Paschal Thoughts

I'm back! Apologies to people following this blog but life has been very busy for me over the last couple of months and I've been plagued with IT problems too. But I'm back at last and hope to do more regular blogging in future. For now I just want to reflect on some aspects of the  rituals celebrating Easter or Pascha, as most of the non-Anglophone world  know the feast of Christ's Resurrection.

This year I did the full Easter/Pascha Triduum, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday night. It's the latter that I want to comment on. If you've never done the Vigil mass in either it's Roman or Anglican (rite) forms then I should explain that it includes a long series of readings from scripture, usually starting with Genesis 1, the account of the seven days of creation. I want to say some more about that but before I do I want to take a sidetrack into some history. After the Vigil Mass I wondered about the history of the rituals and the readings included in it. In particular I was interested in the antiquity of Genesis 1 as a Paschal reading. I didn't have to go far; Wikipedia has a quite comprehensive article on the Easter Vigil, especially as celebrated in the West. What was most fascinating was this:

The original twelve Old Testament readings for the Easter Vigil survive in an ancient manuscript belonging to the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. The Armenian Easter Vigil also preserves what is believed to be the original length of the traditional gospel reading of the Easter Vigil, i.e., from the Last Supper account to the end of the Gospel according to Matthew.

In the earliest Jerusalem usage the vigil began with Psalm 117 [118] sung with the response, "This is the day which the Lord has made." Then followed twelve Old Testament readings, all but the last being followed by a prayer with kneeling.

(1) Genesis 1:1--3:24 (the story of creation); (2) Genesis 22:1-18 (the binding of Isaac); (3) Exodus 12:1-24 (the Passover charter narrative); (4) Jonah 1:1--4:11 (the story of Jonah); (5) Exodus 14:24--15:21 (crossing of the Red Sea); (6) Isaiah 60:1-13 (the promise to Jerusalem); (7) Job 38:2-28 (the Lord's answer to Job); (8) 2 Kings 2:1-22 (the assumption of Elijah); (9) Jeremiah 31:31-34 (the new covenant); (10) Joshua 1:1-9 (entry into the Promised Land); (11) Ezekiel 37:1-14 (the valley of dry bones); (12) Daniel 3:1-29 (the story of the three youths).

The twelfth reading leads into the Song of the Three Children

The Song of the Three Children is from Greek Daniel, part of what Protestants term the Apocrypha, but which is included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments. But I'm really more interested in Genesis right now. Unfortunately the Wikipedia article doesn't say how old this manuscript and cycle of readings are but I guess ancient means pretty old, way back in the first millennium, likely dating from the days of the Christian Roman Empire, 4th, 5th or 6th centuries. Here, Genesis 1 is combined with the second creation story, that of Adam and Eve, Eden and the Fall. There's a logic there in that Christ's death and resurrection are believed to have undone the effects of the Fall. Christ is also understood as the New Adam (and Mary, his mother, the new Eve). I find it interesting that the modern day Roman rite Easter vigil does not include a place for the Eden narratives. When I say modern I should also point out that while there have been important changes to the Roman Easter Vigil rite on two occasions in the last 70 odd years the actual suite of readings has been the norm for many centuries. Interestingly, from the Wikipedia article it seems that the Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) rite has likewise dropped the Eden narratives from its Vesperal liturgy for Holy Saturday, reading only Genesis 1: 1-13, the first three days of creation.

Here are the lists of readings for the Roman and Byzantine rites:

Roman 1. Genesis 1:-2:2; 2. Genesis 22:1-18; 3. Exodus 14:15-15:1; 4. Isaiah 54:4a.5-14; 5. Isaiah 55:1-11; 6. Baruch 3:9-15, 32-4:4; 7. Ezekiel 36:16-17a, 18-28.

Byzantine 1. Genesis 1:1-13; 2. Isaiah 60:1-16; 3. Exodus 12:1-11; 4. Jonah 1:1-4:11; 5. Joshua 5:10-15; 6. Exodus 13:20-15:19; 7. Zephaniah 3:8-15; 8. 1 King 17:8-24; 9. Isaiah 61:10-62:5; 10. Genesis 22:1-18; 11. Isaiah 61:1-9; 12. 2 Kings 4:8-37; 13. Isaiah 63:11-64:5; 14. Jeremiah 31:31-34; 15. Daniel 3:1-68.

The Roman rite has reduced the number of readings, at the same time adding new ones while the Byzantine has simply increased the readings by adding to them.

But what are common to all three lists are the first creation story, the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1-18) and the Crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:24--15:21). The binding of Isaac makes complete sense. Early Christians understood the near sacrifice of Isaac to prefigure the sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross. The crossing of the Red Sea is a bit more obscure. Yes, it relates to Passover, from which Christian Pascha/Easter is derived but if Christ is the Lamb surely the earlier passage Exodus 12:1-24, the Charter of Passover (as the Wikipedia article puts it), would be more appropriate, given the central role of the paschal lamb there and the importance of paschal lamb imagery in the Christian context. In the Roman rite Vigil, the prayer following the reading, states that the crossing of the Red Sea  represents the waters of baptism by which the new Israel, the Christian believers, are delivered from sin and death so the text is thus reconfigured by the prayer in a symbolic and ritual way.

But what is most important here is the sea. A number of scholars have observed over the years that the Exodus account of the crossing of the Red Sea contains echoes or might even be a reworking of more ancient Middle eastern mythologies of the battle between a deity and the sea. In the Ugarit Ba'al cycle, the god Ba'al does battle with the Sea god, Yam (Yam means sea in both Hebrew and Ugaritic). Ba'al goes on to do battle with Mot, the god of death. Ba'al then dies and is restored to life. The Jewish scriptures contain many references and allusions to the battle with the sea or the sea-monster (Leviathan/Rahab), in this case the protagonist is YHWH, the LORD, the god of Israel. It's referred to frequently in the Psalms, alluded to in the answer to Job, and of course is the background to the Jonah story too (and in the ancient list of Paschal Vigil readings, Jonah precedes the Exodus account of the Red Sea crossing). We don't know the ritual context of the Ba'al cycle but we do for another major chaoskampf myth of the region, the battle of Marduk with Tiamat in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth cycle. Marduk creates the world out of the broken body of Tiamat; the Enuma Elish was recited/chanted as part of the Babylonian New Year rituals.

In the ancient world the New Year was associated with the equinox, spring or autumn. The ancient Persian New Year, Now Roz, is still celebrated at the spring equinox. Even in medieval Christendom the civil year began with the feast of the Annunciation in March i.e. the spring equinox. (And likewise Aries is the first sign of the zodiac in western astrology because it's the sign that conjoins the spring equinox). However, the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah was celebrated at the autumnal equinox. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement was an important day of the  Jewish New Year cycle. Atonement rituals were important parts of ancient Middle Eastern religions and often were key parts of the New Year rituals. What the New Year rituals signified was the renewal, re-creation of the cosmos. Atonement rituals, as in the Jewish Yom Kippur, could play a key part because they performed the healing of the cosmos as part of the start of a new cycle of the year. Scapegoat rituals, as in the one associated with the Jewish Yom Kippur, were also a frequent aspect of the atonement performances.

Listening to the cadences of Genesis 1 at the Easter Vigil the other night, I could easily imagine it recited or chanted at the New Year rituals of Rosh Hashanah in the ancient Temples at Jerusalem and Ha Gerizim. But what's it doing at Easter/Pascha, a Christian feast derived from the Jewish Pesach/Passover? Well, both Jewish Pesach and the Christian Pascha are associated with, set by the spring equinox. In the Jewish calendar Pesach falls in Nisan, the first month of the Jewish year (the autumnal Rosh Hashanah, New Year, actually falls in Tishrei, the 7th month of the Jewish calendar). In other words Pesach is itself a kind of New Year festival, and the New Year associations are given away by the Exodus account of the crossing of the Red Sea, and indeed the whole narrative of the Exodus, which portrays the LORD doing battle with Pharaoh, culminating with the defeat and destruction of Pharaoh in the sea, recalling those ancient Levantine myths in which the deity does battle with the sea or the sea-monster.

Whether or not Nisan was originally the month of the Jewish New Year is not important. What is important is that the Passover narrative and the rituals of Pesach carry strong resonances of the creation and chaoskampf mythologies of the New Year and Atonement. One could say that while Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur celebrate the re-creation, restoration and renewal of the cosmos, Pesach celebrates the re-creation, restoration and renewal of the Israelite community. Unlike Rosh Hashanah, Pesach was one of the three ancient pilgrimage feasts when the people were expected , if possible to journey to the Temple (Jerusalem or Ha Gerizim) to celebrate Pesach there, a bit like the annual Hajj to Mecca in Islam. Pesach was and is celebrated by the community as a whole unlike Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur which were celebrated in the Temple by specifically priestly rituals.

But then why has Genesis 1 been maintained as a key text of the Christian Paschal rites especially given that the Eden narratives of Genesis 2-3 have actually been abandoned progressively over time in both East and West? I have been kind of developing a rather audacious line of thought here, in part in response to the work of Margaret Barker. I believe ancient Christianity began as one of many ancient Jewish movements concerned with the Temple. A recurring refrain in biblical and extra-biblical texts is the problem of the Temple and its corruption, usually by falling under the control of a rival group. We find this pattern in Ezekiel, Zechariah, 1 Enoch and a number of Qumran texts, for example. I think Christianity began with the perception that the Temple had been corrupted by the priestly circles who ruled there. Jesus himself took on a High Priestly role, might even have been understood as the heavenly High Priest. Perhaps at Jesus' own instigation, Christians began to take on aspects of Temple ritual and reconfigure them to instantiate the Temple now as the Christian community (similar ideas are found at Qumran too). The Eucharist is developed as the key bloodless sacrifice of the new but restored Temple that is the Christian community, an open community in which humans encounter the divine face to face in their communal rituals without the mediation of the corrupt Temple authorities (I more and more think the book of Revelation is a Christian prophetic reflection upon the first Jewish war and the destruction of the Temple and its replacement by the new Temple of the Christian community in which Jesus, the Logos, is made manifest, returns to the community, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist). These Christian rituals, such as Eucharist and Baptism, are derived from Temple ritual and symbolism reconfigured in a way to make God truly Emmanuel, 'with us', rather than 'hidden' in the priestly confines of the Temple. Jesus was executed at Pesach, instantiating, fulfilling the High Priestly role of shedding his blood to heal and renew the cosmos on the Day of Atonement (in the Temple rite, a goat is of course slaughtered in the High Priest's place). So Christians uncover the old New Year/Atonement meanings of Pesach but reconfigure them by joining, blending them with a reconfigured  Pesach as well. The two equinoctal feasts are merged and reconfigured to shape the development of Christian liturgy/tradition (the core component of Christian tradition is liturgy) in succeeding generations. When Pascha was developed as a specific annual feast in the second and third centuries Christians drew upon traditions and memories of old Temple practices to create  a Paschal gestalt. Christian Pascha explicitly identified itself as a new Pesach, a language used to this very day but the ritual patterns and symbolic frameworks that are deployed for this Christian Pesach are as much, even more?, derived from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur than anything to do with Pesach. It was a pattern compelled by the circumstances of Jesus' own death which was charged symbolically with the power of the old rites of Atonement and New Year in which the deity sheds blood/life to renew, recreate, heal and restore the cosmos. And these rites have an ancient provenance. Countless centuries earlier, in the Ugarit myth cycles, Ba'al does battle with Mot/Death and succumbs only to rise anew and restore the cosmos to new life. Likewise in his own ordeal Jesus does battle with Mot/Death to succumb and rise anew restoring the cosmos to new life. The language and imagery runs right through Christian proclamation although the stories of Ba'al's death and rising had been long forgotten (and ancient Ugarit too).

Genesis 1 recounts in a beautiful poetic structure the speaking of cosmos into existence by deity, it is the key text of the old New Year of Temple rite so it makes sense to me that it should lead off the readings of Christian Pascha which celebrates the renewal, restoration, recreation, resurrection of the cosmos through the broken and resurrected body of Jesus, humble Galilean and heavenly High Priest. Reading Genesis 1 in the Vigil Mass on the Paschal Eve links it to traditions and practices that go back thousands of years, into the heart of Temple Judaism and beyond into the world of Canaanite/Levantine myth and ritual from which 'Israel' was born. And not in any supersessionist way of appropriation, but rather in a lineage of creative inheritance and generation.

Caligari, Madness, Sexuality and Foucault

The other night I saw the classic 1920 German silent film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, at some friends’ place. I’d seen it once before many years ago, I think on SBS and probably on quite a small TV. My friends have got quite an elaborate TV/DVD/music set up in their living room with one of those quite large screens and so this time I saw the film in a lot more detail than before. It is really quite superb, not least for its sets which are quite surreal, astonishing in the way they distort angles and warp ‘reality’ (I wonder if H P Lovecraft might have been influenced by the visuals in this film for some of his stories, especially for his ‘Dreams in the Witch House’ in which the notion of distorted angles and weird perspective in room dimensions are key to his portrait of menace). Unsurprisingly, questions of what is real and what is illusion and fantasy are key to the film. That same sort of interplay of fantasy and reality was at play in a modern film, The Black Swan, I saw when down the Gold Coast. That film plays with fantasy and reality in such a way that towards the end the viewer has no idea of what is (meant to be) real and what not. Is the main character mad, has she been taken over from the depths, the Black Swan?

Curiously in both films, sexuality is interwoven with madness to signal that we are beyond the realm of the ‘normal’. There are several moments of queer slippage in Caligari, most explicitly in the final scenes when the Somnambulist character is presented as a kind of distractedly demented dandy. Likewise in Black Swan, at first, there’s more than a hint of (hetero)sexual desire in the interaction between the dancer, Nina, and the ballet director and I thought that maybe we were being given a narrative of young woman’s repressed creativity being released through eros and heterosexual eros too. But then suddenly as the boundaries between reality and fantasy really begin to blur there is a full-on lesbian eruption, much more graphic than any heterosexual scenes in the film. From that point on the story is swept away as the boundary between fantasy and reality collapses like the shattered mirror of Nina’s dressing room.

These links between madness and queer sexuality were even more striking for me as I’ve recently finished reading Lynne Huffer’s book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. I think Huffer’s book is probably the most important publication in queer theory and sexuality studies for a long time, at least in English- there has been interesting work in French not least by Didier Eribon who I was reading and writing about back in 2009. Eribon’s book made me want to go back and read Foucault’s Introduction to the History of Sexuality again. I’d read it, at least in part, back in my undergrad days in the early 90s. At that time it didn’t have much context for me and I found a range of other authors that influenced me more. At the same time, here in Brisbane those years following decriminalisation and the first anti-discrimination law were a heady time for LGBT folks, especially folks like me who were active in community stuff and politics. At UQ too, these were the first years of a queer space, the Rona Room, the existence of which was really changing the dynamics of queer life on campus. Probably, a much more important influence for me back then was Homocult and the activism around ACT UP and Queer Nation. What most appealed to me was the stance of not regarding heterosexuality as the default – as one slogan went ‘heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common’ - and that led to a reading perspective of looking for queer possibilities in anything, destabilising the heteronorm and opening a space for the queer and homosexual. That perspective still largely describes my scholarly framework on sexuality. I don’t accept heterosexuality and its norms as the default or as something to aspire to. That’s one of my concerns with the push to same sex marriage (and something I saw earlier in the last couple of days, ‘gay family values’). It seems to me that one of the dynamics of homosexual/queer sub-cultures is imitation, pushing the boundaries of likeness. After Gay Liberation came the age of the Clone, at least for gay men. I hated it and, luckily, in Australia it remained very much a Sydney thing. And way back in the 18^th century we find the molly houses of old England and their curious practices of parodic imitation of the heterosexual world of marriage and family. In our day, though, the imitation is more serious lacking any parodic element at all (the parody is more at the expense of the imitation as in the anti-marriage quip of a queer friend of mine ‘Gay marriage? Makes as much sense as a male tampon’). Are we reproducing the heteronorm as our own standard for homosexual life?

Returning to Foucault and Huffer’s book, to be honest I’ve not read a lot of his work. I own a copy of the second volume of his History of Sexuality. I’ve not finished it because like Huffer, I found it boring, not least because of its focus on elite males in ancient Greco-Roman society. Foucault didn’t inform my work on Sodom and Gomorrah much at all, although after reading Huffer I can see how I might have been able to deploy him quite productively but I don’t regret not doing so. More important for me back then was the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She helped me to refine my reading position and lens and she’s still an important intellectual influence for me. Oddly, I don’t recall Foucault as a dominant motif in her work no matter how important he was for her theoretically. But periodically I’ve been rubbed up against Foucault by the way his Introduction to the History of Sexuality was being deployed in, to my way of thinking, quite uncritical ways. The crudest rendering of this Foucault deployment is the notion that homosexuality was invented as a category by sexologists and psychologists back in 1870 (or for some even later). This marked a new beginning and the creation of the homosexual identity as opposed to a time before when we can only speak of acts, certainly not identities let alone communities. As I heard one person say, citing Foucault, at a public forum about four years ago, there is no continuity with that time before the ‘invention’ of the homosexual and our modern LGBT worlds.

To which, of course, I say rubbish, and to which I also say you clearly haven’t understood Foucault if you think that was his argument. When I was reading Eribon, I was struck by the thought that maybe people hadn’t quite gotten Foucault. While he critiqued Foucault’s History of Sexuality, from memory especially its lack of sufficient historical depth, in relation to the ‘invention’ of the homosexual, Eribon also highlighted how important Foucault’s History of Madness was in giving more depth to his arguments in the Introduction to Sexuality. Eribon seemed to suggest that Foucault might have profited much more by drawing on his earlier work. After all, he asked, how was it that sexuality, homosexuality, should be the subject or object of discussion and study/treatment by psychologists and therapists. So I went back and re-read Foucault’s Introduction. I hadn’t gotten far before I realised that Foucault’s project here was not ‘history’ and certainly not homosexuality as such but much more about the discursive structures of social power. And when I re-read it, I was struck by the realisation that the famous passage about the homosexual being invented in 1870 was not about same sex love and eros as such, the people who lived it, their identities and communities. Foucault was not interested in identities and certainly not interested in aetiologies. I was struck by the thought that this was more a wry observation on the, one could say, vainglories of powerbrokers. In the late 19^th century in the field of sexuality these were the therapists, the sexologists, who were above, outside of the realm of the deviant erotic just as a biologist of the day was above, outside the realm from which specimens were collected and returned to the halls of knowledge in the metropole for classification and study, or white male anthropologists might be above, outside the communities of ‘savages’ they were studying. (And no wonder then that the term homosexual was resisted for so long by queer folks of the past as a term that was being imposed on them and not cognisant with their own experience). I couldn’t also help but think that somehow Foucault’s wry observation had been mis-taken by so many people in the areas of queer theory and sexuality. It always seemed to be cited as grim fact rather than grim joke. Queer theorists spectacularly misread, and thus failed to get, Foucault’s wit.

I had planned to write more about Eribon and my new understandings of Foucault but last year my adventures with depression got in the way, although I think it’s quite appropriate that I re-read Foucault when I was myself off spinning in my own trajectory of soaring madness and collapse. Maybe it helps to read Foucault when you’re mad. So when the chance came to read and review Huffer’s book eventually I had to go for it and was most surprised that I could get it, that nobody else had put their hand up for it at all. The book itself is rich, very rich and rewards reading and re-reading. It is an excellent introduction to Foucault’s thought, his overall project, not just Sexuality or Madness. There is a key central thesis to the book, to wit, queer theorists who restrict their reading of Foucault to his History of Sexuality, even if supplemented by Discipline and Punish, are severely limited in their understanding of Foucault. Huffer goes as far as saying that you can’t really grasp History of Sexuality without also reading History of Madness, that the two complement each other, with Sexuality standing almost in continuity with Madness. She argues that Sexuality should even (only?) be read through the lens of Madness to be understandable. The problem was, though, that for those who don’t read French, an English translation of the whole text wasn’t published until 2006 (translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). The 1965 translation, Madness and Civilisation, was a much truncated edition which omitted important content from the original work.

In tandem with her thesis, Huffer also provides a critique of queer theory especially as practiced in the United States. In particular she critiques the ‘straight’ reading by queer theorists of that famous passage in Introduction, a passage she describes as clearly ironic especially when read in the French. She provides both the French and her own translation with the standard English translation to highlight the ironic aspects in Foucault’s words. She goes further and says US queer theorists have seriously misread it by reading it as a statement of origins or aetiology of homosexual identity. It’s nothing of the sort, she declares, indeed Foucault ‘refuses to posit an origin of anything’ (75), a fact most clear from reading Madness. She goes further saying that to ‘read the date 1870 as other than ironic is to buy into the psychological, psychiatric, and medical authority Foucault goes to great pains to dismantle’ (75). In other words, queer theorists mangled Foucault in the press of US identity politics and obsessions. I was struck by Huffer’s repeated observation that in Madness, Foucault describes (and laments?) the suppression of a homosexual lyricism in Europe during the Age of Reason , a suppression that happens alongside the Great Confinement, the rise of the asylum for imprisoning the ‘mad’ and the ‘deviant’. (And hence, says Eribon, sexuality and its manifold variations becomes the field for doctors, psychologists, therapists, and not historians, ethicists, philosophers, or theologians and biblical scholars either for that matter.)

Huffer also reminds us that first and foremost, Foucault is a philosopher, or better anti-philosopher. He wrote Madness, amongst other things, as a critique of Descartes, of the Cartesian separation of the mind/self and the body, in which madness is explicitly excluded from the Cartesian cogito; but more than just Descartes Madness was also of the Enlightenment and its heirs. However Foucault writes philosophy with the use of the archive so his work is history-like. Foucault is the heir of Nietzsche and seeks to abolish the subject so constructed by Descartes and developed by Hegel and the Enlightenment and later too by Freud and psychoanalysis. In all these projects of the internal metaphysical self both madness and sexuality have been deployed in its construction, to demarcate its boundaries and essence. As the heir to Nietzsche, Foucault rejects such essentalism of the self, as Huffer puts it there is no inside to this outside, it is a false demarcation. In this context, it’s no surprise that the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick began exploring Buddhism towards the end of her life. The Buddhist doctrine of anatta, no-self (as opposed to the Hindu/Vedanta concept of Atman/Self) bears a certain resemblance to the Foucault-Nietzschian position. My understanding of Nietzsche is that he stood for an unmediated immediacy to life which again bears a resemblance to the Buddhist aim of living free of all attachment including to the illusory ‘self’.

But this brings me to my main critique of Huffner’s book. Queer theorists might have misread Foucault’s wit and worse uncritically elevated him to canonical authority, ‘gospel’, but queer theory remains a heterogenous and fluid project. Foucault might have authority but he is jumbled with all manner of other intellectual streams. As Huffner points out queer theory even tries to couple Freud with Foucault (Huffner strongly critiques Judith Butler’s Psychic Life as one example of this coupling), which is like coupling matter and anti-matter. Foucault stands opposed to Freud; Freud’s gift, psychoanalysis, ‘endlessly performs and augments the Cartesian coup of the seventeenth century’ (160). But Huffner wants to make queer theory a more specifically, completely?, a Foucauldian project. She is herself ‘in love’ with Foucault so I can understand her zeal; she has ‘met’ this Foucault ‘in the archives’ and realised his breadth and depth in contrast to the cardboard cut-out of the standard queer theoretical perspective. I can understand her ‘love’ especially given both the splits between much of queer theory and much of feminist theory (which she explores early in her book) in part based on that old misreading of Foucault and the fact that queer theory nowadays is, in my opinion, really kind of moribund and disconnected, having no real ethical grounding or political eros to use Huffner’s term. But I would like to keep the heterogeneity and fluidity of queer theory, which might in future be further fed by a specifically Foucaultian project, overlapping but neither separate nor totalising.

For those of us who don’t want to work on a specifically Foucauldian project, Foucault might yet be a model. I like the way he works from, with the archives. The philosopher writing history against philosophy, philosophy from the archives, Foucauld blurs categories. What I appreciated about queer theory has been that blurring, the lack of rigidity, the almost bower bird approach to thinking and the commitment not to accept the heteronorm as given. But it has also remained caught in an identitarian morass (and perhaps that helps serves interests of late capitalist society anyway). I’ve not been all that interested in identities but rather the way people have lived their same-sex love and desires, how they have dealt with the rejection, also those cultures and discourses of insult and denigration that reinforce the heteronorm. I’m interested in the way those discourses work and I look for ways to change all that, to maintain a critique that opens up different possibilities. I suspect the identitarian thing may be a displaced aetiology. One thing’s for sure I’m not interested in origins or causes, or gay genes. They don’t broaden our horizons or humanise us, let alone change our world.

My critique then is not really of the book as such. In fact, looking through my copy of Mad for Foucault I see that I have underlined on just about every page, reinforced with exclamation marks and asterisks as well as occasional comments. It’s a book well worth reading by anyone doing any sort of sexuality studies, especially if they’re doing so under the umbrella of queer theory. Likewise for those doing feminist and gender studies. I recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in Foucault in any way at all. After reading Huffner there’s only one more thing to do and that’s read History of Madness, the full version, itself. I’m looking forward to it, not least to catch a glimpse of that disappearing suppressed homosexual lyric for which he mourned.

February Days, Wonderful Days in Egypt

Things have been quiet here of late because, well, life's not been so quiet for me. After I put up my last post two weeks ago I went away for a bit over a week down the Gold Coast to have a break and catch up with friends. It was a very social time, which also continued a theme that had been running in my life over the Christmas period of reconnections with people from the past - there were more such reconnections at the Gold Coast too. The Gold Coast is an interesting place in the way it can juxtapose great beauty, quaint charm and the most extraordinary ugliness all at once. I don't think anyone there ever gave a thought to building a beautiful city on the South Pacific and thus no one ever did. Apart from its natural beauty, any beauty there is completely unintentional, often dependent on accidents like time of day or unexpected vantage point. My friends live at Palm Beach which is not as built up as other parts, indeed it's very suburban often in ways recalling that old song 'Little Boxes'. But at night because it's a narrow sliver of suburbia with the ocean on one side, the sky can be quite stunning. I was down on the week of the new moon which made for a beautifully deep dark sky glistening with stars. You have to go a long way to see a sky like that in Brisbane. I went walking one night and looking up felt like I had a clear view to the end of the universe, peering into the dark depths.

All the while the drama was unfolding in Egypt, a drama which reached the denouement of its first act last night my time. The events in Egypt are stunning and amazing and inspiring. They're on a par with the end of apartheid 20 years ago and following the Tunisian revolution they're on a par with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union's control of Eastern Europe. Tom Engelhardt writing in Asia Times Online two days ago makes this comparison of the two events:

Today, after almost two decades of exuberant imperial impunity,Washington finds itself in an uncomfortably unraveling situation. Think of it as a kind of slo-mo Gorbachev moment - without a Gorbachev in sight.

What we're dealing with here is, in a sense, the story of two "abroads". In 1990, in the wake of a disastrous war in Afghanistan, in the midst of a people's revolt, the Russians lost what they came to call their "near abroad", the lands from Eastern Europe to Central Asia that had made up the Soviet Empire.

The US, being the wealthier and stronger of the two Cold War superpowers, had something the Soviets never possessed. Call it a "far abroad". Now, in the midst of another draining, disastrous Afghan war, in the face of another people's revolt, a critical part of its far abroad is being shaken to its roots.

In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia - along with obdurate Israel and little Jordan. In previous eras, the chosen bulwarks of "stability" and "moderation", terms much favored in Washington, had been the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s (and you remember his fate), and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and you remember his fate, too).

Egypt is a crucial part of the Arab world. It's the most populous country and a major cultural and religious centre. Cairo's Al Azhar University, founded in the 10th century is the chief centre of Arabic literature and and Sunni Islamic learning in the world. What happens in Egypt has the potential to flow on to the rest of the Arab world in a major way. The Mubarak regime was a US satrapy in the heart of the Arab world, a world which, with some exceptions, is comprised almost entirely of US satrapies based on borders drawn by the British and French in the aftermath of the two World Wars and designed to serve their own colonial interests and not the interests of the locals. US policy was to break the old European Empires and replace them with US commercial and political hegemony.

The Mubarak satrapy was perhaps the most important because of the peace treaty with Israel, the only such Arab treaty with the Zionist state. Egypt also directly borders the Palestinian territory of Gaza and assists the Israelis in their blockade regime. Presumably a democratic Egyptian government will not be prepared to play auxiliary gaoler of the Palestinians, which will be good news for the people in Gaza but not for the Netanyahu government. The Mubarak satrapy unsurprisingly received copious amounts of US aid, mostly for military and police. Unsurprisingly most of that money ends up in US corporate pockets. Writing in Crikey earlier this week Bernard Keane observed:

The US government provides about $1.3 billion a year in military aid to Egypt.

Like much western aid, though, US military aid to Egypt is really about US aid to its own industries. Prior to the 1978 Sadat-Begin peace deal, Egypt had principally relied on the Soviet Union for its arms. One of the conditions Jimmy Carter agreed to as part of the peace deal was extensive military aid for Egypt -- Israel, naturally, already being a recipient of generous US assistance.

But US military companies have always been the big winners from this.The Guardian reported last week that General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Sikorsky Aircraft are currently the biggest beneficiaries of the United States' military assistance to Egypt.That’s why there was never a serious chance of the Obama administration threatening to halt its military aid...

On a more real-world level, Combined Systems Inc provided the teargas that Egyptian police used by the truckload in a futile effort to suppress the demonstrations. CSI, which also provides teargas to the Israeli military, makes a wide variety of "tactical munitions", "impact munitions", "crowd control devices" and "irritant munitions". CSI is owned by Point Lookout Capital Partners, which specialises in military manufacturers, and the Carlyle Group.

The Mubarak satrapy rested on an extensive police regime of torture and murder. The police had developed a culture of impunity. I had signed on to the Facebook page We are all Khaled Said which was named for a young man murdered by police in Alexandria and his was not an isolated case. Mubarak therefore had added insult to injury by installing Omar Suleiman as his VP early in the revolution. Suleiman was the head of the torture network and had even tortured the Australian Mamdouh Habib who had been sent to Egypt by the US as part of its rendition programme. Under Mubarak Egypt had become a key torture subcontractor to a US gov't trying to avoid its legal obligations. Pepe Escobar dubs Suleiman Sheik al-Torture (follow the link to his article, it's superb; and yo can find more of his articles here).

I confess I was not all that happy when I woke this morning to see that the army had taken power. However at the Amnesty-organised Solidarity rally this morning in Brisbane, we were addressed by members of the local Egyptian community here, including a Coptic Orthodox priest, and also by phone by someone from Cairo and it was clear that they all felt that a major change had happened. After all about a quarter of the population of Egypt had taken to the streets in the last few days. The ongoing updates from We are all Khaled Said on Facebook listed details of strikes and all manner of anti-government actions happening all over Egypt. It's clear that the people of Egypt have experienced their power in a way that we on the outside can barely imagine. I don't think the people are prepared to go back to what was there before.

Here is Al Jazeera footage of the response of the people in Tahrir Square to the news Mubarak had gone

And I have to say Thank God for Al Jazeera during this time. I also want to share a song inspired by the resilience of the Egyptian people in their struggle. It contains incredible footage of that struggle

And here are more photos of the people celebrating in Tahrir Square. Roland Boer over at Stalin's Moustache shared this delightful joke yesterday: 'The Interior Minister asks Hosni Mubarak to write a farewell letter to the Egyptian people. Mubarak replies, "Why? Where are they going?"' It's Mubarak who's going instead and Suleiman with him, thanks be to God.

I hope this revolution spreads throughout the Middle East bringing down all the satrapies that the people have been saddled with for so long. Which country will be next?

UPDATE

Tariq Ali is always worth reading and he has a great piece on the Egyptian revolution in the Guardian here

The age of political reason is returning to the Arab world. The people are fed up of being colonised and bullied. Meanwhile, the political temperature is rising in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen.

And Al Jazeera has an excellent piece by Lamis Andoni The Resurrection of pan-Arabism

Events in Egypt and Tunisia have revealed that Arab unity against internal repression is stronger than that against a foreign threat - neither the American occupation of Iraq nor the Israeli occupation galvanised the Arab people in the way that a single act by a young Tunisian who chose to set himself alight rather than live in humiliation and poverty has.

This does not mean that Arabs do not care about the occupied people of Iraq or Palestine - tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands have taken to the streets across Arab countries at various times to show solidarity with Iraqis and Palestinians - but it does reflect the realisation that the absence of democratic freedoms has contributed to the continued occupation of those countries.

The Arab failure to defend Iraq or liberate Palestine has come to symbolise an Arab impotence that has been perpetuated by the state of fear and paralysis in which the ordinary Arab citizen, marginalised by social injustice and crushed by security apparatus oppression, has existed.

When they were allowed to rally in support of Iraqis or Palestinians it was mainly so that their anger might be deflected from their own governments and towards a foreign threat. For so long, they put their own socio-economic grievances aside to voice their support for the occupied, only to wake up the next day shackled by the same chains of repression.

All the while, both pro-Western and anti-Western governments continued with business as usual - the first camp relying on US support to consolidate their authoritarian rule and the second on anti-Israel slogans to give legitimacy to their repression of their people.

But now people across the region - not only in Egypt and Tunisia - have lost faith in their governments. For make no mistake, when protesters have gathered in Amman or Damascus to express their solidarity with the Egyptian revolutionaries in Tahrir Square, they are actually objecting to their own rulers.

Ironically, the Arabic word for resurrection is 'ba'ath' - Washington might have destroyed the Ba'ath party of Iraq but here is, I hope, a new ba'athist trajetory that Washington and other foreign powers and their client rulers cannot withstand, God willing.

For Epiphany 2011: Thoughts on Religious Pluralism

(I began this post on the day after Epiphany Gregorian reckoning, while I was still housesitting. After I got back home a couple of days later, life got rather intense for me including some disastrous floods in Brisbane. Where I live in New Farm stayed high and dry but we lost power for a few days and so decamped to friends with power. Other friends of mine were not so lucky. Once I finally got back home again I had other stuff to attend to which put this on the backburner. I'll leave what I've written as is and then continue)

7 Jan 2011

For Christians using the Gregorian calendar, it is now the the season of Epiphany. Western Christendom has traditionally associated the Epiphany with the coming of the Magi to the Christ-child in Bethlehem, as recounted in Matthew's gospel (Eastern Christendom associates Epiphany with the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan by John the Baptist, also known in the East as the Forerunner). This time last year I put up a post about the Magi and the history and symbolism, including astrological symbolism, this story invokes. You can read it here, and if you haven't read it, I'd recommend you do, because for this post, I want to start by quoting one of the final paragraphs from that older Epiphany post:

As well as astrologers and sages, the Magi were also priests, pagan priests. But in Matthew's story they travel to Palestine, they meet with Jewish sages, they bow before the infant Jesus, they converse with angels and then they return to their homeland, presumably to resume their religious duties. There's no trace of anxiety about pagan priests attending the birth of the Messiah, the child "from the Holy Spirit", Emmanuel 'God is with Us'. I said before that early Christians read Virgil's 4th Eclogue as a pagan prophecy of Christ. It seems that some early Christians accepted that there had been some sort of 'preparation for the Gospel' not only in Judaism but also in the pagan religious world as well. In other words, that as with Judaism, some sort of divine activity had been at work in the pagan religious worlds to make them ready for the Christ event too.

And it might be worth it to have a look at this post, also from last January, where I reflected on some of the complex inter-relationships between Jewish religion and Persian religion. The two religious traditions have strong connections with each other, and it's worth remembering that Cyrus the Great, the founder of the ancient Persian Empire is hailed as Messiah, Anointed, in Isaiah (45.1). In last year's Epiphany post, I also reflected on the change of identity for the Magi in Christian tradition, making them into kings out of the East, instead of sages. I speculated that such a move might have served to 'cover up' (or at least deflect attention from) the fact that the Christ-child was attended by pagan astrologer-priests, a most uncomfortable fact for a more triumphant Christianity in Rome, Armenia and elsewhere.

So, at least for Western Christendom, Epiphany raises the most uncomfortable question of Christianity's relationship and connection with other faiths in rather unsettling ways for those more triumphalist, exclusivist or fundamentalist in their religious outlook. And not just Epiphany, but Christmas itself, a major Christian feast, is also a site where differing faith traditions rub up against each other, both in terms of the varieties of Christian traditions themselves and Christianity vis a vis other religious traditions. This inter-faith overlay is further complicated by the demands of capitalism and its makeover of the feast into a 'secular' spending extravaganza. Here in the southern hemisphere, it's further complicated by the fact that a traditionally mid-winter feast is being celebrated at mid-summer.

Christmas is one of those feasts that highlight the differences within Christianity itself. There are Protestant denominations that do not observe Christmas at all, regarding it as a pagan or, even worse, a popish festival. Back in mid-17th century England, Cromwell's time, this position was held by a much broader Protestant constituency resulting in the suppression of Christmas, both as a religious observance and as a public holiday and festival, during the time of the Commonwealth. This was an unpopular move and with the restoration of the monarchy the bans on the observance of Christmas as both a religious feast/holy day and civil festival/holiday were lifted. But Protestant purists, to this day either regard Christmas (and Easter/Pascha too) with suspicion or reject it completely.

At the other end of the spectrum, Christmas serves to highlight the divisions within Catholic Christianities too. The greater number of Eastern Christians celebrated Christmas early this month on January 7. These include Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Serbian, Macedonian Orthodox Churches and the Jerusalem Orthodox Patriarchate. However, the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul plus the Patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria, and the Greek, Albanian and American Orthodox churches observed Christmas at the same time a Western Christians. The former Churches still use the old Julian calendar which is 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar of the West. The latter Churches use the Revised Julian Calendar of 1923, bringing the greater part of the liturgical year into harmony with Western timing (the exception being Easter/Pascha which is calculated in such a way as to ensure all Orthodox observe it at the same time). But not only was the New Calendar obviously not adopted by all Orthodox but in the Greek Church especially it prompted a schism leading to small Old Calendarist denominations, who stick to the Julian calendar along with their Russian and other Slavic co-religionists. The Coptic and most other Oriental Orthodox Churches also use the Julian calendar so that their Christmas falls on January 7 Gregorian too. The Armenian Church, however, still observes the original date of Christmas, January 6, combining Christmas and Epiphany in the one feast. So even as a Christian festival Christmas highlights differences amongst Christians. to the extent that it is celebrated on different days by different communities or ignored, even, by some.

22 January 2011

As well as becoming a point of contention through its being given a 'makeover' by capitalism into a secular festival of shopping and consumption in the lead up to the New Year, Christmas also highlights the differences and interconnections between Christianity and other faiths. Christmas comes after the solstice, the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, and much of the customs and foods and symbols traditionally associated with Christmas have their origins in old pagan winter solstice practices, especially in the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic lands outside the old Roman Empire. In other words these practices were adopted or absorbed as the Irish and Scots, Saxons, Swedes, Germans, Danes, Czechs, Poles and Russians adopted Christianity through the second half of the first Christian millennium. It's a popular myth that Christians or even Constantine himself picked the date of 25 December to take over the old pagan religious festival. But that appears to be no more than a furphy as Christmas had already been set at 25 December in the West and 6 January in the East before Constantine ever appeared on the scene. These dates seem to be based more on the date of Jesus' death, as Christians then understood it, and the believed harmony of the death date with the date of Jesus' conception than on any pagan festival. And while, as has been seen, for many centuries the old pagan associations with Christmas only gave concern to purist Protestants, the situation has changed with the emergence of neo-pagan religions in the West, many of which claim a direct connection with the old religions of pre-Christian Europe. So there are growing numbers of people who are celebrating Solstice and not Christmas, per se. In the northern hemisphere, that can lead to arguments over who 'owns' what in relation to Christmas; less so in the southern hemisphere, as it's summer solstice down here with different seasonal symbolism to Christmas. But at the same time in Australia there has developed the tradition of Christmas in July, as an attempt to keep some kid of traditional seasonal connections with Christmas, too. And I've heard people advocate moving Christmas to winter as a way to respect the traditional liturgical calendar.

Christmas also falls around the time of the Jewish feast of Hannukah. Hannukah is the Jewish Feast of Lights and commemorates the cleansing and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem after it had been desecrated (the 'abomination of desolation') by the Seleucid King, Antiochus Epiphanes, back in 167 BCE. Hannukah is an 8 day feast that starts on 25 Kislev: the Jewish calendar is a luni-solar one and so 25 Kislev falls any time between late November and late December on the Gregorian calendar. So more often than not, Jews are celebrating Hannukah around the time most Christians celebrate Christmas. And to further compound things in 2006 and 2007, the Muslim feast of Eid al Adha fell around Christmas too, which meant that in 2006 three of the Abrahamic religions were celebrating a major feast in the second half of December. However the Muslim calendar is strictly lunar so there are no seasonal associations with their feasts, which move all over the Gregorian calendar (and Julian and Jewish ones too) through the years.

The mention of Islam serves to remind that over the last few decades, the countries, like Australia, of the old 'settler' Commonwealth, along with the UK, USA and many European countries have seen the growth through immigration of substantial and growing communities following Islam and other religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism etc. Questions have been raised about how appropriate it is in a multi-faith culture for the state to give preference to one religion by observing a holiday for it's key holy days (Christmas, and Easter too). Sometimes the debates can be quite contentious, especially in the USA, which strikes me more and more as a very fundamentalist society (perhaps as a result of it being the capitalist heartland - I'm thinking more and more that capitalism spawns fundamentalism, that most superficial form of identity politics, and lets face it the capitalist system doesn't want us to go any further in our politics than the superficial). Ironically, the voices of Muslims, Hindus et al are rarely heard in these discussions, which seem to be mostly bouncing around among Christians and post-Christians. And with the rise of the apparently new (and militant) atheism, both in response to the ridiculous excesses of US Christian fundamentalism and fostered by George Bush's crusades against the US's fundamentalist simulacrum in the Middle East, it's almost as if some people actually resent having to take a holiday. In my younger working days, all holidays, any holidays were always welcome no matter what, so I find this newfound secular puritanism quite disturbing, especially in Australia, the proverbial land of the long weekend.

The irony is that Christmas has been changing, too, as capitalism has morphed it into a secular celebration of the great market sacrament of shopping. This process began over a century ago and is most dramatically evidenced by Coca Cola's makeover of Santa Claus (Santa Claus or Father Christmas was a much more complex, even threatening figure before this makeover). It's perhaps ironic, given the contentious nature of the debates on this question, that it is the USA which is the home of secular Christmas. Not only the commercialised Santa, but a whole suite of secular Christmas music, White Christmas, Frosty, Rudolph etc. To be honest I find these songs completely banal, if not vapid and utterly incongruous, too, in an Australian context of high summer. But to be fair, there are some pretty tawdry religious carols too, mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries. I can't began to say how much I despise Away in a Manger for it's cheap sentimentality and it's obnoxiously patronising approach to children. I despise it as much as I do Frosty, Rudolph, and these neverending sleighbells jingling through our pretend winter wonderlands.

Secular Christmas was invented in the USA and then exported very successfully to Japan, definitely not a Christian country, where it is both a children's festival and oddly enough a kind of holiday for lovers too. Christmas has also been taken up in Singapore, again in a big way. Like Japan, Singapore is not a Christian country either. Perhaps because Christmas draws on a rich range of associations, both pagan and Christian, and given its seasonal winter associations in the northern hemisphere, it's a package that can be picked up and adapted in non-Christian cultures like Japan (and as China becomes more capitalist will Christmas be added to the Chinese festive calendar too?).

28 January

(since I resumed this post the other day, I had further problems with internet access which prevented me from getting back it)

I said before that most of the debates about the appropriateness of keeping a religious festival in the Anglosphere, anyway, seem to be mostly conducted by Christians and post-Christians with very rare participation by people from other faiths. Several years ago I had the privilege to work with two colleagues at UQ from Slovenia (one of whom now dead and the other returned to Slovenia). Their specialty was South Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism especially. They used to laugh at the Christmas debates. Being socialists they couldn't understand why people would resent a holiday (although they would critique the gross commercialisation of it and the associated hype). But they also told me that in much of India it's quite normal for people to join in each other's religious celebrations and holidays. It's a way that religious difference can enrich people's lives and their society. And India is a very rich and religiously diverse society containing ancient Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian communities, as well as Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain. I've also been told that in much of Syria too it was common for Christians and Muslims to join in each others holidays and share celebrations at each other's shrines and sanctuaries. And while we think of Syria as Muslim, the fact is that it contains many varieties of Islam, not one, and many, mostly ancient, varieties of Christianity too. Syria is a multi-faith society then despite appearances.

I think that these practices might provide a worthy model for our modern secular societies. Secularity does not mean the banishing of religion from the public sphere as in religious and spiritual = strictly private, while public = secular/atheist only. That's just a form of tyranny and only serves to promote arid fundamentalism and cheap sentimentality as evinced in the regular and tedious US Christmas wars and the incredibly vapid nature of commercial capitalist Christmas. Just compare the emptiness of Frosty the Snowman with the depth of something like Coventry Carol. The commercial and secular infantilises and diverts our attention from the depths of joy and of horror.

Here in Brisbane the Buddhist community has taken to holding public celebrations of Vesak, the birth death and enlightenment of Gautama Buddha, on the Labour Day public holiday. I've yet to get along as I'm usually marching with my union in the Labour Day celebrations. But in our multi-faith society I can't why there shouldn't be a public holiday for Vesak so that Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike can share in the day. And the same applies for other faiths too, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, indigenous religions etc. A secular and multi-faith society provides the opportunity for mutual enrichment, whether one's a believer or not. The secular state itself offers nothing for us to address the substantial questions of life and nor should it try to. All it can do is provide us the spaces, temporal, spatial etc, whereby we can share with each other and learn from each other and our respective traditions, in mutual respect, gratitude, and fun too. After all these are holidays.

AFTERWORD: Given all the disruptions in the writing of this post, which stretched out the timeframe for composing it, I suspect that I got clear away from where I thought was heading when I began early this month. However I intend to return to some of these themes through the course of this year.

Farewell 2010

So it's the last hours of the year and I've been having a quiet day and a quiet night as well. New Year's Eve is quite hyped, I think, these days and I have largely lost interest in the frantic celebrations and extravagant displays. It's almost like a Neitzschean eternal return, these maxed out secular festivities. And already I can hear fireworks in the distance and parties all around.

This time last year I was housesittting, too, but at a different place (right now I'm at Wavell Hts) and it was likewise a night on my own. I was surveying the rubble of a ruptured friendship, a friendship so important to me, and reconciling myself to all manner of lost hopes and dreams, well trying to reconcile myself. Just about everything seemed shut down around me, but there was still one possibility that I had decided to embrace, a union job that seemed to be opening before me. Of course, it turned out to be a false path but I wasn't to know it then.

A year later the ruptured friendship is reconciled but he is leaving Brisbane in January for who knows how long, so with reconciliation comes separation. As for anything else, I look at next year and there's nothing. I have no job prospects, no career plans, nothing. Any hopes I had in that regard have long since evaporated. They were largely rubble this time last year anyway. Now, too, I have no institutional affiliation either. I'm an independent scholar - which is not a bad place to be actually.

I look back over the past year, a year marked by grief, depression, the pit. To my surprise, though, the main feeling I have is how extraordinarily blessed I've been. Here at Wavell Hts, I'm looking after two cats and a dog and today with the rain finally gone and the sun shining, I thought I'd take the dog for a walk. I hadn't walked a dog in years. It felt really good and she is a lovely dog too. But as we were walking in the park, I was struck by just how lucky or fortunate I was, how blessed I was. When I looked back over the year, I kept thinking how much worse things could have been. If I had to descend into the deep pit of depression, then I was put in the best possible place to do so. At the same time while I had no paid work, I was still engaged in community events particularly relating to the Museum of Brisbane's LGBT History exhibition. I am quite astonished by the things I did in 2010. I don't know how I did any of that because I remember all too well just how I was feeling, just how paralysed with doubt and anxious I was.

And so I regard 2010 as an especially blessed year and I am grateful for the blessings I received. I don't know why I received them, I certainly don't feel worthy of it, but they were given to me and I feel quite humbled by it. I'm looking at 2011 with trust; that's all I can do. Whoever, whatever has been watching over me these last few years has brought me through so far. I look forward almost eagerly to what you'll bring me next year. I suspect there will be more struggles and there is the pain of separation. But separation is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be a way of building and strengthening friendship. Certainly that's what I hope and pray will happen and what I commit myself to. As for what else is in store for me, I guess I can expect plenty of surprises.

And so for you too, dear reader, I hope you can see the blessings that came your way in 2010 and I hope many more will come to you, and I, in 2011. May you be richly blessed in this comng year.

More on the BBC's Nativity

Last month I wrote about the BBC's new 4 part dramatisation of the Nativity story in which they portray Mary and Joseph as a kind of couple found in contemporary romantic fiction. I pointed out how this modern notion of Mary and Joseph's "enduring love story" was in striking contrast to the ancient sources, canonical and non-canonical, from which we draw the story in the first place. For ancient and medieval Christians and for the sources themselves, there's no love story at all, not least because marriage was not about love. For one of those sources, the Protoevangelion of James, not only is there no love story but there's not even a betrothal - the adolescent Mary is initially more of a ward of a very much older Joseph's care and protection. Marriage is more an afterthought, resulting from Mary's pregnancy.

The Protoevangelion also attempts to show the danger pregnancy might hold for the young Mary and, surprisingly, for the elder Joseph too. It seems the BBC drama attempted the same thing, causing a bit of a kerfuffle as a result. Matthew is the one canonical source that alerts us to the fact that being unexpectedly pregnant when betrothed might be the cause of a problem by telling us that when Joseph learnt of her condition, he decided to "dismiss her quietly" rather than "expose her to public disgrace" (Matt 1.19). The BBC's Nativity wasn't content with that. Instead, according to this report in the Guardian

It shows the mother of Jesus trying to flee a hostile Bethlehem crowd and a
rabbi refusing her the haven of his synagogue, letting her escape through a back
door instead.

Unsurprisingly, the former Chair of the Reform Judaism Assembly of Rabbis, Jonathan Romain, who also sits on BBC advisory panel on matters religious, has come out and criticised Nativity for turning the Nativity story into an exercise in bashing Judaism.

"The Gospels tell us there was no room at the inn, not that a rabbi kicked Mary
out of a synagogue," he said. "Having survived Mel Gibson's anti-Jewish Easter
onslaught The Passion now the season of goodwill has been spoiled."

I can understand Romain's concern and I'm also rather puzzled by this too. I assume the makers of Nativity want to bring home to a modern audience the cost that pregnancy might mean for an unmarried woman. But honestly a mob chasing Mary through the streets of her town? It sounds too melodramatic, over the top, for my taste. Pregnancy for a single woman in ancient a Palestine would no doubt have been a horrible disgrace. Her life could well have been at risk, not only from the pregnancy itself, but also from honour killing within the family. Honour killings happen now in parts of the Middle East, including Palestine; I don't believe they're an invention of Islam. If not honour killing she may also have faced rejection by her family and thrown out alone into the world. Even if she wasn't rejected by her family, her suitability for marriage was now finished. She might end up as a drudge in the family home, instead - and encumbered by a child. That is, of course, assuming the entire population of Judea or Galilee or wherever it was Mary came from shared such ultra-negative attitudes to pregnancy outside of wedlock. But again we can't be certain. I suspect that the ancient population we term Jewish, may well have been more diverse in its attitudes and beliefs than we imagine. Nevertheless, female virginity has always been highly rated in marriage economies and I think it a safe bet that most inhabitants of Judea and Galilee and even Samaria had that much in common. But a mob chasing a pregnant 14 year old through the streets, I don't think so. I suspect the programme's makers have as an intertext the story of the woman taken in adultery. But adultery is a different matter - it's a crime against the husband's ownership of his wife's womb and sexuality. The gospel passage doesn't say but the woman would have been a wife caught or accused of being with another man. Mary was not a wife, yet.

I also have a problem with the portrayal of the rabbi, who I beleive is also wearing a prayer shawl. Now I haven't seen Nativity but it sounds as if the rabbi is in relationship to the local synagogue as rabbis are today, at least in most Jewish denominations, and as most Christian clergy are to their local churches. In other words, here we have Bethlehem's parish rabbi. Now 200o years ago I'm not certain that rabbis and synagogues went together like horses and carriages. We get references to presidents of synagogues in the Roman world, but they're not necessarily rabbis, sometimes they were even women! Judaism was extraordinarily diverse back then and the Temple was also still in existence (plus a subsidiary Temple down the road in Leontopolis Egypt). Bethlehem is a stone's throw from Jerusalem and it's not surprising that, in the ancient accounts of the Nativity, synagogues don't get a mention but the Temple features quite strongly. There were Temple lands adjacent to Bethlehem where Temple flocks were grazed, most of which would end up as sacrifices. In Judea especially, priests were equally important religous functionaries, maybe more important than rabbis. Was there a synagogue in Bethlehem and if so would it have had a resident rabbi or any sort of rabbi for that matter? Rabbinic Judaism was just one thread in the ancient Jewish tapestry; it would take two or three wars against Rome and the destruction of the Temple and its cult to allow Rabbinic Judaism to become the norm for most Jews, and even then not without struggle and resistance.

I'm struck by the fact that Nativity has to resort to such melodramatic tropes to try and bring this story alive, especially given the richness of the primary narratives. Is it no longer possible to imagine worlds where marriage and love don't automatically go together? Is it no longer possible to imagine shame, disgrace and danger, unless there is mob violence involved? Or does the spectre of mob violence draw on, even invoke, a mixture of progressivist prejudices against the past mixed up with contemporary Western (neo-colonial?) prejudices against perceived hidebound and backward (Jewish and Islamic) alien cultures? After all, it's not that long ago, in my lifetime, when being pregnant and unmarried was considered a serious disgrace in our own English speaking and Western cultures too. And in many parts of the Anglosphere it might even still be.

Power, Flight and Refuge - the feast of the Holy Innocents

Today is the fourth day of Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The day commemorates the infants of Bethlehem which according to Matthew's Gospel were murdered by King Herod in a desperate attempt to kill the Christ child. Herod had been alerted of his birth by the arrival of the Magi who had come wanting to pay homage to the newborn king of the Jews. Herod arranges with the Magi that when they find the child they would return to him and tell him its whereabouts so that he could go and pay homage too. Of course Herod really wants to kill the child. The Magi are subsequently warned by angels mot to return to Herod but to leave Judea and return to their homeland. Herod realises what has happened and orders the killing of all boy children in Bethlehem 2 years old and under. Joseph is warned in a dream to flee and he and Mary take flight with the infant Jesus and escape into Egypt while the massacre is carried out.

2.13 Now when they (the Magi) had departed, behold, an angel of the
Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his
mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about
to search for the child, to destroy him."
2.14 And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, 2.15 and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt have I called my son."

2.16 Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men
2.17 Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:
2.18 "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more."

Matthew's account is short, sparse, six verses. There is a longer and quite dramatic account in the Protoevangelium of James. Here, it's the infant John the Baptist who becomes the focus of Herod's attention, presumably because he has heard of the prodigies surrounding the birth. While the infant boys of Bethlehem are massacred, Elizabeth flees with her infant son and finds miraculous refuge in the mountains. Herod then turns on her husband, Zechariah, who is murdered in the Temple by the soldiers.

21. And, behold, Joseph was ready to go into Judæa. And there was a great
commotion in Bethlehem of Judæa, for Magi came, saying: Where is he that is born
king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and have come to
worship him. And when Herod heard, he was much disturbed, and sent officers to
the Magi. And he sent for the priests, and examined them, saying: How is it
written about the Christ? Where is He to be born? And they said: In Bethlehem of
Judæa, for so it is written. And he sent them away. And he examined the Magi,
saying to them: What sign have you seen in reference to the king that has been
born? And the Magi said: We have seen a star of great size shining among these
stars, and obscuring their light, so that the stars did not appear; and we thus
knew that a king has been born to Israel, and we have come to worship him. And
Herod said: Go and seek him; and if you find him, let me know, in order that I
also may go and worship him. And the Magi went out. And, behold, the star which
they had seen in the east went before them until they came to the cave, and it
stood over the top of the cave. And the Magi saw the infant with His mother
Mary; and they brought forth from their bag gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.
And having been warned by the angel not to go into Judæa, they went into their
own country by another road.

22. And when Herod knew that he had been mocked by the Magi, in a rage he sent murderers, saying to them: Slay the children from two years old and under. And Mary, having heard that the children were being killed, was afraid, and took the infant and swaddled Him, and put Him into an ox-stall. And Elizabeth, having heard that they were searching for John, took him and went up into the hill-country, and kept looking where to conceal him. And there was no place of concealment. And Elizabeth, groaning with a loud voice, says: O mountain of God, receive mother and child. And immediately the mountain was cleft, and received her. And a light shone about them, for an angel of the Lord was with them, watching over them.

23. And Herod searched for John, and sent officers to Zacharias, saying: Where have you hid your son? And he, answering, said to them: I am the servant of God in holy things, and I sit constantly in the temple of the Lord: I do not know where my son is. And the officers went away, and reported all these things to Herod. And Herod was
enraged, and said: His son is destined to be king over Israel. And he sent to
him again, saying: Tell the truth; where is your son? For you know that your
life is in my hand. And Zacharias said: I am God's martyr, if you shed my blood;
for the Lord will receive my spirit, because you shed innocent blood at the
vestibule of the temple of the Lord. And Zacharias was murdered about daybreak.
And the sons of Israel did not know that he had been murdered.

24. But at the hour of the salutation the priests went away, and Zacharias did not come forth to meet them with a blessing, according to his custom. And the priests
stood waiting for Zacharias to salute him at the prayer, and to glorify the Most
High. And he still delaying, they were all afraid. But one of them ventured to
go in, and he saw clotted blood beside the altar; and he heard a voice saying:
Zacharias has been murdered, and his blood shall not be wiped up until his
avenger come. And hearing this saying, he was afraid, and went out and told it
to the priests. And they ventured in, and saw what had happened; and the
fretwork of the temple made a wailing noise, and they rent their clothes from
the top even to the bottom. And they found not his body, but they found his
blood turned into stone. And they were afraid, and went out and reported to the
people that Zacharias had been murdered. And all the tribes of the people heard,
and mourned, and lamented for him three days and three nights.

This account omits the flight into Egypt. Why? Who can say? Did Herod carry out a massacre of children? We don't know. It's only related in Matthew and other Christian texts. It would certainly be in character and that in the end is the only judgement that can be made. History must here defer to story and it's the story or stories that are most important here not some fundamentalist attempt to step through the text into ancient Palestine. And so for this day I put the two texts, the two oldest accounts of this narrative of ruthless power and terror, side by side. I do so as a reminder that the Christmas story is not one merely about bourgeois niceties and warm feelings but also contains within it horror and dread, fear and flight. These are stories that still have resonance in our world; they describe events that are taking place all the time in our world. Power, arrogance and cruelty and fear and flight and refuge. The need for refuge has particular significance here in Australia given the shameless and cruel demonisation and victimisation of asylum seekers fleeing to this land. I was heartened at Christmas Mass to hear a sermon about the rights of asylum seekers and not the usual vacuous or worse. And so to finish this post I'll point you to Abdul Karim Hekmat's account of his voyage seeking asylum here in this country and why.

If you celebrate Christmas then the only response to those seeking refuge is welcome.

The Biblical Illiteracy of Biblical Scholars

Today is the feast of St John the Apostle and Evangelist who has been identified in very ancient tradition as the Beloved Disciple of the Gospel that bears his name (basically on the strength of him being the Beloved Disciple) and I was tempted to write something on same-sex love and the relationship of Jesus and John/the Beloved Disciple. However I've been distracted by my reading.

I'm currently reading/reviewing a couple of books and today I've just finished reading one of them, Subverting Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Use of the Bible. I'm still gathering my thoughts about it; suffice to say I enjoyed much of it and was put off by it in almost equal terms, not least because it is in many ways an imperialist, US imperialist, exercise. So many of the essays seem to have as their underpinning concern - there are people out there who don't subscribe to our bourgeois liberal order of reality; they are using religion and 'The Bible' or Scripture as the ideological base for their rejection of our nice liberal order; even worse, a substantial number of them live in these here United States. This last point I think is the main concern; Islamic terrorism and even ultra-Zionist settler terrorism in Israel (on the last point with the exception of the Jewish contributors) are of course foreign, outside, not us, and so not so surprising for its rejection rather than the extraordinary violent impact of that rejection. No what is most unnerving is the spectre of US fundamentalism, the apparent refusal of so many of 'us' to subscribe to the tenets of the liberal order. As both a gay man and a Catholic (not to mention a 'foreigner', outside the US) I find that US fundamentalism quite disturbing and both threatening, as someone both non-USan and gay, and thoroughly twisted and blasphemous, as a Catholic person. But perhaps the apparent 'liberality' of the order was really a mask to hide its ruthlessness and violence. After all, the liberal order is one based on a ruthless class and race based oppression at home and abroad. It is a violent and murderous order for all its pretence at reason and liberality.

But that's not what I want to write about tonight. Rather, I come back to the old question of canon and how astonished I am that scholars these days really are ignorant of the history of the anthologies we call Bible/s. In most of the essays 'the Bible' is accepted as a given without even the recognition that Bibles are multiple and various. Unsurprisingly, it's the Jewish authors who will acknowledge that plurality, but, perhaps unsurprisingly too, they can only see the plurality in terms of two (sometimes three, if the Qur'an is included). That was most strikingly exemplified in the final essay of the anthology, Subversion as Return, by Shaul Magid.

Magid is mostly writing for Jewish concerns and as part of his argument he wants to demontrate the constructedness of Biblical canons. So his essay first sets out to sketch a 'brief genealogy of what we today call the Bible' (218). He gives a relatively adequate account of the making of the Jewish canon (although there are parts of it I would dispute) before turning to the Bible in Christianity. Christian Bible-making reinforces his argument by showing analogous processes in Christianity and Judaism which produced their various Bibles. Magid makes his entry point into Christian scripture by highlighting the difference between the Hebrew Bible of Judaism and the Old Testament of Christians. The Hebrew Bible ends with Second Chronicles, which closes with King Cyrus issuing his decree to allow the return of Jews to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple there. As the final text of the Hebrew Bible, 2 Chronicles is placed after Ezra-Nehemiah which recount the return of exiles to Jerusalem and the work of rebuilding the Temple and the city walls. Magid then contrasts the Hebrew Bible ending with the ending of the Old Testament. He wants to highlight the contrast "the rabbinic and early Christian view of history and, by extension, the rabbinic and early Christian view about divine will" (219). He continues "The Christian canonizers had something quite different in mind when they concluded the Hebrew Bible, their "Old Testament," with the prophetic words of the prophet Malachi..." (220).

The problem here is that the 'early' Christian canonizers didn't end their Old Testament with Malachi. If they ended their Old Testament with one of the prophets it was Daniel (not counted as a prophet in the Jewish Hebrew Bible). That's the final Old Testament book in my Eastern Orthodox Study Bible. That's also how one of the oldest Christian Bibles, Codex Vaticanus, ends it's Old Testament. And presumably that's how the other ancient Christian Bible, Codex Sinaiticus, ends its prophetic component of the Old Testament, including Malachi in the Book of the Twelve as the first prophetic book (Sinaiticus is incomplete - the Twelve, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations survive intact but Ezekiel and Daniel are missing). However Sinaiticus follows the prophetic corpus with the four Books of Maccabees, ending its Old Testament with 4 Maccabees. The other ancient Christian Bible, Codex Alexandrinus, ends its Old Testament with Sirach, placing the prophets plus the four books of Maccabees in the middle of its Old Testament.

It's also important to note that these ancient bibles did not use the Hebrew Bible for their Old Testament but the Greek Bible referred to as the Septuagint. Over in the West, Jerome tried to revise the Latin Bible by basing it on the Hebrew Bible but he was unsuccessful being resisted by none other than Augustine. The result was that the Latin Vulgate Old Testament of the West was a kind of hybrid of both Hebrew and Greek Bibles. Augustine certainly closed his Old Testament with the prophets but for him it seems that Ezekiel went last (De doctrina christiana 2.13). Augustine understood the order of the prophets as The Twelve, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Ezekiel.

Nevertheless, the Latin Bible came to order its prophetic corpus as we in the West are familiar with today - Isaiah, Jeremiah & Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea-Malachi (or the Twelve). However, the prophets were followed by 1 and 2 Maccabees. This was the ordering in the 15th century Gutenberg Bible and remains the order in Roman Catholic bibles to this day.

The Old Testament order that Magid refers to only came into existence with the Reformation; it is the standard Protestant Old Testament but I'm wondering if the intent was to end with Malachi or whether it was the accidental result of the removal of the 2 books of Maccabees and other texts (such as Baruch) and their relegation to the so-called Apocrypha (they aren't apocryphal for Roman Catholics and Orthodox). So Magid has actually confused the Protestant Old Testament and its canonizers with the various Old Testaments of early Christianity and the canonical processes of their day. Protestantism is the dominant religious form in the US and indeed one could even say that the US is a grand Protestant, even Calvinist, experiment. Magid's understanding of Christianity and Christian Bible making processes has been heavily refracted through that Protestant lens, despite the fact that Magid is himself a Jew.

Magid's error is all the more striking because he actually set out to relate a biblical genealogy to highlight the constructedness and diversity of biblical canons. And is that one of the key problems of this book, that it doesn't really address the key assumptions and ideological constructs underpinning US society and that frame the entire culture wars scenario that so many of the contributors are attempting to remedy, or even worse, 'manage'.

A Selection of Lessons and Carols for the Nativity

Below is my offering for Christmas. Rather than writing something I thought I would compose something with text and music. You can regard it as an online installation or as a liturgy. My inspiration comes in part from the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols for Christmas, most famously performed every year at Kings College Cambridge. But I found 9 was not enough for me and so I've expanded the lessons to 12, and some of them having multiple 'voices', a practice I've noticed in the Roman rite Easter Vigil Liturgy especially. I also drew on the practice of the old Tridentine rite, to incorporate what was called a Sequence. I have used that for a text from Qumran, one I think quite an important background text for Christian origins. I've also incorporated a series of Graduals, which serve as both a bridging text to the following carols and the next reading as well as a kind of commentary on the text just read.

In constructing this post I have deployed the good old liturgical principle of juxtaposition - texts, music and lyrics all interact with each other to weave a broad effect. No text speaks on its own but contributes to an overall gestalt. I suspect many biblical and para-biblical texts had their origins in just this way. They are composite texts, just as liturgies are composite texts, and other performance pieces like Handel's Messiah. I can't help but think that Isaiah, for example, should be read as a libretto rather than a book.

I had a number of key goals with the weaving of this piece. The first was to represent some of the rich cultural diversity of Christianity. So there is music from the Middle East, Ethiopia. Greece, Russia, and Eastern Europe as well as from Western Europe and North America. I have also tried to give a sense of the Hebraic traditions from which Christianity sprang. There is a popular fiction that Christianity went feral and pagan very early on, dumping its Jewish heritage, hence its popularity and spread in the broader Gentile world. I question that notion. Christianity was born from and retained its Hebraic traditions. Jesus might or might not have been the first Jewish Messiah but he was by no means the last and in so many subsequent Messianic upwellings in Judaism, the same clustering of themes, re grace and law, freedom and transgression, incarnation and deification, sacrifice and redemption, death and resurrection, ritual and sacrament, recur albeit with different emphases. These themes form a dangerous undercurrent within, or below, normative Judaism and are especially associated with Jewish mystical traditions such as Kabbalah. The Hebraic tradition itself represents an exercise of recasting and transforming the older and contemporary 'pagan' milieux from which it itself derived. The Hebrew tradition reconfigured 'paganism' and Christianity brought the fruits of that endeavour to the broader Gentile world/s.

Finally I have tried to make the Christmas story look strange, which is how it should look in my opinion. And so I have drawn on texts that are unfamiliar or not normally used in (Western) Christmas settings. In this I have probably failed, but that's okay :-) - it's a big challenge I set myself. And I should also add that an astute reader should pick up some moments of queer slippage too. Christianity is probably the queerest of all religions, hence the virulent homophobia with which it is all too sadly connected. I regard it too as probably the most dangerously audacious vision of life and our world ever conceived by humans. If it is not true then life probably isn't really worth living in any meaningful way. In my opinion the closest alternative is one sprung from the womb of Christianity itself, Communism (in which I include anarcho-communism and syndicalism). In fact the greatest tragedy of our current world is probably the recurring failure, dare one say betrayal, of both Christianity and Communism by the respective leaderships over the generations.

And so I leave you to read and enjoy. You can do it all in one sitting or come back periodically. If you have limited download capacity then you might not be able to watch all or any of the clips. In that case I have also embedded links to the lyrics and other information wherever possible. So skip the music and follow the link. Except where otherwise indicated all biblical passages are from the RSV. No special reason, just the first online Bible site I found (and one restricted to the standard Protestant canon) was one which gave limited options, of which I thought the RSV the best.

Finally, finally, in light of the recent tragedy at Christmas Island, I would like to remind you that Jesus began his life as a refugee in flight from the cruelties of power at least according to the stories we have and I have tried to acknowledge that too.

And so read on...

A FESTIVAL OF LESSONS AND CAROLS FOR THE NATIVITY OF THE LORD

Gaudete, performed by Steeleye Span - Latin text and English translation here

Introit: Psalm 110

¹ A Psalm of David. The LORD says to my lord: "Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool."

² The LORD sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your foes!

³ Your people will offer themselves freely on the day you lead your host upon the holy mountains. From the womb of the morning like dew your youth will come to you.

⁴ The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, "You are a priest for ever after the order of Melchiz'edek."

⁵ The Lord is at your right hand; he will shatter kings on the day of his wrath.

⁶ He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses; he will shatter chiefs over the wide earth.

⁷ He will drink from the brook by the way; therefore he will lift up his head.

Lesson One - Selections from Genesis in Four Voices

Voice One: Genesis 2.4-8

⁴ These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,

⁵ when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up--for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no adam to till the ground;

⁶ but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground--

⁷ then the LORD God formed the adam of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the adam became a living being.

⁸ And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the adam whom he had formed.

Voice 2: Genesis 4.1

¹ Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, "I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD."

Voice 3: Genesis 19.30-38

³⁰ Now Lot went up out of Zo'ar, and dwelt in the hills with his two daughters, for he was afraid to dwell in Zo'ar; so he dwelt in a cave with his two daughters.

³¹ And the first-born said to the younger, "Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in to us after the manner of all the earth.

³² Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve offspring through our father."

³³ So they made their father drink wine that night; and the first-born went in, and lay with her father; he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.

³⁴ And on the next day, the first-born said to the younger, "Behold, I lay last night with my father; let us make him drink wine tonight also; then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve offspring through our father."

³⁵ So they made their father drink wine that night also; and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose.

³⁶ Thus both the daughters of Lot were with child by their father.

³⁷ The first-born bore a son, and called his name Moab; he is the father of the Moabites to this day.

³⁸ The younger also bore a son, and called his name Ben-ammi; he is the father of the Ammonites to this day.

Voice 4: Genesis 21.1-6

¹ The LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did to Sarah as he had promised.

² And Sarah conceived, and bore Abraham a son in his old age at the time of which God had spoken to him.

³ Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him, whom Sarah bore him, Isaac.

⁴ And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him.

⁵ Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him.

⁶ And Sarah said, "God has made laughter for me; every one who hears will laugh over me."

Gradual: Psalm 2.7-10

⁷ I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, "You are my son, today I have begotten you.

⁸ Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.

⁹ You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel."

¹⁰Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

Niño Dios D'amor Herido (Francisco Guerrero) - The title translates roughly Christ-Child Wounded by Love

Lesson Two - Selections from Ruth in Two Voices

Voice One: Ruth 1.7-18

⁷ So she set out from the place where she was, with her two daughters-in-law, and they went on the way to return to the land of Judah.

⁸ But Na'omi said to her two daughters-in-law, "Go, return each of you to her mother's house. May the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me.

⁹ The LORD grant that you may find a home, each of you in the house of her husband!" Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept.

¹⁰ And they said to her, "No, we will return with you to your people."

¹¹ But Na'omi said, "Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Have I yet sons in my womb that they may become your husbands?

¹² Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. If I should say I have hope, even if I should have a husband this night and should bear sons,

¹³ would you therefore wait till they were grown? Would you therefore refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, for it is exceedingly bitter to me for your sake that the hand of the LORD has gone forth against me."

¹⁴ Then they lifted up their voices and wept again; and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her.

¹⁵ And she said, "See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law."

¹⁶ But Ruth said, "Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God;

¹⁷ where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you."

¹⁸ And when Na'omi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more.

Voice 2: Ruth 4.13-17

¹³ So Bo'az took Ruth and she became his wife; and he went in to her, and the LORD gave her conception, and she bore a son.

¹⁴ Then the women said to Na'omi, "Blessed be the LORD, who has not left you this day without next of kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel!

¹⁵ He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him."

¹⁶ Then Na'omi took the child and laid him in her bosom, and became his nurse.

¹⁷ And the women of the neighborhood gave him a name, saying, "A son has been born to Na'omi." They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David.

Gradual: Isaiah 9.2-6

² The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.

³ Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast increased its joy; they rejoice before thee as with joy at the harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.

⁴ For the yoke of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as on the day of Mid'ian.

⁵ For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire.

⁶ For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."

(The ancient Greek Septuagint version renders the final part of this verse "and he is named Messenger (Angel) of Great Counsel for I will bring peace upon the rulers, peace and health to him.")

Whence Comes This Rush of Wings (A Carol of the Birds)

Ethiopian Orthodox Hymn - The Saviour of the World is Born Today

(If you like Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas music, there's another great clip here)

Lesson 3: Selections from Genesis in Four Voices

Voice 1: Genesis 3.1-21

¹ Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any tree of the garden'?"

² And the woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden;

³ but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'"

⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die.

⁵ For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

⁶ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.

⁷ Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

⁸And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

⁹ But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"

¹⁰ And he said, "I heard the sound of thee in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself."

¹¹ He said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?"

¹² The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate."

¹³ Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I ate."

¹⁴ The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle, and above all wild animals; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

¹⁵ I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel."

¹⁶ To the woman he said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

¹⁷ And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

¹⁸ thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

¹⁹ In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

²⁰ The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

²¹ And the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them.

Voice 2: Genesis 6.1-6

¹ When men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them,

² the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.

³ Then the LORD said, "My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years."

⁴ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.

⁵ The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

⁶ And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.

Voice 3: Genesis 18.17-21

¹⁷ The LORD said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do,

¹⁸ seeing that Abraham shall become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by him?

¹⁹ No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice; so that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him."

²⁰ Then the LORD said, "Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomor'rah is great and their sin is very grave,

²¹ I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry which has come to me; and if not, I will know."

Voice 4: 22.1-10

¹ After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I."

² He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Mori'ah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you."

³ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.

⁴ On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off.

⁵ Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the ass; I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you."

⁶ And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together.

⁷ And Isaac said to his father Abraham, "My father!" And he said, "Here am I, my son." He said, "Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"

⁸Abraham said, "God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So they went both of them together.

⁹ When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood.

¹⁰ Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.

Gradual: Wisdom of Solomon 11.22-26 (King James Version)

22: For the whole world before thee is as a little grain of the balance, yea, as a drop of the morning dew that falleth down upon the earth.

23: But thou hast mercy upon all; for thou canst do all things, and winkest at the sins of men, because they should amend.

24: For thou lovest all the things that are, and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made: for never wouldest thou have made any thing, if thou hadst hated it.

25:And how could any thing have endured, if it had not been thy will? or been preserved, if not called by thee?

26:But thou sparest all: for they are thine, O Lord, thou lover of souls

O Magnum Mysterium

O Magnum Mysterium (setting by Giovanni Gabrieli)

Lesson 4: Selections from Isaiah in Two Voices

Voice 1: Isaiah 7.10-14 from Qumran Great Isaiah Scroll Column VI Lines 25-29

25. (10) [{And continuing YHW}]H spoke to Ahaz saying, (11) Ask for yourself a sign from YHWH your God

26. [{from the deep ask}] it or from the height above. (12) And Ahaz said I will nor ask and I will not

27. [{tempt}] YHWH. (13) And He said, Hear now Oh House of David, is it a small thing for you
28. [{to wear}]y men, will you also weary God, (14) therefore [+YHWH+] [m..adonay] himself will give to you [{a sign}]
29.[{Behold}] the virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son and he shall call his name Immanuel. (15) Butter [{and honey}]

Voice 2: Isaiah 35.1-6 from Qumran Great Isaiah Scroll Column XXVIII Lines 19-24

19. from generation to generation they shall dwell in it. (chapter 35:1.) The wilderness and the desert will rejoice for them and the plain shall be glad and blossom like the rose (2) And it shall blossom profusely, and rejoice even with joy and singing the glory of Lebanon

20. is given to her, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of YHWH. the [..majesty..] of our God. (PP)

21. (3) Make strong the weak hands, and firm up the tottering knees. (4) Say to the hasty of heart be strong and do not be afraid behold

22. your God comes with vengeance, with recommence God himself comes and He will save you. (5) Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened

23. and the ears of the deaf shall be opened., (6) Then the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the dumb shall sing, because of the breaking out in the wilderness

24. of water and streams in abundance [m..the plain] [+shall go out+].

Gradual: Psalm 118.24-29

²⁴ This is the day which the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

²⁵Save us, we beseech thee, O LORD! O LORD, we beseech thee, give us success!

²⁶ Blessed be he who enters in the name of the LORD! We bless you from the house of the LORD.

²⁷ The LORD is God, and he has given us light. Bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altar!

²⁸ Thou art my God, and I will give thanks to thee; thou art my God, I will extol thee.

²⁹ O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures for ever!

In Dulci Jubilo

Angeli v Nebi/Angels in Heaven, Russian kolyadka/carol sung by the Novokuznetsk Spiritual Seminary Choir

Lesson 5: Proverbs 8.22-31

²² The LORD created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.

²³ Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth.

²⁴ When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water.

²⁵ Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth;

²⁶ before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world.

²⁷ When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

²⁸ when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep,

²⁹ when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

³⁰ then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,

³¹ rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the sons of men.

Gradual: Isaiah 40.1-5

¹ Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins.

³ A voice cries: "In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

⁴ Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.

⁵ And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken."

And the Glory of the Lord (Handel)

What else? But this time in Korean sung by the Chai Hoon Cha Choir, Seoul

Czech Carol: Narodil se Kristus Pán/The Lord Christ was Born - Czech lyrics on YouTube page here and if your browser is Google Chrome it will roughly translate them for you too

Lesson 6: Selections from 1 Enoch in Three Voices

Voice 1: 42.1-3

1 Wisdom found no place where she might dwell; Then a dwelling-place was assigned her in the heavens.

2 Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men, And found no dwelling-place:

Wisdom returned to her place, And took her seat among the angels.

3 And unrighteousness went forth from her chambers: Whom she sought not she found, And dwelt with them,

As rain in a desert And dew on a thirsty land.

Voice 2: 46.1-3

1 And there I saw One who had a head of days, And His head was white like wool, And with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man, And his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels.

2 And I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, concerning that 3 Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was, (and) why he went with the Head of Days And he answered and said unto me: This is the son of Man who hath righteousness, With whom dwelleth righteousness, And who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden,

Because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him, And whose lot hath the pre-eminence before the Lord of Spirits in uprightness for ever.

Voice 3: 48.1-6

1 And in that place I saw the fountain of righteousness Which was inexhaustible: And around it were many fountains of wisdom: And all the thirsty drank of them, And were filled with wisdom, And their dwellings were with the righteous and holy and elect.

2 And at that hour that Son of Man was named In the presence of the Lord of Spirits, And his name before the Head of Days.

3 Yea, before the sun and the signs were created, Before the stars of the heaven were made, His name was named before the Lord of Spirits.

4 He shall be a staff to the righteous whereon to stay themselves and not fall, And he shall be the light of the Gentiles, And the hope of those who are troubled of heart.

5 All who dwell on earth shall fall down and worship before him, And will praise and bless and celebrate with song the Lord of Spirits.

6 And for this reason hath he been chosen and hidden before Him, Before the creation of the world and for evermore.

Gradual: Zechariah 9.9-10

⁹ Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt the foal of an ass.

¹⁰ I will cut off the chariot from E'phraim and the war horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.

Veni, Veni Emmanuel/O Come, O Come, Emmanuel - English lyrics here

Medieval Christmas Music in Prague played by Dubia Fortuna

Sequence: 11Q13 - The Coming of Melchizedek, Qumran text

(...) And concerning what Scripture says, "In this year of Jubilee you shall return, everyone f you, to your property" (Lev. 25;13) And what is also written; "And this is the manner of the remission; every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because God's remission has been proclaimed" (Deut.15;2) the interpretation is that it applies to the Last Days and concerns the captives, just as Isaiah said: "To proclaim the Jubilee to the captives" (Isa. 61;1) (...) just as (...) and from the inheritance of Melchizedek, for (... Melchizedek) , who will return them to what is rightfully theirs. He will proclaim to them the Jubilee, thereby releasing them from the debt of all their sins. He shall proclaim this decree in the first week of the jubilee period that follows nine jubilee periods.

Then the "Day of Atonement" shall follow after the tenth jubilee period, when he shall atone for all the Sons of Light, and the people who are predestined to Melchizedek. (...) upon them (...) For this is the time decreed for the "Year of Melchizedek`s favor", and by his might he will judge God's holy ones and so establish a righteous kingdom, as it is written about him in the Songs of David ; "A godlike being has taken his place in the council of God; in the midst of divine beings he holds judgement"

(Ps. 82;1). Scripture also says about him ; "Over it take your seat in the highest heaven; A divine being will judge the peoples" (Ps. 7;7-8) Concerning what scripture says; "How long will you judge unjustly, and show partiality with the wicked? Selah" (Ps. 82;2) ,the interpretation applies to Belial and the spirits predestined to him, because all of them have rebelled, turning from God's precepts and so becoming utterly wicked. Therefore Melchizedek will thoroughly prosecute the vengeance required by God's statutes. Also, he will deliver all the captives from the power of Belial, and from the power of all the spirits destined to him. Allied with him will be all the "righteous divine beings"(Isa. 61;3).

(The ...) is that whi(ch ...all) the divine beings. The visitation is the Day of Salvation that He has decreed through Isaiah the prophet concerning all the captives, inasmuch as Scripture says, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion "Your divine being reigns"." (Isa. 52;7) This scriptures interpretation : "the mountains" are the prophets, they who were sent to proclaim God's truth and to prophesy to all Israel. "The messengers" is the Anointed of the spirit, of whom Daniel spoke; "After the sixty-two weeks, an Anointed shall be cut off" (Dan. 9;26) The "messenger who brings good news, who announces Salvation" is the one of whom it is written; "to proclaim the year of the LORD`s favor, the day of the vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn" (Isa. 61;2)

This scripture's interpretation: he is to instruct them about all the periods of history for eternity (... and in the statutes) of the truth. (...) (.... dominion) that passes from Belial and returns to the Sons of Light (....) (...) by the judgment of God, just as t is written concerning him; "who says to Zion "Your divine being reigns" (Isa. 52;7) "Zion" is the congregation of all the sons of righteousness, who uphold the covenant and turn from walking in the way of the people. "Your divine being" is Melchizedek, who will deliver them from the power of Belial. Concerning what scripture says, "Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; in the seventh month . . . " (Lev. 25;9)

Gradual: 4Q88 - A Psalm on the Last Days from Qumran

Col. 9 [...] The masses

will worship God because He has come to judge everything

and to rid the earth of evil,

so that sinners shall find no repose,

the heavens shall give their due,

and there will be no wrong doings there.

The earth will produce crops in its season

and they shall not fail.

The fruit trees shall [ . . . ] of their vineyards

The poor will eat for those who follow YHWH shall not go hungry

Arabic Hymn of the Nativity - "Today, is born of a Virgin, He who holds the whole creation in His hand"

Diva Sina Porodilla/A Virgin Gives Birth to a Son - Russian kolyadka (carol) sung by the Novokuznetsk Spiritual Seminary Choir

Lesson 7: Ode 19, Odes of Solomon

1. A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord's kindness.

2. The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;

3. Because His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.

4. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.

5. Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who have received it are in the perfection of the right hand.

6. The womb of the Virgin took it, and she received conception and gave birth.

7. So the Virgin became a mother with great mercies.

8. And she labored and bore the Son but without pain, because it did not occur without purpose.

9. And she did not require a midwife, because He caused her to give life.

10. She brought forth like a strong man with desire, and she bore according to the manifestation, and she acquired according to the Great Power.

11. And she loved with redemption, and guarded with kindness, and declared with grandeur.

Hallelujah.

Gradual: Revelation 12.1-6

¹ And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars;

² she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery.

³ And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads.

⁴ His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth;

⁵ she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne,

⁶ and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, in which to be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days

Angelus ad Virginem - popular medieval carol (follow link for lyrics)

Erourem, Erourem/Rejoice, Rejoice - A Greek Byzantine kalanta (carol), Greek lyrics at YouTube here and if it's your browser is Google Chrome will probably make a reasonable translation of them

Lesson 8: Ascension of Isaiah 10.1-18

AND thereupon I heard the voices and the giving of praise, which I had heard in each of the six heavens, ascending and being heard there:

2. And all were being sent up to that Glorious One whose glory I could not behold.

3. And I myself was hearing and beholding the praise (which was given) to Him.

4. And the Lord and the angel of the Spirit were beholding all and hearing all.

5. And all the praises which are sent up from the six heavens are not only heard, but seen.

6. And I heard the angel who conducted me and he said: "This is the Most High of the high ones, dwelling in the holy world, and resting in His holy ones, who will be called by the Holy Spirit through the lips of the righteous the Father of the Lord."

7. And I heard the voice of the Most High, the Father of my Lord, saying to my Lord Christ who will be called Jesus:

8. "Go forth and descent through all the heavens, and thou wilt descent to the firmament and that world: to the angel in Sheol thou wilt descend, but to Haguel thou wilt not go.

9. And thou wilt become like unto the likeness of all who are in the five heavens.

10. And thou wilt be careful to become like the form of the angels of the firmament [and the angels also who are in Sheol].

11. And none of the angels of that world shall know that Thou art with Me of the seven heavens and of their angels.

12. And they shall not know that Thou art with Me, till with a loud voice I have called (to) the heavens, and their angels and their lights, (even) unto the sixth heaven, in order that you mayest judge and destroy the princes and angels and gods of that world, and the world that is dominated by them:

13. For they have denied Me and said: "We alone are and there is none beside us."

14. And afterwards from the angels of death Thou wilt ascend to Thy place. And Thou wilt not be transformed in each heaven, but in glory wilt Thou ascend and sit on My right hand.

15. And thereupon the princes and powers of that world will worship Thee."

16. These commands I heard the Great Glory giving to my Lord.

17. And so I saw my Lord go forth from the seventh heaven into the sixth heaven.

18. And the angel who conducted me [from this world was with me and] said unto me: "Understand, Isaiah, and see the transformation and descent of the Lord will appear.

Gradual: Exodus 40.34-35; 2 Chronicles 7.1-2

³⁴ Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle. ³⁵ And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting, because the cloud abode upon it, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle

***

¹ When Solomon had ended his prayer, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the LORD filled the temple.

² And the priests could not enter the house of the LORD, because the glory of the LORD filled the LORD's house

Nebo i Zemlya/Earth and Heaven - Russian kolyadka (carol), English translation here

Χριστός γεννάται σήμερον/Christ is Born Today - Greek kalanta (carol) possibly from old Smyrna (now Izmir Turkey)

Lesson 9: Hebrews 1.1-12

¹ In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets;

² but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

³ He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power. When he had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

⁴ having become as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs.

⁵ For to what angel did God ever say, "Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee"? Or again, "I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son"?

⁶ And again, when he brings the first-born into the world, he says, "Let all God's angels worship him."

⁷ Of the angels he says, "Who makes his angels winds, and his servants flames of fire."

⁸ But of the Son he says, "Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever, the righteous scepter is the scepter of thy kingdom.

⁹ Thou hast loved righteousness and hated lawlessness; therefore God, thy God, has anointed thee with the oil of gladness beyond thy comrades."

¹⁰And, "Thou, Lord, didst found the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of thy hands;

¹¹they will perish, but thou remainest; they will all grow old like a garment,

¹² like a mantle thou wilt roll them up, and they will be changed. But thou art the same, and thy years will never end."

Gradual: Philippians 2.5-9

⁵ Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus,

⁶ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, ⁷ but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

⁸ And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.

⁹ Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name

Wexford Carol - Traditional Irish Christmas Hymn, lyrics on Wikipedia site and at YouTube

I Saw a Swete Semly Syght - Medieval carol, lyrics at YouTube here

Lesson 10: Protoevangelium (Infancy Gospel) of James 17.1-19.16

17. And there was an order from the Emperor Augustus, that all in Bethlehem of Judæa should be enrolled (cf. Luke 2:1). And Joseph said: 'I shall enrol my sons, but what shall I do with this maiden? How shall I enrol her? As my wife? I am ashamed. As my daughter then? But all the sons of Israel know that she is not my daughter. The day of the Lord shall itself bring it to pass as the Lord wilt.' And he saddled the ass, and set her upon it; and his son led it, and Joseph followed. And when they had come within three miles, Joseph turned and saw her sorrowful; and he said to himself: 'Likely that which is in her distresses her.' And again Joseph turned and saw her laughing. And he said to her: 'Mary, how is it that I see in thy face at one time laughter, at another sorrow?' And Mary said to Joseph: 'Because I see two peoples with mine eyes; the one weeping and lamenting, and the other rejoicing and exulting.' And they came into the middle of the road, and Mary said to him: 'Take me down from off the ass, for that which is in me presses to come forth.' And he took her down from off the ass, and said to her: 'Whither shall I lead thee, and cover thy disgrace? For the place is desert.'

18. And he found a cave there, and led her into it; and leaving his two sons beside her, he went out to seek a midwife in the district of Bethlehem.

And I, Joseph, was walking, and was not walking; and I looked up into the sky, and saw the sky astonished; and I looked up to the pole of the heavens, and saw it standing, and the birds of the air keeping still. And I looked down upon the earth, and saw a trough lying, and work-people reclining: and their hands were in the trough. And those that were eating did not eat, and those that were rising did not carry it up, and those that were conveying anything to their mouths did not convey it; but the faces of all were looking upwards. And I saw the sheep walking, and the sheep stood still; and the shepherd raised his hand to strike them, and his hand remained up. And I looked upon the current of the river, and I saw the mouths of the kids resting on the water and not drinking, and all things in a moment were driven from their course.

19. And I saw a woman coming down from the hill-country, and she said to me: 'O man, whither art thou going?' And I said: 'I am seeking an Hebrew midwife.' And she answered and said unto me: 'Art thou of Israel?' And I said to her: 'Yes.' And she said: 'And who is it that is bringing forth in the cave?' And I said: 'A woman betrothed to me.' And she said to me: 'Is she not thy wife?' And I said to her: 'It is Mary that was reared in the temple of the Lord, and I obtained her by lot as my wife. And yet she is not my wife, but hath conceived of the Holy Spirit.'

And the widwife said to him: 'Is this true?' And Joseph said to her: 'Come and see.' And the midwife went away with him. And they stood in the place of the cave, and behold a luminous cloud overshadowed the cave. And the midwife said: 'My soul hath been magnified this day, because mine eyes have seen strange things—because salvation hath been brought forth to Israel.' And immediately the cloud disappeared out of the cave, and a great light shone in the cave, so that the eyes could not bear it. And in a little that light gradually decreased, until the infant appeared, and went and took the breast from His mother Mary.

Gradual: Isaiah 42.1-4

¹ Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my Spirit upon him, he will bring forth justice to the nations.

² He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street;

³a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.

⁴ He will not fail or be discouraged till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law

The Cherry Tree Carol, sung by Joan Baez, lyrics here

Nowell We Sing

Lesson 11: From Gospel according to Luke

Luke 2.1-14

¹ In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. ² This was the first enrollment, when Quirin'i-us was governor of Syria. ³ And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. ⁴ And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, ⁵ to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. ⁶ And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. ⁷And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. ⁸ And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. ⁹ And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. ¹⁰ And the angel said to them, "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; ¹¹ for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. ¹² And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger." ¹³ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ¹⁴ "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased!"

Gloria in Excelsis Deo (J S Bach)

Luke 2.15-28, 34-35

¹⁵ When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us." ¹⁶ And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. ¹⁷ And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child; ¹⁸ and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. ¹⁹ But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. ²⁰ And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. ²¹ And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. ²² And when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord ²³ (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord") ²⁴ and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons." ²⁵ Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.²⁶ And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ. ²⁷ And inspired by the Spirit he came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the law, ²⁸ he took him up in his arms and blessed God

³⁴ and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, "Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against ³⁵ (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed."

Gradual: Protoevangelium of James 22.1-8

22. And when Herod knew that he had been mocked by the Magi, in a rage he sent murderers, saying to them: 'Slay the children from two years old and under.' And Mary, having heard that the children were being killed, was afraid, and took the infant and swaddled Him, and put Him into an ox-stall. And Elizabeth, having heard that they were searching for John, took him and went up into the hill-country, and kept looking where to conceal him. And there was no place of concealment. And Elizabeth, groaning with a loud voice, said: 'O mountain of God, receive mother and child.' And immediately the mountain was cleft, and received her. And a light shone about them, for an angel of the Lord was with them, watching over them.

Coventry Carol (Trad, 15th century), sung by Tori Amos, lyrics

The Coventry Carol sung by Joan Baez

O Come All Ye Faithful/O Holy Night, Philadelphia Municipal Employees Chorale Ensemble

Lesson 12: From the Gospel of John the Beloved

John 1.1-14

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

² He was in the beginning with God;

³ all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.

⁴ In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

⁶ There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

⁷ He came for testimony, to bear witness to the light, that all might believe through him.

⁸ He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.

⁹ The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.

¹⁰ He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.

¹¹ He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.

¹² But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God;

¹³ who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father

Gradual: 1 John 4.7-9; Revelation 21.2-6

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.

⁸ He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.

⁹ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

***

² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband;

³ and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them;

⁴ he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away."

⁵ And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true."

⁶ And he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the fountain of the water of life without payment.

Verbum Caro Factum Est/And the Word Was made Flesh (John 1.14)

El Cant Des Ocells/Carol of the Birds (Traditional Catalan), English translation here

Concluding Prayer and Blessing - Peace Prayer of St Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Where there is injury, pardon.

Where there is doubt, faith.

Where there is despair, hope.

Where there is darkness, light.

Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

And so, dear reader, I wish you peace this Christmas and I pray that 2011 will be rich in wonder for you. As a parting gift for you this Noel I give you a link to this marvellous clip of Aretha Franklin and Billy Preston performing 'O Holy Night' live. There's a little bit of TV show chat at the start but stick with it, it's worth it. I would have used it here but embedding was disabled. And I close our little celebration here with yet another version of Gaudete.