Category Archives: religion

The Daily Gift

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(We were reminded this week by the death of a former colleague at the age of 44 that life and death are not predictable, not even for those imprisoned and facing capital punishment.  And what if it were?  Dr. Frank Crane ponders—–)

THE UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE

“There goes a man,” said the physician, “who is under sentence of death.”

“What to you mean?’

“He is in the secondary stages of a disease for which there is no known cure.  He is as sure to be dead or to lose his mind, which amounts to the same thing, as far as the victim himself is concerned, and one of these calamities is bound to occur within six months as the sun is certain to rise tomorrow.”

“Yet he seems cheerful. Why?”

“Because he does not know it.”

There you have the secret of contentment. For you and I, and every man, is under the sentence of death, as well as those marked by a mortal malady or sentenced by court-criminal our court-martial…

Every sunset, every clock-stroke brings us mechanically near the drop. And we know it. And we are cheerful. Why?

Simply because we do not know the date!

IF we knew that it would deaden our days and darken our minds. Just one fact of the future, if its time of happening were to be revealed to us, would paralyze life.

And so you see the falseness of another common notion, that the uncertainty of life is a bad thing. On the contrary, the uncertainty of life is its chiefest charm.

Heaven, which prescribes death, gives us death’s antidote, which is ignorance of death’s time. The sentenced world laughs and plays, drinks deep of dear human love, is busy with business—in fact the whole human comedy is interesting, amusing, and worthwhile just because the time of the certain fall is concealed.

 

We, the Incompetent

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(All of us are incompetent.  When a faucet leaks or a light switch quits working at my house, it is Nancy who fixes it, not me. I can help her with words when she’s trying to convey a particular thought to someone on Facebook or in a note, however.  Dr. Frank Crane says it is easy to pronounce others incompetent while ignoring our own lack of skill. But, he says, there is one overpowering competence that he believes will survive all of the abuses that we, the individual incompetents, might do to it.)

ONLY HUMANITY IS COMPETENT

One day as I passed down the street, I came to a spot where a teamster had unhitched his horses from his wagon and was giving them their mid-day oats, beneath the shade of a benevolent and comfortable oak. From one of the animals, I noticed the collar had been taken and that his neck was sore.

“Pretty hard, isn’t it?” I inquired of the man, “to make a horse pull with a sore shoulder against the collar?”

“Yep,” he answered, “plum tough.” And then he handed me a bit of philosophy which I have put among most prized possessions. “There wouldn’t be much work done in this word, mister, if only horses and folks that are plum fit had to do it.”

There you are!  That is a large and brilliant truth.  The business of this earth is carried on by the incompetent and the unfit. It is the mothers that don’t know how to bring up children that are bringing up most of them; it’s the people not at all qualified to marry marrying; it’s the teachers that can’t teach that are teaching; and the preachers who can’t preach that are preaching. Most mayors, governors, and presidents do not know how to manage states, cities, and nations; doctors who don’t know are giving us pills and cooks who are incompetent are preparing our food; and altogether the world is in the hands of the unfit.

Yet, somehow, nature manages to get things done. She gains her ends. Perfectly balancing all of imperfections, she arrives at perfection. Let us take heart. Incompetence is no excuse for despair. No individual is competent; only humanity is competent.

 

Old Friends—and the Greatest Friend

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(Paul Simon wrote the lyrics and he and Art Garfunkel recorded it long ago. It’s kind of a melancholy song at first hearing but later reflection reveals it to be a song about the unspoken quiet comfort of longtime relationships that are greater than acquaintance with one another.

Perhaps you have heard the song. It’s been done by several artists. Here are some of the lyrics:

“Old friends, Old friends, Sat on their park bench, Like bookends…Old Friends, Winter companions, The old men, Lost in their overcoats, Waiting for the sunset….Can you imagine us, Years from today, Sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange, To be seventy. Old friends, Memory brushes the same years, Silently sharing the same fear…Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph, Preserve your memories, They’re all that’s left you.”

Memories and photographs are what remains. Why, then, do we become friends if in the end that’s all we have left?   The answer is simple: It is friendships that make life worth living each day that we have life.

Think about the first sentence of Dr. Crane’s meditation on—–)

FRIENDSHIP

When a man says friendship I think he utters the deepest word in human speech. It ranks even a little higher than love, being a sort of unselfed love, love with the hunger and itch extracted.

We do not love our friends; we like them. We love our children, wife, parents, and kinfolks. We like apples and custard pie and a cozy fire and a good bed and slippers—and a friend.

Like goes farther than love. Like is a voice from the subconscious self, a cry from the inward and unknown me. It lies behind the will, beneath the judgment, in the far darkness of our secret soul…

Whence, then, come friends? And who are they? And how can one make them?  All answers to these pathetic questions seem to me to be unsatisfactory, partial, and by the way. The rules of the wise will not work. We do not make friends by being noble and good. Friendships do not arise from similarity in tastes…

The fact is the secret springs of friendship are totally mysterious…As I look over my friends I find I like them as a dog likes his master. So I conclude that his emotion must originate in some Newfoundland or St. Bernard region of my nature, and is one of those instincts not yet eliminated by evolution, something I share with dogs.

For all that, I honor it as the best thing I am conscious of. I am prouder of liking my friends than of any other of my small bunch of virtues. When I think if Bill and Lige and Al and Ralph and Newt, I get a kind of warmth about the cockles of my heart no other contemplation can produce.

And the biggest hurts I have ever felt are those made by the disloyalty of others whom I had thought friends and trusted. Nothing is so salt and nauseous as the taste of Judas in the mouth of memory.

And it seems to me—for this is, after all, a sermon—that religion, rightly taken, is a friendship for God rather than a love for God, and that we would translate all the Bible’s admonitions to love God by the paraphrase to be friends with God.

To love God has a conventional sound, but to be a friend of God—that is a searching and swordlike word. It means to like him, not to avoid him, to seek his presence, to be at home with him, to the cheered, consoled, to be quieted by the thought of him.

Speaking for myself, I can say that I never came into this comfortable relationship until I had swept away all I had ever been taught, dared to presume upon the debt God had incurred toward me, and I took my rightful place as his son at his table.

It does not require any assumption of holiness or sinlessness to do this. It only needs to presume upon the vast nobleness, kindness, and forebearing wisdom of such a heart as Jesus reveals to us. It requires a tremendous burst of moral courage to believe God likes the kind of man I am. But I do believe it and the result is the greatest ethical dynamic of my life—the friendship of God.

When we become infinite

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(There are times when all of us ponder issues of mortality and what comes after. Those of us who believe there is something after occasionally think about what that will be like.  I hope it’s a time with all of the friends and relatives I’ve known—-although I prefer not to meet them anytime soon—and all of the cats and dogs I’ve loved who (I hope) loved me back. It’s a place where I can play softball again and where I’ll never have to trim my toenails. And, yes, with the infinity of time, I not only want to read, I want to meet many of the people I read about.  Maybe I’ll run into Dr. Frank Crane and find out if he’s accomplished the things he planned when he explained—–)

WHAT I SHALL DO WHEN I GET TO HEAVEN

The first thing I shall do is to read up for a thousand years or so.

Nothing impresses me so with the brevity of life as to enter a library—oppresses, I would rather say.

How can one find time to get even so much as acquainted with literature when a Niagara of books, not to mention magazines and papers, roars from the laws of the press in an unending stream?

In Heave, time being no matter, I shall learn all the languages earth ever had (Heaven has but one—multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus una*) clear back to the guttural clicks of the stone-age man and glug-glug of the lake dwellers, and get all local colors and hence know all life.

Celestial beings move with the rapidity of thought. Distance makes no difference. With you were on Antares; and behold you are there.

Now the science story-tellers tell us we see the light of stars that may have been extinguished centuries ago. Rapidly as light travels it takes ages for it to cross the universe, if it ever gets across at all. Hence traveling with thought-rapidity, I can overtake light anywhere along its road. Consequently, all I need to do, in order to witness with my own eyes anything that ever happened on earth is to wish myself at such a distance as shall bring me to where the light of that event is fresh.

Placing myself at so many million miles, I am present at the death of Caesar; at so many more million miles, I walk with Pericles the ways of Athens; so many more I see Moses coming down from Sinai.  So in Heaven, I shall be able to be “among those present” at anything that ever took place. Interesting. What?

In heaven also I shall have time to develop all my latent capacities. The only reason I have not written like Shakespeare is that I haven’t had time. That would take me several hundred years.

So if you meet me a million years from now on some satellite of Sigma Bootes***, you will find me to be a combined Beethoven, Socrates, Raphael, Newton, Agassiz, Newton, Paderewski, and J. Caesar. You can see that I can do anything anybody ever did better than he did it; can lay brick better than any terrestrial masons, also out-Caruso Caruso in singing, and teach your Miltons the art of poetry.

As mere duration, Heaven is rather a dull prospect; but as infinite development, it is an amazing idea. For as John Fiske** says, “The essential feature of man is his unlimited possibilities of development.”

And not only shall I increase in skill and all kinds of efficiency, but my other powers, what may they not become when they are stamped with immortality?

My memory—it will be stored fuller than the British Museum or the Vatican.

My will—it will be strong enough to move a train of cars. I speak soberly. Who knows what the human will may not be harnessed someday, as well as electricity.

My taste—through infinite crudities it will live and become divine.

And my character—what power, gentleness, goodness, nobleness, and majesty it might acquire in aeons of experience!

This is what is meant by those striking words—“the power of an endless life.”

And that high word of Paul that we shall be “changed from glory to glory.”

And from John—“It does not appear what we shall be; but we shall be—like Him.”

*Latin for, “The inhabitants of earth have many tongues, those of Heaven have one,”

**John Fiske (1842-1901), an American philosopher and lecturer was for many years a lecturer on history at Washington University in St. Louis.

***Sigma Bootes is one of the stars in a Bootes constellation known as “The Herdsman.” Astronomer Jim Kaler describes it as a “relatively modest star” about three times more luminous than our Sun, fifty light years from earth.

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I respectfully beg to differ

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(We live in a time when disagreements seem unresolvable, when disputing forces seem more interested in fighting than serving, when disagreeing is, to use a term we wish had never come up, weaponized. Dr. Crane reminds us that disagreement can be a positive part of our existence, if respect is part of it, as he asks—-)

ARE YOU ON OPPOSITE SIDES?

Doubtless each of us knows someone in his circle of acquaintances who is intellectually contrary. Such as one delights on every occasion to take the opposite side.

If he is within a religious community he will take his stand firmly for atheism.  If he is one of the scoffers, he will argue just as valiantly for the church. He is a standing minority report. He is a crooked stick that will not lie in the woodpile. Like Goethe’s Devil he is the spirit who constantly denies.

This type of person is the steady, normal crop in the field of humanity. We would not get along without them. They keep the kettle of thing stirred, which otherwise would settle and spoil. These are they that keep the course of social life pure as a running stream and prevent it from becoming like a green stagnant pool.

They supply ginger for political campaigns. They are the party out of power. They are the watchdogs of progress. Without them religion would harden into a cruel tyranny of superstition, falsehoods would be crystallized into power, and ancient fraud live forever.

They harass mankind into being honest.

The Perpetual Best-Seller

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(I’ve told people from time to time that I never fear an editor, that nobody has ever written a perfect book—-which explains why there are so many different versions of the Bible on the bookstore shelves. We offer these thoughts from Dr. Frank Crane, who wrote them in 1912, although we admit not being sure about their political correctness.  But we think his thoughts are worth consideration because they suggest the Bible comes from a culture and a time different from ours and its teachings might be perceived as being presented differently from the way we understand teachings. Perhaps, he suggests, we can understand those teachings better if we consider—-)

HOW TO READ THE BIBLE

I have no particular creed I want you to swallow, and no particular church I want you to join. I have no intention to convert you, and even aim to “do you good.”

Still a friendly hint on how to read the Bible may interest you.

You may read the Bible from moral motives, or merely as literature. In the one case, you may find it a very puzzling book, and in the other, very antique, unless you remember one thing.

The one thing is that the Bible is an oriental book.

Unless you keep that in mind you’re pretty sure to miss its meaning.

Some of the most absurd vagaries have arisen by forgetting it, and by treating the Bible as a western book.

The oriental mind differs from ours chiefly in this, that it is essentially poetic. Eastern peoples have always thought, spoken, and written poetry…

Poetry does not speak plainly. It hints, symbolizes; touches facts not with a rough, firm grasp but evasively; loves riddles, dark sayings and apparent contradictions.

It functions in parables and paradoxes.

The western mind is prosaic. It plods, builds, and reasons.

To get to the top of the mountain, the occidental cuts logical steps in the rocks, the oriental flies.

In moral subjects and religious the eastern mind is the more skillful, as such matters are better divined that argued.

Forget not, therefore, that there is hardly a line of your Bible that is not poetry.  The nearest to prose is in Paul’s writings; yet they also abound in highly poetical passages.

No one had this poetical turn than the chief figure of the Bible, Jesus.

His parables are pure poetry; his maxims are full of paradox.

It is very unfortunate that our western bent for logic and bald facts led us to use the glowing images of the Great Master’s poetry as bricks and squared stones wherewith to build up our “systems for truth.”

For it is doubtful that truth is a system at all; it is more likely a vision.

Take one illustration: Jesus would teach his disciples the value of humility. Instead of analyzing this virtue, dissecting and explaining it, as a modern professor might do, He removes his coat, girds himself with a towel and washes His pupils’ feet, saying finished:

“If I, your Master, wash your feet, so ought ye to wash one another’s feet.”

The advantage of this method of teaching is that it is striking, easily remembered, visual, and interesting.

Common sense prevented His disciples from taking his command literally. They were forced to seek the idea, the sentiment behind it.

Literalism is not Truth. It is the foe of Truth. “The letter killeth.”

You cannot literally obey a poet; you should spiritually obey him; that is, try to appreciate him, to get his point of view, his atmosphere and feeling.

Logic chopping is fatal to all poetry.

 

A Study of Fear

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The uncertainties of political and economic life are leaving some of us fearful. A litany of the fears we might have would be a long one. Long before President Franklin Roosevelt warned us about fearing fear, Dr. Frank Crane defined it in terms of positive fear and negative far when he wrote about—-)

TWO KINDS OF FEAR

There are two kinds of fear: centripetal and centrifugal. One draws me to you; the other pushes me from you.

The noblest quality of love is accompanied by fear.

No man loves his wife duly unless he fears to do would bring upon him her contempt or aversion.

No woman loves her husband as she should unless there are pits and fear all around her love, things she is afraid to do.

You have noticed how, when a young fellow falls in love, he is full of tremblings and dreads. He is as frightened as a child in the dark. “Will she scorn me for this? And what will she think of me for doing that?”

A proper self-respect is not possible without self-fear. George Washington,  in the cherry tree episode, was afraid to tell a lie; afraid not of punishment, but of himself.

This is Tennyson’s meaning in the lines:

Dowered with the hate of hate; the scorn of scorn,

The love of love.

Many persons fall into grievous error by not understanding this. They think all fear is weakness, and timidity is ignoble. Hence they imagine they should be bold and fearless toward their own conscience, and have no timor of their own modesty.

It should be remembered that the very finest quality of courage, and the keen edge of true love, is pure fear. The bravest soldier is afraid to run, the noblest lover is afraid to be unworthy.

These two kinds of fear are brought out in the Bible. On the one hand “the fear of the Lord” is spoken of as a most commendable thing, the fountain of morals, “the beginning of wisdom.”  On the other hand, we are told that “perfect love casteth out fear,” and we are not to fear God but to “boldly approach.”

Which is easily understood if we perceive the two qualities of fear. That which is commended is that sensitive, trembling fear which is always the little sister to a great and pure love.

That which is condemned is the craven fear which has no advice for us but to urge us to flee.

Centipetal is the other side of love.

Centrifugal fear is the other side of hate or repugnance.

If I love you I am afraid of you. If I hate you I fear you. But they are two different feelings.

The love-fear is that of the lover toward his beloved, the child toward his mother, the soul toward God; the hate-fear is that of the criminal toward the policeman; of class against class; of feuds and grudges, of the life that loves evil toward the Lord of life.

Patriot

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I am a patriot.  And I do things patriots do.

I stand for the national anthem.

I put my hand over my heart, or somewhere near it, when the flag passes by or when I say the Pledge of Allegiance.

When I say the pledge, I say it as a pledge not as a rote statement poorly delivered:

I pledge allegiance (pause)

To the flag (pause)

Of the United States of American (pause)

And to the Republic for which it stands (pause)

One nation (pause)

Under God (pause)

With Liberty and Justice for All.

After which I sometimes mutter, “Play Ball,” because it just seems like the right thing to do.

But I say the pledge the way it ought to be said:

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America (comma) and to the republic for which it stands—One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  I usually finish and drop my hand while other about me are saying “Under God.”

I don’t rush through it. It is my personal pledge, said as one not said as a group rote.  I confess that the phrase “under God” is bothersome because it assumes something we might believe but cannot know. Perhaps someday it will permissible to say, “One nation, hopefully under God….”

That position is heavily influenced by Abraham Lincoln, whose family lived in the town where I was born, and who practiced law as a circuit-riding attorney in the two towns where I was raised. He once supposedly said, “My concern is not whether God is on our side; My greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.”  Scholars have not been able to confirm that Lincoln actually said that and the statement might be distilled from part of the oration given at Lincoln’s funeral in Springfield Illinois on May 4, 1865 by Reverend Matthew Simpson of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who had a “long and intimate friendship” with Lincoln:

“To a minister who said he hoped the Lord was on our side, he replied that it gave him no concern whether the Lord was on our side or not, “For,” he added, “I know the Lord is always on the side of right;” and with deep feeling added, “But God is my witness that it is my constant anxiety and prayer that both myself and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”  

I stand for the flag, but I respect others who do not see the symbolism in our flag that I see. I have not walked in their shoes or in the shoes of their ancestors. I cannot be confident that I am on God’s side in such circumstances because to do so would be to assume that God is not on the side of others or wished others to be less free than me.  While others might be comfortable in assuming they know the mind of God and are therefore entitled to a definition of patriotism that allows them to judge others from their sacred viewpoint, I cannot reach that level of confidence. I prefer the other approach—hoping that I should be on God’s side rather than assuming that God is on mine.

It is a liberating rather than a confining position for it leaves me free to accept others and to see their possibilities, which I believe is the direction a great nation must go if it is to be even greater.

It enables me to suggest to those who cite early American naval hero Stephen Decatur’s after-dinner toast (“Our  Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”) that adhering to such a sentiment requires no consideration of the narrowness of it.

English philosopher, lay theologian, critic, and writer G. K. Chesterton was more abrupt in dismissing the idea by saying it is equivalent to saying, “My Mother, drunk or sober.” His comment is drawn from his first book of essays, The Defendant, published in 1901.  The sixteenth chapter is “A Defence of Patriotism”

Better, I find, are words from Missouri Senator Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who became a Civil War General, St. Louis newspaper publisher, and later Secretary of the Interior, from the Senate Floor on February 29, 1872:

“The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” 

He elaborated on those thoughts on October 17, 1899 at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference in Chicago:

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

We recently came across an article by Noah Millman in The American Conservative from 2017 about teaching children about patriotism, “if you want them to understand their country’s crimes and failures as well as its achievements.”  Love of country, he suggests, cannot be narrow because love, if true love, cannot ignore differences. He cited Chesterton’s comment as he outlined why patriotism cannot be selfish but must involve responsibility for others, just as love grows from an awareness of, and acceptance of, and a responsibility for another.

People feel an attachment, and a willingness to fight to protect, their homes, and their communities. That can take noble and ignoble forms — sometimes fighting to defend your community means committing injustice (as, for example, if you band together with your neighbors to prevent someone from a disfavored ethnic group from moving to the neighborhood). But the feeling is rooted in a direct experience, not an abstract attachment.

For any political community larger than a city, though, that attachment necessarily becomes abstract. So you need to teach your children why they should care about that larger community, be proud of it, and treat it as constituent of their identity…

Chesterton famously quipped that the sentiment, “my country, right or wrong” is like the sentiment, “my mother, drunk or sober.” But the thing about the latter is that she is your mother whether she’s drunk or sober — it’s just that your obligations change based on her condition. If she’s drunk, you won’t let her drive — instead, you’ll make sure she gets home safely.

The question, then, is how you teach your children to see their country as, in some sense, like a mother when their relationship is necessarily abstract rather than directly felt. A love of country based on the lie that your mother is never drunk will be too brittle to survive any kind of honest encounter with reality. But it seems to me equally problematic to say that you should love your country because it is on-balance a good one. Does anyone say about their mother that they love them because on-balance they are sober?

Filial love is first and foremost rooted in gratitude for existence itself. That applies to adopted children as well; we are not born able to fend for ourselves, but radically dependent on others’ love and care, and however imperfectly it was provided if we survived at all then it was provided in some measure. And that gratitude extends to the larger society. None of us were raised in the wilderness; whoever we are, we are because of the world that shaped us, and we are grateful to be ourselves even if we are not always happy being ourselves.

In this time when the word “patriot” has been abused and has been turned into a term of narrowness, when love of country has been defined as fear or hatred of those who are different and therefore unacceptable, when violence has become a sanctioned way of expressing patriotism, it is time to learn what love is.

Paul defined it for us in one of his letters to the believers at Corinth: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs.”

Sounds like an outstanding definition of what a Patriot is, or should be. This is a time to be a Paulist Patriot. But being a Paulist Patriot will require a stern unwillingness to let Chesterton’s drunk mothers prevail.

I stand with Paul. And Schurz. And Lincoln.

I am a Patriot.

Looking Beyond

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(Looking inward has its value but only for a while.  Better worlds are made by looking outward, looking beyond ourselves, looking to what can be for others.  It is called “vision,” and Dr. Frank Crane returns to this Monday space with a reflection for us and a hope we might offer to others as he gives us—)

A PRAYER FOR VISION

O Lord, open my eyes.

Cure my blindness that I may see past the tall buildings of cities and perceive the souls thereof, past the dark material into the luminous spiritual, past the hard things visible until the fluid, eternal things invisible.

All about me are the barriers that cut off men’s view of the wide vistas. Make my eyes to  have X-ray power to pierce through, and to be like telescopes to see affair.

Let me see beyond the quick satisfaction of hate to the long joy of forgiveness.

Let me see beyond appetite to the pleasure of self-control.

Let me see beyond greed to the luxury of giving.

Let me not love the one woman less, but through her the welfare of all women.

All around and about my own children stand innumerable children everywhere; may my vision reach them, that I may strive to live for them also.

Let me see past revenge unto the strength and wisdom of forgiveness.

Let me see past binding price to sunny healthfulness of humility.

Let me see past profit to usefulness.

Past successes to self-approval;

Past passion to poise;

Pas the heat of desire to the light of renunciation;

Past the glare of power to the abiding beauty of service;

Past the rank, poisonous growth of self to the fragrance and flowers of unself.

Take my life out of the narrow pit and set up upon a high mountain.

I want to see, to see, and not forever to be a prisoner of prejudice, a bat of blind custom, a mote of ignorance, a convict in the penitentiary of fear, a frightened rat in the house of superstition.

Let me see beyond the boundaries of my country until all the world;

Past competition to cooperation, past war to world government;

Past party to patriotism,

Past patriotism to humanity.

Let me see past the night to the renewing dawn;

Past gloom to glory, past death to eternal life, past the finite to the infinite;

Past men and things and events to God.

 

What There Is To Christmas

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(Christmas week is much different this year, with many traditional family events cancelled, many gifts and decorations remaining unbought because of their unaffordability in these uncertain economic times, and sorrows because of those who have not survived the pandemic to be part of our celebrations—-we could continue, but all of us recognize this Christmas is different more than it is special.  Dr. Frank Crane reminds us, however, of a universal and unchanging message—-)

CHRISTMAS MEANS THE INDESTRUCTIBILITY OF JOY

Christmas is the protest of the human race against gloom.

The one thing time nor force can suppress is instinct.

In days past religion tried to stamp out earthly gladness, play, fun, the joy of man and maid. As well one might endeavor to dam the waters of the Mississippi.

When we have clamped human nature down with our reasonings and revelations, along comes    instinct, and to use the words of Bennet, blandly remarks :

“Don’t pester Me with Right and Wrong. I am Right and Wrong. I shall suit my own                     convenience, and no one but Nature (with a big, big N) shall talk to me!”

In the fourth century the Christian world was pretty dismal. This world was considered a             dreadful place, to get away from as soon as possible. Consequently, the boys and girls were lured off into heathen sports, for the heathen alone raced and danced and frolicked.

Then the Church established the Christmas festival, which was one of her wisest strokes of policy.

In 342 A. D. the good Bishop Tiberius preached the first Christmas sermon, in Rome.

Into this opening poured the play instinct of the world.

The time of the winter solstice strangely enough had been the jovial period of the year                 everywhere. Then the Swedes of old used to light fires on the hills in honor of Mother Friga,       goddess of Love. Then the Romans indulged in their Satur nalia, the one carnival of democracy  and equality during the twelve months of tyranny and slavery. Then the Greeks lit torches upon Helicon in praise of Dionysius. In Egypt at this period the populace bore palms for the god        Horus; in Persia they celebrated the birth of Mithras, and the Hindus in India sang their songs to Vishnu.

Many of these festivals had become very corrupt. Excess and license darkened the hour of national joy.

The wisest thing Christians ever did was to turn this feast day over to the child.

The child Jesus stands for the childhood of the world, perpetual, evergreen, inexhaustible.

It’s a weary world to those who have lived wrong or too long, but to those who remain healthy in their tastes it’s a wonderful world, full of undying youth, running with sap, recurrent with primal joy.

Christmas means the supreme fact about life, namely: that it is joyful.

In the opinion of many the greatest music ever composed is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As a climax for his orchestral composition the master chose a chorus to sing Schiller’s “Hymn to Joy.”

Christmas means that when this world and all its purposes and deeds are wound up, and the last men and women stand at the end of time and contemplate the complete story of humanity, they will not wail nor hang their heads, but they will shout and exult.

The truest, most everlasting element of mankind is play, accompanied with laughter.

(This article is from Dr. Crane’s 1915 book, Christmas and The Year Round, which can be found at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t3vt2h96j&view=plaintext&seq=7)