Holiday Hopes

This holiday season, I've been taking note of secularized pronouncements of the Christmas gospel, i.e., exhortations or meditations, apparently or explicitly detached from Christian belief or doctrines, on the themes that churches connect to the birth of Jesus: peace, care for the lonely and forgotten, the power of love to rescue us from alienation and despair.

Of course, free-floating wishes of "peace on earth, goodwill toward men" have filled the December skies like snowflakes as long as mass media and mass merchandising have existed. Usually, though, such language retained at least nominal ties to the Christian celebration--quite often flanked by images of angels, bells, or stars, or accompanied by strains of sacred Christmas carols. For the last several years though, ones with no such ties seem almost ubiquitous; in store displays and shelves of Christmas cards, in music and other holiday entertainments, generic invocations of peace, light, joy jockey for position with tales and scenes of theophany in a stable, and it remains to be seen which will claim the larger corner of the public square.

Taking a long view, or one long view, there is nothing surprising here. Midwinter festivals predating Christmas celebrated the return of light and hope for renewal of the earth. People always, everwhere, have hoped for peace, love, and new beginnings (either in this life or another). However, I think that centuries of religious celebrations of Christmas (among other things) have left the post-Christian world with impossibly high hopes of these kinds, with a longing for some harmony or deliverance that, by any reasonable accounting, is unattainable. The manger may appear empty to many, but annually they bow nonetheless. Far from being simply a frenzy of materialism, secularized Christmastide is essence a societal cri de coeur for transcendence.

I heard a commentary on the radio a couple of weeks ago in which the commentator, after confessing deep doubts about the existence of God and the usefulness of any religion, opined (unfortunately I'm paraphrasing loosely) that the Christmas story is reminder that, "out there somewhere," there is "something more" to existence than survival imperatives and the utilitarian economic and political calculus that directs and shapes most of our lives. All that a Christian could quibble with in that is the "out there, somewhere." The gospel of Luke may reference heavenly choirs, but the coming of Christ and his work of redemption took place here, on the earth. Christmas invites us to look for that "something more" around us and within us. Perhaps in that looking, you find Christ. But I'm certain that a careful and loving attention to one's own and others' humanity, and to the world encompassing it, is the true beginning of peace on earth, and goodwill among all.

Merry Christmas.