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| Thanksgiving & Feasting | | Date Created: Nov 25, 2004, 09:10 AM |
The 19th Century English Poet and Critic Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote this mock prayer to Jesus: “Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown gray with Thy breath.” This prayer expresses one part of the modern mythos of how modernity has saved us from the Christian church. Before our savior liberated us darkness, glood, drabness, and all-around dreariness reigned in Christendom. But as told in the movie Pleasantville modern enlightenment humanism has brought joy and color to life. This is the myth of modernity--the story that is told to modernist children.
The problem is that it doesn't match the facts, those troubling little devils. Take the feast of thanksgiving as an example. The first Thanksgiving, three days of feasting, was celebrated by the Plymouth colony Christians in 1621 to give thanks for their first harvest and for surviving their first dreadful Massachusetts winter. Do you find it remarkable that such a dreary bunch of killjoys--the American Pilgrims & Puritans--could be the origin of such a festive occasion as thanksgiving? Well, you should, if you believe everything you hear about them on TV and in modern American schools. If you were to form an opinion of the Puritans based solely on what you read in government school textbooks and hear from popular media, you would scarcely rise above the conventional caricature of an inhibited, introspective, moralistic, hypocritical bunch of prudes, who were bent on stamping out all fun.
One modern detractor defined Puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. This popular portrait is pure fiction, invented by the Devil himself to disfigure what was in many ways a very healthy Christian community. After all, the word “Puritan” itself was a sarcastic term coined by their enemies, a word which implied censoriousness and hypocrisy. It was not what they called themselves.
This almost universal misunderstanding of the Puritan lifestyle and mindset is slowly being chipped away by modern Christian scholars to reveal something quite robust, even charming. For example, everybody knows that the gloomy outlook of the Puritans was reflected in their drab clothes (black, black, and more black). Right? Wrong! No matter how many times this caricature is repeated, it remains unhistorical and downright silly. Their daily dress was quite as colorful as it was fashionable.
For example, the well-known Puritan theologian John Owen, vice-chancellor at Oxford University was described by one of his peers: “hair powdered, cambric band with large costly band strings, velvet jacket, breeches set round at the knees with ribbons pointed, and Spanish leather boots with cambric tops.” (Cambric is fine linen made in N. France in a city of the same name). It is a matter of historical record that the Puritans wore fashionable clothes of many colorful fabrics. The gloomy black-clad people portrayed in public education textbooks (for example) are an historical fiction, the sinister invention of the enemies of orthodox Christianity.
Chesterton inOrthodoxy upends "the view that priests [or Christian pastors] darken and embitter the world. I look at the world and simply discover that they don't. Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests [and the church], are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and colored dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and disciple may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased." |
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