To Foil Thy Foes With Joy

Detail of Serbian fresco of the Nativity of Jesus from Kosovo

In just a few more days we, in the West will be celebrating the birth of our Savior at Christmas.  One of the things I love to do during the Christmas season is to listen to Benjamin Britten's 'A Ceremony of Carols'. He composed it in 1942, during the darkest year of World War II, while he was crossing the Atlantic from the United States to England.   

My favorite movement in the entire piece is based on the fifth stanza from the poem "New Heaven, New War" by 16th century the Jesuit saint and martyr, Fr.Robert Southwell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTyIP7m8Btg

These are the concluding stanzas of the poem:

5.   
This little babe, a 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.

6.
With tears he fights and wins the field;
His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babish cries,
His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns cold and need,
And feeble flesh his warrior's stead.

7.
His camp is pitched in a stall,
His bulwark but a broken wall,
His crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes,
Of shepherds he his muster makes;
And thus, as sure his foe to wound,
The angels' trumps alarum sound. 

8. 
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 they foes with joy,
Then flit not from this heavenly boy.

Jesus was born into our world, not armed with the power to coerce and compel our obedience.  Rather, he came to us disarmed, wielding only the weapons of mercy and love, forgiveness and reconciliation, communion and peace.
  

As our world reckons power, Jesus had none to speak of.  Yet he overcame the power of sin in our lives and in our world with a different and deeper kind of power, the power of God’s unconditional, self-giving love and the inner transformation that love makes possible.

The  Russian Orthodox bishop, Anthony Bloom, wrote that those whose love is not defeated by suffering acquire the only power that matters: the unconditional power of forgiving those

who inflicted  suffering on them. 

This is the authentic power revealed to us in this tiny baby whose birth we celebrate.

Come, Lord Jesus!

In the End, It's All About Joy

 Wood Engraving by Ade Bethune

Today is the thirty-sixth anniversary of the death of Servant of God, Dorothy Day.  In pondering with gratitude her life and witness, it is easy to forget that for her, following Jesus, and a lifetime of doing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy were, in the end, not a penance or a burden but all about joy. 

She wrote:"You will know your vocation by the joy that it brings you.  You will know.  You will know when it's right."  

Of course, the hardships she endured were real and painful enough.  She lived with loneliness, disappointment, doubt and criticism, with the daily struggle to face her own faults and failings and sins.  She was misunderstood by many, including some of those who admired her the most.

But it was the friendship of men and women on the edges of society, the poor and forgetten, the ones who are of no account in this world, but who are closest to Jesus, who brought her close to Him.  It was with them that she found joy, for it was with them that she found Christ, our joy, our hope and our peace. 

Dorothy Day, Servant of God, pray for us.

Living in Time and Rememberance

As the year begins to draw down, I'm reminded that there are so many calendars in our lives and that it is these calendars that tell us who we are, as peoples, as communities of faith, as families and as individuals.  Remembered in every calendar are those moments over time, in the words of Gaudium et Spes of "joy and hope, grief and anguish" in the life of a people, or a faith community, or a family or an individual.

On my own personal calendar for October was my sister Nancy's birthday, who would have been 60 years old on the 29th.  (She was a year younger than me and died when she was 11.)  As with everyone, I have a personal calendar of joys and griefs, hope and anguish that I chose to observe each year, ranging from the delightful and lifechanging such as meeting my wife Paula for the first time (December 18th) and our first kiss (January 2nd).  Other dates in my calendar were filled with such hope and promise: our wedding anniversary (October 23rd), the births of our daughter and son (July 19th and April 12th, respectively) and my ordination as a deacon (August 10th).

And the inevitable events of grief and anguish, which are both universal and deeply personal: my sister's death (January 14th) and the deaths of my teacher and mentor Pere Igor (March 17th); of my friends Helena, Raul, Buddy and Richard (June 28th, November 13, February 5th and August 6th).

But of course, we live, not only observing the feasts and memorials of our own personal and private calendar, but within larger calendars that include others: the yearly observences of nations and peoples, the monthly calendar of the tides and annual cycle of the seasons, which is the earth's calendar and the cosmic calendar of the moon, the sun and the stars.   And for believers, the religious or liturgical calendar.

What we remember and what we anticipate are bound up in all of these calendars, which in their various cyclic observances overlap with the arc of our lives from birth to death to eternal life.   I'm thankful for the ways in these cycles allow me, allow us, to live in time and in rememberance
and in anticipation of the world to come, which is beyond time and somehow brings together past, present and future.

I am grateful that all of these various cycles of time afford me the opportunity to set aside the time to remember all of the beloved persons and events of my life.  As each year of my life has unfolded, this is such a joy and a consolation.