SOME
THOUGHTS ON ADVENT, CHRISTMAS, AND THE NEW YEAR.
I must confess
that as a Cleric I have mixed feelings about the
celebration of Christmas. It is a festival that was fixed in the
calendar, as so many of the Christian church’s practices, by
association with practices or customs coming from cultures predating
the emergence of the Christian Church. While parts of the
Christian Church have argued against many of the “Holy Days” including
the celebration of Christmas on the grounds that it represents elements
not truly Christian, this argument if taken seriously would soon be
forced to exclude all but a very few words abstracted from Greek
Scriptures and other Christian Writings. The evolution of
Christianity from the memory and experience of Christ was an evolution
that used parts of the surrounding cultures and understandings.
The historical Jesus was not a Christian and it would be stretching the
truth to suggest that what we now call Christianity was what the first
followers of Jesus actually followed.
The Feast
of the Incarnation, known popularly as Christmas, was
not a central celebration of the early Church. It was not until
the 4th century that it emerged as an important festival. There is
still in the Eastern and Western Churches a difference in the date of
the Feast and of the preparation for it. St Francis of Assisi and
Charles Dickens have as much to do with how we understand Christmas
today as the two accounts of the Birth of Jesus we have in Matthew and
Luke. Mark, the earliest Gospel written, does not have a nativity
narrative and begins with the relationship between John the Baptist and
Jesus, having Jesus being baptised by John as the beginning of Jesus’
public activity. John does not give a Narrative of the Nativity
but rather offers a metaphysical argument for the pre-existence of the
“Logos” that was Incarnate in Jesus.
The very
different accounts of the Nativity in Luke and Matthew also
indicate that the tradition about the birth of Jesus had from early on
various understandings and accounts. The growth of what we now
call Christmas was not inevitable or necessary. The Spiritual
understandings of the meaning of the Incarnation of God born in a
vulnerable and marginalized infant are profound and central but they
were not originally part of the early church’s celebrations nor are
they universally witnessed in the early writings of the church, either
canonical or non-canonical.
It was St.
Francis who originated the idea of a Nativity crèche,
when 3 years before his death he created a manager scene in order to
“excite the inhabitants of Grecio” where he was visiting at
Christmas. His idea soon became a common feature in most
Christmas celebrations. It was Charles Dickens, more than any
other, who made Christmas into a festival of gifts, snow and
winter. The season of birth of the historical Jesus had little of
the winter imagery we imagine. The winter gift giving and family
focus of Christmas owes a great deal to Dickens.
The Puritan
movement in Britain had banned, for a short time, and
succeeded in curtailing the celebrations around December 25th. At
the time of Dickens it is likely the celebration he envisaged in the
Christmas Carol did not exist. In fact the Carol can be seen as a
force countering the Puritan influence and arguing for a celebration
they would have been uncomfortable in celebrating. Christmas was
not a day-off or holiday and "was not lavishly celebrated, except in
some country homes. It simply wasn't a major, culturally dominant
celebration, but I think Dickens wanted to make it more so."
Santa Claus may
resemble St. Nicholas in some distant ways, whose feast
day is Dec. 6th, but in the main is a creation of North American
culture. Likely the Coca Cola Company was the first to give us the
rotund white beard fellow. Again there can be much about this
creation of modern times that appeals to the deeper spiritual insights
of the festival but it is well to realize that he is both a fabrication
of modernity and of the drive to market and commodify.
One could go
through every common symbol used at Christmas time and
point to its origins as coming from everywhere but Palestine.
Christmas without doubt is a creation of many cultures and times.
I am not meaning to take away any of the trappings, but I am interested
to suggest that there is a Spiritual insight that can be sometimes
buried, literally, under a mound of wrapping paper and tinsel.
The present
festival of Christmas as celebrated in our consumer and
materialistic culture appears to be at odds with the Spiritual
Dimensions of the Festival of the Incarnation. The two most
significant days in our culture associated with Christmas are “Black
Friday” and “Boxing Day”. Black Friday is the Friday after American
Thanksgiving that marks the beginning of the obsessive and compulsive
season of consumption that culminates in Christmas Day. Boxing
Day, once a day to recognize the servants with gifts, has now become
another day of obsessive shopping as “post-Christmas” sales begin.
While gift giving may be construed as a response to the Spiritual
Insight of seeing God in the most vulnerable and marginalized, it has
become an obsessive and obscene frenzy of a consumer society believing
it can purchase its way to justice and contentment.
The point of all
the above is not to merely dump all the things that
have accrued to Christmas through the years but rather to find those
practices, and those “spiritual insights” gained in the evolution
of the Festival that may help us to hold something of the meaning of
the Incarnation. Certainly the wonder of a child, the simplicity and
directness of love between parent and child is something to be
celebrated. Certainly an awareness of the vulnerability of the Sacred
as the presence and vision of compassion and justice for the marginal
and marginalized is to be valued. Certainly a celebration of the
hope, peace, joy and love that resists the will to power and despair of
our present world is central to the Incarnation. The heart of
this Holy Day that has evolved through many cultures and social forms,
is found in the stillness at wonder’s birth in the human heart.
Christ is born, we say in our liturgies, on this day and therefore on
everyday for those who will seek the hope, the joy, the peace and the
love incarnate in human form and in the flesh and blood of human
experience. The child of God born long ago is born again in each
act of compassion and every cry for justice. It is up to us to
prepare room for the birth of wonder in our world. May the Feast
of the Incarnation find us all with Mary bearing God born as a child
for a world in need of hope beyond despair.
As this year
ends, I want to speak also of “philia,” or friendship. It
is one
of the most important practices found in all spiritual
traditions. In the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, an important mystic in
the Early Eastern Church, he speaks of Friendship as the aim for all
human actions, “Count all else as dross, next to Friendship with the
Divine.” He suggests a Spiritual path that has as its aim friendship
with all, and finally with the Divine Reality that befriends all. To
enter into Friendship with the Divine is to come at last to an inner
state of peace, where one attends to that which befriends all that
isthe
Sacred. This “Cosmic Friend” is the one who calls us all into the
creative dance of being and values each one, not as an “object” but as
a
subject to be befriended. This spiritual realization moves us beyond
the
destructive play of guilt and compulsion that distorts so much of our
humanity. In Friendship we do things not out of guilt nor out of pity
but out of a sense of the infinite value and beauty of the other who is
our friend. This may sound a peculiar idea, but befriending not only
“human” others but befriending all parts of the natural world places us
in a relationship that is so profoundly different from the destructive
religious and secular patterns common to most western cultures as to
mark
a radical shift. St Francis of Assisi suggests this Spiritual path when
he speaks of "Brother Sun and Sister Moon." Francis
greets all things as friends and Creatures of God. Hugh of St.
Victor spoke of this befriending of the Sacred, the World and the
Human,
as the central spiritual discipline of the monastic. Aquinas spoke of
friendship as the true spring of all moral action. As I approach a new
year, I hope to exercise more fully the Spiritual practice of
friendship
and I wish for each of you in the coming year a deepening of the bonds
and joy of friendship.
“Each friend represents a world in
us, a
world
possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting
that
a new world is born.” -
Anaïs Nin