The post The Challenge of Christmas appeared first on Anglican Mainstream. by Wilfred M. McClay, First Things: Richard John Neuhaus had a great talent for aphorisms. The one that I am most inclined to repeat appeared in this magazine’s...
The post The Challenge of Christmas appeared first on Anglican Mainstream.
by Wilfred M. McClay, First Things:
Richard John Neuhaus had a great talent for aphorisms. The one that I am most inclined to repeat appeared in this magazine’s first issue, published in March 1990: “the first thing to be said about public life is that public life is not the first thing.” Neuhaus went on to elaborate with another gem: “Religion that is captive to public life is of little public use.” From the very start, the necessary connection between the two, and the equally requisite distance between them, was to be a guiding theme of this enterprise, now into its fourth decade of robust and indispensable existence.
Christmas is a time of conviviality and joy, an opening of the heart to our precious relationships with others, so often unacknowledged or forgotten amid the insensibility of the everyday. Consider the appeal of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and the transformation of Scrooge’s mindset from a hard and isolate individualism to a softened openness to others, a generosity of spirit. We owe so much of the glorious way we observe Christmas to Dickens, and to the Victorians.
Part of that legacy, though, may be a certain Victorian evasiveness. It is not without reason that people complain we don’t keep “Christ in Christmas” or that we forget “The Reason for the Season.” Delightful as the season’s spirit is, it is a byproduct and not the thing itself. The name of Jesus Christ is never spoken in A Christmas Carol, even if the story is obviously a great and compelling allegory of God’s redemptive love. But can the allegory exist indefinitely apart from the thing being allegorized? That is the kind of uncomfortable question that this magazine exists to ask, and answer, with boldness and integrity.
The post The Challenge of Christmas appeared first on Anglican Mainstream.