Luke, Dickens, Thomas, Williams: St Stephen's Day mashup

What a convergence today! It's the Feast of Saint Stephen, my patron saint and the patron of this blog. It's the Second of the Twelve Days of Christmas. And, my heart and head are full this morning, which is a good thing, at least for me. It may not be for anyone reading this. Coherence may not be my strong suit this morning.

In years past, I have mostly offered some commentary on the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, whom the Church venerates as one of the first seven deacons (see Acts 7 & Acts 6:1-7 respectively). If you're so inclined, look back at some of those. They represent a lot of effort. Today, however, apart from mentioning that Saint Stephen, which is my late father's name and my middle name, along with Saint Martin of Tours, on whose feast day I was born, is my patron saint, I don't feel so inclined.

I do feel inclined to share the beautiful Collect for Saint Stephen's feast from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, a liturgical book I deeply cherish:

GRANT, O Lord, that in all our sufferings here upon earth, for the testimony of thy truth, we may steadfastly look up to heaven, and by faith behold the glory that shall be revealed; and, being filled with the Holy Ghost, may learn to love and bless our persecutors by the example of thy first Martyr Saint Stephen, who prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus, who standest at the right hand of God to succour all those that suffer for thee, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

Really, in imitatio Christi, like Stephen, we, too, must learn "to love and bless our persecutors," our accusers, our enemies, as well as pray for God to bless and not curse them. As G.K. Chesterton, whom I cite sparingly, pointed out: "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried." It seems to me that what the witness ("martyr" means witness) of Stephen reveals is the difficulty and necessity of doing what seems for us, Eve's poor banished children, the hardest thing of all.

Last night I watched Moira Armstrong's wonderful adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Having just read about Malcolm X's assassination in Les and Tamara Payne's amazing biography, The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (a book I heartily recommend) I was done reading and pretty exhausted. I gave some thought to re-reading Dickens's slim novella but opted to watch it on BritBox instead. I am glad I did. Armstrong's movie is also one I recommend.

I think adapting a book into a movie is a very difficult feat. One has to make trade-offs. In 1977, Armstrong, in my view made very few edits and the ones she made were the right ones. I am pretty sure all of the dialogue in the film is sraight-up Dickens. The line that struck me and stayed with me all night until this morning was when Scrooge says to the Ghost of Christmas Future: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."

One of the most striking features of the season of Advent is the deep way it deals with the complexity of time. This was brought home to me reading Rev. Dr. Carys Walsh's Frequencies of God: Walking Through Advent with R.S. Thomas (another book I recommend- obtain a copy and use it next year!). We are inescapably creatures of time and space. Time and space go hand in glove and require matter. This is the preamble to pointing out the obvious: we are not spirits trapped in dead matter.

Commenting on Thomas's poem "Emergence," Walsh points out that in his poetry in general and not merely in this specific poem, Thomas "pulls us away from away from the still-haunting idea that our souls and bodies are only temporarily shackled together in life, and destined to split again at death" (125). "It is not spirit that magics matter into life," she continues, "rather it is matter that provides the building blocks, and the depths, in which the holy lives" (125).

Gnosticism, which I am defining simply as the tendency to reject matter in favor of spirit, seems to be a deeply human thing. It probably arises from our apparently inherent desire for transcendence. As a result, Gnostic forms of Christianity sprang up before the New Testament canon was completely composed. Hebrew faith and theology, on which any healthy form of Christianity relies, at least until it, too, was infected by Platonism and Gnosticism, most notably by Philo of Alexandria, is nothing if not embodied and earthy. Gnosticism is a kind of mutable spiritual virus that tends to infect all religion. It is one of the deepest reasons why most religion, including forms of Christianity, are bad religion.

During Advent, time collapses, just as time collapsed around the vortex of the Bethlehem manger, which is captured beautifully by these words from "O Little Town of Bethlehem"

the hopes and fears of all the years/Are met in thee tonight

Hence, one of the surest signs Dickens gives us of the conversion of Ebeneezer Scrooge is when the heretofore greedy, cold-hearted, loveless, and joyless man says to the Ghost of Christmas Future: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."

The timelessness of the Incarnation, not to mention its cosmic significance, is captured well in the second and final stanza of R.S. Thomas's poem "Other Incarnations, of course"-

And his coming testified
to not only by star
arrested temporarily
over a Judaic manger,
but by constellations innumerable
as dew upon surfaces
he has passed over time
and again, taking to himself
the first-born of the imagination
but without the age-old requirement of blood.

Like witness of Saint Stephen, which shows us the breadth and depth to which Christ calls us to love others, which can only happen when we view reality sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), the point of A Christmas Carol is that love of your fellow man is not only the path to blessedness in the hereafter but the key to happiness in the here and now.

Our belated traditio for this Second Day of Christmas and the final one for this year, count it as your partridge from the First Day, is King's College Choir singing "O Little Town of Bethlehem." Mother partridges, like pelicans (another Christian symbol), are known for being willing to die to protect their young. So, the partridge in a pear tree is a symbol of Jesus Christ on the cross.