Christmas Eve Links

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.  

[Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot]

• Reading good stories at an early age, especially myths, legends, and fairy tales, builds children’s moral imagination. It provides them with an imaginative framework for understanding the world around them, and a rich resource on the affective level for discerning between good and evil, right and wrong. In reading classic fairy tales, children practice navigating a world filled with perils by stepping into the shoes of an Everyman protagonist, and are thereby given the confidence that no matter what “monsters” they will have to face, the story is going to end happily ever after. In this way, fairy tales are an essentially Christian genre. Crucially, fairy tales are not cloyingly didactic; they teach about the consequences of vice in a way that is extremely subtle, but deeply profound. [The Lamp] 
• Losing my parents wasn’t just a reminder that I will die and be forgotten. It also started that very process. When they died, they took to the grave some of the stories and memories they had of my early childhood. Things that only they remembered, that I never knew or have forgotten. Things that never got written down or captured in Kodak. Those events and memories were part of my story, my life. But now they’re gone because the only two people who carried that part of my life story are gone. I’m not even dead yet, and I am already slowly being erased from the world. What I am experiencing, then, what I see and touch and what I insist on recording is that everyone, everything on earth is ephemeral. My parents are dead; my wife and daughters and friends will all eventually die; my teaching and poems and translations will someday be forgotten or lost; even what little I have put into print will sit slowly biodegrading in the basements of a handful of libraries. This summer I went to our college library to borrow a volume of poems by the great Spanish Romantic poet José de Espronceda; when I opened it, most of the pages had never even been cut. Does anything we do last? As a Catholic, I have consolation available to me in the faith: “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge”; “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones”; “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead.” This is what I have somewhat thoughtlessly called the “good news” all my life. But as the saying goes, the good news isn’t good unless the “bad news” is bad. When I lost my parents over that catastrophic year, I finally heard the bad news. [Kelly Scott Franklin]
• What’s more, given the amount of scriptural support for the practice of venerating relics, it’s unclear why the practice seems to be followed mostly by Catholics. Acts describes how the early Christians would touch handkerchiefs and aprons to Paul and bring them to the sick and possessed, and “the diseases departed from them, and the wicked spirits went out of them.” When the hemorrhaging woman wished to be healed, she knew that just brushing the edge of Christ’s cloak would heal her. Christ Himself created one of the Church’s most cherished relics. While Jesus was carrying His cross on the way to Calvary, a woman was moved with compassion and approached Him. Desperate to give Him some kind of consolation, she wiped His bloody, sweaty face with her own veil. Later, the woman realized that the image of Christ’s face had been imprinted on the cloth. The woman has been named “Veronica” by tradition, derived from the Latin vera icona, or “true icon.” Thousands of miracles have been attributed to Veronica’s veil, and the Church preserves and venerates it to this day. I have come to think of our N.I.C.U. nurse as not unlike Veronica. Just as Veronica approached Christ to wipe His face, desperate for some way to alleviate His suffering, the nurse had given us the little teal-starred blanket because she was attempting to find some way to console us. The blanket became his only real possession, since we didn’t have the time or the presence of mind to give him anything else. And just as Christ left His imprint on Veronica’s veil, He also allowed Iggy’s blanket to become something more for our girls, a way to give them the grace of consolation. [The Lamp]