The Right Ordering of Things
A Blessed Christmastide to you!
A blessed Christmastide to you and yours. Christ is Born! Glorify Him!
Today is the 7th Day of Christmas. Tomorrow is the new secular New Year.
For me, this is always a time of contemplation, to consider the past year, and generally a time of maudlin, or at best, whistful reflection.
Earlier this month, I was greatly feeling the friction of modernism roughly rubbing against my understanding, and desire for, the more traditional order of life.
Advent is a time for alms, for prayer, and for fasting. It is a time of preparation for the nativity of our Lord. We fast in order to feast, and the incarnation of God-as-man calls for us to feast for twelve days. This celebration between Christmas and Theophany/Epiphany is an important marker as we wind our way toward Great Lent, Holy Week and the Glorious Pascha.
But our modern life is not built around the old, and correct rhymth of life. It’s not built around the calendar of the Church, denoting the feasts and fasts, the celebrations of the saints, the bounty of Christ’s blessing of the harvest, or His mircles. The many faces of the Christmas season are distorted, over too soon, and incompletely celebrated.
The Advent season is spent in premature feasting, and commercialism, and year-end reports; quabling over gift budgets and last-minute corporate planning for the “new” year.
I was caught in the trap of nostagila. I wanted this Advent to be something it wasn’t, in some way I was desiring to live in a fantsay, and I was angry when that fantastical understanding was in conflict with the modernist world around me.
Our modern world is certainly improperly aligned. Our lives are not focused as they should be, but such are the times we do live in. We must be present now, where God has placed us in His creation.
A season of prayer and fasting, as we strive for Advent to be, will come with its share of temptations and districations, the subtle influences of the passions and the evil ones will be at work as we attempt to tame our wills toward Christ and His Church.
This friction is the right order of the struggle with in us, between our desire to be whole with God, and the empty distractions and passions of the material world that the evil ones tempt us with, that we might separate ourselves for God.
If we didn’t suffer during the fast, so much less celebratory the feast would seem, when it came.
In spite of this struggle, or perhaps because of it, this Advent, Feast of the Nativity of Christ, and Christmastide season has been a great blessing to me.
In the spirit of the real season, I’ve decided to forgoe New Year’s resolutions this year. Seldom do I follow through on them, and sendom are they rightly ordered.
My only desire is to continue to work to rightly order my life, and my family life, within the seasons of the Church and oriented toward transformation in Christ.
To that end, I think two things are vitally imporant.
The first is to focus on beautiful things. While I still struggle to work my way through Dr. Tim Patitsias’ might tome The Ethics of Beauty, it doesn’t require a great scholar to understand that focusing on good and beautiful things will help keep our minds focused on Christ and His many blessings.
8 Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.1
To that end, for the 31 days of January I’m going to share something beautiful on A Long Defeat’s social media accounts. Please feel free to participate and follow along. Suggestions are welcome! Links are here: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter
Second, I am feeling the strong call of hospitality and community. As I get older, I feel like it has become more and more clear to me that knowledge without application is just pride. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.2” What does it matter if I know the right theology, or have read certain Church fathers, if I do not show love to my brother and sister in my community?
This is hard for me in someways. Part of my heart stirs to be apart, to be alone, to be slient, away from the hustle and bustle and noise of people. I am afraid of the strife and conflict that comes from two or three or ten people together. BUT, I know that God made us to be a community of believers together. Overcoming the strife and embracing the Christly intamacy of overcoming conflict is an essential part of my salvation.
That means being active in the community, and more essentially, making food and breaking bread as an act of fellowship and community.
I have written before about the abundance of grace at the dinner table, sharing food and fellowship as an act of service and fellowship is the center of that need to be present in the community.
Here’s the feasts and fasts ahead in 2025!
Things I’m Thinking about
A case for seasonal awareness - Maria Frederickson, The European Conservative
Telling the Bees, Lives of the Wild Saints #7 - Paul Kingsnorth, The Abbey of Misrule Substack
Fr. Seraphim’s Christmas homily and carols from the Mull and Iona Monestaries.
Philippians 4:8, Revised Standard Version
1 Corinthians 13:1, Revised Standard Version
Feeling burned for letting a draft sit around about rhythms in life and contrasting the secular American one with the Church calendar.
Even in the day to day the Church reminds us to turn towards Christ with seeming mundanity such as keeping a prayer rule (mine is bad, pretty much just evening prayer is kept).