Rev. Furrer will speak on the heart of Christmas when its stripped of all the schmaltz and commercialism.
“Demythologizing Christmas”
I want to talk about the heart, the essence, of Christmas.
It’s a holiday laden with myth—all holidays are laden with myth though few so
clearly as Christmas.
Unitarians love Christmas. It’s our favorite holiday. But
this was not always so. As I explained last Sunday, our puritan ancestors
deplored the day, as it had no clear scriptural basis. True enough the nativity
narratives in Luke and Matthew say the baby Jesus was born in a stable in
Bethlehem, that shepherds, beckoned by an angel, were in attendance, and that
later—on Epiphany (12th Night), wise men came from the East seeking
to see him. But these narratives are full of anomalies. To cite only the most
obvious, why would shepherds be out in wintertime? They wouldn’t, period.
The puritans were all well versed in scripture and very
serious in their daily readings and devotionals. They knew these anomalies and
knew, too of the Roman holiday of Saturnalia:
an annual return-of-the-sun ritual that Roman authorities grafted into
Christianity in order to make the new religion more palatable to their fourth
century subjects. So for the puritans, Christmas was pagan, pure and simple,
and they wanted nothing to do with it. Indeed, from 1659 to 1681 celebrating
Christmas was illegal in Massachusetts. People caught with an advent wreath
were subject to punishment and a fine.
There were, apparently, secret celebrations or they wouldn’t
have made such laws. But as the Puritans themselves were in periodic trouble
with authorities in London, there were occasions when their rule was less
secure. And on such occasions the popular social order—part of a cultural world
that went back thousands of years—sort of naturally bubbled up. Christmas was
an important—and symbolically charged—part of this cultural world.
By the 1730’s, and there ever after, religious authorities
more or less stopped condemning Christmas and began, instead, to purify it of
its seasonal excesses. This goes on to this day: those who would “put Christ
back in Christmas” are but modern-day puritans. After 1760 it became unusual not to celebrate Christmas and no hymnal
published thereafter failed to include a Christmas hymn. Our current UU hymnal,
Singing the Living Tradition, has
thirty-three: more than in any other category.
In the popular imagination, myth = primitive untruth. In
fact, myths are neither—neither
primitive nor untrue. They are,
rather, a kind of poetry or imagery that helps us make sense of the
world and our place in it. They are not
to be taken literally, any more than Shakespeare or Mark Twain or Emily
Dickenson. They should, however, to be taken seriously. The philosopher Alan
Watts, who spoke to several of our churches and fellowships back in 1960s,
defined myth as “an imagery with which we make sense of the world.” In any
case, people who reject myth out of hand, it seems to me, are as confused about
its intention as those who take it literally. The key—if you want to understand
myth—is (1) enjoy it as poetry, and;
(2) strip away the hokum by demythologizing it. If you strip away the myth—see
it as myth (as metaphor and poetry), that is, then you can enjoy it all
the more, and see its value and meaning all the more clearly.
So what is the
Christmas myth? Basically, it seems to me, it’s about faith. And hope. And renewal. And also, Christmas is about
the means to nurture these needed
qualities—faith, hope, renewal—in our communities and in us.
* * *
People everywhere
celebrate the cycle of nature. All the Northern Hemisphere cultures celebrate
winter solstice[1],
when the days stop getting shorter and the sun b
