Last weekend marked the second week of Advent, a time of hope when Christians await the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ, on Christmas Day. Young people are more readily anticipating the material rewards of the holiday, even those well past belief in Santa Claus. That’s natural and fine up to a point, but not when the original point, the birth of Christ, is lost or, worse, reviled along with the faithful. Then the ultimate result can be campus youth menacing Jewish students, ripping terrorist-held hostage pictures off the walls, and condemning Israel.
They have forsaken the teachings of a young Israelite Jew who two millennia ago inspired all of Western civilization. They hate Him for this, as they disdain their own heritage. For their masters are not priests or rabbis but satanic cretin, like the three prestigious university presidents who testified before Congress last week. None of them could or would answer Rep. Elise Stefanik’s question on whether students calling for the genocide of Jews violated the schools’ code of conduct regarding bullying or harassment.
Instead, we can immerse ourselves in religious Yuletide music as rich and beautiful as the cathedrals of old.
“If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment,” said University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill with a smug, smarmy smile on her face. “Conduct meaning committing the act of genocide?!” retorted the incredulous congresswoman. By Magill’s insane logic, calling for the reinstatement of slavery would require students to be chained before the university could act. She knows anyone who uttered such a horror would be expelled an instant later, deservedly. But somehow menacing Jews falls outside the university rules of reaction. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: All in the Homily: On the Death of Norman Lear)
Magill and her two witch sisters could not believe there would be consequences for their smarm. After all, their thousands of colleagues, hundreds of thousands of young disciples, and the entire mainstream media echoed their position. They were the best and the brightest with the power to cloud young minds. And they thought everyone worshipped them.
In an all-time low for the longtime barren icon, Saturday Night Live, the show’s cold open mocked not the easy target of the three hags, but Stefanik, played as mentally disabled by the painfully unfunny Chloe Troast. The skit defied the first rule of satire — always ground the gag in truth. Troast’s spastic impersonation bore no resemblance to the Harvard-educated congresswoman who surgically destroyed the careers of the witnesses. All three ended up groveling insincerely soon afterward, and Magill resigned in disgrace on Sunday. Ironically, SNL didn’t get the joke. (READ MORE: Christmas Melodies From Near and Far)
As for the woke kids, their parents failed them first. They didn’t prepare them to resist academic Marxist indoctrination. Too many paved the way for it. They let them disdain their God and Messiah — and the distant little nation that shared His Light with the world — to worship darkness and barbarism. Hence, most of them are now miserable wretches, and a new Gallup poll confirms this.
The poll found the children of conservative parents are likelier to have better mental health than those of liberal parents. According to the study, only 55 percent of adolescents of liberal parents reported good or excellent mental health compared to 77 percent of those with conservative or very conservative parents. “Being raised by liberal parents is a much larger risk factor for mental health problems in adolescence than being raised in a low-income household with parents who did not attend college,” wrote Jonathan Rothwell, the brief’s author and principal Gallup economist.
I saw many of the majority youth in church this Second Advent Sunday. And I could bet none of them will be ripping pictures of innocent hostage children off their future college walls. While watching them, I got an idea on how we can further welcome the birth of Our Lord while revering our glorious culture — the very culture Les Miserables despise — through Christmas with classical Christmas music.
Skip secular favorite songs like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Jewish Irving Berlin’s elegiac White Christmas, or Judy Garland’s haunting Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Instead, we can immerse ourselves in religious Yuletide music as rich and beautiful as the cathedrals of old. Pay attention to the sound and lyrics of pure faith from Christian Britain and Europe before both abandoned God for idolatry. (READ MORE: Ready to Celebrate Christmas? Listen to These Advent Carols First)
Take the wonderful God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen, vintage enough to be featured in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. When Scrooge heard it being sung outside his office on Christmas Eve, he “seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror.” In its very opening verse, it poetically covers the literal crux of Christianity: God rest ye, merry gentlemen, let nothing ye dismay/for Jesus Christ our Savior was born upon this day,/to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray./O tidings of comfort and joy,/comfort and joy;/o tidings of comfort and joy.
The same holds true for other gems of the time, like Good King Wencelas (1853, honoring the legend of St. Wencelas, Prince of Bohemia, 921-935 AD), Angels We Have Heard On High (1862, French), O Holy Night (1847), We Three Kings (1857, U.S., celebrating the Magi), and many more. Or go back a century to Adeste Fideles (translated into O Come All Ye Faithful in 1841), I Saw Three Ships, Joy to the World (1719), or even earlier than that into incredible Gregorian chant. These glorious songs and their history will help us celebrate the very first Christmas in Bethlehem, Israel more than 2,000 years ago.