RITE AND REASON: Maybe this Christmas would be a good time 'to tiptoe back to the church', suggests Father Dermot LaneRite and Reason
Every Christmas is unique, not because the meaning of Christmas changes, but because the historical, social and cultural context in which we live out our lives changes and this affects the way we experience Christmas. What has probably changed most of all in the last year in Ireland has been our culture.
By culture, I mean here the way we live our lives as reflected in our language, social practices and moral values.
Our culture has become increasingly aggressive and greedy, strikingly soulless and spiritually empty, and there is an extraordinary passion to dumb down and deconstruct everything and everybody in sight. Serious social inequalities persist in spite of economic progress.
People have begun to notice this cultural shift and they are not at all happy with it. By far the most significant commentary has come from the Ombudsman, Emily O'Reilly, in a talk she gave to the Céifin conference last month. In her paper she referred to unrestrained drunkenness, random violence, foul language, the parading of obscene wealth, disdain for the poor, an increasing neutrality in our judgments of all sorts of objectively bad behaviour, and so on. Her analysis received a remarkable amount of favourable comment in the media. Brenda Power picked it up in the Sunday Times, noting also how coarse and vulgar our culture had become.
The remedy proposed by Emily O'Reilly against this trend was the suggestion that people consider the possibility of tiptoeing back to the church in search of some direction.
In spite of all the failings of the churches and religions, they do have spiritual values and they do hold up a moral vision, and they try to embody liberating practices in ritual and celebration.
Have you noticed how frequently the f-word now appears on chat shows in the name of entertainment and how the b-word is trotted out as sign of emotional maturity, and how the J-word has become an expression of independence?
The coarsening of culture and language is ultimately a coarsening of life itself: the dignity of the person is diminished, human relationships are trivialised, and sexuality is reduced to a commodity. Nothing is sacred, nobody is unique, and everybody is flattened out into the lowest common denominator.
Christmas is indeed a good time for all of us to tiptoe back to the church to recover the empowering and healing memory of Jesus.
Why? Because the Christmas message has the capacity to soften the coarseness of our culture.
The Christmas story with its emphasis on a Jewish woman, taking refuge in Bethlehem, giving birth to a baby in a manger, the forgotten figure of Joseph, does indeed touch the human heart and has the power to lift the human spirit to another level.
Attention to the Christian message can transform rudeness into respect, greed into generosity, and consumerism into a new communion of solidarity with the stranger.
But, some will ask, as did John Betjeman:
And is it true. And is it true?
This most tremendous tale of all
The Maker of the stars and sea
Becomes a child on earth for me.
For some the Christmas story has become just an occasion to recover childhood memories, or to engage in self-indulgent sentimentality, or just an excuse for an extravagant bash. For others, the meaning of Christmas is much more: it is the centrepiece of Christian faith and the hallmark of Christian identity.
Christmas means that God has come into our world and walked among us as a figure of history.
The child in the stable is God in human form, the eternal Word of God made vulnerable to the vagaries of existence, divine wisdom made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth - to such an extent it evoked the response "Come let us adore Him". What this means, in effect, is that God has adopted our world; that the earth has become the sanctuary of God, and that God has bound Himself to every human being and thereby given value, dignity and lasting rights to all.
The darkness of the night, which haunts all of us, has been penetrated by the light of Jesus Christ, and the apparent distance between God and the world has been bridged by the birth of his Son, Jesus of Nazareth, and the isolation of our little planet within the vastness of the cosmos has been overcome by a new communion between the Creator and the creature in Jesus.
If this is at least some of the meaning of the Christmas story, then maybe Christmas is a good time to tiptoe back to the church to rediscover the good news of Jesus as the wisdom of God; maybe the celebration of Christmas in word and sacrament, in song and prayer around the crib, has the capacity to deepen respect for each other, change our coarsened culture, and to be more inclusive in our relationships and social policies.
Father Dermot A. Lane is president of the Mater Dei Institute of Education, a college of DCU, and parish priest of Ballally in Dublin