Memorial of Saint Francis Xavier, priest

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/120311.cfm

A valley near Mt St Helen
still ravaged by volcanic ash. 

He will give rain for the seed
that you sow in the ground,
And the wheat that the soil produces
will be rich and abundant.
On that day your flock will be given pasture
and the lamb will graze in spacious meadows;
The oxen and the asses that till the ground
will eat silage tossed to them
with shovel and pitchfork.
Upon every high mountain and lofty hill
there will be streams of running water.

Several years ago I wrote a poem about Christmas which describes my own vision of an Earth festival. I have included it among the extra documents placed at the top of this page. I hope that we will someday rediscover the prehistoric, pre-Christian roots of the festival that is called solstice. It is no accident, I think, that we celebrate the Light of Christ shining in the darkness of our winter. 

As the sun begins its slow return to the northern sky, life revives. If the worst of winter is yet to come, the growing light promises Spring with all its vitality. The ancient solstice was surely a feast of fertility; and the ancients knew what we often forget, that human sexuality is not dissimilar from the irrepressible vitality which throbs in the beasts of the field, the animals of the wilderness, and the green vegetation. Even mushrooms and their innumerable fungi kin leap out of the earth with the spring. 

Our Christmas holiday is a poor excuse for the solstice. Even our dismembered Christmas trees signify a holiday without roots. We left most of the tree underground! 

The  Prophet Isaiah understood we are creatures of earth. And he understood the Promise of Restoration must include rain, seed, wheat, soil, flocks, lambs, meadows, oxen, asses, silage, high mountains, lofty hills and streams of  running water. I hear from my student colleagues at the VA hospital how angry their theological professors are at Christianity for its neglect of the Earth, but these same professors (or their students) seem not to know Isaiah! It sounds as if these theologians would like to uproot Christianity from our western culture for its apparent failure; but that effort only abandons a secular society when it most needs to hear the "proto-evangelist," Isaiah. 

It is no accident that Saint Francis -- renamed in the twentieth century, the Patron Saint of Ecology -- was fascinated by Isaiah. Both saw God's endless resourcefulness in the Earth's vitality. 

Christmas will not die; its roots are both terrestrial and heavenly. As we wait in the darkness of winter for the Birth of Light, let us feel the cold and remember the promise of  Warmth Eternal.