Category: Feasts and Seasons

13Dec

The Santa Myth

Santa Claus, that chubby old chuckler who flies around on a sleigh pulled by reindeer, and drops through chimneys delivering gifts, has become the iconic symbol of Christmas. There is an almost perverse cultural overemphasis on “believing in Santa”, even as the incarnation of Jesus the Son of God falls further and further away from our collective consciousness.

The spectacular fantasy film “The Polar Express”, based on the beloved children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, is a good example of the cultural pressure to uphold the Santa myth. The protagonist, a boy who is struggling with doubts about the reality of Santa, is invited to ride on a mysterious train to the North Pole. A creepy hobo he meets on the train asks him, “What’s your take the big guy?” The whole point of the yarn is of course to decry disbelief in Santa. A web page on WikiHow tells you how to “Keep Your Child Believing in Santa.”

Even Christians play along with the Santa myth, as it is passionately defended in an article I ran across entitled “Why I Believe in Santa (And My Kids Will Too)” by Hannah Giselbach:

You get where I’m going with this. The thought of having an intervention every time your children use their imaginations is ill-advised and rather silly. Why, then, are we so afraid to let our children imagine and pretend when it comes to Santa Claus? Pretending isn’t always lying. One very sad and dismal day, your children won’t play with dolls anymore. They won’t run, elated, arms flailing when they see Mickey Mouse at Disney World. One day, your children will grow up and understand that all the things they used to play with and pretend with are not actually real. I beg of you, don’t take away that magic prematurely. It will happen when it happens. And I’ve never once met an adult who felt betrayed by their parents who “lied” to them about Santa when they were children. Not once! I have, however, met adults who feel deprived of a major part of childhood because their parents felt the need to dispel their belief and encourage their questioning doubt at a very young age.

This approach, of winking and saying “it’s a good lie” or “it’s just pretend” makes me a bit squeamish. Also it seems unnecessary. In my own family we have reveled in the imagination of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” without trying to maintain that they are real and true. I don’t want to be a spoiler of enchanting ideas, or an enemy of imagination, but neither will I tell a bald-faced lie to someone, especially a child. Especially as Christians, the myth of Santa is not the place to stake our flag of truth, lest we lose all credibility on more important things, such as the Resurrection.

This is not merely a frivolous worry. Philosopher David Kyle Johnson, associate professor at King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, PA, wrote an opinion article entitled “Sorry, Virginia” in the Baltimore Sun, in which he stated:

Parents should stop teaching their kids to believe in Santa Claus. Reading stories about Santa is fine, and encouraging generosity and imagination is great. But tricking children into believing that an omniscient fat man, with a red suit and rosy cheeks, will slide down the chimney bestowing presents on Dec. 24 is just flat-out immoral. First of all, it’s lying. It’s one thing to lie to save someone’s life, but stop kidding yourself. “It’s fun to watch the kids get excited” is hardly a noble cause. Nor is it harmless. I’ve amassed recollections of “finding out the truth about Santa,” and many were stories of genuine embarrassment and resentment. The systematic deception makes children feel taken advantage of or like the butt of a joke. In contrast to the opinion of Ms. Giselbach, prof Johnson has collected stories of harm done by the lie, and you can read about this here.

An article published in Lancet Psychiatry also hypothesizes that lying to kids about Santa may be harmful. As reported in The Guardian:

Kathy McKay, a clinical psychologist at the University of New England, Australia and co-author, said: “The Santa myth is such an involved lie, such a long-lasting one, between parents and children, that if a relationship is vulnerable, this may be the final straw. If parents can lie so convincingly and over such a long time, what else can they lie about?”

Even more, from a Christian perspective, is this: The more of our time and brain space we give to the “Santa” myth, and by extension to the plastic and commercial “X-mas” of our culture, the more we distract from–nay, rob from–the glory of Christ’s birth. Pastor and author John Piper, of “Desiring God” fame, responded to the question of Santa by first recounting the fact that Christmas celebrates that Jesus came to seek and save the lost, that he came to give his life a ransom for many, and that through his death he might destroy the one who has the power of death.

So the birth of the Son of God, the very God, very man, is simply stunning and glorious and infinitely serious, an overflow of the happy news. The angel called it “good news of great joy” — great joy, not small joy, not a little bit of joy, but great joy (Luke 2:10).

…It is mindboggling to me that any Christian would even contemplate such a trade, that we would divert attention away from the incarnation of the God of the universe into this world to save us and our children. . . . Not only is Santa Claus not true — and Jesus is very truth himself — but compared to Jesus, Santa is simply pitiful, and our kids should be helped to see this.
(Desiringgod.org).

I’ll return to the question posed by that ghostly hobo, “What’s your take on the big guy?”

When this came up for me, when my kids were toddlers, I pondered how to honor Santa, without lying, and without sucking away the magic of the season. I purchased a lovely little book by Julie Stiegemeyer entitled Saint Nicholas: The Real Story of the Christmas Legend, published by Concordia Publishing in 2007. This is a very readable book with charming illustrations, which I found helpful. It links Santa with the historical St. Nicholas, relating him to the real meaning of Christmas at the end of the story.

If asked, “do you believe in Santa?” or “is Santa real?” I will say “yes”. “Santa” is real of course, as he is based on a real person known to us as St. Nicholas, a fourth century Christian bishop in the town of Myra, now part of modern day Turkey. He was recognized as a “saint” by the church. He was remembered for his generosity of spirit, and so giving gifts in his honor is fitting. St. Nicholas now lives, presumably, in heaven. That “Santa” is as real as you and I.

However, if I am pressed and asked whether Santa is literally a fat guy in a red suit from the North Pole who drops down chimneys, then I can’t lie about this. My answer is “no”; that “Santa” is as real as Darth Vader, Princess Bubblegum, and Mickey Mouse. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

28Nov

Advent Greetings

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Our warmest greetings to you as we begin the season of preparation for Christmas. From the Advent page of our parent website:

This is the season of preparation for the coming of the Christ Child. As St. Paul said in Galatians 4:4 “But when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son”. In his book, Time, Science, and Society in China and the West, Nathaniel Morris Lawrence suggests a metaphor in which “fullness of time” can be thought of as the moment before delivery in a pregnancy. During advent, the universe is pregnant. All of history has led up to this moment, when the God of time and creation takes upon himself our nature, becomes enfleshed, and steps into our timeline, into the specific time and place of Bethlehem circa 4 BC. The universe is pregnant, awaiting this moment. Mary, the future mother of Jesus, is pregnant, awaiting the delivery of her child. The people of Israel are expecting a messiah. The moment is almost upon us.

(Image credit: “Adventskranz” by Liesel, available at Wikimedia Commons)

30Sep

A Medieval Prayer in Honor of St Michael

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O Myghell! by grace of Cryst Iesu
Callid among angelis þe hevenly champioun,
Be a prerogatyf synguler of vertu,
Held a batayll, venquysshed the dragoun,
Be thow our sheld and our proteccyoun
In euery myschef of daungeris infernall,
Dyffende our party, presente our orisoun,
Vp to the lord that gouerneth all.

– John Lydgate

(Image and verse are Public Domain)

08May

Remembering Our Mothers, and Saint Monica

In many Christian calendars, the feast day of Saint Monica nearly coincides with Mother’s Day. May 4th is commemorated as her feast day by some Lutheran bodies, the Eastern Orthodox, and The Episcopal Church USA.

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Monica shines as a powerful example of maternal love and devotion. She prayed unceasingly for her wayward son as well as for the conversion of her husband. Famously, she was told by a bishop “the child of those tears shall never perish.”

Her tears paid off well, for her, for her son, and for the church. Her son repented of his previous lifestyle, converted to Christianity, and eventually became a bishop. His writings are some of the most brilliant and penetrating of his era. He is known and remembered to us as Saint Augustine of Hippo.

In Roman Catholicism Monica is regarded as a patron saint for mothers, among others.

Happy Mothers Days.

15Feb

Love and Hell

Valentine’s Day brings the annual punctuation of Winter’s cold by the arrows of Cupid. We are put in mind of romance and love, as we wander the rows of pink and red cards, and navigate the bewildering assortments of chocolate and flowers. We may find ourselves reading delightful poems by Donne or Byron, or perhaps thinking of tragic love stories from ages past.

Since we are observing the holiday this year on a Sunday, this is a good time to recall the deepest and oldest, and perhaps most tragic love story of all time. This story eats Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” for breakfast. It is more intriguing than the pathos conjured by Tolkien’s “Lay of Beren and Luthien”. The story in view here, of course, is the tragic tale of God’s deep love for humanity, for his created beings whom he made in his image, and endowed with the gift of life. He has loved us despite our rebellion and waywardness. God has endeavored to woo us back. The shocking finale is that God wrote himself into our story, taking our humanity and all its joys and sorrows upon himself.

As in the words of an old Lutheran hymn (Adapted from Thomas A Kempis)

“Oh, love, how deep, how broad, how high,
Beyond all thought and fantasy,
That God, the son of God, should take
Our mortal form for mortal’s sake!”

Sadly, that love often has gone unrequited. In the end, a soul that says, “leave me alone” gets its wish. In the title above, I invoked the idea of Hell, which I won’t try to fully define here. An important aspect of the definition is that the ultimate curse is the precise opposite of the ultimate blessing, as expressed in the famous “Aaronic benediction”. Instead of God’s presence, there is absence. Instead the light of God’s countenance shining upon his beloved, there is only darkness and loneliness.

Some might ask us how we square the idea of a loving God with a concept like Hell. I was recently listening to an old message by Tim Keller, of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and was struck by a statement, that we will never really understand the depth of God’s love for us without believing in Hell. What did it cost God to love us? Was it nothing? What did Jesus actually endure on our behalf?

It turns out that what really makes Jesus the “man of sorrows” arises from much more than the mere physical tortures inflicted upon him. It wasn’t just the weight of the cross that bore him down. Christian theology teaches that Jesus had to endure abandonment and forsakenness, the sudden disintegration of his relationship with the Heavenly Father. In other words, Hell.

I recall wasting a couple hours in 1997 watching “Event Horizon,” a science fiction horror film that is almost exactly like “2010” crossed with “Friday the 13th”. It begins creepily enough with a ghost spaceship returned after disappearing into a black hole, and a team of astronauts and scientists travel to investigate. From this promising start, the movie degenerates quickly into a fairly brainless gore fest. The spacecraft is orbiting what turns out to be a portal to Hell, and one of the characters gets possessed by a demonic entity. But there is an interesting point: At the end of the movie, one of the remaining crew members willingly enters the portal to Hell, in order to save the others.

That’s exactly what Jesus did. He took on Hell so that we might escape it. That’s a love that is astounding and unfathomable. However, if we try our best to understand it and embrace it–to take it into our hearts–it will be life transforming.

So, reflect on that, and happy Valentine’s Day.

10Feb

Ash Wednesday and Lent

There are different ways to measure the height of a mountain. It is typical to list the elevation above sea level. By this measure, Mt Everest, at 8848 meters (29,029 ft), is clearly “the rooftop of the world”. However, if you measure from base to peak, other mountains are taller. Everest emerges from the already very high Tibetan Plateau, and from base to peak is a mere 4000 meters or 13000 feet (of course, this is still pretty impressive!). Mt. Denali (formerly McKinley) in Alaska beats this with a base to peak height of about 5500 meters (18,000 feet).

Today, many churches celebrate Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent is a Christian observance that dates to around 325 or so. The season of Lent, like many of the Christian observances we know and love, isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Previous to this, the early Christians mainly just celebrated Easter. Easter, spiritually speaking, is Christianity’s Mt. Everest. This is the highest height, and the greatest summit for us this side of Eternity. Easter heralds the ultimate victory of Christ over death, and the triumph of Good over Evil. We glow as the risen and glorified Jesus says, “Lo, I am with you always, to the end of the age”.

How do we do justice to something like Easter, when we remember it in our hearts and meditate upon its meaning? How do we do it justice in our yearly cycle of celebration? What could we do to make something that spectacularly good even just a little bit more special? What I take to be the genius of Lent is that it is a human attempt to make the Easter commemorations even more grand by deepening the depths from which our Himalayan summit rises, thereby creating a larger base-to-peak journey. We descend to the deepest depths and darkest darkness before emerging blinking into the blazing glory of Easter.

How do we do this? Lent begins with the admonition that recalls our mortality: “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.” Many Christians observe a season of fasting, or abstaining from certain foods or beverages. You can read more about fasting here. Many Christians delve into exercises of spiritual disciplines, such as bible study. Some will try to do more acts of charity.

However you choose to prepare for Easter, I commend to you the season of Lent as a time of prayer, penitence, reflection, and discipline. By scooping out a deeper valley, Lent helps Easter rise that much more gloriously ahead of us.

14Jan

Fugue on Epiphany and wise men

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(Photo: Edward Burne-Jones – The Adoration of the Magi; in the public domain)

“Wise men still seek him” or so proclaims a popular slogan that appears on cards and facebook posts this time of year1 (well, more at Christmas, but I digress). Relieved I was therefore to see the headline of a recently discovered copy of a 2014 Time magazine that boldly proclaimed, “The Search for Jesus.” Aha, thought I, the search is on again. Another batch of wise men are on the move.

Reading the article naturally deflated me a bit–these men apparently weren’t of the same mind as those earlier magi. They seemed more “wise guys” than wise men. Like so many popular articles that purport to unearth or reexamine the “historical Jesus”, this Time Magazine piece merely rehashed the statements of Christianity’s fifth column, revisionist scholars like Rudolph Bultmann and the members of the “Jesus seminar.” The summary statement of the article went like this:

This time of year, many people will conclude that those scholars are asking the wrong questions. They’ll answer as one reader did in the letters to the editor following the 1996 story: “It doesn’t matter who Jesus of Nazareth was or what he was,” he wrote. “What’s most important is the lessons he taught.” (You can find this online at Time Magazine’s website.)

Perhaps what is meant by “wise” is the root of the issue. One quickly recalls the statement of St. Paul the apostle:
Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.(First Corinthians 3,Holy Bible, King James version).

Of course an ancient Hebrew proverb tells us The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. (Proverbs 9:10, Holy Bible, King James Version). The “fear of the Lord” and “knowledge of the Holy” are roughly synonymous (if we recognize here an example of the Jewish poetic form known as “parallelism”). To know the holy God is to revere Him (“fear” here connotes more than dread or terror–it is fuller of the awe of the numinous, and reverence for that which is beyond our mortal coil). The reverence for God and knowledge of the Holy are things that precede and are prerequisites for attaining wisdom.

One might go a step further and say that the journey toward wisdom requires more than a mere “head knowledge” of the Holy. Recalling Jesus’ words to his disciples the evening before his death, it would appear that in some mysterious way an encounter with the Holy is required: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.” This indicates that the beginning of wisdom is an encounter with (or the gift of/the activity of) the Holy Spirit of God.

In the end, the slogan should perhaps be reworded this way: “truly wise men still find him”, or better yet, “wise men still adore him”. The “wise guys”, those who know not the holy, who are wise in the world’s fashion, might find themselves forever seeking in vain.

May you have an encounter with the Holy. May you seek the one born to be “Messiah”, and find Him.

1The great Feast of Epiphany among other things celebrates the coming of the Magi to worship Jesus. Traditionally, this is commemorated on January 6, twelve days after Christmas.

14Dec

Spiritual Disciplines

In mid-Advent we are in the midst of a season of discipline and penitence, a “mini-Lent”. Fittingly, I have worked on an overview of disciplines for our parent website:

Spiritual Disciplines

Marines-scaling-mountain

(Photo Credit: Training Exercises, U.S. Marine Corps, by Cpl. Will Perkins, Sept 10, 2015; Public Domain)

This is where the rubber meets the road in Christianity. Through these activities which we refer to as “spiritual disciplines”, we can grow in faith and knowledge, and are permitted to assist in the work of the Holy Spirit, our divine companion, who is dwelling and working mysteriously within us.

St. Paul in one of his letters advised his readers: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12-13: English Standard Version). The “work out” part is where these activities come in to play.

At our baptisms, God could probably have chosen just to “zap us” with instant knowledge and all the “fruits of the Spirit” in full development. He could have made us fully impervious to temptations and further sins. However, God has graciously chosen to allow us to cooperate with Him on a lifelong journey. This idea flows from the Christian idea that “God is Love”, that He wants relationship with beings who can choose love, and not merely a bunch of robotic servants.

Baptism is the beginning for us, not the end. We refer to the earliest part of our spiritual journey as a “new birth”–it is a beginning, a moment of decision, an emerging. We have answered the call to become “God’s woman” or “God’s man”. It may be for some a “mountain top experience”, but in fact answering the call and being baptized are but getting to the trailhead in the foothills, at the beginning of our trek. At this point we are picking up our trail maps and donning the clothes and tools we need for the climb, but hard work remains ahead. The mountain top lies before us, in the remote distance. We will get there, with God’s help.

It should be made clear that these activities we call the “spiritual disciplines” are tools to help us to draw closer to God’s presence, but ultimately the work of transforming our inner being belongs to God alone. In advocating these disciplines, we are not endorsing a “works” based doctrine of salvation. Christianity teaches that “works” flow from “faith”, and not vice versa. Furthermore, even faith itself is mysteriously a gift to us, and not something we conjured up alone. A vital (living) faith produces good works, while dead faith produces none.

We should also make clear that our efforts are designed to bend ourselves toward God. We don’t pray or meditate in order to bend God or the Cosmos to our wills. We are not wizards or necromancers. There are disciplines that if used wrong can become empty incantations, and lead to a false sense of power. You might hear in some quarters about plugging into or wielding the power of the Spirit, or reaping the benefits of prayer. And there is something to that, but the major effort of God’s power is to scrub us and polish us, not merely that we may shine with our own glory, but that we may be better mirrors to reflect God’s glory.

What are the disciplines? Well, you will find a variety of categories and lists. The biggies would be prayer, Bible study, and the various activities that are done in community, what some refer to as “corporate” disciplines. Prayer is a discipline that connects us to God. Bible study connects us to the history of God’s work in the world, His teachings through prophets, and the words of His Son, our Lord, Jesus. “Church” or corporate disciplines involve what we find in Acts 2:42: “And they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.”

One of the recent classics of the subject spiritual disciplines is the book A Celebration of Discipline, by Richard Foster, founder of the “Renovare” movement. He is not universally embraced, of course, but that aside, I have borrowed his classification of the disciplines.

He perceives three categories or types of disciplines: Inward, Outward, and Corporate. The four inward disciplines are meditation, prayer, fasting, and study. He lists four outward disciplines as simplicity, solitude, submission, and service. The remaining corporate disciplines focus on the development of Christian community as a whole; these are confession, worship, guidance, and celebration.

 

13Dec

Remembering the Sabbath…and Blue Laws

I recall from childhood one of the lingering echoes of our forebears’ attempts to establish our nation as a “city on the hill”. The now infamous “blue laws” prohibited much mercantile activity on Sundays. The original rationale was to help Christians observe their sabbath.

Roots of these laws reach deep into the spiritual fervor of colonists who arrived on the East Coast in the 17th century. Always prominent in such reflections are the Puritans of New England, but consider also the 1611 foundation laws of the Anglican colony of Virginia, which are the earliest set of English laws produced in the Western Hemisphere:

As also every man and woman shall repair in the morning to the divine service and sermons preached upon the Sabbath day in the afternoon to divine service and catechizing, upon pain for the first fault to lose their provision and allowance for the whole week following, for the second to lose the said allowance and also to be whipped, and for the third to suffer death.
(You can read this document online here).

Even after the adoption of a secular constitution, blue laws enjoyed widespread support in the U.S. Blue laws were not only supported by religious people, but were also celebrated by organized labor. An online history of the 1909 blue law in Washington state noted the following.

Some labor organizations supported the broad ban the Blue Law placed on commercial activities on Sunday, in order to preserve it as a day off for their members. For example, meat was a product that supposedly could not be sold on Sunday. This gave the butchers’ union a successful argument against merchants requiring butchers to work on that day. (from HistoryLink).

In the mid to late 20th century, there was a rush to abolish these laws. Now they linger on only in a few isolated locales. I don’t recall hearing any great rationale for this change, just something about them being old fashioned, like the spate of stately Victorian and beaux arts buildings that occasionally got slated for demolition in order to build parking lots or condos. Just one more thing for decent ordinary people to suck up–another thing that couldn’t be stopped–in the name of “progress.”

To be fair, although I may not recall them, valid arguments have actually been cited. One was that such laws amounted to discrimination against non-Christian minorities. Church-state concerns have also been raised, and have led to court battles, in which the constitutionality of blue laws has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (for example, McGowan vs Maryland in 1961). Another reason often advanced is cash flow, an example of which we saw as recently as 2010, when New Jersey governor Chris Christie urged repeal of blue laws in order to increase revenue to the state. He cited Bergen County, one of the last last places to keep its malls closed on Sunday, as “costing” the state $65 million in potential tax revenue.

The loss of the “blue laws” has not necessarily been to everyone’s advantage. On a clearly economic basis, it is debatable whether the blue laws have actually helped or hurt localities. It may increase some economic activities and diminish others (Goos, 2005).

It has clearly harmed attendance at churches, which must now compete with shopping malls and an ever growing variety of Sunday morning activities such as youth sports. (To be clear I don’t believe that blue laws are solely to blame for emptying our churches–many other factors can be cited). In concert with declining church attendance, other social ills can be correlated with this change. One study finds that blue law repeal is associated with a decrease in measures of happiness, particularly among women, even as Sunday shopping has increased. (Cohen-Zada and Sander, 2010)

Consider also the findings of a study by economists Jonathan Gruber of MIT and Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame, published in 2008.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) on consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs, the economists found that repealing the blue laws did lead to an increase in drinking and drug use.
What’s more, they found that individuals who had attended church and stopped after the blue laws were repealed showed the greatest increase in substance abuse, Gruber notes.(a summary with link to the journal can be found at MIT News).

A 2014 study from Dara Lee at University of Missouri Columbia indicates that opening the malls on Sunday has caused decreased graduation rates and decrease in number of years in school, along with an increase in risky behaviors (Available online here).

What does it matter? Well, I certainly don’t expect blue laws to make a comeback. Like a lot of changes that happened in the 20th century, you really can’t close the proverbial “Pandora’s Box”. As individual Christians, though, we should do our best to “remember the Sabbath to keep it holy.” We should continue to try to put God first in our lives. That means going to church and perhaps missing out on some sales. It may mean explaining to our sons why they can’t play travel ball on Sundays. Although it won’t be as easy, we should be committed to carving out a time and space for Sabbath rest within our own busy worlds, to focus on God and his purposes for us.

With respect to the larger society, we should also be more vocal and strident in insisting that society “count the costs” before making changes that affect us. We should ask that purely financial goals be weighed against the non-financial harms that might ensue.