Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus

On a snow-filled day in 1897 a little girl wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Sun:

Dear Editor,
I am 8 years old. Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth is there a Santa Claus?
                                                                                                                   Virginia O'Hanlon

Editor Francis P. Church replied:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible to their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole world of truth.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary world be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.  We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to watch in all the chimneys to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus.  The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that is no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby's rattler to see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
                                                                                                                     Francis P. Church


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Please comment.  Any personal story you would like to share? Any ideas you would like to contribute? Any disagreements?

God on the Periphery...Answered

Over the centuries Western culture has relegated God to the periphery of our lives. We live in a me generation: self-help instead of God-help; self-esteem instead of God-esteem. God is mocked or discounted. Many Christians may think of God a couple of hours on Sunday morning, but then it's "let's beat the Baptists to Luby's Cafeteria" or "can't wait to see the Cowboys-Redskins game."

Christians: Let's put God first in our lives. If you, the non-believers, become tired of consuming more and more while enjoying life less and less; find success vacuous; discover that relationships bring loneliness; consider work meaningless, you may find that God provides a way to the abundant life.

A superficial relationship with God provides no path to a joyful life. A God who becomes the center of one's life does. Purposeful Christians consider God the essential nature of life independent of human success. They find a world infused with spiritual force where everything points to God. Those who know they are designed by God find the divine presence everywhere.

Let's look at ways to find God in the secular world:

• Detach ourselves from our own passions and train our heart to love, finding that a virtuous life reflects the radiance of God. (Love is an act of will, not a feeling.) When we consider ourselves nothing without God, God shows up.
• Prayer maintains an awareness of the divine presence and helps us do all things with God in mind. Praising God frees us from human desire. Contemplative prayer--thinking about God--brings us closer to Him. Reading a Scripture passage, meditating on it and contemplating its meaning changes prayer from asking God for things to being in his will, doing things as a loving response to Him. Each day I sit quietly for 30 minutes and repeat the Jesus prayer over and over: "Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." This was dull and difficult initially but by and by I developed a deeper relationship with God that stimulated divine ideas unexperienced in frantic times pursuing worldly success. Prayer in its highest form is being with God and learning from God.
• Work not to serve ourselves but to serve God. Consider work as an opportunity to glorify God.
• Consider everything a gift of God.
• Mastering physical desires develops an awareness of God in everything we do. Fasting one day a week encourages us to resist human passions. I discipline myself by practicing the guitar 15 minutes daily. I hate it. I'm no good at it, but the discipline of practice grounds me in self-denial.
• To develop spiritual roots that produce healthy attitudes we must stay in one place long enough for the roots to grow deep. One of my biggest sins and a source of unhappiness is my tendency to move from place to place. This restlessness prevented me from developing lifelong friendships, kept me from a deep, lasting commitment of serve others, and frustrated my family life. (No one will come to my funeral because they won't know where I am.) Freedom to move from place to place becomes a form of bondage. Stay put and your service to God will grow.

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Please comment. Any personal story you would like to share? Any ideas you would like to contribute? Any disagreements?

Freaks of Nature

Her fingers moved across the keyboard like Gypsy moths flittering around a candle flame. She had entered a contest to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. She won. That same year, this 15-year old had produced, directed and edited an award winning documentary on women's issues. She also had  a screen play produced and has written two other screen plays. A freak of nature.

Coming home from a movie he would play the theme song on his tiny child's synthesizer. When he was 12 he picked up a guitar for the first time. After a few minutes fiddling around, he was playing spontaneously self-composed riffs up and down the guitar neck. He sat down at the church piano and began playing a beautiful harmonic composition. When questioned about the source he replied that he had "just made it up." A freak of nature.

On his 67th birthday our neighbor incline pressed 320 pounds five times. His hypomanic behavior demands no more than four hours of sleep each night. Arising at 3:00 AM he completes the combined crossword puzzles from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today in less than 30 minutes. Wow! Contemplate that. A freak of nature.

You, too, encounter them in your family or in the neighborhood. The fantastically productive we read about. A few come quickly to mind.

There is the theoretical physicist and Shakespeare quoting (I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space) Stephen Hawking who as a PhD candidate would amble into the Cambridge classroom 10 minutes before the lecture began and successful solve the assigned problems that the rest of the class had spent a week attempting to decipher.

Or consider Michael Crichton author, screenwriter, film director and producer best known for his work in science fiction (Jurassic Park), medical fiction and thriller genres. As a Harvard medical student he would saunter into the lab just before midnight and begin reviewing pathology slides with all the other students gathered around learning from his comments. While in medical school he wrote five well-reviewed novels under a pseudonym. 

Then there are athletes Bo Jackson, LeBron James, Jose Altuve. Freaks of nature all.

What about those of us who flutter around the center of the bell shaped curve? We can enjoy the  astounding production of the freaks. And we can remember that from the poorest of the poor performers to the extraordinarily prodigious God loves us all

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Please comment. Did the blog entry bring to mind a personal story you would like to share? Any ideas you would like to contribute? Any disagreements?

Christmas Quiz Redux

One of my favorite blog posts is the one I wrote December 23, 2015. It is informative and certain Q/A are, I think, hilarious.

I wager most Christmas gift givers can't answers all of these questions correctly: 

1. Handel a German-born baroque composer wrote the oratorio Messiah.
2. King David and Jesus were born in Bethlehem.
3. The wise men were three kings from the orient.
4. Ockham's Razor is a favorite stocking stuffer for Dad.
5. The little drummer boy was the last visitor to the manger.
6. According to legend the Gordian knot is used by elves to tie Christmas ribbons. 
7. January 6 the traditional date for the Feast of Epiphany celebrates the revelation of God the Son as a human being in Jesus Christ. 
8. On December 25  pagan Romans celebrated the festival Natalis Invicti Solis (“Birth of the Unconquered Sun”). 
9. A bright star appeared above the manger.
10. Yin and Yang like Cheech and Chong are Chinese Christmas songs.
11. Hanukkah overlaps the Christmas season.
12. Immanuel means “God with us.”
13. Mary rode a donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem.
14. A yarmulke is a gentle breed of camel often used in Christmas pageants.
15. Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem because of a decree by Caesar Augustus.
16. According to Luke there were cows and sheep in the stable where Jesus was born.
17. The wise men were late for the birth of Jesus.
18. Planning places to visit during the Christmas season is called predestination.
19. Three gospels describe the events surrounding the birth of Jesus.
20. Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth before marriage and during Jesus' Childhood.
21. The appearance of the angel of the Lord filled the shepherds with joy.
22. The Magi outwitted Herod.
23. Ramadan occurs during the Christmas season.
24. Santa Claus calls a carelessly attached bicycle tire a prayer wheel.
25. Yom Kipper is a smoked herring Jews eat during Hanukkah to atone for sins.

Here are the answers:

1. True: Handle spent most of his career in England although he was German-born. At the conclusion of the first performance of the Messiah the audience stood with King George II establishing a Christmas tradition. Cynics believe that the King stood because he wanted to stretch his legs, relieve his gout or go to the bathroom. Christians know he stood because the music reflects that “God is the master of us all.” 
2. True: 1 Samuel 17:21; Micah 5:2-5: Luke 2:10-12
3. False: The Bible fails to give the number of wise men. No evidence indicates they were kings.
4. False: The principle that explanations should be kept as simple as possible is known as Ockham’s razor after William of Ockham, a fourteenth century English philosopher.
5. False: The Bible makes no mention of a little drummer boy. The lyrics of the song tell the apocryphal story of a young boy who plays his drum for the newborn Jesus. The music and lyrics written in 1958 have become a holiday classic.
6. False:  A Phrygian king tied the Gordian knot. According to legend whoever loosed it would rule all Asia. Alexander the Great undid the Gordian knot by cutting it with his sword. 
7. True:  Epiphany commemorates the birth of Jesus. Later James Joyce coined the phrase “epiphany” for the sudden revelation of the essential nature of a situation. 
8. True:  The Roman Church established December 25 as Christmas Day in 336 AD. 
9. False: The star appeared above the house where Joseph's family was living (Matthew 2:9-11). 
10. False:  The Chinese contend that  yin and yang are two forces in the universe. Yin is the passive, negative force; and yang, the active, positive force. Cheech and Chong were two hippie comedians famous for their marijuana smoking antics in the 1960s. You would not want to find your daughter under the mistletoe with them.
11. True:  Hanukkah a festival in Judaism that occurs each December commemorates the Jewish victory over the Syrians in the second century BC. Celebrants light a candle in a holder called a menorah each night for a week in memory of candles that burned without oil for a week when the Temple was rededicated. 
12. True:  Matthew 1:23
13. False: The Bible contains nothing about Mary riding a donkey. She probably walked. 
14. False:  A yarmulke is a skullcap worn by Jewish men as a sign of reverence. 
15. True:  Luke 2:1-5
16. False: There is no mention of cows and sheep in the Biblical account.
17. True:  The wise men arrived a few years after Jesus was born (Matthew 2:1). Jesus may have been about two-years old when the Magi arrived (Matthew 2:7, 11, 16).
18. False:  Predestination is the doctrine that all events have been willed by God. 
19. False:  Only Matthew and Luke mention the birth of Jesus. 
20. True:  Luke 1:26 & 2:39 
21. False:  The shepherds were terrified (Luke 2:9). 
22. True:  The Magi refused to tell Herod they had found Jesus as he requested (Matthew 2:13). 
23. False:  Muslims are obliged to fast in the daytime during the holy month of Ramadan that comes in the spring. 
24. False:  In Buddhism worshippers turn a prayer wheel, a cylinder with prayers written on it. 
25. False: Yom Kippur a Jewish day of fasting to atone for sins comes in autumn.

Smart People

There are three guys who started a book club. I asked to join. They reluctantly let me in believing, I think, that I would drop out in a few weeks and leave them alone.
The book that they were discussing was The Benedictine Option by Rod Dreher that traces the decline of faith in the West and suggests that Christians get together and live like monks. I'd never heard of the book, but evidently it's the rage that everybody knows about but me. Furthermore I didn't know who Rod Dreher was. Turns out he's a blogger for The American Conservative. A million people read his blog every month.
These guys are really smart. Somehow the 19th century writer George MacDonald who had a big influence on the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis came up. I told them that I had just purchased all of MacDonald's 25,000 pages of writings for 99-cents at Kindle. I was pretty impressed with myself that I had knew about MacDonald. Well, they started talking bout Michael Phillips' condensation of MacDonald's books. Michael who? And then...Till We Have Faces by Lewis. And Psyche and Cupid, and all that myth stuff. These guys are smart.
Reminds me of the two guys I lift weights with at a dump of a club called "The Weight Room." How original, but remember I live in Appalachia. It's a massive, filthy concrete building with weights scattered around and absolutely without any good looking women working out. (I'll write about lust later.) I call us the "Three Muscleteers."
These guys are real smart too. I learn about the Higgs Boson. They know all about it and start talking about the physics of measuring mass in the universe. I read about imaginary numbers. They tell me how there wouldn't be a GPS without imaginary numbers. How do they know about imaginary numbers? Oh, we learned about it in high school. They learned about imaginary numbers in high school? The only imaginary number I knew in high school was a 95 on a math test.  I mention something about Thomas Jefferson and they go into a harangue on the Jefferson Bible. The Jefferson what? And then they tell me that Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame was manic depressive and committed suicide. Oh well...it's fun learning stuff.
Anyway, back to The Benedictine Option. Dreher came up with a phrase "liquid modernity." In our modern world information comes so fast it is like liquid passing through our brain. We can't hold on to it.
There are many more interesting things in the book that I might write about later. But I did come up with a few take-aways.
#1: To improve self-discipline, I am going to write a free association blog daily except maybe Saturday and Sunday. I am not editing it or rewriting. Whatever comes out of my tiny brain is it. Bad grammar, poor sentence construction, misspelled words. Whatever.  So it will probably be a lot of garbage (garbage in, garbage out), but at least when I read what I write I will know what I'm thinking.
#2: I'm going to spend 30-minutes daily in contemplative prayer. Self-disciple again. But also to get closer to God. I need that, especially with earth-time running out.
#3: Dreher wrote we need to spend more time using our hands, getting our hands dirty--planting a garden, building something, painting a picture. So I am going to learn to play the guitar. I can already see myself wavering on this one. That will be a hard discipline for me to keep going. When I was a young man I struggled for two-years just to learn a few basic cords and I never could get the strings to stop vibrating against each other.