Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Have A Franciscan Season

'eah,  I think it's a good idea to celebrate the solstice in a Franciscan way, Christmas too.  In his Second Life of St. Francis Thomas of Celano, one of the earliest Franciscans who knew Francis,  personally, he quotes him in his Second Life:

If I ever speak to the Emperor, I shall beg him of love of God and myself to enact a special law forbidding anyone to kill our sisters the larks or to do them any harm.  Similarly, all mayors of towns and lords of castles and villages should be obliged each year on the Nativity of our Lord to see that people scatter wheat and other grains on the roads outside towns and villages so that our sisters the larks and other birds may have food on such a solemn festival.  And in reverence for the Son of God,Who with the most blessed Virgin Mary rested in a manger that night between an ox and an ass, anyone who owns an ox or an ass should be obliged to give the choicest of fodder on Christmas Eve. And on Christmas day the rich should give an abundance of things to all the poor.

You can contrast that to the documented pagan practice of killing animals and people, that way to mark the winter solstice that has been papered over in the common received non-wisdom.

One of the things noted that St. Francis was responsible for a re-Christianization in Europe during one of the many periods of retrenchment of charity and other virtues that mark the would-be Christian world.  We are in a severe period like that one, if we need something really badly, it's another St Francis, another St. Clair. American Christmas has become a pretty thoroughly heathen holiday under a un-Christianity that makes what Francis rejected look mild by comparison.

Got to stock up on bird seed.  We don't keep big animals anymore.


1 comment:

  1. Charlie Rose was interviewing Serene Jones (lovely name), Pres. of Union Theological. I only caught the last few minutes, but she was talking about slavery and the scars of racism and how we have to confront 200+ years of legalized torture and brutality and treating people like they weren't human, and reparations has to be a part of that discussion.

    It was a moral condemnation, akin to King's work; and I thought about the atheists today who complain about religion and believers and Mother Teresa, and frankly do nothing but bitch. And I thought about Christ condemning the Pharisees, who lay up burdens on people and do nothing to lift them.

    Tell me again how "moral" atheism is. And I'd like just one atheist who says you can be moral without religion to then take up the burden Sartre put on them with his humanistic ethic that when I choose for myself how to treat others, I choose for all humankind. It's a helluva responsibility, that; but the whiners I encounter don't want responsibility, just authority.

    Which is pretty much what despots and small children want.

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