Keeping Persecution in Perspective

Kristallnacht (1938)

This morning's groggy scan of the Face-space feed revealed that the annual "Keep-My-Christ-in-Your-Christmas" sanctimony has--like the onslaught of reminders to get out there and shop--crept yet earlier. I'm convinced that in my lifetime we will start seeing ads for next Christmas before this Christmas is over.  Of course the important season of Advent gets completely lost in the tide, but that's a rant for another day.

This time the outrage de l'année is because That Omnipresent Coffee Company -- having dispensed its last not-actually-pumpkin spice latte for the year--has gone with a plain red motif for its disposable cups during not-really-peppermint season.  That's right! No Santa Claus, no tree, and, shamefully, no Baby Jesus, surrounded by adoring animals.  So you must boycott, and you must tell everyone.  Because this is a Christian country, by golly, and we've got to make sure nobody forgets!

The irony that this is being held up as an example of "religious persecution" on the 77th anniversary of Kristallnacht simply cannot be overstated.  More on that later today.

The fact that this is getting any traction whatsoever suggests American Christians as a group have become so warped by privilege, that we confuse any thwarted attempt to impose our beliefs on the greater society as "persecution".  And let's be clear. It's not like Allyourbucks used to have Christian images on their cups and abruptly took them away.  If you want to be outraged at them, why not check out their resistance to label GMO ingredients on their products, or the fact that we're still using so many throw-away cups at all?

The Rev. Emily C. Heath summed up my reaction so well that I was hesitant to write about this topic at all:

"Do you think Jesus would rather we remember his birthday by putting it on a coffee cup that’s going in the trash? Or would he rather we remember it by no longer treating one another as disposable?"

I could not say that any better, and I commend her entire post to you. I actually lament the commercial bonanza that Christmas has become, and the fact that--to get us in the mood to spend--we're surrounded by saccharine schlock so early so that we're sick of it by the time the actually holiday  arrives. But any one of us could choose to walk away from all that and observe the season--or don't--however we please.

I did, however, resort to arcane sacristy-rat humor to further point out just how ridiculous this whole manufactured snub truly is:

A Proclamation to the Outraged:

The Feast of Christ the King not being for several weeks, and thusly the season of Advent to follow, any talk of red cups (other than for the movable feast of Beer Pong) is verily premature.

Ye are reminded that the acceptable and orthodox cup choice of the day remains consistent with the weeks After Pentecost, known by our Roman friends as Ordinary Time.

This message (was not) brought to you by the Homer Laughlin China Company, manufacturers of Fiestaware. With Fiestaware, there's no excuse for sloppy orthodoxy on your table!

Sleep in Heavenly Peace?

Lillian Thrasher - Missionary to Egypt (1961) 

  HEARD TELL, PERHAPS APOCRYPHAL, SOME YEARS AGO OF A SERMON given--if memory serves me--by our former bishop, the Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong. His Grace began by drawing a Johari window-style diagram, with four unlabeled panes, on an easel pad and asked the congregants to rattle off things they knew about the Christmas story ("laid in a manger" "three wise men" "answering the census", etc.) which he proceeded to put in one of the boxes without comment.

 When he was satisfied, he labeled the boxes "Matthew" "Luke" "John" and "Hallmark". Guess which one had the most in it?

The sermon was intended to educate us about what we know, vs. what we think we know about the birth of Christ. As I have embarked as an adult on a more informed understanding of my faith, I have discovered that much of the "givens" with which I had grown up are not scriptural in origin, and even the ones that are still find themselves subject to nuances of interpretation. For example, nowhere in Scripture does it say there were three wise men, but yet we "know" this and we even "know" their names.

Shine on, Surfer Jesus

A lot of my early faith experiences were surrounded by imagery that --although we kidded around about it during my formative years in Roman Catholic youth groups and campus ministries--undoubtedly had an effect on how I "saw" the people and places in these stories.  For the most part they were depicted as photogenic Caucasians, generally Nordic-looking (Jesus) or Slavic (Mary), spotlessly clean and groomed, and always with a white dinner plate inexplicably fixed to the back of their heads.  As a child I wondered is it strapped on, or is it just hovering behind them, like the Good Witch Glinda's transporter bubble?

Even today when I search Youtube to hear some of the music that evokes that time for me, the videos (often lovingly if amateurishly produced by the faithful) show Jesus tall and chiseled, his grin perfect and his blond highlights catching the sun off the Galilee, looking for all the world like he might have just left his surfboard on the beach.

This does of course not fit with even the assumptions we can safely make in absence of facts.  Icelandair did not serve Tel Aviv in the time these stories described, and nothing we've been able to find suggests Jesus worked as an Abercrombie & Fitch greeter prior to his public ministry. The Holy Family and Jesus' subsequent followers were in--all likelihood--short (by today's standards), olive-skinned, hairy, and frequently wont of a bath.

This was all brought to mind recently by a wonderful article by Joe Kay about holiday manger scenes, where he asks why these characters are all portrayed as serene and picture-perfect (and, inexplicably, Norwegian) despite what little we know about the journey they took, the conditions in which they lived, the money they didn't have?  I won't try to paraphrase what Mr. Kay says, because frankly I can't improve upon it:

"If our manger scenes were realistic, Mary would be recovering from a painful labor full of sweat and blood, with a look on her face that’s anything but serene. And Joseph — wouldn’t he be a nervous wreck, too? His hand too shaky to hold a lantern?

And about that newborn. Shouldn’t he be red-faced and screaming? Eyes clenched closed and wisps of hair stuck to the top of a head that‘s still odd-shaped from all the squeezing?

Instead, we’ve sanitized and romanticized it. We’ve removed all the blood and sweat and tears and pain and goo. It’s no longer something real. We’ve left out all the messy parts. The oh-my-God-what-now parts. The I’m-screaming-as-loud-as-I-can-because-it-really-hurts parts. The oh-crap-I’ve-stepped-in-the-animal-droppings parts. The real parts."

Nativity scene at St. George's Church, Kobanya, Budapest, Hungary
PHOTO CREDIT: András Fülöp Used under Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved

Since we have artistic control of how we "see" them, why do choose to make them look perfect and unflustered when we know this was not the case? Why--as we struggle to make this more than a season of spending money we don’t have to buy people, some of whom we don’t even like, gifts they don’t need; eating and drinking too much and then feeling guilty--do we give the heroes of this story supernatural powers they didn’t have (endless energy, patience, WetNaps...) and make them less like us? 

I think it is a shame that the canonical Gospels don't include the argument after Joseph refused to ask for directions and the donkey ended up circling Bethlehem for 45 minutes with his left signal on, or the talking-to Jesus got when the bus had to go all the way back to Jerusalem because he was still at the temple, wowing 'em with his mad parable skillz.  We set ourselves up for disappointment when we fall for the notion that everybody else's Christmas looks like the families in TV ads, with nobody arguing or making hard choices about how to afford it all.

As for me and my house, we’d prefer a savior who chuckles and nods knowingly when we vacuum around the piles of clutter, or "phone in" the office potluck by putting something from the deli in our own Corningware. That is the God who may wince a little when we are short-tempered or selfish, but has been there and gets it. This is a time of year when many of us are faced, more than any other time, with the urge to curl up in a ball, mid-gift wrap or bike-assembly, and cry a little. That is a God I could call on in my darkest hour and expect to be understood, and Kay seems to agree:

"We acknowledge our brokenness, and God responds with a kiss on our sweaty faces and goo-covered foreheads. Reminds us that even though we make mistakes and bad choices, we ourselves are never a mistake or a bad choice. Instead, we are always a chosen miracle. And when we feel totally broken, that’s when we’re the most beloved."

If your sugarplums are all color-coordinated and your family beach photo with the Santa hats came out perfectly on the first try, more power to you. Go ahead and carve your nativity figures out of cream cheese just like Martha taught you.  We, the Chaos Muppets, may need to tape a sheep's leg back on or bring in the Power Ranger understudy for one of the shepherds, but each will nonetheless be a familiar home to the Savior when he comes.

May God bless us, every one.

Black Friday Blues (and the latest episode of Hide the Chicken)

Clement - Bishop of Rome (100)
The hoopla about the comparative morality of shopping on Black Friday is largely a rhetorical debate for us.  I have long tried to make gift purchases as the opportunity presented itself, complicated in recent years by the fiscally prudent decision by both my family and the Archwarden's to adopt a "secret Santa" scheme among the adults so one is only shopping for a single person (however one must know for whom one is shopping before any purchases take place and Thanksgiving was -- until this year -- the occasion on which the names were drawn.  I'm working on easing that puppy back to Labor Day.

That said, not much retailing going on today in our house.  We came home with an assortment of left-over goodies but -- paradoxically -- no turkey, so I concocted the following recipe for chicken, which the Archwarden complains I cook too much, so I am constantly challenged to disguise it in new ways:

• Take out three cereal- or soup-sized bowls
• In the first, put flour
• In the second, mix up eggs, a little milk, and a few tablespoons of mustard (we experimented with a raspberry wasabi flavor this time, but you can use any kind)
• In the third, a combination of cashews or almonds, crackers, pita chips (whatever you have open), and bread crumbs, bashed up in the food processor.  For those who can't have what, ground-up nuts make a good substitute coating with some texture... unless you can't have nuts either.

Dip the chicken in each dish in the order above, making sure they are good and coated.  Brush the remaining egg on any "bald spots" then sprinkle on the contents of bowl #3. Bake in an olive-oiled glass pan at 350° until the center of the meat is at least 165°.  I usually make a pound of chicken and this takes about 45 minutes in my oven.

When the Ship Comes In

Hilary of Poitiers - Bishop & Doctor

Okay well it has been an embarrassing amount of time since I have posted anything here.  My friend David described this in a similarly apologetic post as having "gone galt" so then of course I had to go see what that meant, and another ten minutes were lost.

So, what's been happening?  Well right after Thanksgiving, we went to Florida, which was fun although really cold (for Florida) which meant we had a great time in the theme parks because there weren't any lines to speak of.

We got to visit a co-worker from years back and her husband, ride round on golf carts and see alligators.

Then there was Christmas, and a ridiculous snowstorm or three.   We're in the thick of winter here, now, but as someone pointed out earlier, it was still light enough to see at 5 o'clock, so the days are starting to get noticeably longer again.

We did have a rather unfortunate experience on New Years' Eve at a restaurant in Montclair called Costanera.

Queen Elizabeth 2 in 2008

There is an interesting maritime event unfolding in New York Harbor as we speak, although I am unfortunately not participating.  All three ships of the storied Cunard Line are berthed in the city at the same time: The Queen Mary 2 at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, and the quasi-sisters Queen Victoria and the new Queen Elizabeth at the Passenger Ship Terminal on Manhattan's west side, the latter having just completed her maiden transatlantic crossing.  My friend Doug Newman was aboard, and you can read his account on his blog.

This is is only the second time the entire fleet has been together in the port, which speaks as much about the modern need for marketing pomp as it does the state of the company's affairs: in the 1950s they operated over fifty vessels, now they have just three.

Queen Victoria at the Passenger Ship Terminal

The first was three years ago, for the Victoria's maiden arrival.  At that point the legendary QE2 was still in service, and a friend and I took a boat trip out into the Upper  Bay to watch  as the the three ships preened in front of the Statue of Liberty under a fireworks display.

I was also on hand for the mammoth Queen Mary 2's first visit to the city; in fact my dad and I were aboard, having made the maiden crossing from Southampton in April of 2004.