VIEW FROM THE PEW
Oh, happy day, the nativity scene is finally up and we can bask in the glow of tree lights amid the imagery of the birth in Bethlehem. While the music makes our spirits soar, take deep breaths and let the frenzy of shopping lists, mailing deadlines, meeting expectations, maybe sadness or loss, fade away as we listen to the oh-so-familiar story. If we give ourselves a quiet moment, the enormity of this fabulous gift of God’s love could sink in. Oh, Christmas, without your joy and promise, how could we make it through the year?!
It’s such a relief to end the frazzled secular season of Christmas, weary of being stampeded by advertising and special sales and even greedy demands close to home. We’re emotionally frostbitten after extreme exposure to images of snowmen and reindeer — so meaningful in Hawaii — characters from classic books and films, Grinch, Scrooge, Frosty, Rudolph, Nutcracker soldiers and ballerinas. Our brains are so battered by the seasonal spending theme that we might feel we’ve failed because a new car or new mattress or the hot toy of the year didn’t fit our plan or purse.
Relief is an understatement for how it feels to reach the end of this year, period. How wise were Christianity’s early scholars when they chose to set the celebration of Christ’s birth at the end of the calendar year. Lucky us, just as we start to think forward in our timeline, our hearts and souls are fortified with joy, hope and promise.
I started musing about our measuring of time back at the beginning of this month. Drifting through a big bookstore, I spotted a shelf full of those one-day-at-a-time desk calendars, kind of rare in these days when the electronic device in hand is where you look for everything including the date. Too bad if it’s a fading fancy because it was so satisfying to say “bye bye” to a bad day by tearing it off and tossing it in the trash can. It would have been a perfect tool for passing the first days of the commercial Christmas season that way; adios to the Black Friday frenzy captured in scenes of competitive greed, violence and just plain nuttiness. And aloha to the sequels Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, holy days of the prevailing religion of consumerism.
So when a Giving Tuesday promotion showed up as a wrap around the daily newspaper I was inclined to perform another waste basket ceremony. But then, another request to mark that day showed up from an organization I believe in and support. It made me pause to try tolerance for society’s desire to package and label absolutely everything, including the virtues of generosity and kindness. Had you even heard of Giving Tuesday? It began in 2012, first imagined by idealists at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York and the United Nations Foundation and launched with a founding $1 billion endowment from Ted Turner, according to the National Catholic Reporter executive whose email urged me to get with the trend.
Truthfully, I did need the reminder. It’s my procrastinating habit to stuff all the months’ worth of pleas for donations into a folder. Only when the deadline approaches to donate in time to claim tax deductions, do I finally settle down and have a giving day. How’s that for a crass spin on sharing?!
Speaking of calendars, December is a month of several special days that are religious, not secular, rooted in different faith traditions and observed for centuries by believers. Each is a far cry from the cash-based cultural celebration of the month.
When I wrote about religions in the secular press, I’d often wrap up the very diverse celebrations in December as a package trying to emphasize what we all shared. As different as the Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, even ancient pagan faiths are, I see our similarities as people recognizing their own spiritual dimension, seeking to wrap their heads around our human sense that there is something greater than we are. Down through time, people sought ways to be moral, ethical, generous, peaceful occupants of their world.
Ecumenical efforts
“One journey, many paths” was the motto on the NCR email donation request, and it recalled my ecumenical efforts. I got some pushback back in the day. Some members of the Jewish community really don’t want to hear any combining of their Hanukkah observance with Christmas. “It is not the Jewish Christmas,” I was told in a scolding call. The eight-day festival of lights, which Jews are celebrating from Dec. 22 to 30 this year, marks a historic victory over conquerors and the Israelites’ rededication of their Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BC, long before Jesus was born. The miracle in that story is that, despite the unbelievers’ desecration of the temple, a tiny bit of consecrated oil remained. It kept the lamps alight for eight days in the restored temple. Jewish families gather to light one candle for each of the eight days. The celebration involves indulging in special foods and gift-giving to children, thus its comparison to Christmas.
Also in December, Buddhists celebrate the pivotal event in their religion, the day when the Indian sage who is now known as Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment, 2,500 years ago. Bodhi Day, named for the tree under which Buddha sat when he reached that state of complete awareness, was celebrated Dec. 8 with a communal gathering of several Buddhist denominations at Honpa Hongwanji Hawaii Betsuin temple in Nuuanu. Buddhists study their scriptures, meditate and choose lifestyles to emulate Buddha.
As for the pagan festivals of December, just tap “Saturnalia” into an online search and you will find more than you may want to know about the pagan Roman festival honoring their agricultural god which predated Christ’s birth by centuries. Occurring in mid- December and featuring feasting, drinking, gift-giving make it sound a lot like Christmas party time. In 312 AD Constantine became the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity and in 340 AD, Pope Julius I fixed Dec. 25 as the date to mark the birth of Jesus. Historians and church scholars have written about the possible link between Saturnalia and Christmas, and about other dates previously used for Christmas.
Researching those subjects may be a welcome relief from the lingering holiday commercials.
There’s more than one fundamentalist branch of Christianity that refuse to celebrate Christmas because the timeline is not nailed down in Scripture plus the perceived calendar conflation link with paganism.
And speaking of pagans, I always have to give a December shout out to the druids, ancient religionists in England and Ireland, who held the solstice sacred. Thousands of years before Christ’s birth, the druids built huge prehistoric astronomical structures still to be seen at Stonehenge in England and New Grange in Ireland, designed to align with the rays of the sun on sacred solstice days in summer and winter. Of course, the ancients didn’t know it happens because one of earth’s poles reaches its maximum tilt away from the sun but then, it doesn’t seem that our weather reporters get the story behind Dec. 22 being “the first day of winter” either. I just cherish the thought of those ancient people seeking to understand their world and celebrating the good news that time of sunlight would lengthen and darkness would shrink in the months ahead.
Ah, December, you are full of spirituality and excitement and mystery … and I’m not even going to tackle the Big Guy in red this time around. Except to say that Dec. 6 was the day when kids in Holland and other European countries looked in their shoes to see if St. Nicholas left them a lump of coal or a piece of candy. He was a Christian bishop in what is now Turkey, became a legend for giving gifts and died in 343 AD. No known link to what was going on in Rome about the same time!
His saint’s day is missing from the 2020 calendars distributed by my parish this year. Otherwise, they are quite an upgrade from past freebie editions which featured somber renderings of sometimes obscure saints by famous dead artists. “The Saints Among Us” has lively biographies, with saints particularily relevant to our lives, such as native American Kateri Tekakwitha, who was ostracized by her tribe for becoming a convert to the Catholic faith, and Juan Diego, a Mexican peasant whose vision of the Blessed Mother is memorialized as the Dec. 12 feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It’s also loaded with Catholic stuff, the saint of the day, the color of daily Mass vestments, First Fridays and fast days in Lent, you know what I mean.
Secular stuff, too
Not surprisingly, secular stuff is included, government and patriotic holidays, and mother, father, grandparents days, and astronomical dates of moon phases, solstice, equinox, daylight savings time. But then there’s April Fools’ Day, Groundhog Day, administrative professionals day, boss’s day — never in my work career did we mark that one — and “Sweetest Day” which is held in October. That holiday was invented by candy and cake makers in a marketing ploy more than 100 years ago. It has been eclipsed by the February day named for St. Valentine.
As thorough as the calendar designers were, I would have expected some religious references, at the very least a notation of the Orthodox Christian churches’ holy days of Christmas and Easter, which are different from Catholic observance. Christmas will be celebrated on Jan. 7 by our Orthodox friends, who use the Julian calendar which predates the Gregorian calendar compiled by Pope Gregory in 1582, the model for calendars worldwide in modern times.
The Catholic calendar does have one ecumenical feature, noting the National Day of Prayer in May. Actually, that’s a secular date, created by President Harry Truman in 1950. Wasn’t that something, for a political leader to put out a call for people of all sorts of beliefs and backgrounds to share the day, to direct their thoughts and petitions to God, however they knew him? Who knows how that would fly in our divided country today? I just hope someone doesn’t decide to expunge it because it’s not politically correct.
Don’t worry about the calendar. The celebration is just beginning and we can continue the birthday celebration for at least the 12 days of Christmas — that’s not just a song, you know.
We will say farewell to 2019 with a liturgy using the beginning of St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
