A Seasonal Pleasure

I have XM-Sirius, and they create a channel just for the eight days of Hanukkah. It's a wonderful complement to the Christmas music that's everywhere else. I just can't help but enjoy its mix of religious and pop music, cultural features and bubbling-over joyousness.

Sartre: something that doesn't get much publicity

From Busted Halo:

While serving in the French army in 1940, Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher and playwright, was captured by Germans and placed in a prisoner of war camp. Before Christmas, a fellow-prisoner named Paul Feller who was a Jesuit, persuaded Sartre to write a Christmas play for the Christians imprisoned with them. By 1940, Sartre—who had been baptized a Catholic—was a declared atheist, but he agreed to the request out of a sense of solidarity with the other prisoners. The following is a brief excerpt from the resulting play, called “Bar-Jona,” in which Sartre offers a moving reflection on the Virgin Mother and her newborn son, Jesus.

"The Virgin is pale, and she looks at the baby. What I would paint on her face is an anxious wonderment, such as has never before been seen on a human face. For Christ is her baby, flesh of her flesh, and the fruit of her womb. She has carried him for nine months, and she will give him her breast, and her milk will become the blood of God. There are moments when the temptation is so strong that she forgets that he is God. She folds him in her arms and says: My little one.

"But at other moments she feels a stranger, and she thinks: God is there — and she finds herself caught by a religious awe before this speechless God, this terrifying infant. All mothers at times are brought up sharp in this way before this fragment of themselves, their baby. They feel themselves in exile at two paces from this new life that they have created from their life, and which is now peopled by another’s thoughts. But no other baby has been so cruelly and suddenly snatched from his mother, for he is God, and he surpasses in every way anything that she can imagine. It is a hard trial for a mother to be ashamed of herself and her human condition before her son.

"But I think that there are other rapid, fleeting moments when she realizes at once that Christ is her son, her very own baby, and that he is God. She looks at him and thinks: This God is my baby. This divine flesh is my flesh. He is made from me. He has my eyes, and the curve of his mouth is the curve of mine. He is like me. He is God and he is like me.

"No other woman has been lucky enough to have a God for herself alone, a tiny little God whom she can take in her arms and cover with kisses, a warm-bodied God who smiles and breathes, a God that she can touch, who is alive. And it is in these moments that I would paint Mary, if I was a painter, and I would try to capture the air of radiant tenderness and timidity with which she lifts her finger to touch the sweet skin of her baby-God, whose warm weight she feels on her knees, and who smiles."

Worth saving.

From Rodney Crowell:

The sun comes up tomorrow,
but there are no guarantees;
it can rock you like a baby,
it can bring you to your knees.

Check their shoes.

That's how you know who's been too close to the manure pile. Today's NY Times suggests that Illinois representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., is the "Candidate 5" in the Blago corruption case.

Anatomy of a war

Dennis Prager diagnoses the nature of the conflict now being engineered by the extremist Muslims in the light of the Mumbai events. There is every reason, historically, politically and ideologically, to take seriously what he says--that the war on the Jews is a war on the democracies of the West. What will be our response?

The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

Winston Churchill, 12 November 1940, House of Commons

Justice, love and forgiveness

Rabbi Schmuley Boteach has a very challenging comment on the senseless violence perpetrated by terror agents in Mumbai. He suggests that "forgiveness" is not the pure-and-simple right attitude regarding such actions. I'm not sure that his call for a stern attitude is best and most purely motivated by moral revulsion--although this sense deserves to be acknowledged. Retribution always must come from the positive sense of justice and by the ever-present need of civilized, peaceful society to protect itself from the acts of the truly evil and the merely lawless among us. I always have a right to sacrifice myself. I never have the right to tolerate conditions where the violent will violate the innocent. The Rabbi is correct in saying there is a need for the expression of just anger, and for a determined response; but all such expressions must be rightly motivated.

Happy New Year! Some Advent thoughts....

from Engaging Faith blog:

"Let the world indulge in its madness, for it cannot endure and passes like a shadow. It is growing old, and I think is in its last decrepit stage. But we, buried deep in the wounds of Christ, why should we be dismayed." (St. Peter Canisius)

"Hope always draws the soul from the beauty that is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is perceived" (St. Gregory of Nyssa)

"God is so good and merciful, that to obtain Heaven it is sufficient to ask it of him from our hearts." (St. Benedict Joesph Labre)

"The time will come when there shall be one flock and one shepherd, one faith and one clear knowledge of God." (St. Birgitta of Sweden)

"If Christ is with us, who is against us? You can fight with confidence when you are sure of victory. With Christ and for Christ victory is certain." (St. Bernard)