Abby Lincoln - Roy Hargrove - Christmas Cheer

 

Adeste Fideles - Bob Dylan

 

I love Bob Dylan's old, raspy but remarkably in tune singing of this in Latin then English.   I think he pronounced the Latin better than some of the priests I recall from way, way back did.   He certainly sang it better in tune than a lot of them could.  Better than some of the younger members of the chorus did.  

Deep Incarnation - Elizabeth A. Johnson

Deep Incarnation

Odd as it may seem to others, Christians hold to the radical notion that the one transcendent God who creates and empowers the world freely chooses to save the world not as a kindly onlooker from afar, but by joining the world in the flesh.  The prologue of John's Gospel states this succinctly, speaking of the advent of Jesus as the coming of God's personal self-expressing Word, full of loving-kindness and faithfulness:  "The word was made flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1:14).  Note that the Gospel does not say that the World became a human being (Greek antropos),  or a man (Greek aner), but flesh (Greek sarx), a broader reality.  Sarx or flesh in the New Testament connotes the finite quality of the material world which is fragile vulnerable, prone to trouble and sin, perishable, the very opposite of divine majesty. Taking the powerful biblical theme of God's dwelling among the people of Israel a step further.  John's Gospel affirms that in a new and saving event the Word of God became flesh, entered personally into the sphere of the material to shed light on all from within. 

In truth, the configuration of sarx that the Word became was precisely human.  However, the story of life in our planet of repositioning our species, connecting Homo sapiens historically and biologically to the whole tree of life.  Rather than standing alone as a species, we are intrinsically related to other species in the evolutionary network of life on our planet.  Consider this example, taken from Darwin's observations:

What can be more curious than that the hand of man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle off the porpoise, the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions? 

On the ordinary view of the direct creation of each being, he writes that we can only say that it has pleased the Creator to construct each animal in this way.   But if we suppose an ancient progenitor had its limbs arranged this way, he continues, that all descendants inherit the pattern.  The bones might be enveloped in a thick membrane to form a paddle to swim, or a thin membrane to form a wing, or that may be lengthened or shortened for some profitable purpose;  but there will be no tendency to alter the framework.  Indeed, the same names can be given to the bones in widely different animals.  What a grand natural system, formed by descent with slow and slight successive modifications!

The Word did indeed become human flesh;  but we now know that human connection to nature is so genuine that we cannot properly define our identity without including the great natural world of which we are a part.  Danish theologian Niels Gregersen has coined the phrase "deep incarnation," which is starting to be used in theology to signify the radical divine reach through human flesh all the way down into the very tissue of biological existence itself with its growth and decay.

Born of a woman and the Hebrew gene pool, the Word of God became a creature of Earth.  Like all creatures Jesus as an earthling whose blood held iron made in exploding stars and whose genetic code made him kin to the whole community of life that descended from common ancestors in the ancient seas.  "Deep incarnation" understands John 1:14 to be saying that the other human beings; it also reaches beyond them to join him to the whole biological world of living creatures and the cosmic dust of which they are composed.  As Pope John Paul II realized the incarnation accomplishes "the taking up in unity with God not only of human nature, but in this human nature of everything that is 'flesh': the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world.  The Incarnation, then, has a cosmic significance . . . 

Instead of writing that long post I mentioned earlier,  I remembered this passage from Elizabeth A. Johnson's Abounding Kindness: Writings From The People of God so I typed it out.  Finally found my book holder which I misplaced a few weeks back so I can type out things like this, again.   

Odetta - Virgin Baby Had One Son

 

Odetta - voice, guitar

Bill Lee - bass

It's never been Christmas to me since about 1961 until I hear this.  Amazing to me it was that long ago.    

Patrick Cornelius - Christmas Gift

 

Patrick Cornelius - alto saxophone

Gerald Clayton - piano

Peter Slavov - bass

Kendrick Scott - drums

Daquin Noël X Organ in Saint Maximin - Quand Dieu Naquit à Noël

 

Pierre Bardon, titulaire émérite, organist 

My favorite Noel,  no one does it quite like the French do. 

Noël XI (Une Jeune Pucelle) - Louis-Claude Daquin. Performed by Edwin Lawrence on the Organ

 

The Huron Carol

This version performed by Heather Dale, and sung in Wendat (Huron), French and English.

The "Huron Carol" (or "'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime") is a Christmas hymn, written in 1643 by Jean de Brébeuf, a Christian missionary at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons in Canada. Brébeuf wrote the lyrics in the native language of the Huron/Wendat people; the song's original Huron title is "Jesous Ahatonhia" ("Jesus, he is born"). The song's melody is a traditional French folk song, "Une Jeune Pucelle" ("A Young Maid"). The well known English lyrics were written in 1926 by Jesse Edgar Middleton.

Have A Faithfilled Christmas

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, the French-Canadian Nuns who taught us catechism came over from the town where their convent was to watch us brats at the early morning mass on Christmas.  Then we'd have to all troop downstairs to the church hall, a dark and dismal basement room where the priest would come in and we'd be told, beforehand to sing one of the universally known Christmas songs to him and he'd be given a token present, supposedly from all us brats - though we didn't know anything about it though I think I remember having given a dime or so towards it.  If one of my older siblings had a reliable memory for that kind of thing, I'd ask what they remember.  But, there you go.   

In my family it might have meant putting off the hour when we got to open our presents, though we knew our older sisters would insist on singing for the late morning mass and we couldn't open ours until they came back, near or even early after noon time.   I remember feeling some contempt for the kids whose family tradition permitted opening presents before mass or even on Christmas eve.  "Babies" I thought, relishing the kind of feeling of moral superiority which is likely alloyed with a touch of envy.  Probably something like what Republican-fascists think whenever they hear of some poor or destitute person receiving meager aid.  But I outgrew that fairly young. 

I remember one year the Nuns told us to sing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" but they'd decided that a "Merry Christmas" was insufficiently religious and they told us to, instead, sing "A Joyous Christmas."  As French was most of their mother tongues, and most of them came from very pious Catholic families, I figured it gave a little window into the difference between their and Anglo culture.   I didn't know that French Canadians saved up the merriment for Le Jour de L'An, on January 1st, Christmas day being a Holy Day.   

Some of that experience stuck with me because now,  the world of difference all those decades aside,  I still feel reluctant to say "Merry Christmas" because it seems too frivolous for what is a religious, a Christian holiday.   Too English to my ears, to tell you the truth.   I won't go into the diatribe against FOX Lies and Trump at this point but I'm sure you can guess what I mean and  what I'd have to say about that.  

My family, by almost unanimous consent, has done away with Christmas presents for adults - enjoying the entire Christmas season, including Advent, all the more for that.   We still decorate a bit, still make Christmas cookies, and some year I'll make my famous fruit cake again - Haven't made it since our father died thirty-one years ago, I'd probably die of shock at the price of the dried fruits, now.   And we'll have our traditional for the day and have our family party  on the January 1st.  I'm spending the day alone with my old cat and reading the appropriate Gospel readings and which-ever psalms and Epistle readings are for the day and that's as much merriment as I care to have.   I'm even foregoing writing a huge post on the Incarnation and the universal and cosmic theological assertions on that from such deep theologians as Gregory of Nyssa.  

So, have a faith filled, or even a joyous or, if you feel up to it, a merry Christmas.  I'm having one.

Double Speak, Double Think, Forked Tongues and The Such - A Christmas Post

ENGLISH IS A STRANGE language, the way that some words can mean both a thing and its opposite, "inflammable" being a famous example that can mean both something that burns easily or something that doesn't burn at all.   Then there are words that mean one thing then are intentionally distorted to mean something very different for intentional ends.   "Antisemitism" is one of those words I've been examining here since the IHRA intentionally turned that word into a smoke screen to privilege the bad behavior of the Israeli government, so it can do what the most infamous of antisemites in history did to another branch of "semites."   I wonder the part that the denotation slippage of our slippery, sloppy language plays in enabling that kind of thing.   Though, of course, English is hardly the only language that is so strange but as the United States is the primary patron of the Israeli government and has long been since they figured out (some say through the Six Day War in 1967) that Israel could be the American base to exercise out sized power in the middle-east, the facility with which English can be lied so consequentially with is an important consideration.   

But this is about how not only words but entire ideas can be twisted and distorted in response to some snark that came my way about how I've gone from the old, conventional, "enlightenment" practice when it comes to matters in the first century (or earlier) when the topic is religion of doubting everything while still using the exact same testimony about events in the ancient past recorded then when it is, literally, the only thing we have to go on to even know what may have happened, to someone who is willing to believe that they might just be leaving us an accurate description of reality.   What got me thinking about the slips and slops of language and, so, the thinking behind words is how the very same 17th - 21st century academics who heap up doubts about the reports of  the experience of the world of the first and other centuries while claiming to be able to present a description of that world as part of their academic scribbleage, what they get paid to do assume that those very words are unreliable.   I've criticized the "historical Jesus"  industry that does just that to get many an academic on the make for the relatively big bucks that such academics can get from getting on TV "documentaries" about "the historical Jesus" or by writing best sellers on the topic.   

It was while I was reading one of the best of those,  John Dominic Crossan,  specifically his claim that the body of Jesus wasn't given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea but was thrown into a shallow, common grave, likely dug up and eaten by stray dogs, that I realized that he, 20 centuries after Jesus was making up a story of the kind that he said the first century authors of the Gospels, some of whom may have seen Jesus and who very likely knew people who did see and hear Jesus, likely some of those witnesses to his Crucifixion and possibly eye-witnesses to the event did in reporting on his burial.   

I had already caught on to the game of such modern academics of claiming that the years and decades between the presumed date of Jesus's death and the writings of the Gospels as a means of debunking their accuracy or even veracity realizing that one is not to notice that such academics expect you to ignore the nearly two millennia of years, decades and centuries between the death of Jesus and their story telling, not to mention their own entire remove from any eyewitnesses, also their own motives in telling the stories they make up as alternatives.   And, as already said, topped off by them having to rely, entirely, on the canonical Gospels and those not in the canon, which are often suspected of even greater remove from the life and times of Jesus than the supposedly debunked canonical Gospels.   Almost all of the apocryphal gospels I've read contain even  more fantastic stories about Jesus than the canonical ones, but many such modern scholars claim them as more reliable than the officially accepted ones. 

And that's Crossan who has some record of producing credible reviewed academic writing, many of the most influential voices in the land of TV and internet documentaries have little to none of that.   Some of them make claims such as the absurd one that "organized Christianity" that came up with the various Scriptural canons "suppressed" the alternative Gospels.  That's certainly not the case of the Eastern, the Orthodox and the Catholic churches, which clearly took claims about Mary found in the apocryphal gospels to incorporate those in its holdings about Mary, her parents not mentioned or named in the Gospels, and, at least in the case of the Catholic churches, making that the basis of papal "infallible" doctrine and dogma.   The Protestant tradition is, actually, the source of most of the suppression of the apocrypha, though they have certainly also been the source of much of the scholarship around such writings, too.   Yet I'd expect that at least 98 out of 100 college-credentialed People who believe they  know anything about this  would repeat the lie that Christianity tried to destroy those poor-put-upon "alternative gospels,"  those meanies!  Elane Pagels has made a career out of peddling that line.   

I don't have any problem with honest disbelief in what the canonical Gospels say,  so long as one standard and not two or more are applied to the literature and history done in that period.   I have a big problem with double standards, whether in the treatment of academic topics or the behavior of governments and the societies that produce those governments.   I have a really big problem with dishonesty and sloppy, slippery representations of reality.    I'll bet that something approaching 90 percent if not ninety-eight of college-credentialed Americans who absorbed that forged "gospel" that "proved Jesus was married" still believe that years after it was exposed as a forgery made by a known and named forger and peddled to a member of the "Jesus Seminar" working at that most august and reputable of American universities, Harvard.   That scholar, Karen King, finally had to admit it was a fraud that she bought whole hog when it was fairly easy work by real experts to identify not only that it was a clear forgery but were rapidly able to figure out who had made the forgery.   About few topics is a lie as quick to fly around the world and lodge in the common received so-called wisdom of the college-credentialed as about Christianity.   To be fair and even-handed, the same is at times as true among those who aren't hostile to Christianity,  though they tend to be contained within some specific, often very conservative sections of Christianity and those who are pretty naive about history and its allied fields of research. 

I think that the two accounts, in Matthew and Luke, are more reliable than any of the later alternative sources about the Incarnation of Jesus, his birth and early life.   I think if the early followers of Jesus were making it up they would have come up with something far, far less likely to promote ridicule and snark and skepticism with motives other than finding the truth.   The Virgin Birth and the accounts of the infancy of Jesus in those two Gospels would have to be designed to invite that if they were invented either by the evangelists who wrote the Gospels or their sources.    Or, like Mark and John and Paul, they could have just not addressed the conception, birth and early life of Jesus.    I've been over the asserted discrepancy between the Septuagint and the Masoretic passage from Isaiah about a virgin giving birth not being a "Christian distortion" of the text but, rather,  the understanding of what was supposed to constitute a sign by God by those who translated the text into Greek.  I would suspect that many who read it in Hebrew would have understood it to mean a virgin as, clearly the translators did.   It makes a lot more sense if you figure a sign to be even noticed as a sign would be something out of the ordinary and a young woman giving birth in a society in which very early marriage (by modern standards) was the norm.   Who would even notice something everyday as a sign of anything?   I think it was the interpretation of Isaiah in reaction to Christian claims that distorts the text, both Hebrew and the character of the Greek translation made before the birth of Jesus. 

We are as reliant on what the ancient writers said whenever we want to think or talk about the People, times and places back then, archeology and speculation based on physical evidence can only take you so far, when remains of specific, nameable People or animals isn't available, it it almost never is outside of Egyptian royalty, that written record is all we have to go on, it's even necessary in the case of those mummified remains of the royals who we need a text to identify.   In the case of Jesus constructing him, his mother, etc. on the basis of "typical" Jewish peasants,  is as much historical fiction as many sand and sandal movies or 18th century bodice rippers.  If there is one thing we know about Jesus, he was unique among first century Jewish or other peasants, he is the motivating personality and central figure in a religious and moral movement that has lasted two-thousand years.   There is every reason to believe there was little that was typical about him and, likely, his parents.   You can't reconstruct anyone person out of generalizations from archaeology and things like speculative demographics from the lost past,  individuals are too individual for that.   You certainly can't settle the truth of a claimed to be unique miracle such as the Virgin Birth of Jesus with science, though one of the most famous of scientists falsely claimed you could.  You couldn't do that without a number of securely identifiable remains which yielded reliable DNA samples and those are not and never will be had.  And you'd have to rely on textual evidence to identify them, to bring that old post in line with the topic of this post.   I will point out that since 2006 I have chosen to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus based on the evidence available and the consequences of believing in it.  As I said the other day,  I think it's a hugely and universally beneficial belief. 

Candlemas

With certitude 

Simeon opened

ancient arms

to infant light.

Decades

before the cross, the tomb

and the new life

he knew

new life. 

With depth

of faith he drew on

turning illuminated

towards deep night. 

Denise Levertov: Breathing The Water

Israelism: The awakening of young American Jews

 

When two young American Jews raised to support Israel unconditionally witness the way Israel treats Palestinians, it changes their lives. They join a movement of young American Jews campaigning to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel and reveal a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity. Israelism sparked huge debate on American campuses even before the events of October 7, 2023.

It follows Simone Zimmerman, who visited Israel as a teenager, and Eitan who joined the Israeli army after graduating from high school as they discover the reality for Palestinians and radically revise their views. It includes interviews with academics and political activists, including Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Lara Friedman and a former director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe Foxman.

Contributors suggest the narrative that young American Jews are fed almost entirely erases the existence of the Palestinians through education and advocacy, sometimes involving groups that organise free trips to Israel partially funded by the Israeli government.

This film describes how influential this narrative is in shaping attitudes to Israel, not just in the United States but across the world.

This is an excellent documentary, documenting the influence that zionism has had in deforming the perception of reality.   It is very much the same phenomenon at work in the really dishonest and clearly ideological IHRA "definition" of antisemitism which, adopted officially and legally by a large number of countries under the influence of Israeli and zionist lobbying, has distorted the law to protect, not Jews, but one country out of the entire world of countries, Israel.   Other than dictatorships and monarchies that protect their own governments and the governments of their close allies to protect them from not just criticism but the very facts and truth of what they do, there is no other instance I know of where countries deputed to be democracies have done that - the United States is certain to adopt the IHRA's iron smoke screen for Israel, probably as soon as next year.  The fact is that that smoke screen is already up on a defacto basis.  In addition to the phrase "apartheid democracy" we need to start talking about moral blackmail in which the moral aspiration to something worthwhile, the suppression of hatred of Jews, is used to extort unquestioning support for just another and not a particularly moral state, Israel.   The documentary points out that the American right, which includes probably the greatest number of zionists - THE LARGE MAJORITY OF THEM JEW-HATING "CHRISTIANS" - making common cause with fascists and neo-Nazis to distort American politics on behalf of that other country.  

The kind of revelation among former zionists - I guess I'd be considered one before the late 1980s - once they learn the truth about Israel present and past and zionism before Israel, is one of the few optimistic signs of the times.  

Despite the lie that Israel is singled out for criticism over its laws and policies, treated unfairly on that basis, the opposite is true in the United States and by Western countries, in general.  That is done on the basis of moral blackmail when it's not done on the basis of enticing the highly corruptible, generally in right-wing parties.   I want Israel to be treated as any other country with its apartheid legal basis, its Lebensraum policy of stealing land and property owned by Palestinians, its genocidal policy and war on Gaza and its outsized influence in getting the United States into some of the worst choices ever made by our government, like any other country would be.   I want Israel to be considered just another country, as liable to do evil as any other because it is certainly not "the most moral" country with "the most moral army" in the world.  That is a really, really big lie.