Essays in Idleness

… and season’s meet-and-greetings to the grinch constituency. Yes, we might moan on about the commercialization of Christmas, and the increase of direct attacks upon it. Parkdale thugs have desecrated the statue of Our Lady in its little grove outside my church — again. A priest was patiently performing the restoration, as well as he could; he keeps all the necessary solvents in stock. Christmas seems to bring the little devils out. ’Tis their season to be spray-painting, and finding ways to disturb the Mass. The liberals do their bit in the media, on their more sophisticated level.

Lest I be tempted to fulfil my Christmas shopping obligations, I was sternly corrected for saying “Merry Christmas” to a shop clerk last week. I thanked her for the warning, by way of confusing her. Money’s hard to come by, why would I spend it there?

A stateside friend (link) was advised by an upscale saleswoman to buy a “quite adorable” tea set for a little boy. She expressed her preference for a cap pistol. … Another friend, observing a progressive household in which an incompletely degenderized lad had embarrassed his parents by interpreting a walking stick as a rifle, softly whispered to me, “My children have been fully armed since birth.” …

I’m not sure how far we get by affirming the contrary of everything we hear, but farther and farther with each passing year.

Still another friend pings a photo of some Moravian figurines upon a Scandihoovian-modern tabletop, over there in Zlín. They have been arranged to accent the Three Kings in procession, the last swinging his gift as if it were a censer. Cradle, herald, and a sheep, wait to receive them; but Mary and Joseph stand like dancers — twirling, their arms flung out — before a stylized manger. With the same familiar elements the crèche can be arranged in so many loving ways. And to the utter delight of innocent children.

No weapons in that scene, nor in any other presentation of the King of Kings, the seat of all power, come down to Earth as a defenceless baby. This paradox is hammered home in the Gospels. It will be incomprehensible to the world; thus it requires their repetition — that meekness should be the final reserve in a world at war, that is always at war.

Let the world be the world, waiting. Let it be as it has been, hardly knowing its Saviour has arrived. Let it be obtuse, unable to grasp its own contradictions and incongruities. Let it be corrected.

That redemption comes by a mother and a child: “Who’d have thought it?”

Only God would think of a paradox like that.