Christmas as the Ark of Faith
To pass on your beliefs, learn from the holy day that doesn't die
Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.
— Charles Dickens, What Christmas is as We Grow Older
Why does Christmas have such staying power? Why do so many attend church on this day when they have otherwise abandoned the faith? How does the old magic live on?
Christmas offers us a model of how the world should be, and how we must make it again if we are to pass on our beliefs to our children. There is no reason that that which is wonderful about Christmas should be confined to a single day.
Outside of Christmas, too many of us raise our children in a schizophrenic mode. We assert but do not live our beliefs. Faith is walled off - practiced in church - but otherwise our children are abandoned to roam a nihilist wilderness: spiritually dead schools, media, and societies.
Christmas is the opposite of this. Every detail is harmonious and intentional: the world is sacramentalized and every aspect is imbued with meaning. Word is bound to action through ritual, and a reifying unity is produced.
Songs are sung. Family is gathered. Symbols are erected. History is repeated. Aesthetics are created. Belief is asserted. Rituals are practiced. Fire is lit. Light is shone. Each happens in a familiar sequence. The faith is tied into the very identity of the community.
Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performances. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified. They are written into the body, incorporated, that is, physically internalized. Thus, rituals create a bodily knowledge and memory, an embodied identity, a bodily connection. A ritual community is a communal body, and there is a bodily dimension inherent to community.
Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
The ‘physicalization’ of truth bolsters conviction in the truth itself. If our actions are never shaped by our truth claims, this is an indicator that we may not truly believe at all. Over time, a lack of action undermines our conviction in the truth.
But at Christmas, we can rest well in the consolation that every aspect of the living world is given meaning which orients us to something higher and beneficent. A world which was broken is made whole, and a consoling light and warmth erupts, however briefly.
Christmas is one of the last, vanishing opportunities for children to enter into an older world than their own. Both seasonal and spiritual, it is a glimpse into sacred and eternal - rather than earthly - time.
Christmas - the universal cure - ties us back to both the land (the tree, the mistletoe, the snow, the cooking, the seasonal food) and the transcendent. Houses are homes in space; rituals are homes in time.
Each of the theological virtues is given exquisite expression: gifts are given (charity); the nativity is witnessed (hope); the Lord is worshipped (faith). Miracles do not seem so impossible.
Strangeness, mystery, and adventure returns. Mass is said at midnight; secular normality is shattered.
The staying power of Christmas tightly aligns with the findings of my previous reviews of various studies on the practices of families which successfully transmit their faiths.
…families with the strongest transmission of faith ‘sanctify’ and ‘ritualize’ all elements of their lives… Importantly, we see that they are weaving their faith into the most joyous and warm parts of their lives, rather than walling off observances of their faith as discrete activities. As a cohort, they used screens less than average, and conducted joint activities more than average.
Christmas should be the beginning, and not the end, of this approach. The whole of reality should be sacramentalized.
This Christmas, I ask you to think deeply about what it is you enjoy the most, what the essence of that aspect is, and how to generalize it in order to give it expression every day of your life.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Annual rituals turn time into a spiral instead of a straight line, This provides a mental shortcut to the past, kind of like some kind of science fictional wormhole drive to get to distant stars.
Yesterday we set up our Christmas tree for Gaudete Sunday and the look on my boy's face when the lights came on was just wonderful to see. This holiday is nearly feels nearly as much about creating a lasting memory of joy for our Children so they wish to continue transmitting the faith, as it does about celebrating the Nativity itself.