{"id":3695,"date":"2007-01-02T09:22:47","date_gmt":"2007-01-02T09:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html"},"modified":"2007-01-02T09:22:47","modified_gmt":"2007-01-02T09:22:47","slug":"circumcision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html","title":{"rendered":"Circumcision"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"0101circumcision_sm\"<\/a> You might or might not know that January 1 was not always the feast of Mary the Mother of God\/World Day of Peace on the RC calendar. In fact, that ‘s a quite recent development. Up to the revision of the calendar, 1\/1 was celebrated as the Circumcision of the Lord.<\/a> Which it still is in the East, both Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Why they changed that is really beyond me – an act that further <\/em>separates the West from the East, stripping the day of an ancient remembrance, in the midst of a reform that was supposed to be all about re-emphasizing the ancient with, we might add, a dash of an eye to deeper Christian unity. Makes no sense. <\/p>\n

Over at Mere Comments, Anthony Esolen reflects on the importance of the former designation, and the reality it celebrates. <\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

All the ancient writers saw a connection between circumcision and baptism, and if we were but indifferent anthropologists with a healthy respect for a culture far removed from our own, we might see it too.  Consider the first commandment given to man in Eden: "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it."  It is not, "Till these fields" or "Build that temple" or "Burn that incense."  It is, simply, that we should live and bring more of ourselves into the light; the love of man and wife is thus allowed its sublime and holy role in creation.<\/p>\n

     But after the fall, when God calls Abraham to make of him a great nation, and to use that nation as the means of bringing salvation to the world, He requires His worshipers to mark themselves as belonging to Him.  Thus the command that males should be circumcised: in the very organ of reproduction, of begetting, the Hebrew male is maimed, so to speak, as a sign that his own existence and the existence of all those who might be begotten from his loins are gifts from God, who alone is the Begetter.  All life comes from God, and so the act that begets new life must be considered especially holy; it is absurd to hold that God can command what we do with coats or gold or oxen, but that He must leave to our own discretion what we do with that conferred power to bring more incarnate souls into being.  Hence the laws in the Torah regarding sexual cleanliness — laws that the inattentive and scornful consider so foolish.<\/p>\n

     But circumcision is to baptism as the old law is to the new.  Circumcision is a ritual maiming, scored upon the body; baptism is a drowning, a death, a renewal of the soul.  Under the old law Jesus shed his first drops of blood for our redemption — a foreshadowing of the blood he will shed in the new covenant upon the Cross.  Circumcision marks the flaw in man, a bloody flaw, that reaches to the heart of his being; and he is as helpless as a baby to do anything on his own about it.  The death marked by baptism, a baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, washes the blood away, and man is as helpless as a baby to do anything on his own<\/em> about that, either.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might or might not know that January 1 was not always the feast of Mary the Mother of God\/World Day of Peace on the RC calendar. In fact, that ‘s a quite recent development. Up to the revision of the calendar, 1\/1 was celebrated as the Circumcision of the Lord. Which it still is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCircumcision - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Circumcision - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"You might or might not know that January 1 was not always the feast of Mary the Mother of God\/World Day of Peace on the RC calendar. In fact, that ‘s a quite recent development. Up to the revision of the calendar, 1\/1 was celebrated as the Circumcision of the Lord. Which it still is…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-01-02T09:22:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/0101circumcision_sm.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Circumcision - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Circumcision - Via Media","og_description":"You might or might not know that January 1 was not always the feast of Mary the Mother of God\/World Day of Peace on the RC calendar. In fact, that ‘s a quite recent development. Up to the revision of the calendar, 1\/1 was celebrated as the Circumcision of the Lord. Which it still is…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2007-01-02T09:22:47+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/0101circumcision_sm.jpg"}],"author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html","name":"Circumcision - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/0101circumcision_sm.jpg","datePublished":"2007-01-02T09:22:47+00:00","dateModified":"2007-01-02T09:22:47+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/0101circumcision_sm.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/amywelborn.typepad.com\/openbook\/images\/0101circumcision_sm.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/circumcision.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Circumcision"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}