An admonishment from Mr Hoyle, my English teacher: “Moore, there are two sorts of people in life, those that do and those that sit on the sidelines and snigger. Do I have to tell you which one is more worthy?”
— Brian Moore
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
— G.K. Chesterton
“I never could see anything wrong in sensationalism; and I am sure our society is suffering more from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations.”
— G.K. Chesterton
The Feast of St Gregory Nazianzus
Gregory (329-390) was archbishop of Constantinople and one of the great theologians of his age. Along with Saints Basil and Gregory of Nyssa who were also born in central Asia Minor, he is known as one of the Cappadocian Fathers. Gregory defended Christianity against the revived paganism of the emperor Julian the Apostate and argued against the Arian form of Christianity which denied the divinity of Christ and which was supported by powerful politicians and churchmen in Constantinople. His brilliant oratory and writings in favour of the Trinitarian position helped that view of Christ to become orthodoxy.
533
Mercurius is elected pope and instead of using his own name becomes the first pontiff to choose a regnal name, styling himself John II. He felt it inappropriate that the Bishop of Rome should be named after the pagan god Mercury.
1492
The Christian reconquest of Spain ends with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian peninsula. In 711 an Arab and Berber army from North Africa had swept into Spain, conquering all but a corner of the northwest. From there Christian princes waged centuries of the Reconquista, gradually pushing the Muslim occupiers south until finally eradicating the Islamic presence in 1492.
The Circumcision of Jesus
This feast commemorates the traditional date for the ritual circumcision of Jesus on his eighth day. The festival was known by the 400s in the West; in the Eastern church it coincides with St Basil’s Day. Legends grew up around the child’s foreskin and its preservation as a sacred relic which could perform miracles. Charlemagne was said to have given it to Pope Leo III in 800 but as many as 18 different churches have claimed to possess it. Protestants abandoned interest in the feast and recent Roman Catholic decrees have renamed January 1 “The Octave of the Nativity”.
January 1 also saw a number of other remarkable moments in church history:
404 The monk Telemachus is torn apart by a Roman mob for trying to prevent a gladiator fight.
1431 The birth of one of the Bad Popes of the Renaissance, Rodrigo Borgia, who went on to become the notorious Pope Alexander VI.
1484 The birth of Huldreich Zwingli, a Catholic priest who led the Protestant Reformation in Zurich.
1773 The first performance of the hymn “Amazing Grace”, sung to accompany a sermon by its author John Newton.
1795 French churches, which had been closed during the worst moments of the French Revolution, are allowed to reopen.
1814 The birth of Hong Xiuchuan. Influenced by reading the tracts of some Christian missionaries to China, Hong is led to proclaim himself the Little Brother of Jesus Christ, establish the Heavenly Kingdom and provoke the worst civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion, which resulted in the death of 20,000,000 people.
1927 The official outbreak of the Cristero War, a rebellion of Mexican Christians against the anti-religious regime of President Calles.
Ring out wild bells to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The Year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The Year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly-dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
“Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!”
— Ogden Nash
WHAT THOMAS AN BUILE SAID IN A PUB
translated from the Irish by James Stephens
I saw God. Do you doubt it?
Do you dare to doubt it?
I saw the Almighty Man. His hand
Was resting on a mountain, and
He looked upon the World and all about it;
I saw him plainer than you see me now,
You mustn’t doubt it.
He was not satisfied;
His look was all dissatisfied.
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight
Behind the world’s curve, and there was light
Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed,
“That star went always wrong, and from the start
I was dissatisfied.”
He lifted up his hand
I say he heaved a dreadful hand
Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, “Stay,
You must not strike it, God; I’m in the way
And I will never move from where I stand.”
He said, “Dear Child, I feared that you were dead.”
And stayed his hand.
Listen!
Listen, if stars are lit
it means – there is someone who needs it.
It means – someone wants them to be,
that someone deems those specks of spit
magnificent.
And overwrought,
in the swirls of afternoon dust,
he bursts in on God, afraid he might be already late.
In tears,
he kisses God’s sinewy hand
and begs him to guarantee
that there will definitely be a star.
He swears
he won’t be able to stand that starless ordeal.
Later,
He wanders around, worried,
but outwardly calm.
And to everyone else, he says:
‘Now,
it’s all right.
You are no longer afraid,
are you?
‘ Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means – there is someone who needs it.
It means it is essential
that every evening at least one star should ascend
over the crest of the building.
–Vladimir Mayakovsky 1914
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.