The New York Times has recently given a digital subscription to every teacher and student in America. As a result, I can finally read some of the more controversial--or blasé, depending on the day--op-eds and articles that have been behind a paywall. This morning, a number of the op-eds revolved around Christmas and worship. I read two of them, and I wanted to riff off of this one. (I recommend the one about the Zoom church meetings, too, for what it's worth.)
Peter Wehner's thoughts are interesting to me because he has stripped down just what was so revolutionary and radical about Jesus Christ during His own time. As a Mormon--a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--who doesn't really think of himself as a Christian in its modern form, there's a lot that appeals to me. First of all, I think that there's a large difference between Christ and Christianity, the former being of so much greater import than the latter that it hardly bears mentioning. Christianity is what much of the New Testament is interested in establishing; the four Gospels contain all that Jesus said during his mortal (and slightly post-mortal) ministry. It's not a lot, considering how large of an effect His life has had on the history of the world. And, as a Mormon, there are additional components to this--parts of the Doctrine and Covenants, as well as a few chapters in 3 Nephi of the Book of Mormon--that I would call "canonically Christ's". Even with the Mormonic "additional scriptures", what Jesus actually said and did is a pretty sparse account. Even the four Gospels mostly repeat each other, adding nuance, detail, flavor, or expansion in most of the stories. In short, there's not a lot that could be said accounts for Jesus' ministry among mankind. And that's what works so well about Wehner's look. He is drawing our attention to the radical ideas of love, acceptance, and seeking out those most in need of healing--the core concept of Christ's mortal ministry. There's more to what Christ did while He was here, of course. However, His divine ministry, as it were, involved the sacrifice and atonement of mankind, a singular act done by a singular Being that is not really what can be emulated by the rest of us. His mortal ministry shows us how to live; His divine ministry shows us why we live. So it seems fair to me that we spend some time focusing on Jesus' life, particularly as it's currently Christmas Eve and if I don't do at least this essay, there's no guarantee that I'll be having many spiritual experiences over the next two days of avarice and indulgence. I should say that I am definitely a Scrooge: I don't much care for the Christmas season--it's cold, it demands a huge amount for someone whose introverted nature balks at so much interaction, and the lies of the time bother me (kids may know that Jesus is the reason that we celebrate Christmas, but it's the gifts under the tree that make them excited about this time of year; also, lying about Santa Claus has not sat right with me; I remain silent on the topic every year, letting my wife carry that burden of perjury). For a long time, the fact that it lasted all month long--a type of "holimonth" instead of a "holiday"--irked me. Though it could be the COVID restrictions talking, but maybe I'm a bit past that? It certainly hasn't been as draining this year: We don't have to worry about family-, friend-, and ward parties, sledding (harder and harder to do on an ever-warming globe), watching a perpetually-growing list of "traditional" Christmas shows, and an entire miscellany of additional add-ons to the stresses of this time of year. Also, I continue to change as an individual, so my feelings likewise, perhaps, are changing. After however many years to think about it, I may have come to my conclusion about why Christmas, of all the pagan observations subsumed into Christianity's calendar, has left me cold. I think it's because people kept insisting that we should "put Christ back into Christmas". To explain that, let me talk about something else: Cathedrals. I've been to Europe only a couple of times, so I can only speak in a limited way on this, but one of my favorite things to do is to visit European cathedrals. The denomination doesn't matter to me--religiously speaking, Protestant or Catholic, I view them as spiritual cousins rather than ancestors--I just like being in them. I've been to Koln, Notre Dame (both of Paris and Bayeux), and a couple others. They're always exciting to me, letting me glimpse incredible architecture and religious iconography that is familiar-yet-different. After all of the cookie-cutter, utilitarian churches I attended throughout my life, with only a handful of similar artwork hanging on the walls of the hallways (LDS churches don't do bells, stained glass depictions, reliefs, triptychs, statues, candles, or much beyond ninety-degree angles and burlap-textured walls), seeing so much diversity in religious understanding really spoke to me. I would stand outside them and do the very thing their imposing and inspiring architecture was designed to do: Tip the head and direct the gaze heavenward. As far as the religious worship happening there--vespers and censers, kneeling and recited prayers, communion of soul and parishioner--I remained aloof. I had no problem being respectfully reverential toward those who visited the site as a religious duty or desire, but that wasn't my reason for being there. I had a different approach, one that satisfied me and my needs, albeit of a more secular or academic reason. The point of a cathedral is to help the worshippers have a spiritual experience. That's why they're made. (Yes, there were political shenanigans with the creation of many of them, but the motives of those few historical figures aren't what I'm worried about here.) Their splendor, their ingenuity, their imposition, their hope--all of these things are part of what they're designed to do. Just like it's a marvel-bordering-on-a-miracle to see a medieval cathedral rising up from the ground, it's a miracle that God has created Mankind by rising them up from the dust. From the shape of the building as a cross to commemorate the mode of Christ's death down to the materials used--to build upon a rock, rather than a sandy foundation--are all calculated to add to a person's devotion. Do some of the explanations come about through a post-hoc justification that was not part of the original intention? Surely that's so, though that matters very little. The point of the cathedral is to sweep up people in feelings of awe and reverence that can then be easily transmitted to even higher vistas of religious worship. It also acts as a tourist destination. The tragic loss of Paris' Notre Dame still hurts my heart. Seeing it in flames was one of the saddest images in my pre-2020 lifetime. But I haven't lost a part of my religious identity or my history with the loss of that cathedral. As a citizen of the world, I feel that its loss has impoverished humanity; as a worshipper of Christ, I do not feel that same loss. Other cathedrals exist, other churches, other temples. There are other ways for people to worship, but there's no other Notre Dame of Paris. I continue to mourn the loss of mosques, synagogues, monasteries, chapels, and cathedrals due to the degradation of time, the violence of wars, and neglect of parishioners. There is a rich human history in worshipping the divine that irretrievably slips from us whenever these important areas are no longer frequented, remembered, or appreciated. And sometimes, as in the case of the fire at Notre Dame, accidents rob us and our future generations of the devotion of previous generations. It isn't the slowing of worship that personally hurts me, it's the overall contribution to human society that causes my regret. However, true believers will know that it's less the stones and more the stories, less the place and more the people, less the gaudy and more the God that matters. Worship of a place is an idolatry, and loss of great places helps to remind us of that. Christmas is a cathedral. Inside of it, true believers can focus on the stories, people, and God that comprise its walls. Its outer confines, its spires and its clerestories, its flying buttresses and its apses…these are all the exteriority. You cannot see the how high the belltower goes from the pews. When you're inside the cathedral, you can appreciate much of its work, but the purpose is the worship that you can do while inside of it. Though there is some bits of religious performance, there isn't a performative nature to true worship, regardless of where you are. The cathedral is a place wherein the spiritual can happen. So, too, is Christmas an inside thing, a place where the spiritual can happen. And, like all spiritual moments, it is fundamentally and fortuitously personal: No one can be spiritual on your behalf. That's something that can better be done if in a place set aside for it. Christmas is a cathedral. Outside of it, anyone can focus on the marvels that it creates. This is where the lights, snow, red caps with white trim, and the commercialism reside. The sweeping architecture of a capitalist concoction is so stunning, so all-encompassing that it literally causes sleeplessness. This is the "secular" side of Christmas, but it is also part of the building. They are separate, yet connected. And the problem I have with "putting Christ back into Christmas" is that it strives to pull out what is only valuable within. The vespers are best suited for being spoken inside; what makes the cathedral significant to the parishioners isn't found outside. Yet it's the outside that most people see, most people interact with. There are Parisians who never bothered to step foot inside of Notre Dame; I, some random bloke from Chapelvalley Utah, have had the opportunity to walk over its medieval stones twice now. So Christmas is something that can be appreciated (or somewhat ignored…I don't know that any Parisian in the concourse of the past few centuries wasn't at least aware of Notre Dame) at whatever level. The point is, when people insist on their version of Christmas, that their internal become the external, I find myself bristling. There are very few ways that one can do Christmas wrong, but I think there are, still, a few. Those that get bent out of shape because they wish to be wished "Merry Christmas" by apathetic and overworked retail cashiers; that their coffee cups have the "correct" terminology on them; that the parties and the gifts be "correctly" observed; that the "right" meals must be cooked by unthanked and overworked mothers and wives; that the Christmas tree be visible in the White House or Rockefeller Center and bedecked with all of its glitz; that the radio station be tuned to the "Christmas station" in order to listen to the same three hours total of Christmas music that has been stale since before Thanksgiving; that there be a manger scene at their courthouse; that the kids dress up in itchy, ill-fitting clothes to parade in front of the grown-ups while a drowsy rereading of Luke chapter 2 drones beneath the children's buzzing voices; that we "take a moment to think about Jesus" before indulging in the avarice of the season…the issue here is the insistence that the cathedral be viewed from only one angle, that its purpose be monolithic. A believer can enter a cathedral without look up, without seeing the carvings of saints and apostles standing over the entrance and will walk away being fulfilled. A struggling Mormon can cross the ocean and marvel solely at the stonework. It can be a spiritual gift or a secular miracle. Christmas can be many things, but it can't be all things. Insisting that it must be will lead to disappointment, much like if you came to Notre Dame hoping to play some basketball. You've brought the wrong expectation to the right place. (If you really want to play basketball in a consecrated, holy building, just go to your local LDS chapel. We have more basketball courts than we have belfries.) This is more than a "let everyone enjoy Christmas in their own way" plea, however. I think there is active harm in the forcing the internal out or the external in. A cathedral must have both inner and outer walls. Even though it's of the same structure, there is a difference. If anything, I'm saying that the two "sides" of Christmas are fundamentally incompatible: You cannot hold up the façade of a cathedral and claim that people aren't worshipping it correctly when the worship happens on the inside. That, to me, is what happens when people grouse about a "war on Christmas" or think that secular resistance to the ubiquity of the holiday in some way prevents it from existing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that those who gnaw on the non-issue of who says "happy holidays" as opposed to "merry Christmas" have yet to walk in through the doors of the cathedral and instead are fixated on a single stone on the plinth. No, I think that an appreciation of Christmas needs to be as radical as its namesake, with that appreciation being much like salvation: A personal connection that transpires because the individual has chosen to walk inside. Merry Christmas… …and happy holidays, from both sides of the cathedral. Consumption is the way of life; consumerism is something else altogether.
As a teacher, the wherewithal to buy a lot of consumer goods is…limited. No, this isn't a post about how little teachers are paid (I have a take on that, but I haven't written it, yet). After all, compared to many other people the world over, my life--and bank account--is beyond enviable. I mean, I'm typing this on a computer that I own (finally: I bought it on credit from Best Buy right around the time we moved into New Place and I finished paying it off last month) in a warm house with plenty of space and electricity practically oozing out of the walls, anxious to be used to fire up even more gadgets. It's pretty great, honestly. But the problem isn't recognizing what I have; it's tamping down on what I want. And nothing explodes one's sense of self-control quite like the cupidity of the Christmas season. I know that one of the large parts of my antipathy toward the month of December is the incongruity of worshiping a Man who lived his life in abject poverty, despite being a king, and the cultural disapprobation for not splurging to excess--even financial duress--under the same banner of Christ's Mass*. The thing is, I know it's better to be content with what I have. And I struggle--I really do--to keep that as my default. I don't buy books nearly as often as I have the impulse to. I have yet to get new shelves in my office, despite needing them for my ever-growing collection. With a couple of notable exceptions, I don't buy new video games when they come out, preferring to wait--sometimes for years--to buy them at a used price instead. These are luxuries, of course, though there's something to be said for extracting some measure of pleasure out of the dark world in which we live. And that's what gets me: I have plenty and to spare, so why do I allow myself to foster avarice? Here's an example: I have a black desk mat on my office desk. It matches the décor and helps keep the desk from getting scratched. It makes the room feel more professional (until you look at all of the action figures all around me) and I appreciate the way it helps me write, as the edge of my desk gouges into my forearms if I don't use the mat to protect them. And guess what? I really want one of these $60 mats from Angelarium.net. All of the artwork on the website is fantastic--a major inspiration for how I conceived of the sundry goddess and gods in my NaNoWriMo book, Theomancy--and I think it would be so great if I could replace my desk mat with one from the website, preferably the one pictured at the top of the post (which is also the link). There's no practical reason why I should trade up. The mat's dimensions make it so that the expensive, artsy version would cover less of my desk and work less efficiently than my boring-old-black one does now. In other words, the wanting to have it is, in some ways, more appealing than actually having it. What frustrates me, I think, is that I clearly understand the issue. I don't need it. Even if I needed a replacement, I don't need a $60 one. That's madness. But I want it. Like, really badly. I'm considering picking it up with some Christmas money that tends to come my way each year, rather than doling out the dollars at the bookstore as my dysthymia mandates, which is my usual practice. Again: Madness. Why am I like that? I know I'm not alone. Cultural conditioning, social pressures, and psychological impulses all dictate a lot of what's going on inside of everyone's head. And with the annual permissiveness that "It only comes once a year" provides, there's an explicit expectation to splurge, indulge, and allow that greed to winnow its way into the zeitgeist. I'm hardly immune to that sort of thinking and behavior. Every year I read Les Miserables during this time. And every year I'm reminded of what it really means to want, to be unable to know where my next meal is coming from. I have a good life, where much more than I could reasonably expect is part of my day-to-day living. That's not nothing. And every year, I mumble something to my wife about something or other that I would like for Christmas (although I'm actually pretty easy to shop for: I like gift cards to Barnes and Noble, since that's basically where I buy almost everything I want for myself, or something related to Shakespeare or Milton), and then I try hard not to expect to get anything that I would want. It's a strange tension inside of me, one that I can't seem to shake. I resist the avarice throughout so much of the year, the easing up comes unnaturally, yet if I don't resist it and embrace the excess, then I feel guilty for not being a part of the festive spirit. It's all…strange. Life's strange. So, I guess that makes sense, doesn't it? --- * Also, I'm not even Catholic, so why would I worry about different Masses? But if I grinch the season, I'm the Scrooge somehow? Bah. Humbug. In the past I've done a "timed write", which is when I put my fingers on the keyboard and let them run until the timer stops. In this case, I'm looking at twenty minutes of work wherein I will let the thoughts go with as little effort at revising as I can muster.
Fortunately, I have a lot on my mind. Tonight, we did a tradition that I personally dislike, which is the annual pumpkin carving. There's nothing that really appeals to me, as my artistic abilities are limited when it comes to sculpture, and I don't really enjoy getting all slimy. Plus, pumpkin guts smell. More than that, however, it is a really wasteful tradition, one that is somewhat ameliorated when you buy the fake pumpkins from craft stores that you can keep from year to year. Gayle has a handful of those, which do a lot to add to our family's décor. So I was happy that Demetrius, my youngest, picked two too-small pumpkins for Halloween. He liked them because they were cute (the only criterion that matters at that age) and since carving small pumpkins is significantly harder, we convinced him to decorate the pumpkins with felt-stickers. He sat on my lap and drew triangles for eyes and funky looking mouths. I carefully cut the stickers out, then he applied them with all of the studious care that a five year old can generate, making sure that the whiskers of the kitty cat all came out from the right place on its face, and that the hat of the witch had a strap going across it. Once we were done, Demetrius asked if I would read some My Little Pony books to him. These are the easy-reader types, the ones with one or two sentences on each page, none of which were more than ten words long. I read to him about the big fair that one pony put on, and another about the bad dream Pinkie Pie suffered. He picked out a handful of sight-words to work on (he's struggling with "The" when it's capitalized, but he's got "Look" and "Like" down pretty well) as we read. I told him, "Once we finish with your books, I get to read Paradise Lost to you, okay?" "Okay," he said, not knowing really what I meant. But he's a kid of his word. When we finished all of the My Little Pony (plus a PAW Patrol book), he sighed and said, "Okay, Daddy. Now you can read me some Paradise Lost." He settled on my lap again and I began to read. There's a certain power to that poem that comes through reading it aloud. Maybe that's part of why I like teaching it so much: The vivacity of the poem is palpable when it's experienced the way it was brought into this world--through the tongue. Milton's dictation of this epic poem is a feat in and of itself, one worthy of our remembrance. That the poem is this good on top of his struggles in the crafting it puts it on a whole other level. Anyway, as I spoke the sonorous words from book 4 (we were at the part where Gabriel is trying to find Satan in the Garden of Eden), Demetrius poked at the sight-words he recognized in the tiny print of Milton's epic. "'I'. 'Look'. 'Like'." I would compliment each one and then resume my reading. I kept him captive for a page or two, then released him. He was happy to go and change into his pajamas, as it meant being liberated from more Milton. (He was curious, though, to see so much writing in the margins of the book. I have a used copy of the Hughes edition of The Complete Poems and Major Prose, which was carefully annotated by a student elsewhere. I conversate with her markings, weaving my own ideas and thoughts in between hers. Despite the fact that I have my own copy from Norton, edited by Gordon Teskey, there's a charm to the marginalia of the Hughes that I can't escape. That and there's a lot more of Milton in the Hughes--the Teskey edition is only of Paradise Lost with some supplemental parts--which makes it my favorite. It's one of my favorite books, a short list that includes the Complete Works of William Shakespeare Norton International Student Edition that I bought in Stratford-upon-Avon my first time there, and a copy of Paradise Lost from the 19th century. Anyway, Demetrius was shocked that there would be so much writing inside of a book. I pointed out that it was a way for me to think more carefully about the words that are there. I then said to him that it's only okay to write in a book that he owns, and never in a library book. He nodded his head sagely, as if he fully understood that injunction.) Demetrius then plopped a dinosaur book we checked out from the library onto my lap and settled in for a little bit more reading before bedtime. I don't know how much longer he's going to fit on my lap. I've talked about this before, but it's still something that preys on my mind. I've spent so many years (eleven, thus far) as a married man also being a father--we started our family about three years after we wedded--and so it feels like I've always had a pocket-sized human to care for. Now that our third and last is working his way into the grown-up world of knowing good and evil, I find myself being more worried about him. It isn't that the world is so much worse off than it was five years ago (though it is, in important and changeable ways), or that we ourselves are worse off. It's simply…I don't know. A sense of the impending ending that all parents have to confront at one point or another. After all, children must grow older--as I did from my parents. But there's something special about these rare moments of them politely caring about what's in front of them, of when they aren't crying or whining or pouting. It's a rare thing, I think, to have my son on my lap, listening to words that matter so much to me, comprehending none of them, yet being happy to be there because he was there with me. As I brushed his teeth tonight, he said, "You're the best daddy that I've ever had." It's hard not to fall in love with that. Final word count: 1105 ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
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