‘But why on earth should we now be joyful?’ Photo: Book cover of The Intelligent Eye by RL Gregory
‘Timely thoughts on Christmas’ by Margaret C McNeill, from December 21, 1973
‘The impossible that yet is.’
I love Christmas – including all the trappings that I vaguely feel are unQuakerly. I love carols and candles and Christmas trees; the giving and receiving of tokens of good will and remembrance; the conviviality of a good Christmas dinner. Yet I imagine I am by no means alone in feeling that the celebration of Christmas is becoming increasingly a perplexing and burdensome problem. Commercialisation has turned the spontaneous enjoyment of a holiday into a distasteful exploitation of material indulgence, and in a world where hunger and deprivation and injustice exist alongside material plenty, the contrast of the Christmas spending spree to the origin of the festival becomes more and more outrageous.
One is indeed thankful for the inspiration and courage that prompted the constructive protest embodied in the ‘Open Christmas’ [homeless shelter] venture, and surely we would all rejoice if Friends were enabled by such experiments to harness the longing that is shared by many Christians to celebrate Christmas Day in a manner that gives meaning to the Christmas message of peace and good will.
I wish I could leave it at that, but ironically enough the stronger my ardour burns in support of such action the more uncomfortable my reflections become regarding the Quaker attitude to Christmas. It would be relatively simple if this were restricted to the level of extending material blessings to the deprived and homeless, the giving of one’s money, time and energy in the conviction that material comforts – yes, even plum puddings, can be used to the glory of God. Surely this is only putting into practice our Quaker belief in the reality of the sacramental life.
Yet this does not really come to grips with the Quaker testimony regarding the non-observance of church festivals. Like all the Quaker testimonies this is based on a conviction of profound significance. No day is more sacred than any other day, for all days can be sanctified alike in the transforming life of the Spirit. What is good on one day is good on any day; what is reprehensible on one day is reprehensible on any day. So early Friends registered their protest by keeping their shops open on Christmas Day. (Presumably their customers were fellow-Quakers, but I have a sneaking hope that the Quaker grocer round the corner came in handy on occasion for some jovial but improvident neighbour run short of ingredients for the plum duff.) I have never been really happy about this testimony. On sociological grounds alone it seems to flout all the evidence that human beings have a need for ‘special occasions’ of social awareness. I certainly do not mean by this that Christmas should be celebrated because sociologists consider it supplies a need. But is Christmas a celebration of something that is the origin and the goal of this very craving? What is it about the Christmas story that continues, despite all the warring jangle of fear and greed in the world, to call forth for a brief passing moment an impulse of tenderness? Is it simply the undying mystery of birth that is enshrined in the figures of the Christmas crib? What is the inarticulate hope symbolised by the Star of Bethlehem? Many of the traditional outward Christmas practices are indisputably pagan in origin, but we do not now on that account dismiss their significance with the same conviction that prompted early Friends to replace the heathen names of the days and the months with painfully unimaginative appellations.
Nor am I satisfied that the explanation lies in the separation of ‘inward’ and ‘outward’ observance. When the subject of Christmas comes up, Friends are fond of quoting: ‘Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem were born, / And is not born in you, for ever you’re forlorn’, but what do we mean by Christ being born within us? Is there an inward experience centred in some way on what is celebrated at Christmastide? If there is really nothing special about Christmas Day, then should we not go even further than early Friends and cut the whole thing out of our calendar?
So one is pushed more and more towards the question: what does Christmas itself mean to us? I do not think the point at issue is concerned primarily with Quaker doubts about angels, or the Virgin Birth, or any other difficulty raised in discussing the historicity or otherwise of the Gospel narratives. Whether they be fact or myth, the Christmas message they proclaim is a message of joy, of joy that is relevant to every man in every place, of joy occasioned by something that happened in time and was yet of eternity. But why on earth should we now be joyful? Why on Earth?
For centuries theologians have striven to help us to grasp the import of the angelic message, but glimpses of understanding may reach us through many other doors; through the artist’s vision or the poet’s ear; even, as I have just discovered, through a casual glance at a book on optics. The work in question is RL Gregory’s The Intelligent Eye and it lies before me now, showing one of those intriguing figures drawn by psychologists to demonstrate ‘object-ambiguity’. It is a seemingly straightforward arrangement of black and white lines and spaces. At first sight it appears to me to be unmistakably a picture of a solid black wall jutting out from an expanse of white background. Then, looked at suddenly again, hey presto! the black is no wall at all, but simply a shadow thrown by a white wall! Yet nothing has been changed; it is the same one figure.
I do not imagine Professor Gregory ever expected his diagram to bring Tidings of Comfort and Joy to a reader, but I felt something very akin to that as I studied it. I do not understand what process of visual perceptions takes place by which the solid black wall is transformed into an insubstantial shadow, but the fact remains that I see two different things that are yet the same – and some words from the text of the book make me wonder if the scientist is perhaps more open to accept the miraculous than many of us are:
‘Pictures have double reality… they are seen both as themselves and as some other thing, entirely different from the paper or canvas of the picture… No object can be in two places at the same time; no object can be in both two dimensional and three-dimensional space. Yet pictures are both visibly flat and three-dimensional. They are a certain size, yet also the size of a face, or a house or a ship. Pictures are impossible.’
The impossible that yet is. ‘The Word made flesh’ wrote the writer of the Fourth Gospel. ‘Eternity shut in a span,’ sang Richard Crashaw. Theologians call it the doctrine of the Incarnation. I cannot understand it, yet somehow on Christmas Day it is the only thing that seems to make sense.
I would very soon be out of my depth if pressed to pursue this analogy, for I am neither a physicist nor a theologian, but it has at any rate caused me to question our usually accepted attitude towards the outward and the inward, so far as the celebration of Christmas is concerned. In Christian Faith & Practice (section 212) we read of ‘the sacraments of nature, of the family, of friendship, of books, of music, of art. These and other such ministries become the symbols of God’s ever-loving presence and of his care for even the least of his wayward children.’ Do we not on Christmas Day declare the sacrament of time itself? This is not to set up the 25th of December as more sacred than any of the other remaining 364 days of the year, but to accept its significance as a day through which the equal sanctity of every day can be specially revealed. If this is true, does the inward timeless conviction not call for a temporal observance? What form that observance may take for Friends cannot be laid down by rule, but, for my part, I wish it could be our practice to hold a regular meeting for worship on Christmas Day – our surest corporate testimony to the continuing reality of God in Man, and eternity in time.
Margaret (1909-1985) worked for Friends Relief Service and Woodbrooke. By 1973 she had returned home to Northern Ireland where she continued to work for peace. She is the author of By the Rivers of Babylon: A story of relief work among the Displaced Persons of Europe.
Comments
Thank you so much for reprinting this 50 years later! The world’s eye has shifted from Northern Ireland to Gaza but the reasons to feel uneasy with Christmas revelry remain the same. And yet what fun Margaret was—I fear readers may not realize that—but those of us who knew her were very blessed by her twinkling eyes and hearty laugh and loving and tolerant heart. As an American volunteer back then, I was introduced to the British Christmas cracker with its paper crown and toy and joke by the ones Margaret made out of loo paper rolls for the South Belfast First Day School. I was puzzled but charmed. My meeting in Massachusetts will have meeting for worship not only Sunday (unimaginatively renamed “First Day”) the 24th but also Christmas Day the 25th, and I will be feeling deep gratitude for having known Margaret McNeill.
By Bluecarpet on 21st December 2023 - 22:59
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