Songs to Die For--"If Heaven"

I know nothing about country music, but I just heard this song for the first time at Stony Creek Digest, the blog of my cyber-friend Jeff Culbreath. "If Heaven," by Andy Griggs.



I note the allusion to "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes"--"If heaven was a tear, it'd be my last one."

My "Songs to Die For" series started here, with "Poor, Wayfarin' Stranger," almost a year and a half ago now. They don't have their own label. I probably should give them one, but for now they are scattered among the "hymns" and "songs that are not hymns" label. They are (almost) all songs related to death or heaven.

"If Heaven" has several unexpectedly profound things in it. For example, there is the verse that begins, "If Heaven was a pie it would be cherry," which hardly seems like a promising beginning. But then there is this line: "And just one bite would satisfy your hunger/And there'd always be enough for everyone." Which reminded Eldest Daughter, when she heard it, of the following section of Dante:

"It is because your desires are fixed where the part is lessened by sharing that envy blows the bellows to your sighs; but if the love of the highest sphere bent upward your longing, that fear would not be in your breast. For there, the more they are who say ours, the more of good does each possess and the more of charity burns in that cloister....That infinite and unspeakable good which is there above speeds to love as a sunbeam comes to a bright body; so much it gives of itself as it finds of ardour, so that the more charity extends the more does the eternal goodness increase upon it, and the more souls that are enamoured there above the more there are to be rightly loved and the more love there is and like a mirror the one returns it to the other." (Purgatorio, XV, 49ff, Virgil to Dante when they leave the terrace of the purgation of envy)

Or as Augustine says, "Truth ravishes all her lovers, yet is faithful to each."

I've just finished reading The Last Battle to Youngest Daughter, so heaven has been on my mind a good deal. When "If Heaven" connects heaven with earthly joys--finding the people you love alive, your home town, the best memories of childhood--I am reminded of this passage in The Last Battle. Professor Digory is speaking first:

"You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream."...It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right forehoof on the ground and neighed and then cried: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this."

Like, and yet unlike, the joys of this earth. As Lewis says in The Great Divorce, everything good that dies will be resurrected, but it must die first.

Oh, and while we're at it, when I put up my post last year on B. J. Thomas's "Home Where I Belong," it was not available on Youtube (or I didn't know how to find it). But it is now. And so as a bonus, here it is, too.



I wish they could play that one at my funeral.

Hebrews 11:13-16, "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off...and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country...But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly, wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city."

Here's something really funny

I want to announce that next week, February 1, I will be interviewed on the James Allen Show, a talk radio show out of Phoenix, AZ, on religion in the public square and, to some extent, reason and faith. The show goes from 8-9 p.m. Phoenix time. The "What time is it" web site tells me that this should be 10-11 p.m. Michigan time. I'm supposed to be on starting at about 8:15 Phoenix time. Readers, please tell me if I'm missing something here about the time, as I want to be sure to call in at the right time. I've never done anything like this before and am rather nervous about it, but I think Mr. Allen has some good questions planned.

He sent me, for fun, some mock commercials his show had produced, and he kindly gave me permission to put up a link to this one. It hasn't been aired yet, as far as I know, and it is very funny. It spoofs the campaign of a Republican Presidential primary candidate whose initials are R. P. and whose name rhymes with "Don Ball." If any of you are wondering about my precautions in naming this person, they arise from the fact that during the primary this candidate's rather creepy followers (who are his worst enemies, in my opinion), had Google set to notify them whenever his name appeared anywhere, however obscurely, on the web. They would then descend upon any such post like the proverbial wolf on the fold. And I don't want that to happen here.

I'm also posting this because, as Zippy will know from our economic debates, I'm somewhat sympathetic to criticisms of fiat money, and I wouldn't want it to be thought that I've lost my sense of humor. We've had a good laugh here at my house about the paper money bills with Paulian slogans hand written all over them, referred to in this commercial. Maybe you've seen the notes on the money, too.

So click on the link above and enjoy the commercial. And remember--resistance to the New World Order is futile...

Uneasy nights post on W4

I have few readers here who do not also read What's Wrong with the World, but for those few, I want to highlight my new post there called "For Uneasy Nights." It is my recommendation about how we should pray for Barack Obama.

I Am Excited

...about something this week. But it certainly isn't the inauguration of Barack Obama, that's for sure.

It's the commutation of the sentences of former border agents Ramos and Compean, which they received for shooting a drug dealer in the rear end. This commutation, after two years in federal prison, isn't justice for them, but it's better than their being left in prison for eight more years. News reports say that they will be in prison for a couple more months. I hope they stay safe.

Looking up legal docs

Update: Document found. Thanks to Jonathan Prejean, who directed me to LEXIS/NEXIS. Yeah, I know: Why didn't I check that myself first. Well, see, I've never done it before, and... It took a bit of searching even there, but I now have the entire text. An interesting document. It looks to me like the 2DCA was very reluctant to say that her death was not "imminent," and that this was why they referred it to the Supreme Court as a question. There is even an urgent little bit at the end where they ask the Supreme Court to hurry up and hear the case lest (heaven forbid) the person in question should die with feeding and hydration in place while waiting for the courts to "assert her right of privacy." In fact, that's exactly what did happen in this case. But it does contain the "err on the side of life" direction, for what it is worth.

**************************************************************
(Original post)

Not being a lawyer, I refer the following question to my sage readership. How can I get a copy of the actual text of the following appellate court opinion from Florida?

In re Guardianship of Browning, 543 So.2d 258 (Fla. 2d DCA 1989)

I rather fancy myself a rad Googler, but I've googled 'n' googled, and what I've come up with is the Florida Supreme Court opinion by the same name from 1990, here, and a summary of the 2DCA appellate court's opinion, here. It's at least mildly interesting that the summary of the 2DCA opinion says that it held that "a guardian of a patient who is incompetent but not in a permanent vegetative state, and who suffers from an incurable but not necessarily terminal condition, cannot terminate life-sustaining treatment and feeding by tube." The Supreme Court decision by the same name holds just the opposite. In fact, it concludes that a person's death is "imminent" if that person's death will be imminent if food and hydration are removed. Cute, huh? So all of us are "imminently" dying. One would normally conclude that the Florida Supreme Court had simply overturned the 2DCA on this point, yet the Supreme Court's decision is worded rather as an answer to a "question" which the 2DCA has referred to it. In fact, there's no reference in the Supreme Court's opinion at all to the fact (if the summary article is right) that it is coming to the opposite conclusion to that of the appellate court on a fairly important point. Just to make things a little more interesting, the appellate opinion is often quoted as stating that a proxy must "err on the side of life" when trying to decide what a ward's wishes would be regarding treatment (where "treatment" includes, perversely, food and water), but the Supreme Court decision neither affirms nor rejects this instruction. It doesn't mention it at all.

All of this makes me curious to see the full text of the appellate court's decision. Since Google has failed me, I'd like to know what to try next. Esteemed husband has a pretty good interlibrary loan service here at Big State University, but there is (as far as I'm aware) not an actual law library. Does one simply take the reference for the opinion to ILL and say, "Here, find me a copy of this, please"? Or is there some other database one can sign into to see it if one's university subscribes?

This is all for an article I'm working on that will be a restrospective of some of the legal issues surrounding the murder of Terri Schiavo.

Thanks to all you legal eagles in my readership for info.

"Little Jazz Bird" by Glad

And a big HT to reader Stuart for suggesting imeem as a source of Glad clips. I'd been looking all over Youtube for a good recording of "Little Jazz Bird," but with no luck. (I didn't like the ones that were there, and of course they didn't have Glad.) Here is Glad's. I hope Gershwin won't be turning in his grave if I say that this song is absolutely adorable. It would be a lot of fun if some professional child singer had recorded it long ago--like Shirley Temple or somebody. The imeem clip is only missing a little bit at the end.

Little Jazz Bird - GLAD

Break out the world's smallest violin

Okay, I know I'm blogging more often here than usual, but can you believe this garbage???

An AP news story headlined "5 Pirates Drown With Ransom Share," and it tries to drum up sympathy for the pirates. For crying out loud! I say, thank God there is poetic justice in the world after all. But here are some bits from the story:

Piracy is one of the few ways to make money in Somalia. Half the population is dependent on aid and a whole generation has grown up knowing nothing but war. A recent report by London's Chatham House think-tank said pirates raked in more than $30 million in ransoms last year.

Well, cry me a river. See, they can't do anything but take innocent hostages and demand ransom, because that's one of the few ways of making money in their country! Piracy: Main source of income in Somalia. I feel so sad for them.

Or how about this...

Abukar Haji, uncle of one of the dead pirates, blamed the naval surveillance for the accident that killed his pirate nephew Saturday.

"The boat the pirates were traveling in capsized because it was running at high speed because the pirates were afraid of an attack from the warships patrolling around," he said.

"There has been human and monetary loss but what makes us feel sad is that we don't still have the dead bodies of our relatives. Four are still missing and one washed up on the shore."

Pirate Daud Nure said three of the eight passengers had managed to swim to shore after the boat overturned in rough seas. He was not part of the pirate operation but knew those involved.

"Here in Haradhere the news is grim, relatives are looking for their dead," he said.

I just love that quote from "Pirate Daud Nure." As if "pirate" were just some normal appellation. But I suppose we should be glad that the AP is revealing its source. And we're supposed to feel so bad that those nasty, nasty warships caused the death of the poor pirates because they might be (shiff) chasing them. And this is "grim news." God forbid we should have a sense of justice. Maybe they should have interviewed the relatives of some of the hostages and asked them if they think this news is grim.

I'm pretty nearly speechless. This is outrageous. I know that if I read more AP news stories I'd see more outrageous stuff than this, but this is the one that I happened to see today.

A Cappella Gershwin

My old college friend Rich recommended this album to me when I had an earlier post about Glad. I only wish I could find a link that had more samples. Amazon appears to have no audio clips at all.

I got it for Eldest Daughter for a Christmas present, and in her jargon, "it's the bomb." (For all you old fogies like me out there, that's a compliment. I understand that "you are a total beast" is also a compliment.)

Anyway, it's excellent. Glad's top-notch musicianship is on display, as is what I read someone somewhere describing as "Ed Nalle's uncanny high tenor." Some of the pieces have words, some don't. Their vocal renditions of "American in Paris" and "Summertime" in the Gershwin medley are fantastic.

But my favorite was "Little Jazz Bird." I'd never heard it before and can't find a good Youtube or other on-line recording of it. Frankly, I can't stand these female jazz singers I find sort of simpering it out. Ick. But Glad does it straight up. If you should get the CD and hear the song, you'll have it going through your head and cheering you up for weeks. I recommend it.

A word on life in Sderot

I've been restraining myself from writing much here or elsewhere on the situation in Israel. Those who read me here with religious regularity know that my opinions on Israel are somewhere to the right of Likud.

I thought this post was good on what life is like in Sderot. (HT View from the Right)

Few things make me angrier when I read people talking about Israel's response in Gaza than the nonsense about how few people have actually died from the continual and direct rocket attacks from Gaza over the years. They will also mention that those attacks do not by themselves threaten Israel's very existence. (And these are people who claim not to be anti-Israel, yet.) That's absolutely absurd. Think about this: The U.S. could move all of its citizens back fifty kilometers from its borders if rockets started coming over into, say, Laredo, Texas, and showed no sign of stopping. We could just tell the Laredans to live with it or leave, to let Laredo turn back into a ghost town. And the U.S. would survive as a country. We're a lot bigger than Israel, after all. But that would be a shocking abdication of our government's responsibility to protect its citizens, including those in border towns, from unprovoked attack by our neighbors.

No, an attack doesn't have to constitute a threat to a country's existence before there is a just cause of war in responding to it.

The Porpoise-Driven Life

HT: Esteemed husband

Back to the mundane--got any advice on Charter telephone?

From the intellectual to the mundane:

AT & T has gotten increasingly aggressive in their marketing, sending pairs of salesmen (one older woman and one young man each time) to thunder on my door repeatedly. They want to sell me a package in which I have to sign up for cable TV, which I do not want, have my house wired for it, and then cancel it. I really do not want to do this.

However, I am indeed paying too much for Charter internet service. Having internet with one company and phone with a different company does get you a poor price for each. So I'm thinking of switching my phone to Charter. Somehow I feel less nervous about making a change in my phone technology than making a change in my internet technology. This may not be rational, however.

Do any of my esteemed readers have experience with either AT & T internet (I hear it's DSL rather than cable modem) or Charter telephone? On Facebook I have so far one very negative review of AT & T internet service. In December, my Charter internet has had a few connectivity problems, but I will say that they have resolved them. More importantly, when I called tech support and talked to a person, I got a nice American guy with a charming southern accent who knew what he was talking about. This was a big improvement over someone with an Indian accent you could cut with a knife who patronized the customer and was clearly working from a flip chart. So I'm cautiously still satisfied with Charter internet. But they are charging me too much, which they will stop doing (they say) if I switch my phone to them.

Hmmm. One doesn't want one's phone suddenly not to be working right, either.

It would be ironic if A T & T's pushiness lost them a phone customer, though. The devil in me would sort of like to make that happen.

All advice taken in the spirit in which it is intended.

Fighting the leftist nominalists every step of the way

Kudos and more kudos to my cyber-friend Jeff Culbreath for taking a firm stand against the evil attack on marriage from homosexual activists. Jeff has asked a homosexual commentator never again to refer to another man as his "husband" in Jeff's comboxes. Says Jeff, "That's one piece of fiction I'll not be a party to."

In this post, my co-blogger Zippy Catholic suggested that the re-definition of "parent" by the U.S. Census Bureau (to make illegitimacy rates in the black community appear lower than they really are) is an example of nominalism. One commentator questioned this diagnosis, arguing that someone could believe that there really is an essence to being a parent but that traditional definitions don't cut it. Naturally, this led directly to a discussion of homosexual pretend "marriage."

I'm more than a bit worried about what is going to happen to all of my good Christian friends if and when homosexual "marriage" is put into place (with or without the will of the people) in their parts of the country. It seems to me not implausible that some of them will simply start referring to same-sex couples as "married," to the partners in such so-called "marriages" as each others' "husbands" or "spouses" or "wives" and excuse doing so by saying, "Well, no matter what you think, it really is the law that they are married." They might even think in some confused way that they, even in private conversation, are obligated to "obey the law" by using this terminology. In fact, I suspect that any employer in such a state or any businessman who sells any goods or services to the public and refuses to go along in conversation with the "marital" status of a homosexual employee or customer will face lawsuit. And the comments of this hard-core leftist commentator suggest that conservatives will be told exactly this: "Shut up. Homosexual marriage is now a legal fact. That is what you are being asked to acknowledge. Whatever you may think about the matter, you cannot deny the legal facts now in place. Just refer to those and keep the rest of your opinions to yourself." (Notice, among other things, his reference to "refusing to accept a plain legal fact.") (See also this story about the ostensibly Christian Condoleeza Rice, though some might well question whether Rice is a conservative in any sense worth mentioning. The homosexual pair did not even have any pretense of legal "marriage," but Rice went out of her way to call the one man's mother the other man's "mother-in-law" nonetheless.)

Whether or not arguments about the homosexual agenda usually involve nominalism, that argument (about our using the word in this way because "now that's true legally") is nominalism pure and simple. The idea is that a positive law can simply create a legal reality regarding marriage--however crazy that new "reality" is--and that we can and should now refer to this new reality in our own usage, regardless of "what we think," as though the fact that a man literally cannot be married to another man is a mere matter of opinion. This is all very bad indeed.

I say that all conservatives, Christian and otherwise, who know perfectly well that two men or two women literally cannot be married must resist this usage to their last gasp. Fight it every step of the way. Do not give in to this specious argument about a legal reality. In using this terminology without some qualifier such as "so-called" or scare quotes, you are, whether you like it or not, both caving in to and furthering the homosexual agenda and the erosion of marriage. Just say no.

It's hard to know what arguments would convince a conservative friend who says he's "just referring to the legal facts." Perhaps you could try a few reductios: If the courts or the legislature were to declare that Barack Obama is a god, would we then be merely referring to a legal reality and doing nothing objectionable and contrary to our Christian faith if we went about saying, "Our god, Barack Obama"? If the courts declared that a man could be legally married to a dog, would we not be promoting insanity if we went about referring to his dog as his husband? If the courts declared that a gorilla is a person, would we then merely be referring to a legal reality and doing nothing to further an anti-human agenda if we spoke of "gorillas and other people"?

But I don't know. People get scared. And people adapt with frightening swiftness. I predict, but hope I'm wrong, that when homosexual "marriage" comes to your town, you will find a solid majority of your conservative, Christian friends going about referring to the people involved as "spouses" or "husbands" or "wives" and telling you, "There is nothing I can do about it. Whatever we may think, it's the law now. I'm just telling the truth about their legal status."

But I stand with Jeff. And I hope some others do, too, and never, never, never give in.

P.S. I am not interested in debating "same-sex marriage" here. This is my personal blog, and I'm more draconian here than elsewhere. I welcome comments on the specific issue raised in this post but have no intention of debating the larger issues with homosexual or homosexual-sympathizing commentators. I would love to hear from my conservative readers as to what they think, predict, and intend to do about the terminological matter I raise here.

December 26--Pray for the persecuted church

Today happens to be the Feast of Stephen, immortalized in "Good King Wenceslas."

Stephen was the first martyr, and it seems appropriate for us to remember the persecuted church today. Especially on my mind are the members of a Christian family who are victims of Islamic persecution in Egypt. According to the story, they have been stopped from leaving the country and are all in prison, including the two little boys, ages 2 and 4, who are being starved (partially starved?) to pressure their Christian mother, Martha Samuel, to re-convert to Islam. The story states that she has also been raped and tortured to try to secure the same result. The father is in prison, too. Their crimes are simply that Martha converted to Christianity five years ago and that the family recently tried to leave the country to escape persecution. I never knew Egypt was a Soviet-style prison country. Perhaps only to people who have had the temerity to leave Islam. Ironically, they were trying to go to Russia to get away from Egypt.

We should pray for them.

Crossposted at What's Wrong with the World

Merry Christmas!

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

Almighty God, who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin; Grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord Jeuss Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same Spirit ever, one God, world without end. Amen.

Unabashedly, I say that Christmas is a holy day and a holy festival. I have some Christian friends who, most unfortunately, refuse to celebrate Christmas, because they don't want to recognize any day as "holy." But what was meant by the term "holy" in both the Old Testament and New? It was that a thing, person, or day was set aside for a special, divine purpose. And Christmas is, and should be, a day (twelve days, actually) set aside to remember and to celebrate the glory of the Incarnation. God came down among us.

We as Christians do most surely believe and avow that God the Son was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the virgin Mary and was made man. He came down from heaven. Without that great event, no salvation. Without that great event, no peace with God through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Without that, no remission of sins. God did not, and could not, sit in His heaven and forgive the sins of man "just because." No, He had to come down here and reveal Himself to us in the person of a man, a man who took upon himself our human nature, a man who could suffer and die and thus take upon Himself, in his death, our sins.

Thanks be to God.

And so to all my readers I wish a most hearty Merry Christmas. May Our Lord richly bless you during this, the feast of His Incarnation!

P.S. Image credit to Frank Ordaz, the illustrator of this beautiful and really neat Christmas book, which I heartily recommend. The text is by historian Paul Maier. (The "look inside" function at Amazon is incorrect. It is linked to an entirely different book by Dr. Maier with a similar title.)

Thanks also to Frank for stopping by "Extra Thoughts."

Less well-known Christmas things

I'll probably have only a couple of posts directly related to Christmas. I'm enjoying everybody else's Christmas stuff so much. But here are a couple of things that may be a little less familiar to people for Christmas.

First, Charles Dickens's novella "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain." Here is a Google books edition in the public domain. This story deserves, in my opinion, to be made into at least one really good movie, just like "A Christmas Carol" (which I also love). I won't give away too much of the plot, but it concerns a chemistry professor who comes to believe, in his pride and bitterness, that people would all be happier if they could lose their memories of sorrow, wrong, and trouble. He is offered the opportunity to give up his own such memories, and he accepts the bargain. But he is given yet further the power of spreading this forgetfulness to other people by his presence. Eventually, as you can well imagine, he comes to regret his decision and still more to regret horribly his ability to bestow this "gift" on other people without their knowledge or consent. The entire story takes place at Christmas time, and the hero of the story is a young married woman named Milly who has been saddened by the death of her only child in infancy.

I tried to find a youtube or other recording of the unfamiliar but lovely Christmas carol "Here Betwixt Ass and Oxen Mild," but unfortunately I can't even find a cyberhymnal midi version. If you have a copy of the Episcopal 1940 hymnal, be sure to look it up. It's well worth it.

Here are the words and music to "Sing, O Sing, This Blessed Morn," a Christmas carol I'd never heard before becoming familiar with Anglican hymns. (The tune is also sometimes sung with the words to "For the Beauty of the Earth.") These words are truly great. Verse 4 is especially excellent:

God comes down that man may rise
Lifted by him to the skies.
Christ is Son of Man that we
Sons of God in him may be.
Sing, O sing, this blessed morn,
Jesus Christ today is born.

And finally, here is a high school choir singing Bach's "Break Forth, O Beauteous, Heavenly Light." Great parts.

Slightly dark humor

This is amusing, in a grim sort of way. (By putting up this grim post now, I am committing myself to posting something else before Christmas, come what may. I can't have this up at the top of the page on Christmas!)

Lawrence Auster has been talking about a gruesome story out of the UK that no one else seems to want to talk much about: A 63-year-old man named Patrick McGee was murdered and beheaded outside his home, his head thrown in a trash bin. The news stories (such as we have) have said bizarre things to the effect that he was "decapitated after a dispute about noise" by a neighbor "said to be suffering from mental illness." Say, what? You know, you've gotta watch this business of asking your neighbors to turn down the radio (or playing yours too loudly). If you're not careful, you might just enrage the poor fellows to the point where they cut off your head. I swear, it is impossible to satirize the UK anymore. Every story out of there is self-satire.

But here's the darkly amusing part. In his search for more information about this (as in, what is the name of the suspect whom police have arrested?), Auster turned up a story from the Scotsman that had as the headline "Tribute to 'Gentle' Victim." Not, mind you, "Elderly Man Decapitated: Nation in Shock." (I also note that people, including people in the media, simply do not know how to use scare quotes. The headline would give the impression that maybe he wasn't really gentle, even though that obviously isn't what the author intended. But that's a hobbyhorse for a different day.) Says Auster:

The fact that the man was murdered and beheaded is placed in a subordinate clause, while the "real" news, the news in the main clause, is that the man was kind and gentle. Wow. A man was kind and gentle. These people really have an instinct for news, don't they? If they were reporting the news on the day in 1453 when Constaninople fell to the Moslems and the city's population was slaughtered, their headline and lead would have been something like this:

Lovely City Remembered
May 29--Constantinople, which was conquered and sacked by the Ottomans yesterday, with many thousands of its Christian inhabitants slaughtered and others sold into slavery, was described by survivors as a place of many wonderful memories.

I have to admit, that made me laugh out loud.

Secret Agent Penguin

Alas, what with one thing and another I've had no time this week for liturgical blogging on this site, or even clever blogging or funny blogging. I do have a post up at W4 on teaching children about evil and a follow-up on teaching ourselves about evil and the custody of the mind.

On a much, much lighter note (before I go off to do other stuff) here is a new Christmas song (new to me). Eldest Daughter just introduced me to it this week: Brad Paisley's "Penguin, James Penguin." It's about a little black-and-white guy with satellite uplinks in his cuff links who helps Santa out by telling him when you've been good or bad. He also outfitted the sleigh with GPS. Enjoy.

Bible Sunday

The collect for Advent II

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

The collect for this week alludes to Paul's words in Romans 15: "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope." I've never realized before just how many biblical words the collect contains. (It was written by Cranmer himself, not translated.) Cranmer is a genius at working biblical phrases into his collects.

It's hard to tell in the context in Romans exactly what comforting aspects of Scripture Paul has in mind, especially since he doesn't, as one might expect, begin talking about heaven. Instead, he emphasizes the fact that Jesus Christ was sent to confirm the promises of God that the Gentiles also would be invited to be part of the people of God.

One of today's hymns did, however, remind me also of the hope we have in Jesus' coming. The best line is "And for the everlasting right/The silent stars are strong." The hymn reminds me that it is not some new thing for Christians in 2008 to need some encouragement and to feel that we are in the middle of the slow watches of the night.

Thy kingdom come! on bended knee
The passing ages pray;
And faithful souls have yearned to see
On earth that kingdom’s day.

But the slow watches of the night
Not less to God belong;
And for the everlasting right
The silent stars are strong.

And lo, already on the hills
The flags of dawn appear;
Gird up your loins, ye prophet souls,
Proclaim the day is near.

The day in whose clear shining light
All wrong shall stand revealed,
When justice shall be throned in might,
And every hurt be healed.

When knowledge, hand in hand with peace,
Shall walk the earth abroad;
The day of perfect righteousness,
The promised day of God.

We sing it at my church to the tune given here for a different song. The tune is called "St. Flavian."

Christendom Review

There's a new e-journal launched: The Christendom Review. I have an article in it on the naked public square thesis--the idea, basically, that we shouldn't allow our religious beliefs to influence our political actions. (I'm agin' it.) There is also a wonderful memoir by my friend and former (and hopefully future) W4 colleague Bill Luse of his old writing teacher, Smith Kirkpatrick, and a poem about his daughter that I won't even try to describe. Go read it.

Anglican insights on Advent

The collect for Advent Sunday

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

Today begins the liturgical season of Advent. I love Advent. I think it's one of those seasons in which Anglicans can give gifts to the rest of the Body of Christ. Cranmer's collects for the Sundays are particularly wonderful, the emphasis of each Sunday in the season (from the collects and designated Scripture readings) is slightly different, and the season as a whole has a special meaning that even non-liturgical Protestants could really profit from, without in the process compromising any of their theological views.

But first I need to clear out of the way a certain rather unfortunate high church tendency, which I encountered just a bit when first being introduced to Anglicanism. This is the tendency to overemphasize the statement, "Advent is a penitential season." I have to say that to those new to Anglicanism, and even to old hands like me, such an overemphasis has all the winsomeness of the Grinch. And it's theologically misguided, too. Joy in the anticipation of Christmas isn't some sort of frivolous modern invention. There is no Good Friday at the end of Advent. However awed and hence, in a sense, solemn we may feel when thinking of meeting our Lord face to face (on which see more below), it simply is in the nature of the case a happy and exciting thing to look forward both to the festival of his first coming and to the reality of his second coming. I hate the fact that all the stores start playing Christmas carols--sometimes really awful ones--before Thanksgiving as much as anybody does. But one can hardly imagine Scrooge's nephew waiting to wish his uncle a Merry Christmas until he was sure the sun had gone down on Christmas Eve!

Now that I have that off my chest, I want to talk about the distinctive nature of Advent. Before I was familiar with the Book of Common Prayer and with the Advent hymns in the 1940 hymnal, I would have assumed that the word "Advent" was just another word for "the time before Christmas." I had no idea that it had a distinctive character as a liturgical season. Certainly, one major part of Advent is meditating on the mystery of the Incarnation. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us." It's a good idea to get a head start on that during these four weeks--what all Christians call "remembering the real meaning of Christmas."

The second emphasis of Advent, and I think part of the truer (and gentler) meaning of "Advent is a penitential season" is simply that we want to go into the celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord with, as the Prayer Book says, "a conscience void of offense toward God and man." When you are going to have a party, you clean your house. The Apostle Paul tells us to let no root of bitterness spring up among us, and the Lord Jesus Christ tells us to forgive if we would be forgiven. Advent is a good time to get all our ducks in a row as far as our relationship with God and men. If we have been nurturing a sin, we should root it out. If we have grudges, we should toss them. That way, Christmas can come to us with great joy, without our having reservations. As the carol says, "Let every heart prepare him room."

The third emphasis of Advent, and the one that takes non-liturgical Christians the most by surprise, is the emphasis on Jesus' second coming. That's why the season is called what it's called--"Advent," meaning "coming," referring to both comings of Christ. You can see the emphasis in the wonderful collect given above. The Apostle John explicitly says that we should abide in Jesus so that when he appears we will not be ashamed before him at his coming. I've encountered a surprising amount of resistance to the plain sense of this verse among some evangelicals. But you really can't get away from it. It says in so many words that it is possible for us to be ashamed when Jesus comes. What exactly is going to happen then, Scripture doesn't tell us. But it's pretty clear that John is saying we don't want to be in that position. Here, I really think that there can be a rapprochement between Anglicans and "lower" Protestants. The Baptist tradition in which I was raised placed tremendous emphasis upon the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. And Jesus himself did the same, constantly telling his disciples to be ready. Parable after parable makes the point. Now, here is a season of twenty-four days or so in which we are supposed to meditate on that. I found this rather exciting when I first became an Anglican--a sort of point of intersection between one tradition and another.

The last thing I want to discuss is not a separate significance of Advent but just simply the existence of Advent hymns. I never had any idea before I became an Anglican that there were Advent hymns as opposed to Christmas carols. Very few of the hymns for Advent in the Anglican hymnal occur in Baptist hymnals, though some of them do. But one that everyone knows (though it has a different rhythm as Baptists sing it) is "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel." But everyone thinks it is a Christmas carol. If you think about it, though, you realize that it is very different from, say, "Joy to the World." A Christmas carol is saying that Jesus has come. An Advent carol is saying "Maranatha"--Even so come, Lord Jesus! And that is, of course, part of what "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" is doing. It's also mingling the first and second comings by mentally putting us in the place of people before Jesus' first coming--"Make straight the way that leads on high/And close the path to misery." It mentally recreates that longing for deliverance and redemption which is the very spirit of Advent.

There are many other absolutely wonderful Advent hymns that should be more widely known and sung in all churches, hymns that all "mere Christians" can sing without reservation. Here's one: "The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns." (This page has multiple tunes. I like the seond of them, an American tune known as "Morning Song.") Note the repeated contrast between the first and second comings and the emphasis on light and the rising of the sun.

The King shall come when morning dawns
and light triumphant breaks;
when beauty gilds the eastern hills
and life to joy awakes.

Not, as of old, a little child,
to bear and fight and die,
but crowned with glory like the sun
that lights the morning sky.

The King shall come when morning dawns
and earth's dark night is past;
O haste the rising of that morn,
the day that e'er shall last;

And let the endless bliss begin,
by weary saints foretold,
when right shall triumph over wrong,
and truth shall be extolled.

The King shall come when morning dawns
and light and beauty brings:
Hail, Christ the Lord! Thy people pray,
come quickly, King of kings.

And then there is one of my personal favorites, the glorious hymn "O Very God of Very God," about which I have written here.

I hope to keep up blogging about the liturgical season each week during Advent. That's a hope, not a promise. But I encourage anyone who is not familiar with either the Prayer Book collects or the hymns to consider using them and consider celebrating Advent in a special way as distinct from Christmas. It will enrich your Christian walk.