Stripping away the myths, does God exist?
Dan Mackay reflects on the real meaning of Christmas and the challenge Christians have of getting their message over in an increasingly secular society
LAST week’s Courier archive column reported details, dating back to 1997, when a local minister bemoaned the growing materialism associated with Christmas.
The Rev Bill Wallace suggested December 25th should be left to "the pagans of commercialism" and argued, instead, for an alternative date in February to commemorate the true significance of Christmas – as a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
He deplored the situation in which Santa Claus appeared more popular than God and he found the Christmas "spend, spend philosophy" somewhat "incongruous." Certainly the economic impact of Christmas has grown over the years. Many also bemoan that things have got out of hand, that we have all somehow lost the plot.
It seems even Pope Benedict XVI wants to remind us of the true events of Christmas – not the popular misconceptions that have become embedded in our collective psyche.
He has just published a new book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives in which he challenges the historical accuracy of a number of the beliefs we hold true to events around the birth of the baby Jesus.
Amongst its many revelations are doubts about the actual date of the birth of Christ – it may vary by several years. And it seems our commonly held views about the location of the little town of Bethlehem, the Virgin Mary, the Three Wise Men and the lowly animals in the manger are more likely to have been shaped by a mixture of fallacy and ancient mid-winter customs.
The Pope has endeavoured to ensure that God is not sidelined by historical inaccuracies or popular myth.
He reminds us that: "God intervenes directly into the material world." His book, apparently, challenges its readers to see God as someone who continues to transcend our rationalised understandings of the world we live in.
What we are to make of all the seemingly mixed messages? It’s undoubtedly true that we live in an increasingly secular society. And it’s also true that the Christmas period, as we know it, is a hijacked Christianised-version of former mid-winter customs.
The challenge, "should you chose to accept it", is to decide, one way or another, whether there really is a God who gave himself to the world some two thousand years ago; coming amongst us as a baby born of immaculate conception, who, as a man, for three short years wandered the shores of Galilee speaking to confused fishermen – a miraculous man who made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf?
It’s a big ask in these rational, prove-it-to-me times. It requires a leap of faith. I can identify with those many people whose faith has been sorely tested.
My favourite writer, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown (GMB), had a deep faith. In one of his short stories, "The Tarn and the Rosary", his city-bound character Colm writes home to his old friend, Jock, on the (fictional) island of Norday. Jock is an atheist with strong socialist leanings who has long questioned his friend’s religious "mumbo jumbo".
"You have read and digested all those Thinker’s Library books on your mantlepiece – Robertson, Ingersoll, Reade – and so you know that no such person as Jesus Christ ever walked the earth; or if indeed some carpenter at the time of Tiberius Caesar left his work-bench to do some preaching in the hills, that doesn’t mean that he is an incarnation of God – that was the fruit of a much later conspiracy of priests and potentates, to keep the poor in thrall," Colm writes home to Jock.
"But I believe it. God indeed wept, a child, on the breast of a woman. He spoke to the doctors of law in the temple, to a few faithful bewildered fishermen, to tax-men and soldiers and cripples and prostitutes, to Pilate, even those who came to glut themselves on his death pangs."
George Mackay Brown believed that no writer of genius — be it Dante, Shakespeare or Tolstoy — could have imagined "the recorded utterances of Christ."
"There is nothing in literature so terrible and moving as the Passion of Christ — the imagination doesn’t reach so far — it must have been so."
I didn’t make it over to Orkney this year. I try to cross over as often as I can. I especially like to island-hop and notch up another undiscovered location. Already I’ve been to Sanday, Westray, Stronsay, Rousay, Egilsay, Shapinsay, Birsay, Hoy and so the list goes on.
I especially like Hoy, "the high island" — as the Vikings named it. Rackwick Bay was GMB’s favourite place. He variously described it as "the hidden valley of light" and "Orkney’s last enchantment".
Of course nothing of the original character of the place exists anymore. The old crofting "fishermen with ploughs" are merely memories of a lost bygone era. Yet it still retains a very special charm. With all of its GMB associations, he wrote many poems and set numerous short stories there, it has assumed, for me, another mythical dimension.
GMB’s literature is also imbued with an often understated, but nonetheless profound Christian sentiment. Nothing remotely preachy; just a quiet, gentle biblical wisdom. I’m sure GMB was enthralled by the imagery and symbolism he read in the bible. He gave up the "dead hand of Calvin" and converted to Roman Catholicism.
Maybe you sense there is "another actor in (life’s) cosmic drama"... But what are we to make of it all? All I know is that at this time of year more than any other I feel a need to retreat into the poems and stories of George Mackay Brown. They are especially good with a dram at hand and nothing but the sound of coal burning in the kitchen fireplace.
I imagine myself on one of GMB’s fictional islands — easy to do with oatcakes and crabmeat at hand (the crackling coal fire could just as easily be waves breaking on the shore...) — and I immerse myself in a George Mackay Brown golden age. Life was somehow simpler then, our allotted three-score-year-and–ten more accepted, perhaps.
To everything there was a season, a time for every purpose under the sun. It must have been so.