O P I N I O N
THE SOAPBOX
Stand up. Speak up. It’s Your Turn.
There is no easy way to break the news to a world too busy with all the frenetic activity that causes us to “lay waste our powers, getting and spending,” as the immortal Wordsworth so eloquently put it. But even for those of us who try to follow a more spiritual bent, “The World is Too Much With Us.”
For the truth is this is not the Christmas season, though it is undeniably the “holiday shopping season.” The Church, which “speaks with authority and not as the scribes” about Christmas and other important things, has told us that this is the season of Advent. We await the coming of Jesus at the end of the age, even as we remember his birth in a stable in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago.
Yet all the fal-de-la about this season says precious little about either event. It is not just the musical noises about Rudolph, Frosty and “Jingle Bells,” or the exhortation to make a mad rush to buy this, that and the other indispensable thing that we might never have heard of weeks or months before. Even worse, perhaps, is the sappy sentimentality about the aforementioned babe in the manger that makes us feel noble and all warm and tingly all over just to imagine it all. One Christmas song I heard only a few hours ago said, “Christmas is what you feel inside you.”
Really.
We might wonder, then, if the shepherds in the fields that night missed the meaning of Christmas. If Christmas is what we feel within, then why rush off to Bethlehem to find a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger? Why go anywhere to see the Word made flesh? Just close your eyes and contemplate all the “Christmas” within you.
This is not unlike the threadbare argument for missing Mass on Sunday. After all, God is everywhere, isn’t he? And if I feel closer to God in the mountains or at the lake, the ocean or the golf course than I do in church on a Sunday morning, then why should I go to all the bother of trekking off to a church building to encounter Jesus Christ in the flesh and blood, as he was in Bethlehem, on Mount Tabor and at Golgotha? With but a moment’s thought, the question answers itself.
But who has a moment for thought these days? We’re too busy being busy. We rush about buying gifts, attending parties, sending cards and, on the Great Day itself, cooking and baking. After all it is the biggest holiday of the year, isn’t it?
Okay, so why are we so reluctant to speak its name? Why is Christmas the holiday named “Holiday”? A friend who ran a beauty shop in southern Florida years ago kept saying “the holiday” when I knew she was referring to Christmas Day. Many of her customers are Jewish, she explained. Okay, so what? She need not talk to them about Christmas, but why use the verbal camouflage when talking in private to me, as one Christian to another?
And even if one should be overheard by a Jewish or Moslem neighbor or customer, why assume he or she will be offended? Let us not in the guise of “tolerance” or “diversity” imagine our non-Christian friends and neighbors are all unrepentant Scrooges about Christmas.
There are, to be sure, those among us who are hostile to Christmas and all it stands for. They are the ones some Christians have in mind when they complain about the “War on Christmas.” But why let that distress us? It’s true we may no longer find the crèche in a city-owned park or hear Christmas carols in a “Winter Concert” at a public high school. But why should my friend in Florida fear to say “Christmas” even in a private conversation? And why, oh why, should a Catholic college start calling its annual Christmas presentation “December Song”?
The truth is we believers in Christ are waging much of the “War on Christmas” in the form of self-censorship. There is, thank God, no need for it in the “land of the free.” Our Lord told us to preach his Gospel from the housetops. And an appropriate song for this season says:
“Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere.
“ Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born.”
We have our marching orders. Let us be silent no more.
Beg to differ? Agree to disagree? We welcome your thoughtful prose on all topics of interest. Send submissions to carolrobidoux@manchesterinklink.com, subject line: The Soapbox
Jack Kenny is freelance writer from Manchester.
