Christmas – The Story Behind the Story

December 22, 1963
Rochester

This is the time of the year when the fragrance of evergreen and the sound of carols enfold our senses with the announcement that the festival of Christmas is upon us again. We are allured by the persuasive power of gift advertising and fatigued by the effort to continue shopping until the right gifts are found, and in the correct sizes. There is underneath all the glitter and greeting, a tense expectancy that maybe this time will mark the real inauguration of “peace on earth, goodwill to men,” - a feeling dispelled only when we put the dream, like the ornaments, away for another year.

What is Christmas: The “Gospel” is that God created man, Adam, by molding the dust of the earth in to the form of a man, called it good, and breathed into that clay the breath of life. Adam lived in perfect paradise with the female companion brought to life by God from Adam’s body. Adam and Eve had to leave that Paradise, when the man, because God and also granted him “free-will”, yielded to the temptation of the woman – Adam sinned – and that sin became an unavoidable inheritance that no descendant of Adam (and according to the Gospel, all humans are descendants of Adam) could avoid acquiring. But God, in his infinite mercy, provided a Savior, his Son, who was also God, who by his atoning death on the cross paid the price of salvation for all men – a price that persons, because they were human, could not pay. But Jesus was the son of God in a special way. Mary, his mother, had conceived miraculously through the Holy Ghost – a being also God Himself – for the Savior could not have natural man for his father. She had been brought to labor in Bethlehem and a Star shone over the stable where the miraculous birth occurred. Wise men, traveling from the East, guided by that supernatural Star, came to the place where the babe lay; worshiped him; and left gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Shepherds tending their flocks at night also followed the star; and came in wonder to the glorious sight of mother and child. Hosts of angels stood round about singing in triumph, “Glory to the new-born King.” The prophecies had been fulfilled.

The new-born King was taken to Egypt by Joseph and Mary to escape the soldiers of Herod who plotted to kill the babe feared to be the Jewish Messiah. After that, the family returned to Nazareth where “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.” Years later, Jesus began a brief ministry, terminated by his death on the cross – by his death giving men a chance to be saved by accepting him as Lord and Savior. Jesus was buried in a tomb, but after three days, rose from the dead and appeared among men. Then he ascended bodily into Heaven. It was believed he would come again with hosts of angels. Then a great battle was to be fought with the hosts of evil – but God and Christ would triumph. All men would be judged and placed forever in heaven or in the torment of everlasting hell. That is the gospel.

The story is that this salvation scheme was not an unusual one. Many religious groups had similar beliefs. We know that nearly all the major religions in the world contain hopes, dreams, prophecies of the coming day of a Savior who by virtue of his divine power would save the people.

Three thousand years before the birth of Jesus, there was a Hindu belief that there would be a re-incarnation of the God Vishnu. It was believed that when Vishnu reappeared he would cleanse the earth from sin, remove the shadows and bring about the reign of justice and truth.

An ancient Chinese prophecy predicted, “we expect our King. When he comes he will deliver us from misery. He will restore us to new life.”

Six hundred years before Jesus, Zarathrustra, founder of an influential and historic religion predicted, “In the latter days a virgin would conceive; that as soon as the child was born, a star would appear, blazing at noonday with undiminished lustre.”

Buddha, on whom one of the world’s great religions was founded, was born six centuries before the son of Mary. The Buddhist scriptures tell how angels rejoiced at the birth of Gautama, who was to grow in maturity and be known as Buddha.

We learn that the ancient Scandinavian tribes celebrated a great festival on the occasion of the Winter solstice, when the days began to grow longer and the nights shorter. Their feast day was known as Jul and was in honor of the divine birth of Freyer.

We know that the stories of the birth of baby Jesus, with their hauntingly lovely overtones and legends were accepted in an age when people believed in miracles. Many of the birth legends of Jesus were not made part of the gospel until one hundred years or more after he was born.

The stories grew, were retold in an age that was influenced by the prophecies of the Persians; became doctrine when Christians lived in a time when Romans celebrated the coming of the longer days in mid-Winter with the Saturnalia – a festival of unrestrained conduct. It is not secret that Christians tried and succeeded in an effort to spiritualize the immoral Roman Saturnalia of drunkenness and lust by establishing the birthday of Jesus at a time when it would co-incide with the Winter solstice thus replacing the almost universal pagan celebrations of the day.

We need not be puzzled that Jesus was thought to be God, when we realized that from Caesar to Constantine, sixty emperors were deified and worshiped as gods.

With the exception of the Hebrew religion, which in the period of our knowledge of it, sternly adhered to monotheism, holding one male God as the eternal and only God, every religion of the countries that bordered the Mediterranean had as a vital part of its structure a gentle and loving female goddess. Perhaps this difference was a reaction of the Hebrews in their nomadic ages when they encountered the strange, crude and orgiastic rites of the fertility ceremonies of the Canaanites. In any event, the Christian religion soon placed Mary on the plane of a goddess – in fact they called her the Mother of God, prayed to her and sought the favor of God through her. In the course of time, the outsider observing the emphasis placed on the virgin Mary, by the RC Church, can believe with some reason that the cult of Mary grows even more important in the largest section of the various divisions of Christianity.

Even as the symbol of the Sun (s-u-n) surrounds the head of the Egyptian mother goddess, Isis and Horus, her divine son (s-o-n), so the Christians adopted the symbol of the s-u-n and the halo still surrounds the heads of the Holy in religious art.

In the course of the many centuries that have rolled by, the pagan customs of many lands have become part of the pattern of the Christian Christmas – the yule log from the pagan Scandinavian tribes, evergreen from Germanic tribes, St. Nicholas from Hellenistic Christianity of four-hundred years after the birth of Jesus, Christmas cards and Christmas carols – all these have merged in the celebration in the passage of time. With less happy results, the drunkenness and riotous parties of the Roman Saturnalia became one of the popular customs of American business and commerce, but fortunately this excess of celebration seems to be declining in emphasis.

That’s the story – many cultures, many historic periods, many religions have contributed to our Christmas. If that’s all there was to it – a package of myth and legend, embroidered with strange customs and rituals of numerous pagan cults, held before our senses to induce the spending of money, as well as wearing us out physically, it could be recommended that Christmas be ignored, even as the Puritans once ignored it, with no more reason to celebrate it than the witches’ sabbath and the black mass. We could protest that the promotion of Christmas strengthened belief in the unwholesome doctrine of inherited sin and that praise of a “virgin mother” placed an unnecessary and unnatural stigma on natural love.

But that’s not all there is to it – there’s a story behind the story.

Throughout our land, for about the last three weeks, and continuing for at least another week, people will stop and stare at manger scenes in shop windows, churches and elsewhere. We know that far greater numbers of people hear the heart-beat of the church in Christmas season than during ordinary periods of the year. Does the re-telling of a myth made of up strands from many different cultures do this? We feel quite sure that the birth stories of Jesus or the Savior gods of other religions are not historically true or rational propositions. Yet even the so-called “irreligious” person feels something stirring deep within him at many moments during this season of the year.

None of us completely understands himself. There are emotion levels below (or above) the conscious level. There is an inner quickening at Christmas which we cannot fully understand. All of [us] experience, continuously, a deep spiritual need and there is no glib answer as to what, specifically, that longing calls for in response. Is it too sentimental to say, however, that during these theme days of high religious holiday, there are moments when we know an inner security, feel an inner warmth perhaps in response to a hymn, a card, a stamp, a gay ribbon or a myth which gives us a sense of safety far more profound than the facts, confusions, problems and dangers of our lives together warrant?

Somehow, intellectual proposition or historically verified truth doesn’t always tell us enough. History tells us of martyrs who died willingly in the Roman arena under the claws and fangs of wild animals rather than renounce their Christian faith and what they hoped was their scheme of theological and eternal salvation. In these days, when for most people, religious faith is relegated to a minor position in the values that people hold dear, we cannot understand how a person would die for his faith. Would you die at the stake or in the arena rather than give up your Universalism Unitarianism? Or would you say, “belief just isn’t that important.”

On the other hand, the Christian martyr would be completely unable to understand why a person should die willingly for his country. The early Christians, many of them, particularly in the centuries before Christianity became official, just wouldn’t fight for any country.

The story behind the story is a story of feeling, of emotion. The religious myth is one of the highest expressions of religious art. The ancient wonder stories are efforts to reduce the whole of the past to one picture.

We live in a universe of mystery. The telescopes, both the great lens in high mountain observatories with their intricate photographic mechanism and the astounding radio telescopes probing so deeply into space bring immeasurable additional solar systems within our perception. But while these scientific instruments succeed in presenting us with an ever more complete picture of the universe, they paradoxically also deepen the mystery. As the billions of solar systems and stars stretch trillions of light-years into infinity – as we explore light that started from its home star millions of years before our own world even came into being and just now registers on our instruments, the complexity and unfathomable depth of the universe seems overwhelming. Not only are the heavens that stretch boundlessly beyond our full intellectual comprehension, but also, even the mathematics that the physicists and astronomers use to define and describe the universe are a mystery to most of us. But we know we are surrounded by vastness, creativity, energy and light.

The evolutionary process that has occurred and is occurring on earth is reasonably lucid to anyone who studies the story in the rocks and in the sea-bottoms. We can trace the changes in various species until we reach the present development of mankind with only a few gaps to be filled in by inferences. But when we go back to that first gathering of dust and that first one-celled living creature – why? How? For what purpose?

English Unitarian, E.G. Lee (MASS MAN AND RELIGION), wrote, “in order to live in his universe man creates myths – he uses the power of symbol and imagery to conquer the material world and find his way to the heart of the mystery that supports it. In order to live we must be at hoie [? - ed.] in our world ... we must find our own sense of being at hoie [? - ed.] through the myth.”

The merit of the Christmas story, its use as a foundation for spiritual living at the Winter solstice, lies deeper than the accounts of the stories. The legends of the virgin birth, wise men, shepherds, fir trees, gifts, carols and cards are the pattern for today. This pattern will change in the next two thousand years as patterns have changed in the last two thousand years. New cultures will add, new systems of thinking will change, new ideas of relationships between men and nations will add creative thoughts to the stories as we have received them. But beyond the pattern of stories there will be the same fundamental emotional needs and expressions.

One of those needs born in the emotional deeps is the recognition of the common humanity of all people. So many artists have reached for that high dream as they painted the holy family of Joseph, Mary and Jesus with the symbol of the Egyptian sun god haloed over their heads. It is the breathtakingly complete religious symbol of the human family. The divine in the universe has been created in a humble peasant woman. In pain and love she gives birth, nurses and cherishes life itself – and life itself is the most staggering wonder of all the universe, for it is life that comprehends and gazes as the wonder of the stars and planets. The vastness that surrounds us – those distant stars and galaxies – the giant depths of sea, the fields where sheep graze and the courts where wise men brood on the future – of all of this we are a part, for the universe is our home and must always be. We are part of this marvelous mystery of creation and our best expression for creation is the new life that is born of human love and human relationships.

The spiritual need for knowing the supreme value of life and love is reflected in other ways too by the religious spirit. Shot through that mid-Winter spirit is the same gigantic, audacious dream. Peoples, so different, so antagonistic, so completely unable to fully understand each other that they kill, torture and destroy are all brought continuously to the same judgment, for the same law of cause and effect applies to all people. The same spiritual laws govern all. A sheep and goats division at a proposed final judgment is not truly a reasonable forecast or even morally desirable, but in the myths we find a great yearning wish to which all peoples respond, “peace on earth – good will to men.” What brighter star could there be to guide our footsteps, for if we follow not that goal then we will be judged by the unconscionable succession of hostile events which will end all this love and beauty which our hearts seek at Christmas. Peace on earth good will to men, how much poorer we would be if the years-end did not bring us the vision of such a star to guide our fumbling way.

We need the re-telling of the Christmas stories to remind us not only of the unity of human life, but also its unspeakable wonder. As one holds a babe in his arms or sits by the bedside of a person whose earthly life is flowing swiftly away from our area of sense and knowledge, he is stunned by the meanings and mysteries of creation, recognition, growth, associations between human beings and seeming decay and death. Can one express, except through some lovely analogy, such as the stories of divine birth and protection, the triumphant conviction that life is victor not only over the pains of death, but over death itself?

That sense of wonder supports a keener sense of rightness and the treasing [? - ed.] of important values at Christmas-tide. The sparkling eye, the firmer clasp of hand, the renewed associations, the gifts, the cheer, the sense of warmth that depends not entirely on temperature, these cannot be analyzed like a formula. Just as deep spiritual truths are discovered in Hans Christian Andersen, so “life has loveliness to sell” in the Christmas story. This needs no explanation, only participation and mutual joy.

Although must more could be said on this subject, just one more symbolic reference: more light! Man is a creature of the universe, he responds to the universe – to the seasons and their changes. While we need the rest and sleep of night, it is significant that only rarely has there been a culture which has regarded the moon as the most powerful and important God. Most religions, in their infancy at least, have regarded the Sun as chief God. The Sun is the living symbol of life and light. As the seasons changed from Summer to Fall and from Fall to Winter, there was less light, the chief God visible for a shorter period each day. Then Winter solstice, .....