It's Christmas Time!

Aaargh! It wasn’t yet Thanksgiving and they were playing Christmas music in the mall! Hang a shining star upon the highest bough and have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

There’s a near-automatic refudiation, as Sarah Palin would say, when someone who takes Christianity seriously hears these tunes so far away from the actual season, and with an obvious intent of milking the occasion for as much profit as possible. As the righteous slogan used to go: “Christmas sacred, or Christ massacred?”

But then I started listening more carefully and thinking: Is this all simply to make money? Is it all just digging for pay dirt?

Something about the tone of the song struck me, a sense of something precious set against a background of something lost, or threatened with loss. Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore. Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more. Through the years we all will be together, if the Fates allow

What are those “olden days, happy golden days of yore”? And what are the “Fates” that may or may not allow “faithful friends who are dear to us [to] gather near to us once more”?

Did those olden days ever truly exist? Or are they not a metaphor for a fleeting but deep rooted feeling of closeness, of life, of forgiveness, of love? Are they not in fact a popular, acceptable displacement of a much deeper eschatological (present and to come) sense, diffused through culture, of a world freed by Christ from anger, hatred, war and death?

Hold onto your evangelical and liberal hats now! I know it’s a stretch and that we’ve been taught to think about Christmas and the holidays in more and more a “secular” sense. That the world and Christian religion have to be held separate. But may not the “secular” be itself just another displacement—of the world’s own authentic drive (overlaid with lots of distortions and disfigurement for sure) toward a destiny seeded in it by the gospel?

Probably the most popular Christmas song of all is I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. As is well known this song was written and released during the Second World War and was one of the most requested numbers in the Armed Forces Network. It was No. 1 in the Billboard charts in three separate years spanning the war, 1942, 1945, 1946. It is also the best-selling single of all time, with estimated sales in excess of 50 million worldwide. (Thanks to Wikipedia for these fascinating fun facts!)

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas just like the ones I used to know, where the treetops glisten, and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.

What is that but a reaching out for a world freed from the lowering clouds and miasma of war, where nature is pristine and there are no sounds of violence, rather we can hear the music of an approaching absolute gift? And this is possible not in some vague general sense, but in the totally easy implicit sense of “Christmas”, something that happens right here, year in year out.

No wonder they want to extend the season!

For sure it’s the easy implicit sense that says it’s not to be taken seriously—we accept the nostalgia, the wisting and wishing, the deep-snow hush of Silent Night, but then afterward there is the huge trash heap from the gifts, and none of it makes any real difference. The meat-grinder of history continues just as before, and perhaps every year worse. But that’s not where my own soul leads me. If words and signs are the true human food and the best of these comes from the gospel, then I would rather say that all this longing and regret, all this wistfulness, is only there because the reality is there before it. We would not regret what we have never known, what we have never experienced. Underneath all the mixed emotions, therefore, lies the mother lode of a new earth. We experience it only here and there, as thin veins of ore, but nevertheless, if we look with true eyes, we can see they form the irrefutable traces of a transformed human way. What then makes the season so special is its constant authentic sense of a regenerative shift as the year is reborn in its journey, of an earth at peace, with all rivalries and hatreds dissolved by the absolute nonviolence of the baby Son of God. This powerless child has emptied heaven and every other vertical oppressive environment of its storehouses of thunderbolts, the bombs and drones, the diseases and death, the lies and conspiracies and cover-ups. In this new world everything is green and alive and red and full-blooded and passionate with love.

Here is Isaiah of Jerusalem’s description of this time, written centuries before the first Christmas but looking forward to coming of the Nonviolent One who could make it happen. Someone ought to set it to music and I know they’ll play it in the malls!

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food,
a feast of well-aged wines….
And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever.
Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth… (Isaiah 25:6-8)