Hi everyone, it is now Boxing Day morning in Australia, but still Christmas in other places, so I thought I’d share with you three Christmas articles that I thought were terrific.
Christmas and Power
N.T. Wright has a piece for Time magazine on The Christmas Story Has Always Been About. Tom claims:
There are two ways of projecting power: there is Herod’s way, and there is Jesus’ way. Those who celebrate Christmas in a world of power plays and power struggles near and far should read Matthew’s story of Jesus, all the way from the early scene with angry old Herod, to the final scene where Jesus declares that all authority in heaven and on earth, in its radically reshaped form, has now been given to him. The modern church has been quite happy to think of Jesus having all authority in heaven. We have hardly begun to figure out what it might mean for Jesus—the Jesus of the incognito birth in Bethlehem, of the Sermon on the Mount—to have all authority on earth.
Nativity Art Inspires Even Secular Faith in Motherhood
Claire Lehmann offers a Christmas Message about What I learned about Christianity from a visit to the Louvre with my baby. She writes:
This Christmas, my message is to remember what the Renaissance masters understood: that there is something worthy of reverence in the relationship between mother and child. While we may no longer seek the sacred in paintings, we can still see the simple truth that Raphael and Botticelli captured—in witnessing the care of a mother for her child we can look through a window into the sublime.
My visit to the Louvre has always stayed with me. Later on our Paris trip, while I was awkwardly breastfeeding Eric on cold concrete at the bottom of Montmartre, I felt connected to centuries of Parisian mothers who had come before me. Although I was not surrounded by a golden halo, and was not sitting in a sunlit garden, I felt that I had been recognised by those artists who had painted Mary.
Christmas is Better with Religion
Larissa Phillips opines I Took Religion Out of Christmas. I Regret It.
My fellow Gen Xers balked at these traditions, too. Our youth culture questioned everything and routinely dismissed the various—as we learned to call them—industrial complexes. The Christmas Industrial Complex was no exception. In fact, the holiday was the mother lode of problems, a bonanza of both capitalist propaganda and religious dogma. The trouble was, I still loved Christmas.
My generation had the best of both worlds. We played in the crumbling remains of Christian traditions without realizing how much structure and beauty they gave us. I’m still an atheist, but I’ve come to believe that taking religion out of my children’s Christmas was a mistake. They never really witnessed the celebration of a miracle that goes back two thousand years. They didn’t have a nativity set, even though I loved mine, because when you scrub God from your holiday celebration, it’s strange to give your kids a tiny baby Jesus to play with. Isn’t it?
I’m not sure anymore. I couldn’t pass on to my kids a faith in God, but I could have shared the traditions that have always shaped and enchanted childhoods in this part of the world.
Merry Christmas and a glorious Boxing Day to all.
Word from the Bird will be posting again next week.