Christmas Carol paradoxes 2 – Cantique de Noël

My goodness, Christmas carols are loaded with contrasts and paradoxes. And so am I. Good and bad. Deserved and undeserved. Earned and unearned. Beautiful and ugly.

“Fall on your knees…
O night when Christ was born.”

Fall on your knees, as you would to revere a king? Or in exhaustion, like a “weary world rejoicing”? As “the world in sin and error pining”? The same Carol continues:

“The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger,…”

The King? Rich, powerful, feared? Or lowly? Both? Lowliness is royal? Powerful?

“In all our trials born to be our friend;
He knows our need, To our weakness no stranger!
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!”

Our friend? No stranger to weakness? Seems unlikely for a god-man…

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Share your favorite carol lyrics and the paradoxical mysteries they raise inside you, below, please!

Christmas Carol paradoxes 1 – Adeste Fideles

My goodness, Christmas carols are loaded with contrasts and paradoxes. And so am I. Good and bad. Deserved and undeserved. Earned and unearned. Beautiful and ugly.

“Born the king of angels.
Come let us adore him.”

Adore? As when we smile at a baby’s sweet face? That is not bowing down to a king.

How did the Lord of all come to us? By lording over us? Or by being born as a defenseless baby in desperate need of the same loving care every single one of us needed as a baby?

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More on “O come, come, all ye faithful…”:
(poem) Advent prequel to Footprints

Share your favorite carol lyrics and the paradoxical mysteries they raise inside you, below, please!

Authenticity, Uniqueness, and Control

We did a reading (maybe July 18, 2020) about the futility of attempting control, and each shared something they’ve tried to control. I had no answer in that moment. I’m lately feeling instead like I’m more alive when I embrace unfolding, whether as a party plan at my house, or a disposition anticipating a first meeting with my beloved’s mom.

I suspect I may be a kind of person who bemuses controllers. Many in my life have wanted a plan for this and that. I’m not a planner. My boss wants to plan for how to win a sale. I’m not a planner. I am Neil. When I, or a team I am on, accomplishes something because of me, it wasn’t because of the plan. It was because of me. And them. My plan is, be Neil.

My presentation plans too are very loose. When I cannot develop a feel for an audience because it is too large, then I just retreat into being me. When that happens, even people opposite my personality can learn. When a writer writes, they should write what they know. When a teacher teaches, they should teach WHO they know.

I think unique power lies in authenticity and a disinclination to water things down for such a broad appeal that they lose their specific, individual impact. We have evolved to love stories. Informational seminars are boring to our evolved brains. When they succeed at being memorable, it’s because they were personalized by the speaker, or because they appealed narratively to a universal archetype.

I learned a great deal about me by this exercise about attempts at control. I learned that the world needs Neil. And the world needs Lynn. And the world needs Kacey. Etc.

The world doesn’t need universal guidance.

It needs universal freedom to let each child be who they are. That is what calls out loudly and deeply to our nature, and what we feel when we feel loved without conditions. Freedom to unfold who we are.

After all, I do not love what each of you should be. I love WHO each of you IS. Because who you are, is who you should be.

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Neil D. 2020-07 & 2020-12

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Here is a story about how one person’s living out his nature bestows a sense of freedom on those who see him doing it.

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Another creative writer also explains:

I’m not a big planner either. I fly by the seat of my pants a lot. Type A personality people, particularly teachers, hate me. Well, actually they love me bc I’m not a threat to them. I have no desire whatsoever to compete with them. I want them to do what’s best for their students, and I just want to do what’s best for my students. But they don’t like it when I veer from the lesson plan. You’re right; I don’t teach my content; I teach my students. Teaching isn’t just my job, it’s who I am. [Some people from my past] never understood that.
My lesson plans are very precise; very detailed. But I never follow them exactly because a million things happen between the time I develop them and the time I execute them.
I like how you roll, Durso.
(KC 2020-07-18)

Glow sticks break before they glow? Not exactly…

“It’s OK to be a glowstick. Sometimes you have to break before you can shine.”

“A glow stick always breaks before it glows.”

It is not true that the glow stick breaks!

The contents which glow remain inside.

It’s the fragile and delicate parts on the inside which have to be shattered before the compartmentalized ingredients mix together glowingly.

Our ego-mind constructs a rigid but fragile compartment, as if we sticks can be made stronger by stiff logic, or rules, or pleasing people outside our stick.

Yet when the whole is bent far enough, that strength shatters…

And we can’t contain the radiance then.

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Neil D. 2020-12-13

Flamingo earrings are a sacrament

Eight-year-old students interrogated the teacher, who has a thing for flamingos: “Why were you absent, Ms. Doe?”

“I was sick…”

One gave her a gift, 2 weeks before Christmas: The birds as earrings, which weren’t very comfortable, “But I’ll wear them anyway.”
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If you Google “sacrament,” you’ll easily find some definition like “a religious ceremony or ritual regarded as imparting divine grace.” More deeply, it involves symbols that point to “larger realities” which simply can’t be grasped with the mind alone. After all, how do we describe encounters which impart divine grace?
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This gift wasn’t the last day before Christmas break, like a parent might suggest. Do you think the timing suggests a much larger reality in that student’s heart? I do.

Do you think that child thinks Ms. Doe’s ears are pretty? I’d bet.

It wasn’t an apple or a gift card, but a personal favorite close to Ms. Doe’s heart. That child “knows” Ms. Doe’s heart already, and longs to be closer to it.

I think that’s ALL divine.

And I think flamingo earrings are a sacrament.

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Neil D. 2020-12-11