May 23, 2013 by Tess Martinus

Kyrie Eleison

The rumors are not true; I did not quit my blog in disgrace after finding out that I (Tess) was a Hufflepuff. I’ve just been busy doing things like writing and conditionally passing my PhD comprehensive exams. (Yes, I know a Ravenclaw would have gotten a high pass.) I do plan to return to a more regular blogging frequency, and I’m sure I’ll have lots to say about my summer activities, including my upcoming trip to LeakyCon Portland!!!

Today, I wanted to give you a devotional meditation in music, but I found out that I need to upgrade to a paid version of WordPress to insert music files into my posts, and that’s a step I’m not sure I’m ready to take. So I’m just going to give you track titles and you can look them up if you care to.

Kyrie Eleison means “Lord, have mercy” in Greek. The phrase, along with Christe Eleison (“Christ, have mercy”), is used frequently in Christian liturgy and often set to music. (There’s a Wikipedia article if you want all the technical details.) This week I realized that I have five versions of the Kyrie in my iTunes library, and not a single one of them is that Mr Mister song that you’ve probably heard (though I do enjoy that song). The five settings of the prayer that I have are radically different and illustrate the universality through time and through the world of the need to rely on God’s mercies, which, as Lamentations 3 says, are “new every morning.” Yes, as we learned in Awana, mercy is “God not giving me the punishment I deserve,” but mercy is not just something we receive once at salvation; we need it every day. Great is his faithfulness.

So here is a list of the five Kyries that I listen to often. I hope you can find them and listen to them; let me know if you have any trouble.

1. Palestrina, Missa Assumpta est Maria–“Kyrie”

Palestrina was a 16th-century composer of sacred music. This piece is for unaccompanied choir. It’s beautiful in a vaulted-stone-church kind of way. It reminds me of Christmas.

2. Mozart, Requiem in D Minor, K 626–“Kyrie, Kyrie”

This piece was written to be sung at rich people’s funerals, and that’s pretty much what it sounds like. Unlike the Palestrina version, this one is orchestrated. It’s dark, imposing, and sounds like it should be played at the climax of a dramatic film. (Ok, so I’m not a music critic!)

3. Fernando Ortega, “Kyrie I,” from the album Come Down O Love Divine

Fernando Ortega is, hands down, my favorite “contemporary Christian” solo artist (don’t get the wrong idea from that descriptor), and I really love this 2011 album, which combines instrumental pieces, choral numbers, traditional hymns, new settings of parts of the liturgy, and even a clip from a Billy Graham sermon. This opening track on the album features a very contemporary-sounding tune, but it’s still quiet and reverential, and it showcases Fernando’s wonderful voice and piano-playing.

4. Fernando Ortega, “Kyrie II” (same album)

On the other hand, this is a brief a capella choir piece in which Fernando’s voice isn’t heard at all (unless he’s in the choir). Stylistically, it harks back to the Palestrina version. It isn’t my favorite choral piece on this album (that distinction goes to the “Sanctus”), but it’s still lovely.

5. David Crowder Band, “God Have Mercy (Kyrie Eleison),” from Give Us Rest or (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys])

This one was also written for a requiem, but it couldn’t possibly be any more different from the Mozart version. It’s one of those mid-tempo but beat-driven songs that you can’t quite dance to but can sort of do a seated groove to. As you’d expect from a Crowder Band song, it has all kinds of experimental electronic sounds, plus a few additional lyrics, but the essential prayer is still there. I absolutely love this album, by the way; it was one of my favorites of 2012. Don’t let the highly parenthetical title deter you. Oh, by the way, the very next track after “God Have Mercy” is a Johnny Cash cover. No kidding.

Well, if you listen to any of the music, let me know what you think!

April 13, 2013 by Tess Martinus

Another schizophrenic post

Hi, this is Tess. I just want to say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I’ve just been sorted into a house on Pottermore, and the Sorting Hat has placed me in Hufflepuff. Needless to say, I feel a bit conflicted about this decision. I have no problem with Hufflepuff. I like Cedric Diggory. I like Professor Sprout. I like black and yellow (for a variety of reasons). And I don’t believe all the slander about Hufflepuff being a house for duffers. Nevertheless, as you can imagine, the sorting has thrown me into a quandary about a lot of things–major things. Like my Ravenclaw scarf. And my identity.

But I should clarify that while Tess Stockslager may be a Hufflepuff, Penelope Clearwater is still a lifelong Ravenclaw. And therefore, nothing essential will change about this blog. So you can ease your minds about that, dear readers.

March 30, 2013 by Tess Martinus

The Easter Post: Resurrection vs. Reanimation

This will be a quick post in which I don’t intend to say anything new or profound, except in the sense that the gospel is always profound. I just think the co-occurrence of The Walking Dead‘s season finale with Easter Sunday is too good an opportunity to pass up. If you’re a TWD fan, you’ve probably already noticed this conjuncture and have been tweeting little jokes about it all week. While I can appreciate this subcategory of morbidly irreverent humor, I want to remind us all of a few basic yet important truths.

We often forget that Christ’s resurrection means our resurrection too. Do a search on occurrences of the term “first-fruits” in the Bible–in the Old Testament, you’ll get instructions about bringing your produce to the temple, but in the New Testament, you’ll find all kinds of good doctrine, most if not all from Paul, about how Christ’s resurrection was only the first in a series of resurrections. There will indeed be a day when “all who are in the graves will hear his voice and come forth” (John 5:28-29). It sounds a lot like a Romero-esque scenario in which “the dead will walk the earth,” EXCEPT THAT THEY WON’T BE DEAD. The difference between reanimation–when corpses become mobile–and resurrection–when formerly dead people live again–couldn’t be more pronounced.

So when you watch The Walking Dead tomorrow night and you see all those rotting bodies stumbling around outside the gate of the prison where our friends are holed up, don’t think for a minute that this is what the Bible means when it talks about the defeat of death. There won’t be anything creepy about the resurrection, just like there isn’t anything creepy about having an Easter sunrise service in a cemetery (I saw a sign for one of those while driving past Alta Vista, VA, yesterday). And when you attend a church service tomorrow morning, as I hope you do (whether it’s at sunrise or not), don’t think for a minute that Christ’s resurrection was just a past event that’s nice to remember but that has no effect on the present or future.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” I Corinthians 15:58

March 10, 2013 by Tess Martinus

Ghosts by Gaslight

Last night my brother Mark and I went to our second Gaslight Anthem concert, this one in downtown Raleigh’s tiny Lincoln Theater, a perfect venue for getting up close and personal with rock and roll. On the way home, I remarked that I’ve noticed that The Gaslight Anthem’s songs are constantly referring to ghosts. Mark added that they tend to write about radios a lot as well. I’ll let Mark treat the symbolic valences of radios (maybe he could do that on his podcast, Does Anyone Really Need to Hear This?), but let me give you a few of my thoughts on the ghost imagery in the Gaslight canon.

First of all, it’s everywhere. Here are just a few samples from last year’s album Handwritten:

“I danced with your ghost” (“45”)
“All of our heroes were failures or ghosts” (“Biloxi Parish”)
“I already live with too many ghosts” (“National Anthem”)

I’m sure a thorough or even a cursory listen through the catalog would turn up many more examples.

Invariably, these ghosts aren’t spirits of dead people returned to complete unfinished business. In the Gaslight Anthem universe, which looks a lot like a Christian universe much of the time, the dead go On (to echo Albus Dumbledore). This is very clear in the masterful requiem “The ’59 Sound” (“when we float out into the ether/into the everlasting arms”) and in “Biloxi Parish,” one of the few almost cheerful songs on the new album (“when you pass through from this world/I hope you ask to take me with you/or that I don’t have to wait too long”).

No, the ghosts in The Gaslight Anthem’s repertoire are memories–not mere memories, for as the songs heart-wrenchingly demonstrate, memories are powerful and, far too often, malevolent. I can think of only one example in which ghost imagery is positive, and it’s “Biloxi Parish” again. In that song, which I think is highly romantic, I don’t think the line “I will eventually haunt you” is meant to be sinister. But that’s the exception. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the main theme of all of TGA’s music is figuring out how to go on living in the shadows of a devastating past–the shadow of a failure of a father, the shadow of a burned-out New Jersey factory, the shadows of girls named Virginia and Maria.

The ghost references go all the way back to the first album (“like I was a ghost in your dreams” in “Red in the Morning”) and are used to convey a number of different ideas. For example, “Old Haunts” (which I always thing of as The Gaslight Anthem’s more depressing answer to Bruce Springsteen’s already-sad “Glory Days”) is about people who voluntarily become ghosts by refusing to move forward, always falling back on “if you’d have known me when.” Even when they’re not using the word “ghost,” The Gaslight Anthem are singing about ghosts: “Keepsake,” the saddest song on the latest album, is about exorcising those angry memories–or, to use the song’s own metaphor, burying them deep at the bottom of a river. Another theme addressed without explicitly employing the ghost imagery, though the allusion is certainly there, is the determination to avoid creating haunting memories for others. This is why the speaker in “The Spirit of Jazz” asks so earnestly, “Was I good to you/the wife of my youth?”

If all these ghost lyrics were accompanied by minor keys and funereal tempos, they would be maudlin. But many of The Gaslight Anthem’s most haunted songs are among their loudest, fastest, and most danceable. Part of this, I think, is defiance: Hey ghosts, you can’t stop me from playing rock and roll. But also, maybe–I don’t want to presume to read something that isn’t there–maybe there’s also some hope for what we’ll find after we hear our “favorite song one last time.”

March 5, 2013 by Tess Martinus

The Bad Guy Report 2012

This past Saturday, after I watched Skyfall for the second time, I had some clever thoughts that I believe deserve to be turned into a blog post. I realize that it’s a little late to be doing 2012 year-in-review summaries, but in my defense, several of the movies I’ll be referencing are probably still in your local cheap second-run theater. So here it is: The Bad Guy Report.

The year 2012 proved interesting in the villain department. For example, in The Amazing Spiderman, we saw Luna Lovegood’s dad stop trying to recreate the lost diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw and move to bigger, higher-tech mad scientist projects, which led to his turning himself into a Godzilla-type creature who enjoyed ravaging New York City. (By the way, the actor in question may have roles he’d rather be known for than his ten-minute appearance in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One, but I persist in calling him Xenophilius Lovegood because it’s a lot easier to pronounce than his real name, Rhys Ifans.)

Speaking of summer supervillains, this year Batman finally met an opponent with an equally incomprehensible voice. It’s a good thing most of the confrontational scenes between the Dark Knight and his nemesis, Bane (I guess I could have just said “his b/Bane”), involved more punching than talking. Despite Bane’s sad backstory, Steelers fans worldwide will hate him forever for destroying Heinz Field just to prove something we already knew: Even a giant fissure opening up in the middle of the field couldn’t stop Hines Ward.

Moving on to movies upon which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deigned to bestow their notice, Django Unchained featured Leonardo DiCaprio’s first truly villainous role. Seriously, Leo, you’re 38 years old; it was about time you played something other than a golden boy. Well, to be fair, I suppose Howard Hughes wasn’t, strictly speaking, a golden boy; nor was that guy from Shutter Island. But it’s good (in a troubling way, I guess) to see that DiCaprio can cross nimbly over to the dark side when called upon to do so. From what I understand (I haven’t seen the film yet), he does it convincingly. Oh, speaking of bad guys in Django Unchained, what’s this I hear about Jonah Hill playing a member of the KKK? I didn’t think the Klan allowed Jewish participants, let alone sweet-looking baby-faced Jewish boys. I’ll have to see that to believe it.

2012 was also an important year for bad guy philosophy. Wreck-It Ralph is essentially an extended commentary on the interaction (and sometimes the vast disparity) between the roles we have to play and who we really are at our core. You probably saw the trailer with the bad guy support group a million times, but the words of the hairy wrestler Zangief bear repeating: “You are bad guy. But that doesn’t mean you are bad guy.” (N.B. I never figured out what was so bad about Zangief, other than the fact that he left out his indefinite articles.) And if you’ll indulge me in one more profound quote, this one from an unnamed zombie: “Good…bad…UGHHHH [zombie sound]. You must love you.”

Now it’s time for the bad guy move of the year. You know, villains are just like professionals in any field; they exchange ideas through trade publications, discussion boards, etc. (I was going to say conferences, but they generally don’t like to be in the same room with each other, except in the unusual situation described in the preceding paragraph.) So some years, you might see two movie villains employing the same strategy, both to great effect. The 2012 bad guy move of the year is as follows: Get yourself captured and placed inside a glass case right in the middle of the good guy headquarters. Smile unsettlingly and taunt the good guys. Eventually, when it’s too late for them to do anything about it, allow them to develop the inkling of the idea that you are exactly where you want to be. Then, escape and wreak general havoc.

Does this strategy sound familiar? It should, since it was used by two of the most memorable villains of the year, Loki in The Avengers and Silva in Skyfall. I didn’t notice the resemblance until the second time I saw Skyfall, which is proof that 2012’s bad guy move of the year is fully customizable to a variety of personalities, styles, and situations–although it seems to work best for villains who fall into the category of mischief maker (as opposed to, say, mad scientist or power-hungry politician). And now that I’ve mentioned mischief makers, it is perhaps beginning to dawn on you that a very similar strategy, though without the glass case, was used by the ultimate bad guy of the past decade. Remember? “I want my phone call”? In case you need your memory jogged, I’ll close this report with a video clip. After you’ve marveled at the brilliance of this truly frightening 2008 villain, let me know some of your favorite bad guy moments of 2012.

February 11, 2013 by Tess Martinus

Boycott Saturday

My recent post titles seem quite revolutionary: first we resisted the Oscars; now we’re–what? Boycotting everyone’s favorite day of the week? Not exactly. I don’t have a problem with the day itself, but with its name. Here’s why: Saturday is the only weekday named after a Roman deity (Saturn). English is a Germanic language, doggone it. We don’t need any of that Latin crap.

As a review, our other days are named after, respectively, the sun, the moon (note that these are good Anglo-Saxon words–we don’t say Solisday or Lunaday), Tyr (Norse god of war), Woden (the German version of the more familiar Norse god Odin All-Father), Thor (sexy god of thunder), and Freya (goddess of love and beauty and also dead people slain in battle). In other words, the English names of the first six days of the week make you want to go read the Elder Edda while listening to Led Zeppelin.

And then we get to Saturday, which is named after…the depressing Roman god of winter and old age and irony? (To prove my point, if you don’t know what the word saturnine means, look it up; it’ll make you want to lie in bed all next Saturday, even if you don’t normally do that.) That’s lame. I think we need to have a good Northern name for the final day of our week. I’m sitting here with a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. She clearly favors the Greeks and Romans (Norse mythology gets 15 measly pages), but at least her cursory summary will help refresh my memory. Here are some replacement names I would like to propose.

Baldersday. I’m actually surprised there isn’t a day named after Balder. He’s the Christ figure in Norse mythology. Balder was killed with mistletoe, but according to Wikipedia the all-wise, “after Ragnarök [the Norse Armageddon; cf. Led Zeppelin]. . . he and his brother Höðr would be reconciled and rule the new earth together with Thor’s sons” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldr). Baldersday would be a fitting name to mark the dying of the old week and the imminent rise of the new one, like the phoenix from the ashes. But the phoenix is Greek, so never mind.

Valkyriesday. Cue the Wagner music. You know the Valkyries–they’re the “maidens” (Hamilton’s quaint word) who show up after battles and get to pick which warriors they want to take to Valhalla. On second thought, this might not be a good choice. The day formerly know as Saturday could become very dangerous.

Lokisday. Speaking of dangerous. You saw what Loki tried to do to our planet in The Avengers. He’s also the one who killed Balder with mistletoe.* Loki is a shape-shifter and the closest thing Asgard has to a trickster deity (the Norse were a little too serious for an all-out joker), so at least we could say that the last day of the week would be…er…exciting, and a little more unpredictable than Valkyriesday. On Valkyriesday, you would definitely die and might or might not get to go to Valhalla. On Lokisday, you might die. But you might not.

Heimdallsday. Heimdall is the guy Thor yelled at to “open the Bifrost,” remember? (All I could think of during that scene was “Beam me up, Scottie.”) But his name is way too unwieldy (that’s a good Anglo-Saxon word) for a day of the week, so forget it.

I haven’t suggested Freyrsday or Friggasday because those would be too similar to Friday. (Actually, according to Hamilton, some people think Friday was named after Frigga, Odin’s wife, rather than Freya; either way, it’s named after a goddess. Go women!) I hope it’s apparent that this is all tongue-in-cheek; I’m really not one of those would-be purifiers of the English language. I just watched Thor over the weekend and am getting ready to teach a lesson on words derived from mythology in my Advanced Reading and Vocabulary Development class. But seriously, think about it this coming Saturday.

*Actually, Loki didn’t do the dirty work himself; he got this blind guy named Hoder to throw the mistletoe at Balder. Typical.

January 17, 2013 by Tess Martinus

Oscar Resistance 2013

As you know if you followed my blog last year around this time, I have a love-hate relationship with the Academy Awards. I love discussing them, watching them with friends in a party-like atmosphere, and competing with my family to see who can predict them the most accurately. This year, I have a new activity to love: watching as many Oscar-nominated movies as possible in one weekend with my friend and fellow blogger Allison (allisonscoles.wordpress.com) and some other friends. Here’s what I hate: the Academy’s narrow and outdated ideas of what a nomination-worthy film looks like. I also bear a pointless hatred toward the practical constraints of an awards show; I wish every good movie that came out in the past year could get a nod. Yes, the ceremony would be really long, but I would watch it!

Over the past week, I have gone to the local second-run theater to see three movies that will not be winning any Oscars this year because they weren’t nominated. Even though I didn’t plan this “Oscar Resistance,” as I’m now calling it because it sounds AWESOME (cue that song by Muse), it will serve as a nice counterpoint to the above-mentioned event, Allison’s “Moviepalooza.” And now I’m going to tell you about the movies I saw.

1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I saw this on strong recommendation from my two siblings and my mother, none of whom are teenagers. So I figured it wouldn’t be just a cliched teen angst movie, and I was right. All of the main characters are in high school, but the problems they face–and this is a movie, like most good movies, about people with problems–aren’t unique to teenagers; they’re human problems. As you can probably guess from the title, one of those problems involves finding a few people you can feel comfortable with, so that you can be okay with not “fitting in,” whatever that means. If you’ve never faced this problem, you are one of a very few fortunate people, and you probably won’t get this movie. If you have faced this problem, whatever your age, this movie will probably make you cry. The carefully chosen songs on the soundtrack are a large part of that; so is the excellent acting. Logan Lerman broke my heart (I mean that in a good way). And if, like me, you’re a Harry Potter fan wondering how Emma Watson will fare playing an American Muggle, have no fear; she’s great. But I do have to admit that when her character, Sam, admitted to completely bombing her SATs, my first thought was that Hermione would never do that.

2. Here Comes the Boom. Okay, look. I know this movie doesn’t deserve a single Oscar nomination. But neither was it a complete waste of my time. There is an in-between, you know. Some movies don’t want to win Oscars, and that’s fine. I do have a slight beef with the way Here Comes the Boom was advertised; it was made out to look like a zany comedy, and it was actually more of an inspirational teacher movie plus an inspirational sports movie, with some zany comedy thrown in. As with most films from the above-named genres, I was asked to accept a few improbabilities, but Kevin James as a mixed martial arts fighter was actually not one of them; the guy has muscles. Who knew? The other notable cast member was Henry Winkler as a somewhat pathetic but lovable and very funny baggy sweater-wearing music teacher. Between the teachers in this movie and Paul Rudd’s character in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I was just full of inspiration for my first week of spring classes.

3. Hitchcock. Now here’s a movie that may have been trying for a few Oscar nominations. In fact, Helen Mirren was deservedly nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as Alfred Hitchcock’s talented and long-suffering wife, Alma Reville. Probably the reason why this film ended up flying under the Academy radar is that it isn’t a DRAMA. There were no tears, no screaming (except when one character was getting stabbed…in a shower)–it was actually a pretty conventional love story between two people who share thirty years of marriage. The context in which the love story takes place, however, is rather unconventional: it’s the making of Psycho, complete with quirky actors, cantankerous censors, and some trippy magical-realist scenes in which Hitchcock (you can call him Hitch; everyone in the movie does) voyeuristically observes and converses with Ed Gein, the real-life, significantly less sympathetic (mainly because he isn’t cute) version of Norman Bates. I believe my own familiarity with Psycho helped my enjoyment of Hitchcock, but my aunt and cousin with whom I saw Hitchcock had never seen Psycho and still had a good time. (Oh, if you’re worried about spoilers, you may want to avert your eyes frequently. But seriously, Psycho has been out for 53 years; you have no excuse.) As the title character, Anthony Hopkins does an excellent job, as always. Even putting his acting aside, he deserves some props for gaining an alarming amount of weight for this role. (I thought the Academy liked that kind of stuff, altering your appearance and all that? But maybe they didn’t want to be seen to condone obesity. Heaven forbid.)

Well, this post is entirely too long. I apologize. I invite you to join the Oscar Resistance by watching some recent films that didn’t get the blessing of the Academy. And remember, you can be part of the resistance and still go see the nominees–I’m going to see Les Miserables next week.

January 5, 2013 by Tess Martinus

There and back again

No, this is not a review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, although I will take this opportunity to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, enough to see it twice. Look, if the ambivalent hype has made you skittish about seeing it, just remember that you’ll be in the capable hands of Peter Jackson. Has he ever let you down before (at least when it comes to Tolkien material)? And if you start getting cold feet during the lengthy prologue, just stick it out a bit longer, and you’ll spend the rest of the movie in the charming company of the absolutely delightful Martin Freeman. And that’s all I have to say about that.

Actually, the title of this post is a reference to a post called “Returning” that I wrote nearly a year ago. It was mostly about the themes of restoration and homecoming as they appear in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I didn’t know it then, of course, but those themes in general, along with the story of the prodigal son, ended up being prominent in my mental and spiritual landscape throughout 2012.

For example, there was the David Crowder Band’s epic two-disc farewell album, Give Us Rest or (a requiem mass in c [the happiest of all keys]). In a year that saw the release of some great albums, this was one of my favorites, not only because I love a good requiem (Mozart’s is wonderful), but also because so many of the songs are on that theme of returning, which is one way of looking at the death of a saint. In fact, one of the songs is called “A Return,” and it mainly consists of the repeated lyric “the son has come home/we’re rejoicing.” I usually just call it “the prodigal son song.”

Then I read Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. (FYI: I’ve read all of his novels now except for Barnaby Rudge, which I plan to read soon. Perhaps a Dickens mega-review when I’m finished?) Of the many memorable characters in that novel, the one who haunted me the longest after I finished reading was Charlie Hexam, a prodigal son who never returns. Dickens characters usually get some sort of closure; they may come to a good end or a bad end, but the point is that they come to an end. Charlie doesn’t. After he formally renounces his family, he disappears into the bureaucratic machine of the Victorian educational system, and we never hear from him again. It may be a minor plot line, but I read it as a frightening cautionary tale.

After I had been thinking about these themes for a while, I got the opportunity to teach a month of lessons in the 5th-6th grade girls’ Awana club I was volunteering in at the time. One night, I decided to tell the story of the prodigal son and focus on the older son, who’s just as lost as his little pig-slopping brother. Lo and behold, the issue of Christianity Today that I received that very day included a reflection on that very topic, and I was able to incorporate the author’s thoughts into my lesson.

These things may not seem like a big deal, but they provided something like mental background music for me all year. I even wrote a little poem in October about the different types of prodigal sons. It would be nice if I could provide examples of the way that this theme affected my life in visible ways, but I’m not sure if that happened. Or maybe I won’t be able to see that it happened until I get some distance from 2012.

There’s a Bible verse that keeps popping into my mind because it has the word “returning” in it, but it also has four other major nouns. The verse is Isaiah 30:15, in which God, “the Holy One of Israel,” says to his people, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” It’s too early to say, but maybe one of those other nouns will become my theme for 2013. I know that rest and confidence, in particular, are things I want more of, and nobody’s keeping them from me but me.

This post has been more self-reflective (you might say navel-gazing) than I usually like to be on this blog. So let’s make this a conversation–do you ever choose or discover a theme for a given period of time in your life? I would love to hear some of them (and possibly borrow one from you).

December 15, 2012 by Tess Martinus

About yesterday, and about Christmas

Yesterday after I heard about the elementary school shooting (a phrase that should never have entered the language) in Newtown, Connecticut, I tweeted a link to Dylan Thomas’s poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” which is about the inadequacy and, often, the inappropriateness of words in the face of death, especially the death of a child. I hope that in the following comments I will not violate the spirit of his poem or dishonor the victims, that I will not “murder / the mankind of [their] going with a grave truth” (14-15).

One of the most striking things about this event is how close it happened to Christmas. A friend of mine mentioned last night that the children’s parents had probably already bought their presents. This certainly makes what happened all the more horrible, but we shouldn’t be shocked that someone could do something like this during the holiday season. Sometimes we (that is, Western civilization in general) think that people magically become more charitable or at least more “decent” at Christmastime. Charles Dickens, in A Christmas Carol, played a large role in creating this misconception. In the story, it is the spirit (literally) of Christmas itself that brings about an unforeseen, quick, and complete transformation in Scrooge. Though I love A Christmas Carol, I think Dickens is wrong–which is not something I say very often, so this is important.

Christmas does not make us better people. Christ does. This is called sanctification, and it takes a long time and can be difficult. The statistics we hear every year about depression at Christmas, and now yesterday’s shooting, are evidence that the month of December has no special power to transform lives. Only the one whose birth we celebrate at Christmas can do this.

I’m not trying to be cynical. If our favorite things about Christmas–the music, the decorations, the gift-giving–prompt those of us who are Christians to act like what we are being transformed into–the image of Christ–so much the better. And even better if our celebration of Christmas becomes an act of witness-bearing, to give those who do not yet know Christ a glimpse of what the world might look like if all people were restored to what we were created to be, and still have the potential to be: God’s children. But the music, the decorations, the gifts are only symbols. Symbols are powerful, but they can’t do what Christ can.

Another mistake we make at Christmas is to forget that Christ has promised a second Advent. The first time Jesus came, the time we celebrate at Christmas, he didn’t fix everything that was wrong with the world. Of course, he changed everything; he gave us a way back to God. But the world is still broken. Children still die.

This Christmas, I hope you remember that Christ has promised to come again and fulfill the rest of the Messianic prophecies we read at this time of year. Someday he will come and set the world right. There won’t be any more elementary school shootings. There won’t be any death at all. And “of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end” (Isaiah 9:7).

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