Is God Dead?

Due to circumstances beyond my control, the sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent this year has been postponed. This will have ot suffice in its place, at least until I can get it written (if ever). The management regrets the inconvenience, but is grateful it doesn't have to stand up in a pulpit this morning and try to deliver the following as a sermon:

There are many places to start with this review of what appears to be a fascinating book (sadly the review gives Nietzsche credit for killing God, and says nothing about the theological movement of a mere 4 decades ago; space limitations, I'd like to think), but begin here:

A word repeated in Taylor’s book is “disenchantment,” derived from Max Weber, who saw Enlightenment reason turning into modern rationalization as intelligence is used not to get to the bottom of things but to organize life from the top down, through structures of hierarchy, specialization, regulation and control. Taylor agrees that this “disenchantment of the world” leaves us with a universe that is dull, routine, flat, driven by rules rather than thoughts, a process that culminates in bureaucracy run by “specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart” — what Weber called the “iron cage” of modern life.

Sounds like Pullman's "Magisterium," no? (Yes, I know the term is from the movie, not the books; work with me a moment). Sounds a lot like the standard critique of American fundamentalism and Evangelicalism and "mega-churches," from outside Christianity and even from within it: that people go to such churches to be told what to think (I've heard that criticism more than once from within my own denomination, the United Church of Christ). Then there are the blogger critics of religion, who insist all religion is about mind control and thought enforcement and living a life that is "dull, routine, flat, driven by rules rather than thoughts, a process that culminates in bureaucracy run by 'specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart'". Gee, wonder where they ever got that idea?

Could it be the beam in their own eye?

The fact is, of course, we can only see what we can see. The reviewer seems to blame that limitation on post-modern philosophy, but I'd say it goes back at least to David Hume in the 18th century. There all the troubles of modern philosophy began, and Anglo-American philosophy split off finally from Continental philosophy (a schism not unlike the break of the Roman Catholic Church following the Protestant Reformation), and the two not only can no longer reconcile, but no longer even speak the same language. And there's what I've come to recognize as the modern rub: the question of language. Oh, not that that's such an insight, after Wittgenstein and Austin and company, but the more direct question as first put forward by Ol' Ezra:

"Hang it all, Robert Browning! There can be but one Sordello!
But Sordello, and my Sordello?"

In a fractured and fracturing community, whose Sordello do we get to speak of? Whose is the common language we will rally 'round? And will we merely rally 'round it, or use it as the spear to slay the dragons of all those other vocabularies which chew at our boundaries and threaten our identities? Sadly, all the evidence is that what we are seeking today is not just an alternative, but a decisive victory over our enemies. We don't just want new styles of architecture and a change of heart; we want bulldozers to plow under the monuments of the past, of those who don't speak like we do. We don't want to be the restorers of the breach so much as we wish to be the supplanters of the past; in this case, what is barely past. And therein lies the problem, because the past we want to supplant is not just "their" past; it is our past, too.

Part of the problem in this is deciding which past we will supplant, and which past we will replace it with. For example, if this is a fair representation of Taylor's argument, then I disagree with him for much more fundamental reasons than the review reaches:

The Weberian outlook is bleak, and Taylor puts it aside to find a far more hopeful vision in the sociology of Emile Durkheim. In contrast to Weber, Durkheim saw the forms of society as containing not impersonal functions but deeply implanted sacred practices, and he saw religion rooted in the roles and rules of modern social systems resisting the chill of alienation. Whatever intellectuals may think, people value religion as providing a framework of meaning, a realm of unifying symbols and a sense of belonging. Some observers have been surprised by the resurgence of religion in recent years. “In a sense,” Taylor observes, “part of what drove the Moral Majority and motivates the Christian right in the U.S.A. is an aspiration to re-establish something of the fractured neo-Durkheimian understanding that used to define the nation, where being American would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one nation under God.’”

As the reviewer points out, we were never this "one nation under theism." Consider this, published during Thomas Jefferson's campaign for the Presidency:

The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.

Yale College President Timothy Dwight, on the possibility of Jefferson's election

It was Jefferson's "separation of church and state," of course, which made American religion what it is today (although yes, that is another topic). But in learning from the past, let's look honestly, not simplistically, at the past.

This, however, is a very interesting point:

“A new poetic language can serve to find a way back to the God of Abraham,” he exhorts.

It's one that come up before, and recently, and not surprisingly both in connection with politics, and in politics:

“We cannot abandon the field of religious discourse,” Barack Obama, the most eloquently convincing of them all, said back in June of 2006. “Because when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome - others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.”

Again, a tempting argument, but again, I'm reminded of Auden speaking to the late Yeats:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? That's laughable, says Auden. Look around the world after World War I. Look around the world after World War II. Was better language going to solve those problems? Did Orwell teach us nothing? Anthony Burgess even gave us a delightful object lesson in the abuses of language and power: A Clockwork Orange. No, language is not the cure here, nor is it even the disease. We need new ways of thinking, but promoting that is much more difficult than changing the lexicon. How, then, do we respond to those who "...others will fill the vacuum, those with the most insular views of faith, or those who cynically use religion to justify partisan ends”? Warner goes on to argue that the split is already happening, and we simply have to be willing to reap the harvest:

The Christian conservative vote is, apparently, splintering. Younger evangelicals are increasingly said to be interested in putting their faith to greater use than bashing gays, promoting guns and putting God on the presidential ticket. That would seem to indicate that we’re facing a moment of opportunity: a chance to expand and amplify the reach of the voice of religious moderation. The silence I’m hearing makes me think, though, that as a society we’ve come to accept the slippage of prejudicial and hateful attitudes into religious doctrine as somehow normal. Whether that’s due to cynicism or due to cowardice, it’s very troubling.

We probably have, but when was that ever different? Does no one remember Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker? Marjoe? Elmer Gantry? What American President in recent memory hasn't invoked God while bombing and killing innocents around the globe? A "slippage of prejudicial and hateful attitudes"? Has she not read Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail"?

Ecclesiastes was right; there is nothing new under the sun. Which brings us to this quote from Nietzsche, also mentioned in this review:

“An omniscient and omnipotent God who does not even take care that his intentions shall be understood by his creatures,” Nietzsche wrote, “could he be a God of goodness?”

Could an omniscient and omnipotent God, however, who makes His intentions perfectly clear to everyone, also be a God of goodness? That's actually one of the central questions of the Gospel of John, albeit a very subtly posed one (as it should be). Some will recognize it as the question of free will. How do we make everyone understand God without making everyone think as we do? Even the Hebrews didn't think that was necessary, or even possible. Even they argued with God (and still do, I understand). But you see that we are back to the problem of modernity, as identified by Weber. An "iron cage," indeed.

I'm guided, you might have guessed, by the example of Dr. King, who didn't want to convert everyone to Christianity, or even convert all Christians to his way of thinking. His ambitions were never so grandiose, so all-encompassing. He was never struggling to realize some Grand Unified Theory of Society. He simply understood that people of good will could be appealed to, that their consciences could be reached, by the proper application of direct action (he makes this very plain in his "Letter"), and that in reaching their conscience, people of good will would eventually act through their government to support the cause of justice for all people, and especially the ones involved in the struggle for justice through direct action. He knew this because he knew people of good will would want to see justice done, and they first had to see the harsh reality of injustice, which those of us who remember the pictures of police dogs attacking marchers, and marchers being rolled down the street with water cannons, those of us who remember "Bull" Connor, learned to our shame and sometimes, despair. He didn't try to build new buildings or change hearts or even create new words; the old words were good enough, the buildings weren't the problem, and as for the heart, he knew his scriptures too well to be fooled by such an appeal to his ego:

The heart is deceitful above any other thing,
desperately sick; who can fathom it?
I, the Lord, search the mind
and test the heart,
requiting each one for his conduct
and as his deeds deserve--Jeremiah 17:9-10

It is by our deeds that we are known; our words just follow and make excuses or explain. Taylor, the review notes, says this about the modern condition (a statement that could have come as well from one of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms):

At present, he writes, “we live in a condition” in which we suspect our own beliefs as having been influenced by sources other than the self and its reasons, with the human subject the mere effect of forces alien to our being. “We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time,” he writes, “looking sideways, living our faith also in a condition of doubt and uncertainty.” Has religion, then, come to end in doubts about ourselves?

The doubt and uncertainty are not flaws in our faith; they are the ground of it. We are not all meant to be Abrahams, setting out for a new country on the word of an unknown God. Even Abram doubted, and three times told the kings whose kingdoms he wandered into that Sarai was his sister, not his wife. If Abraham did not hesitate on Moriah, holding the knife over Isaac, the image is one too terrible for the rest of us. Israel ran quivering into their tents when the God who had liberated them from slavery spoke to Moses atop nearby Sinai. Even Jesus himself cried out from the cross the words of the Psalmist: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Doubt? Uncertainty? What makes us think certainty is the ground and the birthright of our being, and the enemy of faith? Do we want to merely swap one world of regulation and control for another?

The Santa Claus mythos applies here, in a way that may seem to undermine my own beliefs, but doesn't. Santa Claus is not real, but we make him as real as we can because the idea of Santa Claus is so appealing. But, of course, we insist that we must believe in Santa Claus, or he will cease to be. This is the modern variant on the myth, the one that makes us responsible for keeping the dream alive. What dream are we keeping alive, and why? And is the universe really so dependent upon our attention that without it, for even a moment, some portion of it, some one good thing, will vanish like a burst soap bubble? Aye, there's the rub: just how important are we in the scheme of things? Sartre argued for an ethic which made us responsible for not only our choices, but for choosing for all humankind. It is a terrible burden indeed, but an interesting way of making us responsible without any appeal to transcendence, even the transcendence of the community over the individual (which is where Aristotle began the ethical discussion). But is choosing Santa Claus a choice I make for all humankind? Well, try denying it too publicly before too many children and, especially, their parents. But is it our insistence which keeps the idea of Santa Claus going? Or is it our agreement that this is indeed, for whatever reason, a good thing, an idea that means more than the number of shopping days between the fourth Thursday in November and December 25th?

Isn't it the ultimate cynicism to hate Santa Claus? We may doubt, as children, as we get a bit "too old." We may finally disbelieve. But do we ever really doubt Santa Claus? Do we ever really disbelieve Santa Claus? Which is not an argument for the existence of Santa Claus (that would be absurd); but it is pointing toward a question. No doubt, in some ways, Santa Claus is just another system of regulation and control ("you'd better watch out!"). But in many ways Santa Claus is a transcendent figure, an icon. Who doesn't look at that picture atop this post and want some good feelings, at least, to be attached to it? Is it power and authority which established that? Did we fight a war on Christmas and win those hopeful wishes? So what would we expect a war for religious vocabulary, a war over public piety, to win for us?

"And what I say to you I say to all: Watch."--Mark 13:37

I am watching with bemusement as religion goes from being the solution in American politics, to being the problem. Thers picked up on yet one more example, which is particularly bad as it wants to equate the civil rights movement (Dr. Martin Luther King was a Christian minister, something a lot of people tend to forget for one reason or another) with George W. Bush preening his public piety for the fundamentalist/evangelical vote. Now that we have a real, live ordained minister (who does not have a "theology degree," nor any better understanding of Islam than the average American), and a Mormon who feels compelled to make a speech about religion in American public life, suddenly many conservatives are upset about the influence of religion in American politics.

It would be laughable if it weren't so predictable.

You can nitpick the claims being made now, such as the one Thers highlights:

It's not just the Republicans, either. The Democrats have used churches for decades as backdrops for political speeches, especially in the African-American community. Churches themselves have actively pursued politics for both parties, raising money and issuing endorsements.

All too easy to remind such commenters of the Tax Code, for example; maybe thrown in a mention of All Saint's Episcopal Church. But the real issue here is the question of consistency; and also, the even broader question of public piety.

Piety as most people understand it or think of it being practiced, is linked to the Pietistic movement of the 17th century. Pietism arose in the German Protestant churches in the 17th century as a reaction to the rather arid climate of the Reformation; its aim was to restore a measure of devotion to religious observance, and, not coincidentally, to involve the individual more in spiritual practices. By the 19th century Pietism was bolstered by the emphasis on the individual that arose under Romanticism. This put even more emphasis on the individual experience, rather than on the experience and knowledge of the community. Allow me a diversion for a moment:

The Hebrew prophets had very individual experiences of God. Isaiah had a vision of standing in the throne room of God. Jeremiah claimed God has chosen him from the womb, and Jeremiah often complained bitterly about what God told him to say. Ezekiel recounted visions and experiences we would call hallucinatory and attribute either to LSD or (probably) to schizophrenia today. Hosea felt compelled to marry a prostitute as a public act of prophecy, and to name his children as symbols of Israel's apostasy (and you thought "Moon Unit" and "Apple" were burdensome names!). Amos came in from the fringes of Israeli society (a herdsman and dresser of sycamore trees) to condemn the king in Jerusalem on behalf of God. What made them prophets was not that they said they were, but that the community said they were. Their words were tested by the community, found ultimately to be truthful, to be a revelation of God, and were incorporated into the canon of the "word of God."

Pietism made no attempt to reverse that process, but the abuse of Pietism did. Protestantism, from its beginnings under Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, inspired not unity but fraction. Under the influence of Pietism and Romanticism in the 19th century, especially in America, that fractioning took off, with figures like Aimee Semple McPherson claiming prophetic powers and gathering followers who were, usually, disappointed in the end. Consider the individualism of Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson, and you can easily see where the "Great Awakening" of the Puritan churches of New England in the 17th century, became the "Second Great Awakening" of the American churches in the 19th century, with a healthy push from Romanticism and, not coincidentally, industrialization.

Few churches arose from leaders like McPherson, but while there were alive they were "successful" and prospered, or ended their days in outrageous scandal. Oddly, the scandals seldom dimmed the public perception of their piety, only their ability to command a small fortune from their "faithful." The American "mega-church" is not so new and original as many might suppose. And it simply continues the emphasis on the individual experience, rather than the experience acknowledged by the community. Which, in the public sphere, is ultimately the only experience that matters.

What we are seeing is a return to that understanding, but the comparison to the use of church in Democratic politics (although the Democrats are hardly without blemish in the abuse of church in the pursuit of power) couldn't be more misguided. The African American church has always been important in Democratic Party politics because African Americans have been important to the Democratic party. But the place of the church in African American politics has been in equal measure a central institution of that community, and a place where justice is preached and pursued. Dr. King never wrapped himself in the comfortable public piety of George W. Bush. Instead, he proclaimed the hard truth and long, difficult road of justice, well within the tradition of the Hebrew prophets (anyone who doesn't think the prophets were concerned almost solely with justice, and didn't suffer for their preaching, has never read the prophetic books). Politicians, of course, don't get far making such proclamations; which means they shouldn't wrap themselves in the mantle of religiosity trying to win votes so that they can gain power. Power, after all, is all that politics is about. But in a democracy, power flows from the consensus of the community (fitfully, to be sure, but eventually). The problem with religion in American politics is the problem of that consensus.

Atrios is right: the current strain of public piety is bad for religion. But the reasons it is bad are complex and conflicting. What's interesting now is to watch the return of "secularism." But it shouldn't be confused with the "secular humanism" denounced by fundamentalists, nor with the anti-religious secularism espoused by Dawkins, Dennet, and Hitchens. What's going on now is merely the inevitable change of partners, as power realizes conservative American Christianity has pretty much been used up as its current agent of influence, and now will be discarded with no more regard than we could give to a used kleenex. It doesn't mean it's an opportune time to reclaim the public sphere for a more "liberal" religious spirit (that's a separate question, with separate problems). It does mean the music has stopped, and everyone in politics is looking for new partners.

Time to beware. Time to be awake.

Daemon, daemon, who's got a daemon?

Alright, this is just fun:



This was always my favorite conceit of the trilogy, and perhaps the best entry point for a theological appreciation of the books.

I picked this up from Arkenor, who has an excellent post on the movie and reactions to it. I quite agree: Christianity has survived criticism and even four centuries of persecution. Odd that a church founded on martyrdom (we celebrate the first martyr almost immediately after Christmas Day; and what of the all but forgotten Innocents?) would have adherents who could find it so easily "persecuted" by a movie. Of course, this reflects the changing tenor of society, not the power of the Evil One. But that's another topic, isn't it?

I kind of like my daemon. I was hoping it would be something interesting. At first I thought it was a raven, but a crow seems even better.

In which we learn that Thers' 3 year old really gets Advent

I told you Advent was disturbing!

Oh, just go read it...

Then you can come back and enjoy more music. This one is like a cup of hot chocolate:



I really should think to go to YouTube more often.

"We Write with Both Hands"

The benefit of sitting in a doctor's examining room during finals week (a special time of year in the life of a teacher, I assure you!)(and nothing serious; just scheduling an exam I should have at this time in life's journey), the benefit, as I was saying, is that you get to read stuff like this:

For the death of God certainly means the dying off not only of ontotheology and of classical metaphysical theology but also of this notion of a supervening mystical unity conceived as the fulfillment or the crowning of metaphysical theology. The death of God entails the deconstruction not only of the ousia of classical metaphysics but also the hyperousios of Neoplatonic mysticism. The value of the notion of the death of God is that is gives a provocative name to an ancient and venerable tradition, the ongoing work of the critique of idols, one of which is certainly the idol of some naked prelinguistic ineffable given, which is pretty much what the hyperousios comes down to in classical mysticism. Mystics often claim to speak from within the heart of God, with a kind of absolute knowledge or absolute point of view. I value mysticism as an expression of our nonknowing, but my skepticism has to do with reaching this absolute point of view. One important thing we mean by the death of God is the death of the absolute center, of inhabiting an absolute point of view. That's the point of Derrida's critique of negative theology--which he calls hyperousiology--which is also why deconstruction is not negative theology.

That is John Caputo, from an interview titled "The Power of the Powerless," in a book I just found on my shelf, published in 2007, titled After the Death of God (ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins, New York: Columbia University Press 2007). I've read Caputo's book length treatment of Derrida and religion, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, so I must have absorbed the idea of the power of powerlessness from him as well as from Derrida (there is indeed nothing new under the sun! Bah! And here I thought I'd finally been almost original! Back to the drawing board!). This new book is edited, and introduced by, Jeffrey Robbins, who makes more than one interesting point in his introduction about the state of theology today. This, for example, should sound familiar to participants in any discussion of religion on the Internet:

...[T]he most prominent Enlightenment philosopher of them all, Immanuel Kant, defined the very project of Enlightenment by this most fundamental of all modern assumptions when he wrote that Enlightenment is the release from all forms self-incurred tutelage. What he had in mind, in addition to various forms of political authoritarianism, was the religious authoritarianism and dogmatism that for centuries had discouraged critical scientific inquiry. According to Kant, the enlightened subject would be one who could think for himself, and one in whom religion might still play a part, but only in the sphere of private morality.

How many fruitless arguments about religion have I engaged in with people repeating, in watered down form, this fundamentally 18th century idea, all the while imagining they are on the cutting edge of 21st century thought? Of course, that's usually a discussion with people who've never heard of Soren Kierkegaard or Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Bonhoeffer posed [the] possibility of a religionless Christianity while living out the final days of his life in a prison cell, before his martyrdom for his involvement in an assassination plot against Hitler. As such, his words had an added moral credibility, especially by those like the death of God theologians who were troubled by the moral ineptitude, if not outright complicity, of the church. For Bonhoeffer, this effort at purging Christianity of the comforts of religion would be a risky faith without assurances, one that severs the ties between Christ's call to discipleship and Christianity's association with the offices of power and the religious identification with the cultural trappings of civilization...

[Soren] Kierkegaard, like Bonhoeffer and the death of God theologians who followed, gave voice to the new anti-institutional, individualized Christian faith that stood in opposition to the easy alliance between religion and society. It was a radical faith purged of any vestige of authoritarianism and triumphalism that was unafraid to call into question the very meaning and purpose of the church both by being willing to admit the failure of its own tradition and by seeing the great success of the state churches as their great failure. In other words, for Kierkegaard, the apparent Christianization of culture and politics made it virtually impossible to live up to the radical existential demands of a truly biblical faith.

If you listen carefully, you can hear Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard in what Caputo says:

...[O]n the one hand, serious philosophy and theology involve a work of ceaseless critique of our capacity to deceive ourselves. They reminds us that everyone is on the same footing, that no one enjoys privileged access. This has a salutary ethical ethical and political import because it shows us that we're all in this together and nobody is hardwired up to the Secret. That produces a desirable ethical, political, and religious effect--an egalitarian effect.

But I think that philosophical and theological thinking have to be--beyond critique and uncertainty--affirmative. If all there is to thinking is critique and delimitation, skepticism and doubt, then it will not inspire us. It will simply be disruptive and negative. So I think that philosophy is always looking for a way to articulate what we love, what we desire, what drives us. That is the Augustinian side of my work, which is emblematized by what Augustine calls at the beginning of the Confessions the cor inquietum--the restless heart. We write with both hands. Radical critique and delimitation is the left hand, but the right hand is the affirmation of something that we desire with a desire beyond desire, which is the sum and substance of my argument in Prayers and Tears, which conceives of praying and weeping in a deeply affirmative way. Something can be affirmative--we can say yest to it, for that is what we love--without being positive. That is to say, we may lack a positive formula for what we affirm. Whenever someone erects a positive content, making our affirmation into a determinate object, that can always be deconstructed. Whatever is constructed can be deconstructed, otherwise it is a menace or an idol. But the affirmation itself is irreducible. So I would say philosophy--philosophical and theological thinking, really any kind of thinking at all--has to be driven by a radically affirmative energy, by a desire for what is undeconstructable.

Quite a bit to digest; but I detect Kierkegaard's "Concept of Irony" there, too. Socrates, as Kierkegaard showed, was intent on what we would now call deconstruction of whatever is constructed; but, as Kierkegaard also showed, Socrates was content to stop there, and to deny the validity of the undeconstructable. Upon that premise, if you want to boil it down to one thing, rests the entire post-modern enterprise. And yet that premise is not truth, either.

Searching for an earlier post, I inadvertently gathered this collection of posts, all items deserving of further discussion and more careful consideration. I'm leaving them here as a marker, or maybe a springboard. I just know I don't want to lose them soon.

Merry Xmas from Texas

Still trying to work out getting along with YouTube. A little Xmas music early.

Advent and Apocalypse

Browsing one of my books for Advent (The Roads from Bethlehem), I was reminded of both the complexity of scriptural history, and the nearness of the apocalyptic in Advent. There are two other nativity stories outside the canon, and while both are dependent on Matthew and Luke, both also recognize, even more strongly than the canon narratives, the apocalyptic nature of the story they are telling.

Start with the Arabic infancy gospel:

1. We find what follows in the book of Joseph the high priest, who lived in the time of Christ. Some say that he is Caiaphas. He has said that Jesus spoke, and, indeed, when He was lying in His cradle said to Mary His mother: I am Jesus, the Son of God, the Logos, whom you have brought forth, as the Angel Gabriel announced to you; and my Father has sent me for the salvation of the world.

2. In the three hundred and ninth year of the era of Alexander, Augustus put forth an edict, that every man should be enrolled in his native place. Joseph therefore arose, and taking Mary his spouse, went away to Jerusalem, and came to Bethlehem, to be enrolled along with his family in his native city. And having come to a cave, Mary told Joseph that the time of the birth was at hand, and that she could not go into the city; but, said she, let us go into this cave. This took place at sunset. And Joseph went out in haste to go for a woman to be near her. When, therefore, he was busy about that, he saw an Hebrew old woman belonging to Jerusalem, and said: Come hither, my good woman, and go into this cave, in which there is a woman near her time.

3. Wherefore, after sunset, the old woman, and Joseph with her, came to the cave, and they both went in. And, behold, it was filled with lights more beautiful than the gleaming of lamps and candles, and more splendid than the light of the sun. The child, enwrapped in swaddling clothes, was sucking the breast of the Lady Mary His mother, being placed in a stall. And when both were wondering at this light, the old woman asks the Lady Mary: Are you the mother of this Child? And when the Lady Mary gave her assent, she says: You are not at all like the daughters of Eve. The Lady Mary said: As my son has no equal among children, so his mother has no equal among women. The old woman replied: My mistress, I came to get payment; I have been for a long time affected with palsy. Our mistress the Lady Mary said to her: Place your hands upon the child. And the old woman did so, and was immediately cured. Then she went forth, saying: Henceforth I will be the attendant and servant of this child all the days of my life.

4. Then came shepherds; and when they had lighted a fire, and were rejoicing greatly, there appeared to them the hosts of heaven praising and celebrating God Most High. And while the shepherds were doing the same, the cave was at that time made like a temple of the upper world, since both heavenly and earthly voices glorified and magnified God on account of the birth of the Lord Christ. And when that old Hebrew woman saw the manifestation of those miracles, she thanked God, saying: I give You thanks, O God, the God of Israel, because my eyes have seen the birth of the Saviour of the world.

....

7. And it came to pass, when the Lord Jesus was born at Bethlehem of Judæa, in the time of King Herod, behold, magi came from the east to Jerusalem, as Zeraduscht had predicted; and there were with them gifts, gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. And they adored Him, and presented to Him their gifts. Then the Lady Mary took one of the swaddling-bands, and, on account of the smallness of her means, gave it to them; and they received it from her with the greatest marks of honour. And in the same hour there appeared to them an angel in the form of that star which had before guided them on their journey; and they went away, following the guidance of its light, until they arrived in their own country.

8. And their kings and chief men came together to them, asking what they had seen or done, how they had gone and come back, what they had brought with them. And they showed them that swathing-cloth which the Lady Mary had given them. Wherefore they celebrated a feast, and, according to their custom, lighted a fire and worshipped it, and threw that swathing-cloth into it; and the fire laid hold of it, and enveloped it. And when the fire had gone out, they took out the swathing-cloth exactly as it had been before, just as if the fire had not touched it. Wherefore they began to kiss it, and to put it on their heads and their eyes, saying: This verily is the truth without doubt. Assuredly it is a great thing that the fire was not able to burn or destroy it. Then they took it, and with the greatest honour laid it up among their treasures.

Note there the reference to the "cave" as the birthplace. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is built over a cave which was supposed to be the place of Jesus' birth. The argument goes that animals were usually housed in caves, although I've heard Middle Eastern scholars argue that livestock would be kept in the family dwelling at night, and indeed I think the distinction between "indoor" and "outdoor" is a far more recent, and Western, idea than we realize. But the Arabic Gospel is not the first written reference to a "cave." There is another gospel reference, albeit a non-canonical gospel, one that was another source for the Arabic Gospel, and is even more apocalyptic in tone and content. That gospel is the Infancy Gospel of James:

Chapter 17

(1) Then, there was an order from the Emperor Augustus to register how many people were in Bethlehem of Judea. (2) And Joseph said, "I will register my sons. But this child? What will I do about him? How will I register him? (3) And my wife? Oh, I am ashamed. Should I register her as my daughter? The children of Israel know that she is not my daughter. (4) This day, I will do as the Lord wants."

(5) And he saddled his donkey and sat her on it and his son led and Samuel followed. (6) And they arrived at the third mile and Joseph turned and saw that she was sad. (7) And he said to himself, "Perhaps the child within her is troubling her." (8) And again Joseph turned around and saw her laughing and said to her, "Mary, what is with you? First your face appears happy and then sad?"

(9) And she said, "Joseph, it is because I see two people with my eyes, one crying and being afflicted, one rejoicing and being extremely happy."

(10) When they came to the middle of the journey, Mary said to him, "Joseph, take me off the donkey, the child pushing from within me to let him come out."

(11) So he took her off the donkey and said to her, "Where will I take you and shelter you in your awkwardness? This area is a desert."

Chapter 18

(1) And he found a cave and led her there and stationed his sons to watch her, (2) while he went to a find a Hebrew midwife in the land of Bethlehem.

(3) Then, Joseph wandered, but he did not wander. (4) And I looked up to the peak of the sky and saw it standing still and I looked up into the air. With utter astonishment I saw it, even the birds of the sky were not moving. (5) And I looked at the ground and saw a bowl lying there and workers reclining. And their hands were in the bowl. (6) And chewing, they were not chewing. And picking food up, they were not picking it up. And putting food in their mouths, they were not putting it in their mouths. (7) Rather, all their faces were looking up.

(8) And I saw sheep being driven, but the sheep were standing still. (9) And the shepherd lifted up his hand to strike them, but his hand remained above them. (10) And I saw the rushing current of the river and I saw goats and their mouths resting in the water, but they were not drinking. (11) And suddenly everything was replaced by the ordinary course of events.

....

Chapter 20

(1) And the midwife went in and said, "Mary, position yourself, for not a small test concerning you is about to take place."

(2) When Mary heard these things, she positioned herself. And Salome inserted her finger into her body. (3) And Salome cried out and said, "Woe for my lawlessness and the unbelief that made me test the living God. Look, my hand is falling away from me and being consumed in fire."

(5) And Salome dropped to her knees before the Lord, saying, "God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, (6) do not expose me to the children of Israel, but give me back to the poor. (7) For you know, Lord, that I have performed service and received my wage from you."

(8) Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared, saying to her, "Salome, Salome, the Lord of all has heard your entreaty. (9) Stretch out your hand to the child and lift him up and he will be salvation and joy for you."

(10) And Salome went to the child and lifted him up, saying, "I worship him because he has been born a king to Israel." (11) And at once Salome was healed and left the cave justified.

(12) Suddenly, there was a voice saying, "Salome, Salome, do not proclaim what a miracle you have seen until the child comes to Jerusalem."

The resemblance to Luke's gospel, especially, is not accidental. The cave reference, however, is not original to this gospel either. The earliest reference seems to be from Justin Martyr, in his Dialogue with Trypho, a very early work of Christian apologetics:

"Now this king Herod, at the time when the Magi came to him from Arabia, and said they knew from a star which appeared in the heavens that a King had been born in your country, and that they had come to worship Him, learned from the elders of your people that it was thus written regarding Bethlehem in the prophet: 'And thou, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, art by no means least among the princes of Judah; for out of thee shall go forth the leader who shall feed my people.' Accordingly the Magi from Arabia came to Bethlehem and worshipped the Child, and presented Him with gifts, gold and frankincense, and myrrh; but returned not to Herod, being warned in a revelation after worshipping the Child in Bethlehem. And Joseph, the spouse of Mary, who wished at first to put away his betrothed Mary, supposing her to be pregnant by intercourse with a man, i.e., from fornication, was commanded in a vision not to put away his wife; and the angel who appeared to him told him that what is in her womb is of the Holy Ghost. Then he was afraid, and did not put her away; but on the occasion of the first census which was taken in Judea, under Cyrenius, he went up from Nazareth, where he lived, to Bethlehem, to which he belonged, to be enrolled; for his family was of the tribe of Judah, which then inhabited that region. Then along with Mary he is ordered to proceed into Egypt, and remain there with the Child until another revelation warn them to return into Jud a. But when the Child was born in Bethlehem, since Joseph could not find a lodging in that village, he took up his quarters in a certain cave near the village; and while they were there Mary brought forth the Christ and placed Him in a manger, and here the Magi who came from Arabia found Him. I have repeated to you," I continued, "what Isaiah foretold about the sign which foreshadowed the cave; but for the sake of those who have come with us to-day, I shall again remind you of the passage." Then I repeated the passage from Isaiah which I have already written, adding that, by means of those words, those who presided over the mysteries of Mithras were stirred up by the devil to say that in a place, called among them a cave, they were initiated by him. "[Chapter 78]

Origen also puts the birth in a cave, and notes the location is known, which he offers as proof of the story.

CHAP. LI.

Now the Scripture speaks, respecting the place of the Saviour's birth--that the Ruler was to come forth from Bethlehem--in the following manner: "And thou Bethlehem, house of Ephrata, art not the least among the thousands of Judah: for out of thee shall He come forth unto Me who is to be Ruler in Israel; and His goings forth have been of old, from everlasting." Now this prophecy could not suit any one of those who, as Celsus' Jew says, were fanatics and mob-leaders, and who gave out that they had come from heaven, unless it were clearly shown that He had been born in Bethlehem, or, as another might say, had come forth from Bethlehem to be the leader of the people. With respect to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, if any one desires, after the prophecy of Micah and after the history recorded in the Gospels by the disciples of Jesus, to have additional evidence from other sources, let him know that, in conformity with the narrative in the Gospel regarding His birth, there is shown at Bethlehem the cave where He was born, and the manger in the cave where He was wrapped in swaddling-clothes. And this sight is greatly talked of in surrounding places, even among the enemies of the faith, it being said that in this cave was born that Jesus who is worshipped and reverenced by the Christians. Moreover, I am of opinion that, before the advent of Christ, the chief priests and scribes of the people, on account of the distinctness and clearness of this prophecy, taught that in Bethlehem the Christ was to be born. And this opinion had prevailed also extensively among the Jews; for which reason it is related that Herod, on inquiring at the chief priests and scribes of the people, heard from them that the Christ was to be born in Bethlehem of Judea, "whence David was." It is stated also in the Gospel according to John, that the Jews declared that the Christ was to be born in Bethlehem, "whence David was." But after our Lord's coming, those who busied themselves with overthrowing the belief that the place of His birth had been the subject of prophecy from the beginning, withheld such teaching from the people; acting in a similar manner to those individuals who won over those soldiers of the guard stationed around the tomb who had seen Him arise from the dead, and who instructed these eye-witnesses to report as follows: "Say that His disciples, while we slept, came and stole Him away. And if this come to the governor's ears, we shall persuade him, and secure you."

But there is also a fair influence, at least, from the Revelation to John:

A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth.

Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems.

Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth.

She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod. Her child was caught up to God and his throne.

The woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God, that there she might be taken care of for twelve hundred and sixty days.

Then war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels battled against the dragon. The dragon and its angels fought back,

but they did not prevail and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.

The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: "Now have salvation and power come, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Anointed. For the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who accuses them before our God day and night.

They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; love for life did not deter them from death.

Therefore, rejoice, you heavens, and you who dwell in them. But woe to you, earth and sea, for the Devil has come down to you in great fury, for he knows he has but a short time."

When the dragon saw that it had been thrown down to the earth, it pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child.

But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly to her place in the desert, where, far from the serpent, she was taken care of for a year, two years, and a half-year.

The serpent, however, spewed a torrent of water out of his mouth after the woman to sweep her away with the current.

But the earth helped the woman and opened its mouth and swallowed the flood that the dragon spewed out of its mouth.

Then the dragon became angry with the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring, those who keep God's commandments and bear witness to Jesus.

It took its position on the sand of the sea.

John's revelation, of course, is apocalyptic; a word we associate with final things. But apocalyptic is eschatological only in a Platonic sense: that is, the revealing of the truth brings an end to all falseness. so John's revelation bears fair comparison to Isaiah's proclamation in Isaiah 7:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign: the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.
He shall be living on curds and honey by the time he learns to reject the bad and choose the good.

Although the Hebrew (in the Masoretic text) means "young woman," not "virgin" in the sense of a woman who has never engaged in intercourse. That word comes from to Matthew, and so to Christianity, from the Septuagint. But Isaiah's vision is one of renewal, of the birth of a new generation who will restore the hope of the nation. Apocalyptic, then, not in the sense of the Book of Daniel (written in Babylon during the Exile; Isaiah 7 dates from before the Exile), but in the sense of the hope promised by the God of Abraham. Which makes it a perfect Advent story, if an imperfect prediction of the "virgin birth" of Jesus.

And these apocalyptic nativity stories clearly inspired Ted Hughes' poem, "Minstrel's Song."

I've just had an astonishing dream as I lay in the straw.
I dreamed a star fell on to the straw beside me
And lay blazing. Then when I looked up
I saw a bull come flying through a sky of fire
And on its shoulders a huge silver woman
Holding the moon. And afterwards there came
A donkey flying through that same burning heaven
And on its shoulders a colossal man
Holding the sun. Suddenly I awoke
And saw a bull and a donkey kneeling in the straw,
and the great moving shadows of a man and a woman---
I say they were a man and a woman but
I dare not say what I think they were. I did not dare to look.
I ran out here into the freezing world
Because I dared not look. Inside that shed.

A star is coming this way along the road.
If I were not standing upright, this would be a dream.
A star the shaped of a sword of fired, point-downward,
Is floating along the road. And now it rises.
It is shaking fire on to the roofs and the gardens.
And now it rises above the animal shed
Where I slept till the dream woke me. And now
The star is standing over the animal shed.

Apocalyptic is often rendered in language we would call "dreamlike," if not "nightmare." It is not because apocalyptic aims for fantasy, but that it aims for a reality words cannot quite seem to contain (which violates all manner of modern philosophies, but so be it). That wonderful passage from the Infancy Gospel describe both the moment of revelation and, for a father, the moment of birth. I have a terrible memory for events, but I can still describe, in minute detail, the face of the clock I looked at just as my daughter was born, so I would know the time. It wasn't quite the caliber of the miracle Joseph experienced, but I know the expereince just the same. How would you want to describe the birth of your first-born, except in language so full it pushed the bounds of reality itself? In the case of this gospel, it spills over into apocalyptic; appropriate, given the subject matter of the story.

The symbolism of the Revelation is arcane, to say the least. But Michael is an archangel from Jewish lore. Even Satan is presented here as the "adversary" of Job, the one who accuses others before God day and night. But notice how even the earth (the creation of God) acts to protect the innocent; and notice, too, how well the story of desperation and flight from evil, and of the effects of an especially momentous birth, ring true to the nativity stories of both canonical gospels. If we have lost that sense of importance and even peril in our worship and our liturgical lives, or just in our observance of the season, it is another sign of just how much we have domesticated this holiday, and render it something for our convenience, rather than for our good. Walker Percy has a word to say about it:

God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing....What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!

Isn't that what Advent should be all about? About the startling vision that should shake us awake and send us out into the freezing world? What is missing? And what are we doing to find it?

Evolving societies

I had a hazy knowledge of this story; something about Texas and textbooks and evolution. It clearly doesn't reflect well on Texas, but that's another matter. I also run across a lot of comments by people who assert that religion is the problem in America: and that it is a barrier to critical thinking, or that Europe is more "advanced" because it is no longer as religious as America, etc. To call such views ignorant is, of course, charitable. They are as poorly informed as the people who promote "creationism" or "intelligent design." But the views of Creationists and others are not championed merely because such people are convinced their religious attitudes are important. They are championed precisely because those attitudes are no longer dominant.

Fundamentalism is not a response to modern times so much as a product of it, as Martin Marty has noted. The same can be said of Creationism and "Intelligent Design." Both schools of thought are a response to change, to what is perceived as radical change which is beyond the control of the adherents to such thinking. Consider the situation of "Sunday School."

When I was a child, attendance at Sunday school was not optional, it was mandatory. Even my cousins who didn't attend church were dropped off for Sunday school. The historical irony was lost on me at the time, because Sunday school began as a way for children of working class parents in Scotland to get an education, in the days before universal public education. As public education slowly took over that function (a microcosm of the shift in social attitudes about the importance of religion in Europe, and a contrast with the continued importance of religion in America), "Sunday school" began to take on a role once zealously guarded by parents: religious instruction.

In Protestant circles, it was the family's (read: father's) duty to instruct the children in the doctrines of the family's church. That role was slowly ceded to the church via Sunday school. So, by my childhood, Sunday school was where we learned the "Bible stories" like Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, Jacob's ladder, David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale. I don't remember even the most conservative churches of my childhood being concerned with the teaching of evolution (which we learned in school): they taught the Creation story, the school taught Darwin, and nobody objected to the separation of these spheres. What has happened since? The decline of the importance of Sunday school.

Mega-churches probably offer Sunday school in the format I grew up with. But today I know many teenagers and younger children who are "church orphans" because Mom is divorced and spends her spare time at church, a place the kids don't want to go. Or the children's lives are so regimented and filled with activities (mimicking their family's lives) that they barely have a Sunday morning a month to set aside for worship, much less Christian education. I've been teaching college and high school for 5 years now, and every year I have students, especially from private, non-church schools, who have never heard of the Garden of Eden, or Noah, or even Jonah and the Whale. There is a cultural loss there (how do you read European literature without knowing the Christian stories?), but what has more clearly happened is a loss of cultural identity, of cultural homogeneity. It was once the family duty to educate children in one's religious beliefs. Then we turned that over to the church. But now that we no longer feel compelled to take our children to church, some people want to look to the state to fill this information gap.

Which, of course, is not the state's function at all. Enter the pseudo-science of "intelligent design." In the interest of fairness, I should also point out that in the 25 years since I left graduate studies in English, the Bible went from being "sacred literature" to simply being "literature," and I teach selections from it in a Norton anthology with nary a peep from anyone about desacralizing holy writ. The shifts in perception have actually been quite tectonic, without the least tremor on the surface.

So what we are seeing is not the return of the "Dark Ages" (a misnomer anyway, but that's another complaint, idn't it?), but the last flush on the cheek of a dying age. Church in America is actually becoming increasingly irrelevant as it either disappears into a gathering of grey heads, or as a place where you are told how wonderful you are and the 7 steps or keys or what-have-you for how much better God wants to make you be (I was looking at Joel Osteen's latest book, and comparing it to his first book. This one offers "Seven keys to living with joy and peace." His first was "7 steps for living at your full potential." Clearly it's all about 7; which is so much easier than 12, I'm guessing.) There's everything modern American about that, and very little which is Christian (a friend tells me she's watched Osteen's sermons, and he gives the same one over and over again. Well, it's made him rich....). I've said before this is primarily a good thing, as it will ultimately strengthen a church which needs to cut its ties to the society it finds itself in; but that, too, is another matter for another time.

In the meantime, as Auden noted about the nativity of Christ, we Christians have an apocalypse to prepare for....

It takes a thief----Second Sunday of Advent, 2007

Isaiah 11:1-10
11:1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

11:2 The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

11:3 His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear;

11:4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

11:5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

11:6 The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

11:7 The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

11:8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.

11:9 They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

11:10 On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
72:1 Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king's son.

72:2 May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.

72:3 May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness.

72:4 May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.

72:5 May he live while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations.

72:6 May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.

72:7 his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.

72:18 Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.

72:19 Blessed be his glorious name forever; may his glory fill the whole earth. Amen and Amen.

Romans 15:4-13
15:4 For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.

15:5 May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus,

15:6 that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

15:7 Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

15:8 For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs,

15:9 and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, "Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name";

15:10 and again he says, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people";

15:11 and again, "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him";

15:12 and again Isaiah says, "The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope."

15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew 3:1-12
3:1 In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming,

3:2 "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

3:3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"

3:4 Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.

3:5 Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan,

3:6 and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

3:7 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

3:8 Bear fruit worthy of repentance.

3:9 Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

3:10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

3:11 "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

More doom and gloom this week. Isaiah once again provides the ligher side of the scripture, and Matthew once again plunges us into the cold water of fear and despair. And then there's that whole question of Santa Claus everyone is talking about this time of year. Should we pay, or should we go?

This will end up being the sermon I could never give from a pulpit, because in it I will tell the truth. Not the truth no one can bear, but the truth we can't ever speak in public, especially from the pulpit. I mean, of course, the truth about Santa Claus.

Well, as much truth as can be told. We all know, generally and more or less, that Santa Claus is derived from St. Nicholas. What we know of Nicholas is actually largely conjecture and probably spurious. But his story lingers, especially the part that connects Nicholas to strangers bringing gifts to those who deserve them. This story, of course, gets connected to Matthew's gospel. Matthew tells us about the wise men who come, bringing the infant Jesus gifts. Already, of course, we get that story wrong, because Matthew doesn't say there were three wise men, and he doesn't say the came the night of his birth. Matthew has them come up to two years later. The Orthodox church still celebrates the gift-giving part of the Nativity story on Epiphany, in keeping with Matthew's strangers bearing gifts. But we have moved it to Christmas day, and we associate it with Santa Claus in a kind of reverse thief story.

The Santa Claus story we are all sure has been around since the ancient of days is actually largely the creation of Clement Clark Moore and "The Night Before Christmas." Christmas was a raucous celebration in earlier times; a veritable "Feast of Fools" in which the poor got to demand some benison from their masters. Well, of course, in America we don't have serfs and lords of the manor; but we do have very distinct economic divisions. Moore's poem domesticated the Christmas revels by presenting the home invader as a kindly old peddler who came, not to take from the wealthy and comfortable, but to give to them. What had been a celebration requiring some gift giving by the master to the peasants, became an insular celebration of the family hearth where the father was only obligated to shower gifts on those he was already responsible for: his children.

When you think about it literally, Santa Claus is a house-breaker. He gains surreptitious entry, walks around in the sacred space of your home, and leaves; all while you are sleeping. Indeed, we tell our children, if they don't go to sleep Santa won't come. Any other time, we'd stay up to make sure the thief doesn't break in; but this time of year, we go to bed early, to give him the best possible opportunity.

We do it, of course, because he brings us something. But how do we connect that with Matthew?

3:1 In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming,

3:2 "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

3:3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"

3:4 Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.

3:5 Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan,

3:6 and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

3:7 But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

3:8 Bear fruit worthy of repentance.

3:9 Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

3:10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

3:11 "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.

3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

This is not the language of Christmas we want to hear. We tell our children about "naughty" and "nice," but as Jesus would say later, who of us would give our child a serpent if they asked for an egg? Who of us would really give our child coal in their Christmas stocking, and nothing else? We don't threaten out children, we reward them. So how do we connect that story, to this part of the Christmas story? Where is Santa Claus in Advent?

Maybe it's time we returned Santa to the role of thief; to the one who takes from us, rather than gives. Christmas is already that way, of course. It takes our time, our money, our effort. December can be the most stressful time of the year: shopping, crowds, traffic, credit card debt, packages to mail out on time, the rising cost of shipping...it adds up quickly. We begin cranking the handle of the machine the day after Thanksgiving, and by Christmas Day we flop onto the sea of wrapping paper, spent in more ways than one and completely exhausted and tired from all the effort. We don't celebrate the "Twelve Days of Christmas," we want the whole thing put away by December 26th. We've had a month of it, that's enough! But if we returned Santa to the role of thief...if we "de-domesticated" the holiday....

Paul wishes a blessing on us:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It's a radical blessing, actually. It turns all our expectations upside down. It's a blessing that comes in the context of welcoming all people into the basiliea tou theou:

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus,

15:6 that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

15:7 Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

15:8 For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs,

15:9 and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, "Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name";

15:10 and again he says, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people";

15:11 and again, "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him";

15:12 and again Isaiah says, "The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope."

Notice the Gentiles keep getting mentioned over and over again? It runs like a silver thread through everything Paul mentions. This is reconciliation language. This is calling people to turn out toward strangers, toward those they have already identified as "not us." "Gentile," like "barbarian" to the Romans and the Greeks, simply meant "those who are not us." It's a domesticated word, a word that defines who is in and who is out, and here Paul says: Everybody is in! But he knows that makes us uncomfortable, so he starts with a prayer:

May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus,

and then Jesus becomes the reconciler, the one who can bring us together. But Jesus is also the thief, the one who comes when we least expect it, the one who takes away our comfort and security and leaves us with....what? Well, maybe openness to reconciliation; maybe openness to others, to those who are not like us, who are not within the blood confines of our family. The thief who enters our house and leaves, not what we desire, but what we need. When the angels came at the nativity, they did not sing to the leaders: the priests, the kings, the mighty and powerful. They bypassed all of those and sang to the shepherds, the outlaws who lived on society's margin, both literally and figuratively. They turned the equation on its head. Like thieves, they snuck in when least expected and took away our assurance of our importance by declaring the good news to those we would think least important. Even Isaiah's words of hope and comfort point to a radical shift in the social order:

but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Just ask yourself, seriously: when was the last time that happened? When was the last time the poor were judged righteously and the meek given equity? What would it look like if that were to happen now? What would be taken away from us, rather than given?

This is the season of giving, but something is taken from us in our rush to give. Something of the season’s beauty has been stolen from us, and we don’t even know there’s been a thief. Read the accounts of American celebrations in the years before factory goods reached every corner and washed up in great piles in every house. Christmas was celebrated in simple ways, because it was the only way to celebrate. The gift of a day free from labor, free from farming and harvest and animal care, was a treat indeed. The gift of an extraordinary meal, of play, perhaps even of a sweet, was a wonder. This has all been stolen from us. We have stolen it from ourselves. St. Nicholas, the story goes, prevented a theft, a theft of innocence. He judged righteously for the poor and gave the meek equity; so today we call him a saint. We don’t emulate him, we don’t even venerate him. Instead we steal his story from him, and give it back to ourselves. And now the thief is coming to take this all away from us, again.

What is coming is not comforting: if it were, the mothers of the children of Bethlehem would have no cause to weep again. If it were, Herod would have no cause to order the deaths of innocents. If it were comforting, the magi would have stayed home. What is coming is not comforting. If it were, the angels would have stayed in heaven, the shepherds undisturbed in their fields, Mary untroubled by the visit of Gabriel, Zechariah unchanged by the pregnancy of his wife, Joseph unconcerned with the strange pregnancy of his wife, the Holy Family unburdened as they made the journey to keep the census. What is coming promises to change all that, and make life harder for everybody. Upon the presentation of the child we wait for, Simeon will tell the mother “A sword will pierce your own soul, too.” What is coming is a thief who will take all our comfort from us and leave us vulnerable, leave our defenses down once again, as only an infant child can do.

Open and exposed and perhaps, this time, able to reconcile. Perhaps this time give us hope, maybe this time grant us the encouragement to live in harmony with one another. Open and exposed, perhaps this time we will stand with the shepherds, unashamed that they are outlaws, unconcerned with how they look and act and smell, we will be able at last to hear the angels singing. Perhaps this season will open our hearts so the thief who steals in will steal our complacency and our indifference and our comfort, and leave us listening to angel song. There is no reason to believe they have ever stopped singing. There is no reason to think this song has ever changed:

Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things.

Blessed be his glorious name forever; may his glory fill the whole earth. Amen and Amen.

Faith v. Everything Else

I have been challenged to respond to Mitt Romney's "Religion in America" speech, and so I must take up the gauntlet, despite the fact others have already done so far better than I can hope to manage. Still, a challenge is a challenge.

On the purely political front, let me just say that, when you've lost David Brooks, (addendum: and Peggy Noonan; it's worse than I thought) you've pretty much laid a political stink bomb. Romney was clearly going for the LCD of the GOP, and whether he got it or not, he seems to have alienated almost everyone else in the Party. But the title given to Brooks essay makes for a pretty good starting point on this entire issue.

First, Matthew Dowd is not only wrong but completely clueless on the public, political issue of "faith" (as he defines it). I know I'm jumping around to go from Brooks to Dowd, but stay with me a moment, it will all make sense. For Dowd, faith is apparently about "Finding an authentic place to call home." Shades of Kierkegaard and self-actualization rise to gibber and moan at the implications of that, but leave them be. What Dowd wants to declare is what Romney wants to declare: that "faith" is this "thing" that we all have, and most especially voters, and politicians ignore that "thing" at their peril. Dowd's recommendation could be tailor-made for someone advising Romney to give his "Ich bein ein Believer" speech:

Before you read much further, here's the bottom line: as one looks ahead to the primaries and the general election, the candidate who best understands the importance of faith in households across America and ultimately demonstrates authenticity will likely be the one taking the oath of office in January of 2009.

Advice which can be summarized as: "Sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

Should we talk about faith as a set of concepts to which one must rigidly adhere? What answer, then, Eliphaz, do you have for Job? Should we talk of faith as what is in your heart? Then even God is blind to that:

The heart is deceitful above any other thing,
desperately sick; who can fathom it?
I, the Lord, search the mind
and test the heart,
requiting each one for his conduct
and as his deeds deserve--Jeremiah 17:9-10

Words ominous enough to chill the blood of the most self-righteous of us. Should we talk about faith, then, as a set of common beliefs, known from our actions? I will tell you about my friend, by his actions the most Christian person I have ever known, but by his beliefs, a committed and confirmed atheist.

Tell me, then, how we will measure this thing "faith" and how we will appeal to the voters on the basis of it?

Maybe Matthew 6 should be our guide:

Be careful not to parade your religion before others; if you do, no reward awaits you with your Father in heaven.

So when you give alms, do not announce it with a flourish of trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets to win the praise of others. Truly I tell you: they have their reward already. But when you do give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing; your good deed must be secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

Again, when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; they love to say their prayers standing up in the synagogues and at street corners for everyone to see them. Truly I tell you: they have their reward. But when you pray, go into a room by yourself, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

Oops! Well, I guess not. Although we should notice Jesus does not say there: "Your religion is a private matter! Keep it to yourself!" What he says, quite plainly, is: "Your piety should be a source of humility, not of pride. Otherwise you, like the hypocrites, will have your reward." Which reward will be the honor of your fellows who, of course, when the time comes, will welcome you into the eternal homes.

Probably at this point, I should comment on the text of what Romney said. But that has, as I mentioned, been done better by others. I'm more intrigued by the fact Romney thought this speech needed to be made. You may think this is a new wrinkle in American political culture. But, of course, the election of Kennedy was within my lifetime, and I remember that one controversy of his candidacy was his membership in the "Church of Rome." But the fear of an anti-believer in the White House is a very old one:

The Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire and the dragoons of Marat.

Yale College President Timothy Dwight, on the possibility of [Thomas] Jefferson's election

It is, of course, an issue of exclusion; which is David Brooks' complaint, although theologically Brooks' argument is an ignorant one. Theology doesn't really rest on determing the distinction between the truth in my favored doctrine and the falsehoods in yours. It is actually much closer to "faith seeking understanding," although I prefer to see it as yet another tool available in a search for truth. It isn't the only set of tools, but it is certainly an abuse of them to use theological principles to establish what is right about what I want to believe, and what is wrong about what you were taught. Ecumenism is not as well advanced as it could be, but at least in theological circles it is certainly more advanced than that.

Not according to Richard John Neuhaus, however; as Brooks notes. But is faith really being victimized in America? Well, I suppose, if you presume faith is entitled to a privileged position from which you must further suppose it has fallen. This is no place to engage Neuhaus's thesis, except to say I categorically reject the idea that the faithful in America face any kind of persecution at all. As far as I can tell, the only faithful being attacked by the government are those with a "liberal slant." If there are mega-churches suffering, surely the "Restoration of Religious Freedom Act" afforded them some relief; and surely they aren't showing the strain, even of Sen. Grassley's questions. If the faithful are social pariahs, I see no evidence of that, either. From all I hear, the churches are better and more publicly attended here than in Europe. If there is a "counter-religion of secularism" (whatever that is; it smacks of the Roman Catholic response to the Reformation, to be honest; and today no church can claim to have the social or political control the Roman Catholic church had when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg), it is surely stronger in Europe than in America. As I say, I can't take on Neuhaus' thesis just from Brooks' column, but the evidence for "victimhood" looks weak indeed, and those crying over their lost authority are, to my eye, crying crocodile tears.

What, then, do we make of the reasons behind Romney's speech? Clearly it was meant to appeal to the base of the Republican party, a base stirred only by pious appeals to broadly defined and vaguely adhered to religious sentiments, which leaves him neither religious nor secular. In this, David Brooks is absolutely right:

In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God or the religion most people know — the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.

Religion is not about what everyone else believes, although it is usually understood and practiced that way. But religion has endured because it is about restraints on what we do. Such restraints are not necessarily burdensome or even a source of social evil. Remove the social restraints we all live with, and you have the chaos of Iraq. Which is not to say those restraints either properly or necessarily come from religion. Indeed, in a post-religious world, religious restraints may properly only apply to the individuals who choose to live by them. Such constraints and burdens are never anodyne, or politically irrelevant. But neither are they balm to be poured on public sensibilities in order to make a candidate more attractive to a group of voters.

There will always be voters who prefer such syrup on their political flapjacks. But such stuff is artificial, and bland, and being neither hot nor cold nor even tasting of the maples, we should all spit it out of our mouths, into the faces of the people who want to sell it to us. Faith is not a public commodity to be traded for votes or political support. Why did Romney give this speech? Because he's a politician. It may well be this analysis is right:

Our analysis of thousands of public communications across eight decades shows that U.S. politics today is defined by a calculated, demonstrably public religiosity unlike anything in modern history. Consider one example.

Which is not to say this is a good thing. As that column concludes:

In 1960, JFK sought to be commander in chief. Romney just made his case to be pastor in chief. It's good for his presidential chances, but bad for America.

The key point there is the "calculated, demonstrably public religiosity." That kind of piety has a long history in America, but not a distinguished one. Which means that it, like the poor, will always be with us. But it also means that I, as a Christian, have an obligation to care about the latter, but not very much about the former. The former is a political fashion. It will eventually wear out its welcome. In the meantime, it is Advent; and the stories of Advent remind me who is coming, and what I should do to prepare for him:

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.
Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."
And the crowds asked him, "What then should we do?"
In reply he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."--Luke 3:7-11

St. Nicholas' Day--2007

SAINT Nicholas. Day of death: (according to the martyrology) December 6, about 360. Grave: originally at Myra; since 1087 at Sari in Italy. Life (highly legendary): Nicholas was born at Patara in Asia Minor to parents who, having long been childless, had petitioned God with many prayers. Already as a youth Nicholas became noted for his zeal in helping the unfortunate and oppressed. In his native city there lived a poor nobleman who had three marriageable daughters; he could not obtain a suitor for them because he could offer no dowry. The contemptible idea struck him to sacrifice the innocence of his daughters to gain the needed money. When Nicholas became aware of this, he went by night and threw a bag containing as much gold as was needed for a dowry through the window. This he repeated the second and third nights. During a sea voyage he calmed the storm by his prayer; he is therefore venerated as patron of sailors. On a certain occasion he was imprisoned for the faith. In a wonderful way he later became bishop of Myra; his presence is noted at the Council of Nicaea. He died a quiet death in his episcopal city, uttering the words: "Into your hands I commend my spirit."

Nicholas is highly venerated in the East as a miracle worker, as "preacher of the word of God, spokesman of the Father." --Pius Parsch

The story of Nicholas brings me to Act One of this story, from This American Life. There are two things worth noting about it, in this season when we venerate gift giving and pay a very backhanded acknowledgment to the saint who supposedly threw three bags of gold through a window in order to save three girls from prostitution. One is the sincere American belief, represented here by John Pickle, that "third world workers" are better off being exploited, even in America. There's a deep vein of racism here, as well, though, of course, none dare call it racism. It's such an ugly word. It's the social equivalent of a death sentence. We reserve racism for truly heinous people; people like Hitler. We dare not use the word openly and honestly; such is the depth and breadth of the hidden wound of the "peculiar institution" in American culture.

The idea of factory workers having their lives improved by exploitation in factories is, of course, precisely the philosophy Romanticism rebelled against (see William Blake, especially). Brute economic exploitation is something even Swift condemned. But, as "V" said: "Ideas are bulletproof." Which goes for bad ideas, too.

The second thing to highlight is the lay pastor who helped these people, at great personal cost to himself. He reports without rancor (which is frankly more than I could do) that local pastors told him what he was doing was against God's will because it was difficult, because it cost him in time, effort, and social opprobrium. He reports this without rancor, and he doesn't apologize for what he did, nor does he complain about Christian pastors unwilling to help those he recognizes as his brothers. (I don't judge anyone who doesn't offer help, lest I be judged for my failings, too. But when you judge another and tell them they shouldn't help, well....that's when the judgment rightly falls heavily on you, and justly, by your own hand.) As he says, we like foreign missions; but when those missions come to our "comfort zones," well....

Which I still think is what Advent is all about. It really is a good place to begin the year. And it's not an impossible place to begin, because it ends so quickly, with Christmas. You know, sometimes I think the ancient Church really knew what it was doing.

It's also a good season, as well as a good day, to recall these words from the 4th century, lest our "comfort zone" grow comfortable again.

"What keeps you from giving now? Isn't the poor person there? Aren't your own warehouses full? Isn't the reward promised? The command is clear: the hungry person is dying now, the naked person is freezing now, the person in debt is beaten now-and you want to wait until tomorrow? "I'm not doing any harm," you say. "I just want to keep what I own, that's all." You own! You are like someone who sits down in a theater and keeps everyone else away, saying that what is there for everyone's use is your own. . . . If everyone took only what they needed and gave the rest to those in need, there would be no such thing as rich and poor. After all, didn't you come into life naked, and won't you return naked to the earth?

"The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry person; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the person who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the person with no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help."

Basil
4th Century

"The large rooms of which you are so proud are in fact your shame. They are big enough to hold crowds--and also big enough to shut out the voices of the poor....There is your sister or brother, naked, crying! And you stand confused over the choice of an attractive floor covering."

Ambrose
4th Century

Ecce Salvator venit solvere te a vinculo

Leva Jerusalem oculos, et vide potentiam regis:
ecce Salvator venit solvere te a vinculo

Lift your eyes, Jerusalem, and see the power of your ruler.
Look to a Savior who shall break your bonds.

--Monastic Liturgy

This article was written before the hearing before the Supreme Court today. If no transcript of that story is provided by NPR, listen to the story (available at the same link) if you haven't already. (Thursday morning: the Nina Totenberg report is available in print now.) It is worth listening to if only to hear the arguments of counsel before the Court today. I went to the story link hoping to get a transcript of the argument of one lawyer who told the story of a detainee in Gitmo who finally, after a few years, found out he was allegedly associated with a terrorist who had blown himself up. His lawyer tracked down this alleged terrorist, who is alive and well and living in Germany, and who is not a terrorist at all. Nor was the detainee associated with any terrorists; but without a habeas hearing in Federal court (where this evidence came out), he'd still be in Gitmo, because that evidence is not allowed under the "CSRT's" set up by the Detainee Treatment Act (the one which may, or may not, have removed jurisdiction from the Supreme Court in this matter).

Keep that in mind while you read this:

"I've been down to Guantanamo 12 times. I've seen this evidence. This evidence is the flimsiest stuff you have ever seen. It's a joke," Wilner said.

With less colorful language, that is the same thing that two officers have now said in affidavits.

One, Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, was for six months in charge of seeing to it that exculpatory evidence was transmitted to the tribunals from intelligence and defense agencies. He says in his affidavit that the evidence seen by the tribunals was incomplete, dated and inaccurate, and that the officers serving on the panels were not able to question or test it.

"It's not that truth was never a goal. But it was the first victim," Abraham said.

Abraham, an experienced intelligence officer, says that most detainees have names that are extremely common in their part of the world. And, that the U.S. has little or no knowledge as to whether to use a typical name. For example, do we have the right Mohammad Assam in custody?

"The odds are nil that they will have information about him. They may have lots of material on the other 57 Mohammad Assams from his region and the other 3,000 worldwide. So what you're going to get is every single report dealing with Mohhman Assam, Achmed Assam, Muhammad Asahma," said Abraham. "You get literally a dozen name variants. God help the person who had the same name as a famous person because all that information would be ascribed to him and presumed to be valid."

The lawyers representing the detainees all have stories to tell.

In the case of the Bosnians, the Supreme Court brief recounts a CSRT hearing where a detainee is charged with associating with an unnamed al-Qaida operative. The transcript of the hearing shows the detainee asking who he was supposed to have associated with. But the tribunal chairman says he can't tell him because the name is classified.

After much back and forth the frustrated detainee says, "Maybe I knew this person as a friend. Maybe it was a person that worked with me. Maybe he was on my team. If you tell me the name, then I can respond and defend myself. Otherwise," he says, "all I can tell you is that I am not al-Qaida."

Another of the Bosnians sought to defend himself by asking the tribunal to look at the decision of the Bosnian Supreme Court ordering his release. But the CSRT panel concluded the decision was "not readily accessible," even though it had been filed in federal court and given to the government.

Abraham said that even when a detainee does manage to win at a hearing, the tribunal is ordered to conduct a new hearing — as many as three or four times — until the detainee loses.

And the excuse for this? "We're from the government. Trust us." No, really; that's it:

David Rivkin, who served in the administration of President George Herbert Walker Bush, said that if you nudge the system to provide a higher level of scrutiny "we wouldn't be able to hold most of these people; not because they're innocent, not because they're the wrong Abduls, but because in war you rarely have this kind of information."

Moreover, he notes, if something is really wrong at a CSRT hearing, the detainee can appeal to the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals under the new law passed by Congress.

Well, that's true; but Mr. Rivkin negelects to point out that, under that same statute, the D.C. Circuit has no power to release anyone; because under the statute, federal courts have no habeas jurisdiction.

That's some catch, that Catch-22.

You know, one of the pleas of the Psalms, and even of Advent, is for justice. And, of course, it is the season when the church contemplates the "great and terrible day," the day of the Lord. A day made less terrible for those who already live by justice and mercy.

Juste et pie vivamus, exspectantes beatam spem,
et adventum Domini.

Let us live by justice and by mercy
and wait with bright hope for the Lord to come.

--Monastic liturgy

Steering by the Golden Compass

Or: Without a War on Christmas, We Must Need a New Controversy.

The funny part of this is: it's precisely what "post-modern" literary theory would have predicted.

Okay, okay, "po-mo" is a misnomer, but I've been away from the field too long to have a blanket term readily at hand. But well back in my graduate school days we learned to support our reading of any authorial output (known as the "text" for technical jargon reasons), in spite of the author's stated intentions (word had it W.H. Auden once wrote a poem simply to refute the interpretation of a critic as to what Auden could, and couldn't, have meant in his poetry. None of us took the hint. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Hah!). Once the text left the author's hands, we decreed, so also went his control over what it said.

Of course, one only has to look at the letters of Paul, or the Gospels, or even the Torah, to see this at work in everyday life.

So now comes Philip Pullman's Golden Compass: The Movie. Funny, too, how books still don't arouse much attention (unless they get on Oprah), but movies are a direct assault on our sensibilities, our culture, and our ability to believe. There are identity and boundary issues there (someone doesn't think like I do! How can I sustain my beliefs in such a world? "Never share my hearth, never think my thoughts, however does such things!"), and how that percieved threat is caught up with moving pictures and sound, but not with books (books that almost anyone cand find on the shelves of almost any store, or even in grocery stores, regularly include scenes which would draw an "NC-17" rating if put directly on film). But what's fascinating here are the various interpretations of Pullman's trilogy. We've got the author himself: "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." And yet the U.S. Catholic bishops have apparently taken the bait (what!? They aren't reflexively defensive about their belief systems! Heretics! Fools!):

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting gave the film, which is rated PG-13, a warm review. The film is not blatantly anti-Catholic but a "generalized rejection of authoritarianism," it said.

While noting the story's "spirit of rebellion and stark individualism," the office said Lyra and her allies' stand for free will in opposition to the coercive force of the Magisterium is "entirely in harmony with Catholic teaching."

Inconceivable!

And then there's the last twist; Donna Freitas, a seminary professor who declares the trilogy "a theological masterpiece:"

Pullman's intent aside, she views the trilogy as a treatise on Christian belief.

To Freitas, the series' mysterious "Dust" _ portrayed in the books as connected to original sin _ represents the Holy Spirit. Pullman is not attacking religion but those who use power to corrupt, she said.

Freitas, who co-authored a book on Pullman and religion, says that "ultimately, the arch of the trilogy is about revealing God."

I've seen Freitas book in a publisher's catalog, but now I'm almost intrigued enough to read it (a sign of my jackdaw mind. Ooh! Another shiny thing!) True, one could argue that the movie has sucked all the critique out of the book, and so the Bishops are seeing what the movie makers wanted them to see. And Freitas' interpretation may be so off the mark as to be poor literary criticixm, indeed. Not having seen the movie or read Freitas' book, I can't say. But what's truly illuminating, not to say amusing, here, is that theologians, those people with the vested interest in a subject most people no longer feel is even relevant to their lives (gone are the days when we professed the "mother of all the sciences". Alas!) are the ones least defensive, or simplistic, about their field of endeavor. Is this because they consider it essentially useless? Hardly. Is it because they recognize they no longer have the claim to power and authority being the fountainhead of all human knowledge once gave them? Perhaps. More likely, though, it's a pointed rebuttal to the critics who continue to lambast Christian theology and religion without the least understanding of what they are critiquing. The question of faith is a very live question among theologians, and it has been for a very long time. If I'm no fan of Pullman's attempts to address those questions it's not because he critiques my faith, but because he presents such a poor caricature of religion in the first place. "Never share my hearth, never think my thoughts, whoever does such things"? Nah. Just don't tell me your cartoon version is what I believe, and then tell me I'm stupid for believing what I don't believe in the first place.

Because, frankly, you have no more control over the narrative than the author does. Which, hmm, raises an interesting question about free will....