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Well that was fun, or better put: BEST CHRISTMAS EVER, Road Trip 2006. Columbia to Greenville, SC to Gatlinburg, TN to Greenville, SC and home again. In between, there have been two church services, four big family meals, five present opening times, a walk in the Smokey Mountain woods and even a roller coaster ride.
Where to begin? I think in the realisation that Christmas happens in context of the life you lead, and culture that surrounds you. The starting point for Christmas reflection, begins where you are already, nothing wrong with that. It’s where the whole, big, small thing takes you is the key I think. If the holiday is nothing more than a grand Kabuki like dance, where everyone knows their place and their role, the routine established, then it seems as if the message of the season has been missed, might as well be celebrating Monday morning coffee break, talking about the weekend’s game.
Seems as if the point of the yearly observance is to come again, to the same remarkable, revolutionary story, within context of where your life is at the moment. It should strain you and make you face the disappointments of life, along with the celebrations. I have thought and wondered, if the shepherds who celebrated the birth of Christ, at the urging of the angelic host, had their own children become victims to Harod’s slaughter of the innocents. It would be hard to imagine that the first Christmas would always be completely about that ‘perfect, peaceful day’, the remembrance of the host singing praises to the new born saviour would seem to be mixed with pain, sorrow and anger. Good, I take it that is what it is supposed to do, and why a Saviour was more necessary than generic thoughts about peace and goodwill.
Anyway… along with all of that, I got some cool loot this week as well. Stylish clothes, useful cooking tools, good books and DVD’s, outdoor gear, and even a winter ride on a roller coaster. But first there is this:
What do these two images have to do with each other?
Everything and nothing I suppose. The first is from the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium, in April of 1915. The second image, which I received a colorized version of, is of my grandmother (she’s the infant being held) in April of 1915. Context can be everything. My grandmother, in a small South Carolina town going through her first Easter celebration, a backwater to that age’s main event, which in that month meant the first use of what we would now call a “weapon of mass destruction”, the use of chemical gas, on a battlefield. The age of, I’m sure, these long-gone, masked soldiers still haunts us in virtually everything. The infant in the photo, now 92 years old, sat across from me at Christmas on Monday, having long outlived the state’s of the Kaiser and the Czar, the second and third Reich, the Bolsheviks and all the various French Republics everything in-between. Context is everything, what is important today will be trivial tomorrow, and 92 years later its Christmas in a world unforeseen.
Christmas holidays? It’s a time to be changed by the same story, in a different context, year by year, that and great food and loot as well. Happy New Year!
Former President Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein have nothing in common with each other, just a vast contrast and dying within two days of each other.
Hussein has been the uber-villain of the past 16 years or so in the west, over 25 years in his native land. My reaction to his hanging? Though I sympathise with John Donne about the deaths of men, I don’t have much sympathy here for someone made in God’s image, like us all, I just do not. But I don’t have anger either. Best I can offer the nasty man is the one thing he probably did not want: indifference, sheer, callous, not caring about him. I would rather care about a Kurdish woman gassed to death by his minions in his ‘resistance’.
Ford’s death on the other hand, saddens me in the way that the end of days to those full of life does. He was a civilisation builder: Eagle Scout, worked his way through school, all-star athlete at Michigan, assistant football coach and graduate student at Yale, Naval officer, developer of community building projects while starting his law firm, faithful to his wife and family to a fault, and most remembered for stepping into the breach to salve and end the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon years of American government with the most unpretentious service available. He was not a great man, in the sense of leading armies and doing something completely new, but he was better, a good man.
Hussein faced what the greatest villians of our last century did not: a trial to publicly answer for his crimes and a lawful dispensing of justice at the hangman’s noose. Most villians die in their beds, or never face real justice. Ford is being remembered for being an instrument of justice, where his weapon was his peaceable nature, and amicable spirit. Two unlikely men, from opposite sides of the world, one built civilisation, the other perverted civilisation for his own ends.
I’m not a fan of the War on Christmas chatter, I’m really not. Mostly because if there was a war, it was lost over 150 years ago, when the public reacted to Dickens Christmas Carol the way it did.
Little background first…. theologically, I understand Christmas as an optional Christian holiday (with their only being 1 mandated for NT believers). In fact, I know some folks who, out of their convictions in Puritan/Reformed theology don’t celebrate Christmas at all. Which is fine, the book of Romans gives us guidelines of how one man can hold a day higher than another and our responsibility to not judge each other based on the importance we place on certain days. I’m cool with that.
But let’s get something straight here, and get some terms right. This is not Christmas season. It is Advent season. In the church year, those are two wholly separate events. Maybe those of you with Episcopal backgrounds know what I’m talking about.
It’s Advent until December 25, which has traditionally meant lots of prayer, contemplation, fasting and preparation for the coming of the Lord – a whole month of it. Christmas season is December 25th to January 5th – a time of feasting and celebration of the arrival of our Lord.
It is not the Christian’s job to take offense or to demand rights so that our god can be represented in the Pantheon with Lord Snowman and our Saviour Rudolph. Our job is to bear witness that a new light has come, in whatever way is most convenient. Just asking for another place at the table isn’t what is expected at us.
The world at large likes Christmas season for some reason: the lights, the presents, an opportunity to remember the least of these, and so on. That’s good. We should find an opportunity to ask them why they like it, not to shame them that they don’t have a creche in the lobby or get huffy that they don’t know the ‘real reason for the season.’ If Advent is the season that we remember that the Lord came to a dirty, shitty animal pen, we shouldn’t act like we’re better than that.
At the founding of America, there was no general Christmas season or general public recognition of it. The Reformed, Congregational, Presbyterian, who were a much larger % of the population then, barely recognized it. Those that did had quiet events in their home or church.
It wasn’t until the mid 1800’s, when the above groups lost a lot of their moorings, plus new immigrants from Europe, plus a mercantile spirit that saw a vast opportunity to sell stuff for the usual slower time of year, that Christmas left the home and church, and was celebrated during Advent season instead. That’s what cities and towns and shopping malls celebrate. They’re not celebrating the arrival of the prince of peace.
If they want to be honest with themselves and at least acknowledge what they’re celebrating has nothing to do with any time of Advent season, that’s fine with me, hope they have it.
