Monthly Archives: December 2018

Faith, Music, Poetry

On St. Nicholas Day

From the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s calendar of commemorations for December 6:

Of the many saints commemorated by the Christian Church, Nicholas (d. A.D. 342) is one of the best known. Very little is known historically of him, although there was a church of Saint Nicholas in Constantinople as early as the sixth century. Research has affirmed that there was a bishop by the name of Nicholas in the city of Myra in Lycia (part of Turkey today) in the fourth century. From that coastal location, legends about Nicholas have traveled throughout time and space. He is associated with charitable giving in many countries around the world and is portrayed as the rescuer of sailors, the protector of children, and the friend of people in distress or need. In commemoration of “Sinte Klaas” (Dutch for Saint Nicholas, in English “Santa Claus”), December 6 is a day for giving and receiving gifts in many parts of Europe.

Benjamin Britten’s cantata Saint Nicolas was written for the 1948 centenary of Lancing College in Sussex (an independent secondary boarding school on the south coast of England).  As Paul Spicer writes,

The cantata portrays the life of the fourth-century Bishop of Myra in a work of great poetry and sensitivity. It was conceived and composed with semi-amateur performance in mind and the technical demands of the choral and orchestral writing are appropriately straightforward. The audience also gets to join in two well-known hymns, “All people that on earth do dwell” and “God moves in a mysterious way.”

For Saint Nicholas’ day, enjoy this performance of the cantata by tenor Robert Tear, the Choir of Kings’ College Cambridge and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, all conducted by Sir David Willcocks:

You can find Eric Crozier’s complete libretto and further program notes for Saint Nicolas here.  An excerpt of the 6th movement,  “Nicolas from Prison”:

O man! The world is set for you as for a king!
Paradise is yours in loveliness.
The stars shine down for you, for you the angels sing,
Yet you prefer your wilderness.
You hug the rack of self,
Embrace the lash of sin,
Pour your treasures out to bribe distress.
You build your temples fair without and foul within:
You cultivate your wilderness.
Yet Christ is yours. Yours!
For you He lived and died.
God in mercy gave His son to bless you all,
To bring you life,
And Him you crucified
To desecrate your wilderness.
Turn away from sin! Ah!
Bow down your hard and stubborn hearts!
Confess, yourselves to Him in penitence
And humbly vow your lives to Him, to holiness.

 

— RIck Krueger

Republic of Letters

Advent “is a time for being deeply shaken…”

(Image: Alex Gindin | Unsplash.com)

Advent is perhaps my favorite season of the liturgical year. One reason is that I knew nothing of Advent while growing up as a Fundamentalist—there was Christmas and Easter, and really nothing else to mark any sort of sacred day or season (that would have been “Romanish” and “pagan”). The irony, I suppose, is that we, as Fundamentalists were quite obsessed with the End Times, readily seeking out signs of impending apocalypse in a world moving from one fatalistic sign of doom to the next. And Advent is a season intimately connected with eschatology, judgment, and apocalypse, even while it is also rooted in the Incarnation, joyful anticipation, and eternal hope. In that way it readily demonstrates the “eschatological tension” reflected upon by St. John Paul II in his final encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003), which delves deeply into the Eucharistic character of the Church and the Kingdom. 

The reflections below were written in 2006, and have been lightly edited for this posting. 

Preparing To Meet the Lord: Reflections on the Readings for Advent

An advent, of course, is a coming; the word means “to come to.” Advent anticipates the coming–or comings–of the Son of Man: in his Incarnation two thousand years ago, in his future return in glory, and in the mystery of the sacraments, especially the Holy Eucharist. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the Saviour’s first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming” (CCC 524). Simply put, Advent is about being prepared to meet Christ–not on our terms, but on His terms. By preparing us to meet the tiny Incarnate Word of God lying in a manger, Advent also directs our hearts and minds toward the return of that child as glorious King and Lord of all. 

In a book of reflections titled Seek That Which Is Above, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that the purpose of Advent is “to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope.” Later, he states that Advent is also about shaking off spiritual slumber and sloth: “So Advent means getting up, being awake, emerging out of sleep and darkness.” In Advent of the Heart, a collection of sermons and prison writings, the priest and martyr Fr. Alfred Delp contemplates Advent from a similar perspective. “Advent,” he writes, “is a time for being deeply shaken, so that man will wake up to himself. … It is precisely in the severity of this awakening, in the helplessness of coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations that the golden threads running between Heaven and earth during this season reach us; the threads that give the world a hint of the abundance to which it is called, the abundance of which it is capable.” 

Advent is marked by anticipation, contemplation, joy, conversion, discernment, repentance, hope, faith, and–last but never least–charity. The readings for this Advent (cycle C) aptly reflect all of this, always within the context of historical events and realities involving men and women who face difficulties and struggles similar to those that confront us today. Here, then, are seven themes and/or persons who have stood out to me as I have studied and contemplated the readings for Sunday liturgies during this Advent season. 

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Art, Faith

JPII to artists (1999)

LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS 
POPE JOHN PAUL II 
TO ARTISTS

1999

To all who are passionately dedicated 
to the search for new “epiphanies” of beauty 
so that through their creative work as artists 
they may offer these as gifts to the world.

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gn1:31)

The artist, image of God the Creator

1. None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when—like the artists of every age—captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colours and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.

That is why it seems to me that there are no better words than the text of Genesis with which to begin my Letter to you, to whom I feel closely linked by experiences reaching far back in time and which have indelibly marked my life. In writing this Letter, I intend to follow the path of the fruitful dialogue between the Church and artists which has gone on unbroken through two thousand years of history, and which still, at the threshold of the Third Millennium, offers rich promise for the future.

[Please go to page 2]

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Art, Film

Netflix Will Keep ‘Friends’ Through Next Year in a $100 Million Agreement – The New York Times

Netflix cancels Daredevil, the most thoughtful and heroic show of the last decade, but spends $100 million to stream reruns of a brain dead, amoral, insipid sitcom. What a commentary on the state of modern culture.

The streaming service and AT&T struck an agreement that raises the yearly licensing fee for the show by more than three times.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/business/media/netflix-friends.html

History, Philosophy, Politics

The Bigotry Inherent in American Progressivism | The American Conservative

Tellingly, it is impossible to separate Progressivism from racial and religious bigotry, especially in the United States. Eugenics and social engineering come directly from America’s progressives, who firmly believed in a lily white, Protestant America. One of progressivism’s most famous scholars—a man who supported and received the support of Teddy Roosevelt as well as Woodrow Wilson—was Edward Alsworth Ross, author of the wretched The Old World in the New (1914). “In this sense it is fair to say that the blood now being injected into the veins of our people is ‘sub–common,’” Ross asserted. “To one accustomed to the aspect of the normal American population, the Caliban type shows up with a frequency that is startling.”
— Read on www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-bigotry-inherent-in-american-progressivism/

Philosophy, Politics, Republic of Letters

Supreme Court & Affirmative Action: Call It Racial Discrimination | National Review

Harvard’s racial and ethnic balancing is the poisonous fruit of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on race and affirmative action. And higher education isn’t the only place where racism rears its ugly head. Take the drawing of districts for congressional elections, especially the practice of gerrymandering, whereby legislatures create electoral maps to maximize their party’s advantages. The Supreme Court has injected itself into this most political of activities, one that the Constitution explicitly assigns to state legislatures and whose politically partisan use is as old as the Constitution itself (the word “gerrymander” itself comes from Elbridge Gerry’s drawing of a Massachusetts state-senate district that resembled a salamander; Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and a contributor to the first Judiciary Act and the Bill of Rights). Historically, Southern state legislatures used gerrymandering to reduce the voting strength of racial minorities, particularly African Americans. But now the Supreme Court has allowed the federal government and states to consider race in drawing voting districts designed to maximize the voting strengths of racial groups.
— Read on www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/supreme-court-racial-preferences-affirmative-action/

Politics

Map: Visualizing Every Ship at Sea in Real-Time

The ocean is a big place, which makes it a pretty difficult thing to wrap our brains around.

It covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface, is home to millions of species of life, and it makes up 97% of all water on the planet. But, with this massive size and ubiquity also comes a significant challenge for humans interested in trade: it must be constantly traversed in order for us to move goods around.

As a result, millions of people hit the high seas each day to get cargo from one place to another. The vessels used range from tiny sailboats to massive oil tankers, some of which can get up to four football fields in length.
— Read on www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-every-ship-real-time/

Poetry

When the Witch of November Comes Stealin’ | Front Porch Republic

When the Witch of November Comes Stealin’ | Front Porch Republic
— Read on www.frontporchrepublic.com/2018/11/when-the-witch-of-november-comes-stealin/

With apologies, I’m re-posting this several days too late. Beautifully written, however, and well worth reading.

Philosophy, Politics

Focus on Reining in the American Bar Association | The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities

If I had one suggestion for the Department of Education going forward, it would be to strip the American Bar Association of its accreditation authority over law schools, leaving state supreme courts and state bar associations to determine whether graduates of any given law school may sit for the bar examination in their state. This move would require pressure from law schools, state legislators, and state supreme courts. It could unite conservatives and progressives in common cause.
— Read on allenmendenhallblog.com/2018/12/03/focus-on-reining-in-the-american-bar-association/