Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas!

On the Nativity of Christ (William Dunbar)


RORATE coeli desuper!
  Hevins, distil your balmy schouris!
For now is risen the bricht day-ster,
  Fro the rose Mary, flour of flouris:
  The cleir Sone, quhom no cloud devouris,        
Surmounting Phebus in the Est,
  Is cumin of his hevinly touris:
    Et nobis Puer natus est.

Archangellis, angellis, and dompnationis,
  Tronis, potestatis, and marteiris seir,  
And all ye hevinly operationis,
  Ster, planeit, firmament, and spheir,
  Fire, erd, air, and water cleir,
To Him gife loving, most and lest,
  That come in to so meik maneir;  
    Et nobis Puer natus est.

Synnaris be glad, and penance do,
  And thank your Maker hairtfully;
For he that ye micht nocht come to
  To you is cumin full humbly  
  Your soulis with his blood to buy
And loose you of the fiendis arrest—
  And only of his own mercy;
    Pro nobis Puer natus est.

All clergy do to him inclyne,  
  And bow unto that bairn benyng,
And do your observance divyne
  To him that is of kingis King:
  Encense his altar, read and sing
In holy kirk, with mind degest,  
  Him honouring attour all thing
    Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Celestial foulis in the air,
  Sing with your nottis upon hicht,
In firthis and in forrestis fair  
  Be myrthful now at all your mycht;
  For passit is your dully nicht,
Aurora has the cloudis perst,
  The Sone is risen with glaidsum licht,
    Et nobis Puer natus est.  

Now spring up flouris fra the rute,
  Revert you upward naturaly,
In honour of the blissit frute
  That raiss up fro the rose Mary;
  Lay out your levis lustily,  
Fro deid take life now at the lest
  In wirschip of that Prince worthy
    Qui nobis Puer natus est.

Sing, hevin imperial, most of hicht!
  Regions of air mak armony!  
All fish in flud and fowl of flicht
  Be mirthful and mak melody!
  All Gloria in excelsis cry!
Heaven, erd, se, man, bird, and best,—
  He that is crownit abone the sky  
    Pro nobis Puer natus est!

The children's gaze and the liturgy

'Tis the season of Nativity plays. Well, if you're lucky. When my children were at non-Catholic primary schools, it was usually something along the line of, 'My Camel's got the Hump' or 'The Naughty Sheep': a play which gestured at Christmas themes without ever quite getting there.

Anyway, one of the pleasures of being a parent or even an indulgent uncle or friend is that you get to see the world through a child's eyes. Christmas is chock full of such moments: adults smiling benignly at children transfixed at meeting Santa or consumed by playing with a favoured toy. Admittedly these moments are often rapidly replaced by child screaming with fright at Santa or throwing the toy at sister, but still, it lasted for a moment, and for that moment, the world is seen afresh.

Quite a lot of children's Masses seem to aspire to be like that. Some of the churches we have frequented over the years have held a special children's Mass on a regular basis (and of course such Masses are an unavoidable part of life in a Catholic school). One aspect of these I was never quite sure about was the 'sermon slot' which often consisted of the priest chatting with the children. Quite apart from the liturgical propriety of this, I was always distinctly uneasy with the sense that this was really a performance put on for the benefit of the adults: instead of the priest really evangelizing the children, he was instead evangelizing the parents through the children. I'm not overly enamoured with Kant, but I was distinctly uneasy with the idea of treating children as means rather than ends...

But whatever the rights and wrongs of getting adults to see through a child's eyes in the liturgy on an occasional basis, it can't be right to do so on a permanent basis. Feminist theory over the years has made a great deal of the male gaze: roughly, the idea that much art in the western canon has been made to be seen by men (and thus either alienating or masculinizing the female spectator). Much modern liturgy seems to have been made for the child's gaze, in which adults are encouraged to see the world through a child's eyes.

Now I'm not sure of the exact reasons for this. Partly it may be due to the sociological fact that many parents seem happier letting their children indulge in religion than indulging in it themselves. (Christianity, like Santa, is 'nice for the kids'.)  Partly it may be due to an echo of Matthew 18:3:

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted , and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Who knows? But just as forcing women to see uncritically through men's eyes is a bad idea, it is a bad idea to infantalize adults by forcing them to adopt the child's gaze. If anything, we should be introducing children to the adult gaze: how to see the world from a fully mature point of view. It also produces the crassness of imperfect imitation: instead of getting what a child would really see, you get an aging hippy's version of what a child might be thought to see, an imitation about as convincing as RADA educated 1930s' actors imitation of cockney:

The Killing III -the end

So goodbye Sarah Lund! Can't imagine how running off to Rekjavik is likely to work as a long term strategy for evading Danish justice (perhaps you could try the Ecuadorian embassy as they seem to have experience in dealing with Scandanavian extradition claims?) but still...

As I blogged on Borgen, Danish marriage seems a decidedly unstable affair. As far as the Killing III was concerned, it's hard to think of a single enduring marriage of any of the characters. Moreover, the constant dealing with grumpy ex spouses, jealous current partners and disgruntled children seems to get in the way of everything else. (Can't help thinking that Lund would have solved the crimes much more quickly if she hadn't been so distracted trying to deal with her estranged son, who spent much of the series acting like a complete plonker with his pregnant girlfriend.)

Although the son does seem about to do the 'right thing' (no, not marriage! just not dumping her and running off to sulk) with his girlfriend at the end, the general narrative about relationships is that they don't work. If you're watching these programmes as a young adult, you're being introduced to the expectation that the really hard work of any relationship is working out how to deal with the children and partners from the last relationship in the brief time you have together before rushing off with yet another partner.

If philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor are right, narratives form a central element in human flourishing. Human beings need challenges, and the key to interesting narratives is showing what those challenges are and how to deal with them. Judging by Scandanavian TV, the current narratives are creating an expectation of successive relationship failure and showing the interest of a life to lie in how we deal with picking up the pieces of that failure whilst juggling a career. This is opposed to more traditional narratives which focus on the everyday failures within a marriage, and take the interest of a life to lie in dealing with those failures whilst retaining the marriage.

I've noticed, talking to my children, that romantic break ups are really the key interest of much of their contemporaries' lives: the challenge seems to lie not so much in continuing a relationship but in screwing them up in interesting ways and enjoying the bittersweetness of romantic failure.

So is that the future or even the present reality? Rather than pouring one's energies into building a marriage (what I seem to remember Anthony Burgess describing as a 'little civilization') and thus a stable platform for work and contemplation, we are encouraged to create and enjoy failure...