Now that we have a child of our own, how to celebrate Christmas has taken on a new importance. We have to ask ourselves questions like, “Will our child believe in Santa Claus, or will we celebrate St. Nicholas’s feast day instead, or will we do both? How can we emphasize the importance of the birth of Christ in a world where it’s often considered politically incorrect to wish someone a Merry Christmas?”
Keeping this in mind, and trying to figure out how to start our family’s Christmas traditions off on the right foot, I stumbled upon the following essay by Mother Raphaela, in her book “Growing in Christ: Shaped in His Image” (SVS Press, 2003). Enjoy- this certainly put things into perspective for me.
Many of us have heard how terrible it is to celebrate Christmas. Certainly I agree that it is important to get past the commercialization of the feast. There are all kinds of theories about how to get around this: Keep the religious old calendar so we can have a pagan winter feast with our friends and then have a spiritual, Christian feast later. Or we can stay on the new calendar and give religious, pious gifts. Enthusiastic people have come up with all kinds of Orthodox Christian gimmicks and slogans to counteract the advertising that bombards us the minute summer shows any signs of cooling down. We even can give twice by buying from the charity of our choice.
I would like, however, to suggest another way to turn around this whole approach to Christmas. It may seem now as if I am just playing with words, but I have learned that sometimes the words we use say more about what we really think and feel than we realize.
Rather than thinking in terms of putting Christ into our Christmas, we may rather think in terms of putting ourselves, including our Christmas, into Christ, as the renowned twentieth-century Orthodox theologian Father Alexander Schmemann used to say. Jesus Christ is at the center of the universe, and we need to find ourselves in our relation to Him, not the other way around.
It really is a bit presumptuous of us when, in effect, we say to the Creator of heaven and earth: “In theory, I think that You have created me; the fact that I can speak, think, stand upright, breathe, and live is only because You made me and became human like me in order to redeem me. According to this same theory I profess to believe, You are greater than the greatest expanse of the universe and You are also able to penetrate and know intimately the smallest element of the smallest microorganism or mineral in the smallest speck of dust. My deepest thoughts and feelings about You merely tug at the thin outer edges of Your reality. Your life makes my lifetime appear to be a passing shadow.
“Still, in the universe we actually live in, this whole theory about who You are doesn’t register. I am in the center of this real life of mine and on a day-to-day basis, I give You the space I think I want or need for You in my life. Christmas as I know it is a celebration that gets along very well without much reference to You.
“But I am willing to acknowledge Your existence on occasion and in the right company. I will allow You to be part of my Christmas within limits. (This is the “Put Christ into Christmas” approach). I don’t plan to give up any of my personal plans and social events, but I think this year I may have time to spend an hour or so with the Church that is called Your Body – unless someone else has plans for me. Or the weather is a little bad. I might have to make it to our in-laws’ even if there is a storm, but after all, You are more understanding than they are. And really, on a day-to-day basis, You are not as important to me as they are.”
Now we might say, “I wouldn’t think that way.” But in our heart of hearts, we know that when and if we do try to think any other way, we are or would be branded as religious fanatics or people who are hypocritical saints – since no one can be that good and anyone who appears to be a saint must really be a hypocrite.
Probably in working through all of this, the most important thing for us to ask ourselves is: “Who is this Christ?” Certainly those of us who call ourselves Christians should try to ask this question, if not every day, then at least during this period when we are officially preparing for the coming birth of Christ into this world.
“But who do you say that I am?” That is the question Jesus asked His friends when He walked this earth, and people obviously had all kinds of strange ideas about who He was. How we answer that question will make a big difference in deciding how we are going to live our lives.
Jesus, our Lord God and Savior, may be an interesting person we hear about primarily in church, and we may even have some strong feelings and thoughts about Him on occasion. But our Creator? The Love and the Life that makes it possible for us to be here, breathing and thinking at this moment? I think that if we are honest, we realize we can’t identify with those concepts. We live with democracy, freedom, and material security. We don’t know what it means to depend on anyone for anything. And we really don’t have any sense that there is a reality outside of our daily life. Being created from nothing? Living in the face of eternity? These are not meaningful concepts to us. We even are able to forget most fo the time the fact that we are going to die one day and face Christ, His reality, and His eternity. On occasion, a death that hits close to home may lift that curtain for us, but preparing daily to meet the Lord is not part of being a normal Orthodox Christian in our age. The fact that it was the center of life for centuries of Christians who have gone before us is just an interesting historical note.
Therefore, to behave as if life and death, God and eternity have meaning for us on a daily basis would be hypocrisy. Right?
Being a hypocrite has become one of the greatest sins in our society. It must be avoided at all costs. Of course, there is real hypocrisy, and avoiding it is a fine line we must walk. But what constitutes real hypocrisy is a big question in my mind. By some current definitions, if you are, for example, a mother with a child and that child has aggravated you to the point where you want to strangle it, if you refrain from doing so and allow your child to live another day, you are a hypocrite. It seems that a murderer has more honesty and integrity, and I have heard this argument used in favor of abortions.
I have trouble with this. Such a definition makes it impossible to set goals or aim for anything higher than we have already reached. Yet such a definition is very pervasive in our society. Teachers and employers often say how hard it is to get young people to learn a new subject or trade. If they don’t already know it, it isn’t “natural” to them. And anyone who would try to learn something they don’t already know by doing it is something of a hypocrite. The graphic arts have been very badly affected by this, including our Church iconography. I have known of people who didn’t know how to draw, yet rather than study with someone who does know how and could give pointers, they use a prayer formula, seeming to hope it would, like magic, change their bad drawing into a good icon. Other art forms seem to have become at best a type of therapeutic self-expression, and those of us beholding them from the outside may find ourselves questioning whether they serve any other function.
Certainly any attempt to live a life that could be identified as Christian has been severely undermined by this approach. you don’t understand church services? They aren’t meaningful to you? Asking questions, studying, spending time trying to learn about their intricacy and beauty is often called fanaticism or hypocrisy. Going to more of them to get used to them is even worse. A child may attend early morning soccer practice daily, but an early morning church service? Some Orthodox even seem to think that reading the Bible in order to place the scriptural lessons into a context so they make more sense is something only members of cults do.
But I suggest that this way of seeming “hypocrisy” may be the way we should walk. We need to learn to pray. We need to develop a relationship with our God. We need to begin even when we don’t really know how. To keep ourselves honest, we can say, “God, if there is a God, reveal Yourself to me,” or “God, I want to love You,” or “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” We need to struggle with not getting the kind of answers unconsciously we may expect from God. He always responds to our prayer, but being the best of parents, He doesn’t always say yes. And sometimes His silence is very loud because He is telling us that we need to grow up and figure out or do something on our own.
If we begin to do this, to put ourselves into Christ, Christmas, along with very many other things, will cease to be a problem. We will want to use every way we can think of to celebrate the greatness of the coming of our God and Savior. We have so many ways to choose form, and they are all literally God-given. We have the beauty and solemn joy of church services; the sharing of life in eucharistic communion as well as at our family tables, all heightened by the preceding days of fasting. We can decorate our surroundings; prepare beautiful things; pay more attention to giving and receiving love, including giving presents if they are important to us and to those we love; sing our hearts out; discover the neighbors who have less than we do and share some of our bounty with them. You can add to the list. All of these ways of human celebration and more can be brought before Christ, can be “baptised”. If some of our ways of celebration can’t stand before Him – getting drunk and making life hell for our family, for example – then we had best learn how to let go of them.
Let us think about this. What are the things in my daily life and in my celebrations at times such as Christmas that I can bring before the Lord? How can I prepare for Him? Would I be willing to have Him walk int he door of our church the way we do the services? Am I grateful that He lived as Jesus in first-century Palestine so there is no danger He could walk into my house on Christmas day? These are some of the questions we can put to ourselves as well as to our children. Certainly Christmas is one of the times we should remember Jesus’ words that we must become as little children to inherit the kingdom of heaven.
So rejoice in the Lord. Look for the joy of a child’s wonder. celebrate the feast. And let this Christmas be the beginning of a whole re-orientation of our life around the center of reality: God has made us and redeemed us, and in preparing for the Christ child in the manger, we prepare to welcome all the Life and Love in the universe.
In the area surrounding the seminary, there are signs everywhere attempting to fight against the “War on Christmas”, plastered with the slogan “Keep Christ in Christmas”. While I totally can get behind their message, I’m not 100% sure of the method’s efficacy.
Our series of Catching Up posts continues with a rundown on the typical day here at SVS, at least for us. Kyle just completed this semester, and was kept really busy! His typical weekday would run like this:
