Comment:
"I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino, had it come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis." GKC
Monday, 05 January 2015
Monday after Epiphany
First Reading
Isaiah 61:1-11
Responsory Is 61:1; In 8:42
The Spirit of God rests upon me, for the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the poor, + to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim that captivity is now ended and prisoners are set free.
V. I have come forth from God and have come into the world. I did not come of myself; the Father has sent me. + To heal the ...
Second Reading
From the writings of G.K. Chesterton
(The Everlasting Man Part II, chapter 1)
(The Everlasting Man Part II, chapter 1)
Many notes at Christmas
It is still a
strange story, though an old one, how the wise men came out of orient lands,
crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of
magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as
unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names: Melchior,
Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had
watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong
if we see in them the same curiosity that-moves all the sages. They would stand
for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras
or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and
since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had
their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand
that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the
incomplete.
Such learned men
would doubtless have come, as these learned men did come, to find themselves
confirmed in much that was true in their own traditions and right in their own
reasoning. Confucius would have found a new foundation for the family in the very
reversal of the Holy Family; Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation, of
stars rather than jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still
have the right to say, or rather a new right to say, that there was truth in their
old teaching. But, after all, these learned men would have come to learn. They
would have come to complete their conception with something they had not yet conceived;
even to balance their imperfect universe with something they might once have contradicted.
Buddha would have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius
would have come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.
The magi, who
stand for mysticism and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new
and even as finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which
still tingles in the Christmas story accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery.
For the other mystical figures in the miracle play, for the angel and the mother,
the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and
more supernatural, more elemental and more emotional. But the wise men must be seeking
wisdom; and for them there must be a light also in the intellect. For it is the
paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish
simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a neverending complexity.
The unique note of
Christmas is the simultaneous striking of many notes: of humility, of gaiety,
of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. By the very
nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress
or an outlaw's den; properly understood it is not unduly flippant to say they were
rejoicings in a dugout. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber
was a hiding-place from enemies, and that the enemies were already scouring the
stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only true that the very horse-hoofs
of Herod might have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is
also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing
through the rock and an entrance into enemy territory. There is in this buried
divinity an idea of undermining
the
world, of shaking the towers and palaces from below, even as Herod the great
king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Part 2 of "The God in the Cave"
We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costume, the language, and the landscape of the separate English and European countryside. We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards the Clyde. Most of us know by this time bow true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic.
I fear that many modem critics Will see only a faded classicism in the
fact that men like Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem
under the form of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and
in turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of the
most important links in human history. Virgil, as we have already seen, does
stand for all that saner heathenism that had overthrown the insane heathenism
of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the
sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the
revelation to the shepherds is the solution. 
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It just so happens that the lens the Catholic tradition uses to read the story flows from Scripture itself–to be precise, it flows from the connection between holy words written hundreds of years apart. But despite the many years and different human authors, the texts were inspired by the same Divine Author, the Holy Spirit. In chapter 60 of Isaiah (Is 60:1-6), it is predicted that at a time of darkness, the glory of the Lord will shine over
Myrrh, an aromatic resin, was used in preparing the dead for burial. Gold reveals that the babe in the manger is actually a king; frankincense tells us that is he God incarnate; myrrh tells us that he has come to die. That someone would redeem God’s people through suffering and death was foretold by Isaiah a few chapters earlier (Is 53). This was the really hard thing for those living in Jesus’ time to comprehend–that the same person who fulfilled all those prophecies about a glorious new king also fulfilled the prophecies about a suffering servant.
The ancient feast of the Epiphany actually celebrates three events, tied together by the meaning of the word epiphany as “appearance” or “manifestation.” Jesus suddenly appears as who He really is–messiah and God–to the Magi, at Cana when he works his first miracle, and when he is baptized in the
