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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Bonsai Willows of Ritual as Repetitive and Recursive Functions

Willow Bonsai

I have a post on Ritual considered as a bonsai willow; how we miniaturize the large in order to be able to see it from every angle. We use ritual to fix and prune the Holy into a an easily handled size, then we may put it in a box, or a series of boxes, and open them up once a week, or twice a year, put the contents on display, and then re-package them to wait in their limbo.
Having said that, it seems to me that intelligent beings are forever on the verge of an epidemic of creativity for good or for ill: new ways to help mankind versus new ways to destroy new arts versus new pornography, etc.

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2009/04/meaning-of-ritual.html

It is the latter tendency that leads us to imprison ourselves within dogmas (we shall not speak of civil laws here and now). We make our beliefs defined, consistent, coherent -- all of which intelligence very often is not! -- and we make it repetitive and predictable. It is machine-like and utterly predictable, and thereby allays our fears.

It should be defined, but not well-defined. It should be repetitive, but not recursive. If we look into the universe and it seem indifferent to us, we need to be educated on how to stand on our own two feet, rather than putting a cap on our fears by handing over our birthright of creative intelligence to prison guards holding new straight jackets for us.

We all draw, we all paint, we all dance, we all play; not all of us are professional artists of a certain type of conscious expression, but we all do it. So do we all confront the Holy, and the only coaches, managers, tutors, and mentors we have are the ones standing by with holy books and holding the keys of our spiritual cells!

"Ritual" Seen As A Bonsai WiIlow

Willow Bonsai

Jesus said the kingdom of heaven was the inheritance of the Poor.
His Mother sang that the Almighty will thrust the mighty and rich from their thrones, and then raise up the lowly, thereby turning the profane world upside down!

Jesus said the Peacemakers are the children of God.

How do we deal with the poor and homeless in today's world?

How do we deal with war and peace?

The manner in which we, the USA, deal in public with these issues is reflected in and is a reflection of our religious beliefs. We do not feel the divine compulsion to go up to the high country and listen to that Sermon on the Mount too often.

"Ritual" is the setting aside of space and time, moving it from the profane to the sacred. For example,when we deal with the poor, we have special times: food drives, Sunday sermons; all compact and perfect within themselves, yet not pervading our entire lives.

By setting aside special times and spaces, by not letting the great teaching pervade our lives, we create the separation of religion and life. We set up small rooms of devotion, and then we tend to use our extra religious "furniture" - way too much for the one small room - in our profane and non-churchly pursuits...because we think we have seen the Holy in its entirety.

By establishing special times and special places for God, we restrict holiness into those small rooms.
By restricting God thus, we find ourselves able to look about the small room into which we pushed the divine and fancy that we see everything there is.
Thus, we feel we know all the aspects of the divine.
Thus, we create Ritual, and Ritualistic Icons: Yoda, Neo, martial arts with a spiritual bullet.

Ritual is akin to a cutting, a pruning...not to promote luxuriant growth, but to restrict and domesticate the wild; to bring the forest into the domicile.

Think of your Ritual as Bonsai: small, restricted; it will not grow beyond bounds and infect the entire universe with its virus of freedom and life. It is an Icon.
When the Icon substitutes for the reality, then we see the world of today in the USA and around the globe.

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The later post in 2011:    http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/willow-bonsai-original-post.html
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