It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Part II

    Three years ago I wrote an essay titled It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. In that essay I described why I liked Christmas so much and the reasons it should be such an important holiday.  I am now going to expand on that theme.  Earlier this year, I read an amazing book, The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton.  Two chapters in particular threw all the details of Christmas into an even clearer and sublime light than even I had cast them. 

The End of the World

    Chesterton begins his discourse by describing the defeat of Carthage by Rome.  He describes that the citizens of Carthage were worshipers of Moloch, also known as Baal, the most vile and dark of the heathen gods of the middle east. How the evils of their worship poisoned their whole society into something terrible, where human life was considered very cheap and babies were thrown in furnaces to appease Moloch and his sinister consort Tanit.  When Hannibal invaded Rome it was seen as a threat to all that was good and light in the world, everything was about to be swallowed in darkness. Then, by some miracle, Hannibal was defeated and Carthage itself was razed to the ground and never recovered.  The best and brightest of human civilization had defeated darkness once and for all.

 Or had it?A culture that began and ended with domesticity, whose household gods defeated the demons of Hannibal's Carthage began a slow moral decay. Greek and oriental vices and immorality began to invade as the new fads of society. Every new fad that came from the fringes of the empire, new eastern philosophy, new secret mystery religions, any and all things new were used to stab awake their drowsy apathy. This could truly have been the end of the world.*

    Chesterton compares Mythology to a search, a search for man's purpose in the world. There comes a time in a civilization, if it lasts long enough, when men tire of playing mythology and pretending that the tree is a maiden and the moon made love to a man, it is then that men seek stranger obscenities to cure their jadedness. They tire of walking in their sleep of ordinary life and begin to wake themselves with nightmares such as gladiators and mystery religions.The noble mythology of man was dying and would have left a vacuum had it not been replaced with something far, far more wondrous, theology.  

   Paganism was dying because society itself was maturing.   The mythology that had been around for millenia, or not quite religious paganism, was the young world's riot with ideas and images rather like a young man's riot with wine and lovemaking.  Youthful irresponsibility more than malicious immorality. As society matured, like an individual matures, it began to see the weaknesses and insufficiency of this lifestyle.  So as society began to decay, it got bored with it’s old lifestyle and started to turn to obscenities to cure it's boredom.
 

    The urban mob became 'enlightened', in other words, they lost the mental power to create legends. Rather like jaded grown ups who lament the loss of their childhood yet despise the idea of fairy tales; or today's historical and literary revisionists that delight in tearing down heroes but then wonder why people seem to have no sense of morality.  The people mourned the loss of the gods and consoled themselves with bread and circuses.  A similar thing is happening in our own present day.  We became 'enlightened' and 'free thinkers'.  We threw God out of society (since He is un-progressive unscientific) and as a result, condemned any ideas of being in awe of things supernatural or worshiping something larger than ourselves or our social systems.  In the deadness that has resulted, we console ourselves with celebrities, sports, and reality TV.

 "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons." Galatians 4:4

The God in the Cave

   The world was dying, when news came out of the east that would shake the whole earth to the very core, and strike fear into the hearts of the demon-worshipers and the philosophers.  God really was dead, some even claimed to see Him die.  But, they added, He then became alive again.  No longer would humanity have to seek for the reason of their existence, He had been found, in a cave, under a star.  The shepherds had found their Good Shepherd, and the philosophers, their endless searching over, would kneel before Him, for the Desire of the Ages had come. 

   This new sect calling themselves "Christians" were invited to set up an image of their God along with all the others in the temple.  They refused, saying that their God was alive, and not a dead image.  Not only that, but he was the only God, and would suffer no worship of another.  This refusal to integrate was the turning point of history. If the Christians had accepted and tossed their God in with all the rest, the would have been subsumed into the melting pot of gods that was already evaporating.   This new claim of only one God who had come as a helpless baby to save us from ourselves was the one thing that would revolutionize the whole world.  

   The Birth of Christ in a cave can be equated to the start of a revolution.  He was announced with shouts and songs of angels, and the shouting of that night still hangs in the air today.  Christians are on the whole meek and mild and love their neighbors.  However, their refusal to kneel to other gods, or go against the commands of their own God, is as much a challenge as anything. A challenge to fight against all error and evil. Christianity proclaims peace on earth but never forgets why there was a war in heaven.

     Christmas is most wonderful because it remembers the day when the whole world was saved from itself.  The world nearly died once of broad-mindedness and the brotherhood of all religions. Christ was born to revolutionize that and show us that while we must love our enemies and be innocent as doves, we must also fight to the death for what is true, good and right. As Joy Davidman Lewis states when discussing how disappointed the Jewish leaders were with Jesus when he would not overthrow Rome and be their King "He offered them not all the longed-for kingdoms of the earth, but only-only!- the salvation of their own souls."

*It is telling that at this time many high-society Roman women began to convert to Judaism.

This is the Season Dearest to the Heart

As I stated when I posted the first portion of Kortirion Among the Trees, there is another part that I like to read at Christmas time.  Again, I prefer the second version of this poem to the first or third.  In the third version of the poem, Tolkien refers to "The funeral candles of the Silver Wain" (meaning the Big Dipper) and I think that is a rather poor description of the night sky in winter, which is my favorite season.  But then, John could be quite a humbug when it came to winter.  And even Jack Lewis, who loved snow and Christmas almost as much as I do, turned into a real Scrooge while Joy was ill (as I saw this summer from some of his writings). But that is neither here nor there, and they are allowed to be that way.  Here is the winter part of the second draft of Kortirion Among the Trees, starting at line 85.

  This is the season dearest to the heart,
  And time most fitting to the ancient town,
  With waning musics sweet that slow depart
  Winding with echoed sadness faintly down
  The paths of stranded mist.  O gentle time,
  When the late mornings are begemmed with rime,
  And early shadows fold the distant woods!
  The Elves go silent by, their shining hair
  They cloak in twilight under secret hoods
  Of grey, and filmy purple, and long bands
  Of frosted starlight sewn by silver hands.

  And oft they dance beneath the roofless sky,
  When naked elms entwine in branching lace
  The Seven Stars, and through the boughs the eye
  Stares golden-beaming in the round moon's face.
  O holy Elves and fair immortal Folk,
  You sing then ancient songs that once awoke
  Under primeval stars before the Dawn;
  You whirl then dancing with the eddying wind,
  As once you danced upon the shimmering lawn
 ***
(Line 119)
The seven candles of the Silver Wain,
Like lighted tapers in a darkened fane,
Now flare above the fallen year.
Thought court and street now cold and empty lie,
And Elves dance seldom neath the barren sky,
Yet under the white moon there is a sound
Of buried music still beneath the ground.
When winter comes, I would meet winter here.

Quoted from The Book of Lost Tales, pages 38 and 39.