Beauty In Our Secular Christmas?

I was listening to some "holiday" music on NPR today while driving around and was amazed at how many happy, positive songs there are about Christmas that have absolutely nothing (overtly) to do with Christianity. Well, I guess I wasn't that amazed, but it was interesting. Every single song I heard spoke of something fond or magical about this time of year, while not a single one mentioned anything particularly Christian, and I'm sure the folks at NPR were quite intentional about this, which I can understand. But to me, it begs the question: Why? Why so fond of Christmas? What is the source of this Christmas magic, if not simply the hard facts about Jesus being born to a virgin some 2000 years ago? Obviously tons of people don't believe that and still LOVE Christmas time. 

So what is it that makes Christmas so universally wonderful? Even for those of us who believe in the Christ-child of the Bible, we don't simply love Christmas because of the fact that He was born, do we? Perhaps the best of us can answer yes, but for most, the answer is no.

Think about children. When you were a child, if you were normal, you loved Christmas for the presents. That's simple and not at all "Christian". But even that goes beyond the realm of mere selfishness and materialism into the realm of magic if you believed (as many of us did) that there was a jolly old god-like saint flying around the world in a sleigh and coming down your chimney to leave you that gift you really wanted. And let's be honest, you believed you would get it, even if you were a brat most of the time, even despite the threats from your parents, and even though you were confident Santa was quite serious about his naughty and nice list. Still you trusted. Santa was coming for you.

Of course, when we grew up, we found out that was not actually true. We all believed in something that turned out to be...false. Or did we? Well, yes, in a sense, but in another sense, all the folklore, the movies, the songs, the decorations, and our parents own - uh, lies - were instilling in us something very profound, and profoundly true. At Christmas we really believed that there was a deeper magic to this world, a magic from the outside, which was extremely powerful and yet extremely personal. We were confident this magic was big enough to reach the whole world in a night and yet small enough to fit down our very own chimney, walk around in our living room, and eat our cookies. And we believed that, while he stood only for what was good and noble and worthy, he came to give gifts, not rewards. We knew all this at Christmas, and we were right.

As Natalie Portman's character said in one of my all-time favorite movies (though I have almost given up trying to get other people to like it with me!), V For Vendetta, "Artists use lies to tell the truth while politicians use them to cover the truth up." Very true. And I think, if we are Christians, we ought to understand this "art" correctly. But first let me say, the facts of the Christian message are crucial. They MUST NOT be lies. To paraphrase Paul, if Jesus was not actually raised from the dead, then all is lost. Our faith is pointless and pitiable at best, and probably extremely harmful to the world and to ourselves at worst. Our hope is in the facts of Jesus coming, dying, rising, and returning to reign (when he does). But even those facts are something more than facts. They are more than packageable, memorizable moments on a timeline. And they appeal to more than just our memory or our intellect. They are a story - the story, in fact, which speaks to the deepest longings of every human heart. The story we all want to be true, that proclaims that there is hope for us and for this screwed up world we live in.

C. S. Lewis, a gifted storyteller himself, speaks of the Christian story in a similar fashion, I think, except instead of the word "story," he uses the word "myth," which in our culture has become nothing more than a synonym for "not true." For example, "You don't really believe that Bible non-sense do you? Christianity is a myth!" Well, maybe it is, but perhaps it's the myth that speaks to deepest parts of the human soul. And maybe it's the myth that became fact at Christmas, when Mary became pregnant. At least, that's what Christians believe. Anyway, here's a quote from Lewis on this subject:

"To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other. The man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than the one who assented and did not think much about it."

So it's Christmas time in America, and it is easy to see how our culture has sadly trampled on the real beauty and the real hope of the facts of the Christmas story - the incarnation of God himself. But, in my view, we have not yet trampled on the myth. On the contrary, at Christmas we seem to feed on it. Think about it. In our customs and traditions, are we not in some way clinging to the ancient myth(s) of love, redemption, and restoration? Is there not some of the right kind of hope, even in the secular carols, customs, decorations, and myths that inspire us to celebrate, to reconcile, to do good, and care for the needy, though we may not have any idea about the source of the inspiration?

Perhaps there remains something magnificent about our American Christmas, that along with destructive commercialism and consumerism, helpless family dysfunction, cold weather, and the reminder of sickness, poverty, and death...there is also the mysterious yet familiar feeling of hope that somehow draws even the most broken and unfaithful among us into a love story that became fact when the Word became flesh, and became our real redemption on the splintered wood of an actual cross some 2000 years ago.

Yet even without knowing it or without remembering it or without believing it, we sing and bake and decorate and give...because we want it to be true. We need it to be true. Lord, thank you that it is. Merry Christmas!