Christmas and yearnings - Viewpoint

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 20, 2002 by Tom Ehrich

What is your favorite holiday?" asked my 11-year-old son.

"Thanksgiving, I suppose. What is yours?"

"Christmas." He said he likes having his older brothers home, family meals, reading in front of the fireplace. I could say the same about Thanksgiving, but I sense he has more to say.

"I hope we have a white Christmas this year." Living in the South, he has never seen snow on Christmas, of course. In fact, the only December snows I can recall were during college days in western Massachusetts, when snow was an obstacle to getting home. When I think of Christmas, I don't think of snow. He does.

Maybe it is the song "White Christmas," which Bing Crosby was crooning last weekend in Costco, six decades removed from its release in war-torn 1942 and nearly three decades from its use as the signal for American troops to evacuate Saigon, but still voicing the heart's yearning for "the ones we used to know."

Maybe it is snow-decked scenes from Christmas cards, where life looks peaceful and fun, or the invariably snowy illustrations in "The Night Before Christmas," where the only threat is "clatter" on the lawn. Christmas stirs so many emotions, taps so many inchoate yearnings, rekindles so many memories, both happy and sad. Troops wept when Bing sang "White Christmas" at the front, because he spoke of where they wanted to be. The ironic two-part code used in 1975--a radio announcement that the temperature in Saigon was "105 degrees and rising" and the playing of "White Christmas"--was, in effect, the much awaited command, "Let's go home."

In its freeing of our yearnings, Christmas seems to be about what could be.

Once the commercial clutter is navigated, the heart simply opens--to the pain of lost childhood or lost family, to distance from home, to "hopes and fears," to our need to be loved, to joys we otherwise take for granted.

Early Christians paid little attention to Christmas. They had bigger questions, namely, would they survive persecution? When would Jesus return in triumph? They expected both questions to be answered within their lifetimes, for they remembered Jesus saying, "This generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place."

But that generation did pass away, and many more since then. As the Second Coming lost its urgency and Christians had to rethink God's victory, they focused on life after death, so that whether or not the Second Coming of Christ occurred, the individual could have a moment of victory.

Only Matthew and Luke offered Nativity stories, and their quite different accounts read like add-ons to the main story. Unlike the modern creche and pageant, their focus was on danger, the willingness of Joseph (Matthew) and Mary (Luke) to step outside normal bounds, the amazing appearance to gentiles (Matthew) or to humble shepherds (Luke), and, throughout, God's stepping decisively into human history.

I doubt we will ever regain the evangelists' original intentions.

Epiphany, honoring Matthew's account, is a largely forgotten Christian holiday in the Western world. Luke's account has been sanitized and sentimentalized into a cultural fable. Besides, there is too much else going on, from commercial clutter to Hollywood's "Christmas blockbusters." Christmas is in play, and that won't stop.

What we can do is to examine our yearnings. Why would a child yearn for a snowfall he has never seen? Why do couples get engaged during this emotionally wrought season? Why do people give alms that they normally don't give? Why do people yearn for family members? Why do people spend money they don't have to give gifts?

These yearnings are the rest of our story. Most of the time we get by, maybe prosper. We cast our lot with employment and enjoyment. More and more think they can go it alone, not needing partners or friends. Christmas pokes holes in those defenses. We see what we generally try not to see.

What we need is the courage to enter those holes and to know our yearnings. We need companions for what might be life's toughest journey: the journey into what could be. In other words, the journey toward God.

Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.