On Browning’s “Christmas Eve”

One of the interesting struggles I always faced at the holidays during my time back at college was the terrible collision between the new life and identity that I was discovering for myself away at school with the old, established and traditional way of life back home. I would walk through the doors of the old house with the joy of homecoming, only to quickly be knocked flat with the realization that I had changed, but life back home had not.

Now, I went to Biola University, basically a Bible college, and so one of the places where I felt this collision most was going to Church with my family again on Sunday morning. You see, I had just spent a whole semester expanding and broadening my mind as to how to think about who God is, how to read and interpret the bible, and how to worship. You name the topic, and you can bet that my new-found friends and I had spent hours pouring over all the possible ways of looking at the topic and, obviously, had found the only solution imaginable.

I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys-R-Us kid

Coming into this holiday season I’m reminded of one of my favorite child-hood memories. Every year when I was a kid, come Christmas time, my mom used to take my brothers and I out Christmas shopping. Now, I have three brothers, and my mom got us started at an early age buying Christmas gifts for each other. In order to do this and still keep it a surprise what gifts we had bought for our brothers, she would pick a Saturday, make sure that we had all saved up our thirty dollars from allowance money ($10 for each brother’s gift), and then take us out one by one to shop, and we always had to be in a different room of the house when they got back to the house so as not to catch a glimpse of the gifts. Well, my mom’s method meant that every year she made four subsequent trips to the local Toys-R-Us, and each of these trips almost invariably led to the Lego’s isle.

Hector, the real hero of the Iliad?

In returning to Troy to gather his mother and all the noble women to offer prayers to Athena, Hector approaches his brother Paris, and hurls insults toward him for his prolonged absence from the war.

Helen, the mistress of Paris and woman whom the Achaean and Trojans have spent years of agony and suffering for, seductively speaks to Hector, first lamenting that she is not the wife of a better man, then softly encouraging him to, “Come in, rest on this seat with me…You are the one hit hardest by the fighting, Hector.” Hector responds in noble fashion,