A Christmas Hymn

I was going to write in sorrow or outrage or scolding critique about the shootings at Newtown, Connecticut a week ago today. But all of that has been vented and then some, and the postings on this site this week have said . . . not all there is to say, but the first things that need to be said, and have said them very well.

So I resort once again to poetry—in honor of the season, to Christmas carols. My favorite? Lots of competition, but Christina Rossetti’s “In the Deep Midwinter” has long been a prime contender. Quiet, sere, anti-triumphalist. Plus, as the title states, it admits upfront the not-so-subtle coincidence of our celebration of Christ’s birth with all those attempts, ancient and modern, to take on the shortest day of the year, the pit of time, the largest darkness—the winter solstice. Which falls today.  

Gaining in my appreciation, however, is “A Christmas Hymn” by Richard Wilbur. I first heard it sung a couple years ago, on Palm Sunday—the key both to the text’s profundity, theological and poetic, and to its timeliness for our circumstances this year. A congregation might well sing this hymn during Advent, then again during Passion Week, as a way of tying up the two ends of Jesus’ life. The end is present at the beginning—end both as last phase and as purpose—but the start is also there at the stop, and it’s all caught, fittingly, by the image of stones. The virtual stones by which the stable becomes a shrine. The stones on the road of the triumphal entry. The “stony hearts of men” which put the blood of God “upon the spearhead,” and the blood of first-graders on the schoolroom floor. Yet, at the very end, which is also "now," the stars “bend their voices” as if imitating God’s condescension, so that the very stones do cry out in “praises of the child/By whose descent among us/The worlds are reconciled.” The stones become stars--or is it heralding angels?--just as our hard and weary hearts might become temples of a living word.

Richard Wilbur (b. 1921) was teaching at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, when he wrote these words for the university’s annual Christmas concert in 1958. The poem was first published in his Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems (1961), and appears in hymnals today as “A Stable Lamp Is Lighted.” I heard it sung to the tune ANDUJAR, composed by David Hurd, professor of music at General Theological Seminary in New York City. Listen for it at about 3:00 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD6rAQpOAS8.  

         A Christmas Hymn

 A stable-lamp is lighted
   Whose glow shall wake the sky;
      The stars shall bend their voices,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry,
      And straw like gold shall shine;
         A barn shall harbor heaven,
      A stall become a shrine.

 This child through David’s city
   Shall ride in triumph by;
      The palm shall strew its branches,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry,
      Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
         And lie within the roadway
   To pave his kingdom come.

 Yet he shall be forsaken,
   And yielded up to die;
      The sky shall groan and darken,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry
      For stony hearts of men:
         God’s blood upon the spearhead,
   God’s love refused again.

 But now, as at the ending,
   The low is lifted high;
      The stars shall bend their voices,
   And every stone shall cry.
   And every stone shall cry
      In praises of the child
         By whose descent among us
   The worlds are reconciled.

Richard Wilbur remains one of the United States’ most distinguished poets. He was Poet Laureate of the United States for 1987-88 and has been awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry as well as the National Medal of Arts. Approximately one-third of his poetry can be classified as religious. May “A Christmas Hymn” be a present treasured this day of the deep midwinter.   

History War at the Movies

History writing used to be about kings and battles. Now a fair number of the battles are about history writing. Just since Thanksgiving two quarrels have exploded in the American field alone: one about Jefferson and slavery (again), the other about Lincoln. More precisely, about Lincoln as presented by Steven Spielberg. Since the Lincoln dust-up is the more public of the two, being about a movie and all, I’ll speak to that here and maybe return to the Jefferson affair later.

       Controversies over history writing typically make conflicting claims about accuracy, relevance, or political agenda, but often come down in fact to the questions of who’s doing the writing and for whom. So you see guild professionals tangling with journalists (Jon Meacham) or independent scholars (Henry Wiencek) or oracular Authority (David McCullough). Alternately, some guild professionals, who claim to be cutting edge, tilt with others who, by reason of topic, writing style, and sales figures, might in a gimlet eye look to be panderers and popularizers (think the late Stephen Ambrose. Or Joseph Ellis. Or any other plough-boy in the field of Founders Chic.) The “for whom” question usually entails “for what purpose” the history is being written as well. To turn up genuinely new knowledge? To make one’s name by yet another daring (or faddish) methodology or interpretation? Or to edify? Make the reader proud of his country? Reaffirmed in what she already believed, only now with new anecdotes as sweeteners?

             Lincoln doesn’t suffer from such predictable quarrels. Much, anyway. There’s the usual Spielberg sap from time to time (black soldiers reciting the Gettysburg Address from memory as they walk away from an encounter with Honest Abe? To open the movie? Honest?), and the applause at the end of the screening I attended made me sure that Pride and Edification had occurred. But the much more interesting questions about Lincoln have to do with framing questions and their consequences for narrative and theme.  

             As is well known, Lincoln rests on the book Team of Rivals, by independent scholar, superb stylist, and Great Leader aficionado Doris Kearns Goodwin. The book celebrates—per its subtitle—“the political genius of Abraham Lincoln,” and the film does right by the original. It’s refreshing to see the quasi-deified Lincoln of American lore brought back to life as the canny, yet conflicted, politician that he was, by turns opportunistic, unyielding, confident, self-questioning but persisting in his course anyway. All played to a T by (the Brit!) Daniel Day-Lewis. (“Call me Oscar.”) The movie builds to an anxious, rousing climax by tracing the process by which the 13^th Amendment was pushed through Congress under conditions of uncertainty and an urgent deadline.

       Turns out that choosing Team of Rivals as resource (actually, selecting out of its 750-page narrative the bare thirty that cover the Amendment process) was a major interpretive choice that will likely seal the public’s understanding of Lincoln and the abolition of slavery for a long time to come. And will seal it on a false note. For as Lincoln’s critics point out, slavery was already a dead horse by the time (January 1865) the film starts rolling, and was so by virtue of actions undertaken by the slaves themselves. For three years they had been leaving their plantations, flocking to the advancing Union armies, enlisting in those armies to the tune of 200,000 men, sometimes dividing up Ol’ Massa’s lands for themselves, and in general creating a huge threatening cloud on the horizon of the moderates, like Lincoln, who were in charge of the Northern war effort. This was the urgency, not some (false) deadline for getting the text of the Amendment through Congress by the end of the month. The next Congress could have convened in March with a two-thirds majority of Republicans and no lame-duck Democrats to buy off—the horse-trading that the movie entertainingly follows.

       The freed-people weren’t just flocking to the Union armies, either. They were flocking to Washington D.C. too. With a little imagination, his critics aptly say, Spielberg could have pulled away from all the white guys in Congress—the majority of timorous reformers looking bold only by contrast to the egregious racists who opposed them—and filmed some street scenes of black crowds on Pennsylvania Avenue, and on the Capitol steps. Even keeping its White House focus, it could have followed the staff-of-color to the meetings they were helping to lead to organize all the new arrivals in town.

       That would have entailed leaning on a different book—something like Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2011) or the classic (1935) Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. DuBois. Spielberg’s defenders say that the resulting film would not have made as gripping a drama as Lincoln. Depends what you think makes a good story, I guess. Or whose story you wish to tell. How is important in the history wars. But who and what trump.  

Poem for Black Friday

I’ve treasured this poem ever since I first read it as a freshman in college. It appealed to this then late-60s kid as a brilliant send-up of American consumerism ‘50s style, a consumerism we had kicked for sure. Only it turned out we were upgrading it in hipper style.

The poem still strikes home today, though with a twist. Four years out, the backwash of the Great Recession has turned for many people into a slough of despond from which no exit appears imminent. The poem’s picture of absurd prosperity might trigger a wistful thought for a second, a yes-but, until we remind ourselves that we know better, that the postwar boom was all hollow and misbegotten. Wasn’t it?

Or is that an impression only the materially comfortable can draw? Think of an alternative ode, written on this  Black Friday 2012. Would its images be more poignant, its tones more sad than sardonic, amid persisting high unemployment? Might it skewer the feints and blather of high rollers playing fiscal-cliff politics, their own safety net quite secure, thank you very much? How would it register the spiritual costs of faded economic dreams, of uncertainty, of straitened prospects enfolding whole regions and generations?

Maybe such thoughts mix into the undertone we’ll hear this year while watching news footage of the Stampede at the Big Box, that pilgrimage on hyper-speed which opens America's truly holy season. How to capture so jaded a frenzy? Here’s the original to give inspiration, complete with the poet's original headnote.

BOOM!, by Howard Nemerov

SEES BOOM IN RELIGION, TOO

Atlantic City, June 23, 1957 (AP) – President Eisenhower's pastor said tonight that Americans are living in a period of “unprecedented religious activity” caused partially by paid vacations, the eight-hour day and modern conveniences.

      “These fruits of material progress,” said the Rev. Edward L. R. Elson of the National Presbyterian Church, Washington, “have provided the leisure, the energy, and the means for a level of human and spiritual values never before reached.”

Here at the Vespasian-Carlton, it's just one
religious activity after another; the sky
is constantly being crossed by cruciform
airplanes, in which nobody disbelieves
for a second, and the tide, the tide
of spiritual progress and prosperity
miraculously keeps rising, to a level
never before attained. The churches are full,
the beaches are full, and the filling-stations
are full. God's great ocean is full
of paid vacationers praying an eight-hour day
to the human and spiritual values, the fruits,
the leisure, the energy, and the means, Lord,
the means for the level, the unprecedented level
and the modern conveniences, which also are full.
Never before, O Lord, have the prayers and praises
from belfry and phonebooth, from ballpark and barbecue
the sacrifices, so endlessly ascended.

It was not thus when Job in Palestine
sat in the dust and cried, cried bitterly;
when Damien kissed the lepers on their wounds
it was not thus; it was not thus
when Francis worked a fourteen-hour day
strictly for the birds; when Dante took
a week's vacation without pay and it rained
part of the time, O Lord, it was not thus.

But now the gears mesh and the tires burn
and the ice chatters in the shaker and the priest
in the pulpit, and thy Name, O Lord,
is kept before the public, while the fruits
ripen and religion booms and the level rises
and every modern convenience runneth over,
that it may never be with us as it hath been
with Athens and Karnak and Nagasaki,
nor Thy sun for one instant refrain from shining
on the rainbow Buick by the breezeway
or the Chris Craft with the uplift life raft;
that we may continue to be the just folks we are,
plain people with ordinary superliners and
disposable diaperliners, people of the stop'n'shop
'n'pray as you go, of hotel, motel, boatel,
the humble pilgrims of no deposit no return
and please adjust thy clothing, who will give to Thee
if Thee keep us going, our annual
Miss Universe, for Thy Name's Sake, Amen.

 - Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) was an American poet and professor of English. His Collected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1977), from which this poem is taken (pp. 222-23), received the Bollingen Prize and both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for poetry.  

An Obsolete Political Faith

The most common theme running through postmortems on Tuesday’s presidential election has been demographic: the Republican Party’s mortal dependency on an eroding white male power base, mirrored by its pitiful share among the rising Latino sector in American society. Some 60% of whites voted GOP, and fully two-thirds of white males—the most lopsided outcome in that demographic in all American history. Yet these figures shrink next to the one adding religion to the mix: 79% of whites who self-identify as evangelicals went for Romney. That is, only 21% of white evangelicals picked the winner, sided with what Republican and Democratic talking-heads agree is the emerging future of American society. The presidential election now makes full-throated the question that has been gaining volume over the last decade or so: does evangelicalism have a future in a genuinely pluralistic America?

Well of course it does, if we untie the term from the shackles that political analysts have put upon it—and that the Christian Right has done much to clamp tight. The strongest segment of the Democratic coalition is also the most fervently Bible-believing, conversionist, supernaturalist cohort on the American religious scene. That would be African Americans, who voted Democratic 93 to 7. Repeat: 93 to 7. Super-evangelical, yet somehow they don’t get counted in. Nor do Latinos lack (to put it mildly) Pentecostal numbers. But they don’t count in the camp of this faith either. Could it be their body count in the voting results (71% Democratic) has put them outside the pale? Could that be why Mormons get evangelical hugs when it comes to political chumming up?

The public leaders and a whole lot of the rank and file of evangelicalism have chosen a racial image that belies their official theology, and that has come round to bite them on a very sensitive part of their anatomy. Their operational church has become the Right edge of the Republican Party, and their real litmus test of orthodoxy gives not a hoot for the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, sola fides, or the man in the moon, but the sex agenda at politics: anti-abortion and legal disregard for same-sex relationships. These would seem more likely to be the markers of a fertility cult than of biblical religion—another plus for Mormonism—but never mind. As Christian Right pope R. Albert Mohler declared the morning after: the 2012 elections amount to a “catastrophe on moral issues” http://www.albertmohler.com/2012/11/07/aftermath-lessons-from-the-2012-election/. “Morality” here being defined by sexual association.

A way forward for white evangelicalism would embrace holistic biblical morality instead—a concern for all of life, not just before birth, and for justice and equity in economic matters. It would seem the way of prudence too. Ross Douthat, one of the New York Times’ house conservatives, marked out the path already after the first Obama triumph, in Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2009). “Family values” must include sustainability and hope for the family as an economic unit, its oldest function, and that requires a break from bondage to big capital and free-market orthodoxies. Former George W. Bush advisor David Frum made a similar point about abortion in a CNN column just a week before the election (http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/29/opinion/frum-abortion-reality/index.html): “As a general rule, societies that do the most to support mothers and child-bearing have the fewest abortions. Societies that do the least to support mothers and child-bearing have more abortions.” Such support begins with health care and economic viability.

A “catastrophe” the 2012 elections might have been for evangelicalism—a smashing of the idols of the tribe together with a chance for repentance and a new creative contribution to American politics. We’ll see if new leaders can arise and seize the chance. That would serve better than a centenarian Billy Graham taking down Mormonism from his hit list.

If Sex Don’t Getcha the Money Will

I vowed I wouldn’t make this post about how Evangelical celebrities keep tripping over the sex thing. But it’s so hard to resist. Just in the past week we have two newbies that can’t help but call up a golden oldie. First, right-wing screed-maker and putative thinker Dinesh D'Souza had to walk away from the presidency of The King’s College in midtown Manhattan after shacking up at a political hate-fest of God-and-America lovers with a woman not yet his wife, even though the woman who still is his wife had yet to be favored with divorce papers. Never mind, boys, God looketh upon the heart. Then, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock gets all earnest over how God can bring a good thing out of evil—in this case, a cuddly little baby out of a rape.

Speaking of rape, of course, Mourdock is following in the august train of Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who said last summer that women are endowed with a magic contraceptive thought-thingie that prevents a rapist's semen from producing any fruit in the woman he has favored with his attentions. So if she’s carrying it, she must have wanted it. Akin ought to know, science-wise and religiously too. He has a B.S. in management engineering (that’s your logistics and deliverables, like sperm and eggs and gestation and stuff) from Worcester Polytech, plus an M.Div. from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis where--PCA institution that it is--he might have picked up an echo or two of the he-man New Calvinism. Fortunately for the rest of us, he chose politics as his full-time ministry.

Really, it’s all too easy. So I’ll land closer to home where not sex but money has proven to be the trip-wire. Seems that the just departed administration at my college thought it would be a nifty idea to finance a building spree by borrowing money from banks, investing it in real estate and those sacred Wall Street mysteries that did so much to help out the American economy over the past decade, and using the high yields to pay back the loans and supplement all those insufficient donor contributions with bigger bucks for fancier buildings. Except 2008 happened. Now we’re stuck with a zillion dollars in debt on top of a parlous environment in the higher education “industry” and a difficult-to-sustain business model. My college isn’t alone in the latter two fixes, of course; everybody’s facing it. But  at my place we’re facing it with the financial consequences of arbitrage. No fraud or malfeasance involved, we’re assured. Those were reasonable and customary investment practices. That is to say, everybody was doing it.

My mom and dad never liked that excuse when I trotted it out to justify my tepid and unimaginative walks down naughtiness street as a kid. And the excuse certainly does not pass muster with popes Catholic and evangelical when it comes to sexual behavior. (Well, same-sex behavior, since the divorce and premarital sex rates among self-described evangelical heterosexuals are no better than their worldly neighbors’.) But “reasonable and customary” seems enough for Christians on the financial front. Maybe because Jesus and the prophets didn’t bother so much about money compared to sex. After all, the Lord himself told a charming story about a guy who didn’t take enough as enough but vowed to build still bigger barns. So why doesn’t it say anywhere in Scripture that by their derivatives ye shall know them?

I dunno. I started out with an easy one, but here, to cite Mark Twain, I’ve hit a stumper.