Born to us in the City of David ...

Christmas greeting:  May the peace which passeth all understanding be with you this Christmas season. 

 

Meditation on the Advent of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

 

The animals of the stable being just themselves provided by expiration a warming house for the new arrival. 

 

By being present spiritually in the moment of arrival at the manger, our hearts will be open to love and the love of a God who sent into the world his one true Son to live, suffer, and to die as one of us. 

 

Remember in the instant of the incarnation that God, whose righteousness is the righteousness that matters, underscored in the humbleness of the manger the manner in which he would become for we humans the certainty of the God of Promises and Fulfillment. The Good News of liberation from sin and a new relationship for humankind with the God of love would await the Resurrection (Easter) and Pentecost, but we who live now some 200 generations later have yet to accept fully the gift of eternal life. 

 

Christmas wish: Here's to a closer walk with Thee in 2013!   Bless you all, the great and small, the strong and the weak, who in relationship with God can only become a fully realized human self.   

 

RJH.  Christmas eve, 2012.

Time for Us All to Permit Serious Consideration of Gun Control

Some perpetrators are convinced of their victimhood and society’s injustices, or rather specifically that of his or her parent's or care provider's. The recent episode of school site violence, murder, and mayhem in Newtown, Connecticut comes to mind. Indeed, there is a separation in society over the review of what went wrong in the life of the particular perpetrator that led to the evil he did do and to innocent children too. Since he took his own life, one understands he did not except himself from consequence for his action (but nevertheless he escaped prosecution and state punishment of his crimes).

Justice in our society leads to punishment for wrongdoing and loss of personal freedom for the perpetrator. Two or three possible instances arise in society for a person at issue: (1) one whose conduct is adjudged criminal conduct, or (2) in exceptional cases one whose criminal conduct is adjudged that of a debased person (adjudged one who has a psychotic or sociopathic proclivity to violence or predatory acts), and (3) in some rarer instances to a separation from reality of one whose senses were deluded and had no cognizance of the actual evil perpetrated by one’s conduct on the welfare of another person (stuck a knife in a pumpkin which was actually another’s head).

The actual work of safeguarding others from the criminal conduct of such persons is thankless and arduous. The work of public defenders is absolutely without its due credit for justice requires the defense of the accused or one the subject of state due process (i.e. one to be adjudged criminally insane). The work is sometimes ineffective (given the tendency of such persons to recidivism after and during incarceration or “treatment” programs).

The law has failed, the human has failed, and we have failed with each light that is extinguished by the perverse perceptions of those who suffer self-pity instead of asking like you and me what is required but to do the loving thing, the respectful thing, and the honorable thing when we suffer adversity.

Let government speak and act to preserve us all, but also treat with dignity and justice the least of us: the pedophile, the rapist, the violent criminal, the psychotic and sociopathic mentally ill, and all those who play by a different set of rules (inclusive even of white collar criminals tending toward the sociopathic comes to mind).

Our society must govern itself (mostly by individual self government) and therefore must also provide accountability, consequence, and restraint of the evil doers by due process of law. That's what is required to procure a civilized society! In a democracy, we must require of our government its lawful pursuit of evil doers.

Accountability which does concern us all is that which arises in the long shadow cast by tragedy. At least for those of personal honesty and integrity who step out of the shadow to ask what may I do this day to provide for a different future for the survivors of the tragedy. For those who exercise the right to bear arms, the accountability is even a greater requirement of a person when the arms in the hands of perpetrators results in the death of innocent children.

I ask the second amendment advocates not to except themselves from this extremely serious discourse on remediation of evil by changes in societal regulation and control of the sale and licensing of fire arms. This includes the consequence of forfeiture of property for one’s failure to keep the fire arms from use in criminal conduct results.

Light the candle of accountability and keep it lit.

Extraordinary Courage to Live One's Life Out is Required

Journey’s end, victory 1945


Words surely not escaping her,
That dying, not living, is due,
The martyr whispers to herself:
“Thy calm be mine, Lord."

“And not the stillness of my youth,
When dried eyed, I once stated
A valiant desire to overcome
The dread of my life ending."

A soldier they say knows for him,
When other survivors chide sore,
That of him more living is required:
“Moving on takes utmost valor."

"I now must redefine valor
As living life as life requires.
If I otherwise limit valor’s use,
Futile will be a comrade’s death."

And so we too journey onward
By way of inns and taverns
In which the talk of the place
Is of war’s end and a trite peace.

Someone must pay the costs,
Others redeem the prize.
One claims the laurel wreath
Which crowns the victor’s head.

Hitler at the end of his Reich
Safe for the moment in his hole
Puts his pistol to his mouth
And silences his dictator.

And to whom does solace fall
In the ruins of Berlin and Tokyo
If not in the camps in which lie
The brutalized, the maimed, the live.

To a blind and palsied crone,
Adrift at life's end, marooned,
Left with no family or friends,
As her lips quiver in thanks.

Holding her, skin withered,
Tendons bare on bone, rank,
In a harshness of unkind light,
For us, life, like peace, grows dear.


by Richard J. Hilber.

Published by Fairmount Avenue UMC
in its 2012 Advent Meditation Reader.

Sainthood for Dorothy Day

A conservative Roman Catholic Cardinal Dolan of New York is in the news today on public radio for furthering the canonization process for Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Society (see NYT link below to its story of the news about Dolan on November 27, 2012).  One is reminded of widening turns of the gyre and how Dolan's endorsement can come to be given the penchant of Dorothy Day for a knowing love of her Church:

"I loved the Church for Christ made visible.  Not for itself, because it was so often a scandal to me.  Romano Guardine said the Church is the cross on which Christ was crucified.  One could not separate Christ from His cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church,"

Dorothy Day in The Long Loneliness at pgs 149-150.  Day was during her lifetime “notorious” for her pacifism and social revolutionary positions and efforts.  Her devotion to her Catholic faith led to a growing commitment to the poor and disenfranchised.   The Social Gospel proponents, of which I believe I am one, see in her the very onus of faith in a loving God and the second half of the Great Commandment.  Read her story in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, published in 1952 by Harper and Row.  Day in a postscript to her story wrote:

"We cannot love God unless we love each other, to love we must know each other.  We know Him in the breaking of the bread, and we know each other in the breaking of the bread, and we are not alone any more.  Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship."

(Id. at p. 285).  To her credit and the gift of a subscription to the Catholic Worker newspaper,, as a young man I found no inspiration in the materialist social revolutionaries who would, being falsely radical would supplant one tyranny for another such as had happened in the communist and atheist ascendancy in Russia of the Bolsheviks and its movement's decay into Stalinism.   I was bent on pacifism and rejection of the Viet Nam War as a solution to imbalances in power and wealth.  War like capitalism or communism were only symptoms of the great soul sickness of the human race without any reliance on God and the Law of Love.  

Even today, communists in Red China who have embraced capitalism have proven that wrong turns by materialistic socialism are a sad and dangerous human legacy in a toxic elixir of statism, atheism, and materialism.  Pundits of capitalism love to deride socialism as the enemy while failing to mention capitalism's decay inherent in its daliances with statism (fascists and nazi movements) and capitalism's love affair with the atheism of Ayn Rand and her enshrinement of selfishness as a virtue upon which to build wealth, as opposed to creating a just and loving community.  Dorothy Day stands in stark contrast to the worship of Mammon by modern day capitalists and the wreckage and carnage left in the wake of unbridled capitalism, rampant poverty and disease with endless wars to perpetuate exploitation of the wealth of the planet for the aggrandizement of the rich and the powerful. 

The real revolution is the one that happens inside the human heart when nihilism or materialism are overthrown in favor of governance by the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor.  Humankind's search for meaning can be resolved in favor of a God of Love, a Spirit of Compassion, and Adoration of Author God of the Creation.  So when I say Dorothy Day understood that dynamic for real change, the evidence of her life time commitment survives her and is a standing legacy to her God and to her convictions as well.   

Her conversion to Catholicism occurred after an earlier time in her life when she was secular and materialistic, and even resorted to abortion.  Her life parallels in more than one sense with her contemporary, Thomas Merton of Gethsemane Monastery of Kentucky.  When she later was able to bear a child, it was after she had the spiritual resources and reliance on God’s restorative grace which is available to all.

On a personal note, today, I received by this news (at least news to me) the strongest possible incentive in my recent embrace of the Roman Catholic Church.  If Dorothy Day could live a life of devotion to God and the imperative to love God and neighbor within the Church, well then I can too. 

I have lived decades in the wilderness, in exile really, as a rebel, and only now discover my rebellion ultimately can not be against a Church that stands with the poor and the disenfranchised and as well stands with the advocate of social conscience, persons such as Dorothy Day. 

My personal affront to God was that at times in my life I did turn away from dependence, trust, and reliance on God and surrender to his Divine Will for us.  If God wills, I recommit myself to a life of service to my fellow man and to do this as a reclaimed son of the Church. 

See the New York Times (NYT) article online at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/nyregion/sainthood-for-dorothy-day-has-unexpected-champion-in-cardinal-timothy-dolan.html?pagewanted=all.

A Prayer for the Canonization of Servant of God Dorothy Day is available online and directly from this publisher:

Claretian Publications

205 W. Monroe St., Chicago, IL 60606

312-236-7782 ext. 474