Or to put it another way....

One from the vaults,as it were. This, in essence, is how I put the same basic point a few Christmases ago....

The Real Meaning of Hogswatch

by Simon Smith

At this time of year, people naturally to turn to progenitive myths, originative stories and the like. In the dead, dark days of winter, we need their bright reflections; we yearn for gifts of light and life. The old cold world shrivels to a frozen stub, black and lifeless; we must remind ourselves that we, at least, are still alive.

That’s what the trees and tinsel, mulled wine and minced pies, parties and presents are all about.

The stories we tell at this time of year have, of course, changed considerably over the last few thousand years; and there are a great many stories to be told, apart from the obvious one.

No, not Santa. I meant Jesus, the birth of Jesus.

But wait a minute. ‘Of course’? Have they, I wonder, really changed that much? And are there, for that matter, really that many stories? Or is it just a few: the same stories told in different ways; old stories, like old gods, doing new jobs?

The “Santa” story is a good example: the spirit of good will and giving, born and reborn year after year; Dickens’ ebullient and jovial Spirit of Christmas Present, decked out in living green, rather than Coca Cola’s red and white.

Another much loved variation on this theme, to which I return every Christmas, is Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (Corgi, 1997). If you’ve never read Pratchett, then you have my deepest sympathies. Your life is sadly incomplete; ever shall it be so until you rectify this shameful lacuna in your reading. Why anyone should deny themselves one of the greatest pleasures attendant on being human is frankly beyond me. Unless they have been diagnosed as clinically humourless.

Pratchett was one our funniest writers; and I don’t mean in the sense that some people mistakenly think Douglas Adams was funny. Adams was witty, certainly, and amusing; but rarely outright funny and never actually hilarious.

No he wasn’t; and if you’re shaking your head, I can only suggest that you have a doctor look at your sense of humour. It needs re-calibrating.

I’m not kidding. The failure to find Terry Pratchett funny is indicative of a serious personality defect.

Pratchett is in the same league as Wodehouse or Spike Milligan. (And if you don’t think they’re funny, there’s no hope for you; you aren’t humourless, you’re dead; check yourself in to a morgue immediately.) Like Wodehouse, he has, on occasion, been accused of literature. I think he could be accused of philosophy too. You see, Pratchett is not only funny – in the embarrassing snort-out-loud-in-public sense – he’s also quite thoughtful at times. True, he can also be a bit sententious; nevertheless, there is, in his writing, a sensibility, a truth, that is both profoundly human and deeply metaphysical.

It comes down to an intuitive understanding of myth and metaphor; not merely as literary devices, but as proper narrative or personal ones. To put this another way, Terry Pratchett knew what myths and metaphors really are; and he knows what they’re for. He explored the complex and subtle ways that human beings use myths and metaphors to construct their identities, shaping human nature in the process.

Myths and metaphors, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, are the building blocks from which we construct ourselves. They are psychological and metaphysical extensions by which all too limited selves interlock with others, so reach out across the infinite expanse of consciousness. They are mirrors, reflections of who we are and who we might be; images without which, we reduced ourselves to the zero-point of a supposedly rational mind which conceives itself entirely in terms of its own finitude. (Therein lies the key to the classical rationalist’s desperate need for necessitarian projections.) As myths and metaphors supply the building blocks, they also supply the tools with which we can make sense of the most important of philosophical questions: the nature and meaning of human existence; more simply, what it means to be human at all.

Hogfather is my favourite expression of this idea. In case you’re wondering, the Hogfather himself is the perfect mid-winter demiurge for a pork-based economy. I’m surprised he hasn’t caught on in here in Ireland. He doesn’t, in fact, play a very large role in the story, only turning up at the end, when all the hard work is done. That’s because the story isn’t really about the Hogfather as such; it is about persons and what that means.

It is also where Death really gets to grips with the meaning of life. Not death. Death. Cowl, scythe, quite thin, especially around the face, always smiling, sort of. That is, Death the character, as opposed to death the final banjo-twang in the great symphony of life. This character is, he himself is the first to admit, the anthropomorphic personification of that natural process. And he always turns up, sooner or later, whether you’ve been naughty or nice.

Being a projection of the end of life, Death is simultaneously an insider and an outsider. On one level, he doesn’t seem to understand human beings, their obtuseness, their mythopoeic tendencies, their need for projection and reflection. Consequently, he tends to see the world in literal terms. For instance, his response to poverty and hunger is, oddly enough, to give people a decent meal. (I cannot tell you how upset he gets when he comes across the Little Match Girl about to seasonally snuff it in snowdrift.)

At the same time, however, Death understands the dynamics of human nature very well indeed; deep in the bone, as it were. Hardly surprising since he is, after all, a projection of that nature. So he’s perfectly placed to remind us just very how important are the stories we tell about ourselves and, by extension, the world we live in. Stories about birth and rebirth; about justice and fairness, goodwill and kindness; stories which remind us that other people are, as Dickens said, our business; stories about being naughty and nice. Stories, in short, about light and life.

These are the stories, the myths and metaphors which, as Death himself says, make us “THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE”.

Although, the Librarian may be taking this idea a bit literally. (Look it up.)

Speaking philosophically, we are narrative creatures, living the life-stories we write for ourselves and for others. These stories are a vital insight into the human condition. They tell us what we’re really like (even if we don’t want to admit it). That’s why we need the big myths: to fill in the plot holes and fill out the under-developed characterisation of ordinary author-actors. Big myths are a mirror: they tell us to our faces who and what we really are. But as they reflect, they also refract, providing the means to overcome the shortcomings of our story-lines. Greek myths taught us about justice (of a sort), honour, and heroism. More recently, as Wendy Hamblett’s book, Punishment and Shame (Lexington Books, 2011), suggests, the lessons were humanised. They became about sharing and sacrifice: the primal connections that make us who and what we are. And that, my dears, is the true meaning of Hogswatch.

This isn’t just “trickery with words”, as Death’s granddaughter, Susan, supposes. She can be such a typical rationalist; but then what would you expect, she has had an Education. (And we all know how much damage that can do; especially to students.) Psychological reduction is an easy game to play; it haunts the porches of any act of faith, churns myth and metaphor into fluffy pink clouds of self-deception. Of all “people”, Death knows that, for most people, life is rarely pink and almost never fluffy. He knows, too, that some things – like justice, love, even humanity itself – only exist because we believe in them; we have faith in our stories and live them accordingly.

P. F. Strawson, called it ‘descriptive metaphysics’; others, like Farrer and William James, found a pragmatic theology in it. Like Death, they knew that faith sometimes creates its objects. It does so using metaphors, images of ourselves idealised. Well, it would do. Justice and sacrifice, naughty and nice, light and life: that, Death reminds us, is where humans live.

It’s the Most Mythical Time of the Year

by Simon Smith

Come on, sing it with me, you know you want to.

It’s the most

Myth-i-cal tiiiiiime

of the

        year!

Andy Williams must be spinning.

I like Christmas; I like it very much. I like the sparkle and glow of it, the red, green and gold of it. I like the sounds and smells of it: boozy carols and boozier puddings; the crackle of frost on the grass; the gentle thud of another pensioner falling on the pavement outside. I like the pagan heart of Christmas too, the unquiet ghosts; the joys and fears of one year ending and another beginning. I like the excess of it, ever-so-slightly brittle in the frozen days of winter; red-ruddy faces kissed by wind from the north and wine from the south; goodwill and cheer, lighting the shadows that lurk at the cold, dark stub of the year.

The wren, the wren, the king of all the birds

On Stephen’s day was caught in a furze,

Though he was little, his honour was great…

I am, I freely admit, a rank sentimentalist when it comes to Christmas. And, at the very great risk of sucking half the fun out if it, the Season of Goodwill is also philosophically interesting. Not the age-old question of how Saint Nick manages to do his rounds in a single night. That, I take it, is a question for Quantum Physics. Christmas is interesting because it is, as hinted, essentially a myth.

There’s no getting away from it; Christmas was basically invented by the Victorians. As everyone knows, it was Charles Dickens and his excellent ghost story, A Christmas Carol, who cemented the season in our imaginations. That too, of course, is a myth, a story put about by F. G. Kitton; or so The Dickens Project at the University of California would have us believe.

For many, of course, the origins go back two thousand years to a manger in the Middle East where, in the words of Johnny Mathis, a child was born. (That, America, is what happens when you don’t have adequate healthcare provision.) As origin-stories go, this seems unlikely, not least because of documented history. Apart from anything else, the historical figure we know as Jesus Christ definitely wasn’t born in December.  Would shepherds really be washing their socks in a field in the middle of winter? Hardly. Various dates have been suggested; my preference is for October for no better reason than it’s well known to be the best month in which to be born. Also a good month for clean socks. Alternative origins may be found in the Roman festival of Saturnalia and a whole host of other winter solstice revelries, some of which involved short-term coronations and sacrificial rites. As Terry Pratchett memorably pointed out, the ‘traditional’ red and white Santa suit wasn’t invented by a well-known soft drinks manufacturer; it was remembered.

            The rising of the sun

And the running of the deer…

All of which seems quite likely to be made up too. Christmas, like a drunken chain-store Santa, is just a big, fat fake. The big plastic tree in the corner; twinkling lights; shiny baubles; tinsel and glitter; a ‘jolly old elf’ breaking in to our houses allegedly to leave presents (I swear it’s true, your honour). None of it is real. They found Santa’s grave, kids. He was buried in Turkey seventeen hundred years ago, presumably after a drink-driving accident. He must have hit the sherry pretty hard on that last trip and lost control of the reindeer.

The word ‘elf’, by the way, derives from the Old English word ‘alp’, meaning ‘nightmare’. That’s what’s been creeping round our little bedrooms since the fourth century. How jolly.

And did I spy, on a starless night, and did I spy an old wooden cart, piled high with hessian sacks that wriggle and squirm and whimper and cry and wish that they had behaved just a little better, as mamma said they should?

Freyja’s cart climbs the icy road out of town. Old Freyja, whose cart was once a chariot, drawn by great wild cats from the forest; Skogkatt and Huldrekat: hidden people. Now something else labours between the staves, beneath the yoke, another shape pulls the cart along the long track, thick black score in the deep white snow that leads up into the mountains where an empty pot awaits…

           

What’s that? Christmas a humbug, uncle? Well, of course not. We’ll have no smart-casual humbuggery here, no anti-Christmas cries of ‘wake up and smell the eggnog, sheeple!’. Not today. I’m not even going to complain about rampant commercialisation.

Christmas is not a fake. Are the good cheer and festivities fake? Are the Christmas wishes and Christmas kisses fake? And what about that feeling, that small, warm feeling you get when you open a card from an old friend or relative; that small warm feeling you get when take a moment to think about them and to wish for them a merry Christmas and happy New Year? Is that fake? Well, possibly, but only if you’re a bit of a ****.

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,

                                                comfort and joy…

Christmas is a myth; and to say so is not the same as saying it’s fake, nor anything like it. In fact, Christmas is an example – better, it’s the example, the perfect instance and expression of our mythopoeic nature. Put simply, it’s about stories: stories of justice, naughty and nice; stories about sacrifice and giving; stories about beginnings that foreshadow ends; stories to drive away the darkness and wake the sun up again, if only for a while. Such stories make us who and what we are; they make us human, if we’ve a mind to be human.

Start with the wrong theory of language, the wrong ideas about ‘true’ and ‘false’, and all this is bound to sound suspicious. So much the worse, say I, for vulgar empiricism, and its odious cousin, philosophical realism.

Where’s the evidence? Where’s the measurable and the quantifiable truth of it? Where’s the independent reality of it? Now that’s a humbug.

Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree…

Where’s the evidence? How about in a life lived, in kindness and generosity gift-wrapped and hand-delivered, from one generation to another? How about in the countless sacrifices made by those who came before us? Or the simple gift of ourselves, the investment of identity, thought and understanding, the building blocks of a personality that all those who had and held us freely bestowed upon us? Would that be evidence enough for something extraordinary; a seasonal miracle, even?

See there, curled between the ox and the ass, red fox lies, his golden eyes shinning in the dark; golden eyes fixed on the eyes of a child in a manger while the child’s eyes are fixed on his, all through the long night…

I did warn you I was going to suck the fun out of Christmas. The sterile abstractions of independent realism and reductive empiricism (which no one really believes in anyway; they just pretend to because it makes them feel better) have nothing intelligible or interesting to say about what it means to be a person. They miss the point entirely. Actually, that’s not quite true. If we look at what empiricism does, rather than what it says, especially in the sciences, we can learn a lot about what it means to be a person: striving, aspiration, the overwhelming desire to know and understand; essential elements, these. More importantly, they teach us that we’re not isolated or independent; we’re co-authors in the universe’s biography; that is, autobiography.

Closer to home, we’re co-authors in our own autobiographies too; we participate in one another’s life-stories; we can stifle and frustrate them or make them a reality if we choose. And the tools we use are the stories we tell about ourselves and our world, the myths and metaphors which uncouple us from the vanishing point of pure reason and remind us of the dialectical extensions that are open to us, should we only seek them. These myths and metaphors, stories of light and life, are the ampliatory and amplificatory mechanisms of a consciousness engaged in its own infinite extensions.

That, I think, is what this season, this season of the spirit is really all about: spirit returned unto spirit; reminders of what we are and what we might be, all dressed in red, gold, green, bearing mistletoe and a holly crown, bringing joy and good cheer, and a few good stories to tell around the fireside.

So here is to Cherry and to his left ear,                     

Pray God send my master a barrel of beer…

On the Feast of Christmas

by James Beauregard

Today, the Christmas season stirs many different thoughts and feelings across the world. T.S. Eliot captured the many possibilities when he wrote,

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,

Some of which we may disregard:

The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,

The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),

And of the childish – which is not that of the child

For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel

Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree

Is not only a declaration, but an angel.[1]

Some believe, some experience the joy of the season, some oppose it. In the personalist tradition, it is striking and likely not a matter of coincidence that so many of the 20th (and now 21st) century's personalists were themselves Christian believers. Anglo-American personalism  developed, in part, from Protestant theological tradition and Borden Parker Bowne’s study in Germany, and the names of Christian personalists of the past century abound:  Bowne himself, Austin Farrer, Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, Karol Wojtyla, Edith Stein, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John F. Crosby, Roberts Spaemann, Bernard Härring, Romano Guardini, Czeslaw Bartnik, Bogumil Gacka, Randy Auxier, Tom Buford, Rocco Buttiglione, and many others  - the list goes on and on.

Given the season, I would like to take a moment to focus on two personalists who explicitly turn their attention to the feast of Christmas: Edith Stein and Romano Guardini.  Stein was born into a Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) the late 19th century and after drifting away from faith in her adolescent years, found her way into the Roman Catholic Church and into the order of Carmelites. She was a member of the Carmelite community in Cologne, Germany, but after Kristallnacht in 1938, left Germany and took up residence at the Carmelite convent in Echt, the Netherlands. She was arrested there in a roundup of Jewish – Christians in the wake of protest against the National Socialism by the Netherlands bishops, and transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers on August 9, 1942. Guardini, born in northeast Italy, and whose family moved to Germany when he was about a year old, was a Roman Catholic priest and theologian whose writings, both philosophical and theological, are still read today.

First, Edith Stein. She spent Christmas of 1931 at Beuron Abbey in Germany, and during her stay there wrote a reflection called Das Weichnachtsgeneimnis: Menschwerdung und Menschheit (The Mystery of Christmas: Incarnation and Humanity).[2]  In this text, she refers to the Mystery Christmas, and by extension of Christianity, as an “undivided whole”: to enter into any part of the mystery is to enter into the whole of it. In the journey of the Christian life, in her words, "The way leads from Bethlehem to Golgotha, from the manger to the cross." To live that life, for her, means to live that life as a person in community, to live in ongoing Association communication with God, to hear the word, to follow it, to pray and to follow the will of God. The German word Umkehr - return -  is typically thought of as a Lenten word, a turning away from sin and a return to the heart of God. It is, at the same time, an advent word, it's time to return to an understanding of what it means to be persons, and persons in relation to God and community. Living deeply out of her own tradition, she wrote, “The way for each of is lies with the Son of God, through suffering and death to the glory of the resurrection.”  The American Scripture scholar Raymond Brown has written that the infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are microcosms of the wider gospel message. Stein perceived this decades before Brown wrote his magisterial commentary on those narratives, The Birth of the Messiah.

The second personalist who wrote explicitly about the Christmas season, Romano Guardini (1885 – 1968), published in 1954 a book called simply, Der Herr (The Lord), an extended series of reflections on the life of Christ.[3] in the first reflection Guardini also touches on the theme of the unity of persons through consideration of the prologue to the gospel of John. He writes, " Everything is concentrated on the ultimate, all – powerful essentials: Lagos, flesh, step into the world; the eternal origin, the tangible earthly reality, the mystery of unity."[4]  an understanding of the meaning of personhood emerges from his reflections, and understanding grounded in the person of Jesus of Nazareth: "he entered fully into everything that humanity stands for – and the names in the ancient genealogies suggest what it means to enter into human history with its burden of fate and sin. Jesus of Nazareth spared himself nothing."

As T.S. Eliot noted, it is quite easy to get caught up in the commercialism of the season, which begins earlier and earlier each year, but the take the time to stop and reflect is to reenter the mystery, and to resume an attitude we knew as children, but so often forget:

the child

For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel

Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree

Is not only a declaration, but an angel.

---

[1] T. S. Eliot. The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. New York: Farrar Straus and Cudhay, 1954.

[2] Edith Stein, “Das Weichnachtsgeneimnis: Menschwerdung und Menschheit,” in Edith Stein Gesamtauggabe, 19, Geistliche Texte I. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2009, 2-14.  Translation from this text are mine and taken from this edition.

[3] Romano Guardini, The Lord. Washington DC: Gateway Editions, 2014.

[4] Romano Guardini, The Lord, 5.

Hidden in the Mistletoe

by Denis Larrivee

Strolling down New York’s East Side Avenues in mid-December one senses that the city’s merchants know all about the euphoria that is meant by Christmas spirit. There are the beaming mannequins conversing in Bloomingdales’ glass exposes, Patik timepieces, wise legacies from father to son, Harold’s delicacies left unwrapped by family hearths; all laced with northern hemlock and bound in scarlet bows. The persistence of this yearly reenactment seems to confirm a long-buried consensus over what is needed to for the season’s mood.

Its seemingly ancient heritage is deceptive, though. It is the legacy of a Christmas not so long ago, a zeitgeist of a mid-Victorian Christmas revival, captured in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The story’s captivating power has beguiled English speaking generations since. Dicken’s influence can be seen in the warmth of family gatherings, rich seasonal food and drink, dancing under the mistletoe, games and fine dress. The ‘Carol’s impact was immediate. Published on December 19, 1843, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve. Thirteen editions followed in 1844; in fact, the novella has never been out of print, and has seen its transformation to film, stage, and even opera. Of course, Dicken’s story is not really about Madison Avenue’s annual reincarnation, or Harold’s plum pudding. Those in the know - and that seems to include nearly everyone who has read it - will tell you that it is the story of personal conversion and a reincarnation of St Nicholas’ spirit of generosity. England then was simply revisiting its own Christmas traditions in that early Victorian day and Dicken’s experience of Field Lane Ragged school, where London’s half-starved illiterate street children were cloistered, made the connection both logical and inevitable.

That sort of knowing nod from nearly us all - ‘bless us everyone’ - may not be so encompassing or revealing of what lies beneath the shimmer and behind the smile, however. An inkling of what lies hidden in the story also, and likely what Dicken’s wished to convey, can be seen in the titling. The full version, and not the abbreviated one of common parlance, is A Christmas Carol; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Its suggestion of a hidden and active supernatural aura Dickens makes explicit in the spirits of Christmas past, present, and future, who do the heavy lifting of moving Scrooge from miser to deacon minister. While academics have debated the story’s secular vs Christian allegorical message, there seems little reason to disclaim the notion that either Dickens or the enthralled public viewed the spirits as insignificant sidelines in an otherwise captivating tale; or that the sense of festivity at Little Tim’s party was both sign and medium for a visible supernatural expression.

This appeal of an unseen essence, that appears so irresistible a part of the Christmas fabric poses a challenge - undoubtedly amplified at this time of year, but latent in its provocation beyond the season - to those who require an explanation for the evident and cannot fathom how one might evoke the other, or why it should have meaning or at least a consensus meaning that they cannot concede to. Conceding the presence of the appeal, though, and eliciting the inevitable pushback to its evident challenge is seen, for example, in a recent December meeting of the New York Academy of sciences on the Will to Meaning: Seeking the Why of our Existence at which the Academy proposed its own plausible variants. Underscoring the apparently ingrained need for existential satisfaction its reincarnation at a second annual staging - apparently the major issues having been unresolved on the first go-round - sanctioned another contrarian suite of explanations. Billing for the event lay heavy emphasis on the tried and failed glitter of today’s foremost empiricist arts, from neuroscience to astrophysics, all looking to extract a why from a how, and never quite moving past the seen. Also taking up the cudgel, in a gastric guise - perceiving but not seeing and so with surer aim - are the political ambits that cannot stutter what is being uttered in the East Side frolicking festivities; Merry Christmas! Whether the sacred can grace the profane, in fact, is a query that has created a virtual string of pirouettes by occupants at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

One wonders why the appeal provokes such a vivid display, like the pulsing galactic spirals of a stellar implosion the Academy makes reference to - spinning out its radiating corona amidst the black backdrop of a starless horizon. What provocative presence needs to be silenced?

Dickens might tell us. After four novellas only one ran the presses. When an unscrupulous publisher attempted thievery over author’s privilege Dickens sued, lost his income, and spent a good remainder of his life raising funds through its recitation. He had an opportune chance to gauge enthusiasm’s stimulus. Scrooge’s pivot from the grasping materialist to the kinder, gentler ‘minister to need’ says much of the twist from ‘grab what you see’ mentality to the observant socialist moved by unseen motivations of mutual harmony and considered concern, the idea that Dickens appears to wish to convey. But then how do we view the spirits who act like provocateurs? Are they the pivot makers who merely create good will and horizontal exchange? The Carol doesn’t seem to tell us.

Or perhaps Huxley, another English don? Like Dickens, Huxley spent a lifetime of transition from the drab Cartesian proclivities of colorless family tastes to the ‘unseen behind the manifestation’. Unlike Dickens, Huxley’s taste ran beyond sacramental gestures that signify the full circle of the transformative in community organizing, leaving Christmas wraiths as sidelined instigators. As early as 1932, thirty years before his death, he elected to disclaim his familial anti-revelation sentiments that made mere epiphenomena of the transcendent. His parody of liturgical Fordism In Brave New World parodies brother Julian’s explicit endorsement of religious sentiment as a naturalized device for controlling the masses, cleaving brotherly bonds. Keeping to this trajectory, Huxley went on to explore Go-like permutations of seen and unseen, from Eastern pantheistic Unseen Manifestations, to neural revelations of hallucinogenic imbibing, to a materially emancipated form he called Mind at Large, to settle on, finally and for him, a defining faith utterance “The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to Nature and to our fellow men.” His tracking through all appears to have completed the circle from the paternal allegiance of Darwin’s bulldog to the maternal embrace of Anglican choirs.

Huxley’s pursuit through a succession of decades and variable conceivings is emblematic of the intellectual hound whose foraging sees the faint glimmer of orange and spotting the trail moves on to new ground. There is the sense of broken twigs and crushed blades of grass, but they are gestures hidden by briar understories and disguised by a shadowed canopy, above and before a rising knoll. The wonder for Huxley was, perhaps, not in the reclusive but in the sense of exasperation that was superseded to overcome all.

The other wonder, though, is the sort of unrelenting gravitation that makes the turning to the center of everything an ongoing source of new stimulation. Both these wonders are present in December’s East Side displays, the glimmer and the pull. Like Huxley’s tracking the strollers move from glitter to smile before moving on. Never quite satisfied, but always impelled, they resemble the brownian trembling that seems just chance, until distantly viewed in the accumulated flow. Never quite realizing that the glitter is not the radiance, that the object is not the subject that compels, unseen amid the seen, the strollers leave behind them Bloomingdale’s expose.

Jean Luc Marion proposes that the unseen can never be more than a glimmer, only an ever receding subject that we are incapable of grasping, which we grapple with and are grappled by - which perhaps excuses the strollers. He explains that its radiance saturates, dazzling us, and leaving us unseeing. What Marion proposes is perhaps revealing about the source of the joy we sense in December. That in our inability to assuage the hope and to quell the desire, there is a revelation of our own insufficiencies. The resolution to this paradox instead lies outside our limits. When we grasp this idea and when we see the subject of our desire we are filled with joy, both for the presence of that hand and the intention of that heart. Rejoice, Rejoice! O Israel!