Category Archives: seasons

til the sun breaks down . . .

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Come, sons of summer, by whose toil
We are the lords of wine and oil;
By whose tough labours, and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crown’d with the ears of corn, now come,
And to the pipe sing Harvest Home.

Leaving a late afternoon meeting the other day, someone remarked that it doesn’t seem like November. It isn’t cold enough. My neighbor’s oak tree has hardly begun to carpet my yard. The weather seems stuck somewhere just the other side of Poe’s lonesome October. Still, Halloween brought us a nice gaggle of children and a few jokes at the door in keeping with the local tradition.

I timed my arrival at church next day so as to avoid singing all the verses of “For All the Saints”; not that I don’t love the hymn, as I love St. Patrick’s Breastplate and the Hallelujah chorus. But I’ve sung them all too many times for too many years. That aside, there’s still something about this time of year that I especially love, something about the various enactments around the time of All Hallows that arrests and gives me pause to think again for the hundredth time (the hundredth time being that time whose coming is always both old and new) of the round of mortality we celebrate amongst ghosts and shadows in the lengthening nights.

All Hallows perhaps emerged in the eighth century as a sanctification for Europe’s new Christians of various pagan celebrations. And it has never lost its pagan character, even in today’s commercially appropriated forms. I’m amused at some of the arguments we now have about appropriate costumes for Halloween, though I probably shouldn’t be because these arguments get pretty serious for those most directly affected. “Dress up, if you will, but don’t appropriate somebody else’s culture,’ doesn’t solve any problems, nor do appeals to freedom of speech in spite of the fact that Halloween has always been a time of inappropriate hijinks. Too, it doesn’t take much of a history lesson to point out that Halloween has always been an appropriation of someone else’s culture; but the reason white college students shouldn’t wear blackface, or stage all-white parties, or throw frat parties with gang themes, etc., isn’t that doing these things involves appropriation, and no number of scripted “conversations” will make it so. The reason these practices are odious is that they perpetuate invidious ethnic stereotypes with which we are presently struggling.

For in the final analysis the hijinks are folded into a great solemnity. These days in my church we tend to collapse All Hallows and All Souls into an All Saints Sunday (that closest to November first); though All Saints Day, itself, remains a day of solemn obligation requiring a Mass, like Christmas, the Feast of the Assumption, and a handful of others that don’t necessarily fall on Sundays—all Sundays being days of solemn obligation. We festoon spaces in our churches with photographs of loved ones that families wish to remember, and we sing hymns and read lessons that recall saints known and unknown. One of my favorite such lesson is from Ecclesiasticus 44. “Let us now praise famous men,” it begins; but its chief aim is to remember those “there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.” This is the logic of Agee and Evans’s famous book of depression photos.

But All Hallows is also part harvest festival. I’ve quoted above from Robert Herrick’s wonderful poem, “The Hock Cart, or Harvest Home”; albeit a celebration of feudalism when it was already gone (and perhaps a rueful nod towards the hard lives of those who must feed their lord). Still, the symbolism of the hock cart, or the last laden harvest wagon, decorated with a figure made of sheaves and ribbons, is for Herrick not an end but a beginning:

And, you must know, your lord’s word’s true,
Feed him ye must, whose food fills you.
And that this pleasure is like rain,
Not sent ye for to drown your pain,
But for to make it spring again.

I remember driving along rural North Carolina roads during the tobacco harvest and marking how elderly wooden harvest wagons left a litter of broad, green leaves behind them as they bumped along. The great cotton wagons of West Texas did the same in my day, littering the roadways with a white chaff that might or might not find its way to the gin. And I think of the parable of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas. A woman walks down a road carrying a jar of meal. She doesn’t realize that the jar is leaking until she arrives home and finds it empty, poured out indiscriminately like the abundance of God, or Herrick’s rain, or Stingy Jack grinning through a ghoulish face carved from a hollow turnip or a pumpkin as we do in this country.

Why the pairing of harvest home with images of waste and death? Because growth and dying are wrapped together like the yin and the yang. “Unless a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone,” says John’s Gospel. Harvest is that death that gives us present abundance, but also provides us the seeds of all future abundance. It is the sign and prophecy of the cosmic stubbornness we live in, of which we are a part. Call it Nature or call it God’s own field—we plow and scatter the good seed upon the same earth in which we bury our dead

—to make it spring again.

Twelfth Night

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Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you
A Happy New Year . . .

Today is the twelfth day of Christmas; the festival ends some hours from now, on Twelfth Night. In times past the celebrations would have included mumming and wassailing that would have been going on for days, as barriers of class and rank relaxed temporarily and the Lord of Misrule commanded festivities in the courts and great houses of Europe. The popular carol we know as “The Twelve days of Christmas” is a remnant of this past.

According to legend, it was the beauiful Princess Rowen, daughter of the legendary Saxon mercenary, Hengist, employed by equally legendary British King Vortigern, who introduced the custom of Wassail to Britain. Approaching King Vortigern with a golden bowl filled with wine, she offered to toast his health, saying “Lauerd King, wassheil” to which the king was instructed to reply with the word, “drincheil” before imbibing. Vortigern was so beguiled that he sought the lady in marriage and immediately began to give away pieces of his kingdom to her relatives. I first encountered this story in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, but Geoffrey had translated it almost verbatim from another pretty much legendary poet we know as Layamon.

Christmas revels have been variously intertwined with pagan celebrations of the new year pretty much from the beginning. In the English speaking world, January 1 was first appointed as the beginning of the new year by William the Conqueror in honor of his own coronation, and secondarily as the traditional date of Christ’s circumcision. The practice, which came to be known as circumcision style dating soon gave way, however, to the older practice it had replaced, which began the new year with the Annunciation, and appointed March 25 as the day of celebration.

The confusion of dates and dating is partly a result of confusing solar and lunar calendars; our present New Year’s day more or less inaugurates the solar year. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII appointed January 1 as the beginning of the new year, and that date was adopted widely on the European continent. In Britain and the British colonies, however, March 25 continued to be celebrated as the beginning of the new year until 1752, in the American colonies as elsewhere. Present-day arguments about Christmas in the United States have mostly to do with developing pressures to celebrate or to deplore multiculturalism, but the winter festival has always been a time of cultural dissonance.

We recall, too, how the winter festival comes bearing the faces of Janus, the Roman god who looks forward and back, for whom the month of January is named. Light in darkness, ease after war, joy after pain, love and hate, springtime and harvest, youth and age, the coming and going of things. And there is that other as well. “Pity would be no more/if we did not make somebody Poor”—Blake calls it the human abstract, the source of discontent and its like, indifference. The watchmen on the heights at Advent looked backwards towards the death of time and called us to a new wakefulness, a new sensitivity (not different from the old) to the issues of life and death that are woven into the fabric of our being whether we like it or no.

Shall we survive the winter? It is always a question of how much warmth we can husband about us, but if it is we who are to survive it is always a question, too, of how much warmth we can share. Such warmth (which is also warmth of heart) is not a commodity but the pearl of great price. We are given it for a time only that we may give it away.

Next Winter comes slowly, Pale, Meager, and Old,
First trembling with Age, and then quiv’ring with Cold;
Benumb’d with hard Frosts, and with Snow cover’d o’er,
Prays the Sun to Restore him, and Sings as before.

Are change and decay, like growth and presence, built into the nature of things? And do we do them honor in this time when the world turns upside down—is that what it means to celebrate the death of time? “I should be glad of another death,” says Eliot’s Magus. This, in solsitio brumali, the very dead of winter.

Cultural dissonance ought not to blind us to the hospitality and generosity we honor and hopefully extend to others at this season. These have been part of the winter festival as we know it, both Christian and Pagan, for many centuries. The mumming and wassail are reminders that generosity and hospitality are owed among humans. To deny them is not only to deny compassion to others, but also to deny what is best in oneself, to make oneself a worse person. That’s the lesson Ebenezer Scrooge learns, what legendary Wenceslas (about whom I wrote last year) already knew, the lesson Dives in Jesus’ parable fails to comprehend. At bottom, it isn’t a rational lesson; indeed some forms of theology may be its enemy. There are problems with the idea of setting aside a season for honoring generosity and hospitality, but perhaps we need to be reminded that these virtues and their grounding in love of one’s companions are basic to civilized life.

As I say, it’s the twelfth day of Christmas, but Twelfth Night can be understood to conclude a festival time that begins with All Hallows Eve and is perhaps associated in the remote past with the ancient Celtic Samhain and the Roman Saturnalia. Death and rebirth, “Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward“: all of which might serve to remind us of Shakespeare’s play, which features reversals and misrule of many kinds, though it ends happily as we like to think the twelve days of Christmas do. After all it’s the Bard’s best fool but one who reminds us at the close that the world began a great while ago.

Here’s our holiday letter. Just click on the image to open it. Love and joy to all.

last Advent

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So, what horizon do I look towards as Advent closes?

Perhaps not a new miraculous birth, but a couple of posts ago I wrote about some signs of the times that give me pause. Here’s one that gives me hope. Just hours ago my long-time Internet friend, Hadar Aviram, swam the length of the Sea of Galilee. I can’t even imagine swimming nine and a half hours, and Hadar is quick to point out that she did not do it all by herself, having been assisted by members of her family and friends. You can read various narratives and see some photos here.

Hadar’s swim raised funds for Beit Dror, an Israeli shelter for homeless LGBT teens. According to the shelter’s website, it is “the first and only center designed to meet the needs of out-of-home GLBT youth in Israel, and one of the few similar institutions in the world operated by governmental organizations.” Opened in 2002, Beit Dror has a modest program at present, but its goals call for expanding programs and services. Hadar’s fundraising goal was a modest $2000, which she has substantially exceeded. I want to tell another story now, but I’ll come back to this.

My calendar shows that December 29, 1957 was a Sunday. I’m thinking it must have been that evening I found myself driving back to Dallas from Waxahachie, where I had a church job. I’m sure it was late, after an evening service. I was driving my four-year-old Oldsmobile 88, a lemon for sure; I had to shift the Hydramatic manually. I had traded a beautiful De Soto coupe for it, but it had a twelve-volt electrical system, whereas the De Soto had an old-fashioned six volts, which made for dim lights at night and bad radio reception.

The Oldsmobile had bright lights and a great radio. That evening, December 29, 1957 (if that’s when it was), I was listening to Monitor, the NBC weekend radio service, as host Dave Garroway mused ironically about quirky things in between news episodes with Chet Huntley, and skits by Bob and Ray and Mike Nichols and Elaine May and other Monitor regulars. At one point, Garroway chuckled about how Americans had been down recently because the Soviets had launched Sputniks one and two and made us feel inferior, or at least a little insecure. Indeed the Soviets’ capture of the lead in the space race, a race we Americans didn’t even know we were running until we found ourselves losing it, had become a major political issue at the end of 1957. Sputnik two had carried a dog and weighed a thousand pounds. We Americans didn’t even have a Rocket capable of launching such a behemoth.

But we had launched a Santa Claus, as Garroway pointed out with a gentleness that gave the cliché some cover, who had been sighted many times orbiting the earth (or at least our part of it) just days before, as he had since time immemorial. I was twenty that year, old enough to have been stung in a bad car deal, and it still embarrasses me a little to acknowledge that for a moment I took some consolation and perhaps a bit of hope from Garroway’s sentimental ramble. We had launched Santa Claus, that particularly American myth figure, whom my Grandmother had taught me to think was the spirit of Christmas: brash, jolly, generous, full of good will, and fearless—all that and a lover of children, somehow the guarantor of the good middle-class world many of our parents in my generation had died, we thought, to preserve in the preceding decade.

The Soviets might have the better of us for a little with their beeps in the night and thousand-pound flying dog houses; they may have stolen Eastern Europe and China from the good world. But Americans knew we were not totalitarians in the depths of our hearts. We were still a long way from achieving racial and economic justice, but we had repudiated McCarthyism. Our understanding of life and the world and the social contract we had based upon it offered more of the goods of life, more liberty and prosperity than any other. It disturbed us a little that some outside our country thought of us as ugly Americans, but we wished them well as we did our best to spread the same liberty and prosperity we enjoyed around the planet. Or so we thought, some of us at least.

Why think of this now? Perhaps because I hope my fellow citizens have not lost the naïve impulse towards human good will I took from Dave Garroway on my evening road home that fifth day of Christmas so many years ago. It’s problematic, to be sure. We err in its service, as I have often erred. But it’s the best thing about us as a people. Still, if the last century taught us anything it taught us the limits of our mythology. If we are to remain major stakeholders in the evolving world we shall need a better vision of ourselves than that offered by present versions of American ambition. We ultimately won the space race, only to abandon it. Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon proved to be somewhat less than a giant leap for all humans.

So who or what else might escape the surly bonds of earth and point the way for us towards a usable future? What present brightest and best might dawn on our darkness and lend us aid? I take present hope from young people like Hadar Aviram. You can read about her at the websites I’ve linked. I don’t know why Hadar chose the day of the winter solstice for her swim, but it seems fitting. It draws together both the adventurous and philanthropic aspects of the winter festival as it is celebrated in many traditions; for it isn’t just Christmas, or even the ancient Yule—it’s ecumenical whether we like it or not and always has been. It crosses seas and deserts. I will never ponder another Advent without thinking of this one and of Hadar’s Swim. Then too, there are profound ethical and human issues involved in the very existence of Beit Dror. You can read about some of those at the shelter’s website as well.

Finally, I’m thinking of the orchestra that Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said founded. To proclaim such things, to support such enterprises as Beit Dror and the Divan Orchestra, is to preach the gospel of peace, however one does it; though how fine a gesture to swim the Sea of Galilee! And I’m thinking of the words of Isaiah as James Jenyns fit them up for Handel’s music: How Beautiful are the feet of them . . . who cross such seas. Deer walk upon our mountains now, as the poet says. Great white bears still swim amongst the polar ice floes. And the universe rolls on into what heavens, what still unspeaking and unspoken Word to one who has seventy six winters and fewer tomorrows than he used to have? There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy.