Christmastide 2016: Childermas and Newtown Childermas

Today is another fine day, Childermas, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents. I am re-printing two of my posts on Childermas from 2013; we arrived home last night just after midnight, struggled tragically with the luggage up the many steps, and collapsed.

I slept too long and have much to do, so I have little time to write, but there is - as always - so much to be said, especially when the writer thinks his words are so important for the future of mankind and the rest of the earthly biome.

Childermas is of great importance to me. It has been for a time.

The times since the turn of the century have been a bumper harvest of children shot, children displaced  by war, children bombed, childrens' bodies washed up on beaches around the Mediterranean. So far, the 21st century may be the Century of the Child, but if it were, we would have to pronounce it with ironic sarcasm.

Now more than ever I find children to  be wonderful... ever since my granddaughter came.
(See her photo in the post Christmas Morning Glory: http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2016/12/christmas-morning-glory.html )



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Childermas 1

 Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit

Since researching Saint Nicholas Day on the sixth of December, I have been drawn to the role Nicholas played in our civilization's conceptual understanding of children and society. In particular, the fact that this season we are in begins on Saint Nicholas Day and finds an ending near Childermas, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the children who were slaughtered by the order of King Herod.

So we have something I had never noticed before: a season that starts with the Saint who restored life to two brothers who had been murdered for their belongings, and extends through the birth of the Christ Child, and then celebrates the Holy Innocents, a feast which is a climax of gore as well as a celebration of martyrdom.

I begin to suspect that there was a distinct awareness of the abuse of children in the past, and that this season was instituted and modified over time with that awareness very much in the intuitive and the active minds of the peoples of the time: they created a sequence of holy days to celebrate children - to illustrate the horror of crimes against the young and to contrast that with their innocence and sinless natures - all of which makes them counterpoints against the sordidness and evil of the World.

I feel as if I had been blind, and now I see.

This is a time to remember the children now orphans in Bangladesh whose parents and relatives made clothes and childrens' toys made in the factory where 120 people were killed in a fire. This is the season when we must keep the sight of the children slaves in India recently freed from their evil masters who forced them to make Christmas toys and ornaments..., for us.

Scrooge Sees the Boy, Ignorance, and the Girl, Want

As we fight, claw, and gibber madly in the spiritual wasteland of Black Fridays, we fail to realize how black we really are; we are the inhumane processes of Dickensian London portrayed in A Christmas Carol that condemns its own children to poverty, disease, and despair:

"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

The bell struck twelve.

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.

And this realization of mine that our past generations have tried to build walls of inspiration and holiness and faith to protect the innocent, and we ourselves have not received this gift without debasing it and making it a wretchedness of material excess, leads me to a deep distaste for our ways and times.


**

Childermas 2

 

Brueghel's Slaughter of the Innocents

In the post The Feasts of All Children  (or Childermas 1 above),  I spoke of how this season may have developed, beginning with the miracles of St. Nicholas of Myra, who discovered the crime of the young students being murdered for their wealth, urged the criminal responsible to confess his crime, and then restored the students to life.
All in all, a fine inspiration for a saint of innocent children.

With St. Nicholas on December 6 we have a narrative about Children being abused, Children being innocent victims, and Good triumphing over Evil.

Then with the Christ Child on December 25 we have a narrative of Good triumphing over evil and a Child of unsurpassed innocence and purity. This Child, however, has his own history inextricably linked with liturgies and holidays soon to come of Abuse and Violence, as this Christ Child will grow into an adult who will be violently killed - not by marauders and thieves - but in a social setting and by socially approved ways of justice.

Lastly we had The Holy Innocents, or Childermas, on December 28, and we have the narrative of those children killed by King Herod's order to slaughter new  borns, lest they be the King born to supplant his rule. Here again we have Innocence, Abuse and killing, and the fact that these children are martyrs or witnesses to the faith: Good triumphs over Evil.


What we have construed as some mad dash to the mall, it seems that our ancestors wove together with statements, hints, nuances, suggestions, story and fable to create a quilt-like story of the cycle of the miracle of renewed life as children are born into the world, the harsh environment into which they are born, and the moral responsibilities of all society to ensure one thing above all other things! Above ideologies, above politics, above retail shopping, above fiscal cliffs and other self-created stumbling blocks!!!...........
....
One thing the hearers and viewers of the stories are supposed to do is to ensure that Good triumphs over Evil.

We have turned away from the story of the Feasts of Children and created a diorama of our diseased souls. The trampling of shoppers at the mall and the fights and shooting over toys reflects our endless wars and threats of wars.

So we add to the season of Children, not by a triumph of Good over Evil, not by actions which our progeny will remember for centuries as great feats portrayed in icons, but by a new Childermas, a new slaughter of the Innocents:  December 14.

--



I missed the Feast of the Sandy Hook Innocents or the Newtown Childermas. It was 2 days after my mother's passing. I pray for all now.

Baby Names: Marie Pacifique?

Everyone is still working on baby names as February 15th approaches.
This will be our first grandchild. I have called her Zoe, which seems appropriate, as Zoe means "life".

I have been preoccupied. My mind turns only on the potential futures. Terrifically we are immersed in out thoughts, and we ignore the puppet shows of presidential candidates.
(We suspicion they will all implement policies which shall "ice-floe" the elderly anyway, won't they?)

The weather forecast for our drive to Maryland has improved since February 3rd, at which time the GFS models forecast either 1.5 inches rain or 15 inches snow in Maryland. The snow would have been spread out over a number of days, making it more manageable than the previous 31 inches of snow spread out over 36 hours two weeks past, which pretty much was it for the eastern seaboard below the Mason-Dixon line. Schools were out for a week, and municipalities were asking for volunteers to help shovel out bus stops which were piled high with snow.

Back then we all were thinking snow, snow, snow, ... and pregnant ladies traveling to hospitals along roadways covered by 31 inches of snow...
We all were so focused that I think we may be able to handle 15 to 20 inches with aplomb.
It occupied a good portion of the mind. My mother said that she expected to look out the window and sees snow everywhere. She did not see any, because we live up north of Maryland, where there is no snow really, and today the temperature is supposed to reach 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and my seasonal allergies are continuously in some vast legislative tumult about the scope of their powers: the sinuses claim outrage that the bronchial passages are overextending their grasp, while the chthonic powers afflict me with an unexpected satyriasis, and the tinnitus of autumnal hay fevers flows into winter and laughs a metallic chuckle.

I looked for snow every day, also, and there was none. I informed the powers that be that I would accept the 31 inches and shovel out the drives of all the infirm and elderly within a 2 mile radius if they would transfer the powder up our way and keep it away from our daughter.
Until we moved in 2003 I used to shovel out our house, our immediate neighbor's house, and the house of the old lady across the street. I don't think we ever got 31 inches snow, however. We would not have had places to store it.

I hope the baby's name is Mary-something-something. Mary is a fine name. It is powerful and focused. One never goes wrong with a patroness such as Holy Mary.
My wife had an aunt by marriage whose name was Marie Pacifique, whom all the Irish relatives called Aunt Pacifica.
I was thinking along the lines of Mary Pacifica until it dawned on me that all the kids at elementary school would be goofing around, saying

Mary Pacifica! Mare Pacifica!

making a joking pun on the Latin for "Pacific Ocean" :  mare pacifica ,
and what is worse than hazing in Latin? (In my imagination, I already have the child going to a rather snooty school.)

The kids always used to make fun of one of She-who-must-be-obeyed's paternal nephews by changing his name from

Meyer Hans Joachim

into a teasing chant of

Meyer Hansy Waffles!

One must be careful with names.

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Childermas Is Coming

Mr. Splane Speaks on Child Abuse in Portugal

An article on child abuse among the Jehovah's Witnesses, illustrating that it still is open season on children, and the Christmas season rightly has Childermas [Childrens' Mass] or the Feast of the Holy Innocents to remind us.
However, we dismiss the thought and securely believe that only King Herod could do such dastardly deeds, while we positively worship kids and are in all senses vastly Pro-Life!

Pro-Life! That is our culture!
The metaphors of violence and guns are, well, metaphors for something really weighty; don't quite know what yet, but when we do figure it out, we shall find it to be important.


How Jehovah’s Witness leaders are responding to child abuse scrutiny
By Trey Bundy / December 14, 2015
https://www.revealnews.org/blog/how-jehovahs-witness-leaders-are-responding-to-child-abuse-scrutiny/

...Jehovah’s Witnesses leaders have said publicly that they are proud of their child protection policies and that they do more to shield young members from harm than other religions. Despite mounting lawsuits and media reports, however, they have failed to acknowledge that the organization has hidden child abuse from secular authorities around the world for decades...

They are proud that they have done more...

First, they admit their sin, and secondly they assert - without proof - that their sin is less that the sins of others.

--

Spotlight On Abuse!

I went to see the film Spotlight yesterday.
It deals with the Boston Archdiocese's cover-up and mishandling of the sexual abuse of children by its priests in the late 20th century, and the Boston Globe newspaper's exposure of the affair.

It was a masterful film, and everything was superb.

Except for the fact that the story was more like a report, like journalism than a story.

I suppose it suffered from the fact that we had seen Brooklyn just two days before, and that was a story about a young Irish girl who emigrated to the USA. That was a story that was filled with characters, love, tension, conflict, suffering, and achievement.
It was the stuff of enchantment.
When it was over, I looked at She-who-must-be-obeyed and said I could not believe how fast the time went by.

During Spotlight, however, in the far reaches of the film, I was often aware of my wallet... which being in the general area of meiner toches, began to frequently remind me of how Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures used to rate movies: if his toches began to go numb and he moved around in his seat, the film was a loser.
Towards the end, I was moving around a bit and began to pray for closure.


I regretted that the intensity of the film tends to focus on one class of events and ignore others. By watching this film, we probably forget that it is open season on children everywhere in the world. Within the orchard of youth there are fruits for every abusive taste: sexual, verbal, spiritual, physical... Everything.

We forgot children killed in present wars.
We forgot children enslaved in present poverty.
Why we even forgot the tear-jerking photos of drowned children from Syria washing ashore upon the golden sands of the Mediterranean. We forgot the soon to be dead children behind barbed-razor-wire fences on the verges of Europe...

WE FORGOT  the Governors of our own United States saying,

"We don't want them Syrian refugees here!"

In Spotlight, the question was frequently asked,

"Why did we not do anything? Why did we not take a stand?"

Well?
Why do we not do anything?

--

L'Avenir

The Future....

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Further Notes On Holy Innocents Day

In speaking of cruelty to children, we note the following in J. Brand's Popular Antiquities:

The learned Gregory, in his '' Treatise on the Boy Bishop,'' preserved in his posthumous works, observes that " It hath been a custom, and yet is elsewhere, to whip up the children upon Innocents Day morning, that the memorie of Herod's murder of the Innocents might stick the closer, and in a moderate proportion to act over the crueltie again in kinde."

So the lesson to be learned is all to the young while the adults ply their trades of various cruelties. Truly a good example of a people unable to confront their weaknesses.

Touching on the Boy Bishop, we may read in  The Cathedral Church of Salisbury: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum (Google eBook)

... there are so many records of the function with which popular credence has associated it, that a short digression is almost unavoidable. The pamphlet by John Gregory is elaborately minute and much too long to be quoted fully, yet some of the facts he brought together may be briefly noted. It seems that on the feast of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children, the choir-boys elected one of their number, who from that day to the feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28th, bore the rank and exercised the functions of a bishop, the other choristers being his prebendaries.

During his term of office he wore episcopal vestments. On the eve of the Holy Innocents he performed the entire office, excepting the mass, as a real bishop would have done. At Salisbury on that day the boy-bishop and his boy-prebendaries went in procession to the altar of the Holy Trinity, taking precedence of the dean and resident canons.

At the first chapter afterwards the boy bishop attended in person and was permitted to receive the entire Oblation made at the altar during the day of his procession. The names of many of the choristers and the amounts of the oblations offered for the boy-bishops are the subject of many entries in the capitular registers of both English and continental churches.

Bishop Mortival in his statutes, still preserved among the cathedral muniments, orders that the bishop of the choristers " shall make no visit (some commentators consider this has been misinterpreted, to infer that elsewhere he held visitations), nor keep any feast, but shall remain in the Common Hall, unless he be invited to the table of a Canon for recreation." The order of service in use in this diocese has been preserved (MS. No. 153 of the Cathedral Library); in it we find as a special collect, "O, almighty God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, " etc., not, however, quite in the form it appears in the Prayer Book of Ed. VI.

 Another instance of a ironic reversal of roles, which may contain within it a germ of repentance for a societal tyrrany.

--

The Feasts of All Children

 Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit

Since researching Saint Nicholas Day on the sixth of December, I have been drawn to the role Nicholas played in our civilization's conceptual understanding of children and society. In particular, the fact that this season we are in begins on Saint Nicholas Day and finds an ending near Childermas, or the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the children who were slaughtered by the order of King Herod.

So we have something I had never noticed before: a season that starts with the Saint who restored life to two brothers who had been murdered for their belongings, and extends through the birth of the Christ Child, and then celebrates the Holy Innocents, a feast which is a climax of gore as well as a celebration of martyrdom.

I begin to suspect that there was a distinct awareness of the abuse of children in the past, and that this season was instituted and modified over time with that awareness very much in the intuitive and the active minds of the peoples of the time: they created a sequence of holy days to celebrate children - to illustrate the horror of crimes against the young and to contrast that with their innocence and sinless natures - all of which makes them counterpoints against the sordidness and evil of the World.

I feel as if I had been blind, and now I see.

This is a time to remember the children now orphans in Bangladesh whose parents and relatives made clothes and childrens' toys made in the factory where 120 people were killed in a fire. This is the season when we must keep the sight of the children slaves in India recently freed from their evil masters who forced them to make Christmas toys and ornaments..., for us.

Scrooge Sees the Boy, Ignorance, and the Girl, Want

As we fight, claw, and gibber madly in the spiritual wasteland of Black Fridays, we fail to realize how black we really are; we are the inhumane processes of Dickensian London portrayed in A Christmas Carol that condemns its own children to poverty, disease, and despair:

"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

The bell struck twelve.

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.

And this realization of mine that our past generations have tried to build walls of inspiration and holiness and faith to protect the innocent, and we ourselves have not received this gift without debasing it and making it a wretchedness of material excess, leads me to a deep distaste for our ways and times.
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