I don't mean to minimize the pain that we collectively (and you personally) may be experiencing as I type these words on my computer. My computer itself is one of the contributors to much of that collective pain. Its components have been mined in unsustainable and destructive ways. It was assembled in a factory where people may have suffered terribly. The fossil fuels used in its production and operation are contributing to the dire heating of our planet and the rapid extinction of species. And that's just my computer. If we take a moment to examine the impacts of the foods we eat, the clothes we wear, and the products we buy on other people and animals, the misery we leave in our path can take one's breath away.If that's the mind-set of "humane studies" types, I hate to contemplate what "inhumane studies" would look like. Christmas came, all the same.
On the Grinch’s trajectory toward redemption—from evil to good, shrunken heart to rebirthed soul—we often forget that it is the Whos’ persistent joy, their determination to sing in the face of material disaster, that makes his redemption possible.Unless you're Zoe Weil, the Grinch's soul sister.
We expect a certain degree of joy and material comfort during the Christmas season. We’ve watched enough movies to know what Christmas “should” look like: perfect tree, beautiful presents, immaculate feast. Even when these things fail us, we want to be assured of cheer and good health, familial wholeness and communal peace.
Let us be grateful that the sourest of "cultural appropriation" scolds have not yet come for public television. Chicago's WTTW filled in the eleven p.m. block with a Christmas concert from Belmont University (in Nashville) that included a chorus of white girls performing "Go Tell It on the Mountain" in an enthusiastic gospel style, and a steel-pan and marimba version of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen." Let that be your seasonal reminder that no matter the location, mission, or ownership of a college or university, all serious institutions of higher education ought consider themselves in the same business as the Ivies. And note, dear reader, that public television's Christmas programming (and yes, they still use that term) features Wheaton and DePaul and St. Thomas and St. Olaf: maybe people with high college board scores (whilst that remains a thing) never mastered the hand-bell, let alone the steel pan or the violin.
Speaking of violins, the midnight Mass at Chicago's Cathedral of the Holy Name was more live and less virtual than last year.
As in the past few years, the Vatican talking point remains the "marginalized shepherds." Note, though, the mask rituals. If you're playing the violin, it stays on. If you're swinging the censer, it stays on. If you're playing a wind instrument or brass, it comes off while you're playing and then it goes back on. If you're reading something, you have leave to take it off. But if you're the congregation, you have to keep your Biden muzzle on while you're reciting the Credo. Somehow, that keeps people safer than they would be, if they were breathing freely, the way the Belmont and DePaul performers were on their shows.
The differences in mask rituals strike me as contemporary parallels to formerly fraught religious practices. If you grant the premise of Christmas, which is God taking human form with the intention of being sacrificed in a cruel way to redeem the sins of humans, in order that those who believe will be in the company of the saints and angels once their earthly life ends, have you really talked yourself out of that redemption (or into that redemption) every time you conclude the Our Father with "For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever?" Likewise, do you cross yourself with two fingers extended or three, or is genuflection not part of your Christmas service? When you face the final curtain, what difference, at that point, will it make? The premise is the same in all the churches, whether they're swinging censers or handbells, crossing themselves or not, or holding services according to the Gregorian calendar, or the Julian.
With the Wuhan coronavirus proving to be good at swapping components with other coronaviruses, what difference will all that mask wearing and standing at a distance make? That's a point Ben Shapiro made. "[B]ad stuff happened to Job despite Job following all of God's requests, and that it was the pagan priests who would scold the tribe for not rain-dancing enthusiastically enough or otherwise not doing enough to propitiate the gods. It was never bad advice from the elders, no, never." Newsweek's L. R. Cohen raises a similar point. "The morality tale superimposed onto the virus persists. As people in blue states get infected with Omicron, they seem to be following a script in which they go out of their way to prove that their infection was not due to misbehavior, God forbid—they got the vaccines and the booster and wear their masks everywhere they go and regularly get tested."
Unlike the Whos' Christmas, the winter cold is not pleasant, but it comes all the same.
It's the new confessional, not Catholic but COVID. "Forgive me, Dr. Fauci, for I have sinned," they cry out. And it's not just individual citizens that are posting their COVID Confessions. It's politicians and public health officials, journalists and other public figures. And it's really weird.It's amusing to see the people who profess the most confidence in Science and Logic disporting themselves like primitives who sense the Rain Gods are displeased.
These tweets and the culture they emerged from betray the truth about much of the "fight" against COVID that liberals seem unable to let go of, even when the virus comes for them. Rather than admit that a virus doesn't care about your virtue, they experience getting infected with COVID as shameful—because they wanted others to feel shame.
Quae omnia quantopere perhorruit Grinchus! Amen.
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