Father Christmas

Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him, they didn’t find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.

-C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Uncles and Aunts

It is in the offering of uncles and aunts that we first use our priestly powers. Long before we can see our parents, we look with gladness upon their brethren. There is no greater historical gift than a brace, a set—a baker's dozen, if at all possible—of uncles. (Dutch uncles will do as well as blood uncles; indeed the inequities of nature make them alsmost indispensible. No boy's priesthood should be imperiled just because his grandparents failed to have enough children.)

...Any ten-year-old boy who would not rather live with his Uncle Henry is a boy to be watched with the gravest suspicion: his priesthood should have been operative long since. He will not be able to choose his own father for years, but, if he cannot offer his uncles now, we may well have an unhistoric monster on our hands. Such a boy should not, of course, be banished. He needs help, therapy, treatment. Accordingly, he should be provided, perhaps at the government's expense, with a deluxe set of uncles for oblation. A 210-pound water skier, for a start, and a 140-pound model locomotive builder to go with him. And, if available, a poetry reader, a crane operator, an amateur violinist and a judge of good whiskey. And, above all, an uncle who can tell jokes which will grow hairier as the the boy grows taller. His cure would not be long coming. The therapy is well-nigh infallible.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 131-132.

The Emergence of a Priestly Agent

The portrait of a young couple with their first baby is still an elegant one. But the snapshot of a pair of beaten forty-five-year-olds surrounded, overshadowed and stymied by a handful of teen-agers and a clutch of elementary school pupils has less to recommend it on the level of intelligibility. Somewhere in between, elegance left by the back door. Around the end of toddling and the beginning of talking, a second and unnoticed pregnancy began; another and quite painless delivery was accomplished. A person was born. A piece of history began to distinguish itself and quietly proceeded to start a history of its own. A new priest was ordained sub rosa and sent back to his old haunts, with no collar and no letters of ordination, but with all the powers of the priesthood of Adam.

From there on, the story of childhood is the classic story of the unrecognized prince in his rightful kingdom. His poor parents are totally unprepared for his claim. With immense good will, they struggle like peasants and villagers to find out what is going on, but they are always several episodes behind the story. The pains of childhood—the agonies of the teens—are due precisely to the emergence of a priestly agent among beings that are not ready to have him arrive so soon.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 125-126.

Fellow Priests

The approach of man to man is precisely a dance, and a courting dance at that. None of my meetings with another man is a mere event, either in his life or mine. Every introduction is an invitation into each other's meaning, a terrible opening of one history to another. In friendship, love or alliance we enter inexporable exchanges, rendering death and forever at each breathing.

Needless to say, we do not commonly see the kind of care we should expect in such meetings. Even in the most deliberate invitations—when we invite love, when we propose marriage—we act frighteningly off the cuff. We come at each other as casually as we approach watermelons. We hold each other in careless, calloused hands. We see those we should offer only as beings to be used. We grasp them, but we watch ourselves.

-Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles, 113.

What to Do with Bits of String

We are expert at extraction, making
something out of something else;
a cat's cradle for the kids. A rag rug.
A torn loaf for turkey stuffing, or Eucharist.
We take traces of a fractured dream
and fashion a plot for a new novel.
Old tires make for resilient highways.
My friend rips out worn sweaters
for new scarves. Women in Africa
roll old magazine pages into beads,
varnishing them for sale in other worlds,
jewels from junk. I rescue river stones
and beach shells for ornaments
along my window sill. They cost nothing.

Try it yourself. See what lovely new thing
God can make from what is common
and discarded. Including your own life.
Call it recycling. Call it renewal
and you're getting at the heart of it.

-Luci Shaw

Not Just a Laundry List

All who read scriptures know this story well...Absalom instigated a palace coup and David fled for his life to the wilderness. Civil war followed, father fighting son, son fighting father. David won back his throne at a terrible cost, the death of his son, over which he mourned magnificently. The life of David is full of incidents like this. Everyone’s life is. Not a palace coup for most of us and, hopefully, not the treachery of a son, but conflict and failure and fear, love and betrayal, loss and salvation. Every day is a story, a morning and evening ending that are boundaries for people who go about their tasks with more or less purpose, go to war, make love, earn a living, scheme and sin and believe. Everything is connected. Meaning is everywhere. The days add up to a life that is a story...We are not always aware that we are living a story; often it seems more like a laundry list. But story it is.

- Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall

A Poem Can Be Like

A poem can be like two hands that lift you up and put you down in a new place. You look back with astonishment and find that because you have read a few lines on a printed page, or listened for a couple of minutes to a voice speaking, you have arrived at somewhere quite different.

-Elizabeth Goudge, Towers in the Mist, 212.

Even Rocks

There’s an organic interconnectedness in the comprehensive totality of creation, visible and invisible, “heavens and earth,” by which everything seen and heard, tasted, touched and experienced, if only followed far enough and deep enough, brings us into the presence of God. Even rocks.

-Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall, 207.

The Devil's Work is Abstraction

The Devil’s work is abstraction—not the love of material things, but the love of their quantities—which, of course, is why “David’s heart smote him after he had numbered the people” (2 Samuel 24:10). It is not the lover of material things but the abstractionist who defends long-term damage for short-term gain, or who calculates the “acceptability” of industrial damage to ecological or human health, or who counts dead bodies on the battlefield. The true lover of material things does not think in this way, but is answerable instead to the paradox of the parable of the lost sheep: that each is more precious than all.

-Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, 279.

Things Must Be Met for Themselves

But if man’s attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him—every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact—he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him, and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods—to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults: it is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 19-20

Peevish

The Dean was sorry for his disappointment but the peevishness added to his joy, for a man is only peevish to his friends.

-Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean's Watch, 177.

An Unanswerable Objection to John Locke

It is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near to it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection, (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.

- Thomas De Quincy, "On Murder", 19 (Quoted by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Footnote 68)

Happier

I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses,” he added, with a smile, “I must endavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”

-Jane Austen, Persuasion, Chapter 23

"Lord, I Thank Thee - "

IF IT were not for the war,
This war
Would suit me down to the ground.
There are things about it which pander to my worst instincts,
Flatter my weak points,
And make me a prig and a Pharisee.

I have always detested travelling,
And now there is no travelling to do.
I need not feel that I ought to be improving my mind
By a visit to Rome, the Pyramids, the Pyrenees,
New York or New Guinea,
Or even Moscow;
I have never really panted to contemplate Fuji-Yama,
And now I need not bother about it;
I need not feel abashed by people who take their holidays on the Mattherhorn
Or navigating the Fiords;
I can sit quietly in Essex and feel superior
When my friends complain
That they cannot get on with a sea-voyage or sea-bathing,
(I abominate cold water),
That they feel stifled
Without a breath of mountain air.

I was born in a hollow
At a confluence of rivers,
I was brought up in a swamp
Carved, caged, counter-checked like a chessboard
By dyke and drain,
Running from the Great Ouse to the Wash,
Where the wind never stops blowing;
I know all about the smell that comes off the drowned land
When the waters turn home in the spring
(A peculiar smell - and I have encountered something like it
In Venice
In the piccoli canali in the moonlight,
Where it is considered highly romantic);
I can say to the gadabouts:
"If you must have dank smells, you can get them in the Fens of East Anglia;
If you must break your necks on a precipice You can do it with perfect discomfort
In Cumberland;
And there are apple blossoms in Kent,

Blue seas on the Cornish coast,
Conifers in Scotland;
But I shall stay at home,
Indulging my natural laziness,
And save petrol and coal for my country;
And if anybody requests me
To deliver unnecessary speeches in remote parts of the country,
I can plead the difficulties of war-time travel,
And suffer no pangs of conscience.

I detest bananas,
A smug fruit, designed to be eaten in railway carriages
On Bank Holidays,
With a complexion like yellow wax
And a texture like new putty
Flavoured with nail polish.
Yes, we have no bananas,
Glory be!
And the hygenic people
Who eat prunes and grape-fruit for breakfast
Are cast out into outer darkness
Gnashing their dentures.
Why should anybody eat breakfast
For its edifying qualities,
Or its slimming properties,
Or its improving influence
Upon the skin and the bowels?
Behold, the moral has put on immortality,
And the last shall be first
In the economy of managed consumption.
I do not take sugar
In tea or coffee (even black coffee);
I can give it away to my neighbours,
Purchasing their grateful affection
At no cost to myself—
If everybody was made like me
The Ministry of Food would rejoice.
I need not buy new clothes,
Or change for dinner,
Or bother to make up my face—
It is virtuous to refrain from these things,
I need not shiver in silk stockings;—
I had a hunch about wool before it was rationed;
Now I have knitted myself woollen stockings
That come a long way up.
They are warm and admirable,
They do not ladder or go into holes suddenly.
I can boast quietly about them
And smirk while others admire my industry;
As it happens, I like knitting
And nothing gratifies one more
Than to be admired for doing what one likes.
In London there are still shops
With silk stockins in the windows
("Positively the last release");
I see the women and the girls
Check in their stride, stop, gaze in hungrily,
Fumbling with handbags, calculating coupons,
Yielding to temptation.
Poor souls!
They will never be able to walk through the rose-garden
Or play with the kitten
But anxiety will gnaw at their hearts like a demon rat;
The crack of a snapping stitch
Will sound in their ears like the crack of doom.
But I shall walk cheerfully in woollen
This winter, and the next, and the next,
Hand-knitted without coupons;
And the old lisle stockings will do for the summer—
If there is any summer.

It is jolly to take up a newspaper
And find it so thin!
The ruthless restriction of twaddle
Is a rare, refreshing fruit
Better than many bananas.
The Woman's Page,
The Sports Page,
The Feature Page,
The Page of Bathing Beauties,
Are clipped as close as Samson's skull,
Together with the Comic Strip
And the God-wottery Corner for Garden-lovers.
The blare of the advertisements,
Imploring, cajoling, stimulating, menacing, terrifying
An apathetic public
Into buying what it neither needs nor desires,
Has dwindled into an apologetic murmur.
Regretting the shortage of supplies,
Whispering pathetically, "Forget-me-not,
Forget me not when good times come again!"
We are not electrified every other day
By the bursting into the world,
With the accomplishments suitable to the advent of a long-promised Messiah
Of a new soap.
Soap is rationed.
(I always thought we washed far too much anyhow—
Animals do not wear out their skins
And destroy their natural oils
With perpetual washing;
Even the cat despises soap,
And whoever heard of a cow washing behind the ear?)
There is very little room these days
For the misreporting of my public utterances;
Soon they will not be reported at all,
Thank goodness!
And, curiously enough, books and plays seem to do better
When nobody reviews them.
Also, owing to the lack of paper
The demand for books exceeds the supply—
A thing that has not been known
Since they started all this popular education and cheap printing.
Nobody ever wants a thing
Until it is taken away—
We used to have far too much of everything.

I can now enjoy a more glorious victory,
More exultation of spirit,
By capturing a twopenny tin of mustard
Or a packet of hairpins
And bearing it home in triumph
Than I could have achieved before the war
By securing a First Folio of Shakespeare
At vast trouble and expense
In the sale-room [.]
The local chimney sweep
Keeps hens.
He takes the scraps from my table, the kitchen scraps,
And the hen returns them to me,
By a beautiful economy of nature,
In the likeness of eggs.
A new-laid egg
Will bind a friendship
Faster than it binds a cake;
A string of onions
Is a gift more gracious
Than a string of pearls;
I am better off with vegetables
At the bottom of my garden
Than with all the fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream.
If it were not for the war,
This war
Would suit me down to the ground.

- Dorothy Sayers

Suffer Fools Gladly

There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word ‘suffer,’ and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word ‘gladly,’ and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.

-G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, H/T Austin Kleon

John 3:16

And yet all the good I know is in this, that a man might so love this world that it would break his heart.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 254.

Prayer

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.

But sometimes a prayer comes that you have not thought to pray, yet suddenly there it is and you pray it. Sometimes you just trustfully and easily pass into the other world of sleep. Sometimes the bird finds that what looks like an opening is an opening, and it flies away. Sometimes the shut door opens and you go through it into the same world you were in before, in which you belong as you did not before.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 253.