant it when I said that human understanding of complex events relied on putting them into a narrative context. If you want to make hay over that you'll have to put up with the way that the Trump regime, the Republican-fascist party and the corporate media have dissolved trust in the truth because it relies on the same methods of pat debunkery that you want to bring to this story.   I don't remember, weren't you one of the ones who got mad when I ripped apart Dawkins "first bird to call out" Just-So story as lacking not only the level of evidence required for science but, really, any level of evidence and that it, furthermore, was mathematically impossible to both have the scenario occur and it having the results Dawkins claimed for it and, furthermore, it transformed superior eyesight and hearing into mal-adaptations, all of those eviscerating the natural selection that was both Dawkins' motive in making up his story, a story made up with the goal of providing evidence for natural selection, adding the logical sin of question begging to total incompetence?   You see, you atheists are in love with your stories, even when they're rather stupid ones.

 I meant it to be a corny joke.   I was mocking the accusation so often made among the college credentialed of not having a sense of humor as a value judgement in a system of artificial, superficial and conventional secular rejection of the more exigent and often less personally gratifying traditional morality which presents having a sense of humor as if it were a transcendent definition of the good, as in "What do you want in a husband," or, in the appropriate context based on gender preference, "a wife," answered by, after a conventional pause in a simplistic pose of giving the question due consideration, "He," or "She has to have a sense of humor," as if that will mean they will stand by you in sickness or health, for better or worse, in a caring faithful relationship until death do you part.  Or pay the bills.

Sorry, I watched a pirate video of Regard of Flight last night and the text is kind of sticking with me. 

A teaching nun was doing a lesson for Career Day, she asked Mary O'Brien what she wanted to be when she grew up and Mary said,  "A prostitute".   The nun was horrified, she said,  "What did you say you wanted to be when you grew up?   "A prostitute."  

The nun sighed in relief and said, 

"Oh, for a second there I though you said a Protestant." 

No Sense of Humor?

A Catholic was walking by a monastery, he looked in the kitchen window and he saw a someone making french fries.  

 

He walked up to the window and said,  You must be the friar.

 

The monk said,  No, I'm the chip monk. 

 

Timing. 

 

I Like Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's Idea Of The Secretary of Defense Recalling Michael Flynn To Active Duty And Court Marshalling Him

 

I didn't think I'd agree with so many military officers as I have over this period of Trump gangster sedition and insurrection.   While I think it's essential to get rid of the kind of thugs, fascists and traitors in the military I have come to have some respect for some of these professionals who turn out to have real  moral and ethical substance whereas so many of the lawyers don't.

O Rex Gentium With The Magnficat - Gregorian Chant

 

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,

lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:

veni, et salva hominem.

quem de limo formast.

O King of the nations, and their desire,

the cornerstone making both one;

Come and save humanity

who you fashioned from clay.

 

Magnificat anima mea Dominum;

Et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo,

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae; ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est, et sanctum nomen ejus,

Et misericordia ejus a progenie in progenies timentibus eum.

Fecit potentiam in bracchio suo;

Dispersit superbos mente cordis sui.

Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles.

Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes.

Suscepit Israel, puerum suum, recordatus misericordiae suae,

Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros, Abraham et semini ejus in saecula.

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,

sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper: et in Saecula saeculorum. Amen.

 

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,

my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for He has looked with favor on His humble servant.

From this day all generations will call me blessed,

the Almighty has done great things for me,

and holy is His Name.

He has mercy on those who fear Him

in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm,

He has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,

and has lifted up the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich He has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of His servant Israel

for He has remembered his promise of mercy,

the promise He made to our fathers,

to Abraham and his children for ever.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,

as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever.

I Should Give You This Today Too

At the same time. Mary's characterization of herself as the "slave" of the Lord is the text most responsible for the impression of her as a passive character, the antithesis of a liberated woman. In this Luke's way of setting her up as the model for submissive feminine behavior and of articulating the acceptance of patriarchal belief in female inferiority, dependence, and helplessness? Slaves held the lowest position within the Israelite, Jewish and Christian communities and were without rights at law, unable to won property, or have a family or a genealogy in the proper sense. The term "slave" has a shock value that can be felt by those today who are aware of their heritage of slavery and who are anguished by the slavery that exists in our world. Luke, however surely intends the term to have a positive value here. It must be seen in connection with the Jewish use of the honrary title "slave of God," applied to a few outstanding men of Israelite history [Moses, Joshua, Abraham, David Isaac, the prophets, Jacob] and to one woman [Hannah].* The word associates Mary also with Jesus, portrayed as among the disciples "as one who serves" (22:27) though not called "slave," and with the female slaves on whom God's spirit would be poured out "in the last days" making them prophets (Acts 2:17-18, citing Joel 2:29-32).

Jane Schaberg

 

It is one of the most obvious things about the history of Christianity since it first gained official status in the Roman Empire that the words that Jesus said about the last being first, that those wanting to be the greatest of his followers had to make themselves the lowest, serving all, becoming the servant of all, perhaps a "slave" to all masters was not the model of leadership followed either among those who professed their secular power was either at the will of God or in the service of Christianity or, in fact, in most of the history of Popes, bishops, priests, ministers, even in many cases monks and women religious, though I will say that the lower down in the ranks you get the more often they did try to live that longest or metaphorical crucifixions were taken up and lived out. I don't know but that the farther down you get the more often service to the poorest among us got the women religious, monks, priests, even bishops the crucifixion of martyrdom. That has certainly been the case in our time.

That that was certainly not how those texts were read and still are read by those who practice earthly power is true, it is as true that there have been Christians, certainly from the time we have women of education leaving us writing, as many monks and friars and brothers have, even some of the earliest theologians and saints, they have seen things at least generally along those lines. If they understood anything about what Luke says about Mary in that context, I don't know. 

 

* Certainly Luke had that in mind because the text of Mary's song where that is said parallels Hannah's song in a similar context in 1 Samuel 2:1-10. These are things that are, of course, lost on most casual readers of hearers of Luke most of whom probably aren't aware of Hannah's song (If Mary did say what Luke has her saying, she certainly knew that verse). I don't think the oppressive use to which the Magnificat has been put to by sexists in churches (none of them much more so that the Catholic Church) can be excused by ignorance. The men who used it that way could certainly have been expected to know all of those verses, the ones about the last being first, the least among them being the representation of God, the "slavery" accepted by Mary not being like slaves would be treated like people, women treated universally by men. Their convenient, self-serving, preferred and willful misreading of them has universally dominated the position of women in Christianity right up and well into the modern period.  

Jesus And Mary As Even Lower Than The Least Among Them

IN Jane Schaberg's commentary on Luke's Gospel, found in The Women's Bible Commentary she says:

 

In contemporary New Testament scholarship the tendency is to find the virginal conception asserted in Matthew and less clearly (if at all) in Luke.  It has been claimed that Luke 1 can be read as not about a virginal conception.  Read in and for itself, without the overtones of the Matthean account (so the argument goes) every detail of it can be understood as referring to a child to be conceived in the usual human way.   Gabriel appears to Mary who is at that time a virgin and tells her she will conceive a son.  Her question in 1:34 stresses that she and Joseph are in the period of betrothal and not having sexual relations.  The question gives Gabiel an opening to speak about the character of the child to be born. Gabriel's statement in 1:35 about the Holy Spirit "coming upon" and "overshadowing" Mary is a figurative way of speaking about the child's special relation to God not implying the absence of human paternity (cf Gal 4:29 where Isaac is called "the child who was born according to the Spirit.").

Conception  with Joseph as the biological father is an idea not expressly denied in Luke 1 or 2, however,it is denied in 3:23:  Jesus is only the "supposed' child of Joseph.  The reader who understands Luke 1 to be about a normal conception is thus faced with another alternative, the biological fatherhood of some unnamed person and the illegitimacy of Jesus.  It is possible that both evangelists inherited a tradition of the illegitimacy of Jesus and transmitted it very differently.  Both evangelists it must be pointed out, stress the Messiahship and holiness of the child (Matt, 1:21, 23;  Luke  1:31, 35), in spite of or perhaps because of his origins.

 

When Luke's account is viewed as preserving and working with a tradition of Jesus'  illegitimacy, several of its details fall into place.  For example, in the dialogue between Gabriel and Mary, Gabriel's response (1:34) is not an explanation of how the pregnancy is to come about but is a statement of reassurance, urging trust.  The verbs "come upon" and "overshadow" promise empowerment and protection (cf. Acts 1:8, Luke 9:34).  These verbs have no sexual or creative connotations.  Mary's question "How?" is sidestepped and remains unanswered.  This scene echoes aspects of the commissioning or call or prophets. But Mary is commissioned to be a mother, not a prophet.  Her response is to consent freely to motherhood (1:38).  With this expression of her consent in faith Luke creates the positive portrait of Mary as model believer. 

Jane Schaberg goes on with a deep and critical commentary on Luke presenting Mary as "a passive character, the antithesis of a liberated woman," from a point of view I can't imagine coming from any but the most astute of male commentators, and I doubt any of those have had such insights into the account.  See what I said about why I've come to respect Scripture commentary over just the kind of ignorant reading a novice like me can bring to it.  And I came with a predisposition to be open minded on the things I believe and don't believe about it, many readers already have their mind made up before they start. I don't have to find everything that a scholar like Ms. Schaberg says believable but I'm not stupid enough to discount informed commentary on it.  I do think that Luke's account can well be read as Mary being more than "just" a mother.   From Luke you have to conclude that she was the first to act as a Christian priest, bringing the body and blood of Jesus into the world and as the first preacher of  the good news.  For me, arguing with opponents of Catholic Women Priests, I've said that in a more profound way than any male priest, Mary, by the very doctrine and tradition of Catholicism, must have been the first Christian priest.   

But the idea of an "illegitimacy tradition" concerning Jesus is one I not only find interesting, it's clear there was one from early in the history of Christianity - it is well documented in pagan debunkery of Christianity and it is attributed by them to "the Jews" - and it's certainly one you can imagine the opponents of Jesus probably made hay out of during his lifetime.  Having lived in a small town all my life, I know how easy gossip about women and speculation about the "legitimacy" of their children is to create and once told, it spreads far easier than assertions of virtue.  I doubt that was not the case in small towns and large around the Mediterranean basin back then.

The only person who could know if Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived would be Mary, as the Luke narrative has her saying, she'd never had sex with a man when the angel told her she was pregnant, maybe she did say that. Whether or not she remained a virgin is certainly not revealed anywhere in the Bible I know of, that was a development of later speculation, especially as the Middle Ages wore on and an ever more elaborate cult of the Virgin grew in Catholicism and to an extent Orthodox Christianity. The Mary of the Gospels is hardly to be found in it.

I'm not interested in the virginity of Mary or the possible human father of Jesus - I maintain that the improbability of earliest Christianity getting anything out of telling the story leads me to conclude that it was widely believed by them, and they were closer to it than I'll ever get - but I am interested in how the dubious nature of the story of the Virgin Birth adds depth to the teachings of Jesus and how it adds depth to the entire Jewish tradition of justice.

As I more or less started out during Advent, both the dubiousness and the scandalous salaciousness of the claims of the Virgin Birth narrative in the Matthews Gospel and its implication in the Luke Gospel would have led to a rational decision by the authors of the Gospels leaving it out.

They would certainly have known that a telling of that story would be fertile ground for their opponents to sow the idea that Mary was a tramp who slept around with Roman soldiers (as I pointed out, along with the industry in creating a cult of the Virgin, there was an opposing one creating things like a Roman father of Jesus named Panthera and many other lines of lore). The Roman Empire and Mediterranean culture was saturated in one of the more rigid forms of patriarchal forms of honor concerning the virginity of brides, their monogamous attachment to a husband (though husbands, in many cases could have more than one controlled wife) and the strict legitimacy of children as the offspring of their fathers. That was as true for Jewish culture as it was for pagan cultures, certainly the Greek culture that had so thoroughly influenced first century culture in the Middle East. It is to be noted that even with the radical transformation of the Gospels and the Epistles, that aspect of the paganism that influenced the formations of the various Christian churches was not much less malignant than it was at the time of Jesus' birth. Women thought to be or gossiped about were not treated all that much better, though they weren't as likely to get stoned to death, in many places they were likely to be murdered by their fathers, brothers or husbands. That is true today as, for example, in the United States male jealousy is one of the leading causes of violent death of women in the United States.

They knew they were telling a story that would have to have had to originally been claimed to be true by a young girl who was reportedly pregnant before she should have been, to a man she claimed to have never slept with - he'd certainly have known if that were the case, as it says in Matthew - and with an angel coming to tell her the news to start with. Who would have believed her before her son grew up to be a wonder worker and prophetic preacher?   And as soon as he started to become famous, they'd have had all the more reason to bring up those old rumors about him.

I've pointed out that the implausibility of the story would rationally lead to the conclusion that unless the ones writing it down really believed in the Virgin Birth really believed it, it is one of the things they would have left out if they'd heard that claim, as possibly the authors of the Mark and John Gospels discretely did. Though it's possible they'd never heard those claims.

It wouldn't be worth repeating this if it wasn't for something else about the salacious, gossip and snark generating aspects of the story if not believed as told by the young girl who was pregnant when she shouldn't have been. No doubt a lot of people who knew her, who knew her son didn't believe it. No doubt they would be suspicious if the son didn't look like Joseph (would he have if the Virgin Birth were by the action of the Holy Spirit?)  No doubt those who didn't know either but heard the story and were too wised-up to believe it for a second would say obviously Mary was a tramp and Jesus was a bastard, not the son of the guy she eventually got to marry her, even though she slept around. Celsus has her getting thrown out by Joseph for being a tramp, though as far as I know he's the only one who said that.

If Jesus couldn't have been born any lower than to have parents of the lowest economic, social and political class, born on a trip to a strange city, in what we come to think of as a barn where animals are kept - as I like to remind everyone with their manure and urine soaking any bedding that might, or might not have been there for them, flies, insects, rats, mice, put to sleep in their feed trough (seldom the most hygienic of places in even a well kept barn) put on top of that the story makes him and his mother the topic of gossip, the target of mockery and slander, certainly lower than the poorest women and children who at least had no sexual scandal and illegitimacy attached to them, in later mockery, him the son of a detested foreigner, an occupying Roman soldier of probably not much more respectable circumstances in his own milieu. Jesus would have grown up among children and adults who would not only have looked askance at his mother and him but likely would have said it, what she was suspected of a crime that might have gotten her stoned to death, maybe the reason Joseph married her - they wouldn't have found his dream revelation in Matthew much more convincing than Mary's story in Luke. Some of them might have respected Joseph as a stand-up guy, or desperate for any wife, even one who was going to present him with a Roman soldier's bastard to raise, but most of them would have seen him along the same lines as Bontsche Schweig in Isaac Loeb Peretz's rather cynical telling of the story.

Of course none of that is elaborated in the Gospels and it isn't a point I recall any early commentators pointing out. When Jesus says in that great passage in Matthew 25 that what you do for and do not do for the least among you, you do for God, he could very well have a really good idea of how least the least among us can be because it's not unlikely that even in the milieu of the lowest of the low, he may well have been lowered by the denial of the one and only thing that so many of the lowest will guard jealously, the respectability of their very person and, even more so, that of their mother.