This article originally appeared on Virtue Online as part of a larger project on church polity for the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA). Featured photo is by the incredible Trey Ratliff of Stick In Customs.

Much has been made of the Millennial generation (today’s twenty-somethings) with regard to its religious affiliation…or lack thereof. Depending on which study you consider, as many as 82% of people under 30 don’t attend church regularly. One famous statistic claims that 75% of young people today lose their faith in college. Certainly, if you visit a mainline church you won’t see many young adults in the pews. And the megachurches appear to have gutted Christianity in their frantic effort to make it appeal to young people.

But others dispute these apparent trends. A recent article on The Atlantic’s website suggests that whatever might be “wrong” with young people, it’s just because they’re young—they’ll grow out of it. And after all, whatever New Life and Saddleback are selling, they seem to be moving a lot of product.

Thanks to the sheer size of the Millennial generation, the Anglican Church in North America’s efforts to bring about a revival of Anglican Christianity in the United States would seem to hinge on getting this question right. Why are young people staying away from church, especially “traditional” church? And are they likely to come back as they get older?

To answer these questions, we need to go beyond isolated statistics. There are real traits common in Millennials that aren’t going away. The best studies don’t compare today’s 25 year-olds with today’s 65 year-olds; they compare them with yesterday’s 25 year-olds. And while some things definitely change as kids grow up, things happened in the 20th century that have had a lasting impact on American culture and society. To be able to bring the Gospel to today’s young adults, the Church needs to understand what those things are.

As a Millennial myself, and as a communications consultant who works with organizations (including churches) to grow strong support communities, I think it’s crucial for the Church to consider what forces have shaped the Millennial generation—and especially how its experience with church might have affected its perception of religion.

The Millennial’s Story

Ross Douthat’s 2012 book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics documented how the decline of the mainline churches in America coincided with their conformity to political trends. But it’s equally true that the decline of the American church’s influence on Millennials has coincided with its conformity to inhumane social trends. I don’t mean abortion or marriage revisionism; I mean how we order our lives as individuals and communities.

The story of the Millennial generation begins with the suburb and, as a result, the suburban church. We were the first generation with a majority raised in the suburbs–54%, not counting another 32% urban (a lot of whom still lived in a suburban-type environment technically within a city). In stark contrast with (say) our grandparents, we did not live in small, close-knit communities where social and institutional ties were strong. We lived in a world where industrialization, urbanization, and suburbanization had shaped our environments and isolated us. As a result, while we are fascinated by the word community, it’s rare for us to have experienced relationships that have much institutional, economic, or psychological value.

Growing up, we didn’t know our neighbors. We had to drive to see our friends. We had no common life with anybody; our family life was privatized in our suburban castle, and that’s if we were lucky enough to have an intact family. We had no sense of belonging anywhere, because we moved four times and every suburb looked the same anyway.

And church? Church was a building. The suburban church, based on the megachurch business model, was an attempt to adapt to the modern materialist lifestyle. If Protestantism individualized Christian theology, megachurchism officially accepted the individualization of Christian community. In so doing, it conceded as lost the idea that the faith could play a central role in our social structures, and changed church into a one-way, me-centered strip mall commodity to which people could drive once a week to consume a product. There was no liturgy, no Work of the People, because there was no People—not to us. Just Jesus and me. Spiritually, we were alone.

But that was okay, because in this environment, we were told that we were special. Really special. We could be anybody, do anything. We were told not to give up on our dreams, but to find what made us happy and pursue it. The heroes in the stories we grew up with were like Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, who learned that if you reject your parents and sell your soul to the devil in order to get what you want, you’ll live happily ever after. And we were given the internet to empower us to wander alone, freeing us from reliance on tradition, authority, or expert knowledge.

In short, we grew up in an environment where the crucial socioeconomic relationships that had given past generations meaning (family, church, town) were largely irrelevant to us, and where we were constantly told that we didn’t need them anyway. As Columbia sociologist Robert Nisbet had predicted in 1952 in his classic The Quest for Community, to suppose that any such relationships could maintain vitality in the absence of clear, significant functions was “like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will long outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished.”

The Results

In this context, perhaps you’ll understand the following trends within the Millennial generation. As the first of us have progressed through our 20s into our early 30s, today’s academic studies (in contrast to those 10 years ago) have grown increasingly similar in their conclusions about us:

• We aim for the stars at all costs: We are career oriented; 89% of us say a college education is crucial for success in life, and we are willing to postpone or give up things like marriage or community that might slow us down in our quest to inflict our genius on the world. We internalized the idea that we were supposed to save the world, but with no concrete community to belong to and lots of Disney movies in our systems, we tend to think that that is something you go to New York to do.
• We’re individualist networkers, not neighbors: As Marc Dunkelman has demonstrated in National Affairs, the most important relationships to us are inner- and outer-ring relationships; the people closest to us like family, and the acquaintances with whom we share perhaps nothing more than an employer or a favorite sports team. The middle-ring relationships, the ones like neighbors and barbers and fellow citizens that were once at the center of American community life, are almost completely unknown to us.
• We’re skeptical of authority and tradition: While some dispute the finding that a staggering 80% of us score high on the narcissism index; it’s undisputed that concepts like authority and tradition don’t sit well with us. After all, if I’m so special, I must have greater insight into the human condition than all the people before me combined. And since I have access to all the world’s information through the internet, I must know as much as you. I’m going to listen to my heart—don’t label me!
• We’re lonely and rudderless: 60% of us have changed careers at least once, as we continue to search for meaning in life. And 79% of us are unmarried, as we continue to blindly blunder around hoping to randomly run into the perfect spouse who is good enough for us. Community is to us what independence might have been to a third-generation African slave in the 19th century—something we long for, but can’t seem to find. The experience of moving to a new city and spending a year or more trying to surround ourselves with even a handful of meaningful relationships is one with which most of us are familiar.
• We’re disillusioned: Based on a survey that’s been consistently administered for decades, we think the most important thing in life is being happy (in contrast to prior generations at the same age, who tended to value things like honesty, hard work, etc.). Yet as the pursue-your-dreams fantasies we were fed come crashing around our ears when we hit adulthood, we have little idea how to accomplish that. We’ve discovered that overweight ballerinas and talentless artists don’t make much money, and our romantic chances are the pure luck of meeting the perfect person at the right moment. Many of us have become cynics, we snicker at the idealism of our ancestors, and you’ve no doubt seen the unprecedented numbers of us that have given up and moved back in with our parents.
• We rely heavily on the internet, but we try to use it to make real life possible, not replace it. Social media wasn’t an attempt by young whippersnappers to radically reshape human relationships and become screen zombies. It was an attempt by a profoundly lonely generation to use the resources at its disposal to re-humanize the lives of its members, allowing them to connect with people again. A Harvard study revealed that the friends we have on Facebook tend to pretty closely mirror the ones we have in real life, and our interactions on it do the same. While social networks show our flaws and sometimes exacerbate them, most social network activity is either local or extends local-type interactions to our out-of-state friendships.
• We believe in God but we’re not sure who She is: Only 18% of us attend church every week, and only 25% of us fully affiliate with a religion (e.g. “I believe what my church teaches”). Only 55% of self-described Millennial evangelicals go to church regularly. 3 of 4 young Catholics say they would follow their own conscience over the teachings of the Pope (Martin Luther for the win, I suppose).

Are They Coming Back?

Perhaps you begin to see the magnitude of the challenge. The Church is the repository of the cumulative knowledge of Christianity—not just scholarly knowledge, but the beauty and vibrancy and depth of generations of lives surrendered to Christ. The institution offers something that only an institution can: as David Brooks put it, “an idea space that existed before we were born, and will last after we are gone—something that improves and progresses, because it is the repository of hard-won wisdom.” Done right, the Church offers more than salvation from destruction in the distant future—it offers human life as it was meant to be lived, including the mysterious marriage of individual and group in liturgy; as Alexander Schmemman put it, “the action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts.”

In other words, the church offers precisely what Millennials yearn for most deeply, but in forms and through avenues they have been conditioned to distrust most deeply.

For this generation, the old-school parish smacks of stuffiness (“sooo inauthentic”), authoritarianism (“why can’t I pray in my own words?”), and exclusivity (“who’s to say yours is the only way?”). Yet somehow, sooner or later most of us ditch the suburban churches we grew up with—those of us who wander furthest start to sneer at what we see as pathetic attempts to appeal to us, and those who stay closer just don’t go every week (why do we need to?). We remain largely unchanged by lengthy, one-way sermons that go against our instincts for interaction and engagement (and which provide an inadequate counter for the 24/7 influence of our digital and non-digital secular environments). And the large majority of us remains, in the long run, uncommitted to pseudo-Christian rock concerts that are merely a cheap knockoff of the secular show we attended Saturday night.

As some of the facts about us suggest, there is a market among us for something really different—something that gives our lives meaning, and makes us a part of a real community; something that doesn’t bother to try to compete with the other things vying for our attention, and instead claims supreme importance over all of them. A sizable minority of us are joining Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox churches that appear to promise this.

But, in answer to our original question, most Millennials won’t come back to church as they get older—not as long as “church” is recognizable as the optional Jesus and Me Show they saw growing up. The megachurch concedes too much ground to materialism, making it just one competitor among many for our attention. And going back to the old agrarian parish community isn’t an option, since people don’t live physically next to their churches any more.

Yet the Church, as Chesterton once pointed out, has historically had a habit of bouncing back powerfully just when it’s been written off. It may be possible to re-imbue the relationships of Christian community (individual and institutional) with concrete significance for the 21st century and beyond; recognizing the realities of the post-industrial age but finding creative ways to apply Christian social ideals to them.

Show me a church that can offer—in a post-industrial, post-Christian era—something like the significance the parish had in my great-grandparents’ lives, and I’ll show you a church ready to be packed with Millennials…for the long haul.

By the time this reflection hits the press, some months will have dulled the passions surrounding Election 2012. As it is, this mid-November, Americans find themselves in belated agreement about the reality of a social landscape just validated by the voting majority, and the narrative is set: Democrats are the deft, adaptable realists, Republicans the recalcitrant fogies. At least in Washington, there’s enough gloating and fretting to wonder if the middle’s bottomed out.

“It’s the end of the Republic,” I heard a married southern white woman despair twelve hours after the outcome was called. Within minutes my phone vibrated with an invitation from a young and single Wendell Berry urbanite: “Last night got you in good spirits?” it sang. “Come dance it out this Saturday at Club Heaven & Hell with a nine-piece Funk Orchestra!” I couldn’t help but laugh. One nation, indivisible?

In our splintered context, it seems as tiresome as it does critical to put a little time into cleaning up the aims and means of political persuasion. Tiresome because polarization seems too permanent a feature to overcome, critical because without a real effort to bridge our chasms, a country founded on ideas suffocates its own engine. If a democracy is to survive, we don’t really have a choice but to think anew about the purpose of persuasion, about the good that is possible when people’s minds are changed, about the even deeper good that can sprout in the overture process itself.

Reassessment carries special weight for Christians, who have tended toward a preaching model in their fraught history as advocates on the political stage. Not being equipped, somehow, to have their faith affect political expression other than to declare holy high ground and doggedly pound home the same arguments, those on the right and left have succumbed to didactic overreach as they’ve condemned and glorified whatever or whoever speaks to conservative or progressive theo-political priorities. Trusting that repetition is somehow effective, Christian lapels have instead earned the scorn of self-respecting thinkers who won’t stomach moralism beyond pulpit’s pews.

Read more at Comment magazine: changing this requires a hospitable, humble posture, one that welcomes potentially uncomfortable revelations of counter-evidence and logic, one that is even willing, on some issues, to be persuaded.

Why should Christians bother themselves with politics and public life? After all if the world is not our home and salvation is our chief concern, what use do we have for the realm of politics?

It’s a good question, especially when you consider how fruitless many of our public efforts have been. 40 years after Roe v. Wade and we still have high rates of abortion, prayer is no longer taught in schools, divorce rates are still high, etc. When social trends seem so disproportionately unhelpful, and when others seem to be happy when we don’t engage, what’s the use, surely we are just a “passin through.”

I’d say there are many half truths in statements like these. For instance we ought to be concerned with salvation, but the gospel is about far more than the method of salvation or even a one time experience, the gospel is concerned with bringing all our life, and community life, and even cultural life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Here’s a helpful illustration. When a 40 year old businessman gets saved, the gospel isn’t just concerned with his devotional life and Sunday worship, instead the gospel is concerned with his home life, his work life, his relational life. The gospel is concerned with bringing all of these elements, the whole person if you will into the Christian way of life.

Another half-truth, we haven’t made much progress in our concerns therefore we should disengage. We’ve tried politics and it hasn’t worked. It’s true we have tried political engagement, but why hasn’t it worked? Well in part we haven’t developed a deeply rooted public theology, but we have also used political tactics and strategies that by their nature fail to bring about change. We have used a knight’s narrative that says we are righteous and good and those who oppose us are wicked and godless. Therefore we will go out and defeat those who oppose us through the ballet box and push for large one party majorities to advance our interests.

When you approach politics in this way, you will strengthen your opponents and you will inevitably end up in the sort of deadlock and loss of moral influence that you see today.

Read the full post on Foolish Confidence….

Peter Thiel, inventor of Paypal, giving a futurist critique of the deceleration of economic progress since the 1970s on a range of traditional indicators of civilization: transportation technology, agriculture production and prices, rapidity of infrastructure construction.

While computers and telecom have advanced consistently, that sector can’t carry a country.

…

Congressman Paul Ryan argues that the chief political virtue is prudence, defined as good judgment in the art of governing. A ship captain doesn’t curse the wind, but conforms to it in order to move forward.

Madison modeled prudence in the Constitutional Convention when after losing several motions he believed in deeply and argued strenuously for, he became one of the chief advocates of ratification.

Other advice Ryan gave to Republicans: don’t play the villain in the President’s morality plays.

…

Governor Scott Walker arguing that Republicans need to change the narratives they tell the country. Stop using budget language (fiscal cliff, debt ceilings) that communicate very little practically to people’s everyday problems, such as inflated college tuition, local school performance, health care costs.

Walker says that 30 of 50 governorships are in GOP hands, which indicates local Republicans are solving local problems. National Republicans need to adopt the language of local concerns, and loop them back to the national interest.

…

Senator Ted Cruz says Republicans should cancel their subscription to the New York Times because they know the headlines will always be “Abandon all hope ye conservatives who enter here.”

My response: That is stupid. Two of the best conservative writers–David Brooks and Ross Douthat–are NYT writers. But more importantly, strategic communications demands you understand the narrative of your opponents and its audience impact. Ignoring the messages of your competitor is ignoring half the debate.

Cruz’s better suggestions were for Republicans to focus on economic growth and social opportunity. Budget battles locks you into zero-sum messages that plays to the turf of redistribution. Play on the ground of nonzero messaging where Republicans are not the party of today’s corporations, but are the party of tomorrow’s companies that outperform and innovate beyond today’s corporations.

Big corporations love big government, says Cruz.

…

The panel on “What is a conservative foreign policy” with Fred Kagan, Andy McCarthy, and John O’Sullivan typified what is unarguably the weakest link in today’s conservative movement. They all begged the question one way or another, which is, what is the national interest?

Fred Kagan begged the question when he insisted on a procedural definition of conservatism as realism, which according to him asks three questions: 1) What is actually going on? Why do we care? And what could we do about it?

The problem with this formulation is that the second question *is* the locus of the question. How you define the national interest determines what we care about.

Andy McCarthy–an unreconstructed Bush acolyte– assumed “real” democracy promotion and spreading our ideals was our interest, which he undercut later by noting that terrorist organizations exploit weak states and democratic chaos. Also, McCarthy in his bluster against Obama’s foreign policy unknowingly agreed with al-Qaeda’s view of the world when he described that “Islamic supremacist movements” flow directly from Islam, and that we are in a clash of civilizations, which was fun.

John O’Sullivan was the most sensible when he said we need to balance realism and idealism in ever context, and renounced the idea of foreign policy doctrines in general.

…

Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell explaining his governing philosophy is what he calls “results-oriented conservative” that focuses on empirical results. Quoting Reagan, McDonnell says we must “trust but verify” our own principles. They must work.

Don’t be fooled, though, McDonnell is honing a stump speech.

What problem does believing in Jesus solve for you?

It’s a question that answers more about you than about Jesus. I recently asked it to a group of friends and heard back answers reflecting a range of concerns about the world. Theological friends said Jesus solved technically precise theological problems. Intellectual friends said Jesus solved intellectual problems. Practical friends said Jesus solved everyday problems. Apparently, Jesus solved what they needed him to solve. But were any of their problems the right one?

We often think of “orthodoxy” as the right answer, but what about the question itself? What if orthodoxy has more to do with having the right problem? The right problem would have to be one to which Jesus is the unique, not an adequate, solution—the acceptable answer, not an acceptable answer.   A human problem Jesus solves uniquely provides the ground to stake the orthodox case for Jesus: he is the only way. A problem Jesus solves adequately is the wrong problem because an adequate Jesus is the wrong Jesus.

Christianity is benignly optional to people who don’t believe Jesus solves anything uniquely or who have solutions already adequate to their problems. Sure, Jesus can get us through the day, motivate us to help with poverty, provide a social ethic, or resolve intellectual problems. But people use many things to get through the day, among them coffee. Indignation motivates crusades against poverty. Pick your social ethic. Theory solves academic problems. While Jesus can solve such problems adequately, an adequate Jesus inspires nobody.

So how can people change their problems?

Problems are encounters we interpret as inconsistent with our cognitive models of the world. We reckon with life by assessing our priorities, expectations, and concerns against how we think the world works. Problems are the gaps between what we observe about the world and how we expect it to work. Thus, our models set up problems that structure the solutions we seek.

Two cognitive models set up problems that, in turn, structure our theological solutions. One model centers the ego in the solution while the other displaces it. People with ego-centered models tend to identify their problem with “their world’s” problem—their country, social circle, or individual life—and scale solutions to the size of their world. Theological constructs scaled to resolve such problems define their faith in God.  People with displaced-ego models tend to invite new encounters that subvert their problem with bigger ones—typically on missions trips—and expand their world in the direction of a bigger solution. Faith in God defines their openness to bigger problems that destabilize their theological constructs.

For both kinds of people, models shape the problems we see and shape our theology about Jesus. Theology is how we apply our beliefs about Jesus to our lives, how we “make solutions” out of him. Using theology to fit Jesus into our problems is a tricky business because our theological constructs are obviously not Jesus himself. They are what we use to get at him, which calls for two caveats: 1) constructs are tools for knowledge, not knowledge itself; 2) we must hold loosely answers that result from our theological constructs. They are the output while models are the input. Thus, replacing theological constructs amounts to replacing answers: the underlying problem remains.

People change problems when they adopt displaced-ego over ego-centered models of the world.

Changing models is ultimately a way of discarding an adequate Jesus by discarding the wrong problem.  Displaced-ego models make us vulnerable to encounters that overturn our understanding of Jesus, surfacing how we use him for solutions and answers we want to get. But that means we must seek such encounters, and learn to know when we’ve had them. Jesus himself performed ministry this way.

Jesus entered the world in a moment of culture war. Competing ego-centered constructs about societal problems filled first century Palestine. Pharisees claimed their problem (cultural decline) was their world’s (Israel’s) problem. Laxity in observing holiness had precipitated Israel’s decline, hence Pharisees wanted to hallow the land because Yahweh was holy: “You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy.” Their solution was personal and national holiness to correct the broken link between God and their world. So they responded to Roman subjugation with a rigorous morality, emphasizing barriers among people along an axis of holiness.

Jesus confronted the culture war around him with displaced-ego theology. He subverted the bounds of the Pharisees’ solution by enlarging their problem. Jesus criticized the ceremonial, societal, and ultimately exoteric spiritual barriers of their holiness program while enlarging the formal principle—and problem—of holiness. “It is not what enters the mouth that defiles a man, but what proceeds from the heart” (Matt. 15:11). He dedicated his ministry to breaking down spiritual camps and advocated an alternative vision of human community: compassion on all groups that violated the barriers of each (the Parable of the Good Samaritan). He dealt with people’s hearts—their ego-centered models—in showing that their accepted problems were too small.

Ego-Centered Models

Ego-centered models tend to make Jesus an adequate solution to a scaled down problem.

Ego-centered models (in Jesus’s day and ours) are particularly vulnerable to getting wrong societal problems—and creating among people spiritual camps—because they are self-referential in identifying their problem. They rely tenaciously on a person’s limited experience of how his “world” works, and for knowledge beyond that, substitute derivative models from others to inform how the “world” works (i.e., societal narratives or worse, ideology). Those derivative models, or narratives, are the perceived “world” from which problems are identified, and within which theological constructs are meant as solutions. The problem of the ego-centered model and the problem of its “world” become the same. And the solution—for many, Jesus—is scaled to the size of their world.

Thus, across any spectrum of ego-centered diagnoses of societal problems, theological constructs tend to mirror each other as partial, absolutized “worlds” in dueling conflict. Exoteric spiritual barriers among people rise up when people take the boundaries of their “world” as absolute. That is why fundamentalist and ideological movements—of both Right and Left, religious and secular—regiment communities of true believers into mirroring camps along the axis of their respective solutions.

Ideologies and fundamentalisms, Left and Right, are ego-centered constructs aimed at preserving the sacred link (however defined) between society and the cosmos that an enemy endangers. Christians—both Left and Right—make Jesus a symbolic solution to such problems because in reality they desire a societal outcome: the link (however they define it) between the cosmos and their “world” restored through the other side’s defeat. Both sides overemphasize the exoteric in a rigorous projection of their problem on their world. Jesus solves adequately both sides’ need for a rallying symbol. Both sides use Jesus as an adequate solution to the wrong problem.

So what problem can Jesus solve uniquely?

Jesus subverted people’s theological constructs by solving a problem different from cultural decline. He stressed that God’s compassion solved a bigger problem, the right problem, while the culture war of the Jews’ holiness code impeded people from discovering it. Our enemies are not the right problem, so defeating them is not the solution. This is why we turn the other cheek to those we consider evil and love those who impede our solutions. Only after people confront the bigger problem will Jesus’s solution seem real enough to accept. How does someone get to the place of having a problem for which there is either no “adequate” solution for anyone, or one unique answer for everyone?

The right problem is discoverable by displacing our ego from the accepted problem of each of our worlds, narrowly considered. Carrying this to its logical end, the right problem demands that we expand our world until it encompasses everyone equally. We must all be in the same camp: in other words, we must confront a concrete human problem.

Jesus devoted his ministry not to confronting people with sins and absolving their transgressions, but to proclaiming a kingdom through healing and raising the dead. Of 47 encounters Matthew records between Jesus and the “multitudes” and Pharisees, 28 involve healings or discourses about life and death, but only two involve sin or forgiveness. In Mark’s account, 22 of 38 encounters recorded involve healing and life, while only four mention sin. In Luke, it’s 23 of 43 encounters with four mentions of sin. In John, it’s ten of 20 encounters with four mentions of sin. Jesus’s own response to faith was never, “Your faith has made you sinless,” but “Your faith has made you well.”

We are objects of God’s compassion and Jesus’s ministry because we are subject to decay and death, and need his life. The enemies we make are objects of Jesus’s ministry and God’s compassion because they are subject to decay and death, and need his life.

Death is the orthodox problem.

Jesus saw himself as solving death uniquely with life. His mystical teachings always center on his ability to impart “true life,” “everlasting life,” and the “life eternal,” to anyone who believes, and contemplated his own flesh as the solution given “for the life of the world,” according to John’s account. Matthew (10:39), Mark (8:35), and John (6:53) all record Jesus teaching that anyone who rejects him and clings to their own life will have no life.

The church fathers’ true north in the Christological controversies was a Jesus who solved genuinely the problem of death. He had to partake fully in divinity, fully in humanity. He had to have both natures, both wills. Only then could God become man that man might become god, in the words of Athanasius, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Augustine. Humanity only then could partake of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) through mystical union with Jesus and share in the spoils of his victory over death. The displaced-ego theology of the Incarnation solves uniquely the orthodox problem of death.

Sure, Jesus can meet you where you are and solve the problems you have. But spiritual growth consists in embracing the problem of orthodoxy, and effective spiritual challenge to the world consists in confronting it with death. The orthodox solution is life, joy unspeakable and full of glory: Jesus came to be the life of the world. And not the sort of life lived as passing through events—as the times crease into our faces—but the positive force of life of being and doing in flourishing relations with others under the expectation that our death is conquered, and is the curtain call for the real show.

The delightful Sarah Clarkson, author of “Journeys of Faithfulness: Stories of Life and Faith for Young Christian Women,” has posted her list of books of the year for 2012. If you’re not familiar with Clarkson, this quote will give you a little taste of, well, her taste:

“Beauty seen and people loved are my passions. Grace comes the clearest to me amidst friendship and family, in the beauty of good stories, in vigorous discussion, art in myriad form, and music, always music. I will do almost anything for a strong cup of coffee or tea and am always ready to enter the buzz of a good debate. I love the green earth; hope someday to live a little closer to it, but for now am always eager for a foray into the mountains or down into the valleys. Life is, to my thought, a feast to be celebrated, a grace to be daily blessed, and my delight is to live it fully through beloved God and the people he has given me to love.”

She explains: “This won’t be a long list, just a few of the books that smacked me in the brain and changed the way I think. I will only count books that were, in my evaluation, marvelous, and that I had never read before, and that I read in their entirety.”

Read the list

The current issue of The Aspen Idea sits innocently atop my magazine pile, enticing a flip-through with its happy banners framing the nation’s best and brightest as they participate in the annual Ideas Festival. Former General Stanley McChrystal stares up from the cover with earnest gestures overlaid by the text, “A Call for National Leadership.” A sort of American summer camp for the Davos crowd, the Aspen invitation is an honor badge for any professional, and its scrapbook provides a representative portrait of the Who’s Who of our time. The roster is impressive, deep and varied, and normally I’m just interested in learning more about the experts and the debates they’re waging.

Today, though, in the wake of the Petraeus-Broadwell scandal, I am struck by an odd naiveté woven into the manners of this very successful class, perhaps the same naiveté of a broader achievement culture that idolizes its winners out of impatience with a quieter glory. The surface story of these smiling, accomplished, at ease yet earnest men and women seems admirable according to contemporary formulas for the good life: Work hard, attend a prestigious school, diversify your experiences, be altruistic, persevere through all odds, bulldoze if you must to attain what you must, praise others and accept praise, surround yourself with stimulating people, marry well and expand opportunity for your kids. And of course, depending on application, these tropes are fine and endearingly American, some even virtuous. But looking now at Aspen’s photos of Paula Broadwell sipping champagne with other participants and hearing her Petraeus biography praised by Michael O’Hanlon during a festival interview (not to mention the lavish blurbs on the back cover), I am disquieted by the knowledge of darker secrets hid at the very moment of public celebration.

For the naiveté I observe is a moral one, selective as it is toward who gets judged and what counts for virtue. Media coverage of the Petraeus scandal has hardly paused to revisit old ideals that honored the quieter habits of submission, spousal faithfulness among them. That’s the boring non-story. I admit some disheartened offense at this callous nonchalance from both left and right (with middle-aged men taking up most of that vocal space, I can’t help but note). A “been there, seen that” dismissal of adultery seems so foolishly arrogant, reductive and cheap. But beyond my bias toward relational commitment lies a bewilderment that a smart, sophisticated group of people is relying on a set of guideposts for worth often anchored no deeper than the opinions of the mutual admiration societies into which they give and take.

This is not a danger exclusive to elites. Human nature is one of those deliciously indiscriminate agents, and no amount of careful breeding, self-awareness or even hard knocks can quite staunch the flush of another’s praise. Our social needs hardly weaken the closer we get to distinction! (Indeed, it’s plausible that General Petraeus chose to unzip a life of accumulated treasure in the heat of wanting a still more intimate admiration.) But, to stake security and one’s aspirational compass only in the smooth topsoil of like-minded, like-educated folks seems awfully fast and loose, especially for a group whose discoveries, decisions and collective progress impact circles far beyond its immediate orbit. There is often a soft clubbiness that belies the weight of their offices, and I wonder if the country wouldn’t be better served by some rude interruption of the parochial warm and fuzzies, or at least a few more words of honest questioning between members of this tier.

I don’t mean to tirade against etiquette and its pleasantries—they can keep the world spinning even as they lend a shared language for each tribe that appropriates its own set of manners. These are goods in our tricky age, and for all people, compliments usher in cooperative spirits necessary for larger problem-solving and encouragement, when sincere and deserved, is ever salutary. But somehow, more recently, as society’s moral domain has contracted to accommodate our individual preferences amid diversity and transience, the framework for any kind of rigorous accountability has been re-jiggered, rending the fabric open for a fuzzier set of “shared values” to patch up our social governance. And it is in the achievement class that these values come off as the most vague, even as they’re coated with a hypersensitivity to political incorrectness or personal offense. This combination is unsustainable.

I’d love to see some social historians map out the development behind the current morass. For now I’ll guess that part of the answer is located on the training grounds for today’s leaders: parents who filled the toolbox for their kids to succeed but omitted the counteracting lessons in humility and fear of one’s own temptations; college campuses squelching voices from certain quarters; cloistered networks now technologically capable of feeding consumers data points that sooth their own impulses. Somewhere along the path toward a steady status was a little too much of a compartmentalizing, organized achievement ethos, and a little too little of a rounder, friction-laden virtue ethos.

It’s impossible to know what could have paused the choices of General Petraeus and Paula Broadwell as they triggered their public disgrace with private disorder, just as it would be for any of us who do and will fall. But I can’t help but wonder if our society wouldn’t be healthier if reticence were to make a cultural comeback. If we were a little slower to fawn and a lot shyer to peacock ourselves around, so that praise, when voiced, could be more fully legitimate, more properly an encouragement toward the good life in all its shades. Then we might experience a social trust confined less to one class of people, one more broadly dispersed and honestly earned. Genuineness has a timbre most people recognize after all, and it sticks.

About the author: Lauren Bobbitt has a master’s degree in English literature from Marquette University.

This is my first Christmas ever without the structure of an academic schedule, and somehow it feels like Christmas shouldn’t come without the end-of-semester crucible. In its absence, I need to provide some other kind of structure for myself, to be sure that I am prepared for the coming of Christ. I am sure that many of you are more diligent (and more timely) in personally observing Advent than I am, but if perhaps you, too, would appreciate something to enrich your other rituals, I thought I would offer to you the Advent and Christmas poems that I will be using daily during this season. Some date back hundreds of years and others are contemporary, but all, I trust, provide substance and beauty to deepen my, and perhaps your, contemplation of the magnificent mystery of the Incarnation.

As you begin your Christmas preparations and celebrations, may you rejoice in both the ordinary and the extraordinary as the magnificent breaks into the mundane and the Word becomes flesh. And may you be haunted by the strains from another world that keep us longing for its coming…

December 23: O Rex Gentium (Malcolm Guite)

For today, another of Malcolm Guite’s Advent sonnets, based on ancient Latin antiphons. This is the final sonnet in his series, celebrating the Christ child as King, contrasting the glory of His kingliness with the commonness of human form. As you reflect, may you embrace your own humanness and yield to the shaping hand of the One who deemed our “clay” not too base for Himself…

Here is the Latin Antiphon that inspired Guite’s poem:

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one, Come and save the human race,which you fashioned from clay

O King of our desire whom we despise,
King of the nations never on the throne,
Unfound foundation, cast-off cornerstone,
Rejected joiner, making many one,
You have no form or beauty for our eyes,
A King who comes to give away his crown,
A King within our rags of flesh and bone.
We pierce the flesh that pierces our disguise,
For we ourselves are found in you alone.
Come to us now and find in us your throne,
O King within the child within the clay,
O hidden King who shapes us in the play
Of all creation. Shape us for the day
Your coming Kingdom comes into its own.

December 22: Journey of the Magi (T.S. Eliot)

There is so much depth in this poetic narrative (like the images in the second stanza, rich with allusions to the gospels). May your exploration of it help you welcome death to the things that have passed and life in the things that have come through Christ’s birth…

‘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.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

December 21: A Poem for Christmas (Joseph Brodsky, translated from Russian by Seamus Heaney)

May your imagination richly dwell within the mystery of the Incarnation in all its magnitude and mundaneness…

Imagine striking a match that night in the cave:
use the cracks in the floor to feel the cold.
Use crockery in order to feel the hunger.
And to feel the desert – but the desert is everywhere.
Imagine striking a match in that midnight cave,
the fire, the farm beasts in outline, the farm tools and stuff;
and imagine, as you towel your face in the towel’s folds,
the bundled up Infant. And Mary and Joseph.
Imagine the kings, the caravans’ stilted procession
as they make for the cave, or rather three beams closing in
and in on the star; the creaking of loads, the clink of a cowbell;
(but in the cerulean thickening over the Infant
no bell and no echo of bell: He hasn’t earned it yet.)
Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded
immensely in distance, recognising Himself in the Son,
of Man: homeless, going out to Himself in a homeless one.

December 20: Gloria in Profundis (G.K. Chesterton)

Somehow with Chesterton, one feels as if there is nothing else to say…and so I shall only only say: may you be profoundly met by the glory of God…

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover,
For the wine of the world brims over,
Its splendour is spilt on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all-
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountain of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate-
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

December 19: Bethlehem (Charles Williams)

Wherever your journey takes you this season, may you find your true home and true joy in the stable in Bethlehem…

‘Let us go a journey,’
Quoth my soul to my mind,
‘Past the plains of darkness
Is a house to find
Where for my thirsting
I shall have my fill,
And from my torment
I shall be still.’

‘Let us go a journey,’
Quoth my mind to my heart,
‘Past the hills of questing,
By our ghostly art,
We shall see the high worlds,
Holy and clear,
Moving in their order
Without hate or fear.’

‘Let us go a journey,’
Quoth my heart to my soul,
‘I shall thrive never
On the world’s dole.
Past the streams of cleansing
Shall a house be found
Where the peace and healing
For my aching wound.’

By the streams of cleansing,
By the hill of quest,
By the plains of darkness,
They came to their rest.
As the kings of Asia,
They went to a far land;
As the early shepherds,
They found it close at hand.

When they saw Saint Joseph
By their ghostly art,
‘Forget not thy clients,
Brother’, quoth my heart,
When they saw Our Lady
In her place assigned,
‘Forget not thy clients,
Mother’, quoth my mind.

But my soul hurrying
Could not speak for tears,
When she saw her own Child,
Lost so many years.
Down she knelt, up she ran
To the Babe restored:
‘O my Joy,’ she sighed to it,
She wept, ‘O my Lord!’

December 18: A Song for Simeon (T.S. Eliot)

Simeon’s Prayer – Luke 2:29-32

“Now Lord, You are releasing Your bond-servant to depart in peace,
According to Your word;
For my eyes have seen Your salvation,
Which You have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
A Lightof revelation to the Gentiles,
And the glory of Your people Israel.”

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season had made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

December 17: The Glory (Madeleine L’Engle)

May you abide in the truth that the timing and giving, the story and glory of the Incarnation, are God’s…offered to us here in hereafter…

Without any rhyme
without any reason
my heart lifts to light
in this bleak season

Believer and wanderer
caught by salvation
stumbler and blunderer
into Creation

In this cold blight
where marrow is frozen
it is God’s time
my heart has chosen

In paradox and story
parable and laughter
find I the glory
here in hereafter

December 16: Poem for a Christmas Broadcast (Anne Barbara Ridler)

Anne Barbara Ridler was a poet and editor on the edge of the Inklings, and also worked closely with T.S. Eliot. May her poem move you to consider what you bring before the infant King…

Woman s Voice

Perhaps you find the angel most improbable?
It spoke to men asleep, their minds ajar
For once to admit the entrance of a stranger.
Few have heard voices, but all have made a journey:
The mind moves, desiring dedication,
Desiring to lay its gifts, as a dog its bone,
At the feet of the first creation. ‘Take it or leave it’
Says pride, ‘You made it; You must bear the blame.’
But secretly the heart ‘O make it good.’
‘Either God acts in vain, or this is God.’

1st King
Melchior brings gold. O teach me to give,
For this was infancy’s first love:
Its first possession; its adult passion
O new creation
Take my treasure and make me free.

2nd King
Caspar, incense: all that is strange,
Oblique, projected beyond the range
Of the First Person. Such mediation
O new creation
Take, that we dare the direct sight.

3rd, King
Death is a strong wish. Balthasar
Brings his desire in a gift of myrrh ;
Seeking perfection in pain and cessation
O new creation
Die for me, make me desire to live.

All Three
Mary, who nourished glory on human kindness
By springs of power hidden from the mind,
Here is our small self-knowledge, now
Make it acceptable, or teach us how.

Mary
He will accept it, never fear,
For his audacity is my despair.
O do not give what he should not bear.
His boldness is beyond belief,
His threats, his lightnings, his short grief.
Is it divine or mortal confidence?
Mortal ignorance, godlike innocence.
Brazen, he takes love as a right;
He knows to demand is to give delight.
Youngling, here we offer love
What have we to offer but love?
And what is our love? Greed and despair.
O do not take what you should not bear,
Or tainted love by true convince:
Let us not harm you, helpless Prince.
Sin is the chance of mercy;
Then even sin contrives your greater glory.

December 15: The Nativity (C.S. Lewis)

May even the most mundane matters, like the nativity animals, be ripe for your reflection and sanctification this season…

Among the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Saviour where I looked for hay;
So may my beastlike folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some woolly innocence!

December 14: The House of Christmas (G.K. Chesterton)

As you celebrate in your own homes this Christmas, may your heart’s deepest longings for Home be met at the manger and may you abide with Christ in the place where He has made His home – within you…

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost—how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wife’s tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

December 13: Christmas (George Mackay Brown)

May the striking imagery and contrasts of this poem help you truly know the deep need for the Life and Light to come…

‘Toll requiem’, said sun to earth,
As the grass got thin.
The star-wheel went, all nails and thorns,
Over mill and kirk and inn.

The old sun died. The widowed earth
Tolled a black bell.
‘Our King will return’, said root to bone,
To the skeleton tree on the hill.

At midnight, an ox and an ass,
Between lantern and star
Cried, Gloria…Lux in tenebris…
In a wintered byre.

December 12: The Disarming Child (Charlie Lowell)

As the Christ Child comes to you this season, may you be met afresh by His beautifully unsettling presence and be given by Him what you need – whether sorrow or joy – to be quickened into newness of life…

Helpless and human
Diety in the dirt,
Spirit married with flesh
We couldn’t make it to you,
But you come to us.

You always come to us.
In our stubbornness and desire,
Entitlement and shame
Remind us that we need you,
Merge your untamed Spirit with our flesh.

We try to forget those
Years of wandering.
Shackles and masters,
An eternity of doubting
And still, you come to us.

A divine intrusion
Through our scheming and chaos-
Coats of armor, angels and armies.
Do some wrecking here,
And gently come to us.

Disturb us this day
Through sorrow and through dancing,
The bliss of joy and sting of death
Past hands that would threaten and tear,
You come to us extravagantly.

From your manger lowly,
Mighty and mysterious
You come to us, Seed of Heaven
Spirit wed with flesh,
These broken hearts to mend.

December 11: Vicit Agnus Noster (Michael Card)

Not all singers do I consider true poets, but Michael Card I most certainly do. This song weaves Old Testament, New Testament, and church liturgy together to fix our meditation on our God of faithfulness and paradox. May your heart be firmly rooted in this:

Vicit agnus noster eum sequamur…”Our Lamb has conquered. Let us follow Him.”

Vicit Agnus
Vicit Agnus
Noster eum sequamur

Did Abraham himself not say
God would provide a lamb
To take instead the punishment
That should belong to man

And so to humble shepherds
Was His glory first revealed
And with His birth a covenant
Made long ago was sealed

Vicit Agnus
Vicit Agnus
Noster eum sequamur

Out of His dark obscurity
The Light of God has shone
And through the meekness of the Lamb
God’s strength would be made known

The just and gentle Promised One
Would triumph o’er the fall
And conquer by His own defeat
And win by losing all.

If you would like to hear a recording of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVS0Ex4uvyo

December 10: O Emmanuel (Malcolm Guite)

A good friend recently pointed me to a collection of contemporary Advent sonnets by Malcolm Guite, based on ancient Advent liturgy. I am delighting in Guite’s profound reflections that rework the forms of the past – both liturgical and literary (i.e. the sonnet) – to join them with a contemporary voice proclaiming truths that transcend past, present, and future. May you find the same richness in these words that magnify the Word.

On his blog, Guite explains the foundation of his project: “In the first centuries the Church had a beautiful custom of prayng seven great prayers calling afresh on Christ to come, calling him by the mysterious titles he has in Isaiah…I have responded to these seven “Great O” Antiphons, as they are called, with seven sonnets, revoicing them for our own age now, but preserving the heart of each…” (http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/o-adonai-my-second-advent-reflection-and-sonnet/)

Here is the English translation of the Latin Antiphon that inspired the following poem:

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us
O long-sought With-ness for a world without,
O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.
Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name
Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,
O quickened little wick so tightly curled,
Be folded with us into time and place,
Unfold for us the mystery of grace
And make a womb of all this wounded world.
O heart of heaven beating in the earth,
O tiny hope within our hopelessness
Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,
To touch a dying world with new-made hands
And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.

December 9: Into the Darkest Hour (Madeleine L’Engle)

However dark the world may seem to you this advent season, may you draw hope from the wonderful truth of Immanuel -God with us – whose presence is most evident when signs of its absence are most keenly felt…

It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss-
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.

It was time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight-
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.

And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! Wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.

December 8: Christmas Dream (Eugene Peterson)

May the anticipation in your Advent preparations and the fullness of your Christmas celebration carry you throughout the year and make you always at home with grace…

“…an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream.”

Amiably at home with virtue and evil -
The righteousness of Joseph and Herod’s
Wickedness – I’m ever and always a stranger to grace.
I need this annual angel visitation.

- this sudden drive by dream into reality -
to know the virgin conceives and God is with us.
The dream powers its way through winter weather
and gives me vision to see the Jesus gift.

Light from the dream lasts a year. Through
Equinox and solstice I am given twelve months

Of daylight by which to build the crèche where my
Redeemer lives. The fetus of praise grows

deep in my spirit. As autumn wanes I count
the days until I bear the dream again.

December 7: Nativity (John Donne)

May your reflection on this 17th century sonnet move you to awe at the paradoxes of the Incarnation and the vastness once contained within a manger…

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov’d imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod’s jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith’s eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

December 6: Mary’s Songs

May these two selections together round out your contemplation of the Incarnation from the perspective of the one who carried the Infinite in her womb…

Mary’s Song
by Luci Shaw

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest …
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

The Magnificat – Luke 1:46-55

My soul exalts the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has had regard for the humble state of His bondslave;
For behold, from this time on all generations will count me blessed.
For the Mighty One has done great things for me;
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is upon generation after generation toward those who
fear Him.
He has done mighty deeds with His arm;
He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones,
And has exalted those who were humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things;
And sent away the rich empty-handed.
He has given help to Israel His servant, in remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and his descendants forever.

December 5: A Christmas Carol for 1862: The Year of the Trouble in Lancashire (George MacDonald)

In 1862 the Lancashire region in northern England was plagued by a severe depression and America strained under the burden of civil war. The loss of American cotton imports to the Lancashire region initiated a Cotton Famine that created widespread unemployment and deprivation for rich and poor alike. In a time perhaps not so very unlike our own, George MacDonald penned this poem, reminding us that Christ the child is also Christ the King, whose rule leaves no part of life untouched. May His coming be not only in your heart this season but but also for a country and world in great need…

The skies are pale, the trees are stiff,
The earth is dull and old;
The frost is glittering as if
The very sun were cold.
And hunger fell is joined with frost,
To make men thin and wan:
Come, babe, from heaven, or we are lost;
Be born, O child of man.

The children cry, the women shake,
The strong men stare about;
They sleep when they should be awake,
They wake ere night is out.
For they have lost their heritage—
No sweat is on their brow:
Come, babe, and bring them work and wage;
Be born, and save us now.

Across the sea, beyond our sight,
Roars on the fierce debate;
The men go down in bloody fight,
The women weep and hate;
And in the right be which that may,
Surely the strife is long!
Come, son of man, thy righteous way,
And right will have no wrong.

Good men speak lies against thine own—
Tongue quick, and hearing slow;
They will not let thee walk alone,
And think to serve thee so:
If they the children’s freedom saw
In thee, the children’s king,
They would be still with holy awe,
Or only speak to sing.

Some neither lie nor starve nor fight,
Nor yet the poor deny;
But in their hearts all is not right,—
They often sit and sigh.
We need thee every day and hour,
In sunshine and in snow:
Child-king, we pray with all our power—
Be born, and save us so.

We are but men and women, Lord;
Thou art a gracious child!
O fill our hearts, and heap our board,
Pray thee—the winter’s wild!
The sky is sad, the trees are bare,
Hunger and hate about:
Come, child, and ill deeds and ill fare
Will soon be driven out.

December 4: Noel (Anne Porter)

When snow is shaken
From the balsalm trees
And they’re cut down
And brought into our houses

When clustered sparks
Of many-colored fire
Appear at night
In ordinary windows

We hear and sing
The customary carols

They bring us ragged miracles
And hay and candles
And flowering weeds of poetry
That are loved all the more
Because they are so common

But there are carols
That carry phrases
Of the haunting music
Of the other world
A music wild and dangerous
As a prophet’s message

Or the fresh truth of children
Who though they come to us
From our own bodies
Are altogether new
With their small limbs
And birdlike voices

They look at us
With their clear eyes
And ask the piercing questions
God alone can answer.

December 3: First Coming (Madeleine L’Engle)

He did not wait till the world was ready,
till men and nations were at peace.
He came when the Heavens were unsteady,
and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.
He came when the need was deep and great.
He dined with sinners in all their grime,
turned water into wine. He did not wait

till hearts were pure. In joy he came
to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.
To a world like ours, of anguished shame
he came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,
to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.
In the mystery of the Word made Flesh
the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!.

One thing I hate about major elections is sorting through all the opinions of what went right/wrong afterward. But after several weeks, here is what I think was the cream of the crop. If you’re wondering if conservatism will ever be embodied in the GOP (or elsewhere) in a way that is compelling to, and beneficial for, 21st century America, here are some of the most challenging thoughts I’ve seen.

Conservatism Means Conservation

Roger Scruton: “What has gone wrong, it seems to me, is not the attachment of conservatives to the market, but the failure to see what a real market solution requires: namely the retreat of the state and its projects from every decision in which local aims and loyalties are at stake.”

Outsider Conservatism

Daniel McCarthy: “The art of politics—especially for the traditional conservative, who shuns utopian dreams of making men all alike, whether in class, creed, virtue, race, or anything else—has always been the art of integration: reconciling hoi polloi and hoi aristoi, the rich and the poor in the Greek city state; reconciling Catholic and Protestant, Scots and English in the United Kingdom; keeping intact the polyglot empire of Austria-Hungary or the racially and regionally divided United States. The challenges the U.S. faces today are not different in kind from those that other polities have confronted in the past, with various degrees of success; conservatism’s task is to serve as the pin that holds together a society in whirl.”

The Conservative Future

David Brooks: “If you listened to the Republican candidates this year, you heard a conventional set of arguments. But if you go online, you can find a vibrant and increasingly influential center-right conversation.”

Sources of Conservative Renewal

Rod Dreher: “The weakness here is that an iteration of conservatism that came out of an era of social chaos, overweening statism, and Soviet expansionism, and that presented itself as a compelling answer to the misery, malaise, and drift of the 1970s, cannot speak to voters who didn’t live through the times that formed Reagan, or immediately preceded his ascension to the presidency. If you can’t remember the inflation of the Seventies, or the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the emotional weight of those times, chances are you will struggle to make sense of Reagan conservatism.”

Also by Dreher: The Rout of Traditionalist Conservatism

Moses and the Gipper and the End of America

Elizabeth Scalia: “This election has shattered, finally the illusion that if “good conservatives just keep fighting,” somehow “another Reagan” was going to come along and restore the “shining city on a hill”. For too long I have watched friends remain enthralled to the notion that a single man or woman equipped with rhetorical skills, a bit of spine, and right-thinking would be able to resurrect what is remembered by some modern conservatives as a golden age.”