Friday, December 25, 1998

Merry Christmas: The spirit of Christmas remains joyous

The point of Christmas, it is said, has been buried by mounds of stuff, by all the material things people give each other. The spirit of Christmas, it is said, is stifled in even the heartiest soul by too much hassle, all the shopping, cooking, traveling, worrying.

And yes, to some extent, both observations are true, but something else is true, too. During this season of the year, joy keeps peeking around corners at passersby as they approach, and jumping out at them as they get near.

This is a holiday like few others in that respect. It can even be transformative. No secular version of its possibilities is so penetrating as Charles Dickens’ story, A Christmas Carol. In it, mean old Mr. Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by ghosts showing him the great promise his life had in the past, its shriveled condition in the present and the dreadful consequences of his miserliness in the future. He is finally reminded of his own mortality, and wakes from all these dreams exhilarated that he is still alive and has a chance to enlarge himself through kindness to others.

This secular story, of course, derives from the religious story, which holds that the savior of all mankind came not in the fashion some believed he might, in a chariot of fire with glorious armies trailing afterwards, but as a baby born in a stable. The message of this humbly arrived Christ would be that redemption and newness of life lie in having trust in God, whom he spoke of as a father, and in having love for one another.

A clergyman’s reflections have brought home to us how these two stories, the one from a 19th century English writer and the other from the New Testament, intersect tellingly at that point when Scrooge looks out his window on Christmas morning in search of someone to fetch a turkey. He spots a boy and shouts, "I have something wonderful for you to do." The biblical story would have people know that there's something wonderful for everyone to do — live their lives in love. And, in the middle of all the coming and going of this hectic season, that's a thought that, in one form or another, keeps reappearing, making it difficult to keep joy at a distance.