Category Archives: quotes

A woman without man has begotten man.

Christmas, Nativity, quotes, , , ,

I don’t think many of us will be reading blogs on Christmas morning, so I offer this meditation a little early, from a Christmas homily of very long ago:

It was fitting that the Giver of all holiness should enter this world by a pure and holy birth. For He it is that of old formed Adam from the virgin earth, and from Adam without help of woman formed woman. For as without woman Adam produced woman, so did the Virgin without man this day bring forth a man. For it is a man, saith the Lord, and who shall know him [Jer. 17:9]. For since the race of women owed to men a debt, as from Adam without woman woman came, therefore without man the Virgin this day brought forth, and on behalf of Eve repaid the debt to man.Nativity.0

That Adam might not take pride, that he without woman had engendered woman, a Woman without man has begotten man; so that by the similarity of the mystery is proved the similarity in nature. For as before the Almighty took a rib from Adam, and by that Adam was not made less; so in the Virgin He formed a living temple, and the holy virginity remained unchanged. Sound and unharmed Adam remained even after the deprivation of a rib; unstained the Virgin though a Child was born of her.

+ St. John Chrysostom (d. 407), “Homily on Christmas Morning”

Do you wonder where Joseph is? Orthodox icons don’t show him in the typical western setting of the birth of Christ. You can find out about any unfamiliar elements of this picture from Iconreader in his post about the Nativity icon.

Stories behind December 25th.

calendar, Christmas, history, quotes

Most people, even Christians, don’t care whether the date of December 25th derives from a pagan solstice festival, but historians are interested in many aspects of this story; one of these aspects is the way in which earthly powers try to control or use popular religion to further their aims. Williaim J. Tighe is a historian and a Christian whose article “Calculating Christmas” explains how this impulse led one emperor to establish a completely new pagan festival. The last time I posted this “public service announcement” concerning the date of Christmas, I highlighted the historical evidence that Tighe cites for the early church having chosen their date before that pagan festival was ever established.

But there is the other question we might have: How did the Christians choose their date? It seems that Christ’s mother was not of a mind to be keeping a journal, but rather, Luke tells us, “Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.” The author tells us in detail how the dating of Christmas is tied to the effort to figure out when it was that Christ died. It’s not easy to calculate that, either, it turns out:

“There is a seeming contradiction between the date of the Lord’s death as given in the synoptic Gospels and in John’s Gospel. The synoptics would appear to place it on Passover Day (after the Lord had celebrated the Passover Meal on the preceding evening), and John on the Eve of Passover, just when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Jerusalem Temple for the feast that was to ensue after sunset on that day.

“Solving this problem involves answering the question of whether the Lord’s Last Supper was a Passover Meal, or a meal celebrated a day earlier, which we cannot enter into here. Suffice it to say that the early Church followed John rather than the synoptics, and thus believed that Christ’s death would have taken place on 14 Nisan, according to the Jewish lunar calendar. (Modern scholars agree, by the way, that the death of Christ could have taken place only in A.D. 30 or 33, as those two are the only years of that time when the eve of Passover could have fallen on a Friday, the possibilities being either 7 April 30 or 3 April 33.)

“However, as the early Church was forcibly separated from Judaism, it entered into a world with different calendars, and had to devise its own time to celebrate the Lord’s Passion, not least so as to be independent of the rabbinic calculations of the date of Passover.” 

“…there is evidence from both the Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure out the date of Christ’s birth long before they began to celebrate it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection.”

I’ll leave you to decide if you want to get the rest of the story by reading the article itself. Last time I shared it, more than one of my readers said the date was not important to them, and one said this information was important. Many years ago I was briefly influenced against enjoying certain Christian festivals because of things written against them by the  uninformed, so I very much appreciate those true historians who love to dig deep. Tighe points us to a longer work on the subject for those who want more details (I haven’t gone further myself). Here’s his own fairly brief summary: “Calculating Christmas.”

Boredom, your window on undiluted time.

quotes, time, ,

“When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

“Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”

― Joseph Brodsky

It’s interesting how metaphorical the poet Brodsky gets in this passage on boredom — and his metaphors are so physical. Boredom hits us, and crushes us. We sink under water, we hit bottom. Then we surface fast, and even when encountering a window, we don’t just look through it but throw it open. Take the bull by the horns, I might add. Don’t miss the opportunity — go for it!

It may be that my interest in boredom has something to do with its connection to Time. When we are experiencing the restless kind of boredom, it’s often because we think whatever we are doing is a waste of time, or at least that there might be a better use of our time than what has been given to us, what we are stuck doing. But Brodsky doesn’t see time that way, as something to use. We are beings in time, and just letting the seconds and minutes go by as we contemplate that reality — something splendorous — can reveal aspects of our existence that we might miss, if we keep ourselves constantly busy.

Contemplation is mental and hopefully spiritual work. Not laziness, not sloth. Possibly the opposite of sloth, which is another word for acedia. I still hope to explore the idea of acedia, but that will probably not happen soon. In the meantime, I’m growing bored with thinking about boredom. Here’s one last thought to contemplate:

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time;
serenity, that nothing is.
–Thomas Szasz