FAVORITE CHRISTMAS QUOTES 2012, # 1:

"And afterwards, when He was born in Bethlehem the splendid,
in what purity they were parted: though they were poor,
there was never so blissful a chamber as a barn was then,
nor a sacristy so shining as a cow shed there. . . .
For there was our sickness made all sound, though considered most severe,
and there was the aroma of roses where rot has always been,
and there was solace and song where sorrow has always cried.
For angels with instruments – organs and pipes,
And royal, ringing rebecks and just the right fiddle – 
And all gracious things that could properly make a heart glad
surrounded Our Lady when she was delivered.
Then was her blithe Babe burnished so clean 
that the ox and the ass worshiped Him at once;
they knew Him by His cleanness to be the King of nature
for none so clean had ever come from such an enclosure ere then."


"Cleanness" - an anonymous 14th C. Middle English poem, most likely by the writer of at least 3 other poems ("Pearl," "Patience," and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"), lines 1072-1076, 1078-1088, from an original translation I prepared for use in former Guilford College Professor Elizabeth B. Keiser's book on "Cleanness." (A modified version of the translation appears in the book.)

Competing Cruelties

It is a cruel thing to kill what will, in the normal course of things, be a child because of its father's crime.

It is also a cruel thing to shackle the victim of a rape to the scum who violated her, quite possibly for the rest of her life, by forcing her to bear his child.

I do not feel competent to choose between competing cruelties to be inflicted upon anyone else. The proper response to any woman forced into such a horrific corner is simple compassion, not the attempted addition of a burden of guilt to her sufferings.