A Holiday About Nothing

 NEW YEARS IS THE MOST blaah holiday other than Flag Day.  Good reason to go to bed at nine the 31st and to wake up late.  Other than changing the calendar and start practicing writing a new number never could see what people saw in it.  

At least I won't have to hear some adenoidal goof intone the most boring song in the English language, John Lennon's overblown atheist drone, Imagine.   It doesn't even have the life in it that the most pedestrian Psalm tone does.  Those mean something. 

They should have kept the old one, it was gooey and annoying but at least it wasn't pretentious and flaccid and vapid.  

Actually, they should have cancelled the whole thing.  It's the Seinfeld of holidays, a holiday about nothing. 

Hate Mail - The Moral Problems And Necessary Limits of Unlimited Pluralism Are There And We Supporters Of Pluralism Must Face That

SAID IT BEFORE and I'll say it now, the religious pluralism that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said he believed was preferred by God is something I believe is likely true.   It is one of those things that my more mature reading of the Jewish Scriptures sees right there unnoticed in plain sight, God is presented as having made covenants with other Peoples who weren't part of the Children of Israel, God is presented as caring about those People and their moral lives, the Children of Israel are commanded to treat foreigners among them as equals even as God commands the same Children of Israel to follow the their own religious and moral path which includes that pluralistic moral egalitarianism.  And what was taught in the First Testament is expanded by Jesus into the second testament such as in the parable of the Good Samaritan holding  and on to the ultimate of of loving even those who are our enemies and praying for them and not discriminating against them and violently repelling them. 

But in life, human life and culture and politics and secular law that radical ideal will have to have limits.  Ideologies that glorify in the opposite of those, in discrimination against, enslavement of and murder of other groups identified as "others" by a favored group will create intolerable conditions and human beings will not be able to live with that, ultimately.  

Hitler voiced his admiration of the Spartans who violently and murderously enslaved large numbers of Helots and imagined his Aryan Reich doing what they did on a far larger scale.  The American white supremacists would do the same here if they could get the power to do that and our Constitutional system is under active manipulation by the Republican Party to give them that upper hand.   When I say "American white supremacists" you can substitute the actual entity that is bringing that about, the billionaire and millionaire oligarchs and other gangsters who are behind the empowerment of the overt fascists, racism and other forms of identity hatred is merely one of their most important means of doing that, the corruptibility of lawyers, judges, "justices" and politicians almost as potent but working on fewer numbers. 

I think there has to be a distinction made in this, that those religions and ideologies that accept pluralism and egalitarian democracy can be accepted as working equals in the shared civic life of People of good will.   Along with that is the moral responsibility of both identifying and rejecting those religious denominations and ideologies that refuse and reject pluralism and egalitarian democracy. AND THOSE IMPOSSIBLE TO GET ALONG WITH IDEOLOGIES ARE DISTRIBUTED ACROSS THE BOARD.   The sects and denominations within Christianity that reject the equality of the sexes, races, other religious believers, and LGBTQ people are not worthy of inclusion within what is acceptable or, ultimately, tolerable in a society that seeks egalitarian democracy and the rule of good will.   

Even the groups and cults within different denominations include those who do accept that list of requirements for an equally distributed decent life and those who reject it.  Catholicism right now clearly has that self-chosen division into those who side with the line of Vatican II and the billionaire financed "traditional Catholics" who reject egalitarianism and pluralism and equal rights.  It is the difference between the Catholicism of Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the Catholicism of Amy Coney Barret and Brett Kavanaugh.  That it is dramatically obvious in their legal decisions on the Supreme Court that their religious orientation within Catholicism is very much in line with their legal decisions proves that this is, in fact, an extremely important matter in every practical way.   In one case, that of Justice Sotomayor, she favors egalitarian democracy and pluralism, in the case of the two "justices" they favor Republican-fascism, the rule of money owned by billionaire and millionaire gangsters, the ability of states to practice American style apartheid, the subjugation of women, in time they will roll back the protections of marriage equality and other hard fought reforms of the 20th and even 19th century and the destruction of the environment for profit.  They will, very soon, on a partisan basis, reject the ability of President Biden and Democratic governors to issue effective rules to prevent the spread of Covid-19.  

There is a difference between loving your enemies and praying for them and tolerating their empowerment to oppress, enslave, murder and set up a regime of Nazi or Soviet or American supported strong-man rule so as to bring about an era of grinding oppressive evil.  There is a difference between living with the differences that lead to different sects and denominations and even more basic religious differences on a basis of good will and mutual respect and living with sects, denominations and, perhaps, even larger divisions of religious identity which reject the bases of good will and mutual respect and living together in difference but in love and good will.  I don't think, as the stupid secular law would have it that we must make believe those differences are not obvious and must be allowed because judges and "justices" are either not trustworthy or honest enough to hold their jobs making such distinctions or because they want to pretend they are that stupid because they don't want the stupid and sleazy ones on a higher court to embarrass them by overruling their decisions.  And that is just how stupid our legal system is right now, pretending that con men and hucksters and liars those harnessing religiously gullible into political power and wealth are the same thing as the living saints among us.   I certainly wouldn't favor the violent oppression of the enemies of the common good but even more so I reject their empowerment on the basis of the inadequate language of the First Amendment - perhaps as dangerous as the inadequate language of the Second one.  

It is by their own choices that the enemies of good will, of equality, of a common, decent life for all remove themselves from the moral and rational tolerance for difference that should have an equal footing under law just as an alcoholic with a bad driving record removes themselves from those who should have a license to drive and the legal right to own a car.  

I will add as another practical example that under the Republican-fascist legal and political madness that we face right now, supported by ideologues and religious cultists, the sanity of depriving the dangerously mentally ill from having and carrying assault weapons is another kind of "equality" that is not only insanely irresponsible, no matter how the "justices" allowing it will come up with written "reasoning" to do the unreasonable, it's getting lots of us killed and that cannot go on forever, unstopped.  Moral pluralism cannot extend that far, not even when they call it religion advocated by millionaire hallelujah peddlers.

I Hope The High Class Child Trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell Saves Her Own Skin By Talking About The Rich, Powerful and Famous Men Who Also Raped Children

ANYONE WHO EXPECTS the convicted panderer and sex abuser, the rich, well-connected, deemed beautiful and attractive Ghislaine Maxwell will ever do anything out of a sense of shame and fear of ultimate consequences for her moral depravity is likely not correct.  Though I believe in the possibility of redemption, she'd be as hard a case for it taking hold as the scumbag rapist and child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and her own father, Robert Maxwell. 

I would like to know what she knew about the activities in the world of Epstein-Maxwell of a long list, Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz,  Bill Barr and is father, huge numbers of elite scientists and academics, people in the world of the sciences and the arts and finance.  I would love to know the relationship of Epstein and Maxwell to the new atheist fad of the 00's and on to today.   I wouldn't be surprised if their role in it was quite similar to the last Stalinist trust-fund atheist Corliss Lamont (the "last" might be slightly exaggerated, the "Stalinist" is spot on) with the immediate predecessors in organized anti-religion and atheism.   

I would, of course, like to see her spend the rest of a long life in prison for what she did as I wish he had, I really hope that what led to the death of Jeffrey Epstein - and I fully suspect he was murdered to keep him from fingering the rich, the powerful and the elite, being especially suspicious of the role Bill Barr played in his last hours - does not happen to her.   I would like her to truly, deeply, fully and effectively repent for her evil and try to do something to repair some of the damage to many girls and young women she gulled into the hands of Epstein and the men who raped and assaulted and tortured them, she is proven to have participated in that, as well.  I don't know if any other women were guilty as of now 

I would like that, I'm not waiting up nights.  I hope she has many nights awake with her consciousness of what brought her to where she is and I hope she comes to feel truly sorry for her sins.   If that happens, it's a good thing for her to go to prison because I doubt she would ever do it without prison.  It could be the best thing that has ever happened to her in her privileged, sordid, evil life.   Who knows, perhaps her telling what she knows about the dangerously rich and powerful and famous men will be part of that.  What I hope for her I also hope for them, their victims should be so lucky as to have a fittingly different and strong possibility for grace to be provided for them.   They deserve to have the metastasizing damage inflicted on them end and be repaired.

After That Depressing Post I Needed To Post Something More Hopeful

 

Direct link to video

I have to say watching them transplant the second female tree in what looked like deadly dry sand to me was kind of jarring but it's clear they know the territory better than I do.   I'd have to really change my thinking to do that kind of gardening. 

Of all the things I found out about in 2021, this was one of the ones that made me feel better about things. 

Chris Hayes' Realistic View Of Our Near Term Future Was One Of The Best I've Heard All During Covid But It Only Points To Understanding

 

Direct link to video 

My take on this is that all of the good that we can get from the freedom to determine our own lives and the course of our societies is defeated when that is turned to irresponsible, selfish, self-centered liberty to do whatever we want without responsibility.   I know using the word "liberty" so popular with, especially, conservatives but also with secular liberals in that contrast is bound to be everything from confusing to enraging but that's what it is.  Liberty removed from the morality of the Golden Rule which we cannot seem to extend to even our fellow humans, will always be a mortal danger to someone.  In this case, since a virus is involved, to everyone.

In the last part of Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Subversion (or Sub-Version) of Reality he said that what is a proper lesson of kindergarten is also part of the relevant business of the university.   I think it can be condensed in the real, effective, responsible and consistent practice of moral responsibility and the fetish of liberty and individualism which is the underside of the credo of American civic faith is and always will be in opposition to that moral responsibility.  In normal times it is far less dramatically obvious to most people what the consequences of that selfish irresponsibility is because its consequences are not made real in a viral disease that can kill you or seriously disable you, very likely in some cases permanently.   

If, as I believe most likely, the disease originated in the brutally cruel wet market captivity and slaughter of wild animals so rich people could eat meat - AND LET'S NOT KID OURSELVES, IT COULD WELL HAVE ORIGINATED IN AN AMERICA, EUROPEAN OR THIRD-WORLD PIG MEAT OR CHICKEN OR DUCK OPERATION - its origin is from acts of callous human selfishness and feeding appetites. 

If, and though I don't believe it the idea is not entirely implausible, the virus was a result of human manipulation in a scientific lab, it was, again, created in an act of dubious responsibility, certainly one of wisdom generating something that scientists who never consider morality as a part of their purely scientific work certainly should have thought many times over whether or not they should do it.  I can't know if it was out of professional interest, the eternal quest among scientists to have something else to publish or, if it was to be concealed, to get them approval at work, or if it was merely the kind of scientific curiosity that I once heard an ex-Soviet scientist say led him to try to create the most deadly possible viruses he could construct with the tool of breeding he had at his dispose.  The ability of scientists to manipulate DNA at a level they can now makes the choice to permit science to be done merely out of a quest for knowledge and not with a strong hand of considering moral responsibility is probably one of the more dangerous things in human culture today.  I think it could turn out to be the thing that turns our ability to do science and the modernism that included the rise of modern science divorced from questions of morality into the definitive maladaptation as Darwinists conceive of them, leading to the extinction of our species as, in fact, science has given us the amorally used power to drive so many thousands of other species into extinction. 

It's been my experience of talking to some of them that many scientists don't even want us to consider the possibility that it originated in the work of scientists, as if they are not as prone to unintentionally carry a deadly virus out of the lab as a worker in raising animals in the meat industry could.   Even that level of moral awareness and reflection is anathema to them.  In the West, they don't even want the inconvenience of considering that their laxly supervised, dopey kid grad assistants are quite capable of getting infected and then going out into the wider world.  And I do think a lot of that is a matter of professional, faculty convenience. 

If what Chris Hayes said didn't scare you enough, I'll leave you with that thought, that the science that may save us from this one, and that's entirely dependent on medical, epidemiological and other branches of science being made effective by a morality that is absent from science, itself and that could be swamped by either the amorality of our feeding our appetites without regard for the suffering of our fellow creatures.  Or that scientists on the make are allowed to do some stupendously dangerous things that can escape the lab and spread like the Covid-19 virus has, even more dangerous things.   Though I think in this case it was viruses passing among different species, picking up mutations and passing into the human beings selling the miserable creatures to people to eat them.  The next one could, as ones in the past have, come from an American pig breeding operation or a chicken meat factory.   

It all started in allowing huge areas of human activity to sluff off moral considerations instead of practicing them.  As even the discussion of moral considerations became unfashionable and then distasteful in our pursuit of  liberty that has successfully been transformed from a value intrinsically wedded to responsibility into an idol of self-indulgence, there's nothing else to stop our self-extinction. 

You Save Humans And Animals Alike, O Lord - The Radical Salvation Possibilities Of The Belief That Jesus Was God Incarnated Which Is Unique To Christianity - A Christmas Post

WHILE NOT NOW INTENDING to transcribe her entire and great lecture about Deep Incarnation Theology, I am thinking of transcribing large sections of Sr. Elizabeth A. Johnson's lecture from last year "You save humans and animals alike, O Lord (Psalm 36:6) Reshaping Our Imagination of Salvation."   I am posting it here for anyone who wants to understand what I meant when I said Creation Theology was my preferred theological understanding.   I reject the traditional Catholic theology - though I think it's actually mostly a product of 17th century modernism - that radically limits the realm of salvation to a minority of the human population.  It is, I think, a product of the introduction of some of the more unfortunate Classical era pagan philosophy into the far broader implications of the greater Hebrew tradition, one which is far more in line with the ideology of the triad of control in Walter Brueggemann's lecture which I dealt with most of this month.  

I will admit that partly it is a response to the impending death of my sisters old and beloved dog, a dog I've known and had companionship with me for the past ten years - he was a tornado rescue dog who they estimated was three to four years old when she adopted him.  Partly it's a means of coping with the catastrophic consequences of the global environmental crimes of all People and all places putting the triad of control in power to govern us.  

The Deep Incarnation Theology like the Liberation Theology that I also like so much is the real alternative to that materialistic triad.  If it is folly then it is the kind of holy folly that Jesus exemplified and encouraged in his most radical of all programmatic triads, as Brueggemann talked about early in his lecture. 

If Sr. Johnson or whoever has the rights to her speech would not like me to transcribe it (I'm sure her text, if it is published, will be superior to my efforts) I would like them to tell me by posting a comment.  I will honor such a request.  If it's OK with her, I'd like to know that too.  Though I doubt she'll hear about this.  I'm always open to correction.  I love being corrected as opposed to the alternative of being mistaken.  

Here it is with the warning that the introduction goes on for about three and a quarter minutes.  

Direct link to video.

I Wish It Wasn't Thus But We MUST Learn The Lessons Of The Worse Than Futile Twenty-Years-War

I READ FORMER BRIT PRIME MINISTER Gordon Brown article in The Guardian decrying the humanitarian catastrophe that Afghanistan under Taliban and continuing war-lord rule is and have no idea of how he thinks "the West" could possibly do anything to improve things that twenty years of Western propped up governance of the country, costing trillions of dollars - much of it stolen - couldn't do.   

As I was reading it and its condemnation-exhortation of "the West" for not preventing what may be a catastrophe outside of our control AS, INDEED, MOST OF AFGHANISTAN WAS NOT IN "OUR" CONTROL FOR MOST OF THE PERIOD OF PROPPING UP THE ALLEGED CENTRAL GOVERNMENT,  I kept wondering, why is Gordon Brown not haranguing the Saudi and other oil rich oligarchies of the Middle-East to provide the 4.5 billion dollars he's calling on the West to pledge, not to mention the unmentioned prospect of re-involving westerners in a country so many of them and our Afghani allies had to be emergency rescued from and some of those eligible trapped by the deadline Trump set for American withdrawal.

I deplore the humanitarian catastrophe that Taliban rule and the consequences of that, largely foreign financed religio-gangster regime have brought  BUT IT IS CLEAR FROM THE TWO DECADE LONG EXPERIMENT OF TRYING TO REFORM AFGHANISTAN IN THE WAY BROWN WANTS, THE WAY HIS GOVERNMENT WANTED WHEN IT WAS PART OF THE COALITION FIGHTING TO SUPPORT A  GOVERNMENT LARGELY OF CROOKS AND LIARS THAT IT CAN'T BE DONE.  

We have no power to do what has to be done, if there was evidence that we would have even partial success instead of the kind of futile debacle that the Bush II, Obama, Trump Twenty-Year War that Biden finished was.  We have no power to change Afghanistan to rescue it from itself or what it is under the combined force of internal warlord gangsters, foreign financed religio-fascist-gansters, the power plays of surrounding countries and billionaire gangster money from the oil cleptocracies.  

We have got to get used to the fact that a terrible, violent, ruinously expensive twenty-year experiment has shown us the fate of those being destroyed by that reality IN THAT PLACE  is not in our hands.  We have no responsibility for what happens there, now, those who drove our efforts into disastrous ruin have that responsibility, they and their backers among the gangsters of the middle east and the Afghanistan region.  That they will almost certainly not take their responsibility seriously and will suffer no consequences is beyond our control.   I think, ironically, the one person in the West who will suffer the most from it is the one man who was brave enough who, when Trump along with his cronies in the region set an arbitrary end of America's presence in Afghanistan had the courage to face what that would bring, President Biden.   He will pay the price because the media-political-economic-academic establishment have seldom seen a futile and violent and dangerous incursion into an impossible war in an economically backward (non-)country that they didn't want the United States to commit to.

If Gordon Brown, ex-PM wants to make something of it, he should be lecturing those who have some real influence within Afghanistan.  Outside attempts from the West have never done much but make things worse at worst, merely revert to the status quo ante, at best. 

We should concentrate on getting any remaining American allies trapped in that hell hole out, we have a real moral commitment to those who trusted us from the time of Bush II, Obama and Trump.  The same ones who President Biden's political and media enemies are libeling and slandering so to hurt President Biden politically.  The others, we can cry for and plead for but we really can't help them.  If they want to blame someone they should blame the Saudis and others who created the Taliban and the Pakistani and Iranian power players and their own internal gangster-warlords and the culture that sustains that hell hole situation.  We have guilt there as a result of our war there but what's always been wrong with the place isn't something we are guilty of.

"Institutionalists" Should Have A Dictionary Definition "Those who will stand by spewing empty words as democracy is destroyed"

MERRICK GARLAND IS IN VIOLATION OF HIS OATH OF OFFICE, he is the kind of Department of Justice functionary which we learned about during the House Intelligence and Justice committee's hearings into Trump's illegal attempts to shake down the Ukrainian government to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden before the 2020 election.   I will never stop noting that in those hearings it was the lawyers, especially those associated with the Department of Justice who were empty suits with feet of clay even while it was clear that people in the Department of Defense and the State Department acted as brave patriots who are devoted to democracy and the rule of law in a way the large majority of lawyers proved they didn't.  When the diplomats and military officers called to testify were able to note how they stood up for democracy, the lawyers covered their own asses and used their devotion to their various institutions, the Department of Justice, so called, and the FBI. 

I don't know who in the Biden administration thought Merrick Garland would be a good Attorney General, they were tragically wrong.   If it was the same bunch who convinced Obama to nominate him to the Supreme Court, I'd like to know because they shouldn't have a hand in any kind of decision like that.  If it was Joe Biden's decision, alone, I pray that he does something about his big mistake before it's too late.  And I don't mean nominating him to the Supreme Court.

The graduates of the elite law schools, especially those Ivy League schools that have comprised a majority on the degraded and rotten Supreme Court have proven to be at best a very weak link in the security of democracy in the United States.  Democrats should have a stated and practiced policy of increasing the diversity in the higher courts to lessen the influence of, especially, Harvard Law, Yale, Princeton and the other schools which have given us so many of the worst Supreme Court "justices," Attorneys General and others who have done so much to use the law to destroy democracy and those who, allegedly devoted to democracy, such as Garland, will, nonetheless, let Republican-fascists burn it up so as not to disturb the cotillion-like propriety of their own, according to its rules, faultless professional life.   The nice order that Merrick Garland upholds in his nonfeasance is exactly what the economist Thorstein Veblen called "futile classicism" only he was talking about something that was innocuous, standard English spelling.   The futile classicism that Merrick Garland is upholding is giving the Peter Navarro-Steve Bannon fascists more than their January 6th putsch and criminal conspiracy among Republicans in Congress did. 

Please, President Biden, tell Merrick Garland to resign while it's still possible to replace him with someone who will do his goddamned job.

Pandemic Premieres: A Voice is Heard in Ramah - music by David Walters art by Mary Chomenko Hinckley

 

 

 

Pandemic Premieres is a series of videos produced by the Portland State Chamber Choir during the Covid-19 era. Each video is the world premiere performance of a new choral work by a members or alumni of the choir combined with artwork by local artists. The audio was created on SoundTrap,

Direct link to video  

The day of the Blessed Innocents, the children murdered on Herod's order to try to kill Jesus.   Though this piece apparently wasn't written for December 28th, the text is sung today in a lot of churches. 

Answer To A Question About Transcribing

IT'S NOT ANY GREAT DISCOVERY on my part, it's no kind of an achievement.

You open up a lecture on Youtube and find that you want to understand it better than just listening to it passively will allow. 

You slow it down by clicking on the little cogged wheel icon and choose a slower playback speed.  I almost always go with .75, or 3/4ths of the play-back speed.  Slower than that and sometimes I can't understand what's being said.

You click to have closed-captions (if those are available) understanding that machines are stupider than your ears are and have no comprehension of what the text means.  They often give a deceptive translation of individual words.

You click on the little icon next to the "close" icon at the very top right hand of the screen to take it out of "full screen" mode  and push the side together so the window you have Youtube open in occupies less than half of your computer screen. 

I open up the simplest text editor I have on my computer.  Usually I use Featherpad but have used Leafpad too.  The simplest ones with the fewest non-essential features work best for me.  

I reduce it to less than half of the screen as above and  put it on the opposite side from the window that Youtube is in, so they don't touch.  I use this to type in the first draft of my transcription. 

DON'T FORGET TO NAME YOUR FILE AND TO SAVE IT FREQUENTLY OR YOU'LL GET DISCOURAGED WHEN YOU INEVITABLY LOSE YOUR WORK WHEN YOU CLOSE IT OUT OR THERE'S A POWER OUTAGE.  That's my experience.     I've found that for first drafts the simplest, least complicated text editors are better than a word processing program though I copy and paste the final first draft into one of those to refine the text.  Remember to name your copy and to save it frequently.

I play the slowed lecture video and stop it when it's as far a long as I trust my memory to get it typed into the text editor.  I check my memory with the closed captions, noting frequently how stupid machines are and that "artificial intelligence" is not intelligence nor is the nonsense that calls what they do that. 

REMEMBER TO CHECK YOURSELF AND TO SAVE YOUR WORK FREQUENTLY AS YOU GO ALONG.  Can't say that enough.

I've found that this is hard work and I'd never try it for more than half an hour at a time. If you do much more than that you won't get as much benefit in understanding what's being said and thinking about it, which is the goal of going through this.  Though it is, actually, enjoyable if you like learning and thinking about new ideas. 

If you're as brazen as me and figure a cease and desist might come in your comments but probably won't, you might share it with the rest of us.  Though if anyone who authored anything I do this with asked me I would respect their request that I take it down.   

Most of what I do this with is for my own study.  It's especially useful when you are going through what a geek says about technical stuff.  Even the best of those such as on the excellent and wonderful and invaluable Explaining Computers and Frugal Computer Guy Youtube channels is more useful if you do some slow learning to get as much of the slow wisdom from it as you can.  Repeated listening doesn't get you as far.  And it's better than listening to the same old pop music and TV crap you saw decades ago.  That's numbing, not learning. 

Service Of Eight Lessons And Carols - The Last Section of Walter Brueggemann's Lecture Slow Wisdom

Eighth, finally.

It is written in Psalm 19, about God's commandments, "More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold, sweeter than honey and the drippings of honeycombs."  We might take this statement of an epitome of the two pairs I have tried to exposit.  The Psalm speaks in many wisdoms, in many synonyms of Torah, decrees, precepts, commandments, ordinances and it speaks of many ways to signify the transcendent purpose of God that orders life toward well-being.

This offer is better, better than gold, better than much fine gold, better than honey, better than the drippings from a honeycomb.  Imagine, thick guidance to covenantal existence is preferable to gold or honey.

Typically, this saying does not say how much better or in what way better just more desired, more coveted, more treasured, more to be pursued.  The Torah is a Psalm of steadfast love, justice and righteousness as gold is the quick summary of might, wisdom and wealth.

The task of nuture and socialization and education is to invite sustained critical reflection on choosing amid a tradition of folk who have been making that choice forever, sometimes toward death and sometimes toward life.

So I finish with three conclusions.

First, I am in agreement with that great U. S. theologian, Donald Rumsfeld [laughter] only this time.  The Secretary of Defense famously quipped  that, "there are knowns and there are unknowns and among the unknowns there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns." that's what he said.

The comment sounds wiser than it is [laughter] and one may wish that Rumsfeld had taken the unknown unknowns more seriously, like Iraq is divided into three sects.  He didn't know that.

So I have been expositing two kinds of wisdom, the fast known wisdom of might, wisdom and wealth that ends in control and the slow unknown unknown of the mystery of God that opens beyond our control that requires a relational integrity that appears as steadfast love, justice and righteousness.  And education is the disputatious reflection on those wisdoms.

Second, I have offered a list of contrasts and complements that exegete slow and fast wisdom

body - abstraction
neighborhood - club
tradition - memo
pain - numbness
dream - possession
vocation - career
imagination - explanation
Torah - gold

So the argument keeps coming back to the same point.

It occurs to me that these several word pairs boil down to the possibility of committed relationships of integrity in the neighborhood that make for the common good vis-a-vis a mode of life that is hostile to the common good.  It occurred to me that the relational covenantal narrative is exactly what we best learn in kindergarten. I will not pursue that but you can factor it out.  So I thought it was mind-boggling to entertain a thought that what properly belongs to kindergarten continues to properly belong to the work of the university, namely to sustain and evoke relational identity for the sake of the common good.

Third, the poetry of Jeremiah strikes me as profoundly contemporary among us. As in our time as in that ancient city, time is very short. We, like that ancient city, are now an anxious society in which everyone is greedy for unjust gain.  We, like that ancient city, are now a society against which comes an enduring nation whose language we do not know. We, like that ancient city, are now a society deeply at risk. The poetic response to that risky circumstance seems to me to be completely pertinent now as then.  

"Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, the wealthy in their wealth.  But let those who boast boast in this that they understand and know me that I am the Lord, I act with steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the Earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord."

What in our socieities, our cultures and our governments that stand in the way of achieving "relational identity for the sake of the common good," what is it that is effective in creating "hostility to the common good" what is it about our institutions, cultures and law that oppose "the transcendent purpose of God that orders life toward well-being"?

As anyone who has read what I write would expect I have identified the ubiqitious materialism of modernism, scientistic atheistic materialism, which is certainly a big part of it.  I think that is, in fact, in both its more arrogant, ideological form but probably even more effective, in its vulgar material form of selling out for money and security, capital grants and donations for building projects and endowments and everything else.

But that isn't a total explanation, though it lies hidden behind just about all of it.  I have long considered that the most granitic and glacially changing of political-legal forces, secular law, created over centuries by and on behalf of those with wealth, wisdom and power to enhance their ability to grasp and keep all of those for themselves.  The romantically cited "English common law" that is asserted to be the basis of law in many of the English speaking countries certainly had the provenance, the romantic bull shit about Magna Carta as flowed out of the imaginary mouth of Horace Rumpole was law created by the titled aristocracy of that benighted country, it did nothing to prevent the Tudor atrocity of the Poor Law, the war against the poor and impoverished who were driven off of the land and into rural and urban destitution, petty crime and controlled by a holocaust against the poor by the gallows and enslavement that went on for centuries.  Nor did it, in the period of the rise of "liberal democracy" prevent the scientifically informed reform, by the British elite from turning that Tudor atrocity into the even worse Victorian New Poor Law with its rehearsal for the death camps and gulags of the 20th century in the system of poor houses where the inmates were subject to a regime of gradual or more rapid starvation which led to the ones set to breaking apart bones to eat the rotting marrow from them and fighting over it.  

The U. S. legal system is not a revolutionary change from that, its forms and habits are based in it including many though, perhaps, not always all of its most appalling atrocities embedded into its statutes, literature and practices.  Though its most significant ones certainly were kept, especially in regard to slave laws, wage-slave laws and laws that allowed the genocide of the native People of North America to be murdered, robbed and, many of our founders explicitly hoped, eliminated from the future as certainly as the Nazis planned for Jews, Romas and Slavs (a controlled and numbered population of the later kept as a class of Helot, slaves). 

So, even when Democrats are a nominal majority in the Congress and have the White House the Courts, the judges and, especially, "justices" can be counted on to not let that tendency for the common good over the uncommon privilege rule for no better reason than the culture, literature, traditions and practices of the class of crooks, liars and cheats (both for hire and on their own behalf) who are the large majority of the profession of the law.   The judges and "justices" have no armies to enforce their dictates, they only have the bad habits - which is what such traditions and practices are - of letting them get away with their worst.

I give that only as an example of just how radical even Jeremiah's conception of God's will is, entirely more radical than the secular regime of radicalism, of secular socialism, even, can be.  And if there is one thing I have become convinced of in the past two decades in which almost all of my previous radicalism has been shaken and much of it overturned, it is that no regime of secular political or economic theory will be adequate to fight against those for whom the triad of control works.  Nothing else but this kind of faith that that is how the divinely ordered progress of Creation is meant to be, any impediment in it will lead to terrible pain, to which the typical secular answer is that numbness, through drugs, alcohol, cynical indifference, "mindfulness"  that comprises one of Brueggemann's contrasts on the side of "control".   

I will remind you that early in this lecture Walter Brueggemann points out that the radicalism of Jeremiah is not as radical as a very significant  extension of the earlier Prophets  taught by Jesus, (the real Reason for the season) which is the basis of any genuine Christianity, more radical in its goals and more radical in the non-controlling triadic nature of its means. 

He is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head or even healthcare.  The remembered Jesus sits amid our posturing, it reminds us that the great imperial triad of might, wisdom and wealth never delivers the security or the happiness that it promises.

But I will not linger over that counter-triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty that waits silently for us, because that triad is too outrageous and too remote from our business at hand.

He proposed Jeremiah's triad of fidelity as a perhaps attainable goal because he was afraid that getting to that of Jesus is going to remain a work in progress, if we're that lucky.

I may go through one or more of the answers to audience questions but had originally planned on ending where the lecture did.  I may post an index to these postings I've done of Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Subversion Of Reality beginning back on December 6.  

Earworm - The Guess Who - Undun

 

Direct link to video 

If She is The Statue of Liberty (as someone once claimed "American Woman" was, though I never knew if that were true) Randy Bachman was prophetic.  The words certainly fit our situation.  

 She's come undone
She didn't know what she was headed for
And when I found what she was headed for
It was too late
She's come undone
She found a mountain that was far too high
And when she found out she couldn't fly
It was too late
It's too late
She's gone too far
She's lost the sun
She's come undone
She wanted truth, but all she got was lies
Came the time to realize
And it was too late
She's come undone
She didn't know what she was headed for
And when I found what she was headed for
Mama, it was too late
It's too late
She's gone too far
She's lost the sun
She's come undone
No-na-na, no-na-na, no-na-na
Too many mountains and not enough stairs to climb
Too many churches and not enough truth
Too many people and not enough eyes to see
Too many lives to lead and not enough time
It's too late
She's gone too far
She's lost the sun
She's come undone
Doe-doe-doe-doe-doe, doe, un-doe-doe-doe, un-doe-doe-doe
Doe doe-doe-doe-doe, un-doe-doe-doe, doe-doe-doe
Doe doe-doe-doe, doe, doe-doe-doe, doe, doe
It's too late
She's gone too far
She's lost the sun
She's come undone
She didn't know what she was headed for
And when I found what she was headed for
It was too late
She's come undone
She found a mountain that was far too high
And when she found out she couldn't fly
Mama, it was too late
It's too late
She's gone too far
She's lost the sun
She's come undone
No, no-no-no-no-no, no
Doe, doe, doe-doe

Don't know how I heard it, it must have played on the radio stations I listened to after I got a better radio and started listening to the Boston college stations on FM.  Wish I still had that old burner.  Tubes didn't add fidelity but they added something . well, other than heat in the winter and moody light when you listened in the dark. 

Update: Yeah, I was trolling him.  And it worked. 

Update 2:  Oh, and it really was going through my head.  I got more stuff in my memory through repeatedly hearing it on the radio than I ever got in it by intention.  The mass media is a lot more powerful and dangerous than the ultimate idiots, the civil liberties industry lie about it being.  It really needs to be required to not lie with effective punishments when it does.

 

Alma Mater As A Gold Digger Always Going After A Huge Ward Of Cash

Seventh. The triad of fidelity invites to vocation whereas the triad of control invites to a career.  

The triad of control is all about joining the firm, fitting in and advancing so someone at the club is sure to say, "You'll want to look out for this young woman because she is a comer."   The pressure of higher education is all about career and how to make a good living and the university must do that.  But the university is not just about making a living. 

 It is about something deeper and more serious than the advancement of what [leads to] might and wealth and wisdom.  

So the best case study I know is the career of the young Daniel in the Book of Daniel who knew how to work the Babylonian system.  And every narrative ends by saying Daniel got promoted to another office in the Babylonian empire . But along with all of these promotions you can see the sub-text of the Book of Daniel, that he did not give in, he did not forget.  

And so his three friends whom we know by their imperial names,  Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are in are in fact remembered as Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah,  by their Jewish names and their Jewish identities. 

So education is a struggle for identity. Perhaps we might judge that these four handsome Jews had a double identity, imperial by day and Jewish by night. Imperial in the market, Jewish in the Synagogue. Or perhaps we may judge that they forgot their Jewish names and identity because they disappear in the narrative. Or perhaps they pretended their career names but knew their baptismal names. 

Either way the matter is complex, either way, education may help people struggle with identity and vocation. 

It is either the name imposed, the name and the brand imposed by consumer ideology. Or it is the preservation of baptismal names assigned to make us, as we say in my church, sealed as Christ's own forever. Education is about name and identity, about true identity and imposed identity.  Clearly the names to which we answer are determined by the triad in which our life is situated, of faith identity amid steadfast love, justice and righteousness and empire given identity amid wisdom, might and wealth.

The issue of identity is very complex, it is clear, nonetheless, that education that aims only  at the totalizing regime of wealth and might will never yield a covenantal identity that can respond outside the box to the divine impetus for mercy, compassion and generosity. 

I don't know if Walter Breuggemann would agree with me but I think the arc of the academic establishment, being an establishment with a pay roll and an elaborate edifice of overhead has always tended to move in the direction of the triad of control, wisdom in service to might and wealth because might and wealth are what its patrons are all about.  Even if the non-mercenary tendency might dominate in an individual academic or a sub-specialty or even an entire school, the overall tendency, especially under the bean-counting oversight of the institution that pays those idealists' salaries or, more these days, piece-work wages, will make sure things come out on balance with the smart money.   That is especially true of private schools and universities, even with their false fronts of inadequate exercises in something more idealistic.

I think that that tendency, especially as the regime of scientistic, atheistic materialism dominated both academic specialties and, in time, the general culture of academia and, they producing the professional class and the media, the dominant culture.  This is true that while it might not totally dominate within religion departments, its influence is ubiquitous and very influential.  Those who want to make an academic career will certainly know that is the way to respectability.   

Even when the religious department or the entire "religious" university might most strongly reject the academic side that is in service to it, they will be all in with the patrons of that, the beneficiaries of the triad of control, those who benefit from the wealth and might and who hold such a huge role in determining which wisdom gets the grants and gifts.   Notre Dame is certainly one I've pointed that out about, Catholic University of America, Liberty University, . . . the list of such places would probably go into the hundreds even those which officially reject scientistic, atheist materialism all end up working the same wealthy, mighty patrons of and users of wisdom.

If any of this might sound familiar to you it may be because the same thing is true for many if not most religious denominations which have a payroll and, especially, a physical plant that is in need of financial support.   The same sources of corruption from any moral purpose are at work there too.  If there are those who resist that corruption they tend to be few.   While the academics will be happy to give you a list of particulars and even some made up lore about the corruption of churches in pursuit of wealth, they aren't are keen on even an honest but deep look into the consequences for the corruption of academic institutions and, even more so, the powerful influence that materialism, both vulgar and the ideological type, in setting the culture of modernism and the alleged enlightenment and, indeed, science, too.   If there is a school within a university that has been patronized by the holders of wealth and might, it is the sciences, especially if you include the dismal one, economics as among those.  Alma mater is a gold digger when she sees a big ward of cash.

There are times I think that the only reliable source of an education free of that is the education of the dedicated autodidact.   There are times I think that, while not a guarantee of being moral or on the right way,  a small house church supported only by the householders freely giving the use of their homes and supported only by the uncontrolling resources of the congregation might stand some chance of getting on with it uncompromised. 

The people who manage what Daniel is said to do, flip things around to rig the system for their own benefit but not be corrupted by it are mighty few and probably not something we should rely on encountering very often. 

No doubt there is a lot to say about the identity that is conferred by college credentials, especially in the more prestigious private and some elite public institutions.  It is still something of a ticket to, if not the exact top, far higher than someone may have started out. I'm tempted to go into the career of the recently fired head of the Board of Postal Governors, rather dubious figure on organized labor, Ron A. Bloom but that would take me a long time and would get us into those golden boys of the establishment being discussed here, Obama and Tim Geithner -Ivy Leaguers all.  They certainly know the identity of each other so credentialed. Maybe another post another time.

Gems Among The Rocks - Two Keepers From The Christmas Album Featured on Callie Crossley's Show Posted To Below

 

This Christmas We're Screwed

 

Kim and Penn Holderness

This is very funny and I never heard the song it parodies. 

Francine Reed - Cooking Christmas 

 

And I wouldn't even touch most of that, this is not a vegan friendly menu.  I'll be looking for more of her singing.

J. S. Bach - Der Tag Der Ist So Freudenreich BWV 294

 

Direct link to the video 

Der Tag der ist so freudenreich
Aller Kreature;
Denn Gottes Sohn vom Himmelreich
Über die Nature
Von einer Jungfrau ist geborn.
Maria, du bist auserkorn,
Dass du Mutter wärest.
Was geschah so wundergleich?
Gottes Sohn vom Himmelreich,
Der ist Mensch geboren.

 

The day is so joyous, All Creatures;  Then God's Son from Heaven over Nature, From a Virgin was born.  Mary, you were chosen to be his mother, What miracle is this? God's son from heaven is born a Person.  

That's my translation, all of the English ones I found excluded all of our fellow Creatures except human beings and that's not what it says.  I think the German adaptation from the original 14th century Latin hymn Dies est lætitiæ that became a Lutheran Chorale is closer to my preferred Creation theology.

It's good to be reminded every once in a while of just how marvelously Bach set the Chorale melodies for SATB, some of his most modest compositions.  I never checked to see what the provenance of the legend is that when Beethoven was talking about the harmonic language of Bach's chorale settings that he made a pun on the name Bach (a little brook, in German) and said, "Not a brook but an ocean."  I don't know if the story is true or not but what it says is true.  Even not expanded into a Chorale prelude or larger composition, these are worth continued practice, study and performance.  A good thing to spend a year of your life doing.  Maybe over Zoom with friends till it's safe to do it together.  

WHAT,  GO READ WHAT A BUNCH of tired old cynical, do-nothing, conceited blog rats are predictably saying about Christmas and "Festivus?"  I'd rather hear Steve and Eydie's Christmas in Las Vegas.   

Watch out, you could be one New Years resolution kept away from being cancelled here.

Shouldn't you be on Amazon making Duncan and Bezos a little richer?  You're wasting valuable shopping time, that's a sin in your religion, vulgar materialism.

The Copper Family's Christmas Song

 

Direct link to video

A traditional song from the repertoire of the Copper Family of Sussex in southeast England, performed here by Coope, Boyes & Simpson.

Desmond Tutu Has Gone Home To God

IT IS PROBABLY SADDER FOR US than it is for Desmond Tutu that he has left us, one of the best and bravest and most moral people of his generation was ninety, I don't know many people who live into their nineties very far who are happy with their condition. I'm not regarding the prospect with joyous anticipation, myself.   And he certainly would have known that death would not be the end of it for him, that he was dying into God, than which nothing could be more wished for. 

I don't have any doubt that he is a saint, though, as Dorothy Day protested the attempt to make her one while she was still alive, the way we think about saints is really screwed up, making them pure, pristine and irrelevant to their work to bring justice and heal the earth makes the idea a problem.

I certainly hope that his words and ideas, what he fought against apartheid, climate change, economic and ethic injustice, etc. won't be disempowered behind the pay-wall that the children of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. have jailed his legacy for the world behind.  That segregation of his legacy for money is a large part of how his enemies, the ones who attacked him, jailed him and killed him can set up a fake image of him with a few of his most well known words stripped of their context and meaning, effectively silencing his most radical statements and ideas to do that.  If those who have control of his words and ideas allow the honest and full use of them Desmond Tutu might fill in that gap in the real radicalism that really endangers the oligarchs and gangsters.   Maybe we should pray for that.  

I'm sad that such a figure is gone form us now but I don't worry for him, given the people who are getting canonized these days, if they can make it to heaven he's certainly there.  We're the ones who are worse off for it.

This Is A Christmas Tradition I Can't Miss

LISTENING TO CALLIE CROSSLEY'S show when she hosts Mike Wilkins and his annual compilation of really strange Christmas pop music. 

It’s our annual spinning of holiday tunes with our own Mike Wilkins, radio engineer for PRX and GBH’s The World.

All this hour, GBH’s intrepid holiday music collector shares his new finds of old songs that are quirky, weird and sometimes way out there.

These are not the traditional carols you'll hear from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or even new favorites like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Nope, for his annual collection of songs you never heard, Mike has once again rescued vinyl one-hit wonders from the forgotten bins of overlooked B-sides, and highlighted a few new tunes that might become classics.

This season, for his 32nd year of jinglebell melodies, Mike’s collection goes back to basics — sort of. This is Mike’s musical holiday gift bag, “Sack O' Songs,” a Yuletopia recording.

On this one Bert and Ernie sing the Hollywood Christmas song I hate more than any other, including Rudolph.

Way back forty or more years ago one of my goals was to get through the season without hearing anything sung by Sinatra or Pressley, this year I added Santa Baby to the list I hope never to hear again.  I can't say that these will make a list I hope to avoid but it's only because I doubt I ever will hear them again.  A couple of them I don't think I'd mind hearing again, though.  It's not The Chipmunks and Canned Heat. 

Were They Considered Trailer Trash or Lower? How Hard It Must Have Been To Believe That Story, How Much Luke Would Have Known How Far He Was Asking People To Stretch Their Expectations

THE OTHER DAY RMJ posted a piece in which he said the shepherds who were the first people who the birth of Jesus as the Messiah was announced to would have been people of the lowest class, lower probably than the blue collar worker class or at the same level.  As John Dominic Crossan said, the workers like Joseph were considered about the lowest rung of society under the Roman empire, perhaps lower than the agricultural workers like the Shepherds.  No doubt if this happened today the Holy Family would be the "trailer trash" class of people, the shepherds might have been even lower than they were. 

They were almost certainly illiterate and uneducated, probably considered disposable people like the real cowboys were, probably pretty rough characters and anyone Jews as well as gentiles who first heard the outrageous claim that such uncouth people and their probably dirty, maybe diseased sheep were not only among the first but the first to whom ANGELS, FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE, told about this most significant event and who were the first to go see this baby of the lowest class born in a barn, lying in a cattle trough who they were told BY ANGELS was your Savior  . . . Christ the Lord!  

If, as I conjecture, they may have seen themselves as slightly higher in the social scale than a carpenter (or as Crossan has it, stone cutter) and if anyone is conscious of who is just below and just higher than them, it is the nearly destitute, that they would have accepted this baby as that would be miraculous, especially when they found out the mother hadn't been married long enough for the kid to not certainly not be a bastard born to a tramp.  Don't forget that Luke's description of things has given many a scoffer the chance to say that.  I'm not making it up.

The scene as described in Luke was certainly not something that would have been what they or anyone would have expected.  We're told these days that anyone who was expecting the Messiah expected him to be higher class than that, respectable at the very least, certainly not born to trailer trash and first attested to by dirty, ignorant, disreputable sheep herders.   I would bet that if you'd told any of those same shepherds they would see an angel who would talk to them they'd probably have said the equivalent of,  you're shittin' me.  Never mind that they'd be the first to be told about the birth of the Messiah.  I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were deeply impious skeptics and crude cynics.  Maybe some of them still were, thinking they'd lost their minds or that they'd all eaten some bad rye or some weed they'd mistaken for something edible.  Or that the sheep they got milk from had. 

Like so much else in old writing, in and outside of Scripture, we have to imagine it in terms of our own experience.  I could name you the foul-mouthed, disreputable farm boys I imagine in those roles - at least one or two of them relatives of mine. Maybe they were pious in their poverty, I've known some but fewer of those kind, too.  But I'll bet that most of the upper working class and middle class and affluent early converts as well as a lot of the poor ones would have imagined shepherds similarly to this.  

For that matter I'll bet that going to see if what they were told was true was a dare taken on a bet.

When the angels went away from them back into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us.

Like the genealogy in Matthew which names some pretty dicey and unsavory characters from the Bible, at least one prostitute, Rahab, Tamar a widow who tricked her father in law to fathering another person in the line of Jesus, by dressing up as a prostitute among the women,  and including Judah the dirty old goat who had sex with her as a temple prostitute, some of the most dicey and unsavory characters who cheated and tricked and connived their way into advantage and power among the men, those characters we imagine in their cleaned up, Renaissance and Baroque painting, As Made For TV Movie figures would not have been imagined to be clean and pure when the Gospels were written.  The ones who knew the Scriptures  would have known that this was not a cast of the best and brightest, nor the nicest and most respectable.  And they were being asked to accept that out of that background God became flesh and extended The Law and the Prophets, not only to Jews but to the entirety of humanity and, on top of that, saved them and many if not all.  And that they were expected to convince other people of it.  It says that "all they told it to were amazed."   

And it still is pretty amazing. Especially among professed Christians who despise that class of people, now. 

This is an answer to a snarky comment.  Figured I'd post it today. 

Johann Pachelbel - Chorale Prelude, Wie schon leuchtet der Morgenstern

 

Direct link to video 

Jean Ferrard, organist playing on another Silbermann organ  

I agree with the organist's decision to not play the pedal trills marked in the score (if those were in the one being played on, not possible to know) because when the counterpoint is this lively and involved they'd have gotten in the way.  Here the sustained statement of the chorale melody that starts in shorter notes in the upper voices is much clearer.

It's too bad Pachelbel became known for that one, repulsively over played canon because he was a very find composer who wrote a lot of other music.

Dietrich Buxtehude, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BuxWV 223

 

Direct link to video  

Apparently the organist is anonymous for this recording. The organ is the  Silbermann organ of the Stadtkirche Zöblitz

J. S. Bach - Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern

 

Direct link to video 

 Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern 

Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern voll Gnad’ und Wahrheit von dem Herrn, die süsse Wurzel Jesse; du Sohn Davids aus Jakobs Stamm mein König und mein Bräutigam, hast mir mein Herz besessen. Lieblich, freundlich, schön und herrlich, gross und ehrlich, reich von Gaben, hoch und sehr prächtig erhaben. Singet, springet, jubilieret, triumphiret, dankt dem Herren! Gross ist der König der Ehre

Madeleine Schwaighofer - Sopran
Tamara Obermayr - Alt
Konstantin Schmidbauer - Tenor
Benjamin Sattlecker - Bass

I've never once heard all of the verses of any chorale sung as a chorale but they must have been, all seven of them.   Here's the English translation.

1. How beautifully shines the morning star
full of grace and truth from the Lord,
the sweet root of Jesse!
You son of David from the line of Jacob,
my king and my bridegroom,
have taken posession of my heart,
[you who are] lovely,friendly,
beautiful and glorious, great and honourable,
rich in gifts,
lofty and exalted in splendour!


2. Ah my pearl, my precious crown,
true son of God and Mary,
a king of most noble birth!
My heart calls you a lily,
your sweet gospel
is pure milk and honey.
Ah my dear flower,
hosanna, heavenly manna,
that we eat,
I cannot forget you!

3. Pour most deeply within my heart,
you clear jasper and ruby,
the flames of your love,
and make me rejoice, so that I may remain
in your chosen body
a living rib!
Because of you,
gracious rose of heaven,
my heart is sick and smouldering,
wounded with love.
    

4. A joyful light from God comes to me
when with your dear eyes
you look on me as a friend.
Oh Lord Jesus, my beloved good,
your word, your spirit, your body and blood
refresh me within.
Take me like a friend
in your arms, so that I may become warm
with your grace
To your word I come invited.

5. Lord, God,Father, my mighty hero,
before the world you have
loved me in your son.
Your son has betrothed me to himself,
he is my treasure, I am his bride,
most greatly I rejoice in him.
Yes, yes.
Heavenly life he will give me
in the the world above!
My heart shall praise him for ever.


6. Pluck the strings on the harp
and let the sweet music
resound full of joy,
so that with dear Jesus,
my most beautiful bridegroom,
in constant love I may make my pilgrimage!
Sing, leap,
rejoice, triumph,
thank the Lord!
Great is the king of honour!
 

7. How full I am therefore of heartfelt joy
that my treasure is the alpha and the omega,
the beginning and the end;
To his reward he will
take me up to paradise,
and so I clap my hands
Amen! Amen!
Come, you sweet crown of joy,
do not long delay,
I wait for you with longing.

Christmas At Catholic Worker

 

Direct link to video  

A really fine example of family amateur music making.  Though I doubt most of these people are blood relations, they're a bigger family than that.  

If there's one thing American culture needs its more of this kind of non-professional level group singing.  Though it could use more of the professional kind too both have different values and nothing can replace this kind where the making is more important than the approximation of perfection. 

That's Quite A Thing To Ask For - Happy Christmas And Why It Should Be

THIS IS THE MOST ENJOYABLE Christmas I think I've ever had.  No present getting or giving, no decorating, no traveling.  I will miss our annual family party but we always had that on New Years because we had several family members who had jobs that had them on duty on the 25th.   It was easier for them to get January 1st off.  But the Covid resurgence and the certain presence of unvaccinated children under five has led to it being called off for this year.  

Speaking of presents.  I'm happy to be able to say that all of us who are eligible for full vaccination with boosters are fully boosted.   I hope by next year even the babies will be protected to the best of the medical profession's ability to do that.   They and the First Responders who have done a really wonderful job of delivering the vaccines here are a whopping huge present.  Two out of the three were given to me by  fireman-paramedics under the York County Emergency Management Agency, an entity I don't think I ever thought about for a single second in more than sixty years.  That was worth all of the Christmas presents I've ever had in my entire life, including the few useful ones for which I am still thankful.  My parents, especially my mother's gift of respecting well done medical science and making sure we were as fully immunized as possible  is as much a part of that as the actual inoculations this year.   A legacy still giving so many years after their deaths.   I don't think we're anywhere near out of this but for now, what we know now, I'm enormously grateful for all of that.

In place of the store bought presents and decoration is a concentration on why such a holiday matters and that reason is the person of Jesus and his ministry and the nature of the glad tidings his extension of the Law and Prophets both into the wider world and in expanded meaning, freeing us from the bondage to the imagined rule of blind, indifferent, fate.   There would be nothing to celebrate otherwise. 

I've mentioned that I've left behind meditating on my breath and on the physical sensation of taking footsteps for meditating on passages of Scripture, especially this year, the sentences and phrases that make up the "Lord's prayer".  I remember when I was young noticing that the prayer didn't seem to carry much in the way of the cargo cult conception of praying for stuff and the obvious request like that in it wasn't a frivolous request, "Give us this day our daily bread."   Given our abundantly fed habit of praying for loads of stuff or the money to buy it with or the ability to get it, that's a rather modest request, to us, though one which is certainly the most desperately made one, the need for food to get through the day when you don't have it. 

But I think the prayer does have some incredibly ambitious requests.  

"Your kingdom come, your will be done,"  is one which, as a life-long anti-monarchist always made me feel uneasy about asking that.  But the problem with monarchy - which, as I've noted God lays out quite well in `1 Samuel 8 - in human understanding is a problem of humans as kings.  Human governance is bound to be only as good but still highly imperfect as the ones who govern.   Having God as king would certainly not produce the same kind of government, we couldn't even begin to imagine what that would be like, all of our frame of reference being human rulers. The idea of God ruling us is thinking about something none of us has even a vaguely relevant idea of.  It is a request for perfect governance, perfect and equal justice, perfect guidance, perfect in every way.  That's quite a thing to ask for.  

Think of that two-part request again "They Kingdom come, thy will be done."  I used to think of God's will being done as if it was a passive acquiescent acceptance of whatever we got, assuming that what we got was the will of God, that it was a request for passive acceptance of that.  But that's not what I think now, I think it's a request that God's will be done by us because I don't think it makes any sense to think that would happen "on Earth as it is in heaven,"  in our frame of reference by any other means.  It's a request for the grace to do what's right strong enough to convince us or compel us or get us to do that so as to make life into a new Eden, this time us not falling into temptation and into the evil that the later theories of atonement theologically fit in with theories about the crucifixion of Jesus.  Going back to what I said above, just getting allegedly educated Americans to get vaccinated so their unvaccinated Covid-ridden selves won't destroy the medical system and get other people killed shows just how ambitious a request that is.  

The prayer that Jesus gives us in Luke and Matthew would be a great gift even if it was imperfectly realized in life.  Worth anything I've ever gotten for Christmas, worth more than all of what anyone's going to unwrap today put together.  The idea of it, the idea that it is a possibility has done a lot to make me happier even in my pessimistic expectations of what human evil and human folly and stupidity get us for governance and human behavior, now.  Even if I never see it much happen in my lifetime, the idea that it might be possible or even that the less ambitious results of the triad of fidelity that Walter Brueggemann talked about in the lecture I've been transcribing for us might be possible.   A gift card from Amazon wouldn't do for me what just thinking about that does.  

Maybe I'll write about "forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong us," during Lent.  Though, as it's tied to us forgiving those who wrong us, the size of that request should be even clearer.   But it's Christmas so for now I'll let you meditate on that as you will.

The Copper Family - Shepherds Arise

 

Direct link to video 

Gerald Finzi - In Terra Pax

 

Direct link to video  

 

Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913

Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis  By Robert Bridges

A frosty Christmas Eve
   when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone
   where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village
   in the water'd valley
Distant music reach'd me
   peals of bells aringing:
The constellated sounds
   ran sprinkling on earth's floor
As the dark vault above
   with stars was spangled o'er.
Then sped my thoughts to keep
   that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
   by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
   and marveling could not tell
Whether it were angels
   or the bright stars singing.

Now blessed be the tow'rs
   that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer
   unto God for our souls
Blessed be their founders
   (said I) an' our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ
   in the belfries to-night
With arms lifted to clutch
   the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above
   and the mad romping din.

But to me heard afar
   it was starry music
Angels' song, comforting
   as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly
   to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me
   by the riches of time
Mellow'd and transfigured
   as I stood on the hill
Heark'ning in the aspect
   of th' eternal silence.

Also from The Gospel of Luke 2 

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of 
the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round 
about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto 
them:

"Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, 
which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in 
the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this 
shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in 
swaddling clothes, lying in a manger."

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the 
heavenly host praising God, and saying:

"Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will 
toward [men]1. We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we 
glorify thee, we give thee thanks for thy great glory, O Lord 
God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty."

"Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which 
is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us."

And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them 
into heaven, the shepherds said one to another,
And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the 
babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made 
known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. 
And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were 
told them by the shepherds.

Composer: Gerald Raphael Finzi (July 14, 1901 – September 27, 1956) 

Orchestra: City of London Sinfonia 

conducted by Richard Hickox 

Chorus: London Symphony Chorus 

Baritone soloist: John Shirley Quirk 

Soprano soloist: Norma Burrowes