Responsory Christmas Matins that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith S.T Coleridge Mayday Notes Christmas How gleefully some recent books from adherents of the Jesus Seminar announce that the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke are fictions – completely untrue.
Oh no! I thought. Here we go again, the old Puritan attack on Christmas.
Under the Commonwealth, the Puritans abolished Christmas Day and Quakers, who arose around that time, mostly still do not celebrate it.
Of course, we know that the four gospels are not biographies of Jesus but theologies, with some more, some less, reliable supporting biographical material. It is quite possible that the nativity stories were mostly made up, though some scholars have suggested that Luke the evangelist may have had a particular extra source. Mary, who ‘kept all these things and pondered them in her heart’, certainly comes across very vividly in his story. For even if the Christmas story is largely legendary, legends do gather round heroes, and we know at least, that Jesus was a real person born about that time, who grew up to preach the Kingdom of God, or Reign of Kindness, and be executed under the Romans. And the theological point being made, of divine incarnation as a baby in very humble circumstances to bring ‘peace on Earth’ is a very important one; the story of God coming down to Earth into humanity is true. No wonder this tremendous myth has accrued powerful poetic trappings of winter solstice and the sun’s rebirth, see amid the winter snow and deck the halls with boughs of holly.
Yet here was a distinct note of iconoclastic glee. In England Puritans smashed churches and statues, some with gorgeous colours, just as the Taliban have smashed statues in Afghanistan. To abolish feast days, such as Christmas, to sit in silence suppressing ancient liturgies and symbols, sweet scents, poetry, music, song (and of course, dancing) are part of that same Puritan impulse. (Granted, silence can be an important part of worship.) I can’t help feeling hugely relieved that these Puritan impulses did not did prevail from the beginning of the Church (though they do keep popping up.) Then we might have had no Gothic cathedrals, no paintings or statues (of course, no gargoyles), no plainsong or polyphony, no Bach Magnificat, no Renaissance religious art either. I am so glad they have not conquered and the world grown grey with their breath. Consider the flowers of the field. I imagine that if there had been a creator God and he had been a Puritan, he would have created every flower in the world beige, or in tasteful bourgeois estate agents’ parlance, ‘neutral décor’. Oh God! No. Now bring us a figgy pudding!
P.S. One reason for the defeat of the great English Revolution, which asserted ‘the poorest he hath a life to live’, the first of its kind in Europe, was that people got so fed up with Puritan dreariness and bullying that many welcomed the king back because, despite his dangerous pretensions, at least he was jollier.
Facts Matter While we defend the necessity and power of story and myth to tell us true things in their own way, this does not mean that facts don’t matter at all.
Here is a recent expression of this slippery philosophy: ‘Maybe the entire modern obsession with ... historical verification is an illusion. Personally I find myself wanting to blur the distinction between fact and fiction entirely. Perhaps even leave so called facts entirely out of the equation.’ Surely that is a postmodernist copout and even more untrustworthy when it is mixed up with a fuzzy ‘wisdom of the East’, that ‘everything is an illusion’.
Shortly after the first Gulf War the postmodernist philosopher Baudrillard published an article in the Guardian (later, a book) called The Gulf War Did not Take Place (an allusion to Jean Giraudoux’ play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place). His point was that it was merely a media spectacle, a ‘simulacrum’. He wriggled cleverly round this idea. True, the Gulf War did not take place in Paris or London but it did take place in the Persian Gulf region and concluded with the notorious ‘turkey shoot’ of retreating Iraqi forces. Thousands died and some veterans are still suffering from ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ today.
What happens matters. It matters when people are killed, whether people are tortured. Any responsible journalist must try to find out what really happened.
Any proper court of law must investigate evidence and try to establish guilt or innocence. It matters if a father and uncle kill a teenage girl for choosing a boyfriend they disapprove of.
The things that happen to us in our daily lives matter.
It matters if a mother is too poor to feed her child. If you become pregnant it matters whether you miscarry or give birth to a live baby. Both the happy and the sad things that happen, the good and the bad things we do, matter. To deny this is to deny human dignity altogether.
Of course when things happened long ago it becomes more difficult, sometimes impossible, to establish what occurred. But it is worth a try and even more vitally important is to take seriously the reality of the lives of people living on Earth today.
And Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.