Tomte

Tomte are cute, now. They have their own catalog, and in the yearly Luciadag festivals, are played by pre-K's in Swedish costume. In our version, they are referred to as "mischievous little creatures who can be bribed with food." Which is mildly amusing. We have them up in church, even though they are deeply pagan, because we have drawn all the danger out of them over the last century or so.

Originally, they were the souls of the original builders of a farm, which can perhaps have a positive, protective spin put on it, but holds hints of something grimmer.

We miss the power of the paganism because we no longer understand the power of poverty and hunger. If offended, the tomtegubbe might take revenge by curdling the milk, goes one example. That sounds like a minor inconvenience, an "oh, darn" moment now. In a context of ongoing hunger, with the storage of most foods a chancey thing because of mice, leakage, or rot, the loss of any food was frightening. One might well turn to whatever gods or spirits one knew in order to stay alive.

I wrote more on this over a year ago in the series on Wyrd and Providence.

Social Reform

I consider it a great error to read the NT, and especially the words of Christ, as documents of social change.

That society has changed and does change (and I think for the better) as a byproduct of the spiritual change of allying oneself and devoting oneself to the Kingdom of God is an excellent thing. But to retroactively apply our ideas of social progress back on the gospel, as if making good governments were Jesus' main point - or even one of his main points - is a dangerous stretch. You can only get there by making large assumptions, generally unwarranted

For clarity, I am referring to all sets of political ideas that grew up between 1750-1850 that we feel the NT must, just must, be in favor of: socialism, nationalism, communism, free market, self-determination. They are good or bad on their own merits, and have their derivations from NT ideas or not. But they can only be derivations, never the command. The Church had no earthly power at the time of the NT, and the distinction between believers and authorities was clear. As the church moved into the authority business itself, the way back was sundered.

Tangent

Or comparison, if you prefer.

A youngish friend seeking his PhD in history - I think I have referenced Josh on other occasions here - tells me that the some historians of religious history are making a point of spelling Puritanism with a small "p," to emphasise that it was a movement, not a unified whole in any way, with contradictory trends, fads, backwaters, and saints or charlatans.

I am thinking the same thing about the Emerging Church at this point. Seeing it as a single trend, even a diverse one, doesn't capture it. Spell it with a small "e." It is many things, some of them contradictory.

And that is exactly what it should be, if it is to have any permanent positive effect.

At Home

If you hadn't guessed, Bryson's At Home is recommended. Plenty to set you thinking. Popular history always has the difficulty of focusing on the unusual and the extremes of trends, giving a somewhat false picture. But as these extremes are often in the service of correcting a conventional wisdom false impression, the overall effect is about right. Bryson does have that failing, but hews close enough to real trends that permeated society over history (strong emphasis on British and American societies) that his fascination with the outliers can - usually - be put down to a drive for vividness and memorability. He does overstep and gets things wrong at points (I count three so far), however, leaving one to wonder about his entire reliability on other matters. I'm pretty sure he gets most of it, though, despite tackling a variety of subjects in rapid succession. And he writes very engagingly. 4.5 stars.

Kelvingrove

It just doesn't pay to go digging around in the origins of beautiful old tunes from the British Isles. I recognised the tune this morning but couldn't place it. Jonathan leaned over to remind me that it was "My Love" by Steeleye Span. Interesting that the less musical of my two original sons has often been remarkably good at this. I think my wife scored very high on a Johnson-O'Connor scale for tune recognition, and he gets it from her.

Geoff Twigg, the worship minister, identified the tune for me as "Kelvingrove." He and his wife, when they were in their original British context, had known both John Bell of the Iona Community (who wrote the lyrics in the first video) and Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span (in the second video). It's a beautiful tune, used for quite different lyrics here.





Now let me ruin it for you completely. Just so I can share my discomfort.

The tune has been set to many lyrics, and the earliest known version seems to have been a rather plaintive song about a girl who was raped, impregnated, and abandoned. Later versions soften that to seduced and abandoned, then seduced and had to get married, then a suggestion that it is she who inveigled he, then a more innocent romantic song of come and go with me to this beautiful grove, my love. Even those are never quite innocent, as even without the dark background of earlier versions, the mind leapt naturally to sexual suggestion at any mention of encouraging lasses to go to groves in the 19th C, just as it might now. The Steeleye version seems to date from midway through those changes.

This sort of dragging the words wherever you want them to go probably starts up as soon as one gets out of the reach of the original artist, whether by distance or expiration of copyright. And it continues on indefinitely. One youtube version of The Summons was being used at a wedding, clearly referring to the bride following the groom, not a Christian following Christ. These things bug me. I know they have a long tradition in the church, and God Himself seems to be entirely comfortable with the idea - see Ruth's speech, Song of Solomon, and Bride of Christ, just for openers. But I always thought of those as earthly analogies meant to lead us upward. Taking the Christian sense and making it earthly again seems different.

Another youtube version described one of those midway versions of "The Shearin's Nae For You" in more modern terms, that the husband was saying to his wife that she was too old to go out and have fun, and to mind her babies instead. Those lyrics were probably another woman telling the girl that she should grow up. But the thirtysomething female performer was unlikely to gravitate to that meaning. Other versions have the youngish husband and wife in mutual recrimination. How one sees the girl's desire to put buckles on her shoes and ribbons at her knees likely hinges on where on this continuum of blame for her own lot one places her.

I admire in theory those who can rescue a tune that way, but it seldom works for me. The lyrics of the first version I hear infuse the tune with that meaning forever.

Slaves And Servants

Reading Bryson’s At Home, I endured an uncomfortable section describing how hard was the life of a many London servants in the 19th C – how lengthy the hours, how unreasonable the demands, how precarious the employment. I wondered how civilised people in fairly modern times could treat other human beings that way.

They were treated even worse than that, of course, as slavery existed in the first half of the century in many parts of even the Anglosphere. (Still does, even here sometimes, as the good people at Not For Sale remind us.) If slavery can be tolerated, then one would hardly balk at mistreating servants. Or to take that in the other direction, once one has swallowed serfdom, or enclosure laws, or whipping servants for minor infractions, it’s not such a jump to tolerate slavery – especially when one can point to house slaves or individual manors or better regions where the difference may not be so great. Each set of brutalities grants permission for the others. (Hmm, there’s a sermon about the progression of sin.)

We think ourselves mentally far apart from some evils because we don't encounter people who think them unremarkable - they are not public or general, so we think them nonexistent and wonder how societies shrugged them off so easily. Some sense in that. Evil that is rationalised at a societal level rather than as an individual exception has something worse about it.

Yet gradualism can stretch in both directions. The life of a servant in a country house was at times even worse than that of their London counterparts. But as their season of intense labor could last only the three months of the year when the family was in residence, slowing to a more relaxed, even boring pace the rest of the year, it’s not very different from moderns who work 100, 120-hour weeks during peak seasons – in tourist or agricultural industries, for example – with insanely demanding bosses or customers.

I’m not reaching for any grand philosophical point here, comparing galley slavery to small tourist hotels, or defining bright moral lines in the treatment of others. I’m just noting that most people in history have had hard lives and not much respect.