11th Day of Christmas: I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day

 Merry Christmas!  This is the Eleventh Day of Christmas, with still more Christmas to come.  

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1868

Today I’d like to take a look at a particularly moving Christmas song. There's a story behind the creation of every song, and sometimes knowing the story can make the song all the more meaningful.  This is one of my favorites. 

The story begins on Christmas Day, 1863, when the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem called “Christmas Bells”.

Wadsworth starts his poem with church bells ringing out the joy of Christmas:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Henry, Charles, Ernest, and Frances Longfellow

The poet, however, was not filled with unmixed good cheer.  His wife had recently died a tragic death in a house fire, and he had just received news that his son Charles, who had left without his knowledge or consent to fight in the bitter Civil War that was then embroiling the United States, had been wounded in battle.  Longfellow, himself struggling with sorrow in the midst of our most festive season,  juxtaposes the joyful ringing of bells in “The belfries of all Christendom” with the manifest lack of peace among men:

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

These images of war and shattered homes seem to give the lie to the joyful promise of the Christmas Bells:

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Christ did not come, of course, simply to bring joy: he came to free us from the power of sin.  Our Faith is grounded in Christian Hope, which is the confidence that the Power of God is greater than the power of hate, and stronger than hate's master.  Longfellow's closing stanza resolves the conflict between Christmas joy and the sin and violence of this world with a ringing assertion of Christian Hope:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

"My Friend, The Enemy" by Mort Kunstler

Longfellow, who had very powerful incentives to turn to despair, instead created a poem that shows us that the joy of Christmas is not a denial of the brokenness of this world, but God's answer to it.
Longfellow’s poem has been put to music numerous times over the past century and a half (usually under the title, “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day”); my favorite is Johnny Cash’s rendition.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a good video of Cash performing the song, so the clip below will have to do (good recording, no video).
One curious note: all the musical adaptations that I have found have left out Longfellow’s 4th and 5th stanzas, with their references to thundering cannon and forlorn households.  The version below also moves stanza 3 (“Till ringing, singing . . .”) behind Longfellow’s concluding stanza (“God is not dead . . .”), and then repeats the “God is not dead” stanza.  The effect is to de-emphasize the reasons for the speaker’s cry of despair, and give greater emphasis to the redemptive conclusion.  It seems to me that the change robs the song of some of it’s narrative coherence (why should the speaker “bow his head in despair” after hearing "peace on earth, good will to men"?), and, by replacing those concrete examples of suffering with the abstraction "hate", deprive it of much of its dramatic power.  I suppose the song-makers thought those images too heavy for a Christmas song, but in fact they are a stark reminder of why the coming of the Messiah is "Good tidings of great joy" (Luke 2:10).
For all that, the sense of Longfellow’s poem still comes through in the song: the joyful celebration of Christmas seems to be mocked by the all-too-evident evil in the world (and is there any one of us who is not, right now, directly aware of some reason for anger or sorrow?).  The conclusion reminds us that the Child lying in the wooden manger will one day hang upon a wooden cross, precisely so that he might carry us through those evils to the feet of His Father. When we learn about the real suffering that the author of those words was experiencing as he wrote them, we can experience the song, not as sentimentality or empty platitude, but as a true triumph of Christian Hope. Let the bells peal loud and deep!

10th Day of Christmas: Epiphany

 Happy Epiphany . . . and a Merry Christmas!

 

Epiphany, by Fernando Gallego

  Yes, it is still the Christmas Season: the season officially ends next Sunday with the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord.  Today we celebrate the Great Feast of Epiphany (this year we formally observe the feast a few days before its traditional date of January 6th). In the Western Church today Epiphany commemorates the visit of the Magi, whom we often call “The Three Kings”, Balthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar by name.  Scripture, however, neither crowns, nor numbers, nor names them, but simply describes them as “wise men from the East”.  The word Epiphany means “a manifestation” or “a revealing”.  In this context the name of the Feast refers to the fact that the gifts and adoration of the Magi make manifest that Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God.  This ancient feast (which Christians were celebrating even before there was a formal observance of Christmas) has at times also been connected  to the Nativity, the Baptism of Jesus and other manifestations of his Divinity.

It is interesting how many epiphanies of “God With Us” can be found in Scripture, how many different ways he reveals himself: the examples above barely scratch the surface. And yet it’s still so hard for us to accept (a theme I touched on in yesterday's post as well). Mary and Joseph themselves, after visits from Angels, and even after what they knew full well was a Virgin Birth, “marveled at what was said about him (Luke 2:33)”  when they hear the old man Simeon prophesy over Jesus as he is presented in the Temple. A full dozen years later, they still seem to have a hard time taking it all in:

After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions; and all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when they saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously." And he said to them, "How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" And they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them.  (Luke 2:46-50)

   It is so difficult for all of us to grasp the reality of the Incarnation. Even the human parents of The Lord seem to struggle with it – and who could hope to have faith equal to theirs?  

    But even here, as always, the Blessed Mother is the model disciple: “His mother”, the Evangelist tells us, “kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51).  She doesn’t let her initial human reactions have the last word, but patiently waits for the meaning of all these events to become manifest.  One might even say that she demonstrates the classic definition of theology: faith seeking understanding.

"We Three Kings of Orient Are"

performed by the Robert Shaw Chorale

9th Day of Christmas: God's Ways Are Not Our Ways

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
     so are my ways higher than your ways
     and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

       Merry Ninth Day of Christmas!  We hear a lot of Isaiah through the seasons of Advent and Christmas, but this passage expresses with particular clarity one of the most striking and curious things about Christmas. Who would expect the Infinite, Almighty Deity to manifest himself as a tiny baby, born in a cattle stall with the beasts? Who would have thought that wise and exalted visitors would come to this baby from strange lands many miles away with their rich gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, as we will commemorate in tomorrow’s liturgical celebration of Epiphany? Ours is a God indeed whose thoughts are not our thoughts, whose ways are not our  ways: he constantly confounds our expectations. This is not the Grand Entrance any of us would have devised for God Made Manifest.

The Nativity by Jacopo Tintoretto

  Nor did the child grow up to be the sort of Messiah that people expected, not even his own disciples: he rebukes Peter, his chief Apostle, with “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matthew 16:23) because the man who will become the first Pope can’t accept that the Christ must suffer and die in order to save humanity.  And nobody at all was really expecting what happened on Easter Sunday.

  Of course, none of the above should have been a surprise: it was all foretold by the Prophets, as we saw over and over again in the Advent readings and prayers.  In other words, he’s a God of the unexpected mostly because we insist on setting ourselves up to be surprised. But that’s the way we imperfect, broken human beings are: we think we can simply force reality to be what we want it to be . . . but God usually has other plans. 

  We can glimpse something of this stubborn arrogance in the story of two of tomorrow’s Ssaints (who are graciously yielding their feast day to the celebration of Epiphany in many dioceses):

Zosimus and Athanasius (n.b. – he is not the more well-known Athanasius of Alexandria) d.303 + Martyrs in Cilicia (modern Turkey). They were executed during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305). According to one account, Zosimus was tortured and Athanasius, a witness, was so moved that he converted to the faith. Both were then tortured but survived and died in peace after being released. They became hermits. (from www.Catholic.org )

The Roman authorities thought that, if they were brutal enough, they would discourage people from embracing Christianity, but – surprise! – seeing the torture of Zosimus instead drew Athanasius to the Faith.  And his is not an isolated incident: “The blood of the martyrs”, wrote Tertullian, “is the seed of the Church.” Up to the present day, we see that Christianity is strongest when it is under attack.

  We would do well to remember these things when we contemplate the Child in the manger.  However bad, even disastrous, things may seem (and in a world insistently moving further away from God, well, what do you expect?), we should remember that the same child grows up to promise that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against his Church (Matthew 16:18).  

Prepare yourself to be surprised.

A beautiful version of Silent Night by the Winchester Cathedral Choir:

8th Day of Christmas: The Scandal of Mary, Mother of God

 

Bellini Jacopo, Virgin and Child

 Today, the Eighth Day of Christmas, is known out in The World as New Year’s Day; in the Church it is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the final day in the Octave of Christmas.  The secular observance celebrates no more than another turning of a calendar page, but in the Church we look at time with an eye on eternity: the Nativity of Christ turns around all of human history (which is why we eventually adopted the BC/AD arrangement of the centuries with its mirror-image numbering of years, placing the Nativity at the center of time).  Jesus’s mother, Mary, plays an essential part in that unique and astonishing event.

     We must start with the fact that Mary was fully human; as Charles Dickens says in the opening lines of A Christmas Carol, “This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.”  Just as Marley’s death is an essential element in Dickens’ tale, the Incarnation’s meaning for mankind is directly connected to the Blessed Mother’s humanity, because if Christ isn’t born of a human woman, He’s not fully human himself, in which case how can He die and redeem humankind? Mary is the guarantor that Jesus, while He truly is God, is truly one of us as well.

Theotokos of the Life-Giving Spring

     Both truly God, and truly one of us . . . it’s hard for us to reconcile both of those things in our finite minds, but both must be true if Christianity is true.  At the same time, the title “Mother of God” is alarming: some people claim that it seems to say that a mortal woman has brought God into existence, but it doesn't really mean that at all: after all, we don’t think that ordinary mothers actually create their ordinary human babies, body and soul.  Mothers and Fathers are agents in a larger process, and the soul, of course, comes from God.  The original Greek term Theotokos, literally “God-bearer”, while a little less difficult, still challenges us. It tells us that, just as the original Arc of the Covenant carried Manna from Heaven, along with Tablets of the Decalogue and Aaron’s staff, Mary carried the Second Person of the Trinity in her womb, and so she is called the Arc of the New Covenant (see Revelation 11:19-12:1).

     But the first Arc was merely a container, it contributed nothing to its contents; even before anyone knew anything of genetics, however, it would have been obvious that, in some way, Jesus’s fleshly body owed something, at least, to his mother.  In his face, the color of his eyes, the shape of his nose, or some other physical feature, the familial relationship would be manifest. Through the Motherhood of Mary Jesus, that is to say God, takes on our humanity in an utterly tangible, direct and personal way.

     The Motherhood of Mary, like the Incarnation itself, is a mystery.  It is something that we can really understand (although never fully understand) only through experience.  As the last day in the Octave of Christmas, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God it invites us to start looking not only at the Child lying in the manger, but to start looking further at what that Child means for us as men and women.

            O God,

            Who through the fruitful virginity 
                of Blessed Mary

            Bestowed on the Human race the grace of         
                eternal salvation,

            Grant, we pray, that we may experience the 
                 intercession of her,

            Through whom we were found worthy to 
                 receive the author of life,

            Our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son.

            Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of 
                  the Holy Spirit,

            One God, for ever and ever.

                        -Amen

"Gabriel's Message" performed by Christmas Choir:

7th Day of Christmas: The Christmas Tree Points to Christ

 Merry Christmas on this the 7th Day of Christmas!  

    It is true that we are nearing the end of the Octave of Christmas: Sunday will be both the tenth day and the great feast of Epiphany, which this year we officially celebrate three days before its traditional date of January 6th. The Christmas season itself continues for another week after that, and for some of us until February 2nd (see "What is the Christmas Season, and Why Does It Matter?")

    I once published a post at this point in the season entitled "Don't Touch That Tree!", in reference to all the Christmas trees unceremoniously cast out untimely and thrown to the curb at a time when the Christmas lights should still be burning bright. In this post I'd like to look at the Christmas Tree itself as an institution, a beloved Christian symbol and tradition which is sometimes attacked (erroneously) by self-styled debunkers as a pagan intrusion.  
We Christians need not be swayed by such nonsense.  First of all, even if there were historical evidence of evergreen trees being used in pagan worship, Christ can baptize all things for his use (for more on this point, see my post “Christ is King of All . . . Even the Holidays”).  Pagans prayed to their gods, for instance: should we avoid prayer for that reason?  Pagans offered sacrifice on their altars; do any of us put the offerings on a similar altar in the Temple of Jerusalem in the same category, much less Christ's Eucharistic Sacrifice on the altars of our churches? Certainly the same would apply to Christmas trees, if they had pagan origins.

    As it happens, however, evergreen trees were not worshipped or treated as religious objects among the Germanic and Baltic peoples of Europe, although they were sometimes used as symbols of eternity and the promise of Springtime rebirth.  This rather obvious symbolism was recognized in other parts of the world as well.  The pre-Christians of the German forests directed their religious veneration, at least as it applied to trees (is dendrolatry a word?), toward the deciduous oak tree. This oak-worship figures prominently in one popular story, in fact, about the origins of the Christmas Tree, which only makes sense if we distinguish between the two different kinds of tree.  St. Boniface, who left his native England to evangelize the still pagan Germans of continental Europe in the 8th century, famously chopped down a holy oak to which a young boy was being offered in sacrifice. In one version of the story, after the mighty oak fell a young fir tree could be seen standing behind its stump.  The Saint pointed to the evergreen, and told the onlookers (who were impressed that Wotan hadn’t zapped him out of existence) that they should henceforth direct their veneration to this tree, as a symbol of the True God in the Person of Jesus Christ.

Queen Victoria & Family around the tree

    The first actual historical references to Christmas trees (Boniface certainly did cut down the oak, but the rest of the story is historically dubious) come in the sixteenth century. It seems very unlikely indeed that almost eight centuries after the heathens of central Europe converted and gave up tree-worship their practices would somehow find their way into Christian homes.  Christmas trees were not known beyond some (not even all) German speaking areas, along with Latvia and Estonia, until very recently.  Christmas trees were rarely, if ever, seen in the English speaking world until a little over a century and a half ago, when Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, who was German, introduced the custom to the British Royal family.  A print that first appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1848 depicting the Queen and family around their tree is generally credited with popularizing Christmas trees both in Britain and in North America.

    Today one sees Christmas trees all over the world; in recent decades the popes have put up large and beautiful trees near the crèche in St. Peter’s Square.  Saint John Paul II explained some of the Christian symbolism of the tree in his Angelus address on December 19th, 2004:

The feast of Christmas, perhaps the most cherished by popular tradition, is full of symbols connected with the different cultures. Among all, the most important is surely the Nativity scene, as I had the opportunity to point out last Sunday.

Together with the Nativity scene, as is true here in St. Peter’s Square, we find the traditional “Christmas tree.” A very ancient custom, moreover, which exalts the value of life, as in winter the evergreen becomes a sign of undying life. In general, the tree is decorated and Christmas gifts are placed under it. The symbol is also eloquent from a typically Christian point of view: It reminds us of the “tree of life” (see Genesis 2:9), representation of Christ, God’s supreme gift to humanity.

The message of the Christmas tree, therefore, is that life is “ever green” if one gives: not so much material things, but of oneself: in friendship and sincere affection, and fraternal help and forgiveness, in shared time and reciprocal listening.

St. Peter's Square decorated for Christmas, 2001 (Lawrence Journal-World)

Pope Benedict XVI elaborated on the same theme four years later:

With its loftiness, its green [color] and the lights in its branches, the Christmas tree is a symbol of life that points to the mystery of Christmas Eve . . .

Christ, the Son of God, brings to the dark, cold, unredeemed world in which he was born, a new hope and a new splendor . . .

If man allows himself to be touched and enlightened by the splendor of the living truth that is Christ, he will experience an interior peace in his heart and will himself become an instrument of peace in a society that has so much nostalgia for reconciliation and redemption.

There you have it: don’t let the nay-sayers wear you down!  We still have some Christmas left this year, so be of good cheer . . . and don’t touch that tree just yet!

Speaking of Christmas trees, here’s a beautiful tri-lingual rendition of “O Tannenbaum” by Andrea Bocelli:

6th Day of Christmas: The Season is Still Young!

 Merry Christmas!  Today is the 6th Day of Christmas: the Christmas Season is still in its first week.

The Nativity, by Gerard David

The trouble is, it may not feel like Christmas is just beginning.  For many years I have had a second job at a local retail store, in the seasonal department.  Retailers want to get "seasonal" merchandise on the shelves before the actual season begins, and try to get it out there before their competitors do. As a result, over the past century the commercial “Christmas Season” (now more often called the holiday season) has started earlier and earlier: we are putting Christmas merchandise on the shelves in September, and the Christmas-themed music (mostly about celebrating Christmas, or maybe just the “wonderful time of year”, rather than about the Nativity of Jesus itself) begins blaring out of the stores’ PA systems.  They stop receiving Christmas items in early to mid December, and begin selling down their supplies, because once "the holiday” is over (i.e., December 25th . . . what's that holiday called again?) they don’t want to be stuck with a lot of overstock (which means financial losses). The music and decorations are gone when the doors open for business on December 26th. In our post-Christian culture the commercial Christmas season and its advertising sets the tone for the culture as a whole, and so for most people Christmas, sadly, is now over.

But not for those of us who are followers of the Babe Lying in the Manger.  Today is only the sixth of eight days in the Octave of Christmas, all with the liturgical status of solemnity; beyond that, the customary “Twelve Days of Christmas” extend until January 5th, followed by the traditional date of the great Feast of Epiphany on the 6th; the formal Christmas Season itself extends until the Baptism of the Lord on January 13th.  Some Catholics continue to observe Christmas until the Feast of the Presentation on February 2nd, as did Pope Saint John Paul II, and also my lovely bride’s Polish forebears.  

Granted, keeping Christmas when it ought to be kept can be hard, especially when we have all been living and working in an environment reveling in the “holiday spirit” during what was supposed to be the penitential preparatory Season of Advent, and is now wearily going back about its business just when the real celebration is just starting.  Fortunately, the Church has given us the Liturgical Calendar, to keep us grounded in the Gospel and the real events of Salvation History.  There we find, as we do in the most of the observances of the last few days (the feasts of St. Stephen, Holy Innocents, and usually St. John on the 3rd day of Christmas, although this year the Beloved Apostle yielded to the Holy Family), that the Incarnation points to the Crucifixion, and it is only through the suffering and death of Christ that we come to the Triumph of the Resurrection. Our Celebration of Christmas, then, is not mere revelry in defiance of the cruelty of reality, or a vain attempt to deny it; it is true celebration because we know that, precisely because of that cruel reality, the Child born in Bethlehem has come to take us through the brokenness of this world and beyond to something “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

A few years ago I set out to keep myself focused on the True Season by posting something related to that particular day for every one of the Twelve Days of Christmas.  While I'm no longer engaged in bloggery on a regular basis, I’m keeping up that tradition by rerunning some of my old Christmas posts (with, perhaps, one or two new ones, such as yesterday's on St. Thomas Becket) .  Please feel free to join me . . . and have a very Merry Christmas!

5th Day of Christmas: St. Thomas Becket, Martyr

    

  Merry Christmas! Today we celebrate the 5th Day of Christmas, and also the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.     

     It’s striking how many martyrs' feast days we observe during the Christmas season: St. Stephen on the 2nd Day of Christmas, Holy Innocents yesterday; on Christmas Day itself the Church used to celebrate a second mass, not for the Nativity, but for the martyr St. Anastasia.  Today, on the 5th Day of Christmas,  we find ourselves celebrating yet another martyr, St. Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered by knights in the service of King Henry II of England on December 29th, 1170.

The murder of St. Thomas Becket

     St. Thomas has attracted the attention of numerous authors over the years: the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are journeying to his shrine; Jean Anouilh wrote a play about him, Becket, which became a successful film starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton (see clip below); Becket’s martyrdom is the focus of T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, and the saint has appeared in not a few novels.

     In Eliot’s play the soon-to-be-martyred archbishop delivers a Christmas homily in which he discusses this (seemingly) odd juxtaposition between the joy of the Nativity and the mourning of martyrdom:

Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once our Lord’s Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of his first martyr, the blessed Stephen.  Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means.  Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs . . . So thus as on earth the Church mourns and rejoices at once, in a fashion that the world cannot understand; so in Heaven the Saints are most high, having made themselves most low, and are seen, not as we see them, but in the light of the Godhead from which they draw their being.

     Eliot’s Becket here is echoing St. Paul, who tells the Corinthians that “the wisdom of this world is folly before God” (1 Corinthians 3:19).  Becket himself enjoyed quite a bit of success, in the eyes of the world, prior to becoming archbishop: he was a close companion to King Henry II, and the king’s Chancellor.  Henry nominated Thomas to be Archbishop of Canterbury in the hopes that he would subordinate the Church in England to the interests of the Crown. Instead, Becket threw away all the advantages that his friendship with the king brought him and became a champion of the independence of the Church from the Crown. He also seemed to embrace the spiritual life wholeheartedly, surrendering many of the comforts he could legitimately claim as archbishop and giving lavishly to the poor. Some people, at the time and since, have doubted the sincerity of his conversion, but others accepted it as genuine, and it's undeniable that Becket had numerous opportunities to compromise with the king, and so save his life, if he had chosen to do so.  The validity of his conversion received further support when the monks who prepared his body discovered that he had been secretly wearing a penitential hair shirt under his episcopal vestments.

Richard Burton as St. Thomas Becket conducts 

excommunication rite in the film Becket

     In recent years, as government and other powerful social institutions have been encroaching more and more menacingly on the Church, Christians have been turning increasingly to St. Thomas Becket (as well as St. Thomas More, another Thomas martyred by another King Henry three and a half centuries later) as inspiration and intercessor. We do well to remember that both Thomases lost their worldly battles against their respective Henries. And while it is true that Henry II did public penance for the murder of St. Thomas Becket just three years after the fact, Henry VIII never looked back after the execution of St. Thomas More. He never showed any remorse for the seizure or destruction of all the Catholic Church’s properties in England (including the very intentional destruction of both the shrine to St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury and the saint's human remains housed there as relics). Henry shed no tears at the eradication of the Catholic Church itself in his kingdom, and the British Monarch is still the head of the Church of England to this day.

     The point is not that we shouldn’t fight to defend the Faith and the Church: we should do so, with all our strength, and call upon the intercession of St. Thomas Becket and all the saints to help us.  We cannot, however, pin our hopes on achieving victory over the temporal powers of this world.  Thomas Becket is not a Saint because he defeated Henry II, but because he overcame the enormous temptations of power and comfort in this world and remained faithful to Christ, even in the face of certain death.  

     Which brings us back to where we started - the intimate connection between Christmas and martyrdom.  In the Feast of the Nativity we celebrate the birth of Our Savior, who was born expressly to die on The Cross, defeated (apparently) by the temporal powers of the day. Whether or not we win our battles against the Henries, Herods, and Pilates of this world (the wisdom of this world, remember, is folly), the battles that really matter in the long run are not “against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). We celebrate the birth of Christ not because he has conquered Caiaphas or Tiberius Caesar (both of whom, after all, death destroyed centuries ago) but because he has “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

    So, again, Merry Christmas! Gaudete, Christus natus est!

St. Thomas Becket, pray for us!

Egeria Voices chants "Iacet granum oppressum palea", a responsory for the feast of St. Thomas Becket (for a good discussion of this chant, go to this article on Chantblog) - text of the responsory below:

R. Jacet granum oppressum palea,
     Justus coesus pravorum framea,
     Coelum domo commutans lutea.
V. Cadit custos vitis in vinea,
    Dux in castris, oultor in area,
    Coelum domo commutans lutea. 

R. The grain of wheat lies smothered by the chaff,
     the just man slain by the sword of sinners.
     Changing his house of clay for heaven.
V. The vine-keeper dies in his vineyard,
     the general in his camp, the husbandman on the place of his toil.
    Changing his house of clay for heaven.