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~ Occasional Thoughts on Contemporary Christianities and Cultures

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Tag Archives: Christmas

Scary Ghost Stories and Tales of the Glories: Wishing You All a Christ-Haunted Christmas

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Advent, Christmas, Flannery O'Connor, Holy Spirit, Tradition

This blog was begun out of Facebook posts I began writing during Advent. And so it is perhaps fitting that, as this time of year rolls around again, I should offer some thoughts on the season. As usual, they will be vexing and vexed, but here goes.

To begin, I don’t know who to be more frustrated with: those who reduce the season to commercialism and saccharine songs that are not even good by pagan standards, or those who allegedly want to put the Christ back in Christmas – by which they usually mean their favourite id(e)ol(ogy) which they have given the name Christ. If I were feeling uncharitable, I might make some sort of comment about it being impossible to put the Christ back in Christmas without putting the Mass back in Christmas, and you can decide for yourselves what I mean by that – at the very least, it means that it is certainly hard to understand Christ apart from the work of His bride through whom he has chosen to reveal himself. But I am not feeling much more uncharitable than normal, so I shall leave it at that for now.

What I do want to talk about though is how we navigate this odd holiday context in which Christ is in some way inescapable – for simply calling it “the holidays” or dating the world back to BCE rather than AD is just a manipulation of language; there is still the history behind the thing we are celebrating, and the uncomfortable fact that in secularity we are left with neither supernatural nor even basic pagan reasons for keeping the feast. In such a context, we are left with a vague feeling that we should have warm hearts and special generosity around this time because – well, because it’s Christmas.

Perhaps the most positive way we can put this is that the season is a mystery in the cultic sense – we don’t really know why or what we are doing when we celebrate Christmas, but we do so anyway because something in the mystery draws us; like Bryan Adams we simply feel that there’s “something about Christmas time,” and because of the difficulty of sustaining such a mystery religion in a modern, “progressive” world, we find ourselves longing for the infantile innocence of stupidity, which we excuse by mislabeling it as childlikeness, but nonetheless need if we are at all to maintain a state of confusion of which we are rightly fond as something preferable to pure secularity. In the immemorial words of Josh Groban, “you have everything you need, if you just believe” – and it is integral to the maintenance of this season that the fact of belief rather than the content of what is believed in is emphasized.

But if this is a problem for those who want to celebrate Christmas but have no idea why, it is equally a problem for Christians, who ought to know better than to simply lock themselves in a fortress-like dualism over against an ostensibly confused culture. We all know the rhetoric on the other side, the return to the “true meaning” of Christmas, whether this is understood as the iteration of Christ’s nativity narrative, a particular sobriety, the ousting of mammon, or the rather childish abolition of Santa Klaus and other Christmas mythopoeia. What always astounds me about this position is the dead certainty with which these people seem to know the “true meaning” of Christmas. Really? Is it so simple to grasp the fact of God becoming human and also remaining God? Have we really got a handle on this such that we can go about like busybodies correcting the imaginations of our friends and relatives? As you can see, I am happy about neither stance – confused secularism or dead certain faith with an emphasis on “dead.” So where can we find the answer? In ghosts, evidently.

Yes, quite seriously, I think we would do well to pay heed to Dickens and the spooky stories of twelfth night because they get at a fact about Christ’s incarnation that neither the secular sops nor the hard-nosed Chistian killjoys understand; what is primary about Christmas is that it is uncanny. Let me explain. In literary theory, when we talk about “the uncanny,” we are not talking about simple concrete gruesome horror, nor are we talking about something that cannot be known at all. No, what is uncanny exists in a realm that is related in a complicated way to our epistemologies – in negative terms, we might say it is uncertain, or in more positive terms, we might say it is a mystery. The uncanny disappears when certainty appears on either side, that is, when the ghost we are afraid of is debunked, or when it is put to rest within a solid and comprehensive metaphysics. In some Christmas traditions, this uncanniness is negative, as in the case of the poem “Old Christmas Morning,” but in Dickens, the uncanny ghost exists halfway between the worlds of marvel and terror, and the uncanniness of time – that is, the ungraspability – is shown in the persons of present, past, and future. What I want to suggest is that, far from being a distraction from the “true meaning” of Christmas, this tradition of uncanniness gestures in an analogical way to the central story of Christmas – the uncanniness of Christ’s incarnation. “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” speaks more truth than ought to be allowed such a schmaltzy song when it speaks of “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories,” for in a very real sense, the stories are of a piece. What ghosts are to our perception in a negative sense, the incarnation of Christ – inspired after all by a Holy Ghost – is in a positive sense. And we know this from the gospel of John.

For it is in John more than any other gospel that we get the fullest account of Christ’s birth. No, it is not the gospel we usually associate most closely with the Christmas story, given the omission of historical details. Yet there is a strong case to be made that John does in fact recount the Christmas story in the opening of his book – the difference is that he is recounting it from a metaphysical rather than merely human perspective. John, the eagle, looks into the sun of righteousness, and is dazzled. To say John points to the “true meaning of Christmas” here would be moot; rather, the logos has got hold of him and won’t let go. The fish need not draw attention to the whale.

But if this – what John is describing – can happen, then anything might happen. And this is the explanation of the uncanny stories that crop up at Christmas. Our imaginations are tantalized. In such a world, challenged as it is by the incarnation of God, men might come back from the dead. Flowers might bloom in the bleak of winter. Sinners might even learn to repent.

Aside from the more frightening instances of uncanniness, this also helps explains much of the needless frivolity, absurdity, and complete silliness of Christmas – which is perfectly justifiable on Christian grounds. In a world in which God can become incarnate, even the most foolish of things has potential to be folly for God. We do very silly things like sing songs of hope in the middle of a blizzard, or gather together with the people we argue most with – our family – and talk about peace on earth, good will toward men. Indeed, this overturn – this incarnation – may be enough even to redeem the most unredeemable of things. Even kitsch and schmaltz and jest might with the mages lay their gifts at the manger. This comes to pass, when a child is born.

What is clear then is this – that, when Christians seek to have a stranglehold on the “true meaning of Christmas,” they often miss the fact that its truest meaning is dazzling mystery, a mystery indeed patient enough to wait out their clumsy attempts to wield it like a club. Seculars and pagans get the bit about mystery – but without anywhere to point, it collapses into a dualism between ignorant sentimentalism and cynical despair. And it is with these problems in mind that I want to wish you all a Christ-haunted Christmas.

The description is Flannery O’Connor’s, asserting that if the US south is hardly Christ centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted. And it is precisely this perspective I propose in our approaches to Christmas. The season is saturated with Christian images, and imagery, and palimpsests, and erasures. Yet simply trying to go back to a “good old days” when people knew what Christmas was about is not the answer; nor is the answer steamrolling current society so we can rebuild a Christmas worthy of Christendom. No, what I suggest is a return to the mystery of incarnation, a mystery so powerful it does not even need to speak about itself all the time, but can in fact sustain imagination and the beauty of the world – from the highest instances of these to the silliest. All these instances point of course to the one Instance in the scansion of the inscape of creation, and we would do well to follow O’Conner in the realization that even a chaos and confusion of symbols and theologies – a thoroughly haunted labyrinth – is not a great obstacle to a God who calls order out of chaos and enters that order in the ambiguity known to us as flesh, and as the Ghost Who haunts us, moving as He lists.

Dispatches from the War on Christmas 2012

31 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by chinglicanattable in Uncategorized

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Benedict XVI, Charles Taylor, Christmas, culture wars, ecumenism, First Things, Hannukah, IHOP, Jewish-Christan relations, Jon Stewart, Maccabees, N. T. Wright, Peter Leithart, Reform impulse, secular, secularization, Stephen Colbert, War on Christmas

I’ve heard an awful lot this Advent season and Christmas octave about keeping “Christ” in “Christmas.”  Blame it on me, maybe, for being a religious studies guy hanging around evangelical circles, but I swear, it’s more than the local churches with the signboards (or in the suburb where I live, the IHoP) displaying a sign with said call to conserve Christ in Christmas. Everybody seems to be talking about it: local pastors decrying the decay of secularism, worship leaders sermonizing before they lead their worship set, whispers among the laity about how terrible public schools are for disemboweling the season of any meaty references to the Incarnation.

Sure, keeping Christ in Christmas has been a staple of the “war on Christmas” that Fox News alleges to have been happening in a secular(izing) West.  I say “alleged” because Jon Stewart has a fairly convincing refutation of the notion.

But apart from pulpit thundering in evangelical churches and pundits on Fox News, the battening down of the hatches for the Christ child seems to have been an in-house affair.

This year, though, it seems like even that house is falling apart, for not only is there a secular war on Christmas, but a theological one.

First Things first. As Churl noted (and I commented recently), Peter Leithart thinks that we should not only keep the Christ in Christmas, but the canticles there too, songs like the Benedictus Deus, the Magnificat, and the Nunc Dimittis that he thinks no Christian knows. One wonders, of course, how the Divine Office app keeps on getting voted About.com Readers’ Choice Awards’s “Best Catholic Website, Podcast, and Mobile App” yearly if that really is the case.  No matter, though, for Jeffrey Barbeau has written a rejoinder to Leithart, attempting to put the supposedly denuded Christmas hymns in the violent context of the English Reformation and Civil War.

For both Leithart and Barbeau, the Grinch who stole Christmas is none other than biblical theologian N.T. Wright, who seems to have been right about everything ever since his NT tomes hit seminary bookstores in the early 1990s. For Leithart, it’s Wright’s historical scholarship that has thankfully stolen Christmas away from the allegedly inane, apolitical songs we sing about the Christ child, no crying he makes. For Barbeau, Wright is a bit more of a bogeyman in Leithart’s hands, forgetting the political violence of early modern England because he doesn’t tune into BBC’s The Tudors. Move aside, John Piper: the Reformation has a new anti-Wright defender.

Either way you look at it, the central theological problem here is Wright on history: what happens to theology when you put the messiness and violence of historical reconstruction back into the picture?

And that brings us to the Holy Father. With the release of the third installment of Jesus of Nazareth on the infancy narratives, Pope Benedict XVI has been met with wild protest about how he, like Wright, has stolen Christmas. Secular protest about his historiographical method aside (courtesy of The Guardian), Vox Nova has a very interesting post on Benedict’s view of history that makes him sound eerily similar to Wright. The Bishop of Rome may affirm the historicity of the infancy narratives, but like Wright, it would seem, the affirmation of history in and of itself has played into a theological war over how political Christmas should be. Add to all of this L’Osservatore Romano‘s statement on how same-sex couples live in an “alternate reality,” and we find the pontiff in the real Grinch-y pickle of fighting the secular powers that be with the weapons of Christmas.

Wright, Leithart, Barbeau, the pope, his detractors, and First Things may all be stuff sophisticated Christians like these days. I mean, we must be smarter than the masses of co-opted American Tea Party fundamentalist-evangelicals clamoring for Christ in public Christmas pace Bill O’Reilly. But really, if this is what I’m reading this year in First Things, I don’t see much here that’s different from Fox News’s War on Christmas.

After all, Charles Taylor would call all of these skirmishes over the Christ in Christmas–be it his existence, his presence, or his nature–an “impulse to Reform” a “rage for order.”  The idea, as Taylor outlines it, was that in late medieval Christendom, there were a series of “reforms” where spiritual “elites” attempted to purify the practices of the masses and bring them to a higher form of spiritual intensity.  These reforms, as Taylor shows, looked like things as diverse as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Protestant Reformation(s), and the formation of Calvinist city-states in early modern Europe.

What’s hilarious in Taylor’s account is that it’s precisely this impulse that led to the secularization process in the first place. As Taylor reads it, this “rage for order” coincided with the development of “civility” in early modern Europe where states tried to discipline would-be citizens to be able to directly participate in the workings of a civil society.  This created a sphere of action where some practices could be thought of as merely “natural” without any “supernatural” engagement, and in time, the conditions of belief changed such that there wasn’t much of a need to consider spirituality seriously in the public sphere, although private fascination with individual spiritualities where you’re on this quest to find personal fulfillment would always “cross-pressure” this emphasis on the immanent. Give these cross-pressures enough time, Taylor hints, and these new religious subjectivities will begin to contest the very meanings of secularity.

And this brings us back to the plethora of theological views on the War on Christmas. What’s fascinating about all of them is that they are all strangely modern and can even wear the odd secular costume. Give Wright, the Holy Father, and Fox a little read, for example, and what you might find is that at stake is a fairly modern understanding of history, be it Wright’s critical realism, Benedict’s historical criticism, or O’Reilly’s rights of the religious majority. I mean, it’s perfectly OK if Wright wants the prodigal son of history to come home to the older brother of theology. But can we “sophisticated” modern historian-theologians all please remember that maybe we shouldn’t be behaving like secular academics and pundits at Christmas?

So in the spirit of Leithart, maybe I can suggest something both radical and old-fashioned at the end here, courtesy also of N.T. Wright. Anyone who has managed to actually read The New Testament and the People of God will be struck by how prominent a role the Maccabees play in Wright’s narrative. Moreover, anyone who has been following the daily mass readings leading up to Advent will have gotten an earful from the Maccabees in the first readings.

But what Wright notes about the Maccabees in relation to Jesus’ theology of the Kingdom of God was that Jesus upended the Maccabbean ideal of a messianic warrior with a “double revolution,” confronting the will to power in both Jew and Gentile, enacting a kingdom founded on a different ontology altogether. (OK, sorry, I stole “double revolution” from tome #2: Jesus and the Victory of God.)

And that brings us back to Jon Stewart. In 2008, Stewart asked Stephen Colbert if he could interest him in the Maccabbean celebration, Hannukah. In light of Wright’s analysis, there is a bit of irony here. Christmas, the coming of Christ with his proclamation of a new kingdom of God, once upended Hannukah’s ideals. But if Christmas is now a site of modern religious contestation, perhaps it’s also time to start thinking about who the collateral damage of such a war might be. Jon Stewart has already said his piece. Maybe it’s time for more of us to start singing this song.

can i interest you in hannukah? from camille c on Vimeo.

Peter Leithart, N. T. Wright, and the True Meaning of Christmas

24 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Advent, Christ, Christian, Christmas, Dr. Seuss, First Things, gnostic, God, how nt wright stole christmas, N. T. Wright, Peter Leithart

There are a variety of variations on the story. A character or group of characters are fixated on the material aspects of Christmas – what they will get as gifts etc. And then a crisis happens and these characters discover the “true meaning” of Christmas.  In Christian stories, this usually involves hearing the story of Christ’s birth, and pagan renditions tell us that the true meaning of Christmas is love. Both versions can be done successfully; Charlie Brown Christmas brilliantly avoids schmaltz through the ever depressed title character, Veggie Tales’ Toy That Saved Christmas brilliantly captures the near demonic frenzy that occurs around Christmas over absurd toys that have no reason to be popular, and Dr. Seuss’s Grinch is a well told rendition of the pagan version.

However, for Christian hipster types, the “true meaning of Christmas” thing is kind of overdone.  And the new popular thing is to turn to Advent.  Please don’t misunderstand me.  I love Advent.  It is one of the most precious things things God has discovered to me in my journey from low to high church.  And it is precisely because I love both Advent and Christmas that I need to call out a hipster-type Christianity that appropriates Advent via a postmodern tradition lite as an “alt, indie” way of celebrating the season.

I was particularly struck by this as I read Peter Leithart’s reflection on N. T. Wright, Advent, and Christmas.  Once upon a time, the narrative goes, there was a Bible that had some pretty powerful political things to say.  It stirred people up for a while, but then somewhere along the line someone lost the story and started thinking about sin and heaven and victory over Satan at Christmas instead.  And so we were left with only a partial understanding of Christmas – until one day a man named N. T. Wright was born to us and told us the true meaning of Christmas, that it was about politics and this-worldly stuff. And also that there should be no jollity; that we must be rid of any of those joyful festive parodies (such as  Twelfth Night, Christmas miracle stories etc.) that serve as foils for the real heavenly miracle and joy of Christmas; these are replaced by the earnest and dour voices of a certain kind of Protestant doing what he does best – protesting and politicking in a very grave religious way without the least crack of a smile.

The prior paragraph is a bit tongue in cheek, but it does in fact summarize some of the main problems I have with this article.  First, the article is exaggerated.  As if compensating for all those years of not having celebrated Advent, Leithart aggressively attacks certain aspects of Christmas tradition.  Now, I wouldn’t mind this so much if he simply critiqued Christmas commercialism, but he critiques things like joy, heaven, salvation from sin, Christ as the new Adam, and conquering the devil.  And the problem I have with this is, though limiting the season to these qualities is somewhat narrow, sidelining their association with the birth of Christ cuts against nearly all Christian tradition that I know of.

Leithart (and presumably Wright) here speak as if these things were mere inventions of modernity.  They are not, and so when Leithart sidelines them, he goes against much of the tradition of the Christian Church.  Of course, perhaps Leithart thinks that the Church went fairly wrong fairly early.  But he, and those agreeing with him, should be aware that in accepting his argument they are accepting an ecclesiology that sees the Church going wrong very soon after the time of Christ and being finally redeemed when N. T. Wright recently rediscovered it.  For though medieval and early modern Christians did use the language of politics in their interpretation of the Bible – Israel etc. – the more important thing this language was always understood to signify was a spiritual reality – yes, joy, heaven, salvation from sin, and beating the devil.

Leithart seems to accuse these traditions of being gnostic – paying too little attention to the earthly reality – but the curious reality is that a good portion of those who originally condemned gnosticism in its initial heretical form would in fact disagree with Wright’s and Leithart’s emphasis; though worldly particulars are important as a vehicle, the more important things are the spiritual things gestured toward – and this is not gnosticism, but what Christians, Protestant and Catholic, have believed for a good long time.  I understand why theologians like Leithart and Wright feel the need to speak as they do in a culture that has lost the ability to imagine a spiritual realm higher than yet not in competition with an earthly materiality (as in Dante’s Paradiso). The problem is that Leithart and Wright accept modernity’s either/or thinking, and choose earth over heaven, rather than trying to keep both.  There are four senses of Scripture, and here Leithart finds them in competition rather than in divine coordination, as they are.

The second issue is that I’m not exactly certain what Leithart means by a turn back to a political read on the Christmas story – to me, it frankly sounds joyless and wearying. I look at post upon post of hackneyed and simplistic political fluff on Facebook, and find fifty different ways to change the world, convenient automations that save us from the business of actually caring, which in fact involves listening, researching, and bothering with something more than cheap and clever punch lines. Of the making of many politics there is no end…

In fact, one might argue that it is precisely in such a politics-weary context that Christ came. And what made him different than the other messiahs was the fact that his kingdom was not of this world.  Of course this makes people mad in the political realm (and it would seem in the theological realm, too), and it makes people like Caesar mad enough to kill.  But saying that Caesar must kill Christ and His church for not being the world does not seem to be what Leithart’s article gestures toward, but rather a version of Advent that is the new Christian hipster form of political activism – an activism that seems to think it is up to us and our efforts to save Christianity and God’s world, and that places a huge burden on the theologian who must heft the burden of a completely revisionist theology while avoiding the traps of modernity-driven Evangelicalism as well as the “errors” of traditionalism.

Of course, God is perfectly capable of saving his Church without the shouting of someone like Leithart.  As my friend Chinglican noted on Facebook, the programme that Leithart advocates as such a radical and innovative project at the end of his reflection is hundreds of years old in liturgical traditions, and probably even practiced by people you know, too humble to shout about it in the obnoxious Advent-will-change-the-world tone of Leithart.  Of course, God will change the world and so will liturgy without regard for what people like Leithart do or do not say.  But if they want to be part of this in a way other than that of the prophets Jonah or Balaam, it might help them to stop protesting so much about Advent as the new secret weapon for an alternative and forward thinking church, and instead start grinding down their individualism on a liturgy that teaches them that they are dust destined for glory in Christ who gifts them in His Church with a holy anonymity that makes them ever more themselves.

Of Mayan doomsdays and Christmas celebrations

22 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by CaptainThin in Uncategorized

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Advent, apocalpyse, Christmas, darkness, end of the world, light, Mayan doomsday

Today is December 22, and if you’re reading this, the world hasn’t ended. So it looks like the Mayan doomsday believers were wrong—just like all the other end-of-the-world predictions thus far. In my column for the November/December issue of The Canadian Lutheran, I take on the connection between doomsday predictions and the season of Advent (which we’re still in for a few more days). A segment follows below:

But Christians are not the only ones in a season of “waiting” this December. A small number of conspiracy theorists have been predicting December 21st as the end of the world. The idea arises out of some Mayan records which cite that date as the end of an era—the ending of one cycle of creation and the beginning of the next. While Mayan scholars dismiss doomsday interpretations of these records, believers think the Mayans knew something we don’t— that some great catastrophe is coming and that humankind’s time is drawing to an end. Consequently, this has been a year of great darkness for doomsday believers. They have been living under the shadow of death, a shadow growing ever blacker and grimmer as December 21st approaches.

How different from the Christian’s hope! We too dwell under the dark shadow of death, but it is a shadow we know is defeated. We await reunion with our Lord Jesus; doomsday theorists see only the approach of death. At the first Christmas, God Himself entered into our world. In Him was Light, a Light that was the Light of all mankind; and that Light broke into the darkness (John 1:4-5). Yes, on the people dwelling in darkness a great Light dawned—and it forced the shadow of death to retreat (Matthew 4:16).

Check out the full article entitled “Joy comes with the morning” over at CanadianLutheran.ca.

——————–

The Gift of Unintentional Community

12 Wednesday Dec 2012

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Christian, Christmas, Christmas tree, community, Gift, God, Holiday, Intentional community, Lord, mental illness, Tree, unintentional

Yesterday, we set up the Christmas tree, and, like last year, A was not here. Yet for two subsequent Christmases before last Christmas, she had been; the first year, she volunteered to watch Andrew while I bumbled about trying to borrow the right saw to saw off the bottom of the Christmas tree, and by the second Christmas, she was like a part of our family, participating in the tree-decorating etc. as a matter of course. And so perhaps this is one of the reasons that Christmas is one of the times I most keenly feel her absence. But perhaps there is a deeper reason as well. Perhaps around this time when we think of gift-giving and the bound-together communities these gifts ideally represent, part of the pain I feel is due to a thankfulness – that A was part of our family’s life, and that God saw fit to bless pessimistic people like us with the gift of unintentional community.

Why unintentional? I do not mean to sound pessimistic – or perhaps I do – but when I hear the phrase “intentional community,” it conjures images of dewy-eyed, emergent idealists more in love with an appropriated image of the church than the gritty realism of the Church herself. The idea that people can simply get together and “intend” a community themselves – however much they garnish it with ancient-future trappings etc. – is the height of modern individualistic arrogance. Let me be broken on and for community, but I draw the line at intending it.

In any case, as you might guess from the paragraph above, I am probably too cynical for things like intentional communities, as was A. We had all been around the block a few too many times in the Evangelical neighborhood. My wife, M, myself, and A had all faced various struggles – things like depression etc. – not often dealt with well in this neighborhood. And we were weary. And then A moved into the mini student-housing condo across from us. We did not become less weary. But we found the grace that God gives to Christians who do not stop meeting together, even in their weariness.

This grace was the love that could take a person for granted, in the best sense of the word. What I mean by this is that, since A only had herself to feed and since it is not hard to cook for an extra person, we simply expected her to come over for supper daily. One of the most heartbreaking moments for me in dealing with her death was the moment – a few months after it happened – when I inadvertently grabbed four plates from the cupboard to set the table, and then realized there was only a need for three. A was not there.

It is impossible to explain what we lost when she died. My then 2-3 year old son used to tease her like the sister he didn’t have. She joined us in working our way through most of the seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then there was the presence of unpretentious hope. Not the kind of hope that uses big words and has navel gazing conversations about deep things. Rather, the hope that simply is, in the middle of blackness, when we are Christians clinging to a God as palpable as he is puzzling and frustrating. And in this we learned that there could be communion – community – even for those too odd and misshapen to be intentional about it.

I am thankful. I am thankful that God gives his grace to cynical, miserable, depressed people – that he bothers to intend community for those who can’t. And I am bitter. It sometimes takes all the faith I have – and more that God miraculously provides – to add “Blessed be the name of the Lord” to my recognition that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But somehow I keep doing it – and reminding myself that the only reason I can miss A is because God was gracious enough to give ornery people like us the undeserved gift of unintentional community.

A Christian Thing

30 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Christian, Christian thing, Christmas, culture, thing, Tolkien

I started this blog because of an exercise I did last Advent: making occasional reflections about contemporary Christianity, contemporary culture, and their mutual interaction. I did this as a way of expressing my restlessness and frustration with aspects of both .  I found this a useful exercise for myself, and (I hope) others who read it found it useful as well.  In any case, Christmas is over, but contemporary Christianity and culture are still here, and so I decided to make a blog for putting up occasional and brief thoughts concerning them.  Surprisingly, I have friends, and they were interested in joining my endeavor, so you can expect introductions and input from them as well; there just seems to be something right about gathering two or three together…

The title reflects our general uncertainty regarding the overarching purpose of the blog, apart from its Christian focus.  We chose to call the blog a “thing” based on the origins of the word.  In Old Icelandic society, the “thing” was a meeting of people from the surrounding country, where people could bring up and discuss issues pertaining to the broader community etc.  It was somewhat like a Tolkienien Ent-moot.  The Old English Maxims I tell us that “the wise must have a thing” together.  While not professing to be wise, we are professing to have a thing – and perhaps revel in the folly of Christ while we are at it.

Search for Things

Recent Things

  • The Subject of the Big Jesuit Plot
  • Tempus Aedificandi: A New Blog By A Very Close Friend of Churl’s
  • A Time To Build: Fumbling Toward a Disciplined Mysticism
  • My Accidental Devotions: Bl. Louis Martin and the Materialist Mind
  • Becoming a Pilgrim to Cure Myself of Being an Exile: Reception Into the Catholic Church, One Year Later

Thing Contributors

  • Churl
  • CaptainThin
  • chinglicanattable
  • lelbc43
  • Alice
  • notadinnerparty

Past Things

  • November 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012

Things Seen

  • "All generations shall call me blessed." Even the Protestants
  • Fear in a Handful of Dust: Christianity and OCD
  • About the authors
  • Doctor Who: Religion and the limits of human reason
  • The connection between John Donne and William Blake (and John Milton for good measure)
  • Too Damn Catholic
  • The Fire Next Time
  • In praise of Vicky Beeching, evangelical Anglican (Part 2)

Things We Talk About

academia Academics Advent Alastair Sterne Anglican Anxiety Asian American Bible C.S. Lewis Canada Catholic Catholic Church Catholicism Charles Taylor Chinese Chinglican Christ Christian Christianity Christmas church communion death depression Dietrich Bonhoeffer Douglas Todd ecumenism Eucharist Evangelical Evangelicalism evil and suffering Faith feminist theology Flannery O'Connor God Hans Urs von Balthasar Henri de Lubac Holy Spirit Imagination Jesuit Jesus Job John Donne John Piper Justin Welby Karl Barth Lent Literature love Lutheran Mark Driscoll Mary Mental health mental illness neo-Reformed Obsessive–compulsive disorder OCD orientalism orientalization PhD Poetry politics Pope Francis prayer Protestant race Rachel Held Evans religion Rowan Williams secular St. Peter's Fireside Stanley Hauerwas state Theology Tradition

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