All is Calm, All is Quiet" on the Farm

This week on the farm?
   "All is calm, All is quiet."    Except the guys who went out to check the onion beds and got stuck in the mud and needed to be rescued.. [It really is hard to take a vacation when you farm.]

   The men are all of with their families, as they should be. 

We celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas. For many years this was our only vacation. But, the Twelve Days of Christmas is not just a song. Mr. Shakespeare wrote a play titled 'Twelfth Night.' It is said George Washington celebrated Christmas at church, but Twelfth Night with feasting.

In local history, the Kings River is so named because it was discovered by Spanish explorers on Twelfth Night, January 6th, 1805 the Day of the Kings. This is the traditional day the Three Kings actually found and kneeled before the New Born King. Lt. Gabriel Moraga originally named it, El Rio de los Santos Reyes (River of the Holy Kings). Kings County and Kings Canyon are named from the Kings River.

I know many of you have gotten past Christmas and are on to the next adventure. I want to encourage the rest to enjoy the moment. There is a beauty and a peace in celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmas instead of rushing on. I'll close with an excerpt from one of my recent Christmas sermons-

How about if we just let the Grinch win? What if there was no Christmas? Let’s consider a world without Christmas.

               First, if we didn’t have the hoopla of Christmas this would be a dark time of year wouldn’t it? These are the longest and coldest days of the year. Without the hoopla of Christmas what would we do with ourselves from Thanksgiving in November until at least Valentine’s Day? Oops, without Christmas there would have been a St. Valentine would there?

Hospitals

               The Encyclopedia Britannica says the modern age of hospitals began with Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor in the Fourth Century.

 Another source says,

“A nursing tradition developed during the early years of Christianity when the benevolent outreach of the church included not only caring for the sick but also feeding the hungry, caring for widows and children, clothing the poor, and offering hospitality to strangers. This religious ethos of charity continued with the rapid outgrowth of monastic orders in the fifth and sixth centuries and extended into the Middle Ages.

                                                                           Barbara Mann Wall

So, without Christmas, there probably wouldn’t be hospitals.

Education

               While there were schools in the ancient world, education in the West is rooted in the great monasteries and universities run by the church since medieval times.

Science

               The first men of science in the modern era were practicing Christians who used their scholarly abilities to discover the laws used by God to create the Universe. For example, Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics was a monk. Michael Faraday the discoverer of electromagnetism was an elder and deacon in his church.

If we take Christmas out of the world- we take the key motivation for untold generations that built  great schools and hospitals or made  fundamental discoveries of science.

All the best in the New Year.

P