Come to Church and See a Miracle

In an over-sugared haze I finally read that muddled piece in the Guardian about how Christmas should be for everyone, not just Christians who are ‘celebrating’ the birth of Jesus.

I was initially excited because I thought the author was going to indulge in the usual tinsel about how loving all your fellow creatures is totally possible and easy if you just keep Christmas in your heart all year long. And, admittedly, I’ve been watching a lot of Hallmark movies so I feel like I know how these things go. But it turned out to be super disappointing. In fact, not about Christmas at all, but more about Buddhism and how we should all take a page from the syncretism of the east because that’s all enlightened and stuff. There was basically nothing about me following my bliss into the perfectly snow encrusted small town that will embrace me in its strangely well-kept (for a sector of the economy that is notoriously crumbling and forlorn) arms when I quit my well-paying job to follow my dreams. Nor anything about the special tingly feeling I get when I rush out into the snow in a very thin London Fog trench coat with no hat and no gloves to flirt with an actor endowed with emotionally overpowering eyebrows.

Seriously, I won Hallmark Christmas movie bingo three times out of three—but only because I was using every single card that came up in my google search. “Alexa,” I could have said, “win Hallmark Christmas movie bingo,” and she would have obliged.

Anyway, what the writer of the Guardian piece fails to notice is that we in the west are already pretty good at syncretism. There abide at least two kinds of religious Christmas celebrations, both in the adoration of a certain kind of God, and we manage annually to ‘synchronize’ them, like two overstuffed badly coordinated swimmers in a red cranberry sea of nostalgia, both dressed like Santa, pointing their eager toes out of the water but not quite at the same time. You, the worshipping Christian, watch in a miasma of dread horror—the kind you experience when someone is doing something unseemly and you know you should look away but you can’t. Everybody else shops merrily and wonders what your problem is.

This syncretism isn’t fancy and doesn’t have anything to do with Buddhism or Confucianism, or enlightenment of any kind. It is rather the unholy and unhappy marriage of the Christian with a world that once gave enthusiastic lip service to a certain set of propositional beliefs that have lately been jettisoned in favor of a more demanding, and thereby more lovable, god. That new god is the wonder of the self, of course—the precious delightful wonder of the inner person, manifested wondrously in hallmark Christmas, the sweet aroma of human self-satisfaction and self-expression redeeming a charming and wondrous pretty-good-already snowy landscape.

Of course, you can celebrate Christmas without Jesus. Everybody does. The whole world gears itself up into that vestigial feast—the food, the presents, the miracle of having all your dreams come true. The “reason for the season” is mentioned all the time. Sometimes one feels it is Jesus, but more often one knows, deep down, that it is, as the author suggests, “to share in a collective celebration when the sharing matters more than exactly what is being shared.”

What is being shared, though is not the sharing. What is being shared is the deep primordial belief that the human person is basically good and deserving of nice sparkly things—as many as possible—and a big dinner and then a happy time afterward buying all the trinkets the “sharing” didn’t produce. Family and friends gather in fixed, miraculous, christmassy social-cohesion that lets each of them express themselves in their truest form. The miracle is that it looks the same every time.

It is absurd, of course, to try to insist on Jesus in a world that doesn’t have any problems. And so the only real syncretists are the Christians themselves, who try to accommodate and juggle both the real ‘reason for the season’ and the ‘miracle of sharing.’ Everybody else doesn’t worry about it.

But the new year is just around the corner, and small town America doesn’t actually look the way we want it to, and the sharing, when it is about me getting what I want, doesn’t carry me over the threshold into my new year dreams. We all actually have real problems. And Buddhism, and Confucianism, and shopping, and me myself won’t solve any of them. Only the true stark strange miracle of God himself breaking into our dark muddle can save us from our real trouble—ourselves.

Actually, the real miracle will be me shoving myself into my church clothes this morning. Hope to see you there.