“I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes. . . The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse. For though they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. . . . They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator -- who is forever praised. Amen. ”
~ Romans 1: 16-25
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to seaprarate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
~Romans 8:38
Hello from a piece of frozen tundra. In a lot of places that have extensive winters, the real storms come in January and February. I’ve seen this in Michigan and Minnesota so far. Even in places like these with a reputation for snow and cold, residents wonder if it’s going to be a white Christmas, but they know that it’s going to be a white Valentine’s Day. The cold, the wet, the dreariness of winter really sets in at the beginning of February and reminds us that we really have no control over what goes on out there.
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| A bit of the blue sky we are enjoying. |
As I look out my backdoor today, I feel adventurous enough to handle that unknown. Actually, the sun is shining today, and it’s a balmy 25* Farenheit. The snow has been melting for the last five days, and the snow mound on our deck is almost gone. This is apparently what one of my friends, a Minnesota native, calls “False Spring.” It happens every year, and it’s a very good thing. I don’t think I could have endured another six weeks of early February. The first two weeks of February were a perfect combination of striking cold, chilling winds, fog and clouds all at once that made me wonder if I would ever want to go outside again. Even the jaunt across the street became a chore.
I’m not alone in this observation. February has a nasty reputation in literature too. Check out these quotes from famous authors on Goodreads.com.
“I used to try to decide which was the worst month of the year. In the winter I would choose February. I had it figured out that the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.”
“The day and time itself: late afternoon in early February, was there a moment of the year better suited for despair?”
― Alice McDermott
“Why does February feel like one big Tuesday?”
― Todd Stocker
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| See, we have half a deck. |
Death, despair, Tuesday . . . Maybe we should move Christmas to February. Of all the months in Winter’s repertoire, the first two weeks of February most remind me of Tumnus’s lament, “Always winter, but never Christmas.” What better time for celebrating the possibility of something new than just when it starts to feel like nothing new will ever happen? (There was actually a celebration of Christmas on January 26 in some parts of the world before the Church universalized December 25th. In Ethiopia, they still celebrate something like Christmas called Timkat on that day.)
I don’t know what winter was like for the Ancient Romans, Celts, Babylonians, Jews, or Vikings, but this notion of celebrating something new in the middle of winter seems to have been a universal thing. Once again I have been perusing the excellent Encyclopedia of Christmas by Tanya Gulevich. This time I’ve been reading up on the ancient pagan holidays that could be considered precursors to Christmas and finding some interesting trends. All of the Ancient European peoples (and I’m going to include Babylon because they go right along with the trends) had some major festival between the winter solstice and January 15th. This festival would last several days and some of its dominant attributes would be greenery, feasting, small gifts, mischievous spirits, the hope of good luck or abundance for the coming year, and some notion of the supernatural invading the here and now, whether for good or for ill. Fire, either in the form of candles and lamps or bonfires shows up in all of these festivals. And in almost every instance, the festival celebrated the beginning of something new, a turning of the wheel (“Yule” literally means “wheel.”), a change from old to unknown.
These festivals were more than just New Year’s festivals the way we celebrate New Year’s today where we pretend that we are going to reset our lives. They were seen as a kind of resetting of the world. In Ancient Babylon, during Zagmuk (you can’t make this stuff up), the king would renew his oath to the gods and figuratively go down to the underworld to help Marduk defeat the forces of chaos and destruction. During Zagmuk, as well as the Roman Saturnalia and Kalends, slaves were released from their duties during the length of the festival and allowed to interact with their masters as equals. They were encouraged to mock and ridicule their masters, and sometimes slaves or criminals were even set up as mock kings to reign over a little bit of chaos themselves before the world became normal again. (Note the underlying classism there -- kings create order; slaves create chaos.) Men and women switched clothing, and people masqueraded as all manner of things, carousing through the streets of the major cities of these empires. Almost universally, the world went nuts for a while during the darkest time of the year, and the people clung to their rituals, praying either that the gods would be pleased or the gods would be strong, so that spring, with its growth and blessing, would follow in the new year.
One of the little tidbits that I loved most from my research this time around was the hypothesis (because nobody wrote down their reasons at the time) that the Ancient Norse lit their Yule bonfires to help strengthen the Sun as it fought to come back from the realms of darkness. In the Mediteranean areas, people seemed to use this time to indulge in the chaos and let free their inner angst and id. They also gave gifts to the poor, but in the north, where the dark was much deeper, colder, and longer, the community united around the celebration of helping the world become what they wanted it to be.
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| They have caves like these in the mountains, just much bigger. |
It’s easy to see a lot of these things bleeding forward into Christmas, though I think we in our stable, “scientific” world have lost the urgency that a true pagan believer would have had at this time of year (and there were both cynics and scientists in pagan societies too). We are not afraid that spring will not come. It always comes. But we are still afraid of chaos, and if we haven’t given in to the despair of the winter of the soul, we still hope that God will bring about growth and blessing and order of some kind. Christmas boasts a King who arrived in one of the lowliest positions possible: a peasant born in a stable in a conquered nation. Quite apart from his own supernatural deity, the
supernatural in the form of angels invaded earth on that very night. This King went on to wage war against the forces of darkness and chaos, both in this world and in the underworld, purposing to free slaves, undo illness and death, confront the Destroyer, and construct a new kind of society in which slave and master would interact not only as equals but as brothers and sisters. We can definitely identify with waiting for that kind of spring.
I have heard that some people/scholars use these common urges of humanity to debunk Christianity. If we had anything new to offer, our holidays would look different from those of the religions that we say will not lead to salvation. Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but think about this. God doesn’t change. He wrote these currents of eternal life, the equality of all humanity, generosity and abundance, and the triumph of life over death into the fabric of creation. (I’m making a theological assumption with that last one. I’m not sure how death was a part of the initial picture.) Human beings are intelligent. We can pick up on persistent trends in nature and history. Moreover, human beings are spiritual. We long for equality, abundance, and eternity almost universally.
As the Apostle Paul says at the beginning of Romans, “What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse.” We know what God wants, but very often, we don’t want to give it to Him. And that is where a lot of our chaos comes from. “For though they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. . . . Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts . . .They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator -- who is forever praised. Amen. ” ~ Romans 1: 16-25 Note the word “darkened” there. Where is our darkness? It’s in our hearts.
The average Christian doesn’t perceive winter as a serious threat to the structure of Creation. “As long as the world endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease” (Genesis 8:22), and we know that. What we are hoping for is a brightening and restoring of hearts, so that masters want to free their slaves and slaves don’t want to mock their masters, so that men and women of all types feel like they can express their full God-given nature without envy of any other, and people would feel free to revel in the worship of a God who really did and does go down into the chaos to wrestle out growth and honor and strength and security and all those other things that the ancient pagans prayed for.
The spring of the soul, the spring of the kingdom isn’t wholly here yet. Different places get spring at different times (Oregon has tulips right now, or so I’ve heard.). And that’s why we really need Christmas celebrations. We will see many pockets of false spring, when the snow melts, and both grass and people poke their heads up to absorb as much sunshine as they can get. We will see moments of justice and equality and progress and blessing, both in our own lives and in a random headline about some country on the other side of the world. But the fact of the matter is, the world as we know it is under the influence of chaos, and humanity is really good at making it worse, often in spite of our best intentions. We need a divine champion. Life, growth, and blessing do not happen unless God really does go down and wrestle with the darkness. That is the heart of Christmas: peace (justice, shalom) on earth, and good will toward men on whom His favor rests.
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| See, there's life under the snow. |
So that really is why we need to celebrate Christmas, and it is also what we need to celebrate in Christmas. Christmas is a little bonfire that we light in the darkness, not because it actually helps the sun burn brighter, but because we are called to watch, pray, and follow, and sometimes in the midst of watching, praying, and following, we get discouraged and need a regular (not ritual) reminder that underneath our struggles, God is wrestling too. Christmas is one of those reminders (the season of Lent is too). Even as we take a day to celebrate the Peace of Christ, God is still working to a new and glorious harvest.
If the struggle seems long, remember a couple of things:
Chaos is not a threat to God. Chaos, winter, and darkness are all created things, and as such are tools in God’s hands. The word in the Bible that could most closely be translated chaos is tohu vabohu, which means wilderness. The wilderness is a place of testing, forming, and repentance. Yes, the forces of winter are strong. They can be deadly. But even death can serve good and worthy purposes in God’s plan.- As Julian of Norwich reports, Our essence is bound up in God, even as God is present in us. If chaos and winter are not a threat to Him, then ultimately, chaos and winter are not a threat to us. There is a part of us that nothing, and I mean that nothing that is not God, can touch. No matter how much despair we feel, we are not destroyed.
- We have no idea when spring will come. We can’t see the roots and seeds developing underground. But they are there. Never doubt that they are there. Rest in the knowledge that they are there.
- Life is unsuppressable. When spring comes, you may well have tulips in your garden and dandelions in your sidewalk. Life, growth, even weeds are symbolic of God. He pops up in completely unexpected places, spreads in unexpected ways, and never, ever quits.
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