The Irrational Season,
When Love Blooms Bright and Wild

Don Friesen
December 18, 2005
Ottawa Mennonite Church

www.ottawamennonite.ca

There is a fog of madness that settles over us every December, a layer of lunacy — over North America, at least — that makes people do strange things. It's a tense time of year: the shopping mall mobs can be brutal, lines at the cash registers interminable, and people quick to snap at their kids, snap at each other, snap at anything! Once out of the mall there are parking lot skirmishes. And once out of the parking lot, everybody drives sooooo slowly. It's a tense time of year, this season that invites us to be cheerful and generous. People are on edge.

This is the season that asks us to go everywhere, do everything, buy everything, eat everything — and some people can't handle it; they snap! I read of two women who almost came to blows at a retail counter over the last bottle of some kind of perfume. And then there was a fellow who pulled a gun on a clerk when he didn't get the sale he had heard was being offered on a power drill.

It's one thing trying to deal with the pressure of elbowing one's way through crowded stores and aiming one's car through jammed-up traffic, not to mention decorating the tree; mailing out Christmas cards; attending Christmas concerts; attending office parties; and sending out a large cheque to your local church before year's end!

This year, however, there's an extra layer of lunacy harassing the Christmas spirit, and it has to do with where Jesus fits in the season. There was a letter in the Ottawa Citizen a few days ago complaining that the Christmas choir comprised of employees at Public Works and Government Services Canada was re-named this year; it's now called the "seasonal choir". When the miffed chorister asked the reason, he got the following reply from the human resources department, "Communication materials must depict the diverse nature of Canadian society in a fair, representative and inclusive manner." Humbug! said the chorister, "It is not inclusive to rename one of Christians' most important religious days. It is arrogant and offensive!" ("Christians feeling excluded," Ottawa Citizen, December 15, 2005, page A15)

There have been other news items during the past few weeks, the town council of Oxford, Nova Scotia, for example, passing a motion proclaiming that the entire month of December shall be referred to as the "Christmas season" within the town limits. ("Oxford makes Christmas the season," CBC News, November 30, 2005) The media tried hard to find someone in Nova Scotia who might be offended by this, but as usual, Canadians managed but a pale imitation of what transpires to the south of us. There fuel was added to the fire-in-the-holiday-hearth by the publication, this fall, of a book entitled, The War On Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Its author is John Gibson, an anchor at Fox News who is in an all-out race with Chicken Little to convince people that the sky is falling!

It was once not uncommon to hear sermons urging us to put Christ back into Christmas, or Christ-mas, if you will. It accompanied laments about the commercialization of the Christmas season, asking how we dare call such awful displays of avarice and greed "Christmas"! This year, however, the cry from the right is: "Commercialize Christmas, or Else!" The American Family Association, for example, is leading a boycott of the Target stores chain for not using the words, "Merry Christmas," in its advertising, and the Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart over the way its web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, a Fox anchor who started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign last year, has a chart of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays" on his web site, the implication being that they are not worthy of our dollars. (Adam Cohen, "This Season's War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else," The New York Times, December 4, 2005) In this case, the "traditional" Christmas under attack by what Gibson calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters" is the commercialized tradition. And perhaps the commercialization of Christmas — and the church, for that matter — has been rendered complete by a mega church in Dallas that decided not to hold a worship service on Christmas Day this year after running a "cost-benefit analysis" of such a service! If we did a "cost-benefit analysis" of keeping this church going, we would have shut down long ago! Looking at our budget shortfall, of course, we may be shutting down sooner than we think!

These "Christmas wars" reach a new level of absurdity when one remembers that the Puritans despised Christmas. The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian! On their first December 25 in the New World (1620) they made a point of ignoring the holiday, preferring to work. In fact, for more than a decade (1659-1681) Massachusetts made celebrating Christmas, "by forbearing of labour, feasting or in any other way," a crime! (Cohen)

Christmas is getting to be a strange and mean-spirited season. The current "defenders" of Christmas are not just tolerating the commercialization of Christmas, they're insisting on it. The Fox News people were hoisted by their own political petards, however, when it was discovered that their own online store was promoting a "Holiday Collection" for shoppers, including "Holiday Ornaments".

If I were putting up a public creche this year, and trying to accommodate all of these viewpoints, I wouldn't know where to put the baby Jesus! Some say, Put him back into Christmas. Some say, Take him out of Christmas. Some say, Leave him in it, but make sure all his bells and whistles and trinkets and price-tags are attached!

Silliness, of course, is no respecter of persons. If liberals can be silly about political correctness, there's no reason why conservatives can't be silly too! The liberals seem to be just as historically ill-informed as the conservatives. Rename Christmas a no-name holiday, if you wish, but even seemingly benign "holidays" were originally "Holy Days". Those school boards, city officials, and corporations that have implemented rigid rules banning Christmas trees, wreaths, Christmas carols, the proclamation of the word "Christmas," and even the colours, red and green, deserve to be ridiculed.

Britain too has honed in on this rush to silliness, banning advertising references to Christmas because of not wanting to offend it's million-strong Moslem population. Emily received a letter this week from a family friend living in Bahrain, a Moslem state, who noted that Moslems there seem to have no trouble at all wishing anyone whom they think might be Christian a "Merry Christmas". Moslem parents and students give Christian teachers Christmas cards and gifts. Emily's family friend lives in an apartment block that has both Moslem and Christian tenants, but the owner, who is a Moslem, put up two Christmas trees in the foyer!

An Overshadowing and Perplexing Annunciation

These scuffles over how we observe the Christmas season seem far removed from the reality that gripped a young woman some two millennia ago. They distract from the birth of Christ itself and certainly eclipse details of the story, like the Annunciation, for example. The annunciation refers to the announcement made by the angel Gabriel to Mary concerning the birth of Jesus, but like our own church announcements it is often ignored. We skip to the end of the story, to the punch-line where Mary obediently offers herself to the will of God. Synopsis? Mary chosen, Mary favoured, Mary obedient; Go and do likewise.

Interesting, however, that this account of the angel's visit to Mary has not been ignored by poets and painters. There are many representations of the annunciation in painting, literature and film, and while they accent Mary's faithfulness, they also linger over the darkness of the story. They linger over the fear and questioning hinted at by Luke, who tells us that Mary was "much perplexed" (Luke 1:29) by the angel's announcement. "Favoured one" (1:28) or not, the announcement was cause for some bewilderment! Luke tells us that Mary "pondered what sort of greeting this might be." (1:29) It was cause for some speculation, something to mull over, ...and over, ...and over. Luke hints at an element of fear (1:30), alludes to portentous historical hopes (1:32-33), and tells Mary to be ready for the Holy Spirit to "overshadow" her. (1:35) Mary, in this story, is more than a passive instrument of grace; I think the experience agitated her. If this announcement came at the beginning of a worship service, the rest of the service was forgotten as the perplexed Mary pondered its significance.

I grew up in a fairly diverse community in Saskatchewan. Among us were Mennonites, Metis, English, French, and Doukhobors. The Doukhobors, like the Mennonites, had origins in Russia, were also a Christian community, and based their religious philosophy on two commandments: Love God with all your heart, mind and soul; and, Love your neighbour as yourself. However, to the authorities they were known as religious dissidents, and in 1785 Archbishop Ambrosius of the Russian Orthodox Church referred to them as Doukho-bortsi. The name means Spirit-wrestlers, and while the archbishop intended it as a derogatory label, suggesting they were struggling against the Spirit of God, the group itself embraced the name, saying: "We are Spirit wrestlers because we wrestle with and for the Spirit of God against those things which are evil." And while wrestling may suggest bodily force, the Doukhobors were committed to using the spiritual power of love rather than any form of violence.

I think Mary was a Spirit-wrestler. Her perplexities and ponderings are reminiscent of some of the matriarchs of old who struggled with the impossibility of God's promises. Mary's Magnificat may be similar to the Old Testament Hannah's song, but her struggles with the announcement call to mind other women of the Old Testament. When Sara received a similar announcement — another birth announcement — she laughed! (Genesis 18) She pondered long and hard, not at all sure about the identity of the messenger making the announcement or about its veracity.

The Spirit-wrestling continued as Sara's daughter-in-law, Rebekah, struggled with what to do when Isaac seemed to be favouring Esau. Her struggles began in conception already, and continued as she tried to ensure that God's promises would be fulfilled. And Rebekah's daughter-in-law, Rachel, in turn, got into a wrestling match, if you will, with Leah.

Perhaps Mary, like Rebekah's son, Jacob, also wrestled with the angel. Spirit-wrestling is a long-time, noble, biblical sport, recalling a biblical collage of the psalmist's laments, Job's accusations, and even Jesus' own agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is a time-honoured biblical principle that one can argue with God's announcements and wrestle with the messenger.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), an Austrian poet of a century ago, penned the lines,

"How small is what we contend with and fight;
how great what contends with us....

For what we can conquer is only the small,
and winning itself turns us into dwarfs;
but the everlasting and truly important
will never be conquered by us.
It is the angel who made himself known
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
for whenever he saw his opponents propose
to test their iron-clad muscle strength,
he touched them like strings of an instrument
and played their low-sounding chords."

("The Observer")