Christmas Day 2009: Defying the Darkness
Jan 18th, 2010 by Bill
To listen to the audio recording please click on this link:
It’s a rare Christmas that some cleric or other doesn’t complain that we’re not observing the season properly. This year it was the Anglican Bishop of Croydon, The Right Rev. Nick Baines who told us in late November that some of the traditional Christmas carols ‘contain nonsense’. He singles out Away in a Manger for particular comment. ‘I always find it a slightly bizarre sight when I see parents and grandparents at a nativity play singing Away in a Manger as if it actually related to reality,’ he writes. ‘I can understand the little children being quite taken with the sort of baby of whom it can be said, “no crying he makes”, but how can any adult sing this without embarrassment?’
O Come all ye Faithful should, he says, be retitled O Come all ye Faithless, since it was the ‘faithless’ shepherds and pagan wise men who came to see the baby Jesus.
He added: ‘All sorts of fantasies have grown up around Christmas and it has been sentimentalised into the sort of anaemic tameness that has made many people think of it as nothing more than some sort of a fairy story – which is nothing short of tragic, because nothing could be further from the truth.’
While the bishop is lamenting the sentimentality of Christmas carols, and presumably, demanding that some of them be rewritten or discarded, the American humorist, Garrison Keillor, writing in the Irish Times last Thursday, was attacking the certain Unitarians for doing just that. The Unitarians in Cambridge Massachusetts, he says, inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most celebrated of all Unitarian ministers, have rewritten Silent Night so that it’s more about silence and night than about God. Unitarians listen to the inner voice, he goes on, and they have every right to do this; but messing about with the words of Silent Night is ‘spiritual piracy and cultural elitism’.
I’m with Garrison Keillor on this one. Let’s leave the carols and the hymns alone. I don’t want the words of Silent Night to make perfect theological sense according to the traditions of Unitarianism. Nor do I want to sing a version of Away in a Manger which is true to the experiences of everyday parenting. I want these carols to remind me of my childhood. I want to sing the words that I have sung every year for over six decades and which are printed on my memory and on my psyche. I want to experience them in the way I experienced them when I was carol singing round the neighbours’ houses with my sister Eileen and her friends on Christmas Eve. I don’t want theology in my carols; I want nostalgia. I want make-believe. I want snow falling ‘snow on snow, snow on snow’ even though I’ve only experienced two white Christmases in my entire life! The sentimentality so deplored by the bishop is precisely what my soul craves at this time of the year. I don’t care about carols making sense – I had no idea what the words of Good King Wenceslas were about until I was a grown man (in fact, come to think of it, I’m still not sure about it), but who cares? It evokes something inside me. A carol, like any hymn, like any song even, is more than its words; to reduce a carol to theology, as both the bishop and the Massachusetts Unitarians seem to want to do is to misunderstand its nature and its function.
In a radio interview, the Bishop of Croydon, told us that he had visited a school and asked a number of children what they thought of when they heard the word ‘Christmas’. ‘Santa Claus’, ‘Elves’, and ‘Cinderella’, were among the replies received. Very few mentioned Jesus. A reporter on television last week asked a group of children the same question and got similar answers. Where was Jesus? Nowhere, it seems. He comes way down the list. ‘Have we lost the true meaning of Christmas?’ asked the reporter. We ask it every year. In countless pulpits throughout the land and throughout the world this morning, priests and preachers will be asking that very question.
But what is the true meaning of Christmas? Is it, as the Bishop of Croydon thinks, about the birth of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem, the entry of God into the world in a unique way, born of a virgin, his birth heralded by a moving star and announced by angels? The reality of this story is what the bishop wants to emphasise, but I fear that such a message is hardly going to bring people flocking back to the pews.
The children who were asked about Christmas would probably have put Jesus somewhere on their list; he just wouldn’t have come at the top. This is undoubtedly true for many adults, too. Ask any mother what Christmas means and she’ll say, ‘Cooking and cleaning and shopping and wrapping and exhaustion.’ And in reply to your further question about the role of Jesus, she might be inclined to say that wherever he is, he’s certainly not helping her peel the potatoes! And we respond in this way not because we are ignorant of the bible story or contemptuous of it. We just realise that Christmas is not only about Jesus. Christmas is much older than Jesus. Christmas – or the midwinter festival – is as old as the human race. The Jesus story has been incorporated into our celebration of the festival, but the Jesus story is by no means the origin of it, nor does it exhaust the meaning of it.
What does Christmas mean today? What has it always meant throughout history? It has one overriding meaning which can be accepted by all, regardless of religious affiliation: it is about defying the darkness. Christmas is the festival in which we collectively say that no matter how dark it gets, no matter how cold it gets, no matter how bleak the political or economic situation, no matter how much in debt we are, we are going to have fun! We are going to have fun if it kills us! Christmas is the celebration of our innate optimism, of our dogged refusal to be cowed by circumstances.
It is the celebration of the light’s triumph over the darkness, and of life over death. That’s why we bring trees into the house and into the church; why we decorate with holly and other evergreens; why we kiss under the mistletoe, why we light candles. Warmth, fertility and ongoing life are set against the coldness and the barrenness which threaten to engulf us.
This is why we give gifts. Not because the wise men brought gifts to Jesus, but because giving gifts expresses the desire to share what we have in recognition of the fact that only together can we survive the encroachments of the darkness. Christmas is communal. Birthdays and anniversaries are personal celebrations, restricted to one or two individuals in any community. But Christmas is for us all. As Henry Van Dyke says in our second reading today, ‘you can never keep it alone’. Gift giving symbolises community, reciprocity, mutual concern. Sending Christmas cards has the same unconscious aim: to reinforce the sense of connection, to reassure us that we are part of an extended group.
And, of course, our innate optimism is the reason why we entertain fanciful and unrealistic notions of peace at this time of year; because we are hopeful people. Hope keeps us alive. Hope is the forgotten virtue. ‘Without hope, without vision, the people perish’ the Bible tells us. Christmas is the great season of hope, when we imagine, if just for a few days, just what the world could be like.
And into this blessed season of light and hope and community, we incorporate the story of the birth of Jesus. And it is absolutely appropriate that we should because, whether by accident or design, this beautiful story explores all these themes. Jesus is the light of the world, the one who comes to liberate us from spiritual darkness, from the barren coldness of materialism and selfishness. In the baby Jesus, indeed in every child, ‘the hope of the world is ever renewed’, as we say in our baptism ceremony.
At Christmas we defy the darkness. And we do it together. That’s what we are doing here in church. Theology alone didn’t bring us here this morning. Desire for community brought us here, and it’s desire for community which will inspire our continuing celebrations. We will all celebrate this desire in different ways according to our culture, our traditions, our circumstances and our needs, but do it we should; nay, do it we must.
‘Christmas does not need any improvements,’ says Garrison Keillor. ‘It is a common ordinary experience that resists brilliant innovation… … … Too many people work too hard to make Christmas perfect. Perfection is a goal of brilliant people and it is unnecessary where Christmas is concerned.’
Amen to that. Let’s leave Christmas alone. A happy Christmas to one and all.
25th December 2009