A perennial theme of modern holiday classics, from the ridiculous Jingle All the Way to the sublime A Charlie Brown Christmas, is the conspicuous absence of the Christmas spirit during Christmas season. In each case, the Christmas spirit is recovered. The acquisitiveness and rivalry that consumes Jingle All the Way’s protagonist is ultimately transcended by a spirit of giving and brotherhood, while the materialism and ennui in A Charlie Brown Christmas evaporates before a simple and unadorned telling of the story of Christ’s nativity. While it is true that we are forever distracted by the world, the flesh, and the devil, Christmas offers us an opportunity to refocus. In short, it’s different.
During this time of year, even in our secular age, Christ is not conspicuously absent but conspicuously present. Even the most miserly Scrooge and the grinchiest Grinch know, if not quite realize, the reason for the season. Christmas is, by divine providence, a season when even people who are walking in darkness have occasion to see a great light.
My childhood memories of Christ are all ghosts of Christmases past. Each year, at some point after Thanksgiving, I would return home from school in snow pants and jacket, hat and mittens, to find Him. As I unbundled I would catch, over my shoulder and out of the corner of my eye, the family nativity. Arranged on a wooden table at my home’s entrance were simple carved wooden figures. Shepherds and sheep, oriental kings bearing gifts, a cow, a donkey, and the Holy Family: Joseph standing, Mary kneeling, and the swaddled Christ child in his crib gazing up at his mother with painted eyes and a thin brushstroke of a red smile.
I gazed in wonder at the nativity as a child. I asked questions and my parents answered them as best they could. Why are they among animals? Because there was no room at the inn. What are the gifts brought by the wise men? Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. What are frankincense and myrrh? Let’s go find the dictionary …
During my early childhood, my family was not conventionally religious. The first time my father read to me from the Bible was for the purpose of earning a merit badge in Cub Scouts, we did not regularly attend any religious services, but every Christmas Jesus came into our home. Swaddled in mystery at the center of the family nativity.
So the first time I heard the nativity story really proclaimed was while watching A Charlie Brown Christmas. When an exasperated Charlie Brown asks, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” his friend Linus recites chapter two, verses eight through fourteen of the Gospel of Luke:
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.”
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
There it was: faith come by hearing. There in a Christmas movie marathon on cable TV, a sign unto me!
From the warm glow of the mid-’80s Mitsubishi cathode-ray-tube TV came the tidings of angels.
The Incarnation is ultimately a divine mystery. The classical dogmas developed over centuries were formulated to resolve misunderstandings of that mystery. There are a lot of moving parts to the doctrine of the Incarnation: the person of Christ, his divine nature, his human nature, the union between the two natures, and his earthly ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven.
Christmas is a great time to reflect and meditate on them all. It’s also an ideal time to go to church and hear them elucidated and proclaimed. But all the while we must remember that Christ came into this world as a baby so as to proclaim, as an adult, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).
The heart of the Christmas message is simple, “All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means ‘God with us’).” We need not seek God out—he has come to us!
He comes to us, as St. Paul tells us, as “the image of the invisible God, firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1:15). The person of Christ, union of his human and divine natures, makes known the God no one has seen (John 1:18). He came in history “when the fulness of time was come” (Gal. 4:4) in Bethlehem, and he comes to us in the scriptures, which were “written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). He comes to us in the waters of baptism, “for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ” (Gal. 3:27), and in the Eucharist, for as Christ taught, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them” (John 6:56).
Jesus comes to us even in his name. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches:The name “Jesus” contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray “Jesus” is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies. Jesus is the Risen One, and whoever invokes the name of Jesus is welcoming the Son of God who loved him and who gave himself up for him. (#2666)
That is the mystery that was slowly revealed to me through Christmases past, which I hold to this Christmas present, and hope to take with me into Christmases future. The mystery of a God who is not distant and inaccessible but in our very homes and hearts if we will only open ourselves to his presence in all the ways he is always seeking us out.
So if God seems distant as this year comes to an end, A Charlie Brown Christmas may be just what the spiritual doctor ordered. And, of course, there is always church.
