The Spirit of Christmas I

Today we visited a fundraising event put on by the Bektash Shriners of Concord, New Hampshire, called the "Fez"tival of Trees. Every year one hundred and fifty persons, businesses, and organizations decorate Christmas trees and place them in the large Shriners' hall. Patrons purchase tickets (the price of which will go to the Shriners' charity work), and with their tickets can bid on their favorite trees. At the conclusion of the event, tickets are drawn as a raffle and the decorated trees go home with the winning patrons.

Gwendolyn and her grandparents had a ball taking in the lights, colors, and shapes adorning the trees. The Shriners put together a scavenger hunt for kids that Grandad and Gwendolyn completed before we put up our feet with hot chocolate and cider. To a three-and-a-half-almost-four-year-old the event was better than an amusement park.

I strolled around the hall, my infant son in his seat ogling quietly at the lights and colors. We passed trees decorated in snowman themes, others trimmed as shameless business promotions (an office of dentistry decked its tree with toothbrushes and toothpaste), and at least four streamed with red, white, and blue in patriotic fervor. One tree hosted a pile of tools beneath its boughs, the crown of which was a DeWalt chopsaw; next to that tree was a puddle of drool from all the men whose raffled tickets had gone into its pot. Some trees were gaudy, others garish, and many gorgeous.

None of them was Christian.

I noticed early a lack of images derived from the original meaning of the term "Christmas" ("Christ's Mass"). The sole icon of Christianity I saw was a four-by-three-inch creche ornament hung on a tree labelled "Classic Christmas Tree"; the same tree's branches held CDs of Beethoven and a boxed set of VHS "Lord of the Rings" films.

I should not be surprised. Yet by sheer probability (there were one hundred and fifty trees, remember) I anticipated a few that would honor the definition of Christmas as the arrival of Jesus the Christ into the world. But there was not a one.

I try to avoid the tired lament I hear too often in churchy circles about "putting Christ back in Christmas." It seems to me that this cry can hide a misguided desire to get mainstream culture to validate our faith by civil subscription. But I found the sentiment rising up in me out of this vast tide of Christmas-like decor and nearly finding its way to my lips. The bait-and-switch character of the "holidays" to which we are exposed around every winter solstice has begun to impress itself upon me. The dissonance has begun to make the teeth of my soul grind.

The solution? I am suspicious that shouting "Christ!" ever more loudly into the cacophony of holiday Masses may do nothing but irritate further everyone involved. Silence makes for a better resolution to dissonance.

Perhaps it is time for the Church to reclaim her story by the silence she knew for the first millennium of her existence. Perhaps it is time for us again to abstain completely from Christmas.

~ emrys

The Next Joan of Arc

Setting: At the supper table, three days ago.
Cast: Emrys, Sara, Precocious Three-And-A-Half-Year-Old "G"

G: Daddy?

E: Yes, My Lovely.

G: [points at huge FedEx box that arrived two days before, and has been sitting in kitchen] When are we going to open your package?

E: It's work stuff. I'm sure you would find it totally boring.

G: [slowly, deliberately, loudly] Is it paperwork?

[E & S laugh until they cough, then recover gradually]

E: I don't remember teaching you that word. Who taught you that word?

G: [nonchalant, returning to her meal] God.

E: [aside] I hate it when my kids go over my head.

Healed

At a gathering this morning I asked for prayer that my residual back pain from my incident 20 months ago be taken away. As of that prayer time, the twinges of pain are gone. God is still doing awesome things through Christ.

~ emrys

Le plus ca change,

le plus c'est la meme chose.

The latest alteration to our home's configuration is the migration of the "guest bed" (which is usually where Sara and I sleep when family guests sleep in our room) to what used to be the "office." A couple weeks ago I moved the "guest bed" out; in order to give it some small modicum of privacy, we decided to hang curtains to partition off the space. Here is the old "office" with "guest bed" taking up most of its floor space:

 Yes, you see right: that's my three-and-a-half year old using the studfinder on the wall. I think she was concerned about the arrangement of pictures on that wall.

Two curtains and one curtain-wire from Ikea, three holes in the wall, and about an hour later:

Voila! A guest room with a little privacy. We're dreaming of putting a Murphy bed on the left wall, so that we can use the floor space until guests arrive. But at present the Murphy bed is beyond our budget, and the curtains within it. So there we are.

~ emrys

Family

To celebrate my mom's birthday, we had her up to our place and treated her to supper out at our favorite rural-meets-urban restaurant: the Main Street Grill & Bakery in Afton. Since Chris lives only ninety minutes away for the time being, he popped over to join the fun.

~ emrys

Big Fat Lies?

Upon reading my lament about lowering my cholesterol and saturated fat intake, my brother sent me this link:

It is the first of a series of four videos which lay out an argument for why blaming heart disease on fat and cholesterol is wrong.

I'd love it if you would pursue an investigation of this argument with me, and let me know what you discover.

Shalom,
emrys

It's Time for a Change

I am no longer invincible.

This is my confession. Up until Friday, 5 October 2012, I have lived my life with bare audacious impunity. Like my fellow humans who live the same way, I have chosen a particular realm in which to express my impunity. That realm was fat.

Lipids. Long chemical chains with hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions which, when present in sufficient quantity in food, produce flavor.

Whenever possible, I chose cream over milk. I chose butter over margarine. Taking advantage of a metabolism that kept me rail-thin no matter what, I avoided low-fat products as if . . . they would kill me.

On Friday, the day of my pentannual checkup, my physician told me that my cholesterol and related numbers were up too high. Time to change my diet, he told me. Less cheese, less butter, less cream, less licking the spatula when making pie crust.

I am no longer invincible.

~ emrys

Counting Your Name

When asked to introduce herself, my daughter has begun to announce herself in a "name, rank, serial number" fashion: "Gwendolyn Hope Tyler, Big Sister, Three and a Half" [years old].

Recently, as we made our way toward bedtime, I asked Gwendolyn to pick out three stories to read. She replied, "Three and a half?"

Assuming this meant we would have four books, I assented and she went off to her room.

When I got there, a tall stack of books--many more than four--stood on the bed.

"Gwendolyn! I said three and a half books."

Gwendolyn gave me a look as if I were a bumbling dolt. "No, let me show you." She began to take books off the pile, counting them as she spoke: "Gwendolyn. Hope. Ty. Ler. Big. Sis. Ter. Three. And. A. Half." Eleven books, one for each toddling syllable in her title.

I laughed with joy. And then we sat down to read--the top four books on the pile.

~ emrys

My Father's Hand

Remember wide-ruled paper, with red lines for the margins? Remember putting a header with your name, the date, and the class on every sheet? It seems that this was the procedure as far back as 1948, when my dad took his 5th grade spelling tests:

This is yet another little find from the memorabilia I inherited from my dad. What strikes me more than the familiarity of the format and paper style is that of the handwriting. If we changed the names and dates to match my own 5th grade year, I could not now tell the difference between my dad's grammar-school penmanship and mine. By the time I knew him, Dad's handwriting was physician's scrawl; I've got my own peculiar version of chicken-scratch. But our young hands drew such familiar letters.

Is this a result of standardized training in penmanship (that did not change much between 1948 and 1986)? Or is much of handwriting in fact genetic?

~ emrys

Book Review: Transforming Evangelism

Transforming Evangelism, by David Gortner (2008), is one of the Episcopal Church's recent attempts to clarify and refashion the art of introducing others to Jesus Christ. The book covers a wide swath of theory about evangelism but does not neglect to go deep into practice. It offers not only well-thought-out grounds for how Christians offer the gospel of Jesus Christ, but also case studies and creative imaginings regarding how effective evangelism looks.

Like many books on evangelism in the North American Church today, Transforming Evangelism arises from a repugnant reaction to a widespread perception about evangelism. Many evangelistic efforts assert Christianity in terms that strike our culture as offensive. An extreme example of this trend is the annual group of believers who follow the Rose Parade in Pasadena with signs reading "Jesus or Hell" and "Repent: God Hates [choose your category]." As a result of this--and probably many less stark examples--a good proportion of both Christians and non-Christians believe that evangelism is, at its heart, an exercise in condemnation. Therefore regardless of what may come after it, the appearance of the word "evangelism" strikes fear into the hearts of people far and wide.

Another off-putting belief about evangelism, at least from the perspective of Christians, is that one does it out of duty. Jesus said to spread the good news, so I must do it out of obedience. Gone are the motivations of wonder and excitement of which we read in the New Testament. Instead has come a sense of obligation. One must pay taxes; one must go to the dentist; one must spread the good news. Transforming Evangelism seeks also to address this tendency in Christianity.

So, as the book's title intimates, evangelism must somehow be transformed into something that we Christians can do in good conscience. It seeks to re-establish the motivation for evangelism in gratitude to God for Christ's work in our lives. And it seeks to describe a way in which evangelism can be an offer to rather than and assertion upon the un-Christian. I found these goals proper and timely for the Church I know today.

Many of us who are disciples of Christ must examine our hearts to find what the Spirit is doing there on a regular basis. When we do, I believe, as this book asserts, that gratitude will become the proper and joyful foundation of every response we offer to God--from service to prayer to evangelism. Telling people they should believe in Jesus Christ solely out of duty seems hollow and pale compared to the powerful expansive witness that I see in the scriptures, and in a significant portion of my brothers and sisters of the faith. We do not invite people to cram themselves into a rigorous world of black and white; in Christ we find a celebration of God's explosive color. Transforming Evangelism brings this point out well.

In responding to the twin bugbears of evangelism, however, Transforming Evangelism threatens to toss the infant out with the slurry. The book attempts to redefine evangelism as something that is going on all the time in every person's life. (Here I might add that the book pulls up only short of a panentheistic view of the divine, which may lie behind the present problem.) To evangelize, then, is to get on board with what God is doing. This broad definition becomes so wide as to lose its point in the book. Witness the book's recitation of the story of St. Martin of Tours: Martin gave a beggar his cloak, then had a dream in which Christ affirmed his action. The book calls this an "evangelistic action" which transformed Martin himself. While the language of the scriptures would certainly affirm Martin's work as love, and would affirm Christ's appearance to him as theophany, it would not use the term "evangelism" for what happened.

The book also introduces the term "evangelistic listening." To listen to someone's story is to do evangelism. While listening is an essential skill of Christians, and preparation for an offer of the good news requires listening, "evangelistic listening" in the sense used here is uselessly oxymoronic. An essential part of the definition of "evangelism" is announcement, proclamation, telling (not just asking, listening, affirming). The good news of chicken on sale for $1.50 per pound is something one can proclaim to another. If I listen to your woes about only finding chicken for $2.30 per pound, and affirm your grief, and maybe offer to give you extra work so you can afford that expensive chicken, I may have served you well. But I have not offered you good news that will break into your chicken-buying world and introduce new possibilities.

We cannot shy away from the fact that evangelism is an introduction to a Person, and therefore has concrete, objective content. While true that some may not accept the invitation; while true that some--for their own reasons which ought not to trace back to our behavior--will be offended by Christ; while true that we will always be able to look back on a conversation and see ways we would rather have spoken; it is nonetheless true that evangelism is a proclamation of Jesus Christ. It is an announcement of his name, his lordship, and his role as savior. We may transform methods of evangelism. We may ask God to transform our hearts to do evangelism. But we may not transform this root of the good news without causing the vine to wither and die.

~ emrys