i have a friend in seminary who is a recent 'convert' to 'the big church'. he grew up a baptist, more or less, and is now being trained in the best post-modern, post-vatican ii, post-bultmann way. while there is much emphasis on 'relevance' to 'contemporary culture' there is very little emphasis on the liturgy as a repository of wisdom. he reported to me with some amusement that in the old hymnals there were hymns for circumcisions. he thought they were for the actual surgical event rather than for the feast of the circumcision of jesus. nowadays of course much of the western church has 'suppressed' that feast and replaced it with either a feast of the holy name or a feast of the mother of god. how was he to know?we have just come through the darkest period of the year, a darkness which is said in the gospel to be the environment of the true light, which comes into the world at christmas, the nativity of christ. in the christian understanding of history, this incarnation of god the son is the pivotal event of the cosmos, and it is surrounded with a period of preparation--the western church's advent season and the orthodox nativity fast--and smaller feasts that expand on its importance.
it is, i think, helpful to look at this darkest period of the year in a way that goes beyond 'the shortest days' if we are to understand what is at stake. at no other time of the year are the forces of darkness, the forces of evil, working harder. in our 'contemporary culture' these forces take the form primarily of consumerism disguised as 'gift-giving', and are surrounded by great displays of electric lighting which give the illusion that the darkness has comprehended the light. satan comes once again disguised as an angel of light.
the best gift-giving after all recognizes the true potential of the recipient. the wise men brought gifts that were not 'useful' for a new-born, such as disposable diapers and baby lotion, but gifts that recognized him as the king of the world, who would die for his kingdom. i'm not sure what wii games recognize in our youngsters, but it does not seem to be something that develops their highest potential.
and our acceptance of 'artificial light' at all times in all places seems mostly to blind us to the uncreated light rather than illumine us in any way. it is, isaiah reminds us, the people who walk in darkness who have seen the great light. it's very hard at this time of the year to find a dark place to walk. the star followed by the magi has to compete in the sky with the glare of las vegas.
and the idea that sacrifice--especially blood sacrifice--is necessary for true enlightenment is entirely out-of-synch with the new happy-happy-joy-joy worship centers that have been built in the fast half-century, with a 'holy table' replacing the altar, the theology of the feeding of the 5,000 replacing the theology of the upper room.
but the background of all our solstice celebrations seems to have been a sacrifice, either of the king himself or of one of his children. we see remnants of this, suggest scholars such as shirley toulson*, in the festival of santa lucia, in the wild hunt of the norsemen which became tamed as our visit from father christmas, or the hunt for the wren. the church kept this understanding in a variety of ways, starting with the christ mass itself, the mass being understood as a sacrifice. then come the feast of st. stephen, who is credited as the first martyr, the first to witness with his death, and the feast of st. john, who alone of the apostles was able to escape martyrdom because he had not shunned the death of his master by crucifixion, and the feast of the holy innocents, in which the false king herod is ready to shed the blood of children in a vain effort to preserve his own life.
the octave of the christ-mass is the feast of the circumcision. (octaves have also been suppressed in the post-vatican ii church. but the idea is no less helpful, even if, or perhaps even more so, because, it is pythagorean. a vibration is repeated, resonates, at a higher frequency, the octave.) and so on the eighth day of his life, a jewish boy is circumcised, as a witness to the covenant between the holy one and the children of abraham, a covenant which is for the blessing of the whole world. the church sees that covenant as fulfilled with the circumcision of jesus, and a new covenant established with the greater sacrifice of his blood in the crucifixion.
none of this bloody stuff goes down well with our euphamistic 'christmas is for children' avoidance of the real stakes of the invisible struggle going on all around us. (although we don't shy away from shedding the blood of those who oppose our kingship over their oil, and we sacrifice our children in that war.) our pretence that there is no struggle will not make it go away, it rather encourages us to to think we can avoid taking sides.
yet we do know the struggle is going on. the vast popularity of the lord of the rings and of harry potter is evidence that our children do not believe us when we tell them everything is getting better. i have been intrigued by the controversies surrounding these books. critics of the potter books especially seem upset that they do not explicitly seem 'christian'. but the coming of the light into the world is bigger than our creeds--and i say this as someone who firmly believes the symbols of the faith. if we deny the riches of the traditions, whether they are the traditions of the one holy catholic and apostolic church or, the traditions of our grandfathers, even when we don't 'understand' them, then we should not be surprised when the traditions pop up somewhere else.
indeed the next big feast of the church, the epiphany, or theophany, centers around the baptism of jesus, by which all of the waters of the earth are made new, made part of the streams of living waters that proceed from the throne of the holy one. thinking about that puts our treatment of those rivers in a much bigger context. but that, as it is said, is a story for another night.
*shirley toulson. the winter solstice (london: jill normal & hobhouse, 1981).
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