B16 On Christmas Presents

A while back ago, SDG did a post in which he quoted Pre-16 on Christmas in which the predestined-to-be-pontiff took something other than the usual dour, scolding tone that priests and preachers are expected to take toward the way that Christmas is celebrated.

To be sure, he did say that "The hectic commercialism is repugnant to us, and rightly so," but he went on to say, "And yet, underneath it all, does it not originate in the notion of giving and thus the inner urgency of love, with its compulsion to share, to give of oneself to the other? And does not the notion of giving transport us directly into the core of the mystery that is Christmas?"

He went on to reflect more concretely on the custom of giving Christmas presents, saying:

In the offertory prayer of the Christmas Vigil liturgy, we ask God for the grace to receive with joy his everlasting gifts that come to us in the celebration of Christ’s birth. Thus the concept of gift-giving is squarely anchored in this liturgy of the Church and, at the same time, we are made aware of the primal mode of all giving at Christmas: that God, on this holy night, desired to make himself into a gift to mankind, that he turned himself over to us.

The one genuine Christmas gift to mankind, to history, to each one of us, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. Even those who do not believe him to be God incarnate will have to admit that he has enriched and gifted the inner existence of generations upon generations.

This year Post-Pre-16, which is to say, B16 himself, took up this theme again in an address to college students , telling them:

"Christmas gifts remind us of the most perfect gift that the Son of God gave us of himself in the Incarnation,” Pope Benedict told the youth.  “Christmas is the day in which God has given himself to human persons and this gift is made perfect, so to speak, in the Eucharist." (SOURCE.)

I don’t have the full text of his address, but I hope it appears on the web soon, because I’d like to read more about what he has to say on this subject.

In former days, I myself expected pastors to take the scolding attitude toward the commercialization of Christmas, not that this ever stopped me from giving Christmas presents to others.

To this day any talk that suggests a horizontalization of Christmas–that good will among men is the "real meaning" of Christmas–turns my stomach, and I am no fan of the endless holiday movies and TV shows that make this point, including remakes of Charles Dickens’ secular fairy-tale A Christmas Carol.

The real meaning of Christmas is Christ, and to convey the idea that it is anything else, whether commercialistic or sentimentalistic is to confuse the epiphenomena for the Phenomenon that occasions them.

Yet I find myself agreeing with B16, too.

It’s natural to give gifts as part of a celebration. When the Jewish people were saved from Haman’s plot against them in the book of Esther, they exchanged presents of food with each other (9:22). There’s a certain naturalness to that, particularly in an age when food was not as cheap and easily available as it is today. But even apart from the biblical precedent, the exchange of gifts as a sign of joy is a human universal.

There is a familiar pattern that shows up across cultures whenever something is being celebrated. The details may vary, and not every element may be present in each celebration or in each culture, but in the main, whenever humans celebrate something you’re going to find a familiar cluster: eating, drinking, singing, dancing, gift-giving, and decorating. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Christmas or Purim or Eid al-Fitr or Diwali or Chinese New Year. There’s going to be a substantial presence of what we might call the human "celebration pattern" present.

Why does the pattern exist?

I haven’t reflected on the matter until recently, but it seems to me that there are likely to be at least two main reasons:

1) Humans are tangible creatures and we need to externalize our feelings through physical actions. Vulcans might be able to commemorate an event of joy just by meditating on it (assuming they weren’t wrong-headedly repressing their joy), but not humans. We’ve got ants in our pants, and we need to do something.

2) This blends into the second reason, which is that we need to externalize joy not just to express it but to promote it as well. All of the things in the human celebration pattern promote joy–they (when done well) make us happy, and so it’s natural to use them to promote joy over the thing we are celebrating. If you will, they are the occasion of natural happiness that, in religious contexts, becomes supernaturalized by pointing us to something beyond themselves.

Let’s look at gratitude for a moment. Suppose that you had come down with a horrible disease that was going to kill you or otherwise ruin your life. Then a doctor shows up and tells you that there’s a cure, and he gives it to you. In the moments of joy and relief that follow, you would not need any elements of the human celebration pattern to get you to feel joy and gratitude. You’d just feel it. Immediately. Hugely. Without any assistance.

But what about ten years later? The feelings wouldn’t be the same at that point, and while they’d still be there, latent, it would require more effort to bring them to the surface.

Something similar happens in religious contexts.

If you were one of the Israelites who came through the Red Sea, you wouldn’t have needed special celebrations to evoke feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving to God. But 3500 years later? It’s a different story.

In the same way, if we were there at the manger on the night of the first Christmas–in Bethlehem–knowing the significance of the night, we wouldn’t need special assistance in evoking feelings of awe and joy and thanksgiving. But 2000 years later, it’s a different story.

Because of the distance that exists between us and the events we are celebrating, and given the way the human psyche works–at least in its fallen form–we need assistance to help evoke the feelings that we recognize are appropriate for the event we are celebrating. And so we employ elements of the human celebration pattern to help raise us to the level where–at least in a fallen, partial, incomplete way that doesn’t compare to what we would feel if we could go back and be in Bethlehem on that first Christmas–we feel some of what is appropriate.

We use the epiphenomena (the external elements of celebration) to help us appreciate the Phenomenon that occasions them.

That’s just the way humans work.

And so the celebration pattern not only allows us to express joy but to create joy as well.

The danger, in a religious setting, is that we will let the party become an end for its own sake. Parties are fine, and you don’t need a special occasion for them. My square dance club has one every month (that is, a special "Party Night," in addition to its weekly dances). But if you are having a party imbued with religious meaning, that meaning needs to be kept in sight.

This is something that we have to work at at times. It’s easy–when we are children–to focus exclusively on presents–or other elements of the celebration pattern (e.g., decorating Easter eggs, Halloween costumes, Halloween candy)–and we need our parents to help us keep a spiritual perspective in view.

But it is not wrong to use elements of celebration to evoke religious feeling. God knows how we’re made, and he expects us to do this, receiving and blessing the pattern. One of the purposes toward which the tithe was put in the Old Testament was to throw a party in thanksgiving for what God had given you. This was a matter of divine command at the time, and it shows the divine reception of external, joyful celebrations oriented toward the spiritual.

If we then ask: How much celebration is appropriate on a particular occasion, the answer will depend in part on what it is we are celebrating. If it’s the feast day of St. Paul well, as awesome as St. Paul is, that ain’t nothing compared to the birth of the Messiah. The joy occasioned by the latter should far outstrip the former–and St. Paul would say so himself. (Indeed, he would be positively insistent on the matter.)

The birth of God in human form–together with the rising of God from the dead for our salvation–should occasion the greatest joy and the greatest celebrations. One can argue that our culture doesn’t have the respective proportions between Christmas and Easter right, or that it allows other holidays to compete with them that shouldn’t, but at least among Christians they are recognized as the two most important religious holidays.

If we leave off comparing one holiday to another, though, and just ask ourselves "How much celebration is warranted for the birth of God in human form?" it seems to me that there is no intrinsic maximum to how much joy or how much celebration we should have. This is an event of such transcendant importance that the answer to how much joy you should feel or how big a celebration you should have, the answer is "As much as you can."

God doesn’t want you to exceed your means in these matters. He doesn’t want you to get so joyful that you become blind to your surroundings and rush out into the street shouting praises and get hit by a bus. Neither does he want you to ruin your family finances buying Christmas presents that you can’t afford. But within your means, it’s warranted to throw Christ a tremendous birthday party.

What counts as a tremendous birthday party depends on the means of the family and the culture throwing it. On the principle of the widow’s mite, a family or a culture that has very modest means will throw an externally modest party that is just as tremendous in God’s eyes as a family or culture with larger means which throws an externally larger party.

The key is not the size of the party but that it seeks to reflect the joy that is due the Event, within the means we have available, and that the party not lose sight of the purpose for which it is being celebrated.

I thus find my own reaction to the contemporary celebration of Christmas taking a somewhat different shape than it used to. It’s not the size of the party that our culture throws or all the economic activity that Christmas generates. My concern is more directed to orienting the celebration toward Christ rather than complaining about the excesses of the celebration (though there are certainly those in individual cases).

Which is why I was very pleased Friday night at my square dance club when our new caller confessed himself unashamed to wish people Merry Christmas. This not only drew immediate applause from the dancers but occasioned extensive Merry Christmassing for the rest of the evening.

I don’t know how religious everyone at the event is (it’s not a specifically Christian square dance club), but it helped keep Christ in Christmas–not to say keep Christmas in Christmas–and that made me happy.

Merry Christmas, one and all!