Welcome to January 1st. In the “Land of the Long Weekend” this is the day to recover from the NYE parties and celebrations. It’s a day at the beach or home with a ‘Barby“.
The Church struggles to get a full house on this day although there is a bonus when it falls on a Sunday as has happened this year. In good old Catholic Tradition this day was known as the Feast of the Circumcision of the Lord. Yes, it is the only Catholic feast for a medical procedure. As with all great Biblical accounts there is a picture gallery available on Google.
Circumcision gets some pretty good press in the Scriptures as a popular practice and metaphor. By the time you have worked through the Hebrew Scriptures and made your way to some of Paul’s letters you get to the most cutting of his statements: “Beware of the cutters,” (Ph.3:2). So, there you have it, time to stop infant circumcision!! If Paul was around today he would probably join one of the Facebook pages against infant circumcision.
Thanks to this feast we also have a great new word for scrabble: prepuce. The Holy Prepuce or the story of the foreskin relics is another contribution of Catholicism to the religious entertainment industry. It seems that we can also learn a bit from Michelangelo about this practice.
The United Nations Theme for 2012: The International Year of Cooperatives
In Australia we will celebrate The National Year of Reading
And to sing in this New Year I suggest we can do nothing better than join the chorus of We Are the Many
Oh, Tony darl, sweet Shakespeare surely to the rescue! “There’s a Divinity that shapes our Ends, rough-hew them how we will!” (Horatio in Hamlet).
A most frolicking, rollicking Happy New Year to You!
Love
Michael
And while I have you (so to speak), splendid Tone, here’s an ‘Ode to a Sweet Pee’ that I composed to express my solidarity with your anti-circumcisionist sentiments:
All scrubbed-up, masked and gloved
He loads the wheel-ed trolley
With shiny surgical steel
Just a nip and tuck, quoth he
I’ll do it in a jiffy
A simple operation
For manly men and boys
And in different ways and means
On women (mere toys?)
For cleanliness or subjugation?
None of your sissy susuration
He reaches twixt the male child’s legs
Stoops to check his sweet prepuce
With glov-ed hands and scissored shears
He plans his attack
I fear
I watch him as he
Swabs the foreskin clean
Strains to pull it back
Retract and chop-it-off
The sixth he’s done today
The baby’s face contorts
No primal scream can name
The pain he feels, the loss sustained
No Freudian explanation
To quell his stifled consternation
In years to come they’ll say
We’re glad we had it done
For reasons more cosmetic
Than obviously prosthetic
Its always been this way
His prowess too is proven
In withstanding STDs
Proud, he’ll stand and show it off
When he decides to pee
And when sexually performing
For all at large to see
What warped religious fantasy
Could do this to a child
To divide him from a part of self
To stop him being mild
To strip him off his nature
To intrude with knif-ed glove
For reasons that his skin is wild
All in the name of love?