O Little Town Of Bethlehem
Dec. 19th, 2008 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I have sympathy with the vicar who decided he didn't want to be singing "O, Little Town of Bethlehem" this year. He'd been to the real Bethlehem, seen what a shit-hole it is, got involved with the politics- and couldn't square his experience with the fantasy version in the carol.
"How still we see thee lie"? Actually, no.
It's the job of a priest to point this sort of thing out.
Christianity isn't just bubblebath for the soul. There's also the social gospel.
Myth and ethics: a powerful- and volatile- combination.
Besides, there are plenty more carols to chose from.
"How still we see thee lie"? Actually, no.
It's the job of a priest to point this sort of thing out.
Christianity isn't just bubblebath for the soul. There's also the social gospel.
Myth and ethics: a powerful- and volatile- combination.
Besides, there are plenty more carols to chose from.
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Date: 2008-12-19 12:22 pm (UTC)http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1093875/Three-starving-children-Two-addicts-shaking-And-poor-homeless-refugee-Church-updates-Twelve-Days-Christmas-21st-century.html
No objection, except that "five repossessings" doesn't scan!
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Date: 2008-12-19 12:52 pm (UTC)And, as you say, it would be better if it scanned.
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Date: 2008-12-19 12:42 pm (UTC)Christianity - and especially non-orthodox Christianity such as Evangelical Lutheranism (e.g. Church of Denmark) and the Anglican Church - seems to have little justification if it does not engage with the current social issues at any given moment in time. It can't all be pretty and twee; some times a religion that bases itself on a social critic who ended up tried for his social and political AS WELL AS his religious beliefs, needs to step up to the plate and say "look, we have something to say about this!".
Of course, most of the time I personally disagree, and so be it. But if the C of E stops having opinions - even if they're fragmented and unruled by a central coordination - then it's just a bunch of pretty songs and impressive buildings. And in that case regular civil servants could do the job just as well as vicars and priests.
In short, I agree with you. I just took the long road in saying so...
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Date: 2008-12-19 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 01:11 pm (UTC)(edited for mis-spelling)
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Date: 2008-12-19 01:21 pm (UTC)Mind you, I never really grasped the tenets of the C of E so I might be completely off the mark.
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Date: 2008-12-19 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 01:28 pm (UTC)What do I know, though, I'm just a lapsed Catholic. -_-
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Date: 2008-12-19 02:11 pm (UTC)But I do wonder whether Bethlehem then was all that different from how it is now. Judaea was, after all, under Roman occupation.
The Bethlehem in the carol is a mythical town in a mythical landscape.
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Date: 2008-12-19 02:24 pm (UTC)I don't know. I am just reminded of the arguments I had in Catholic school with the teachers there about whether Catholicism should take social action. I was arguing against priests getting political in the homily because it destroyed the sense of mythic power of the mass by interrupting it with reality. Which is not to say that priests can't become activists, I suppose... but that they should recall that myth and ritual, and their ability to elevate the spirit and one's sense of one's own life's significance, is in itself a great power, and one that we are losing access to as modern skepticism and cynicism removes it from the realm of the "thinking" person.
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Date: 2008-12-19 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 05:21 pm (UTC)I don't go to God for that.
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Date: 2008-12-19 05:39 pm (UTC)Sometimes I dream of being a country parson, reading my services from Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, Sunday by Sunday, in my tiny, (unheated) 11th century church.
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Date: 2008-12-19 09:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-20 09:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-20 02:12 pm (UTC)And thus is paved the road to Hell - or at least irrelevancy.
I was raised United Methodist, even groomed for the clergy at one point, but abandoned them for the Episcopal Church. Then the Episcopalians, in that same sense of tone-deaf and misguided reform, forced "Rite 2" on us by fiat.
I think I'm a half-assed Chan Buddhist these days. I did a stint in the Gnostic Catholic Church, in which I was elevated to the clergy, but it emerged that their leadership were a bunch of clueless wankers as well.
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Date: 2008-12-20 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-20 01:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-20 02:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-21 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 03:31 pm (UTC)In my experience, the media likes to portray clergy - Anglican or catholic - as autocrats, even when the decision has been taken by a parish council
I've always taken it as poetic licence, and part of the general mawkishness of carols - like "No crying he makes" - it wouldn't have been all that still with all those cessor candidates milling about and all the inns full!
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Date: 2008-12-19 03:52 pm (UTC)I don't much like hymns- and never did. I love anything medieaval- and Watts and Wesley are OK- but most Victorian Anglican hymns are horrible. 20th century hymns are even worse.
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Date: 2008-12-19 08:18 pm (UTC)According to the Church Times, he simply said that he wasn't going to sing it - no banning of it.
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Date: 2008-12-19 08:49 pm (UTC)It's a silly story really. A mountain out of a molehill.
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Date: 2008-12-19 05:12 pm (UTC)"O Little Town" was written by Phillips Brooks, who was rector of Trinity Church in Boston, Massachusetts. There is more than one version to the story of how he came to write it.
I share one of them on my LJ page.
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Date: 2008-12-19 05:43 pm (UTC)O little Town is one of the better Victorian carols, I think.