T
he stockings are hung by the chimney with care at the ancestral Mead mansion; and as I settle down for a long winter’s rest I am taking a break from politics and war, sort of, to do some good old fashioned Yuletide blogging.
In particular I want to blog about Christmas itself and what it means. Somehow my generation decided to leave this part out when we passed down the traditions and the lore we were taught to the next generation: we’ve bought a lot of Christmas presents but we were too busy to think much about the meaning of the story or to teach the next generation much about this holiday and the religion which it defines.
That was a mistake. On behalf of us all, I apologize, and this Christmas I’ll be doing my little bit to make amends.
I’ve got some time to do it in. As most of us know from the song about the partridge and the pear tree, there are twelve days of Christmas. The season ends on January 6, traditionally celebrated as the day when the three wise men arrived in Bethlehem with those gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In Elizabethan England the last night of the Christmas season was celebrated with special parties and feasts. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was written to be performed at that special time of year.
Even today, the twelve days of Christmas are more than a phrase from a carol. In much of the Spanish speaking world, January 6 is when kids get their presents. Jesus got gold, frankincense and myrrh; they get video games and dolls. In New Orleans, January 6 marks the end of the season of Christmas holiday parties and feasting, and the start of the Carnival season of parties and feasting. When I lived there I remember people bitterly complaining how unfair life was; while everyone else in the country was going on post-Christmas diets, we poor put-upon people in New Orleans still faced a month of king cake parties and packing on the pounds.
In the old days people kept a Yule log burning during the holiday season; at Via Meadia we’ve had a tradition from the start of a festive Yule blog. From now until January 6, I’ll be Yule-blogging: reflecting on Christmas in ways that I hope will make sense to Christians and non-Christians alike. The Yule blog is a work in progress; each year I try to make it a little clearer, a little more useful, a little less hopelessly inadequate at explaining some of the most important and mysterious truths there are.
The meaning of Christmas is much bigger than the trite clichés that usually come up in this context; I won’t just be writing about the Importance of Giving and the Desirability of Being Nice. Christmas, at least the way I was taught, is a lot more than a merry interlude in the darkest, nastiest time of the year. It is more than getting or even giving. It is more than carols and candy, more than wonderful meals with the people you love best in the world. It is much more than the modern echo of the pagan festivities marking the winter solstice and the moment when the sun begins to reverse its long and slippery slide down the sky.
For Christians, 77% of the American people according to a recent Gallup poll, Christmas is the hinge of the world’s fate, the turning point of life. It is the most important thing that ever happened, or at least the beginning of it, and we celebrate it every year because it is still happening now. Whether we know it or not, whether we appreciate it or not, we are part of the Christmas Event that has turned history upside down. There’s a reason why we date the birth of Christ as the year 1 and why traditionally the world’s history was divided into BC, before Christ, and AD, anno domini, the year of the Lord.
Actually, as Pope Benedict XVI reminded us, the monk who tried to calculate it seems to have gotten it wrong; Jesus was probably born four to six years “BC”. He also did not know about the use of zero as a number; there is no Year Zero between AD and BC — which is why irritating pedants remind people at every turn of the century that the “real” new century or millennium doesn’t begin until 2001, for example, rather than on January 1, 2000. Also worth noting while correcting the math here, that the Twelfth Night, traditionally celebrated on the evening of January 6 is actually the Thirteenth Night after Christmas itself. January 6 is its own, separate feast in the Christian calendar, the Feast of the Epiphany. I’ll get to it in due course, but that is why there are thirteen posts for the twelve days.
Superficially, Christmas is a simple and user-friendly holiday: presents, tree, more presents, food, deck the halls and fa-la-la. How hard is that? But if you look beyond the commercial hype and the pop culture celebration, Christmas is a complicated festival that expresses some of the core beliefs that shape the identities and world views of about a third of the world’s people. Non-Christians, including the 5% of Americans who adhere to a non-Christian religion and the 18% who either claimed no religion at all or chose not to answer the pollsters, need to know about Christianity as much or perhaps even more as Christians do, simply in order to understand the cultural foundations of the society in which they live.
Religious education has pretty much fallen by the wayside in American life today. That’s a problem in more ways than one; I see the consequences all the time when students I teach – and policy makers and journalists I know – simply do not comprehend the cultural foundations of American politics and cannot understand the ways that so many people here and around the world are moved by religious values and ideas. I have taught a course on the relationship of American religious ideas to American foreign policy in some of our leading colleges, and I have had smart, well traveled and otherwise well-read students in that course who have never opened a Bible (or any other holy book) in their lives and simply had no idea why so many other people read and study it every day of their lives.
For Christians, I hope these blog posts will enrich your experience of this special season. To believe in the truth of the Christian religion and to encounter Jesus Christ as the saving Son of God is just the first step; deepening your faith through reflection and understanding, appreciating faith’s resonances and mysteries, participating in the communion of saints and God’s own life, joining the story and not just reading it: that is what being a Christian is about.
I’m trying to blog as a vanilla Christian; that is, I’m trying to write about the elements of our faith that virtually all major Christian communities have historically shared. That puts me at odds with some of the more liberal trends in contemporary American mainline Protestantism; I think the historic statements of Christian doctrine as found in documents like the Nicene Creed make sense and give an accurate and compelling description of what it means to have a Christian faith. I’m an Anglican by conviction as well as by birth and that will inevitably influence the way I approach Christmas, but I won’t be trying to sneak in special little Anglican concepts here, and this won’t be about controversial ideas that divide Christians like infant baptism, predestination, the infallibility of scripture or, for that matter, the infallibility of the Pope. I hope that Christians of many denominations well find something here that captures what the holiday means to them, and that they will forgive any errors or misapprehensions on my part. These are deep waters, and even stronger swimmers than yours truly can be swept off course.
Final disclaimer: I’m not really qualified to do this. I’m not some kind of spotless saint who has achieved deep spiritual insight through a lifetime of asceticism, deep study and constant prayer. Much of what I’ve learned about the right way to live has come through experiencing the consequence of doing things the wrong way first, and my knowledge of God, such as it is, is more the result of experiencing mercy and forgiveness than some kind of reward for living right. To make matters worse, I’m not trained: As a layman I have no special theological training and don’t speak with any ecclesiastical authority whatever. If something in this blog troubles you, you should consult with experienced and thoughtful Christians whose lives inspire you, or the leaders of your own church. Christmas is big, and understanding it is hard.
However, we’ll keep things as simple as possible here at the Yule blog. After a few posts reviewing the basic story of Christmas, the Yule Blog will move on to the meaning of Christmas. That is the more complicated part; Christmas isn’t just the holiday that celebrates the birthday of the Founder of one of the world’s great religions. It’s the main reason so many of the world’s other great religions don’t like Christianity very much. Christians talk about that baby in the manger as God on earth. The monotheistic religions like Judaism and Islam find that idea blasphemous; polytheistic religions like Hinduism wonder why Christians think their own divine birth is so special while Christians look down on those who worship other divine babies born in other places and times. Christmas, a holiday that is supposedly about peace, is one of the most divisive holidays on the world’s calendar. I want to blog about why.
Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to those of you inclined to celebrate that holiday, and seasonal greetings to everyone else. Whatever your faith or lack of it, however you understand the meaning and purpose of your life, may the next few days be a time of rest, relaxation and healing reflection for you that brings you closer to those you love, more generous to those in need and more in tune with that wiser, happier, richer and more generous self that it’s your hope, your duty and, with the help of a merciful God, your destiny to become.