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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 24, 2006
Merry Christmas
Christmas, always the easiest column to write, in prospect, seems always the hardest to complete. I think of priests who must generate sermons that give the appearance of being fresh. Their job could be like that of a supermarket manager.But paradoxically, it is not because one could ever run out of things to say. Rather, the difficulty is in subverting what your audience expects you to say. The difficulty is like that of understanding Christmas carols, repeated from year to year, until the words are lost in the tunes. The thrill of childhood, in a warm Christian home, must consist at least partly of encountering all the paraphernalia of Christmas for the first time. I have my own mother still in the world to remind me of how I responded to my first Christmas tree, with the gifts wrapped all around it. (By wetting myself.) So it was, in a supermarket of all places, I found myself listening through the slightly rappish intonation of a “cover” on a modern Christmas standard, that I had heard many times without hearing. Even a Buddhist immigrant, fresh off a plane from the mountains of Zanskar, would probably recognize it: Said the night wind to the little lamb, "Do you see what I see? Up inside the sky, little lamb? Do you see what I see?” A star, a star, dancing in the night, With a tail as big as a kite! The lyrics don’t improve from there -- by the third stanza they have slipped into the wrong kind of neo-socialist maudlin -- but what an excellent start on a genuinely poetic notion, in words of two syllables or fewer. There is no Christmas without the star of Bethlehem, to say nothing of the crèche. And none without the attempt to regain the simplicity we have fumbled. I had the great honour, this past week, to be passed a little baby in a public bar. It was probably against the law to bring him in there, as it is now against the law to smoke. But the couple whose baby it was, from Germany, were still not fully acquainted with the demands of North American Puritanism, and the staff were all girls -- themselves too busy ogling the baby to get around to evicting him. “Béla” his name was -- four months old -- this little God-formed shape. He could have played the Christ-child in a Nativity pageant: he did not cry, as most babies do, when you try to give their mothers a break. Not a peep all evening, only giggles of delight at being tossed about and played with. Shining eyes, crossed just between Hogarth and Watteau, reaching for fingers, and then amused when he could not catch them. I had him on my lap for what seemed like hours, and didn't want to part with him. Most of the other guys wanted a turn to hold him! For they suddenly remembered babies of their own. I had almost forgotten about babies. The mystery of Christmas is the mystery of incarnation: that, contrary to all rational instinct and appearance, man might indeed be created in the image of God. That he is born quick in the garment of creaturehood, but contains a divine spark. That he is capable not only of murders, but of sanctity. And although he may share in the sin of Adam, his redemption in the Spirit is always at hand. The misery of Christmas, for so many of whose circumstances I am quite aware, happens in the face of this charmed reality. There is no one to comfort or befriend them, and they feel far away from God. They confront the world, with what they have been able to learn of “rights language”. Some, in their rooms, actually cry from loneliness. The baby I had in my arms is among the luckiest I will know, for he has parents among the few I ever meet, who know happiness. It is not a function of their circumstances, but of some grace, in both of them. In the Christmas pageant I have in mind, I cannot help cast them as Mary and Joseph. But you’d have to have seen the smile on this mother’s face, to know that the work of the artists is unfinished. It is the great cosmic joke: that “you had to be there” -- in that manger in Bethlehem, and to have been a wise man, to see what the wise men saw. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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