Stephen Roney's Blog, page 103
December 28, 2022
Deck Them Halls
A very old secular Christmas song.
More cowbell!
I Wonder as I Wander
An unhappy Christmans carol, of all things.
Yet this makes sense. We are speaking of serious things here, not "happy happy joy joy."
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
--T.S. Eliot
Our Religion
Artemis at Ephesus as the all-nurturing "Mother Nature"While we claim as a society to recognize religious freedom, in fact we have a state religion. We call it, incorrectly, “science,” but it is the thing we commonly know as science; and our god, or rather goddess, is Nature.
It is not tolerant of other creeds. Its rituals of worship, things like rules for recycling, or buying electric cars, are mandatory. It is heavily state subsidized; tithing is not optional.
Unlike the Christian God, but like the other pagan gods, Nature is not well disposed towards man. Her temples, the nature preserves, often ban human beings. Mankind becomes, to quote more than one writer, “a cancer on the planet.”
She is clearly and commonly personified, and specifically as feminine. She has all the characteristics familiar from Isis, Artemis, and Gaea, previous nature goddesses. She is aka “Mother Nature” or “Mother Earth.”
Gaea or "Mother Earth" at the Montreal Botanical GardensThe religion also makes no allowance for ethics. Ethics are unnatural; “unscientific.” Instead, we have definite obligations to the goddess, on pain of provoking her wrath and retribution.
The priesthood dresses in distinctive white smocks. At the same time, because the goddess is feminine, mortal women in her image seem to be given unlimited power over life and death. Child sacrifice, common in earlier pagan periods, has returned. There is no more value to human life, after all, than to that of an animal.
The field of psychology/psychiatry is in effect a permanent Inquisition, seeking out heresies.
This is not going well. This has reached its strongest expressions, so far, in Nazism and in Communism; but we would be naïve to think these cannot be bettered in future.
PachamamaBut, you might protest, science is simply truth.
So it is; but scientism and nature worship have nothing to do with science.
Or with truth.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 27, 2022
Imperial Christmas
The Christian New Year Begins
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it….
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John’s gospel is to guide us through the new year. And this is how it begins.
What does it mean, that Christ is the Word? The Word pre-exists and creates the thing it describes? Does this sound odd to you? It is certainly counter to the usual theories of language.
Yet the idea is endorsed as well in the Book of Genesis. God the Father creates the universe by calling it into being.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
This is an endorsement of the Platonic concept of ideal forms. We are not speaking here of literal sounds, but of the essence of a word, the concept in the mind. Words are ideas. The idea in the mind of the thing exists before the thing exists, and the particular thing is an emanation of the symbol.
Put in human terms, we would not be able to experience “cat” if the idea of a cat was not previously planted in our mind by God. Otherwise, we would only have random sense perceptions. If we cannot form the word “cat,” in whatever language, we cannot experience the thing, “cat.”
This is the opposite of the Aristotelian idea which dominates our current culture: that thoughts are inducted, induced, from physical experience.
This seems a logical impossibility. But in any case, this notion is not tenable for a Christian.
For when we say we are Christians, that we worship Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, we do not mean the mortal man Jesus. Him we have never met, in the flesh, and his name was not Jesus. We worship the incarnation; we worship the cosmic Christ; we worship the Word, whom John identifies with light, grace, and truth. Light here being the light of consciousness; as we say “I see,” “it is clear to me now,” and truth “dawns on us.” Grace being beauty.
Elsewhere Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the light.”
Plato would formulate that as “I am the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”
This is what the true Christian seeks, wherever they are found in life. These are the emanations of the divine as they are experienced in this life, and seeking these is the meaning of life.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
The Christian New Year Bagins
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it….
14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John’s gospel is to guide us through the new year. And this is how it begins.
What does it mean, that Christ is the Word? The Word pre-exists and creates the thing it describes? Does this sound odd to you? It is certainly counter to the usual theories of language.
Yet the idea is endorsed as well in the Book of Genesis. God the Father creates the universe by calling it into being.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
This is an endorsement of the Platonic concept of ideal forms. We are not speaking here of literal sounds, but of the essence of a word, the concept in the mind. Words are ideas. The idea in the mind of the thing exists before the thing exists, and the particular thing is an emanation of the symbol.
Put in human terms, we would not be able to experience “cat” if the idea of a cat was not previously planted in our mind by God. Otherwise, we would only have random sense perceptions. If we cannot form the word “cat,” in whatever language, we cannot experience the thing, “cat.”
This is the opposite of the Aristotelian idea which dominates our current culture: that thoughts are inducted, induced, from physical experience.
This seems a logical impossibility. But in any case, this notion is not tenable for a Christian.
For when we say we are Christians, that we worship Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, we do not mean the mortal man Jesus. Him we have never met, in the flesh, and his name was not Jesus. We worship the incarnation; we worship the cosmic Christ; we worship the Word, whom John identifies with light, grace, and truth. Light here being the light of consciousness; as we say “I see,” “it is clear to me now,” and truth “dawns on us.” Grace being beauty.
Elsewhere Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the light.”
Plato would formulate that as “I am the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”
This is what the true Christian seeks, wherever they are found in life. These are the emanations of the divine as they are experienced in this life, and seeking these is the meaning of life.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
Everybody Knows
As a Christmas present, I treated myself yesterday to a visit to the current exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario on Leonard Cohen.
It was a disappointment. But then, I expected it to be. How do you host an art exhibit on a poet? Wrong medium.
You got to see his notebooks under glass; but usually just the covers, and the covers look like any other notebooks, after all. Letters to and from other celebrities; very hard to read in handwriting and under glass, with others crowding you. Much better printed as a book or a web page. One of his guitars; his electronic keyboard. Look very much like any other guitar or Casio keyboard. Videos of him singing; using clips readily available on YouTube. So what?
When I went to an AGO exhibit years ago on William Kurelek, it felt life-changing. I left with a sense of what Kurelek was all about, what he was saying. When I went to a more recent exhibit on Andy Warhol, I left with a sense of what Warhol was all about. When I left the exhibit on Cohen, I was feeling, “was that really all he was about?”
I had to remind myself of the actual lyrics. Being a writer, Cohen was far better at revealing himself than any museum curator’s collection of memorabilia could be.
Had I known of Cohen only from the exhibit, I would have thought that Cohen was interested only in producing tunes that someone could enjoy while doing the laundry, or dance to. Ironic, since Cohen often did not write the tunes, only the lyrics. And did not have one of the world’s great voices. Again and again, the clips chosen seemed to downplay the significance of the lyrics, the poetry, and the novels. Beautiful Losers was the product of sunstroke. “First We Take Manhattan” was an attempt to say “something about Berlin.” “The Future” was gloomy, but saved by an upbeat tune.
If there was a core message, okay, Cohen loved his mother, his family, and his hometown. All actually highly dubious assertions, based on what he actually wrote. If true, merely bland and pedestrian. He was fascinated with guns, for some unexplained reason; he was not a pacifist. He thought the ultimate meaning of life was getting laid. Totally soulless.
At the exit, you had the opportunity to buy a trilby hat like the one he wore on stage, or a keychain, or a t-shirt. Fan stuff.
I felt Cohen’ legacy was being falsified and crassly exploited, either by his surviving family, or by the museum, or, most probably, both.
The title chosen for the exhibit was appropriate: “Everybody knows.” It merely traded on Cohen’s fame, and withheld anything not apparent to everybody.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
The Rebel Jesus
My friend Mithras sent along for Christmas cheer the song “The Rebel Jesus,” which he really likes. Nice tune; but I dislike it intensely. Jesus is Lord, the rightful ruler of the universe. So against whom is he rebelling? The premise of the song must be that the Devil is the rightful ruler, and God is some troublemaker.
Perhaps the thesis is that Jesus was just a mortal man, and was a rebel against the government of his day? Then not true, even given the atheist premise. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Political revolt was an obvious option, expected of the Messiah and endorsed by the Zealots. Jesus rejected it.
Next problem: the narrator says he worships in nature. Nature is fallen, and it is our duty to redeem it. I do not worship cancer, or Covid, or cockroaches, or instinct, or the survival of the fittest. Nature worship is an alibi for spiritual laziness and self-indulgence. The Devil is the Lord of nature: Lord of the Flies.
“But if anyone of us should interfere
In the business of why there are poor
They get the same as the rebel Jesus.”
This is an attempt to avoid our responsibility to help the poor: instead of helping, blame the system. It is not possible to “eliminate poverty.” As Jesus says, “The poor will be always with you.” That is a Marxist con. The rich love it, because it lets them keep their money and blame someone else. “After all, I voted socialist.” Costs nothing.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 26, 2022
Feast of Stephen
St. Stephen's Day in Ireland
