Something The Queen Said: Thoughts on Christmas Faith and Life

As I listened to The Queen on Christmas Day, a couple of sentences stood out for me. The Christmas story retains its appeal since it doesn’t provide theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life. Instead it’s about the birth of a child and the hope that birth two thousand years ago brought to the world.

In old age, Her Majesty has been increasingly clear with us all about the central place Christianity occupies in her life. It’s heartening to hear her speak about the power her Christian faith has had throughout her long life to motivate, inspire and give meaning. 

But this statement I’ve highlighted goes beyond personal testimony to offer a really important insight about how religious faith does and doesn’t function in human life. The temptation is to look to faith to explain things, probe the complex mysteries of existence, come up with answers to all that baffles and bewilders us in our human experience. 

Once upon a time we spoke of a “God of the gaps”, the deity whose existence provided accounts of phenomena that had so far eluded human explanation. Literal readings of the Bible provided ready resources for explaining the nature of the cosmos, the origins of life, the phenomenon of humanity, and the fact of suffering and pain. For many people, they still do, as we can see in the conservative evangelical right of North America for whom the scriptures provide the infallible answer to every question posed by science, ethics and faith.

The urge to explain extended to the arguments for the existence of God himself. I was taught philosophy at Oxford by Anthony Kenny who later became Master of Balliol which was my college. Kenny had trained and practised as a catholic priest but left the priesthood on account of his questioning the intellectual basis of dogmatic religion. His lectures on the arguments for the existence of God comprehensively dismantled one by one the philosophical bases of the classical “Five Ways”. Yet he was careful to say that this didn’t mean that God did not exist. You could no more prove his non-existence than his existence. Whatever affirmation you made about God essentially came down to faith, not logic or evidence. To speak of “explanation”, you could say, was to commit a “category mistake”. Rational explanation and religious faith belong to different “language games”.

I’ve spent a lifetime getting to know the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. I’ve taught it to theology students and preached it to Sunday morning congregations. Above all, I’ve found that it’s immeasurably enriched my personal understanding of faith and the human condition. I’ve learned how agnostic books like Job and Ecclesiastes are when it comes to explaining the riddles of the world and of my own self. Whereas conventional religion likes binaries and causal explanations: right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark, reward and punishment, these writings probe deeper beneath the surface of things. They seem to discern that complexity will not be reduced to a simplistic “yes” or “no”. On the contrary. It takes faith to live with the reality of suffering (Job) or with a sense of ennui or meaninglessness (Ecclesiastes). These texts do not offer “solutions”, “theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life” to quote Her Majesty. It’s faith, not rational thought, that enables us to live with these great unanswered questions. “The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” says Job.

Theologians calls the exploration of faith in the light of the problems of suffering and meaning theodicy. Theodicy can’t offer watertight explanations, and doesn’t try - at least, not any more. What it does is to explore ways in which faith can be understood and presented intelligently in precisely the kind of world we all know we live in, full of paradox and contradiction. This is necessary because for many, it’s questions of suffering and meaning that are a major obstacle to belief. “How can a God of love exist in a world that is so cruel and pain-ridden?” We aren’t being true to our own faith if we don’t feel the force of this question. Theodicy can help sensitise our faith to such questioning, help us articulate it in ways that place suffering and questions about meaning at the centre where they belong, rather than at the margins. 

Christmas gives us a glimpse of this way of believing. We hear afresh the story of the Holy Child of Bethlehem, we sing carols of love and praise, we gaze with wonder into his crib and are perhaps surprised to find ourselves profoundly moved by this image of a birth that brings such a joy and such a hope. This is to say that the the instinct of Christmas faith is contemplative. We look as if through an open door into a world that for a brief moment grants a vision of what life could become. We find ourselves gazing on a transformed world and a transfigured life. “Peace on earth, good will to all people!” we sing in tune with the angels. If only it were true! we say longingly to ourselves. 

The Christmas story itself embraces this longing for a world healed of its wrongs. “No room at the inn” speaks of exclusion and hardship. The flight into Egypt presents the Holy Family as exiles seeking asylum in a strange land. Herod’s massacre of the innocent children depicts the suffering of innocent victims in the most terrible way possible. “The holly bears a berry as red as any blood”, indeed. Theodicy is at the very heart of our Christmas story and the carols we love to sing.

And yet contemplative faith intuits that the greatest mystery in the universe is not suffering but love. It’s love that defies all explanation, other than that this is simply how God is in himself. This is what we understand in a life-changing way is the deepest truth of Christmas. St Francis understood this, which is why he set up the first Christmas Crib and invited people to bring to it their heart’s love. Christmas becomes real for each of us as we give ourselves to this rapturous vision, and it becomes real for our world, by anticipation, as we each live out the hope that is set before us in ways that make a difference to the lives of others, whether it’s in politics, peace-making or the pursuit of social justice. As the medieval spiritual guides understood so well, holy contemplation always leads to good action. And that’s what changes things. 

The traditional Gospel reading on Christmas Day says it all. “And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1.14). We beheld. This is what the Incarnation invites us to do: to look, to see, to behold. For as we gaze into the face of the Love that makes its dwelling among us, as we are drawn into the grace and truth we see there, we instinctively understand that here is the source of all that is life-changing. Those sterile causal explanations we once hankered after don’t belong here, have no relevance to this vision of God. The Queen was right about that. What matters is leaning to become contemplatively wise, discovering how this way of life becomes a source of inspiration and strength as we try to do God’s work in the world.

When religious faith comes of age and renounces its need to explain, turns instead to contemplation, and then acts on what it has glimpsed, it achieves a state of wisdom which is both life-changing and brings hope to the world.

No Crying He Makes

Was ever a Christmas carol so maligned?

I'm thinking of Away in a Manger. At this time of year there's always a steady stream of people, mostly carolled-out clergy, who share their grumpiness about this sweet, innocent and much-loved carol. Special opprobrium is reserved for the middle stanza:

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.

Here, for example, is a blog I read over the weekend. What a load of nonsense is written in some Christmas carols. Of course, many are excellent. But along with the gold there is a lot of dross. Take the line in 'Away in a manger' which asserts boldly: 'Little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes'. Really? On what basis is that stated? It's certainly not in the Bible. The author then turns his wrath on I Saw Three Ships before majoring on We Three Kings of Orient Are. What have they done to deserve it?

It's a depressing take on a familiar aspect of Christmas, this proscribing of what generations of children and adults have loved singing and found to be strangely heartwarming. So let's think about no crying he makes. The usual criticism is that the infant Jesus would hardly be a normal (or "real") human child if he did not cry. So the line questions (it's alleged) whether this nativity would be a true taking of our humanity into God. Moreover, it hints that goodness consists in being seen but not heard, as in another popular and sometimes maligned hymn Once in Royal David's City where the author writes: Christian children all must be, mild, obedient, good as he.

I find this logic faintly absurd. For one thing, every parent knows that all but the most distressed children do, from time to time, wake up but do not cry. Especially is this likely when his or her mother is at hand to offer comfort, reassurance and nourishment. So in the picture language of the carol, the Holy Child lying in tranquility is emtirely consistent with what we know about the behaviour of our own children in their infancy. But the image takes us beyond this. It seems to say to us that this Child knows himself to be in a completely safe place. He is in loving communion with his parents, with his guests, with the animals. His little world is one where the song of the angels is already being fulfilled, because here, in this intimate circle of the nativity scene, there is “peace on earth, goodwill to all people”.

Let’s pursue what this no crying represents in the way the Christmas story has been told down the centuries. It echoes a very long "apophatic" tradition that sees in the incarnation a mystery so profound that silence is the only way of doing it justice. So almost universally, the old master paintings of the Nativity depict a scene full of a peaceful, restful, quietness. Angels and shepherds, and often magi as well, revere the new-born King in a carefully composed atmosphere of stillness. Often, the Child is depicted as asleep, but if he is awake, he is gazing peacefully on his parents, or the shepherds, or the animals among whom he is born. “No crying he makes!” And even when shepherds journey and angels hover, their movements are gentle as befits this great mystery. There is no dissonant commotion or harsh noise to shatter the restfulness, the serenity of the scene. At the crib, human hearts are stilled. We are silenced because no words could do justice to the glory we behold.

In terms of visual art, these nativity scenes probably go back to St Francis who is credited as having created the first Christmas crib as a kind of icon to inspire the devotion of the faithful. But the tradition that links incarnation with silence goes back even further. The key text is in the Wisdom of Solomon (18.14-15): For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half-gone, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne into the midst of a land that was doomed. The early fathers loved that saying. In the development of the liturgy, it was quoted, almost word for word, in one of the antiphons for Christmas morning. In wisdom literature, the "word" was the logos or mind of God, so it was only a short step to read back into it the Christian meaning of incarnation, the "word" or "wisdom" of God becoming enfleshed in the person of the Child born at Bethlehem.

We could almost say, in the imagery of the carol, that the little Lord Jesus is awake yet silent in the face of the mystery of his own incarnation. It's the kind of thought you find in the poetry of Thomas Traherne who imagines a new-born child wondering with joy at the realisation of being alive and inheriting the world. Who's to say that new-born babies don't experience this kind of wonderment at suddenly finding themselves outside the womb and gazing at a loving mother's face? That at least is the direction taken by psychoanalytic writers who regard the bond of love established between a mother and her child as determinative for the whole of human life.  Or we could think of Thomas Hardy’s poem The Oxen where he imagines the ox and ass kneeling in front of the manger as midnight strikes on Christmas Eve. Are these poetic images "biblical"? Hardly, if you're looking for texts to justify them explicitly. But are they biblical in the more profound sense of being completely true to what the scriptures want us to hear, understand and cherish? Undoubtedly!

So it's not surprising that we find this gentle silence that enveloped all things referenced in our Christmas hymns and carols. Think of these well-known, oft-sung examples:

The world in solemn stillness lay
to hear the angels sing.

How silently, how silently
the wondrous gift is given!

Silent night, holy night...

Of course, silence is not the only Nativity motif. Just as important in the spirituality of Christmas are the themes of carolling, exultant celebration, joyous music-making, heaven and earth joined in praise of the God who comes among us. Nor should we neglect the "noise" and pain of the Nativity story: that it happened in a cave because there was no room at the inn; Herod's massacre of the innocent children, the Holy Family's flight into Egypt. These represent some of the realities of the suffering world into which Jesus was born. The Coventry Carol is just one medieval example that recognises the painful realities into which the Infant comes. It's important that we don't repesent the mystical silence of the Nativity as some kind of escape from the real world (a perennial Christmas temptation, whether in liturgy, consumerism or partying).

But it's also important not to worry away at the detail of the poetry and art that adorn the Christmas message. To read Away in a Manger and object to its imagery is to read poetry as if it were cold prose, and confuse symbolic language with material fact. That's the trouble with a lot of religion today: it has lost touched with the imagination because it has forgotten the kind of language it's handling. So what's required is not to demythologise our Christmas carols but to re-enchant them, or rather, allow them to re-enchant us. In this respect, children seem often to be closer to the truth of Christmas than adults, to grasping the essentially symbolic, metaphorical, poetic character of religious language. Is this one of the reasons that Jesus spoke about becoming like little children if we are to enter the kingdom of God? And could our children and grandchildren help us celebrate a more childlike Christmas if only we paid attention?

Maybe as we grow older, we become more relaxed with the symbolic register of Christmas language. Perhaps that's because our conception of "truth" is enlarged as we reflect on what life has meant for us, and we realise that "truth" is a far bigger thing than we once dreamed. Perhaps the memories of past Christmases become stronger with age, especially those of our own childhood or our children's. Once, decades ago, I sang Away in a Manger at a funeral on Christmas Eve. I've never forgotten how poignant it was, the contrast between infancy and old age, gift and loss, happiness and grief. Above all, the carol spoke of the Christian hope we glimpse in the Christ Child:

Be near me Lord Jesus; I ask thee to stay
close by me for ever, and love me I pray.
Bless all the dear children in thy tender care,
and fit us for heaven to live with thee there.

It was one of the most moving funerals I can remember. Even Victorian poetry can work miracles. So if I find myself on my deathbed one Christmas time, I'd love it if some little children could come and sing Away in a Manger for me. I would try to join in if I could. It would be immensely comforting. It would bring happiness and hope. But as for no crying he makes, I can't promise I myself would get through it without shedding a tear or two.

**Image: the east window of St Cuthbert's, Haydon Bridge by Charles Kempe (1837-1907), created at around the time "Away in a Manger" was written.