When Ebenezer Scrooge, awakened of a haunted, black, and frigid Christmas night, asks whether the blazing-pated elder child standing at his bedside is the spirit prophesied by the ghost of Jacob Marley, the spirit responds, “I am.” So indeed could each of the spirits, past, present, and future, echo the words of the Lord. To Aslan, all times are soon. And to Christ, who holds the secret of time and eternity, all times are now, party to the providential moment of God’s labor from the beginning. And by the end of the affair, Scrooge has resolved to live in the past, the present, and the future, keeping Christmas always in his heart.
We might well be inclined to pooh-pooh the commercial Christmas season as Scrooge does the apparition of Marley’s face in his knocker, to cry humbug to the inflatable Santas which have begun to sprout from neighbors’ lawns—ten feet, twenty feet, forty feet—smiling and bobbing inanely against the grey skies, desolated by sloth, in the wake of Thanksgiving. We might shout “Good afternoon” and clap desperate hands to our ears at the thousand-times renewed chorus of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” We might do well in all such demurrals and repudiations.
Nonetheless, I have felt the conviction—more insistent these recent years—that the desire to stretch the Christmas “season,” indeed the whole holiday complex from Halloween through to Easter, is a sign of hope. The heart longs for what is holy, and even in these death-ridden, Christ-haunted latter days of the Western world, to alter a phrase of Walker Percy’s, we long for the one who redeems all things, the font of all holiness. That blow-up Grinch across the street, that burst of saccharine song, that packaging and mailing of presents and cards may all in their imperfect ways bespeak the yearning of the sin-sick age for the one who, sinless, became sin for our sake.
Nor is it foolish to imagine that such expansion of the holy across time is possible. Certainly it can be done foolishly. The holy has gone to seed when it sprouts up in such feasts as National Pie Day, National Eat a Red Apple Day, and Bifocals at the Monitor Liberation Day. (To name just a few associated with December 1st, which this year happens also to coincide with Cyber Monday.) Rarely do such days seem to have much bearing on anyone beyond a few sophisticates and FM radios DJs. But their proliferation recalls another calendar replete with feasts, the calendar of Mother Church, the liturgical year which day after day offers the faithful a saint or a moment of salvation history to celebrate, to say nothing of that daily Eucharist which every moment of the day is being offered round the year for the sanctification of the world.
I have by the somewhat provocative title of the present meditation suggested that Christmas be considered a waste of time. I here mean waste, of course, in Josef Pieper’s sense of that luxury, that lavishing of personal substance by which we demonstrate most plainly our scale of values. I mean the waste of Mary pouring out the aromatic nard on the feet of Christ. I mean the waste of bulls’ blood spilled on the altar and sprinkled on the people. I mean the waste of the Eternal Word made flesh and lain in a manger. I mean the waste of the Blood of the Lamb, lavished on those who do not deserve it. By our wastes, our outpouring of time and energy and substance, we indicate what we find holy, either to our salvation or perdition.
And to be sure, not all the festivities we find in the trappings of our societal holiday season are so rich as they should be. There is a great deal of frittering away our time and our talent on useless gifts and idle pursuits. Yet there remains, too, that sense of abundance to which Scrooge’s nephew Fred alludes in his eulogy to Christmas, a renewed sense that those around me are “fellow-passengers to the grave,” a willingness to take account of the poor, a wish to wish well to others and to retire a moment from the usual business of life in pursuit of a joy which, we can’t help feeling, ought to be the real pursuit of life. In this time of the year when the name of Christ rings out freely on the radio, I can’t help hearing the authentic desire of every heart for the Christ who dwells there, at the depth of our being, the one for whom, in letting ourselves be childlike, we come to yearn anew, as once we did, perhaps, in the Edenic moment of youth, when all moments were as one, before the cares of memory and anticipation had begun their anxious march.
The true Christian, to borrow from St. John Paul II, is the one who lives always in Sunday, who always enjoys the Resurrection as he journeys toward the eternal day of Heaven. If we have not yet passed through the night of Golgotha, we can do worse than to begin by turning to the night of Bethlehem, to the child kept warm by the breath of beasts, to the humble scene adorned by a Virgin’s perfect beauty and a carpenter’s quiet love. There, in the cave, we can offer gifts and choruses, learning again the sort of sacrifice that marks the holy, that we might in turn be marked out by the Lord as His and enter into the perfect day which involves all days, the eternity to which all time is present. Even the secular grasping after such festivity can offer an entry to the Christ child’s stable, and inasmuch as it does so, I say God bless it.
