04.12.05 - The Silly Season

Well, as you??ve probably been told by now on the radio or TV or by a friend or colleague, or as you may have observed yourself, the "silly season" is upon us. It won??t be long until the constant outpouring of Christmas music in stores will have reached saturation point, and the desire to throttle the relentlessly cheerful Crisco woman on TV will have reached dangerous levels ?± well, for me anyway.

The silly season brings with it temptations ?± pressures even ?± to spend more than we can afford. It brings social occasions with people we don??t socialise with the rest of the year, often because we don??t want to and we wonder why we are doing it now. It invites us to eat and drink to a degree that we know could alarm our GP?ñ It??s a crazy season when the majority of the adult population seem to become bewitched by the spirit of consumerism, and the young get caught up in it with the spirit of expectation of gifts. Every silly season countless of us declare that next year will be different ?± and then next year comes and it is just as silly as the last year, if not more so.

Umberto Eco, the Italian author of The Name of the Rose and other novels, has an essay in a recent issue of the British newspaper The Telegraph entitled "God isn??t big enough for some people." It is a bit of a rambling piece of writing where he bemoans the materialism that seems to govern so many people??s thinking, and materialism??s inability to fill the gap left by the decline in religious faith, especially its inability to give meaning to life and to death. The death of God, he says, has led to the birth of countless new idols, from pagan cults to The Da Vinci Code. They multiply like bacteria on the corpse of the Church. Eco is critical of the tendency of contemporary men and women to drift off into silly superstitions such as taking The Da Vinci Code seriously. During the course of the essay he makes this delightful observation, "Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest."

He begins the essay by referring to these four weeks of shopping madness and of children solely focussed on and waiting for presents, and he concludes thus:

"I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.

"I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [who said]: ?´What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent??? The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that." (1)

This is a really silly season for those of us who take the religious celebration of Christmas reasonably seriously but not at all literally, because we recognize the inherent absurdities in what we do and say and sing. It begins with the language of Advent and the presuppositions of the readings in Advent.

Advent is a time filled with language of "come", often linked with "down" ?± "come down? from where?" any intelligent 21^st century person would ask with a very different understanding of the universe than the writers of the Bible or of old Advent hymns..

Advent is a time of language invoking the intervention of an external ("up" there, "out" there) deity into our world of human affairs, when many of us have completely or at least to some extent set aside former beliefs in a deity who dwells in some heavenly realm outside our experience and who from time to time ?± but far too infrequently ?± acts within the world of our experience.

Advent is a time of language of crisis ?± with images of captivity, of lostness, of despair and hopelessness, of darkness which needs light, fear which needs courage, and sorrow which needs joy. To some extent, at least, there is some resonance in this language because we can recognise that there is much in this contemporary world that is or is close to crisis for humanity.

Advent is a time which treats ancient prophecy as foretelling a particular individual, Jesus of Nazareth, and which turns an ascetic wilderness preacher into the herald who announces Jesus as one who was promised of old. We know in fact that biblical prophets had no particular future individual in mind and that any resonance between what they said and who and what Jesus was is a matter of reading him back into the prophetic past. And we know that John the Baptist??s ascetic movement for a time ran parallel to and challenged the Jesus movement, and had some influence on it but eventually faded away. In fact, one of the reasons the gospels tell the story of John baptising Jesus is to take the opportunity to point out how greater than John Jesus is. It was a theologically political statement as the young Christian movement sought to differentiate itself from Judaism including the admirers of John.

Any thoughtful approach to the language of Advent recognises the inherent absurdities and silliness. At the same time for some of us, there is an instinct which says that to put aside this language of invocation and longing, of human crisis and of divine intervention, would be to put aside a poetry about the human condition and its remedy, and to do that would be a deep loss. For we know that darkness and loss of hope, wondering and waiting for something that makes sense of our living and our dying, and imagery of rescuer and the wannabe rescued, is real for many people, including ourselves.

I suspect some of that might have been going on in some people??s minds last Friday around 11am New Zealand time when a young Australian drug trafficker was hanged in Singapore. It is not very often that we know precisely when someone will die, killed by another human being in an intentional and legally-authorised and publicised action. The severity of his offence and the severity of the sentence were just a couple of the things that played on people??s minds, along with the fact of his youth and the sadness and sense of waste that any young death can bring. The hanging happened to coincide with the end of morning tea here in the community centre. Just before 11 the typically animated morning tea repartee faltered and died away, and eventually we each drifted off in an uneasy silence.

We might recognise on one level the absurdities and silliness of the language of Advent ?± which is at its most absurd in the "on clouds descending" language of the concluding hymn we??ll sing today. But we also know that most people??s hearts are not moved by the language of logic and reason. Most people??s hearts are moved by the language of poetry, by metaphor, by words which evoke more than words which define and appeal primarily to the brain. Martin Luther King did not inspire and lead people by speeches of incontrovertible logic; he spoke about dreaming dreams, and what he saw in those dreams. He addressed heart and soul at least as much if not more than just head.

Most people in New Zealand (although not in the world) by and large have a more positive outlook on life and the future than the outlook which is suggested by the language and poetry of Advent. Yet, no matter how positive an outlook, there are also the questions, the silent wonderings, the moments of darkness and grief, of feeling alone and vulnerable, estranged and lost. For many people, I suspect, a few minutes around 11am last Friday contained some of what the language of Advent seeks to address.

There are many, many millions more people in the world for whom our few moments around Friday 11am are a day-long, every day, seven days a week experience. There are many, many more people around the world for whom questions, wonderings, darkness and grief, aloneness and vulnerability and lostness are a daily occurrence, and young deaths by horrible means are so frequent they no longer warrant comment.

We know the absurdity, the silliness of what we say or sing around this time. We know that God is not ever going to come sailing in "on clouds descending". We know that while divine intervention is a deep and heartfelt human longing, it simply doesn??t happen like that. It never has and never will. We know that that image of an intervening God is an image that humanity needs to grow out of, while we at the same time have to learn that that which the language of Advent calls upon God to do, people are called to do ?± we are called to do.

The longing for a better world, for the embracing of justice and peace, for the day when hatred is overcome by love, and darkness by light, and fear by joy, and poverty by plenty, is a deep-felt longing common to all human beings. The language of the prophets which we especially hear during Advent, and the justice hymns of the Psalmist, and even formidable reforming figures like John the Baptiser, have over many centuries been inspirational for men and women who by their own actions, by their own dedication and commitment and conviction that God was with them, have themselves intervened to bring light and hope and life to others. The language of the prophets and the language of Advent has given men and women dreams, and courage to act upon those dreams. The absurd and silly language of Advent can speak profoundly to heart and soul, and make much more difference than cool logic and even common sense.

So, like Umberto Eco making a Christmas crib with his grandson, we soon will turn our communion table around and place a nativity scene inside it, knowing that many of us don??t actually believe the story it portrays as being in any way literally true. We will continue to use the peculiar language of Advent and the silly language of Christmas. We will talk, and sing, about a ?´coming??, and about a ?´coming down??, using all that pre-scientific imagery. And we will do it because poetry and metaphor speak loudly, and even if some people do get confused or even turned off by it, there will be others for who it may open up new dimensions to their own living and their own serving, with a new understanding of a divinity that acts in the world whenever they ?± whenever we ?± act in the world for good, for justice and beauty and peace, with plenty for all and hope to spare.

(1) http://www.aldaily.com/  Arts and Letters Daily, Weekend edition, December 3-4, 2005, under "Essays and Opinions".  A number of us in St Lukes have Arts and Letters Daily as our home page.  It is well worth at least bookmarking.