Awe That Cracks the Heart’s Hardness

By Robin Bates | Published: December 25, 2021
Batoni, Sacred heart

Spiritual Sunday

Pastor Sue Schmidt, good friend and long-time contributor to this blog, alerted me to a Denise Levertov poem that, as always with Levertov, manages to find hope in our fallen condition. In “On the Mystery of the Incarnation,” she puzzles over why God should send “the Word” to a creature so arrogant as to believe it, and it only, was created in the image of the creator. Why not send God’s incarnation to something sweet and innocent, like flowers or dolphins?

Of course, we don’t know for sure that God’s hasn’t. We can just know our own species. And because we know, we can marvel that God responds to our arrogance with love. After we’ve witnessed “the worst our kind can do”—and after we’ve shuddered at the knowledge that we share that “taint in our own selves”—our heart’s shell cracks open at the fact that God sends help. God’s compassion is such that, despite our “ugly failure to evolve,” we find ourselves entrusted with God’s human incarnation as a guest and brother. In the words of today’s Gospel reading, the Word was made flesh and sent to dwell among us.

This gift to undeserving humankind takes Levertov’s breath away. It should humble us all. Here’s the poem:

On the Mystery of the Incarnation
By Denise Levertov

It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.

And here’s John’s magnificent, and very philosophical, account of the incarnation, which we will hear in church today (John 1:1-18):

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

Added note: In her note to me, Sue wrote that, in response to our vain belief that we were made in God’s image, God figured that we needed a new way of seeing that happen. “Hence Jesus,” Sue concludes.

It’s as though God said to us, “You flatter yourselves thinking you are god-like. You boost your ego by assuming that God looks like conquering royalty. But what if God looks like a poor man who dies a criminal’s death on a cross? I await your response.”

Levertov’s response, conveyed through poetry, helps us realize our God potential. Humility, not ego-boosting arrogance, is key.

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Angels at Our Bird Feeders

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2021

Saturday – Christmas

We waited too long to buy our Christmas tree this year, which meant that our regular greenhouse sold out of trees when I went by. This turned out for the good however, as yesterday I toured my mother’s 18 acres of woods searching for a tree with my Washington, D.C. son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. I think we obtained a white pine although I’m not sure. Anyway it’s wonderfully shaped and is now standing in our living room, complete with lights and ornaments. Finding it ourselves excited 9-year-old Alban no end.

He’s also excited by our bird feeders, especially our cage of suet, which has been attracting hairy and downy woodpeckers, chickadees, and a Carolina wren. Years ago I shared a poem by my father that compared feeders to Christmas trees, with the birds as ornaments. Here it is again. And Merry Christmas.

Slightly amended from a Dec. 16, 2010 post

My father wrote Christmas poems for years, sending them out as the family Christmas card and also publishing them in the Sewanee newspaper, which my mother founded and ran for years. In addition to being a fine poet of light verse, my father was an enthusiastic bird watcher, and the poem below—one of my favorites—combines his passions.

Seemingly straightforward, “The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner” is actually about mystical transformation. Multi-colored birds, drawn to a feeder, turn a cedar into a Christmas tree.   Partaking of a feast that appears miraculously, the birds themselves become a feast for the soul.

The transformation occurs “trysmegistically,” Hermes Trismegistus being an ancient philosopher associated with the Greek messenger of the gods. Hermes moved between heaven and earth, opening up concourse between the mystical and the mundane. The poem describes the birds as angels, and one thinks of the Edmund Sears carol about Christmas angels “bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold.” Here we see angel-like birds “feasting and flying and doing a show/For watchers on the earth below.”

We watchers, struggling through cold, dark days, live in hope that the world will be mystically transformed. “Peace on the earth, good will to men” (and women): that is what midwinter rituals like Christmas are all about.

The Bird Watcher’s Christmas Dinner

By Scott Bates

You can’t exactly call it greed
 When birds at feeders feed and feed
 On endless quantities of seed;

It’s sleeping in the cold all night
 And doing prodigies of flight
 That gives a bird an appetite.

They wait their turns with impatience
 Perched on the cedar by the fence
 Like so many Christmas ornaments,

Cardinal, goldfinch and chickadee,
 Turning it, trismegistically,
 Into an ancient Christmas tree

With angels hurrying to and fro
 Feasting and flying and doing a show
For watchers on the earth below.

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A Trip through My Childhood Reading

By Robin Bates | Published: December 23, 2021
Jules Feiffer, illus. from Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth

Friday

The Scott Bates poem I shared in Wednesday’s post provides a good map of the books and poems that my father used to read to me and my brothers.  In case there were any works that you do not recognize, here’s the key:

–Leerie is “The Lamplighter” in Robert Lewis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.

—The Phantom Toll Booth is Norton Juster’s witty journey into a word and number wonderland.

–The Cheshire Cat, of course, smiles its smile in Alice in Wonderland

–The “Chimes” is a reference to one of my all-time favorite Christmas stories, Raymond McAlden’s “Why the Chimes Rang.”

–Tom piping up is Mother Goose’s “Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,/Stole a pig and away he run.”  My father read us Mother Goose so many times that not a day goes by that a chance word doesn’t trigger at least one of them.

–As a child I loved hearing my father read Edward’s Lear’s nonsense poetry, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” “The Pobble that Had No Toes,” and “The Dong with the Luminous Nose.”

–“The Selfish Giant” is Oscar Wilde’s great Christian children’s story.

–Mr. Pickwick from Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers helped establish Christmas as we have come to know it and so is particularly appropriate to this poem.

–The “Meadow Mice” are from one of my favorite chapters in Kenneth Graham’s Wind and the Willows, where Mole and Ratty find their way back to Mole’s old home and have an impromptu Christmas meal with carolers.

–Long John Silver, of course, is Stevenson again (Treasure Island).

—Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit are from the African American folktales collected and adapted by Joel Chandler Harris.

 –Toby is the gentle Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy who, like my father, can’t bear to see animals of any kind, even pests, suffer.  (At one point Toby gently releases a fly.) We named our youngest son in part after this Toby. 

–Peggotty and Ham are from Dickens’ David Copperfield while Friday and Scrooge (of course) are from Robinson Crusoe and Christmas Carol.  If Dickens set the stage for our modern Christmas with Pickwick Papers, then he consolidated it with Christmas Carol.  Then he followed that up with a string of other Christmas stories, including The Cricket on the Hearth.

–Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s sidekick, was the subject of one of my favorite poems by my father, who sees him as matter-of-fact reality at war with the world of the imagination.  In this case, a windmill finds itself deprived of the chance to be a knight:

Let this be my hour
Sancho Panza: my wind is up
my arms are aching for your flour

My battle never has been won
since chivalry’s finest flower
withered in your sun

O gaseous ball: my knight
is gone to the asylum and no one comes
Sancho Panza come and fight

—The First Christmas Tree is the Christian conversion story by Henry Van Dyke.

—Ladies with their knights could be anyone, starting with the Arthur stories, but I suspect my father particularly had in mind Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.

–There are many Magic Islands in literature but the one I remember most from my childhood, more even than Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, is Johann Wyss’ The Swiss Family Robinson (1812).  All fantasy literature functions as a kind of magic island, and some of the ones that were big in our family when I was growing up were Oz, Never Never Land, and Middle Earth.

–Caves appeared in a number of stories that our father read to us, including “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves,” “Aladdin,” and “The Scotch Twins” (by Lucy Finch Perkins).

–The Hollow Tree series by Albert Bigelow Paine was popular with children in 1900. There are also magical hollow trees in Peter Pan and The Swiss Family Robinson.

—The Jungle Books, and Kipling’s stories in general,were very important to us as children.

—The Scottish Highlands my father had in mind were those that appear in Stevenson’s Kidnapped.   In Wednesday’s post I mentioned reading Jane Porter’s 1809 work The Scottish Chiefs late into the night after receiving it for Christmas.

Notice how many of the works are fantasy.  When life was unsatisfactory—and we were witnessing a lot of racial hatred in the 1950’s and early 1960’s—then fantasy was always a place we could go.  It explains why I still go to books for comfort.  My literary fantasies have just become more complex.

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bell hooks Saw Lit’s Liberating Power

By Robin Bates | Published: December 22, 2021
bell hooks


Thursday

bell hooks, the noted African American culture critic, feminist, social activist and professor died last week at 69. To honor her, I am running two excerpts from an exchange she had with poet Maya Angelou since, between them, they say much about the importance of literature in the world.

According to her Wikipedia biography, hooks grew up in segregated Kentucky (she was born in 1952), the daughter of a janitor and a maid. She was an avid reader, her favorite authors being poets William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

At age 19, at Stanford, she began writing Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, the work that would make her famous when it was published ten years later.

The exchange between hooks and Angelou occurred in 1998, six years after Angelou delivered her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration. It was moderated by Melvin Mcleod and appeared in the journal Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time.

In one interchange, hooks and Angelou talk about the importance of art in breaking down barriers between people:

bell hooks: In your book of essays, Even the Stars Look Lonesome, you say, “We need art to live fully and to grow healthy.” Talk about that.

Maya Angelou: That’s true. I do believe that art is as important to the human psyche and physical body as air is, as oxygen, as water. And alas, because it’s not something we can quantify reliably, we tend to think art is a luxury.

Art is not a luxury. The artist is so necessary in our lives. The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked. And when there’s a question asked, there’s an answer somewhere. I don’t believe a question can be asked which doesn’t have an answer somewhere in the universe. That’s what the artist is supposed to do, to liberate us from our ignorance.

bell hooks: You’re constantly encouraging people to read, and not just to read your books but to read a wide variety of writers—to read the great white male writers, to read the great African-American writers of both genders. I think that’s a force that we see in everything you’ve done—praise for the power of reading to transform our lives.

Maya Angelou: I remember myself as a young girl in Arkansas in the lynching days of the thirties. One man was lynched in my town and people took pieces of his skin for souvenirs, because he was burned after he was lynched. My grandmother was kind of the mother of the town, mother of the black part of town, and she heard about this and we prayed and prayed and prayed. Every time she’d think about it—”On your knees.”

In the meantime, I was reading Charles Dickens, and Dickens liberated me from hating all whites all the time. I knew that I liked some of these people, because I felt for Oliver, and I felt for Tim. I read the Bronte sisters and I felt for those people. I decided that the people in my town were a different race than the whites on the moors and in the poor people’s homes and in orphanages and prisons. So I was saved from hating all whites, you see.

bell hooks: When I read Wuthering Heights as a working class girl struggling to find herself, an outsider, I felt that Heathcliff was me, you know? He was symbolic to me of a kind of black race: he was outcast, he was not allowed into the center of things. I transposed my own drama of living in the apartheid south onto this world of Wuthering Heights and felt myself in harmony with those characters.

Maya Angelou: Absolutely.

Melvin McLeod: It strikes me you are suggesting that reading is a more powerful way to develop empathy with people of different races or classes or times than even our normal day to day relationships.

bell hooks: Well, this is so because reading requires that you have to use your imagination. When I’m reading Wuthering Heights I have to imagine what Heathcliff looks like, I have to imagine what Katherine is like. I have to imagine and so my mind has to be working.

Because they believe literature has this power, both women decry those who contend that one cannot cross demographic lines:

bell hooks I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. I think the worst thing that can happen to us is to lose sight of the power of empathy and compassion.

Maya Angelou: Absolutely. Then we become brutes. Then we risk being consumed by brutism….

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance. When I finish lecturing, I find that the whole audience, black and white, is a little bit changed, because I will have recited Sonya Sanchez, Anne Marie Evans, and probably Eugene Redmond, and Amiri Baraka, and Shakespeare and Emerson, and maybe talk about Norman Mailer a little bit, because he writes English, and Joan Didion, who writes this language. People see something. I don’t know how long the change maintains, but if you have changed at all, you’ve changed all, at least for a little while.

I’ll just note that philosopher Martha Nussbaum, fighting a similar fight, arrives at the same conclusion:

But the great contribution literature has to make to the life of the citizen is its ability to wrest from our frequently obtuse and blunted imaginations an acknowledgement of those who are other than ourselves, both in concrete circumstances and even in thought and emotion. As [Ralph] Ellison put it, a work of fiction may contribute “to defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience.” This contribution makes it a key element in higher education.

Never one to avoid a battle, bell hooks spent her career challenging us to open our minds. Her knowledge of literature gave her a powerful base from which to speak.

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Our Christmases Always Involved Books

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2021
Knud Erik Larsen, Children Reading by Lamplight

Wednesday

Christmas has come early to the Bates household: I’ve just learned that my two sons and three of my five grandchildren will be visiting us this coming week. Nine-year-old Alban from Washington, D.C. will get to spend time with nine-year-old Esmé and seven-year-old Etta from Buford, Georgia. There will also be tennis and ping-pong and music (Alban on the violin, the girls on the piano). Oh, and lots and lots of reading.

Books have always been an integral part of Bates Christmases. After opening our presents, we would then spend the rest of the day reading them, since they would invariably be books. I remember once being so entranced by Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs (the basis for the movie Braveheart) that I spent most of the night reading it.

With this in mind, I share one of my father’s poems about a bookish Christmas. How many of the books can you identify? (I’ll provide the key in tomorrow’s post.)  

A Christmas Carrel

When the students have departed
For a sunny southern beach
Leaving teachers broken-hearted
Without anyone to teach
When the classrooms are deserted
And the halls are cold and blue
Oh the library’s disconcerted
Without anything to do

   Oh the library’s dark and empty
        Like a sock without a shoe

But what’s this Listen Look
There’s a murmur in the stacks
There’s a glimmer in a book
And it’s coming through the cracks
You can hear the Xerox mutter
At the laughter in the stair
All the file cards are a-flutter
There’s a party in the air

There’s a stir in Circulation
        And it’s spreading everywhere

All our friends from all the ages
                Slip out of their printed pages
                Filling all the empty spaces
                With their own familiar faces

Here comes Leerie lighting lanterns
Down the desert aisles
Through the Toll Booth come the Phantoms
Cheshire Cat’s all smiles
Down the chimney Chimes are ringing
Tom pipes up a tune
While on the heart the Cricket’s singing
Hits from Brigadoon

The Owl and the Pussycat are dancing
        In the Reading Room

The Selfish Giant opens castle
Passes out free ale
Mr. Pickwick mixing wassail
Stops to tell a tale
Meadow Mice are singing carols
Ratty cuts the cheese
While Long John Silver rolls out barrels—
Rum from pirate seas!

Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit
        Have rum with their black-eyed peas

Now the party’s getting merry
Toby flips his wig
Peggotty and Ham are very
Glad to dance a jig
Friday’s fixing creole gumbo
Scrooge eats goose and glows
Sancho Panza does a rhumba
With the Pobble That Has No Toes

While high on the top of the First Christmas Tree
        Shines the Dong with the Luminous Nose

But all good times must have an ending
Leerie snuffs the lights
Back to storied halls are wending
Ladies with their knights
Back they go to Magic Island
Cave and Hollow Tree
Jungle Book and Scottish Highland
To live adventurously

Until they meet again next year
        In Christmas revelry.

You can get a sense of how fun Christmases were with my father. When I settle down with Alban, Esmé and Etta, I’m sure he’ll be looking over our shoulders and delighting in the stories.

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Light a Candle to Drive the Dark Away

By Robin Bates | Published: December 20, 2021
Winter Solstice at Stonehenge

Tuesday – Winter Solstice

Today being the shortest day of the year, here’s a Susan Cooper poem noting the centuries-old traditions where people came “singing, dancing, to drive the dark away.”  So keep singing and dancing.

The Shortest Day
By Susan Cooper

So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us—Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

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Manchin Delivers a Lump of Coal

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2021

Monday

Senator Joe Manchin, from the coal state of West Virginia, made sure that America got a lump in its stocking this year. With his announcement that he will be deep-sixing the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan, he will—among other things—set back the battle against climate change. Depressed when I should be feeling the Christmas spirit, I turn to some of my father’s environmental Christmas poems. He too is fatalistic but at least finds some cheer through his light verse fantasies.

But first the news before I turn to them. Here’s what the Washington Post reported on Manchin:

President Biden’s climate agenda suffered a massive setback Sunday after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) pulled his support from Democrats’ spending bill, potentially dooming the legislation amid warnings from scientists that the world is running out of time to prevent climate change’s most catastrophic effects.

Manchin’s comments on “Fox News Sunday” put at risk a $555 billion package of tax credits, grants and other policies aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions that would rank as the largest clean-energy investment in U.S. history. The legislation’s passage would have helped Biden meet his goal of cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions in half compared with 2005 levels by 2030.

Without a reduction of that speed and scale, the United States would fall short of the targets it committed to under the 2015 Paris agreement, potentially locking in a future of increasingly destructive forest fires, deadly floods and droughts. Already, record-breaking hurricanes and fires are testing the federal government’s ability to respond to overlapping disasters.

Of course, Manchin doesn’t bear all the responsibility. The fact that no Republican member of Congress is willing to lift a finger to save the planet is a scandal. Do they just not care about their grandchildren?

Anyway, in his last year (2012) my father put together (and my son Darien published) a chapbook of poetry supposedly written by Aurora Borealis (a.k.a. Ms. Santa Claus). In the form of annual Christmas letters, she reports on life at a North Pole experiencing catastrophic warming. My father loved Christmas and, as you will see, he loved children’s books, which he read to me and my brothers until we were in middle school. Both the holiday and the books kept alive his own childhood sensibility in a world that he saw going steadily downhill.

Letter from the North Pole
By Scott Bates

Dear Friends,

I was only last year, on Christmas morng,
That my husband, Nick, got a global warning
That our factory’s foundations were getting shaky—
So this year, when our basement turned into a lake, he
Went down to the station of the Polar Express
To buy us all tickets for a change of address
To a possible nice little, tight little island
Like maybe Never-Land? Or some high and dry land
Where we’d be all together and still get around….

But most of the islands were taken, he found,
“So how about Vegas? Or even L.A.?…”
Well, thanks…Anyway,
With pontoons on the sleigh
And the reindeer in rain gear, were were ready to go
–As Blitzen said, “with the flow:–
To all those developing, damp neighborhoods…
And we went! En bateau!
Over the slush and the urban sprawl
It was splash away! splash away! splash away, all!

                               But this time next year,
If we’re lucky and dry, you’ll undoubtedly hear
From us at Floating Island or the Land of Oz…

                                    Yours, Aurora Borealis
                                        (Mrs. Santa Claus).

In the next letter, Aurora describes a future which is becoming ever more our own and which Manchin’s decision will accelerate. As New Yorker’s John Cassady puts it,

For the country as a whole, the issue is: How will the nation ever address the enduring market failures, glaring inequality, and big social-safety-net gaps that the Build Back Better plan was designed to tackle? 

Cassidy quotes a veteran budget analyst, who says the plan was “probably the most far-reaching in the area of social provision, in improving the lives of tens of millions of people, of any since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in the nineteen-sixties.” Cassidy concludes,

Climate change isn’t going away; it’s intensifying. Neither are child-care needs or exorbitant health-care costs. Most immediately, the expanded child tax credit, which currently aids thirty-five million families, will end this month. “Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone,” [White House press secretary Jen] Psaki said, in her statement on Sunday. “We cannot.”

Most of the allusions in “Letter from Oz” are to Wizard of Oz, but the gnome king, a miserly hoarder of wealth, first makes his appearance in Ozma of Oz, the third book in the series. The “born again witch” is Phyllis Schlafly, founder of the socially conservative and anti-feminist organization Eagle Forum. (Schlafly is also the inspiration for Serena Joy in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.) This “death of the American Dream” poem ends with an echo of Yeats’s apocalyptic rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem in “The Second Coming”:

Letter from Oz

Well, we made it to here
To the Land of OZ!
But we find to our sorrow
It’s not what it was…

The Wizard is running almost everything now,
But he’s changed from an ally into a wealthy cynic
(His brokerage firm is called The Golden Cow);
Uncle Henry’s closing the Planned Parenthood Clinic.

Glinda the Good is doing her best
To teach her students about terror and decorum
As the born-again witch rides in from the West
Leading the great dark host of the Eagle Forum.

The Lollipop Kids are running the Missile Defense
And directing the Munchkin Rifle Association;
The Haunted Forest has been cleared for developments;
Auntie Em is packing a Magnum .41.

The Wizard explains that money comes from God.
Dorothy’s drinking with the Winkie Fraternity.
The cowardly Lion commands the Poppy Squad;
While the Scarecrow, in his brand-new SUV

Tours his extensive and lucrative golf estates.
The Tin Woodman chairs the Old-Growth-Lumber Committee
Winged Monkeys with assault guns guard the gates
As the Nome King moves into the Emerald City.

Grim stuff, but the poet’s light touch helps me bear our present moment a little better.

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Recovering a Child’s Sense of Wonder

By Robin Bates | Published: December 18, 2021
This 1840s engraving of Victoria’s Christmas tree launched the tradition in England

Spiritual Sunday

Tomorrow our Christmas tree goes up—and when it does, I will be spurred on by imagining the response of my grandson Alban when he shows up later in the week. In my grandchildren, I am able to reconnect with fond memories of Christmases long ago.

T. S. Eliot recalls his own memories in “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” a poem in which he distinguishes between “the childish” and “childhood wonder.” The childish he associates with several other attitudes towards Christmas that “we may disregard.” Of these attitudes, I don’t agree with his dismissal of the social attitude, which for me is positive as it involves the family coming together. That’s an integral dimension of Christmas. But “torpid”—which I’m reading as blasé—and “patently commercial”? Absolutely.

As for “childish,” I imagine that he means shallow and immature, as when St. Paul writes, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). All these attitudes Eliot sets up in contrast with the real meaning of Christmas, which is “childhood wonder.” Here the appropriate Biblical quotation is from Matthew 19:14: “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.”

One way to receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he believes, is to recollect the wonder that the Christmas tree held for him when he was a boy. Then, the candle to him was a star and the “gilded angel spreading its wings at the summit of the tree” was an actual angel.” That is the “glittering rapture” he wants to relive. And along with “the first-remembered Christmas Tree” is the childhood delight at everything else associated with Christmas, including “delight in new possessions” and “the expectation of the goose or turkey.”

This vision is set against the danger of a jaded life: “the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,/ The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure.” And to this depressing list Eliot also adds,

the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children…

In other words, the sanctimonious and holier-than-thou believer who is more interested in purity than in wonder. Maybe such people include those purists who rail against the way our Christmases incorporate symbols of other religions—which, incidentally, include Christmas trees themselves, which are pagan fertility symbols, imported into the holiday from northern Europe.

A brief aside: two nights ago, Julia, my mother and I watched The Man Who Invented Christmas, about Charles Dickens penning Christmas Carol. A fun if not a great film that contends Christmas was a minor holiday until the Dickens’s novella (see my post on that here), at one point it shows the Christmas tree just beginning to enter the English scene.

Back to Eliot: maybe fearful that he himself has been prone to piety and self-conceit, he looks to Dante’s Divine Comedy to keep him focused on God’s love. St. Lucy is the figure of divine grace who leads Dante out of darkness into light and who, in Paradiso, sits opposite Adam in the celestial rose. The crown of fire that Eliot mentions also points to how various countries celebrate St. Lucy’s Day, years ago on the winter solstice but now on December 13. In Scandinavian countries, a young woman represents Lucy by dressing in white (her purity) with a red sash (her martyrdom) and wearing a crown of candles (which St. Lucy supposedly did to keep her hands free to bring food to Christians hiding out in the catacombs). In short, when Eliot feels too full of himself and loses touch with his childhood wonder, he looks to this figure of grace and light.

Eliot wrote the poem when he was in his seventies and it was one of his last. In it, he imagines living until 80 (he died at 76) and concentrating “the accumulated memories of annual emotion into a great joy.” That joy, he adds, will also be a great fear, by which he means the awe of divinity come to earth. The beginning (Jesus’s birth) shall remind us of the end (when God’s kingdom will come to earth)—which is to say, when we become as innocent as those children who are lost in wonder on Christmas day.

Advent reminds us to cultivate this sense of wonder.

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

By T. S. Eliot

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish – which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,

So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St.Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

In a fine essay on the poem, Casey N. Cep of Paris Review notes that “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” does not seem characteristic of the poet who wrote “The Hollow Men,” The Waste Land, and even the subsequent Christian poems. Instead of internal struggle, this one seems to accept and celebrate “the pretty packages and bright lights of Christmas.” In The Waste Land Eliot writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” speaking of (among other things) using fragments of poetry and culture as a defense against the desolation of World War I and modern alienation. Cep writes that “Cultivation of Christmas Trees” seems “almost saccharine when compared to his earlier work” but adds that, by the end of Eliot’s life, “the pains of conversion had waned” so that the poem “conveys the hopeful joy of his faith.”

“Like some fairytale of foliage,” Cep adds, “every Christmas tree tells a story in a season filled with stories, and Eliot is right to hang his argument about innocence on its branches.” The poem, he says, “is not about raising evergreens, but curating our own lives.”

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How Anti-Vaxxers Deny 800,000 Dead

By Robin Bates | Published: December 16, 2021
Antony Van Dyck, Venetia, Lady Digby, on Her Deathbed

Friday

For today’s post, I am rerunning the essay I ran on October 3, when the United States hit 700,000 deaths. I’ve changed 700,000 to 800,000 and updated some stats but otherwise made few changes.

The United States hit 800,000 Covid deaths over the weekend and it’s as though we hardly noticed, even as our local county hospital—like hospitals across parts of America—fills up with the unvaccinated. In this pandemic of those who refuse to get a shot, it appears as though certain Americans have “mastered the art of losing” their fellow human beings, to borrow a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The One Art.”

I do not count myself amongst them. No fatalist, I am doing all I can to protect myself, my wife, and my 96-year-old mother. I would rage against either of them dying and against getting critically sick myself. But as I look out and see that only 40% of the eligible people in our county are fully vaccinated—and that only 29% in adjoining Grundy County are—I can’t help but think resignation has set in. As the speaker says in the poem, if you learn to accept losing something every day, soon you can resign yourself to losing houses, cities, even loved ones. “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture/ I love),” she writes, “I shan’t have lied.”

Such a one may think she’s achieved mastery. But when you can write off dead people the way you write off lost keys, it’s a sign that you’ve lost your humanity.

The poem sounds more like someone dealing with forgetting than with losing fellow human beings. Maybe Bishop is describing someone with early onset Alzheimer’s or an addiction (Bishop herself suffered from alcoholism). But the poem still applies to those denying Covid. At the end of the poem, the poet must forcefully remind herself to “Write it!”–in other words, interrupt the sweetly flowing rhythm and rhyme of losing and acknowledge that what she’s witnessing actually is a disaster. Because she has allowed losing to creep up on her, she has become numb to the catastrophe that’s staring her in the face.

800,000 deaths and counting is what disaster looks like. Write it!

The One Art
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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