His Majesty the Baby is Angry

In the pop-psychology of the nineteen seventies the trendy thing was “get in touch with your anger and vent it,” hopefully, appropriately. That’s a big hopefully. In particular I remember a job interview years ago for the Director’s position at a Recovery Hospital in California. They had a separate building out behind the unit that was a Gestalt “Scream Therapy” room. The idea was that the patients were to go in there and vent their anger for relief. That kind of venting just multiplies the anger. The Psalmist gives this wise advice, “Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil” [Psalm 37:8].

In the family, and in the job, learn from the experience of Moses. “They angered him at the waters of Meribah, and it went ill with Moses on their account, for they made his spirit bitter, and he spoke rashly with his lips” [Psalm 106:32-33]. People and situations can drive you nuts! I should know. But one of the five power words in the New Testament is ‘krátos’ which means, ‘might, strength, power, rule or dominion.’  The first place to exercise ‘krátos’ is in exercising self-rule.  Rule over your emotions; don’t let them rule over you. Paul says, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger. [Ephesians 4:26].

Everyone experiences anger at one time or another. If you are angry, understand why you are angry and talk about it with a safe person. There are a variety of reasons why we get angry. Very often it is because someone, or some situation, is stepping on our toes. The resulting feelings of helplessness often cause anger. Venting anger is associated with our attempts to control people or situations, and that is not only not very realistic, but sometimes downright destructive.

The Young Poet Fallen from Grace

The Tudor Poet John Skelton was one of Henry’s tutors, a Tudor Tutor if you will.  Henry composed melodies and his extant poems were written for singing.  Henry himself played the lute, organ, and harpsichord, and one of his anthems, “O Lord, the Maker of All Things,” was sung in English Cathedrals.

History has left us with the image of Henry late in life as an obese man with severe health problems and a brutal disposition; but he was once a young man filled with vitality and grace, perhaps even with a winsomeness that was attractive, but lo, how the years and exigencies of time and circumstance changed him.

The question arises: How does our increasing age and the exigencies of our own times and circumstances change us?  Will we go on as heliotropes always facing the Sun and always being transformed from light to radiant light; or will we become beasts long after we have been seen as winsome children of God?

 

Originally written in Latin, the following translation was in the time of Elizabeth I

O Lord the Maker of All Thing

O Lord, the maker of all thing,

We praie Thee nowe in this evening

Us to defende through Thy mercie

From all deceite of our enemie.

Let neither us deluded be,

Good Lord, with dream or fantasie;

Our harts waking in Thee Thou keepe

That we in sinne fall not on sleepe.

O father, through Thy blessed sonne,

Grant us this our petition,

To whom, with the Holy Ghost alwaies,

In heaven and earthe be laud and praise.

"Green Groweth the Holly"  by King Henry VIII

Green groweth the holly,

so doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts

blow never so high,

Green groweth the holly.

As the holly groweth green

    And never changeth hue,

So I am, and ever hath been,

    Unto my lady true.

Green groweth the holly,

so doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts

blow never so high,

Green groweth the holly.

As the holly groweth green,

    With ivy all alone,

When flowerys cannot be seen

    And green-wood leaves be gone,

Green groweth the holly,

so doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts

blow never so high,

Green groweth the holly.

Now unto my lady

    Promise to her I make:

From all other only

    To her I me betake.

Green groweth the holly,

so doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts

blow never so high,

Green groweth the holly.

Adieu, mine own lady,

    Adieu, my specïal,

Who hath my heart truly,

    Be sure, and ever shall.

Green groweth the holly,

so doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts

blow never so high,

Green groweth the holly. 

What Does it Mean to Belong?

On Prince Edward Island the shore fields roll away down the hills to the edge of the sea. Queen Anne’s Lace graces the margin of the roads, along with goldenrod just beginning to bloom, and clusters of wild pink bramble roses. The shore fields themselves are a patchwork quilt; squares of variegated green, hay, oats, barley, wheat, yellow canola too bright to look at, endless fields of potatoes; patches of purple heather and untamed fallow fields resting now for the season.

The fields are marked out with hedgerows and the hedgerows themselves are dominated by island pines. The trees, some in the shape of Christmas yet to come, march down to the red rocky shore line. Here and there a single pine stands majestically silhouetted by the sea. As the light begins to fade into darkness the moon rises quickly over the Northumberland Straight casting a broad swath of hammered silver along the rippling waters.

Small farm houses decked out with hollyhocks and orange tiger lilies are set well back from the road. The road itself wends its way gently down towards the harbour. The beacon of the lighthouse shines brightly against the encroaching night. The warm lights of homes clustered together like bramble roses speak of the warmth of families, food, and of refuge from the lonely dark. These are the harbour lights along the shore.

Approaching the Island from the sea the reflected light of the moon rising in the sky casts a silvery sheen on the water off the starboard side of the ferry. Ahead of us the water is smooth and black as we draw close to the shore line. The coast line itself appears only as a humpy rise of deeper black barely distinguishable from the black of the sky and the sea, but there are along the shore some lights at its edge. One light higher than the others is brilliant and blinks on and off with its designated rhythm. If you know this coast and count the rhythm you will identify this lighthouse as the Wood Islands Light, and the lower lights around it as the small cluster of buildings marking the Wood Island ferry landing. We are in fact seeing a visual illustration of an old hymn.

Brightly beams our Father’s mercy from His lighthouse evermore,

But to us He gives the keeping of the lights along the shore.

Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!

Some poor fainting, struggling seaman you may rescue, you may save.

Christ Jesus Himself is our Father’s Lighthouse. He is the light of the world. From far away those who are lost on the sea of many peoples, nations, and tongues, see His light shining in the distance long before they see the lights along the shore. Lighthouses serve several purposes. Some say “Stay away! Stay away! Here rocks and wreckage will be found.” Other lighthouses mark the way home. It is the lights along the shore that say, “Come home! Come home! Here warmth and refuge will be found.” We are the lights along the shore.

Not all seaside villages are equally hospitable. Those who fish the coastal waters of the Northumberland Straight will tell you there is a difference. In some places you can set your lobster traps and fish in peace, in some places a malicious few will steal from your traps and make life difficult for people of whom they don’t approve. In some very few places bad blood stirred up by an unhappy few makes hospitality vanish altogether.

Islanders have a sense of belonging to the land and to the sea that is enviable. Those who come to the Island “from away” seek the peace and companionable sense of quiet that marks belonging to the Island and to each other. Some will never be able to belong, whether or not they born here, or how long ago they settled here.

Take Mabel, a “Herring Choker” from Nova Scotia, a loud dominating woman with a wooden leg. At dinner with the neighbours the other night she held forth; she would never have Venetian blinds in her home, only curtains. Our hostesses home has blinds in every room; but to Mabel blinds are dirty. According to her, Reggie, the fisherman she has just moved in with, will have to get rid of his blinds. Reggie says with an odd smile that he just paid fifteen hundred dollars for the blinds, to which she retorts that they will have to go out in the trash. Reggie’s response was missed by some in the room, “The day the blinds go in the trash there is going to be a wooden leg poking up from the middle of the trash!” Mabel was not at all daunted and began to loudly obsess about how she was going to clean Reggie’s place. “I’ll wash the walls and the ceilings three times a year.” An old Irish expression comes to my mind, “O, she laughs and she smiles and she shakes her wooden leg.”

Later, as the party thins out, a few quiet bets are offered. “She won’t make it to the next summer!” “No! By the end of winter Reggie will have had enough.” “She won’t make it to the spring fishing season!” What is the problem? She is “from away.” She will always be from away because she can’t really accept what being here on the island really means. She knows everything. She is right. Islanders, many of whom like blinds, need to conform to her standards and she will bloody well make them, starting with Reggie. She will always be “from away” and she is too tough an old dog to change. After all, she has been right all her life.

By spring she will be gone and wherever she goes she will tell others “from away” about the dirty Islanders with Venetian blinds, who are inhospitable and un-accepting because they won’t do what she knows is right. As long as she stays, this little harbour village will be in minor turmoil; but I give her only until next spring.

Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave! Some poor fainting, struggling seaman you may rescue, you may save.” What does it mean to belong? To belong on the Island one has to accept the Island for what it is, but some people, wanting to change the Island to fit their expectations, will always be “from away.”

Simeon’s Song

The pure Word of Israel’s God

Sprang whole cloth woven in my mind,

A Word that could not be denied.

With it came the certain knowledge,

“I have been anointed with fresh oil.”

One day when I was younger,

Decades have slipped away,

I stood at Sabbath reading,

Tasseled tallus o’er my head,

His Word leaping from the scroll.

“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,

Speak ye tenderly to Jerusalem:

‘Thy long warfare is ended and

Thine iniquity is pardoned!’”

The Word burned within my soul.

I cried: “These words are now my words

God’s true Word spoken unto me.

I shall not die until I see

The comfort of God’s Israel.”

Pious skepticism meets such words,

“There is no Word

save only a famine of the Word.”

His Word I buried very deep,

A heavy burden from my Lord,

Where too often Words that challenge

Our precious lives are stored.

Today that Word has come again.

“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people

Speak comfortably to Jerusalem

Cry out to her, her warfare has ended,

Her iniquity is pardoned;

Now is the acceptable time,

Now is the day of salvation.”

Now an old man

I stand within God’s temple,

His Word a burning flame within.

“I have been anointed with fresh oil.

The time has come to cry aloud,

This day is the day Messiah comes.

"Lord, you now have set your servant free *

To go in peace as you have promised;

For these eyes of mine have seen the Saviour, *

Whom you have prepared for all the world to see;

A light to lighten the Gentiles, *

And the glory of your people Israel.”

C. S. Lewis and Paddy Moore’s Mother

Sometimes life is what happens to us when we are planning to do something else.  For C.S. Lewis it was the World War of 1917-1918 that deflected him from his immediate plans for education at Oxford.  Shortly before his nineteenth birthday he was drafted and found himself billeted at Keble College. 

By fluke of alphabetical order he found himself sharing a room with Paddy Moore.  The two young men agreed that if either of them died in battle, the one that lived would take care of the other man’s family.   In November of that year Lewis was sent to the Western Front with the 3^rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry where he was wounded and returned to England for recuperation.  Paddy Moore was not so lucky but was missing in action and believed dead.   

At the end of the war Lewis returned to Oxford to continue his education.  Lewis’s brother Warren writes that C. S. Lewis felt a “duty of keeping some war-time promise made to Paddy Moore” and as a result took on what was going to be a life-long association with Paddy’s querulous and demanding mother.  Warren wrote of Paddy Moore’s mother that she “interfered constantly with his work, and imposed upon him (C.S. Lewis) a heavy burden of minor domestic tasks.  In twenty years I never saw a book in her hands; her conversation was chiefly about herself, and was otherwise a matter of ill-informed dogmatism: her mind was of a type that he found barely tolerable elsewhere.”  Lewis faithfully maintained his relationship with Paddy Moore’s mother until her death some thirty years later. 

What is amazing about the story is everything else that C. S. Lewis accomplished while under the stress of living in a household dominated by this old tyrant. He was a voracious reader and creative thinker who left an indelible impression on his peers and on generations to come.   C.S. Lewis is one of the most prolific Christian authors of the twentieth century, and as university professor also wrote books in his own field.   

He did all this while living with Paddy Moore’s mother.  In one of his books during World War II, Lewis reflects the attitude that adverse circumstances shouldn’t hamper you from meeting the more important challenges of your life.  There will always be a crisis of some sort.  Stress never really goes away, it just changes its coat.  Life is what you make of it where you are, in the midst of everything that is going on. 

In the midst of everything C.S. Lewis grew a habit of steady prayer and scripture reading and developed a special fondness for the Book of Psalms.  As his books became popular he prospered and extended his charities to a wide variety of societies and needy individuals.  He was a man whose gaze was so firmly on the heavenly city that the hindrances on the immediate horizon faded in importance.  Rather than being quelled by his domestic circumstances, C.S. Lewis thrived and blessed us all.

One thing I am firmly convinced of is that a crisis is just a crisis.  We’ve seen crises before.  We will see them again.  Stress goes away for a while, then changes its coat and comes back again in another guise.  If we wait for circumstances to change before we do those things that we want to accomplish we will wait forever.  There will always be something that threatens to deflect us from the things we are called to do.  Like C.S. Lewis, instead of being constrained by the crises and stress of everyday life, we face the challenge of stepping forward, right where we are, to meet God’s deeper calling on our lives.

                                                                                                                       

When Love is Born at Christmas

When love is born at Christmas                                 

the busy world is hushed,      

all creation waits to hear        

the infant’s cry of life.           

The sheep and oxen gather    

‘round the humble manger,    

The young mother kneels to see         

God’s holy child, now hers.   

God Himself is bending there,           

Yielding self to human care,  

To Mary humble mother        

and to Joseph standing there.

In the fields not far away      

Shepherds guard their flocks by night,          

When all the heavens shine bright     

With angels in brilliant light,  

Singing loud Hallelujahs,       

Jesus Christ is born tonight.   

Let no evil you affright,         

He comes to set things right. 

And what do these shepherds see?    

A baby in a manger,   

such a simple thing to see;     

with the mother kneeling by.

GLORIA            

Gloria!

Birth moans

in strawed stable.

The King has come,

his lusty wailing

rends dark night.

Gloria!

Birth bloody

as his death,

the King has come.

His reality

mouth and mother's breast.

Gloria!

Birth starlit in musked air,

The King has come,

God swaddled in human need.

Gloria!

Jesus Son of God Most High.

Gloria in Excelsis Deo!

Gloria!

Wondrous Love

What wondrous love,

my Lord that you should leave

bright heavens realms above

to dwell with us below.

Enthroned above

with the Father and the Spirit

in eternal glory,

in majesty supernal.

Myriad’s of angels.

Seraphim and cherubim

in ceaseless adoration

sing the praises of Your Name.

Now time bound.

In human flesh appearing,

The Virgin’s womb

Not distaining.

King of kings

yet born of Mary

God’s only Son

now one of us.

BELLS RINGING       

Bells ringing!                          

Bells singing!                         

In simple joy,                         

Love's own alloy,                   

God's babe is born                 

this happy morn.                    

Bells ringing!                          

Bells singing!                         

The infant's tear                     

Cries God is here.                  

He’s come at last,                                           

Now life will last.                  

Bells ringing!                          

Bells singing! 

The Winding Centuries Have Come and Gone

The winding centuries have come and gone

Still the Christmas song goes on and on.

Some have loved the Babe, some still hate him;

Christmas joy is for hearts that welcome him.

Peace on earth, the thronging angels sing,

Throughout the heavens hear the merry chorus ring.

Simple shepherds on the hill rejoice to hear

The news that Almighty God has drawn near.

Herod on his throne feels a deadly chill;

Any who threaten his power he will kill,

Wife, or son, or even little baby child.

There is no safety for child or mother mild.

King Herod is dead; the years have come and gone,

Only Christ will come with the breaking of the dawn.

The Toasted Cheese Sandwich

Sometimes life is more simple than we think!

There is a marvellous sequence in one of C. S. Lewis’s books.  An old tramp and a younger man named Mark are held captive in a situation fraught with danger.  Mark points out that they are in considerable danger.  The tramp offers his solution.  “Ah,” said the man approvingly, “I got a plan.” “What is it?” “Ah,” said the man, winking at Mark with infinite knowingness and rubbing his belly. “Go on. What is it?” said Mark. “How’d it be,” said the man. . . . “How’d it be if you and I made ourselves a nice bit of toasted cheese?”[i]

The situation is not one that either the tramp or Mark could do anything about.  Mark is a well-educated young man concerned with the potential danger.  The tramp, a simple man, was more concerned with the immediate present and making the best of a difficult situation. 

I would not counsel passivity in the face of things that we can do something about, and our Christian faith is not a faith of passivity, nor is it a faith that ignores the reality of the present.  On the other hand the tramp has a point.  His main thing is to enjoy the present and make of it what he can.  While we can learn from the past if we will, there is no point in trying to relive the past; that never works.  The future is not something within our grasp.  What the tramp does is live in the present.  There are times when planning to make a toasted cheese sandwich is just the right thing.

There is a Zen story about a man who is being chased by tiger and leaps over the edge of a cliff to escape.  As he falls he grasps the branch of a tree and hangs dangling over a precipice.  Then he spies a strawberry growing out of the craggy side of the cliff.  “My, how sweet that strawberry tasted.”

If we try to live in the griefs of the past or live in fear of the future, we will miss the simple joys of the present.  Pascal would remind us that we have pain in the present.  And so?  Should that prevent us from accepting those moments of love, of joy, of beauty that flow to us in the present moment; the purr of a cat, the happy wagging friendship of the family dog, the love of a child, or a parent, or a friend, the beauty of a sunset, the wonder of a balmy day in the middle of winter or the wonder of cold crisp winter day.  St. Paul counsels us, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”[ii]  Sometimes a toasted cheese sandwich is really the right thing.

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[i] C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, (New York: Scribner, 1974) p. 309

[ii] Philippians 4:8