The Human Side Of The Holidays

December 3, 2000
Venice

Years ago I read that when jazz musician Benny Goodman was talking with a woman at a party, someone dropped a champagne glass. At the sound of the shattering glass, the woman asked, “What was that?”

Goodman answered, “C Sharp.” We humans are like that – we respond according to our interests. To some the sound would have been startling, creating anxieties about a stained rug or someone drinking too much wine. Others might be amused at the awkward accident happening to somebody else. To Benny Goodman, the sound meant C Sharp.

Today is the first Sunday of the Christian Advent season, when Christian believers begin their preparation to celebrate the virgin birth of their Savior, Jesus, in a manger in Bethlehem. From different points of view, the Christmas holidays also bring out differing reactions and unlike interpretations. Unitarian Universalists many times have mixed feelings about Christmas. Some hear “C sharp”; some hear breaking glass. But the person who denies the power of feeling at Christmas season has never listened either to his fellow-liberals or acknowledged his own emotions.

We try to accommodate in various ways, sometimes sensitively, sometimes rationalizing, sometimes naively. An old friend remarked that Unitarian Universalists never mention Christmas without also referring to Hanukkah. I suppose we do that for several reasons: to recognize the wideness of the cultural patterns we celebrate in December; to included the liberation celebration of Hanukkah, which has been a part of the heritage of many of our families; to create an atmosphere for the cultural universality of December rituals – concerts, charitable giving, both personal and commercialized, and swinging parties.

There is no single origin of our mid-Winter celebrations. One flowing spring is seldom the only source of a mighty river. Other brooks and streams feed into it. We need remember the many sources of Winter celebration – not only Christmas and Hanukkah, but also many others, including in recent years, Kwanzaa.

India may be at least one of the sources of Western culture. The roots of Western cultural origins may have beginnings in the Indus Valley, as well as the Tigris-Euphrates basin and Egypt. There are other sources, including the Roman, Teutonic, and Scandinavian.

Thousands of years before the birth of Jesus, the people of India were devoted to the god, Vishnu. Even today, Vishnu may have more followers than any other Hindu god. Originally, he was a Sun god. As the Brahmanic religion developed, Vishnu became the principal god to whom sacrifice was made. In the Hindu trinity, he is the second member who assumes human form. There are differences between Hindu and Christian mythology. Vishnu was incarnated many times, sometimes as animal, sometimes as man. We should note that what we call the “messianic tradition” was a continuing hope in Hinduism. One day, Vishnu would reappear, he would cleanse the earth from sin, remove the shadows and bring about the reign of justice and truth.

Some of us have roots in the Scandinavian peninsula. The traditions of the Norsemen tell the stories of the great celebrations on the occasion of the Winter Solstice. The feast was known as Jul and honored the divine birth of Freyer.

Zoroaster, who lived six or seven centuries before Jesus, was the founder of the religion that bears his name, Zoroastrianism. This prophet of Persian religion taught that there was a struggle constantly between good and evil. Mythology and legend accumulated after his time on earth. Followers declared that Zoroaster was born of a virgin, was visited by adoring Magi; in infancy[, he] was saved from a powerful enemy. In other myths, the life of Zoroaster paralleled the Gospel stories about Jesus.

About the birth of Buddha, there also grew a miraculous mythology, although he had taught ethics and rejected the gods. Years after his death, he was transformed into what in life he had rejected, a god. Parallels with the Christian stories are found also in the mythology that accumulated around Confucius, who lived about the same period as Buddha, about the sixth century, B.C.E.

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, tied with the ribbons of strange customs and superstitious rites of numerous early religions, held before us in order to encourage the spending of money, not to speak of exhausting us physically, we could recommend that Christmas be ignored. If the complex patterns of ancient Christmas myth and legend were all there was to it, we could protest that promoting the celebration of Christmas strengthened belief in the unreasonable and unwholesome doctrine of inherited sin. Furthermore, we could protest with justification that adoration and praise of a virgin mother placed an unnecessary and inhuman stigma on natural love between man and woman and the children born to them.

But that’s not all there is to it. There may be considerable dilution of feeling in placing other customs in conscious juxtaposition with Christmas and Hanukkah, because we may not be able to have our cake and eat it too, as far as the deepest and most poignant sentiments of Christmas are concerned.

When we turn to the universality of the Winter feast, when we ring the changes on the likenesses of Christian, Buddhist, Persian, Chinese, and Scandinavian myths, there may be a real question as to whether we just want an excuse for a party, or feel a reluctance to be too different, whereas for the convinced Christian believer, Christmas is Christ’s Mass, and the Mass celebrates the unique and once-and-for-all supernatural atoning sacrifice of God in Christ for all humankind. But I know no Unitarian Universalists who celebrate Christmas for that theological reason.

We like the carols with lovely melodies, with wistful words, whose theology we ignore. An old friend in a church I served many years ago used to say around the Christmas season, “What we won’t say, we sing.” We tend to convey by our attitudes that inasmuch as many faiths have saviors, we will taste them all, like a wine-tasting party.

Do we celebrate because the old pre-Christian tides of anciently imbedded feelings surface when the Winter Solstice arrives? Or, in spite of our rejection of Christian theology, are we still sufficiently conditioned by the Christian centuries to want to celebrate Christ’s birth – and then explain it away to rid ourselves of any intellectual discomfort we might feel? The Christian Christmas stories and music are deeply moving even to an agnostic or atheist.

When one gets right down to cases, there is no more reason to celebrate the Winter Solstice than the theological Christ’s Mass. The early pre-scientific peoples believed the change from darkness to increasing light was the gift of the gods, who were unpredictable in their bounty. We have learned that the changing seasons and measurable variations of day and night are astronomically precise, predictable as planet Earth moves in its rotating, plotted orbit around our sun-star. There is perhaps even less reason for annual re-creation of the feasts of Anglo-Saxons, Teutons, and Scandinavians than there is for our Christmas worship, even though the pagan wassailing, tree worship, and slightly scandalous parties seem in truth to bring a more enthusiastic response in our day than the incarnation theology.

We do not wrestle seriously with these considerations because feelings prevail, hardly less so among self-classified rationalists and agnostics than with anybody else. Feelings will prevail because we will respond to the aroma and sight of evergreen and candle, the excitement of being busy for others, the sounds of Adeste Fideles and Handel’s MESSIAH, the abundance of sentiment, the image of Jul log (not in FL?) and the warmth of human affection.

On Ash Wednesday, the ashes used in most Roman Catholic churches, traditionally, are secured by burning the palms used the previous year on Palm Sunday. In a few countries, Scandinavian, I believe, the ashes, the visible sign of repentance, were the ashes of the Jul log burned the previous Christmas. Were these penitential customs an awareness that the Christmas dreams of peace and goodwill were not realized because of what we humans are and the ways we think and behave?

But in this season, can there not be moments when new content may replace both the superstitions of pre-history and theologies we can no longer believe? Yes! I believe so.

We celebrate the wonder of life in its lovely realization – the wanted, new baby in the manger of the poor. The story of the baby Jesus stirs us deeply because his is a universal story of parents who experience the shattering, mysterious compound of love, danger, fear, and hope, blended with the fact of pain, the surprise of human sacrifice, and the wonder of human growth.

We celebrate the creation of new human life. Do you remember Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem, “Nightmare for Future Reference”? It was written at the height of the Cold War, but we are still under threat with at least 7 or 8 nations possessing nuclear weapons, and who knows how many have biological death weapons in their secret laboratories? Benet’s poem goes:

“That was the second year of the Third World War
The one between us and Them....”

The poet goes on with laconic but sobering words in the framework of a father speaking to his son:

“The lab chief was no longer permitted guinea pigs for experiments and the statistical curve of the birth rate was in a steep and terrifying slide:

I didn’t ask them,
Not even your mother – she was strange those days –
But, two weeks later, I was back in the lines
And somebody sent me a paper –
Encouragement for the troops and all of that –
All about the fall of Their birth rate on Their side.
I guess you know, now. There was still a day when we fought
And the next day, the women knew. I don’t know how they knew,
But they smashed every government in the world
Like a heap of broken china within two days:
And we’d stopped firing by then. And we looked at each other –
Well, I’ve told you now. They tell you now at eighteen.
There’s no use to tell before.
Do you understand?
That’s why we have the Ritual of the Earth,
The Day of Sorrow, the other ceremonies.
Oh, yes, at first people hated the animals
Because they still bred, but we’ve gotten over that.
You can call it a virus, of course, if you like the word,
But we haven’t been able to find it. Not yet. No
It isn’t as if it had happened all at once.
There were a few children born in the last six months
Before the end of the war, so there’s still some hope,
But they’re almost grown. That’s the trouble
They’re almost grown.
Well, we had a long run. That’s something. At first they thought
There might be a nation somewhere – a savage tribe.
But we were all in it, even the Eskimos.
And we keep the toys in the stores and coloring books,
And people marry and plan and the rest of it,
But you see, there aren’t any children. They aren’t being born.”

Some psychologists interpret the image of a child in a dream as indicating the beginning of new life in a patient. New Life! We know that to define human beginnings as the fertilization of ovum by sperm is to describe, not explain. The emergence of living form, the growth of limb, mind, emotion – all these are/wonderful for diagnostic words. Everyone who has ever held a young baby knows that.

At this season, carol, candle, creche, and evergreen remind us with gladness that children are still being born. What theologically is called the “incarnation” is an all-human occasion for renewing the feeling of glad mystery that life forces are still with us, “the light that lighteth every one that cometh into the world.” No particularized theology may monopolize that full joy and deep wonder.

We celebrate another universal feeling. Church historian Hans Lietzmann helped put this in historical and cultural perspective (A HISTORY OF THE EARLY CHURCH (Vol II, p. 166 – 168). The Roman poet Virgil (79 B.C.E. – 14 B.C.E.) had predicted a time when a savior, coming to the world as a divine child, would erase sin and usher in a golden age. Many Romans thought that Caesar Augustus was that divine incarnation. For centuries to follow, all Caesars were deified. The Age of Augustus was extolled as one which brought better fortune and lessening misery as the Pax Romana brought universal peace. Temples of Peace, dedicated to Rome and Augustus, were built in city after city. Wrote Lietzmann, “A community of feeling passed over the boundaries of the provinces and the differences of race, and created the vitally necessary ideology of the Roman Empire.” So it is today – there is a community of feeling which is all too brief. There are World War I legends of soldiers climbing from the trenches and meeting as friends in Christmas battlefield truce. Personnel executives have told me how difficult it is to discharge persons at Christmas. We are more generous, not only with family, but also to worthy causes and needy persons. Christmas is an incarnation briefly of the dreams of all peoples of the world as it might be, when there would be peace on earth and goodwill to all. We do not need the psychologist to tell us that the babe in the manger or the crib room of the hospital is a sign of hope, for on him/her we project our deepest yearnings, the purer dreams of a human society where the symbols of religion will represent the reality of peace and the full recognition everywhere of the dignity of every person. Dr. Edmund Sinnot (THE BRIDGE OF LIFE) wrote, “Man’s objective now is not to make superior individuals reproduce themselves more efficiently, but to make individuals superior. Greatness will not be the result of evolution, but of aspiration.” (p. 124)

Consider four lines from W. H. Auden’s poem, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”,

“Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.”

Because humankind has a dream, still persuade us to rejoice. There will come a time, in a couple of weeks, when the long night ebbs and more light shines on the babes of the world. When that illumination moves silently, transforming shadow to light, then something in our bones, our blood, our cultural heritage cries out that no matter how dismal the prospect for human redemption, no matter how formidable the portents of disaster, in spite of the blows with which we have been struck, there is a spirit of creation abroad in the world which calls us to protect the innocent, to warm our homes with light and love; and reverently embrace the cosmic mystery, which, I believe, underlies all the matter, energy, and value structures of this universe, this planet, our home.

Centuries before the Christian era began, long before the liberation struggles of the Maccabeans formed the Hanukkah celebration, the Greek dramatist Euripides had words for this occasion in the concluding prayer chorus of IPHIGENIA IN TAURUS, (p. 89):

“O great in our dull world of clay,
And great in heaven’s undying gleam,
Pallas, thy bidding we obey:
And bless thee, for mine ears have heard
The joy and wonder of a word
Beyond my dream, beyond my dream.”

That is the aspiration for the human side of the holidays – we hear the joy and wonder of a word and a world beyond our dreams, because the fulfillment of hopes depends upon the quality of our aspirations and upon our persistence in making real what has been ideal.

[Editor's Note: This sermon appeared at the end of the final (2004) bundle of musings, but was dated as being from the year 2000.]