I DIDN'T POST my favorite cranky Christmas piece by Garrison Keillor in which he mentions the Unitarians around Cambridge who rewrote Silent Night so as to make it more about silence and night and leaving God out of it. No doubt to save the embarrassment of having to consider God and, you know, Jesus Christ had something to do with Christmas. And as Mary McGlone's piece I borrowed yesterday shows, there is plenty in the original song about sleeping in heavenly peace that misses the point, making one of the most fraught and difficult as well as most welcomed good news of the Nativity story disappear in dangerous sentimentality. So I've linked to it now in this, another of my own cranky Christmas pieces.
American Christmas specializes in burying the real meaning of the story in cargo and boozy jollity. It buries the story, perhaps reportage of the event, the birth of Jesus Christ, the original war on Christmas that FOX Lies carries on on the side of the real holiday here, stuffmas. The Incarnation story in Luke, which has been so much the focus of debunking, were probably the story of scoffing well before Luke used the stories he had collected to write his account. A pregnant virgin is bound to lead to that, which leads me to believe no one would have made it up as a story they wanted anyone to believe. That is unless they were convinced of it, sufficiently, themselves. But within the story is the profound claim of God's relationship with the world and universe which we know so fragmentarily through our experience and through the extension of that in science, that the Creation is in the most intimate and complete way, part of God, that God permeates all of it, most of all, for us, our own selves and lives. The Incarnation whether it is report or fable is a claim of that in the person of Jesus but the meaning of it is universal. Certainly, Luke makes that clear and the cast of his account. Nobodies, a young teenage girl betrothed to a manual laborer (not like a union carpenter today, then they had one of the lowest statuses in that society) pregnant before she was married, someone so far down that she and her husband had to lodge with the animals instead of in the main house, she being very pregnant. Laying her baby in a feeding trough surrounded by shit and, no doubt, flies and other insects. And the first people to get the good news were, as McGlone pointed out, very low on the social scale, shepherds. No kings, no gold, no insense or sweet smelling resins to cover up the smell. It couldn't possibly be less royal, less priestly, less elite and yet it is hijacked by the worst of those today to put it to the worst of all uses.
I've slammed Unitarians, myself, living out my entire life in New England I've known more than a few and been more than a bit irritated by some of them. Especially around college towns. Some are nice people, some almost as serious on living out the Gospel (if they'd excuse me saying that) as some of the better members of the United Church of Christ or Quakers or radical Catholics but a lot of them are as bad as some of the high church Anglicans and trad-Catholics, just not tending towards Republican-fascism - which is no small distinction, in itself. I think that their demotion of Christianity through their unitarianism, through their emphasis and then abandonment of something as unfashionable as God does, really, matter. Even when it stays on the better side from the thoroughly depraved and TV induced cargo-cult Christmas which is merry and meaningless. And it's such a cheat, even if you got the whole Christmas list from Eartha Kitt's vulgar materialist song to Santa Baby,* it wouldn't be a drop of spit next to the real thing, the news that God cares about you, that God cares about us all, that God cares about the animals and plants and ecosystem and the solar system, that God cares so much about the human experience of the world that he came to share our experience with all of its pain and suffering and even our better days. And to tell us we had to care about all of that, for all of us, too.
I have said a number of times I don't believe Creation is supposed to have settled for any past period of human experience, not the worst of times, certainly, but not our rose-tinted memories and imaginings of past times or our present. I don't think what Brueggemann calls "classical Christianity" was supposed to stand for all times - it couldn't anymore than any other human created system of explanation - or that anything we come up with in this life will stand, either. Classicism in any area, the absurd and ahistorical elevation of a particular, imaginary past, political, social or religious, is bound to rot into an oppressive system. The role that classicism played in the fascist and Nazi regimes of the past century is certainly worth considering as an example of that as is, I assert, the Renaissance and classical imagination of the Greek and Roman classical periods. I don't see the Renaissance as that imaginary improvement on the medieval period which we are all taught to consider it and I certainly don't think the "enlightenment" that still plagues us with its sins is either. Nor do I think that other tendency in gangster governance that concentrates on an imaginary future, imagined out of Romantic era philosophy and an absurd futurism as "science," Marxism is any better. All of those and the modern culture of materialist-atheist-scientism are, if anything, more imaginary than Luke's infancy narrative might be and none of them carries the potential to correct the worst aspects of any other framing of reality. Luke doesn't promise an Earthly utopia, it certainly doesn't hearken back to an idealized and romantically imagined past, it deals far to heavily in honesty and reality to do that. It does hold up the example of a young pregnant, unmarried girl and her hapless fiance, riding out the storm of Roman occupation and the corrupt period of Judean-Israelite history well into the decay of the Hasmonean era with its corrupt Temple priesthood and more corrupt traditional rulers. It holds up the by-the-skin-of-their-teeth Shepherds as those deemed by the Angels of God to be those fitting to first know the best news that humanity would ever get, that God had chosen to be born among us to someone on their own social level, living with animals - as they did- living among shit and flies and filth, coping as best they could. And it was the messengers of God who was telling them that, that they counted enough to have been told that and told it before anyone else had been. It might have been the first validation of their existence they'd experienced, it was certainly the greatest validation of their lives they could possibly ever have on this side of death. And they'd have been very familiar with death, babies died in the best of circumstances and those weren't the best of circumstances.
How does a Christmas tree and presents and American Christmas outshine that? That it does might hold a clue as to why it was done among those with next to nothing, likely illiterate, certainly uneducated, certainly poor or likely destitute. They might have been the only ones who could see it. Writing this reminds me of something I once read about the lives of young street walking prostitutes and the surprise of the author of the article how religious so many of them were. One said she knew whenever she had to get into a car that God got in the car with her. I can't imagine what that is like, though I can begin to understand it and understand why I can't see it. Maybe someday I will understand it better. Maybe someday I'll know that God is there in the abyss with me, the abyss I can well imagine is coming. Could there be any better news than that?
* It's too bad that so many younger People know Eartha Kitt only through that kind of thing, she was a lot more than that. She died on Christmas day, maybe someone should light a candle for her. Maybe I will.
