For many Christmas is a quite literal returning home for the break, to return to all those aspects of life so important but neglected - recreation, relatives and religion. Sir Roger Scruton once pointed out that in our ultra-modern, individualistic and secular England, Christmas is still the time everyone returns home to honour the old religion again.
Even in the most hedonistic and materialistic excesses of consumerism in the fast time of Advent, there is a kitsch attempt to answer that longing for the old home, the old beliefs and the old world again. The answers provided might be hideously consumerist, but deep down aren't those insatiable consumers filling our shopping malls (but it should be remembered often buying for others) really seeking a return home?
That return home is of course in the context of a technological, change-orientated, atomistic and hedonistic age. We live in a culture and world far removed from everything that the Feast of Christ symbolises. And yet there remains that yearning for that other higher world.
We pride ourselves on our rationalism, we scoff at what we dismiss as sentimentality, we wish to appear cynical and worldly. Our families are falling apart, our history and identity is erased, magic is extirpated from the world in the name of science. And yet, once a year this is all set aside for a feast that celebrates, remembers and takes part in the Incarnation.
Many will say they merely enjoy childhood memories or love the old rituals, that it is a time for relaxation and family. All these things though are transformed and affirmed by the Incarnation, by the Word made flesh. We live in a world where life can be blessed and even made magical, not simply mundane and profane.
That magic of Christmas is something particular to Christmas. It is the magic of receiving, not the magic of manipulating the world around us. In the chaos of our post-modern culture people are more and more looking to magic as a means of controlling and manipulating the world around them, This is trying to reform the world rather than receiving it as gift. Indeed, this approach to magic is a form of techne closely related to science and technology. It is no coincidence the early empirical scientists were occultists and alchemists. That is the magic of manipulation, unlike Christmas.
At Christmas the magic is a gift that blesses us. Even for the children Father Christmas visits as a surprise bearing surprises for their stockings. Children do not resort to spells or incantations to conjure and command Father Christmas. They learn the magic of the gift as a blessing out of our control or power.
The magic can only be found if stiff-necked pride is put to one side. Then we can discover the mystical magic down "in yon forest" where the Grail is hidden. We must be ready like little children trustingly to receive with faith. We all know this in our hearts and much of our cynicism and rationalism is mere bravado because we are too proud to show our inner child.
From Dickens and Chesterton to Lewis and Tolkien, modern writers have, like the prophets of old, pointed us back to the childlike magic of Christ's birth. And the magic starts to change people, just like Scrooge. Even hard-nosed Protestants for one season of the year honour Christ's Virgin Mother, meek and mild. Religion begins to recover its old mystical magic again and the rigidity of rational doctrine is replaced with the mystical tradition of the Church at its beginning. And the world is re-enchanted.
Forces are ranged against this rediscovery, this return to our homeland. Commercialism, greed, consumption, family resentments, all come to the surface to challenge the gentle power of the event on that silent and holy night. Mad buying has replaced the fasting of Advent before the feast. Christmas can become nothing more than drunken snoozing in front of the telly, sensual pleasure of the flesh hiding the spirit of Christmas.
Even so, as the parish churches are full again for one day of the year, as families reunite and the Gradgrind world of capitalist work and career is forgotten in favour of the magic of the season, we all know we are returning to something more true, more beautiful, something that is good for us and brings us back to who we are in our spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment