Essays in Idleness

Up here in the High Doganate, we have decided to check out of Idleposting for a few days, and leave gentle readers to their Christ-masses, not in privatized and monetized “facebooks” but in the familiarity of living human faces, and the ghostly memory of all our dead — time past, time present, gathering together. I have my own little agenda of things to be done and caught up with, especially with regard to God, and this swirling world of souls. It need not go without saying, that I feel a special gratitude in this season to those who have been reading these humble essays, and writing such encouraging and instructive notes, and lately, sending money unbidden to support my idle cause. I am incidentally far behind in mail: please be patient if you are waiting for a reply, and ask again if it seems I have forgotten.

I have never sent out Christmas cards. This is shameful behaviour on my part, the more because I so enjoy receiving them. Especially this year — for what at first might seem a shallow reason. The majority of them, on a side table in my sight now, are hand made, “dripping with religion,” strikingly beautiful, indeed graphically superior to any “store-boughten” cards; patient labours of love. At a time when our Church and her people are experiencing perhaps more than the usual demonic turbulence, it is wonderful to behold such subtle indications that Christians are themselves taking charge; taking matters into their own hands. This is what Christ commanded.

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy, but to fulfil.” This is the line of text (recalled from the grand old regal KJV) that has been on my mind: that we must be builders not destroyers, in emulation of Our Lord. That we are called to be artists, and that the traditions, or shall I say, The Tradition, must be carried in the marrow of our bones.

I wrote the other day about the “axial moment” in history; that everything before looks forward, and everything after is a consequence of it. May that wee Child in Bethlehem restore to us this knowledge, and make it animate.