Christmas and the Dark
Posted: December 24th, 2009 | Filed under: Modern / Not Modern
My friends Stephanie and Nathan, in love and in life.
The Christmas holiday as we know it is a celebration of life - this we do through getting together with blood relatives, the people wherein our lives begin and grow. It’s meant to be the best day of the year, the time when the stuff we really live for is most present. It’s an assertion of life against the coldness of winter and the short dark day of solstice. In the Christian form, there’s even a birth in the mix, a miracle birth of a deity in human form, no less.
Christmas, therefore, is liturgical - even in its secular form. In liturgy, people agree to perform some set of actions by a predetermined schedule, for the purposes of re-experiencing their base principles. In America, for example, the Fourth of July is a liturgical form, as is the Super Bowl (for better or for worse). And so Christmas is a liturgical act - a regular, collective act of celebrating life.
We all know how liturgies can ring true or ring hollow for people. When the Season’s celebration of life is presented as compulsory, easy, and even natural, those for whom death is more evident on this day might be forgiven for hurrying the day along, even dreading it.
I’m thinking about all this for many reasons tonight, but chiefly because of the people in my life who have lost much this year. My loved ones have lost loved ones. People I love have lost their jobs, their homes, their reasons for pushing through. People I love are missing their loved ones, badly.
So Christmas can ring hollow as a corporate celebration of life in these circumstances. Cynicism is so easy for me, especially in defense of others. I’m looking for another way tonight. Collective rituals can be good, I don’t want to see these things go away.
All I can think of is this - that liturgy intended solely to affirm the positive or provoke warm emotion is at best a limited ritual, and at worst a lie. The most powerful and rich liturgies, the most valuable ones, are meaningful because of what they push for when there’s no feeling at all. Ritual shouldn’t be meaningless for those who can’t feel the intended emotions - ritual should instead find its meaning in the lack of those emotions. The loss of faith, the loss of reasons for hope, is the REASON for the ritual. The liturgy is where the people push back, humbly moving their bodies in hope that their hearts will follow.
This is what I’ll be thinking about tomorrow. I’ll be searching through the carols I know for what song could express the good of the light while it is still yet dark.
I’ll be doing this because I want to think on Christmas about the life I want to fight for against the darkness. I want to celebrate Christmas not because I feel all sorts of good things about life, but because I want to push back, with others, against the night, against death.
[This post indebted to theologian James K. Smith.]