Order is the application of intelligence and will to raw materials. Being decision and commitment, order accepts reality and mortality. In its purest sense, order is the crucifixion of the self with its uncontrolled appetites and desires.

Order is spiritual.

When St. Paul was nearing the end of his earthly pilgrimage and sat in a Roman prison awaiting word on his fate, he wrote one last letter to a young man whom he had mentored and given authority over the church in Ephesus.

The mother of our Lord, Mary, had only recently ended her own earthly journey in this very city. It would seem that Timothy, St. Paul’s understudy, would have known her well and honored her.

St. Paul was about to die and he knew it. So he wrote to Timothy and it is one of the most intimate epistles in the Bible and from the ancient world.

Here is some of what he said:

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.

Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me His prisoner, but share with me in the sufferings for the gospel according to the power of God,

who has saved us and called us with a holy calling,

not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began,

but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel,

to which I was appointed a preacher, an apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles.

For this reason I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed,

for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep what I have committed to Him until that Day.

Flowing through all these words is the theme of the first verse I quoted: fear leads to an unsound mind. And nothing leads to more fear and therefore unsoundness of mind than the fear of death and its corrollary, the fear of suffering.

I have a hard time believing St. Paul enjoyed suffering. That masochistic mindset is itself an over-reaction to the fear of suffering and death and arises from an infirm mind. But he was certainly no stranger to suffering.

Read I and II Corinthians where he describes his sleepless nights, his hunger, his scourgings, and even his anxieties.

If he had enjoyed all this suffering, it would not have been suffering.

But he endured it – and he endured it with a spirit ”of power of love and of a sound mind.” 

How can this be? Verse 12 begins with the words, “For this reason I also suffer these things, nevertheless I am not ashamed.” So maybe we should use the cue “For this reason” and find out what reason he is talking about.

The previous verse tell us that he was appointed a preacher, an apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles. So perhaps that is why he suffers without shame. It’s his job.

Only, verse 11 is not a complete thought. It begins with the prepositional phrase “To which,” and the second word in that phrase is a pronoun.

As you well know,a pronoun stands in for a noun, so if we are going to understand St. Paul’s strength, we are going to have to go back further and see what the “To which” is to-whiching.

End of verse 10: The gospel.

He was appointed an apostle of the gospel. So what’s the gospel.

Of course, everybody knows the answer to that, so at this point we can stop our exegesis and practice some eisegesis (we can switch from drawing meaning out of the text to reading meaning into it).

But wait. I’m not comfortable doing that, so, if you don’t mind, I’m going to continue to reverse engineer this passage and see what led Paul to mention the gospel.

The previous clause says, “who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

Now we’re getting to it!

Now we have something that we’ll have to think about for a long, long time before we can pretend to understand it. It’s a phrase that challenges some of our expectations and assumptions.

Here is St. Paul, in prison, suffering, even dying day by day, having been betrayed and forsaken even by friends, having watched Stephen lose his life (i.e. experience death) and also having known many, many Christians who died, some of whom, I would presume, he himself arrested. Yet here he says “who has abolished death.”

Does he mean anything by this?

Obviously he does, but he doesn’t explain it here. He expects Timothy either to know what he means or to take the trouble to think about it.

Then he goes on to say that whoever abolished death also “brought life and immortality to light.” Now, if he brought life to light, the implication is that previously it was hidden in darkness. Prior to this “who,” people didn’t actually know what life and immortality were. Now, through the gospel, this “who” has brought them to light – has made them, pardon the awkward word, perceivable.

Maybe that gives us a clue about what abolishing death involved. Maybe death was in the dark too. In other words, maybe before “who” came, people didn’t understand either death or life.

Read the Iliad and the Odyssey and you sure get that impression. Achilles was driven by the quest for glory, honor, and immortality. 

But he pursued them like a blind squirrel after a nut. He had power, of a sort, but he lacked love and he certainly did not have a sound mind. I would argue that he was driven by a spirit of fear.

Not Paul. Notice, there is no unease in his letter. There is no hyperness or over-reaction. He doesn’t just say positive things to himself to keep his spirits up. He knows whom he has believed!

And whom he has believed he does not hide from us. The previous clause says this:

But has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ

Our Savior, Jesus Christ. I’d be surprised if you’re surprised here, but don’t let the identification slide past you because it was so obvious. Our savior, Jesus Christ is the one who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light.

That’s not really something the importance of which you can minimize.

Many years ago I wrote some truly horrible poems. About 30 or 40 of them. I showed them a few years later to a college professor friend of mine who encouraged me to focus on the sciences.

What came out of our tear stained brawl was that I hadn’t said anything new in my poems. The poems were an exercise in self-indulgence or maybe a little experiment to see if I could use the form, but they didn’t merit being read by anybody else.

 I hadn’t shed any light on the things I was writing about.

A worthy poem is one that reveals truth about something, leads us to better perceive some reality. A good poem will enable us to perceive something good. A great poem will enlighten us to see something great.

The greatest poems will enable us to see the greatest things – the hardest things to see.

The greatest of all poems is “the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ” because it brought to light the greatest of all things: life and immortality.

To grasp what this implies, you need to read back one more verse:

Who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began, but has now been revealed…

Not only did Christ Jesus bring life and immortality to light, but he also, by appearing, revealed God’s “purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus.”

The magic words are “in Christ Jesus.” To St. Paul everything is in Christ Jesus. Nothing outside of Christ Jesus is worth having, but then all things are in Him and all things have been given to those in Him. Especially life and immortality.

Christ is, after all, the resurrection and the life.

But He’s going to change the way you think about life and immortality – and death. Because what Paul is saying implies that we have been thinking about them all wrong until Christ came.

I have to ask: if you are a Christian, do you think differently about life and death than you would if you were not a Christian?

If you are not a Christian, do you feel like you have any comprehension of what life and immortality are?

This is a Christmas post, you see.

A real Christmas post. Kitschless. No sentimentality.

When Jesus lay in the womb of His blessed mother, she became the burning bush that was not consumed. God inhabited her womb. That was how life came to us.

She gave birth to Him in a cave and laid Him in a manger. It was unpleasant, cold at night, shameful.

She suffered so much that Simeon told her that a sword would pierce through her soul.

But she had no spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, of love, and of a sound mind.

Christmas has become our national holiday because we can avoid the blood of Easter. It’s sentimentalized because a bloodless baby and a very clean mother are easy to keep out of your heart. kitsch dominates because too few dare raise it even to the level of Camp.

While I have to stop, I have much more to say about this: Christmas is what it is because the American Christian wants his religion without pain.

I can relate to that.

Thanks for reading such a long post. Time to wake up.

A few days ago I mildly criticized kitschmas. One of the points I made was that kitsch doesn’t measure up to Camp because Camp tries to be serious while kitsch doesn’t even bother.

Thus, it seems, Camp can give us a strange sort of just pleasure in that we can get the point even while the producer of the Camp doesn’t, while kitsch only gives us pleasure if we are the ones missing the point. Maybe.

So I’ve been thinking a little since then about why Christmas tends toward kitsch.

Let me draw an incident from my life and see if this serves any purpose. The church I attend now celebrates communion on Christmas morning at 9:30, same time as Sunday morning.

No church I attended previously did so; at least, not so far as I recall.

So we weren’t in the habit, as a family, of going to church to celebrate the birth of Christ. We did it at home with cinammon rolls, ostentatiously wrapped gifts, a tree out of Thomas Kincade or Currier and Ives, and all the normal Christmas trappings.

What, Karen asked me, are we going to do this year?  

I found myself immediately confronted with a rather ironic situation. Would we go to church to celebrate communion on Christ-Mass, or would we stay home and celebrate Christ-Mass with our family.

You might ask, is Christmas a family holiday or a Church holiday?

Suddenly I realized that all my life I had been treating Christmas as a semi-secular holiday, personalized, oriented toward the family.

What do you think? Is that appropriate? Do you think that tendency might move us toward kitsch because we want the holiday for our sake, rather than for the sake of the One who dwells in unapproachable light but veiled Himself with flesh and blood?

The phrase has been bandied about for a few years now, and I’m trying to think of one more self-serving. Maybe, “Give me that.”

But I wonder how deeply it penetrates the American mentality. Is it how we feel about our war efforts? Our own economy? Our invincible country? After all, the Chinese need to rescue us for their own sake, right?

Nothing has ever been too big too fail, and any body that thinks it is has always set itself for destruction. Something about pride fits here.

10. That last drink

9. Books that empower my faculties of perception to see the truth

8. Friends like the apprentices and the graduates of the apprenticeship, the CiRCE board, and organizations and schools that work with CiRCE, which is where my purpose in Christ is realized.

7. People who have supported the CiRCE Institute through prayer, purchases, prayer, donations, prayer, and encouragement. We’ve received $7500 in donations and another $2000 in pledges already for our year-end fund-raising drive. Another 15,000 and we’ll be able to have our 2010 conference.

6. The work done by my son David, his wife Bethany, my daughter Larissa, and my son Andrew to help bring us through this difficult time during which we’ve moved our office home and laid off staff – sacrifices for the present that enable a bright future.

5. A national tradition of pausing for a day to give thanks to the creator who by His Providence established and built this country and loves it with all its virtues and vices.

4. My children

8. My new daughter in law

2. My wife, who for 25 years has endured without complaint a mission driven husband who can’t keep track of which side of his shoes the laces attach to and has a melancholy disposition, endless financial stress, houses too small for five children, moving across state and national borders, and an endless cache of petty and large offenses and failures by that aforementioned, no-good, low-down husband of hers.

1. Participation in Christ, into whose patience may the Lord direct my heart.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!!

By the way, #10 was just a light-hearted jest. Thanks for understanding.

for the record: I expect a very low scoring game between the Pack and the 49er’s so if you are a fantasy footballer I’d go defense on this game.

SF might win and everybody will call for McCarthy’s head, but SF is better under Singleterry than they’ve been recognized for so far.

This isn’t their year, but next year might be.

My friend Sorcamford has posted an extended parable about the way conventional education works that I want to encourage you to read. His blog is called New Dark Ages Culture and the parable is about what happens when you study a horse using the conventional perspective.

As the generations went by, the students grew and began to teach about the horse themselves, and, as might be expected, they mostly discussed the aspect of the animal that their individual teachers had studied the most. So there came to be schools of thought about the horse. The “students of the nose,” as they were called, came to believe that their part of the animal was the most important, as did the “hoof scholars” and the “mane institute” – and they passed their best information on to the next generations of students as best they could, writing in the “New Albany Journal of Horses,” all about their individual studies, and about how each thought his study really got to the most fascinating and essential parts of the horse.

To read more, go to New Dark Ages Culture.

Also, Ordo Amoris seems to share my concerns about the future of the home school mom and home schooling generally. She says:

I have a premise that the last vestige of a leisured (educated) class is the mom at home. I am pretty sure I am right about that since all the powers of hell conspire to get mom out of the home. The home is the quiet refuge where ideas blossom.

This intrigues me, because if she’s right it might be a corollary truth that an education oriented toward skills or information undercuts one of the social supports of motherhood.

Of course, a home is only a quiet refuge if you make it one.

We were, until about a year ago, the wealthiest society in the history of the world, or so I kept hearing. I question that.

I am trying to imagine a childhood more impoverished than one without fairy tales.

Look at it this way: education is the

• training of the intellect
• passing on of a tradition
• formation of the soul
• preparation for the “real world”

But our modern mindset has destroyed the imagination, which is 1000 times more important than anything else a school can cultivate.

Until we accept that we are not a civilized people, and that it matters, we have little hope of becoming one.

I’m leaving tomorrow for a trip to CA during which I will be creating videotapes of The Lost Tools of Writing. That’s the idea. Now the application: I’m very busy and shouldn’t be blogging right now.

But sometimes my emotions get the better of me, so I have to tell you all something – both negative and positive.

I’ve always tried to back my computer up, and it’s a good thing because my latest version has been dying lately.

Knowing it was on its way to its fate, I wanted to get a new one, but we haven’t had the resources at CiRCE to get one.

Well, yesterday one of our supporters made a contribution that enabled me to get a new a brand new computer!

Last night I went out to buy it, having lost the day to fighting with computer issues when I wanted to be finalizing my plans for Saturday’s video session.

I came home from the store last night and turned on my old computer so I could get the information I needed for E-mail and that sort of thing.

It was as dead as Marley.

Talk about timing.

It’s horribly inconvenient, of course, but I cannot imagine how much more inconvenient it would have been if the computer had died before I had the new one.

So I want to use this post to thank the donor who stepped forward and all the others who have been contributing during our fund-raising drive.

I mentioned we were seeking $50,000.

You have already contributed an astonishing $7000 of that $50,000.

Dozens of you have already downloaded the recordings of talks from Ken Myers, Laura Berquist, Andrew Pudewa, Vigen Guroian and others.

With the support we’ve received, a 2010 conference on Liberty looks promising, a third edition of Classical Education is hopeful, many refinements to LTW become possible, and I can continue to provide support to classical educators at every level of their involvement.

If you have already contributed and downloaded the talks: THANK YOU.

If you would like to do so, please follow this link or, better yet, click on the banner to the left (which lists the speakers and their sessions) and feed your soul while supporting Christian classical education through the CiRCE Institute!