Tag: generosity

Advent, Day 19

Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

LOOK: Closed Society by Frank Kunert

Kunert, Frank_Closed Society
Frank Kunert (German, 1963–), Geschlossene Gesellschaft (Closed Society), 2011. C-print, 40 × 30 cm. Edition of 50 + 3 ap.

LISTEN: “The Ditchling Carol” (Roud 3216) | Words by William Robert Spencer, 1811 | Music by Peter Parsons, before 1901 | Performed by Waterson:Carthy on Broken Ground (1999; reissued 2013)

Be merry all, be merry all
With holly dress the festive hall
Prepare the song, the feast of all
To welcome Merry Christmas

And all remember, gentles gay
For you who bask in fortune’s ray
The year is all a holiday
The poor have only Christmas

When you with velvets mantled o’er
Defy December’s tempest’s roar
Oh spare one garment from your store
To clothe the poor at Christmas

And all remember, gentles gay
For you who bask in fortune’s ray
The year is all a holiday
The poor have only Christmas

When you the costly banquet deal
To guests who never famine feel
Oh spare one morsel from your meal
To feed the poor at Christmas

And all remember, gentles gay
For you who bask in fortune’s ray
The year is all a holiday
The poor have only Christmas

From blazing logs of fuel awhile
Your homes are within summer’s smile
Oh spare one log from off the pile
To warm the poor at Christmas

And all remember, gentles gay
For you who bask in fortune’s ray
The year is all a holiday
The poor have only Christmas

So shall each note of mirth appear
More sweet to heaven than praise or prayer
And angels in their carols there
Shall bless the poor at Christmas

And all remember, gentles gay
For you who bask in fortune’s ray
The year is all a holiday
The poor have only Christmas

This carol from Ditchling in East Sussex has a very Dickensian feel to it. More sobering than the usual Christmas fare, it contrasts the lavish holiday feasts of the well-off with the poverty that exists outside their doors. Think Lazarus and the rich man. The poor rely on the feelings of goodwill and generosity that Christmas engenders, but as this song acknowledges, the needs persist year-round. Those whom God has blessed with good fortune would do well to share it—not just with family and friends of like socioeconomic status but with neighbors of all classes, and not just during the “season of giving” but on a continuing basis.

Peter Parsons (1825–1901), a Ditchling shoemaker and leader of the village glee club, found the poem above on a broadside ballad sheet from the early nineteenth century and was moved to write a tune for it. I encountered the carol through a nineties recording by Norma Waterson, her husband Martin Carthy, and their daughter Eliza Carthy, who have been at the forefront of the English folk music scene for decades.

I would go even further than the lyrics do and say, don’t just give the poor a morsel or a log; invite them in! What might radical hospitality look like for you this Christmas? How might your merriment expand to embrace those who are typically excluded?

Nature as extravagant gift from God

Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

The following four poets/pray-ers express awe and gratitude for God’s bountiful heart as conveyed through nature, a gift given freely to everyone—new every morning. Each attributes to God an exceeding liberality, even prodigality (wastefulness), in such daily bestowals, which, as the Brazilian Catholic archbishop Hélder Pessoa Câmara (1909–1999) suggests below, ought to inform our own giving.

Sluijters, Jan_October Sun, Laren
Jan Sluijters (Dutch, 1881–1957), October Sun, Laren, 1910. Oil on canvas, 48.3 × 52.7 cm. Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

Untitled poem by Emily Dickinson

As if I asked a common Alms—
And in my wondering hand
A Stranger pressed a Kingdom,
And I, bewildered, stand—
As if I asked the Orient
Had it for me a Morn—
And it should lift its purple Dikes,
And shatter Me with Dawn!

Written in 1858; source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955)

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Untitled poem by George MacDonald

Gloriously wasteful, O my Lord, art thou!
Sunset faints after sunset into the night,
Splendorously dying from thy window-sill—
For ever. Sad our poverty doth bow
Before the riches of thy making might:
Sweep from thy space thy systems at thy will—
In thee the sun sets every sunset still.

Source: A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (self-pub., 1880)

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“The Excesses of God” by Robinson Jeffers

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

Source: Be Angry at the Sun and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1941)

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Untitled prayer by Hélder Pessoa Câmara, OFS

Lord,
isn’t your creation wasteful?
Fruits never equal
the seedlings’ abundance.
Springs scatter water.
The sun gives out
enormous light.
May your bounty teach me
greatness of heart.
May your magnificence
stop me being mean.
Seeing you a prodigal
and open-handed giver,
let me give unstintingly
like a king’s child,
like God’s own.

Source: The Hodder Book of Christian Prayers, compiled by Tony Castle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986)