For Christ's Sake

A Yuletide Toast! Lift the brimming beaker to the much-maligned and badly misunderstood figure in Christmas lore, Ebenezer Scrooge. A heavy too long in hearthside morality tales, Ebenezer deserves an immediate rehabilitation, if only for one reason: His classic two-word description of Christmas is so elegant, so succinct and so true that saying anything more seems almost redundant. "Christmas? Bah, humbug!"

Christmas is humbug in the precise dictionary sense; i.e., "a fraud or imposition, sham, trickery, deception or swindle." Christmas is all these things and more. Oh, I'm not denying there are some good things about it. The whole season exudes a funny magic that gets to almost everyone in some way. But this happens despite what we've done to Christmas, not because (continued on page 314)For Christ's Sake(continued from page 197) of it. Who is responsible for ruining Christmas?

Religious people, of course, have an instant, pop-up answer to that question. Christmas was ruined by its "commercialization." By now, this argument is very familiar. Once upon a time, Christmas was a pure religious occasion, undefiled by hucksters, admen and sales campaigns. Then came the spoilers. Like King Herod's villainous soldiers, the scions of commerce debauched everything.

This account is also humbug. The stale yarn of the Christian goodies and the pagan baddies bears so little resemblance to the real history of Christmas it is surprising it has lasted as long as it has. The truth is that the last week in December, the winter solstice, was a pagan festival time before Christ was born, long before Christians decided to use it to celebrate Christ's birth. For most of Christian history, Christmas was a minor holiday. Ever since it really achieved popularity, in medieval Europe and 19th Century America, Christmas has been a mishmash of disparate ingredients: raucous feasting, churchgoing, wassailing, revelry, hymn singing and Saturnalia. It is also the day on which there occur more murders, suicides, personal assaults and psychotic breakdowns than on any other. Christmas has always been a glorious admixture of religion, paganism, hucksterism and conviviality. That is not what's wrong with it. If it were purely a religious occasion, it would probably be worse.

No. The blame for despoiling Christmas lies not with the hucksters, however boorish they may be. Christmas was messed up before they ever got hold of it. It was ruined not by the cannibals but by the Christians.

How have they mutilated Christianity and, in the process, reduced Christmas to humbug? In a number of ways:

1. They have tried to make the story of Jesus over into a legend about an eviscerated, bloodless ascetic and Christianity itself into a dreary life-denying philosophy of flesh-despising abstemiousness. Admittedly, this has often been a little hard to manage, in view of the Biblical portrait of Jesus. On at least two occasions, the Gospels report that his enemies rejected Jesus because he had no interest in fasting and was "a glutton and winebibber." He frequented parties, kept company with notoriously shady characters and supplied some booze when an embarrassed wedding-reception host found he was running low. I wonder who drew those countless pictures distributed by churches and Sunday schools of a pale, effete Jesus? Those pictures have done more to destroy Jesus than 100 of Herod's legions.

Someday, theologians may even have the courage to speculate openly on an aspect of Jesus' life that, until now, has remained strictly sub rosa: his relationship to women. If Jesus was fully man as well as fully God (which is orthodox Christian doctrine), then how did Jesus the man relate to women?

The Bible itself says nothing about the sexual aspects of Jesus' relationships. In any case, Jesus explicitly rejected the way of the anchorite or the fakir. He did not flee to the desert with John the Baptist (though he apparently toyed with the idea at one time), nor did he join the puritanical Essenes on the shores of the Dead Sea. Jesus was not an ascetic. And the centuries-old effort of clerics, especially celibate ones, to geld Jesus into a prissy androgyne is one of the reasons Christmas today is a bamboozle. Who wants to celebrate the birthday of a First Century teetotaling Myra Breckinridge?

2. The churches have also helped destroy Christmas by turning Christianity into a petty-rule system and picturing Jesus as a finicky moralizer who spent his life telling people what not to do. Jesus himself spent his life breaking most of the taboos of his era--violating the Sabbath, rapping with "impure" men and women, wandering around with no visible means of support, sharply ridiculing the righteous prudes of the day. When people did come to him with moral dilemmas, he invariably tossed the questions back at them at a deeper level. That is just what riled so many people. He made them look within and decide for themselves. And that's scary.

Most people don't like to assume the responsibility of making ethical decisions for themselves. They long desperately for someone, anyone, to do it for them: a shrink, a professor, Ann Landers. Jesus refused. He was crucified. But the churches have gladly obliged. So instead of a feast of freedom, the churches have turned Christmas into one more doleful reminder of how grievously we have all wandered astray. Perhaps the most appropriate way to mark the birthday of Christ, in his spirit, would be to pick out a particularly offensive cultural taboo (not a sexual one; that's too easy) and celebrate Christmas by transgressing it. Transgression is good for the soul. And it also might lower the humbug level of Christmas, if only by a cubit.

3. The ecclesiastical powers have also made Christmas into a flimflam by deradicalizing Jesus. This is their most astonishing example of prestidigitation. After all, this man was executed by the Roman authorities (no, Lenny, your people didn't do it; we goyim did) because they considered him to be a political threat. No imperial power wastes nails, boards and soldiers' time crucifying contemplatives or harmless spiritual mystics. Jesus was neither. His life and message are ill suited as material for an establishment ideology. But the elders are truly wise, and also inventive. The real miracle of transubstantiation is not that the Church turns wine into blood but that it has transformed Jesus into a cosmic Tory.

The con game continues. And until the churches forgo their hard-won seats in the halls of the establishment and loose the radical potential in Christianity, the vast majority of the world's restive and enraged poor will rightly continue to see Christmas not only as humbug but as a fir-scented opiate for the masses who are less and less willing to be drugged.

So there you have it. Christmas is a shell and the blame lies, for the most part, on those of us who call ourselves Christians. Why has it happened? Every religion has at least two sides, and Christianity is no exception. The figure of Christ has inspired an endless succession of great men. Christianity has also been used as a knout for social control, a whip to punish and impoverish. There seem to be two Christs locked in combat. The clerical Christ, the one defined by ecclesiastical authority, is usually, though not always, the oppressive one. On the other hand, the most moving and authentic depictions of Christ often come from those on the edge or completely outside ecclesiastical Christianity. The most vigorous modern retelling of Christ's life was written by Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ). But Kazantzakis was relentlessly attacked by the authorities of the Greek Orthodox Church and, when he died, was refused Christian burial. The reason Christmas is humbug is that the churches are jealous and anxious. They want a monopoly on the portrayal of Christ and the definition of his significance. But they no longer have it, and that is all to the good. Jesus is not the churches' property. Christmas will continue to be humbug until the churches realize that fact and loose their death grip on him.

So why can't we just do without Christmas completely? Get rid of the whole bag? It's been tried--not only by the New England Puritans but in some Communist countries. But Christmas, humbug and all, keeps creeping back. Maybe it happens because man is an incurable celebrator and also an incorrigible dreamer; and Christmas, for all its sham and fakery, grabs him at these two vital points.

In industrial societies, we tend to repress man's festive and imaginative faculties, maybe because they make man less suitable for the assembly line. All our American religions are deeply infected with the moralistic and antifestive qualities of industrial society. The truth is that in religion, dance precedes dogma; saturnalia comes before sermon. Man is festive. He thrives on parties, fiestas, holidays, breaks in his routine, times for toasting, singing the old songs, remembering and hoping. Animals play or gambol; men celebrate. Also, man is a fantasizer. He keeps on dreaming of a world free of napalm and cancer and hunger, despite centuries of frustration. He won't stop hoping. The central symbols of Christmas, both pagan and Christian, speak to that unquenchable hope. So Christmas fuses Homo sapiens' tendencies to celebrate and to hope. If it were abolished, we would have to invent something else to take its place.

Just as we had gotten comfortable with the idea that religion was disappearing--on the campuses, for example--it came back in a swirl of swamis, gurus, chants, mantras, tarot cards and I Ching. The incense business was never better. This current revival of often bizarre religious practices may be a muted scream of protest against the calibrated conformity of industrial society; or it may be a desperate search for a sense of belonging; or it may be a simple quest for God. Whatever it is, it suggests to me that man is more essentially religious than many of us have assumed. He thirsts for mystery, meaning, community and even for some sort of ritual. Religion, Comte and Marx to the contrary, will probably not just wither away.

Neither can clerical Christianity, as it now exists, become the religion of the future. In fact, it is already slipping into the past. Christianity will find a place in the religious future of mankind only if it undergoes a reformation so fundamental and so far-reaching it will make the religious upheaval of the 16th Century seem like a monks' squabble. Even then, Christianity can never again be the single focus of faith, as it was (for Western man, at least) for nearly 1000 years. It will have to make its contribution along with the other great religious traditions of the world and along with the new symbols and rites that are bound to emerge in the future. And the contribution Christianity will bring to this emergent pluralistic faith will have to do with the man whose unknown birthday we mark on December 25 but whose story has been so grossly perverted by generations of anxious prelates and Grand or not-so-Grand Inquisitors that today we scarcely recognize him.

So I lift my flagon to old Ebenezer. He tells it like it is. But as I drink, I secretly have another toast in mind, too, a toast to Christmas. Not the humbug Christmas we Christians have foisted on the world, admittedly with a little help from our friends at Gimbels and Saks. No, I drink to Christmas as it may someday be: a fiesta when we celebrate earth and flesh and, in the midst of all our hang-ups and tyrannies, remind ourselves that at least once one guy lived a reckless, ecstatic and fully free life every day--and that maybe someday we all can.

"Transgression is good for the soul. And it also might lower the humbug level of Christmas."