Happy Christmas!

Bedlam

Is there time to write a blog today?  Has anyone time to read it?  The last working/full shopping day before Christmas weekend.  It's bedlam!

But then Christmas always is bedlam [a place, scene, or state of uproar and confusion].  The roads are bedlam, the shops are bedlam, the church is bedlam and the home is bedlam!

Though in a way the problem is that they are not bedlam.  The word's association with chaotic situations derives from the Bethlem Hospital in London which was, in fact, a lunatic asylum of such grandeur that it became a tourist attraction.  Unfortunately it was not an attraction for those confined within and their miserable environment was both the voyeuristic draw and the derivation of the name for chaos as bedlam. 

Originally it began as Christian foundation and the Order that ran it was named, of course, after the place and the event that the other sort of late-December bedlam ostensibly celebrates but more often buries beneath its confusion.

Thus the answer to Christmas bedlam is, well, Bedlam.  Caught neatly, I think, in the folk carol Joly Wat that feels more like the first Bedlam where the Prince of Peace was found.

Whan Wat to Bedlem cumen was,

He swet, he had gone faster than a pace;

He found Jesu in a simpell place,

Betwen an ox but and an asse.

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

‘Jesu, I offer to thee here my pipe,

My skirt, my tar-box, and my scrip;

Home to my felowes now will I skip,

And also look unto my shepe.’

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

Departed

He died last week.

He'll be sadly missed by those who loved him.  Already I've seen real tears at his loss.  I suppose one must admit that he never showed any belief in God who created him.  His life was consumed with material things rather than spiritual.  Not for him the real meaning of Christmas or Easter, not for him any interest in the words of Scripture, the promises of hope.  He lived his life for this world only.  And now he's gone.  Missed by some, a gift to this world from his Maker, but apparently oblivious to this.  He died without hope.

Christopher Hitchens and Kim Jong il died last week too.  I was not writing about them but about our much-loved guinea pig Alfie yet the observable parallels are alarming as their souls await their next appointment.  Alfie, meanwhile, has just become part of the back garden (and our memories). He rests in peace (except he doesn't because he's gone).

Advent