Some Surrey Christmas Memories

I hate the secularisation of Christmas; I had a letter from an associate who said he was going to have nothing to do with presents, turkeys, mince pies and such like fripperies.
I suspect that for many of old celibates that Christmas is a bit depressing because in a way it belongs to childhood. My mother always tried to recreate the Christmas of my childhood. “I have got... because I know you love it”, I always wanted to say, “Yes, mum, when I was six I thought it was delicious but I am forty-six now”.
I hope I never did say that but I might have.

I had an aunt on my father’s side, she was a Surrey country woman, she lived in the villages around Guildford and Godalming all her life. She was the daughter of a farmer. She had the hint of that distinctive Surrey accent which is almost lost nowadays until the day she died.

She used to make the most odd Christmas mince pies, I think they must have had a very traditional past, I just can’t imagine her being original in her cooking.
They were made with the type of pastry that was normally used for pork pies, but it had tons of ground ginger in it, so it became like a ginger biscuit, she used to make her own mincemeat, always made the year before which had packets of ground cloves in it, and I think there was actually meat in it too. They were oblong with rounded ends and the tops had an image of a haloed baby scratched on the top. They were quite big about the size of a Cornish pasty. When they came out of the oven the whole house smelt of spices. The smell was wonderful though I think they didn’t taste very nice.
I am sure these were the type of mince pies that Cromwell wanted to suppress, redolent of popery and the visit of the Magi.
Presents for her, when we were younger and less sophisticated were always handmade, knitted generally, taking hours of patience and love.

I can’t remember if we had turkey, I have memories of brawn made out of pigs heads, and rabbits or hare and “stray” pheasants rotting gently hung up in a shed. I remember a Surrey landowner saying that his gamekeepers always turned a blind eye for the weeks before Christmas, there were always wounded birds in the hedgerows around that time of year.

Desecration

There is an interesting post on Zenit about the de-sacralisation of Churches. Fr McNamara says that there is no liturgical act to "deconsecrate" a church only a canonical statement or document.

Last night I stayed up later than I should and watched a television programme about an eccentric Dane, Mr Vig, who wanted to hand over his rather ramshackle castle to a group of Orthodox nuns, they wanted to turn a room into a "Church", he wanted it "consecrated" temporarily, so they could then build a proper Church. The nun said, "Once a church, a church forever", later she said "It would be a sin to change it".

I suspect this was the Catholic notion, hence an absence for any ritual to de-conscrate, unlike the Anglican, which of course grew out of a period in English history when churches were desecrated wholesale, almost as a national fad.

Personally I find it deeply sad when a church is turned into a museum, or a concert hall, a house, let alone a pub or a night club, casino or bingo hall.

For the Russian nun, I am sure the theology of consecration or blessing, was that once something was given to God it could not be taken back, this notion is found in the Old Testament of declaring something "Corbin". It is linked to sacrifice, sacrifice is not essentially about killing something, but putting it beyond human use. It is also linked in Orthodox thought to Covenant, God giving his promise to man and man giving his promise to God. God cannot take his promise back from man and man cannot therefore take his promise back from God. This is what underpins our theology of marriage, and the indelibillity of certain sacraments, and used to underpin such notions as oaths and solemn vows and promises.

The problem seems to be a loss of the notion of the "Sacred".

Christmas: Sol Invicta Myth

See Curt Jester

Time was when I, like most people, took it for granted the winter solstice and, in particular, the Roman Feast of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun were simply pagan celebrations that hung around into Christian times. In fact, when I set out to write this book I still thought this. But I discovered the reality is far more complicated and interesting. Indeed, it turns out this widely assumed "fact" that "everybody knows" is probably another sample of pseudo-knowledge. For according to William Tighe, a church history specialist at Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College, "the pagan festival of the 'Birth of the Unconquered Sun' instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the 'pagan origins of Christmas' is a myth without historical substance."

For the fact is, our records of a tradition associating Jesus' birth with December 25 are decades older than any records concerning a pagan feast on that day.

[T]he definitive "Handbook of Biblical Chronology" by professor Jack Finegan (Hendrickson, 1998 revised edition) cites an important reference in the "Chronicle" written by Hippolytus of Rome three decades before Aurelian launched his festival. Hippolytus said Jesus' birth "took place eight days before the kalends of January," that is, Dec. 25.

Tighe said there's evidence that as early as the second and third centuries, Christians sought to fix the birth date to help determine the time of Jesus' death and resurrection for the liturgical calendar—long before Christmas also became a festival.

Latin in Rottingdean

Rottingdean's Catholic and Anglican Churches both are very pretty.

I have been asked to celebrate a baptism in Extraordinary Form for a young Portugese couple ion January and today I have just celebrate my first Latin funeral for ages, in the ordinary form. Ron the deceased wanted a Latin Requiem. As it wasn't in my parish so I didn't suggest we could have faced east, used black rather than purple vestments, and used the traditional absolutions, things the parish priest would have been happy to have concurred with.

It was in the little village of Rottingdean, Catholics are buried in the ancient village cemetery, the Anglican Church's churchyard. So we walked a long the street in chasubles to meet the coffin at the lychgate, very cold the village pond which we had to pass was frozen, I am glad I brought my biretta.

Ron, being a music lover, only had a couple of hymns.

Dialogue and Evangelisation

Holy House of the Blessed Virgin Izmir

A Catholic priest was hospitalized Sunday after being stabbed, the Italian Embassy in Ankara said, in the latest in a string of attacks on Christians in Turkey. Police said they had detained the suspected attacker.
The assault on Italian Franciscan Adriano Franchini was likely to add to concerns about whether the predominantly Muslim country — which is bidding for European Union membership — can protect its Christian community.
Franchini was stabbed after Sunday Mass at St. Anthony's church in the port city of Izmir, said Simon Carta, the Italian consul there.
The priest is responsible for the Capucin order in Turkey and heads the Church of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus, Carta said. He said the priest was conscious when he was taken to a hospital. his injuries inflicted by a sixteen year old boy are not life threatening.

I have had a short correpondence recently with a couple of members of a parish run by another religious order in Turkey, who seem to do everything they can to thwart any possible attempt to evangelise, not it appears, for fear of attack but rather because of their committment to "dialogue" with Islam.

Sandro Magister has another insightful article, this time on the recent "Note on Evangelisation" by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is supposed to clear up the confusion between dialogue and evangelisation.

Beatification of six year old soon

from Don Marco

Dear Jesus, I want to be Thy lamp that, close to Thee,burns with a flame of love,Thy lily that remains always to adorn Thy altarand to adore Thee.
Yesterday, the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI received in a private audience His Eminence, the Most Reverend Lord Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. In the course of the audience, the Holy Father authorized the Congregation to promulgate the heroicity of the virtues of the Servant of God Antonietta Meo, called Nennolina, a little girl born in Rome, in the parish of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, on 15 December 1930, where she also died on 3 July 1937. Nennolina is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. The Venerable Servant of God attended the school of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, also in the parish of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

Pope Decries 'Pleasure at All Costs'

ROME (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI warned Sunday against seeking happiness in drugs or other "artificial paradises" and the self-centered quest for "pleasure at all costs."
Instead, the pope held up Mother Teresa — the Roman Catholic nun who devoted her life to serving the poor in India and elsewhere — as an example.
"Every day, she lived next to misery, human degradation and death," the pope told thousands of faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square. "Yet, she offered the smile of God to everybody."
The pope, speaking during the traditional Sunday noon Angelus prayer, said real happiness cannot be found in cultures "that put individual happiness in the place of God, a mentality that has its emblematic effect in the quest for pleasure at all costs, in the spread of the use of drugs as an escape, a shelter in artificial paradises, which turn out to be completely illusory."
In an annual tradition, children came to St. Peter's Square bearing Nativity figures of baby Jesus for the pontiff to bless.
Earlier Sunday, Benedict consecrated a new church on the outskirts of Rome, blessing the parish's children.