You didn't have enough balls to say no to Donnie Osmand. That's pathetic. OK maybe the woman was special.
It's the shortest day.
It begins.
"O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie;"
And perhaps no single chant has ever so powerfully inclined the shallow and boisterous western mind to a moment of real reverence and devotion as the lines of Franz Grueber’s
Silent Night, Holy Night, sung at midnight of December 24. For the Christ mind was born in the midnight stillness--of evolution.
This dead stoppage of all motion in evolution received a dramatization in one of the Apocryphal Gospels in so graphic a form and so laden with significant implications for all religion that we are constrained to reprint it here. It is an entire chapter from
The Protevangelium or
Gospel of James. It reveals that the Nativity scene was so obviously a drama that one speculates whether this fact does not supply an all-sufficient reason for its being kept out of the official canon of
New Testament books. The recondite meaning of the solstice pause and motionlessness had somehow to be represented in the stage play. It was depicted thus:
1. And leaving her [Mary] and his sons in the cave, Joseph went forth to seek a Hebrew midwife in the village of Bethlehem.
2. But as I was going (said Joseph) I looked up into the air and I saw clouds astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in the midst of their flight.
3. And I looked down toward the earth and I saw a table spread, and working people sitting around it, but their hands were upon the table and they did not move to eat.
4. They who had meat in their mouths did not eat.
5. They who had lifted their hands up to their heads did not draw them back.
6. And they who lifted them up to their mouths did not put anything in.
7. But all their faces were fixed upwards.
8. And I beheld the sheep dispersed, and yet the sheep stood still.
9. And the shepherd lifted up his hand to smite them, and his hand continued up.
10. And I looked into a river and saw the kids with their mouths close to the water, and touching it, but they did not drink.
Here is represented the sudden stoppage of all motion in the field of nature and human life. The sons of men, typed as crude working people, below; the birds of the air, symbol as ever of the divine soul, above; and both suddenly motionless. The sheep and their shepherd,
repeating the same classification--and all caught by the
stasis, or standstill of evolution! It is drama.
The
New Testament parable of the wise and foolish virgins contains a most direct reference to the midnight pause:
"At midnight arose the cry, The Bridegroom cometh."
And an
