This year being what it is, I was even willing to forego my grousing when Christmas decorations went up even earlier than usual. I felt that perhaps this year we all needed some cheer and Christmas cheer is as good as any cheer. But beyond that, I guess I hoped this year might be a little different. At least from where I stand, it doesn't seem to be much different. We've just made the necessary adjustments and carried on. The consumerist gluttony now begins in early October, which seems to usher in one long and increasingly undifferentiated "holiday" season.
Every year since I first read it five or six years ago, I re-read the late William McIlvanney's short article on Christmas he wrote nearly 20 years ago for The Scotsman, a Scottish national newspaper: "Religious ritual still has place in modern world." It amounts to a plea by an agnostic not to abandon completely the religious meaning of Christmas and even our need for God.
If you think about it, even if you are an ardent or uncertain non-believer, a skeptical quasi-believer, or a believing non-practitioner, without its religious meaning Christmas is very shallow. I mean, there is no deep mystery about Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, elves, and reindeer. Whatever resemblance Santa bore to Saint Nicholas has long-since vanished. This cast of characters is a bit like Brill Cream- "a little dab'll do ya." Honestly, I've more or less felt this way since I was very young.
Judging by the utterly weird menageries of blow-up figures that litter so many lawns, McIlvanney seems right to conclude: "Like so many other things now, Christmas has gone post-modern. It's all comparative. You take the concept like a rough length of cloth and cut it to suit your taste."
It's pointless to rail against the freedom that permits the cutting and tailoring. Nonetheless, the pattern that results has little bearing on Christmas and yields little fruit. I am not opposed to enjoyment. But we rush to it with no prelude. It's like initimate relations not only without foreplay but without any romantic prelude. We've moved the Twelve Days of Christmas to the 12 days before Christmas. It likely goes without saying that when life becomes only about enjoyment it turns into a denial of reality, avoidance of the inevitable, an exercise in distraction. In a word, hedonism. At root, the problem with hedonism is its inherent nihilism.
Some people insist that Advent is not a penitential season. It isn't, at least not exclusively. It certainly isn't just a shorter mid-winter Lent. Beginning this Sunday, Gaudete Sunday, Advent takes a turn. But the first two weeks of this season certainly have a penitential quality. Hence, the repeated calls, culminating last Sunday with our reading of the Baptist's preaching, to repent and prepare for Christ's return. This understanding of the penitential quality of the first half of Advent comes by taking the Missal and the Lectionary as your criteria.
The collapse of time during the season of Advent, which was summarized nicely long ago by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who stated that we simultaneously await Christ's glorious return, his being born again in our hearts, and our remembrance of his humble birth, leads us contemplatively to time-out-of-time. Thinking about the last-mentioned of these comings, these advents, our remembrance of the Nativity of the Son of God must include his being born in an animal shelter, wrapped in rags, and placed in a feeding trough.
Our calling to mind Jesus's Nativity, of course, is the Third Joyful Mystery of the Blessed Virgin's Rosary. The fruit of this musytery is poverty. It seems to me that "Christmastime" highlights the reality that we are rich in everything except spirit. The surest way to kill wonder is to try manufacturing it.
McIlvanney's article is actually positive in a characteristically Celtic way that many people can't recognize. He asserts that even though Christianity no longer shapes Scottish, or American, culture to the extent it formerly did, by-and-large, even now people maintain an awareness of its religious nature with many even taking the time to attend a religious service. "In such a situation," he goes on to observe, "it's not impossible to see Christmas as being for many people the intensive care unit of a dying faith kept dubiously alive on the life-support machine of commercialism." It is precisely the dubiousness of the life support system that concerns me.
The one concession I will make to "Christmastime" is that I love egg nog. I don't drink too much of it because I tend to overindulge. By overindulge, I mean go utterly crazy. My late friend, Michael Spencer, one of the first to claim the name "post-Evangelical," the original Internet Monk, wrote a piece on his love of egg nog, which, along with McILvanney's more sobering piece, I read every December: "True Confessions of an Egg Now Addict." My potential egg nog addiction is season agnostic. I would drink egg nog to excess on the Fourth of July.
I am happy that Easter seems to have more or less failed as a secular holiday.
As we near the end of the second week of Advent, headed for the "turn" that happens on Sunday, I think Michael Card's song "Maranatha" off his Present Reality album keeps the spirit of the penitential portion of this complex liturgical season:
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