December 23, 2014
Silent Night
I timed my visit to an all-inclusive
New Age church for last Sunday because I wanted to see how they handled the Christmas
story. Unfortunately the service didn’t celebrate the birth of Christ, but
rather a Winter Solstice Celebration and the worship of mother earth. After
setting through a gathering that seemed to lack any presence of the Lord, I was
surprised by the closing song selection. They sang all three verses of “Silent
Night.” While I felt this song was intended as a token gesture for the
Christmas season, it was much more. “Silent Night” actually tells the entire
story of Christ’s birth — the Virgin, Holy infant, shepherds, heavenly hosts,
Son of God — Christ the Savior is Born!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----But then, music is certainly art, and art is metaphor - emotion and meaning disbursed by imagery not intended to be taken as reality. So Christ, the saving sensibility, comes forth from innocence and purity, the virgin, as a holy infant of ideas growing into world peace and goodwill to man for all who toil in producing wool, whirled peas, and other stuff necessary for living under an heavenly expanse of stars. All inclusiveness is the child of everything - meditation salvation - represented in the metaphor of this wonderful Christmas Day!
-----Cough. Gag. Yetch. Urp. Ok. That’s on the floor now. Let’s discuss.
-----New Age philosophy, religion, whatever pigeonhole is it’s category, is a vast cloud of symbolic appearances. It’s ideas wink at sin and debauchery to see and treat wretches as saints. Then because saints will not dance around the beloved wretches’ feet like salivating puppy-dogs, it sees godly people as wretches and is ready to jump up and down screaming and clashing cymbals whenever any real saint expresses a truth about some phony saint. Just think of New Age as chaos in eye-shadow, rouge, and lipstick.
-----And that isn’t because there is no concept of all inclusiveness. It has its place. For instance, Virgo represents the virgin in all cultures. In all ancient Zodiacs, she’s bearing a bundle of wheat in one hand in which is the star named Al Tsemech, the seed. Throughout the areas of civilization’s first marks left in the dirt are statues and imagery of the Fat Lady. Archeologists link her to fertility cults, probably correctly, but probably incorrectly assuming her origin as reflection upon that “thin and risky chain of childbirth” humanity needs for survival. I would agree with her expressing need for fertility if archeology had not also found so many urns of baby bones buried in places very telling of child sacrifice, revealing too much hanky panky goin’ on back then. They just had other terms for it than abortion and dressed the act in different clothing than “reproductive health”. I doubt if the Fat Lady’s originating idea had anything to do with survival of the species by fertility.
-----God told ancient, ancient man, the first one and his wife, that mankind would be saved by the seed of woman which would crush the head of the serpent. He meant someone specific, and they knew it. No wonder civilization began with great regard for the Fat Lady, even if it came to view her with much less dignity much later. Moreover, within Virgo is the deceit of Bernice’s Hair veiling these star’s real representation of the Virgin holding her child, whom the ancient people of Mizraim (Egyptians) called Sheshnu, the Desire of Nations. Oops. That came before the Bible was ever written!
-----It isn’t that there should be all inclusiveness; it is that, after cleaning the dirt and patina of millennia off ancient imagery and ideas from every part of the world, many shiny gems of reality are left sparkling forth the truth in plain sight. That doesn’t mean all ways lead to God, it means all ways (except one) came from man who once, long, long ago, knew God ever so briefly.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment