VIEW FROM THE PEW
Finally, in the afterglow of our holiday most frenzied, we had a quiet day or two to contemplate the tree lights and the manger scene. Our spinning orbit of shop, bake, sing, cook, shop more, gather, party slows. In the temporary calm we can absorb the point of it all: God knows us and loves us and has given us all we need in the unfathomable gift of his Son.
Catholic Christians do what they can to hold onto the happiness and hope of Christmas with a continuing string of liturgical celebrations, the Jan. 1 Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God, the feast of the Holy Family, and on to Epiphany, the arrival of the Magi with gifts for the Holy Child.
Here we are with the 12 days of Christmas still playing out and it’s OK to keep rolling with the season of love and great expectations. But I think most people believe Dec. 25 was the finale and what a shame that is, though I can’t blame them for deleting that song about poultry presents for another 11 months.
Faith-filled or devoutly secular, we quickly segue from the spirit of Christmas to embrace a frenzy of superstition. The hopes and fears of all the years meet within the rituals of calendar change to a New Year.
Even if you don’t really believe loud noises scare away evil spirits, fireworks can be fun. No matter how satisfied we were with the pre-Christmas cleaning, the neighbors believe the house has to be scoured before midnight Sunday, so we bring out the mops and window cleaner.
Watch who’s carrying the kadomatsu bouquets of bamboo and pine out of the markets — believed to bring good luck and ward off dark forces — and you’ll see how islanders love to borrow each other’s — in this case, Japanese — traditions.
Good luck will be for sale bigtime at the Shinto shrines starting New Year’s Eve. It was an annual assignment for a newspaper religion writer and I was amazed at who I’d see in line for omamori, prayers for prosperity and other good things written on paper or wood and wrapped in colorful paper. You see them dangling from rear-view mirrors, draped on workplace cubicles and store cash registers.
I remember a conversation with a Protestant acquaintance who was at the temple selecting amulets for good health, safe travel, luck in love, all to give as gifts. “You do know that’s a prayer to a pagan god,” sez the self-righteous reporter with a limited knowledge of the aboriginal religion of Japan with gods linked to nature. “Oh no,” replied the born-again shopper. “I don’t believe … but everyone just likes to have good luck.” While people use those New Year traditions as a link to a family’s cultural roots, New Year is a religious observance for Buddhists. When you hear temple bells or gongs, they will be ringing 108 times, a prayerful way to ask for the lifting of the 108 sins or evil human passions recognized in Buddhist teaching, a spiritual house-cleaning.
Being on my ideological high horse about superstitions reminds me of those folks who abhor the modern Christmas celebration because it does not mesh with what’s reported in the Bible, and because the December timing is linked to those early Christians who adopted the Roman Saturnalia, a pagan winter solstice festival. “You’ve got it all wrong so stop having so much fun celebrating the birth of the Christ Child” is their theme.
Blame Emperor Constantine
They are right about the early church layering its own story and message onto older religious and cultural beliefs. In this case, the blame goes to a notable convert, the Roman Emperor Constantine. In the year 312 AD, he ended Roman persecution of Christians and brought imperial patronage to the church. It took a century or more, so people were celebrating both the holy Christ day and the carnival honoring the god Saturn in the same winter season, much like our combination celebration this week.
In a scholarly article on the History Today website, University of London ancient history professor David Gwynn opined: “Devout Christians may be reassured to learn that the date of Christmas may derive from concepts in Judaism that link the time of the deaths of prophets to their conception or birth. From this, early ecclesiastical number-crunchers extrapolated that the nine months of Mary’s pregnancy following the Annunciation on March 25 would produce a December 25th date for the birth of Christ.” One of earliest Christian scholars, St. Augustine, who died in 431 AD, wrote way back in his day that he calculated that March 25 was the date Jesus was conceived and the date that he suffered death. The March 25 date of death gets shifted around a bit now that the church uses the spring equinox to figure the timing of Easter. But that’s another column.
Speaking of equinox and solstice and the astronomy by which we live brings me to my own adventures with another significant date of this season and superstitions and pagan stuff surrounding it. In our sunny tropical home, the most we heard on the subject was the TV weather reporter telling us that Dec. 21 was the first day of winter. The word solstice might have been mentioned but I doubt it because it takes some explaining and that would cut short the surf report. But who cares whether it’s the date the sun shines directly over the tropic of Cancer; we can always count on a warm day and so what if sunset’s a little early.
But for people who live further north on earth’s face, it matters when the planet is tilted to its farthest distance from the sun, marking the shortest day and longest night of the year. It’s darn cold and really gloomy; take it from someone who walked home from school when it was already getting dark at 4 p.m.
My ancient ancestors celebrated winter solstice, not because it was the darkest day but because it’s the beginning of the return of lighter days. The beliefs of the Druid priests of Ireland and other Celtic regions recognized human connections with the natural world.
Many people romanticize that era more than 2,000 years before Christ was born and hordes of those born-again Druids turn out at Stonehenge and other sites for the solstice celebration. Stonehenge is that famous circle of huge rocks in southern England. It was an ancient solar observatory where the rays of the sun reach an exact spot only on the solstice. No doubt it was a spiritual experience for the people who were figuring out basic astronomy, but it was also awesome science. And there’s a similar site, even better than the English one, at Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and you know I’d never exaggerate.
When we set up our Christmas fir tree from Washington in a well-established Teutonic pagan celebration of Christmas, what should shake out of its fragrant depths but eight dried up oak leaves. Oak leaves, from the species of tree that the Druids held sacred. Is this significant or what? Our inner pagan was yearning to be free. We had some bouts of hilarity imagining what would a devout dutiful Druid do. I won’t bore you with it; I think you had to be there.
Just in time to top off my musing on superstitions of the season, along came the email greeting from a friend who actually cares how the planets are aligned. I can’t remember what planet is in retrograde — I don’t even know what means — but I think the gist of it was that things look bad. I don’t argue, and I don’t know what detour my friend from childhood Catholic school days took along her way. It’s been a sticky subject ever since we once talked about the horoscope and I recalled how a certain newspaper editor scrambled those syndicated astrological predictions which are given way too much space in a publication devoted to real news. Thursday looking gloomy? Oops, that was the Monday prediction, and you had a good day anyway.
The star of Bethlehem
How can I disparage those who believe in astrology when here we are, about to honor the Magi who, the story goes, saw the star of Bethlehem and knew it as a portent of a marvelous birth.
Whether they are cheery or scary or just downright hilarious, it’s been human nature to embrace signs and superstitions as a way to understand and try to get control of our unpredictable lives. The start of a new year, a new chance to grasp the controls, brings out our pagan pattern. By the way, Jan. 1 became the first day of the year when Roman Emperor Julius Caesar introduced a calendar in 46 B.C. Pope Gregory XIII kept that in place in 1582, when he issued his Gregorian calendar which eventually was used around the globe.
They were so distant from each other, distinct in themselves, but so similar, those spiritual people of ancient times whom we might label pagan. Whether in the misty Japan islands or emerald shores of Ireland and England, those early people sensed the presence of the divine. They sought the face of God in the world of nature around them. They sought to turn away from evil and to do what’s right.
When God sent us his marvelous gift of light, he showed us the way out of the darkness of superstition. No matter who gets credit for recognizing when the solstice occurs, or who decided Jan. 1 starts the count of days earth takes to orbit the sun, or what date profound thinkers decided to mark the birth of Jesus, wasn’t it an awesome confluence of connections? How could it only be by chance? Isn’t this a wonderful time of year.
As usual, I drifted around in the internet orbit searching for a sign for my bottom line. There are some prayers for the New Year you might want to check out on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops site. But this from a generic Christian website lords-words-prayer.com, a Celtic prayer, rings my New Year bell.
“God, bless to me the new day, never granted to me before.
It is to bless your own presence you have given me this time, O God.
May my eye bless all it sees. I will bless my neighbor, may my neighbor bless me. God, give me a clean heart. Let me not stray from the sight of your eye.”
