Buying Books

It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on...

-Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road, 44.

The Sofa

I sing the Sofa. I who lately sang
Truth, Hope, and Charity, and touched with awe
The solemn chords, and with a trembling hand
Escaped with pain from that adventurous flight,
Now seek repose upon an humbler theme...

-William Cowper

Hope to the Last!

"Hope to the last!" said Newman, clapping him on the back. "Always hope; that's a dear boy. Never leave off hoping; it don't answer. Do you mind me, Nick? it don't answer. Don't leave a stone unturned. It's always something, to know you've done the most you could. But, don't leave off hoping, or it's of no use doing anything. Hope, hope, to the last!"

-Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

Feast Days

The forms and rites of Christmas Day are meant merely to give the last push to people who are afraid to be festive. Father Christmas exists to haul us out of bed and make us partake of meals too beautiful to be called breakfasts.

-G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, January 8, 1910.

Hallelujah!

The kingdom of this world
is become
the kingdom of our Lord
and of His Christ
and He shall reign
forever and ever...

-G. F. Handel (calligraphy by Timothy R. Botts)

Of the Father's Love Begotten

Of the Father’s love begotten
Ere the world began to be
He is alpha and omega
He the source, the ending he
Of the things that are, that have been
And that future years shall see
Evermore and evermore

Oh ye heights of Heaven adore him
Angel hosts his praises sing
Clouds, dominions bow before him
And extol our God and King
Let no tongue on earth be silent
Every voice in concert ring
Evermore and evermore

Christ to thee with God the Father
And O Holy Ghost, to thee
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving
And unwearied praises be
Honor, glory and dominion
And eternal victory
Evermore and evermore

-Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348-413)

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.

Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.

Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow

on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.

No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday

you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.

-Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning

Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus

Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
Born to set thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us;
Let us find our rest in thee.

Israel’s strength and consolation,
Hope of all the earth thou art,
Dear Desire of every of nation,
Joy of every longing heart.

Born thy people to deliver,
Born a child and yet a king,
Born to reign in us forever,
Thou thy gracious kingdom bring.

By thine own eternal spirit
Rule in all our hearts alone;
By thine all-sufficient merit
Raise us to thy glorious throne

-Charles Wesley

A Quiet Chamber: Part IV

There, shedding a dim and varied light, was the Christmas tree my father had decorated alone, every single strand of tinsel hanging straight down of its own slim weight, since he hung them individually, patiently, and would not hasten the duty by tossing them in fistfuls (tradition!)—the tree he had hidden three days ago behind a knobless door.

There, in various places about the room, were seven piles of gifts, a pile for each of us.

There, in the midst of them, my mother sat smiling on the floor, her skirts encircling her, her own radiance smiting my eyes, for she verged on laughter. My mother always laughed when she gave presents, however long the day had been before, however crazy she had almost gone. I began to blink rapidly.

But there, unaccountably, was my father, standing center in the room and gazing straight at me. At me. And this is the wonder fixed in my memory: that the man himself was filled with a yearning, painful expectation; but that he, like me, was withholding still his own excitement—on account of me.

Everything else in this room was just as it had been the year before, and the year before that. But this was new. This thing I had never seen before: that my father, too, had passed his day in the hope that risks a violent hurt. My father, too, had had to trust the promises against their disappointments. So said his steady eyes on me. But among the promises to which my father had committed his soul, his hope and his faith, the most important one was this: that his eldest son should soften and be glad.

If I had grown adult in 1954, then lo, how like a child my father had become! The colored lights painted the side of his face. He gazed at me, waiting, waiting for me, waiting for his Christmas to be received by his son and returned to him again.

And I began to cry. O my father!

Silently, merely spilling the tears and staring straight back at him, defenseless because there was no need for defenses, I cried—glad and unashamed. Because what was this room, for so long locked, which I was entering? Why, it was my own heart. And why had I been afraid? Because I thought I’d find it empty, a hard, unfeeling thing.

But there, in the room, was my father.

And there, in my father, was the love that had furnished this room, preparing it for us no differently than he had last year prepared it, yet trusting and yearning, desiring our joy.

And what else could such a love be, but my Jesus drawing near?

Look, then, what I have found in my father’s room, in my heart after all: the dearest Lord Jesus, holy child—

The nativity of our Lord.

I leaned my cheek against the doorjamb and grinned like a grown-up ten years old, and sobbed as if I were two. And my father moved from the middle of the room and walked toward me, still empty-handed; but he spread his hands and gathered me to himself. And I put my arms around his harder body. And so we, both of us, were full.

This is the way that it was in the olden days.

-Walter Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 64-66.

A Quiet Chamber: Part III

...It was tradition, upon returning home, that we change our church clothes into pajamas, and gather in the kitchen.

Across the hall the door was still closed—but its knob had been replaced. I saw that knob, and my heart kicked inside of me. So I chewed my bottom lip and frowned like thunder: No! It won’t be what it ought to be! It never is.

Adult.

And always, always the hoops of my father’s tradition: we lined up in the kitchen from the youngest to the oldest. I stood last in a line of seven. My littlest sister was clasping her hands and raising her shining, saintly face to my father, who stood before her facing us. Her hair hung down her back to the waist. Blithe child! Her blue eyes burst with trust. I pitied her.

My father prayed a prayer, tormenting me. For the prayer evoked the very images I was refusing: infant Jesus, gift of God, love come down from heaven—all of the things that conspired to make me glad at Christmas. My poor heart bucked and disputed that prayer. No! I would not hope. No! I would not permit excitement. No! No! I would not be set up for a second disappointment.

We were a single minute from entering the room.

And I might have succeeded at severity—

—except that then we sang a song, the same song we always sung, and the singing undid me altogether. Music destroys me. A hymn will reduce me to infancy.

Nine bare voices, unaccompanied in the kitchen, we sang: Ah, dearest Jesus, hold child—and I began to tremble.—Make thee a bed, soft, undefiled—The very sweetness of the melody caused my defenses to fall: I began to hope, and I began to fear, both at once. I began to wish, and wishing made me terrified. I began all over again to believe, but I had never ceased my unbelief. I began to panic.—Within my heart; that it may be—Dreadfully now, I yearned for some good thing to be found in that room, but “dreadfully,” I say, because I was an adult; I’d put away the childish things; I’d been disillusioned and knew no good to be in there. This was a pitiless sham!

—A quiet chamber kept for thee.

My father whispered, “Now.”

He turned to the door.

Little squeals escaped my sister.

He grasped the knob and opened the door upon a muted colored light; and one by one his children crept through the door and into that room.

All of his children save one. I lingered in the doorway, looking, not breathing.

-Walt Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 63-64.

A Quiet Chamber: Part II

Let me be more specific. We were living in Edmonton, Alberta, then. The year was 1954, and I was ten, the oldest of seven children. I’ve implied that we were all excited on that particular Christmas Eve morning, and so we were; but though my brothers and sisters could manifest their excitement with unbridled delight, I could not mine. I absolutely refused to acknowledge or signal excitement. They loved the sweet contractions in their stomachs. I was afraid of them. For I had that very year become an adult: silent, solemn, watchful, and infinitely cautious.

So my brothers and sisters laughed and clapped the day away. They spilled colored sugar on cookie dough and covered the kitchen table with a sweet mess, all unworried, unafraid. They claimed, by faster stabs of the finger, their individual treasures from Sears catalogs, and so they allowed their dreams to soar, and so they passed the day. I didn’t blame them. They were innocent; they could dare the dangers they didn’t see. These children could rush headlong toward the evening, recklessly. But I could not.

I held myself in a severe restraint. Because—what if you hope, and it doesn’t happen? It’s treacherous to hope. The harder you hope, the more vulnerable you become. And what if you believe a thing, but it isn’t true? Well, the instant you see the deception, you die a little. And it hurts exactly in your soul, where once you had believed. I knew all this. I had learned that excitement is composed of hope and faith together—but of faith and hope in promises yet unkept—and I was not about to let excitement run away with me, or I would certainly crash as I had crashed the year before.

Last Christmas Eve, in the midst of opening his presents, my brother Paul had burst into tears. I didn’t know—and I don’t know—why. But I was shocked to discover that the Christmas time was not inviolate. I was horrified that pain could invade the holy ceremony. And I was angry that my father had not protected my brother from tears. There was a fraud here. The traditions were as thin as a crystal globe and empty. I could do nothing but sob in sympathy with my brother, nothing but grieve to the same degree that I had believed.

But by ten I was an adult; and if Christmas gave me nothing really, and if the traditions could not protect me from assault, then I would protect myself.

No: the more excited I was, the more I was determined not to be, and the more I molded my face into a frown.

I’m speaking with precision now. None of us could stand the season’s excitement. But I was frightened by mine and chose to show it to no one, not to my father, not to my mother, and not to myself.

Adult.

-Walt Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 59-60.

A Quiet Chamber: Part I

...But this is the way it was especially on Christmas Eve day:

We spent the major portion of the morning at that upstairs window, giggling, whispering, and waiting for the milkman to come. Tradition. My mother was glad to be shed of us on the day she “ran crazy” with preparations. I think we knew that then. But for our own part, we did truly want to see some evidence of how cold it was outside. It was important that Christmas Eve be cold. And it was the milkman’s mare, you see, who presented us with evidence.

So here came the mare in a slow walk, nodding, drawing the wagon behind her even when her master was rushing up sidewalks, making deliveries. She never stopped. And the mare was blowing plumes of steam from her nostrils. Her chin has grown a beard of hoarfrost. Her back was blanketed. The blanket smoked. The air was cold. The air was very cold, and our stomachs contracted with joy within us, and some of us laughed at the rightness of the weather. So here came the mare, treading a hardened snow. The snow banked six feet high on either side of the street, except at sidewalks and driveways; the snow was castles we would be kings of tomorrow. The snow collected on the mare, whose forelock and eyelashes were white. She shivered the flesh on her flanks, sending off small showers of snow; and so did we—shiver. Ah, cold! The air was a crystal bowl of cold! The day was perfectly right.

And we could scarcely stand the excitement.

Downstairs, directly below us in the house, was a room that had been locked two days ago against our entering in. This was my father’s tradition, which he never varied year to year. Always, he locked the door by removing its knob, transfiguring thereby the very spirit of the room; all we could do was spy at the knob-hole and wonder at the mysteries concealed inside. My brothers and sisters pestered that hole continually, chirping among themselves like snowbirds on a holly tree, puffing their imaginations like feathers all around them.

Tonight, on Christmas Eve itself, we would all line up, and my father would slip the knob back into the door, and one by one we would enter the wondrous room. This much we knew: the Christmas tree was in there.

Therefore, even in the morning at the upstairs window, we could scarcely stand the excitement.

Tonight! And lo: it was very, very cold.

-Walt Wangerin, The Manger is Empty, 57-59.

The House of Christmas

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost – how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

-G. K. Chesterton

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

...But as far as I’m concerned, Mary is always going to look a lot like Imogene Herdman—sort of nervous and bewildered, but ready to clobber anyone who laid a hand on her baby. And the Wise Men are always going to be Leroy and his brothers, bearing ham.

When we came out of the church that night it was cold and clear, with crunchy snow underfoot and bright, bright stars overhead. And I thought about the Angel of the Lord—Gladys, with her skinny legs and her dirty sneakers sticking out from under her robe, yelling at all of us, everywhere: “Hey! Unto you a child is born!”

-Barbara Robinson, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, 79-80.

Dark and Light

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shined.

-Isaiah 9:2

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

God rest ye merry, gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember, Christ, our Saviour
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan's power
When we were gone astray
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy

From God our Heavenly Father
A blessed Angel came;
And unto certain Shepherds
Brought tidings of the same:
How that in Bethlehem was born
The Son of God by Name.
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy

"Fear not then," said the Angel,
"Let nothing you affright,
This day is born a Saviour
Of a pure Virgin bright,
To free all those who trust in Him
From Satan's power and might."
O tidings of comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy
O tidings of comfort and joy

Hotel Shampoo

Natural whole wheat protein and Irish moss help strengthen and shield hair from environmental damage. Gentle enough for everyday use.

John 1:14

The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.

-Trans. Eugene H. Peterson, The Message

Incarnation

Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a mass of filth convoluted in a triple knot as in an intestinal obstruction. Dacians, Heruleans, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves...all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.

And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble, He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being—man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd, with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over.

-Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

The Magendanz Lights

Once again the Magendanzes have outdone themselves with the biggest display of Christmas lights in town – a little Las Vegas – with Santa, Tiny Tim, and Ebenezer Scrooge all standing around the manger; with six wise men, not three, and Frosty, and Rudolph, and the Grinch.

- Garrison Keillor, Now it is Christmas Again

Lux Venit

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the Lord will arise upon you,
and his glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Isaiah 60:1-3

The Wizard's Pupil

TIME like a sullen school-boy stands
Beside the Wizard's knee,
The book of life between his hands,
And spells out painfully
The crabbed Christ-cross row,
The Alpha and the O.

His grimy fingers slowly trace
Each odd, repellent sign
In a dull fear to lose the place;
His voice, with listless whine,
Drawls through the scheduled hour
The syllables of power.

While Zeta is so like to Xi
Small thought has he to spare
For what the screed may signify,
(The Wizard in His chair
Smiles, knowing ere He look
All that is in the book).

But sometimes ill and sometimes well,
Reluctant and perplexed,
He gropes and stammers through the spell
From one sound to the next;
And when the last is read
God's Word wakes the dead.

-Dorothy Sayers

O Come, O Come Emmanuel

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer
Our spirits by thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

-Latin, 12th century; trans. John Mason Neale, 1851.

This Little Babe

This little Babe so few days old,
Is come to rifle Satan's fold;
All hell doth at his presence quake,
Though he himself for cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmed wise
The gates of hell he will surprise.

With tears he fights and wins the field,
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows made of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh his warrior's steed.

His camp is pitched in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib his trench, haystalks his stakes,
Of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus as sure his foe to wound,
The Angels' trumps alarum sound.

My soul with Christ join thou in fight,
Stick to the tents that he hath pight;
Within his crib is surest ward,
This little Babe will be thy guard;
If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

-Robert Southwell