Greater Love has no man... Easter 6

Gospel Reading, Easter 6, John 15.9-17

“There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John  15.13

I hope you enjoyed the great British Bank Holiday last Monday. If you were in London you will remember that it was cold, wet and dark.

Unfortunately I was entertaining a guest from out of town. So instead of staying indoors with books, films, fortifying spirits and unhealthy food, I found myself battling through the rain and heading for the Museum of London in the Barbican.

The Barbican is seen at its best I feel in driving rain under leaden skies.

So ever the cheery host and like thousands of families out on the streets with girning children, I put on a brave face and tried to take the scenic route to the Barbican from the Tower where I now live.

And that’s how I found myself in that little-known patch of grass called Postman’s Park, the old churchyard of St Botolph Aldersgate. It was next to the General Post Office and many postmen took their breaks in the park.

The park came into being when, to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, the aspirational Victorian painter GF Watts decided to build a Memorial of Heroic Self Sacrifice commemorating ordinary people who died while trying to save others.

There are 53 ceramic tiles, decorated and bearing a simple and often poignant sentence. Although nothing much was added after 1931, the Diocese of London gave permission for another tablet to be added in 2009.

That memorials reads: ‘Leigh Pitt, Reprographic operator, Aged 30, saved a drowning boy from the canal at Thamesmead, but sadly was unable to save himself. June 7 2007’

Some of the early memorials sound rather quaint to our ears – locally, across the roadhere, ‘William Drake lost his life in averting a Serious Accident to a Lady in Hyde Park whose horses were unmanageable through the breaking of the carriage pole. 2 Apr 1869’

Jesus says to his disciples in a phrase that has entered into our cultural consciousness, “There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Now many of the incidents recorded in the tablets on the Memorial wall tell of men and women who laid down their lives for strangers, not friends.

And of course most of these heroic deeds were not premeditated. They were spur-of-the-moment decisions to take bold action without thinking too much about the consequences.

You stand and read the wall and can’t help but think: “What would I have done?” And of course you don’t know.

Maybe we would be heroic and act instantly. But maybe we might hesitate long enough to consider the possible outcome of any action and simply wring our hands.

Most of us recognise and admire those who take such actions. And of course the children and men and women who were saved will always carry a burden of gratitude to their saviours.

But what was Jesus talking about in today’s Gospel? He was certainly talking about the heroism that Watts sought to encourage by his memorial.

And he was certainly talking about his own impending death, which was to be a means of ‘saving’ his friends and indeed the whole world.

Yet the death of Jesus was different. It was not like these people listed on the tablets.

It was not like brave St Alban, the first English martyr, feigning to be the Christian priest he was protecting and executed by the Romans in the priest’s place.

No one was about to be killed when Jesus was crucified.

Yet still Jesus taught, and Christian theology has insisted, that it was necessary for him to die.

There’s a Jesuit theologian, Jack Mahoney who has recently attempted to look more deeply into the issue of Christ’s death and how it is traditionally interpreted.

Especially to look again at that idea of an angry God who will not forgive us unless blood is shed to appease him. It somehow doesn’t ring true to the God we see in Jesus.

This is a particular aspect of a doctrine known as penal substitution. Philip Bliss’s hymn, written at about the same time that Watts was planning his wall, has these lines: “In my place condemned he stood, sealed my pardon with his blood.” (Man of Sorrows)

The theology of the redemption of you and me through Christ’s sacrificial death is at the heart of Christianity and of this mass.

And as we ponder it there are always more layers of understanding to uncover.

So Fr Jack Mahoney in his book Christianity in Evolution: an Exploration (Nov 2011) develops what he calls "a Christian theology of altruism".

He emphasises that Christ’s death was not so much to deal with ‘original sin’ but that it was to teach us how to imitate Trinitarian altruism – giving ourselves for others.

We are "prone to self-concern and even self-obsession", he writes, but this is not attributable to "some primordial moral disaster" in a garden of Eden.

Christ by example shows us how to overcome these natural evolutionary characteristics so that his death and resurrection – and here I quote Mahoney -  "can be seen as a major evolutionary step in the moral advancement of humanity, and an indication that universal altruism is the moral invitation and evolutionary destiny of the human species." (The Tablet Blog.)

Well it’s an interesting book, but you’ll be relieved to hear that there are limits to what you can do in ten minutes on a Sunday morning.

Sufficient to say that Mahoney is encouraging a fresh understanding of living for others.

Not in that joyless way that CS Lewis describes: “She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression!” (Screwtape Letters)

A moment before Jesus spoke of laying down one’s life for friends he had said: “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” (John 15.11)

This talk with his disciples is all about joy and loving one another – giving ourselves to one another – laying down our lives for our friends.

It was the outspoken journalist and literatus Malcolm Muggeridge who said in a moment of candour:

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness; or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus. 

 “There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” John  15.13 

St Elizabeth of Hungary

“Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Phil 2.4

St Elizabeth of Hungary, 19th November 2010 (Preached in the Cathedral at Evensong)

Think back to when you were 24 years old – much easier to do for some of you than others of us.

What had you done with your life by 24?

I had sat a lot of examinations at school and at university. I had played a lot of rugby and cricket; done a lot of singing; spent a year teaching mathematics to boys at Lancing College; had a few iffy relationships; fallen off my motorbike too many times; generally messed around!

I’d had quite a good time really for the first 24 years of my life. I hope you did.

Today we remember in the Church calendar, St Elizabeth of Hungary, Princess of Thuringia. She was dead by 24. She died on November 17th in the year 1231.

So what did she achieve in those 24 years that made her a saint of the Church?

You don’t have to be an historian to know that Central Europe was a very different place 800 years ago.

Elizabeth was born to King Andrew II of Hungary and his wife Gertrude in 1207 and by the age of four was engaged to be married to the heir to the throne of Thuringia, Prince Hermann. At that tender age, she was taken to be raised in the court of Thuringia (central Germany).

When Elizabeth was six, her mother was murdered by jealous Hungarian nobles.

When she was nine, her fiancé, Hermann died; and when she was ten, Hermann’s father the king, went mad and died. By 14 she was married to Herman’s brother, now the 21 year old King Ludwig IV.

At 15, she had the first of her three children, and by 20, her husband had died of the plague on his way to a Crusade, and her 5 year old son became King Hermann II.

Almost immediately she was driven out of her home in the Castle of Marburg, and her three children were taken away from her.

What a life! Not much cricket and singing and messing about.

It’s hardly surprising then, that she was a very devout Christian from an early age, and in the last few years of her life became a Third order Franciscan.

There are many stories of her dedication to the poor and the infirm. She gave away much of her money and possessions and nursed the sick in her own hospitals.

Her life of self-giving, rather than what could easily have been a life of self-pity, proved an inspiration for generations and many hospitals, schools and churches have been dedicated to her name.

As recently as 2007, the 800th anniversary of her birth, the German 10 Euro coin was engraved with her image and she even had a musical which ran from 2007 to 2009 – not exactly Abba, but ‘Elizabeth – the Legend of a Saint’.

She made the most of her twenty four years, finding meaning in her tragic life by living for God and for others.

Whatever our life holds for us, let’s ask God to help us never to let self-pity drag us down; or self-congratulation puff us up; but to follow Elizabeth and Jesus in the joyful service of others.

As our patron St Paul puts it: “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” Phil 2.4

Wrestling with God

Wrestling with God

Baptism of Rex William Snow Armstrong

“I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Genesis 32.26

I thought I could do no better today than to start with those opening lines of that wonderful Alan Bennett sermon from Beyond the Fringe. It let’s me get the rugby done with and an introduction to Jacob and Esau all in one go. (I’ll try and use his mocking, parsonic voice.)

First verse of the fourteenth chapter of the Second Book of Kings: 'And he said, "But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man."' Perhaps I might say the same thing in a different way by quoting you the words of that grand old English poet, W.E. Henley, who said:

When that One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name;
It matters not who won or lost,
But how you played the game.

This is a wonderful and mysterious story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel. His name, Jacob, means ‘hold the heel’ and came to mean twister, or cheat. (Although in those name-your-baby books, they generously say it means Conqueror.)

He followed his twin brother, Esau, out of the womb, grasping his heel, and eventually cheated him out of his birthright as the firstborn.

Jacob’s parents, Isaac and Rebekah, and his grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, represented two generations of dysfunctional family life. Hollyoaks and Eastenders are tame in comparison.

Now 20 years after the grand swindle, Jacob’s returning to face his brother Esau. He’s become very wealthy by more cheating and lying and at the expense of his cheating and lying uncle, Laban.

Life with his two cheating and lying wives is not surprisingly complicated. Rachel stole the household gods when they ran away from uncle Laban’s boys; hid them in the saddle bags of her camel, sat on them and said she couldn’t get up to be searched because it was the wrong time of the month. (Gen 31.33ff.)

But now Jacob is afraid as he hears that his brother Esau is heading towards him with 400 armed men. It’s not looking like a kiss and make up party.

Jacob is a bad man; but strangely devoted to God. So he calls out to God, remembering the vision he had 20 years before at Bethel, when God showed him a glimpse of heaven and promised him the earth:

Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the mothers with their children. And thou saidst, I will surely prosper thee, and make thy descendents as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude. (vv 11,12)

He waits for an answer to his prayer, for another vision, for a voice from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And there is nothing.

So he uses his brains, charm and cunning. He sends plenty of bribes on ahead of him, and eventually, the women and children.

Finally he is on his own in the night, by the ford over the river Jabbok. He’s probably contemplating doing a runner at this point, but he knows he’d miss the money, the servants and the women.

And then, there is the Curious Incident of the Man in the Night-Time. It reads as if it’s the most natural thing in the world: “So Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.” (v.25)

They are evenly matched and it’s looking like a draw, when the stranger cheats, and hits him below the belt. (Probably the meaning of this rather strange business about the hip or the thigh.)

Lets now go to the Tate Britain and take up the story. For there is the magnificent alabaster sculpture by Sir Jacob Epstein, Jacob and the Angel, created in the middle of the Second World War.

The two great seven foot, endomorphic, naked men, who look as if they have walked out of a Beryl Cook painting, are in an ambiguous embrace. We can clearly see that the Angel is holding Jacob up, and yet Jacob might suppose that he is clinging to the Angel.

The man wants to be off before the dawn reveals his identity. But Jacob is persistent. Like the woman with the unjust judge in today’s Gospel parable, he will not let God go until he blesses him. For by now he is realising that this wrestling match is the continuation of his apparently unanswered prayer to God.

Jacob is a cheat and a twister and now God has won by fighting foul. He has always wanted to bless Jacob, but Jacob would not let him. He would not become naked and vulnerable. He wanted to stay proud and independent.

The embrace of struggle is the embrace of love. It is a life-changing encounter that leaves Jacob both wounded and blessed.

And to remind him forever after of this, he is given a new name, Israel: Yisra’el, the one who sarahs — the one who strives — with El — with God himself.

Christianity has never been easy-believism. An encounter with the living God, now as then, leaves us both wounded and blessed.

Jesus makes this crystal clear in his teaching. We are to take up our cross and follow him.

For young Rex we hope a long, happy and contented life. But we know that that, however much we try to protect him, there will be the childhood scrapes and bruises.

And as he grows into a man, he will also gather emotional and spiritual bruises, which as he learns to handle them, will add to the richness of his life.

Our ability to grow mature emotionally and spiritually is determined by the degree of woundedness in our lives. And more than that; the degree to which we have processed and wrestled with those wounds.

Here at this Table we come to celebrate the wounds of the one who loves us and who was wounded for us.

I hope you read stories to Rex. And that sometime you might read him Oscar Wilde’s lovely story, The Selfish Giant. The Giant too has been searching for God, and like Jacob asks: ‘Who are you?’

Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, "Who hath dared to wound thee?"

For on the palms of the child's hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.

"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant; "tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him."

"Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love."

"Who art thou?" said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."

“I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Genesis 32.26

War against Terror

The War against Terror

“But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"” Genesis 3.9

This is one of those Sundays when the readings are fairly straightforward and can be summed up, more or less, in two sentences. ’Let’s not fool ourselves and think that we were clever enough or good enough to have found God. He finds us, and he has a party in heaven when we finally realise he has!’

So that clears the way for me to spend the remaining 10 minutes talking about the War on Terror.

I was at a dinner on Thursday with Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of Liberty, the civil liberties organisation. She was answering questions on a broad range of subjects, and as you might expect, was fairly provocative.

She spoke particularly about the dangers of putting western society in a permanent state of emergency – a permanent war footing. During the Second World War, (this weekend marks the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Britain) there were emergency powers and the restriction of some civil liberties, but when the war was over, the powers were removed and freedoms restored.

‘But when will this War end’, she asked, ‘and what might be done in its name and so become virtually permanent emergency powers?’

I don’t wish to get involved in the political issues here, but I want us for a few moments to look at part of the Biblical analysis of our predicament.

Back to our text from Genesis: “But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"”

It reminds me of a week I spent with other trainee chaplains in a large psychiatric hospital when they still existed in the mid 70s. The Chaplain was explaining to us the dangers of asking rhetorical questions in sermons. He said he had once started a sermon in the hospital chapel by posing the question ‘why are we all here?’ – a man at the back shouted ‘because we’re not all there!’

God’s question must be rhetorical, or otherwise the incident paints a strange picture: the almighty, the omnipotent, the omniscient Creator of all things, playing hide-and-seek in the Garden.

“Where are you Adam?”

“Coming ready or not!”

And Adam is not ready. He is naked, and ashamed, and confused, and angry with Eve and with himself. And he has become afraid of the God who is Love. He has believed the Lie

“Where are you Adam?”

This is not a question about location. It is a metaphysical question.

Adam is lost. And so the war against terror begins.

“Where are you Adam?”

I am plotting mayhem and revenge; the slaying of Abel; the atrocities of humanity before the flood; the wickedness of the cities before the scattering from Babel;

I am plotting nationalism and weapons of destruction; infanticide and torture; oppression and racism; inquisitions and discrimination; religious hatred and world wars; holocausts and ethnic cleansing; acts of terror and global injustice.

The third chapter of Genesis is an ancient aetiology of human evil: an attempt to explain why the world is as it is.

Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have wrestled with the terror that is within, and how it expresses itself without.

Humans have experienced great goodness - the simple pleasures of walking with the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the day.

And they have witnessed great evil - the exercise of godlike powers to humiliate and destroy those who are ‘other’.

I think the Archbishop was right this week to point out the insidiousness of reality TV which promulgates a culture of humiliation and mockery.

And so in this war against terror we are sometimes in danger of assuming that ‘the other’ against whom we fight, is somehow inherently different from us.

But we are all earthlings and tainted with Adam’s sin. We are all children of Eve and under our mother’s curse.

Solzhenitsyn, who certainly had his share of suffering at the hands of evil men and women, was wise enough to write:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (Quoted in Mayne, Learning to Dance, DLT 2001, p166)

War can only ever be enjoined with a sense of humility, and with a recognition that those whom we attack are not all evil and we are not all good.

The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car and his father keeps telling him to sit down.

At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”

From childhood we experience the ‘divided self’, that in this story of Adam and Eve, is the result of their disobedience.

For Adam and Eve in the garden, the duality within immediately skewed three dominant areas of their life, and all our lives: sexuality, spirituality and society.

They were ashamed of their nakedness, and sexual companionship becomes an arena for struggle and not for pleasure and deepening intimacy; spiritually, they become afraid of God who only wishes the best for them; and as society, they turn on each other in blame and recrimination.

Genesis only hints at an answer to this war within. From Eve there is to come one who will strike the serpent’s heel. (Gen 3.15)

But the NT interprets the work of Jesus, the son of Eve, as the unifying factor in our lives, that may not end the war here and now, but that is able to give us sustained conquest over our dark side, and ultimate victory.

Our patron, Paul, further develops the solution to this civil war within us - the backcloth of so much human history, literature and art; the backcloth of our own experience of the messiness of life.

He points to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, who helps us to be what we are in Christ; to grow into Christian maturity; to have that attitude towards others that was in Christ Jesus, as he tells the Philippians.

Paul lists the fruit of this Spirit of Christ in his letter to the Galatians. It is the ‘God side’ of our inner duality, the original image of God still present in every human.

These characteristics relate to God, Others and Self.

God - love, joy, peace - these should be the characteristics of our Christian life.

Others - patience, kindness, generosity - these are to be the marks of our Christian society.

Self - faithfulness, gentleness, self-control these are the way to tame the unruly heart.

To be led by the Spirit is to follow our desire for holiness: to pursue the good and the beautiful – but not just for its own sake. The Christian distinctive is in our motivation for the pursuit of beauty. Is it to worship the creature - or to worship the Creator, who is blessed forever?

And lest this should all sound like some long mediaeval struggle for impossible purity, our Lord uses a more vibrant and life-affirming metaphor – the Spirit as the breath in our lungs, the wind in our sails: it is like sailing - finding the wind - and the exhilaration of running before it.

All human beings are capable of this, and we must never forget that whatever else we justify in the war against terror, redemption is always possible, and there is rejoicing in heaven when the lost are found, not destroyed.

God’s challenge to us, as it was in the garden, is to live with him, following Christ and the way to life; or, to hide with Adam and rebel and follow the destructive inner path to death.

“But the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, "Where are you?"” Genesis 3.9

Epiphany, death

Epiphany - death

I suppose I always get a bit maudlin at Christmas and New Year - another birthday, another year, another wrinkle, a stronger pair of reading glasses. And even bishops begin to look young.

The Feast of the Epiphany can help us to look more joyfully at our own mortality.

The Epiphany - the Manifestation - the Showing; or the Theophania as it was also called - the showing of God - it's been celebrated since the early 3rd Century. By the 4th Century, in the Western Church, its focus became the Revelation of God to the Gentiles - personified in those three Wise Men from the East, or were they Kings, or Astrologers? We don't know what they were, or for that matter how many of them there were.

What were they expecting as they followed the star? They had riches and wisdom, and yet left the security of their homes to follow a hunch. Maybe they were going through a mid-life crisis and needed some adventure in their lives? I think there is some truth in that. Men and women, often at the height of their powers, secure with family and jobs, sometimes question what life is all about. Some change jobs; some climb mountains; some have affairs; others hit the bottle, and some look for the meaning of life. These wise men, from outside of the Jewish tradition, came looking for the one who was to unlock the key to life.

In the paradox of Christian faith, and of this Mass, they found the answer to life in death.
This is a theme in TS Eliot’s famous Journey of the Magi, written nearly 80 years ago. The poem ends:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth
and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

The gifts the Magi bear to the infant Christ, although never mentioned in the poem, fit well into this theme of death and life. They symbolise Three Deaths.

1. Gold represents the Death of Self. Christ was born to be King, symbolised in this king of metals - gold.

"Born a king on Bethlehem plain, Gold I bring to crown him again..."

In his earthly ministry Jesus was to demand total allegiance from his followers, promising them that only by death to self, would they ever find their true selves.

"For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it." (Lk 9.24)

Jesus is encapsulating the heart of the Gospel: it is in loving abandonment to Christ that we become fully human, and learn how to love ourselves.

The little boy is standing up in the back seat of the car (this is before seatbelts) and his father keeps telling him to sit down. At last the father stops the car and forcibly sits the boy down. As they continue the journey, the sulking boy in the back shouts: “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!”

This is the individual, assertive self that wreaks such havoc in our lives and in our world; the Naked Self, the Selfish Gene. It does not deserve our loyalty. We only need to look at the world around us to see how love of this self leads to destruction and death. Fealty to Jesus is the only way to life; and to bring life to others.

But we are western liberal thinkers, and all this loyalty to Christ alone sounds a little too exclusive. Let’s look at the second death.

2. Frankincense represents the Death of the gods. We live in a pluralist society. And rightly, there must be acceptance and dialogue with those of other faiths and no faith. The Queen's Christmas Speech reflected that again this year. While affirming her own Christian faith, she was careful to flag up respect for those of other faiths, and for atheists – or as Woody Allen prefers to call them, God's loyal opposition.

But true as this is, there has also been much twaddle about all faiths being basically the same. They are not. Look for similarities between Mormonism and Melanesian Frog Worship and you will look in vain. I will respect and defend the rights of others to practise their faith, but I must also proclaim as a follower of Christ that I believe him to be a unique revelation of God to all nations and cultures.

There is no contradiction in thinking in this, and indeed the Incarnation leaves us no choice - 'Incense owns a deity nigh'. We do not believe that Jesus was just a good and holy man, or a prophet. We worship him, with all around the crib, as God. There is no God other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now this is not to say that he does not reveal himself to others outside of the Christian faith. Or to put it another way: a good Muslim may be much nearer to God than a bad Christian. But I must not let my acceptance of others and their ways of believing, paralyse me from holding on to my own Christian faith; albeit with due humility.

"There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea" as Faber put it. But if we believe that Jesus is Very God and Very Man, there can be no other gods.

3. And that brings us to the central mystery of our faith, and the 3rd Death: The Death of God.

CS Lewis puts it this way:

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact." Mythology is full of dying and rising gods. But in Christianity, "we pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to an historical Person crucified under Pontius Pilate…" We are indeed people of the Empty Tomb, and yet we must not rob the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, of the mystery and potency of myth. "We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology." ('Myth Became Fact' is in Undeception and also in God in the Dock.)

Myrrh represents the Death of Death in the Death of Christ (the wonderful title of John Owen's book).

Mary must have felt one of the first pains of the sword piercing her heart as she was presented with myrrh - used for embalming the dead. This tiny, mystical life was directed from its first human moments towards a terrible death. But in this death he was to rob death of its finality and darkness. Death is a part of the human condition - it is not simply its conclusion. Death is present with us throughout our life.

This is why at times we long for death - moments of despair, moments of ecstasy ('les petits morts'), moments of loneliness, moments of deep faith, moments of deep doubt. At the heart of our faith, at the centre of this Mass, is a Death which brings Life.

I spoke to an elderly lady who had just come out of hospital in my home town, Shoreham-by-Sea: Southlands Hospital, a dilapidated, run-down old 30’s building, that was due to be rebuilt after the war.

She had been close to death at one point, and a bright young doctor had asked her, if she lapsed into unconsciousness, whether she wanted to be revived?

“I ask you Father” Elsie told me, “I’m at the gates of Paradise and they ask me if I’d like to come back to Southlands!”

This is the faith of the saints.

As we journey with the Magi, may we not so much “be glad of another death” as embrace the bubbling life of the Christ-child that will invigorate our living, now, through death, and forever.