Reading the Sky
Christmas Day 2004:
Reading the Sky
As Morag was leaving to go
back to England about ten days ago, she told me she had left me a present on my
desk in the bedroom. ‘Just so you’ll
have something to open on Christmas morning,’ she said. When I got back from seeing her off to the
airport, I noticed the beautifully wrapped package and I noticed it every day
thereafter, but I didn’t open it. What’s
more, I didn’t even pick it up, prod it, or shake it. I waited, as instructed, until this
morning. How different, I’ve been
thinking, from years gone by when I would have eagerly ransacked the house to
find out what Santa had brought me! Now
– probably because I’ve got just about everything I need – the urgent desire to
satisfy my curiosity seems well and truly under control. And, of course, there’s also the fact that as
one gets older Christmas doesn’t seem such a rare event as it used to be. When I was a child Christmas night seemed
like a terrible anticlimax, the beginning of an interminable 364-day wait until
the next Christmas Day. How would I be
able to bear such a protracted interlude? But now Christmases tumble on top of
each other with unseemly and frightening haste.
No sooner have I put my Christmas books back on the shelf – which I
shall do immediately after this service ends – than I am picking them up again
as Advent rolls round once more.
Christmas is
different when you get older. And, in
addition to these purely subjective experiences of change, there are some
objective ones. In recent years there
has most certainly been a move to eliminate all specifically Christian motifs
from this mid-winter celebration. Coca
Cola and Budweiser don’t mention Christmas in their lengthy and expensive
advertisements. ‘Holidays are coming!’
they sing, as the festive Coke wagon trundles through the snow; and the ‘people
at Budweiser’ wish us, not ‘Happy Christmas!’ but ‘a happy holiday
season’. And it seems that a new
celebration has taken off in America.
It’s not Christmas or Hanukkah – these are far too religious; it’s not
even Yuletide or Saturnalia – these are far too archaic. It’s Festivus, first proposed by George
Costanza’s father in the sitcom Seinfeld.
‘Festivus,’ he said, ‘is a festival for the rest of us’ – modern people
with no particular religious affiliation.
He proposed that, instead of a Christmas tree, there should be an
aluminium pole around which the family
should gather on 23rd December, not for the exchange of presents,
but for a ceremony called The Airing of the Grievances, in which each family
member in turn informs the others of the ways in which they have disappointed
them during the year. And the headmaster
of a school in England decided that there would be no traditional Nativity Play
this year. Instead, there would be a
production of Little Red Riding Hood. As
Ronnie Corbett commented on last week’s edition of Have I Got News For You, the
headmaster presumably believes that a story containing a terrified girl, a
talking wolf, and a disembowelling is more edifying than a story about the
birth of a baby!
Christmas seems to be troubling us more now than it
used to. We don’t know what it means
anymore. There’s lots of scholarly
debate about the historical accuracy of the nativity stories, so much indeed
that this week’s issue of both Time and Newsweek have lengthy articles on
Christmas controversies. Both articles
go over the same old tiresome ground:
When was Jesus born? they ask.
Was it when Herod the Great ruled in Palestine as Matthew’s Gospel tells
us, or some ten years later when Quirinius was Governor of Syria, as Luke has
it? And was he born on 25th
December or on one of about 150 other dates which have been proposed down the
centuries. (On Thursday, a learned
professor suggested in a T.V. programme about the Star of Bethlehem, that, in
all likelihood, Jesus was born on April 7th 7BC.) Was he born in Nazareth or in Bethlehem, and,
if Bethlehem, was it Bethlehem in Judea or Bethlehem in Galilee? (I’d never heard about this latter place
until last week!)
And so on, and so forth. Enough historical conundrums to keep the
scholars in doctoral topics and the rest of us in confusion until the end of
time. Why? Because the gospel stories are full of
historical inaccuracies, logical contradictions, and scientific implausibilities. But these are not present in the text because
of unreliable sources, defective memories, or mistaken observations; they
are there to stop us taking the stories literally. On Easter Sunday a few years ago I mentioned
what the great Church Father Origen wrote in the third Christian century, and
it bears repeating here: absurdities and
contradictions appear in the text to force us to look beneath the surface to
find the real meaning of the story. This
statement should be printed in block capitals in the front of every Bible, and
it should be tattooed on the forehead of every student of scripture. Unless we take Origen’s statement seriously we are at the mercy of
squabbling historians and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a terrifying situation
to be in.
Outrageous
and gratuitously insulting statement no. 1: Whenever religion falls
into the hands of historians it has the life sucked out of it!
I
remember many years ago going with the whole school to see Lawrence Olivier’s
film of Shakespeare’s Richard III. As we
were filing out after the film, one of the history teachers was shaking his
head and saying to a colleague, ‘That’s not what happened.’ A shallow judgement indeed! As if Shakespeare, in his great study of the
depths of human tyranny and malice was even remotely concerned with something
as trivial as what actually happened!
Richard was Shakespeare’s vehicle for conveying some insights into the
nature of human depravity; Jesus is the evangelists’ vehicle for conveying
insights into the nature of the spiritual life.
Outrageous and deliberately provocative
statement no. 2: the birth
stories in Matthew and Luke do not describe the physical birth of one
individual in a cave two thousand years ago; they describe the spiritual birth
in the soul of everyone who aspires to walk the path towards enlightenment.
And
here is outrageous and profoundly heretical statement no. 3: Christianity
began life as a Mystery religion, based on the universal myth of the dying and
rising God, who, in the myths of Attis, Dionysus, Isis, and Mithras was always
born after the winter solstice in late December, when the sun reverses its
direction in the sky and light returns to the world.
The
newly emerging, gradually increasing physical light of the sun symbolises the
birth of the spiritual light in those who have discovered that spark of God
within themselves and who acknowledge its latent presence in every other human
soul.
In
Timothy O’Grady’s beautiful lyrical novel I
Could Read the Sky an old Irishman talks about his life as a labourer in
England in the middle of the 20th century. This is what I could do, he says:
But he couldn’t trust banks,
wear a watch, drive a car, wear a collar in comfort, drink coffee, face the
dentist, or understand the speech of a man from west Kerry. One night he looks up at the sky:
‘To the south is Orion. Across I find the Plough, the Seven Sisters,
the Bear. There’s Venus with a very
white star above, and Cassiopeia. The
wide streak of the Milky Way like an exploded spine, Lyra, Pegasus. I am sitting against the wall of a pig shed
smoking a Woodbine and thinking about the mathematics of space....’
We sophisticated moderns, who wear watches, drink
coffee, trust banks, and no longer smoke Woodbines, and who never think about
the mathematics of space, haven’t got a clue what he is talking about: he may
as well be talking like a man from west Kerry!
We can’t read the sky, and so we make nonsense of those stories written
by people who read little else. Getting
a historian to interpret such stories for us is like bringing a plumber in to
deal with the electrics. You might be
lucky, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
When we learn how to read the sky we realise that
Christmas calls upon us to be bearers of the light, to bring to birth the God
who lies dormant within the soul. The
ancient church called Mary Theotokos, a Greek term meaning ‘God-bearer’,
and the Catholic Church, which preserves the vocabulary of these ancient
mysteries but which has forgotten their meaning, honours her with that title
today. But, as Meister Eckhart said in
the 12th century: ‘Mary is
blessed, not because she bore Christ physically, but because she bore him
spiritually, and in this everyone can become like her’, a sentiment echoed by
Angelus Silesius in the 17th century. He wrote:
Though Christ were yearly
born in Bethlehem and never
Had birth in you yourself, then
were you lost forever.
‘A human being is nothing but a frightened God,’ said
Maeterlink in the 19th century and, at a time when we are daily
alerted to our collective follies by the media, and consistently told of our
insignificance by influential thinkers, never have we, as a species, been more
in need of such a tribute.
And our very own James Martineau, who was Unitarian
minister here in Dublin in the 19th century, said: ‘The Incarnation
(God’s presence among human beings) is true not of Jesus exclusively, but of
humankind generally and of God everlastingly.’
 |
| James Martineau |
As the sun awakens once more in the sky, let us pray
for the awakening of the light of God within the soul, because this – not
presents, not sentimentality, not families even – is the perennial meaning of
Christmas, its mystical meaning, and it has been since the dawn of time, ever
since the poets among us started to read the sky.
25th
December, 2004
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