Holy Christmas

I am recycling a post I wrote on December 25, 2006.

There was no feast of Christmas during the first two centuries of the Christian era. Our festival followed the model of pagan festivals observing the sun’s birth on the winter solstice.

This information may stun Christians but it comes from Christian researcher Hugo Rahner, brother of Karl Rahner, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. He wrote that in 354 CE a calendar entry for December 25 listed the birth of Christ along with the birth of the sun.

Following pagan example, Christians bowed to the east to honor the rising sun. Church Fathers accepted this, calling Christ the true sun, the light coming into the darkness, the "Dayspring from on high." Up to modern times, the preferred place for the altar in Catholic churches was the eastern side of the building, the side of the rising sun.
Light imagery sprinkled in our Christian liturgy—such as “Light from Light” in the Nicene Creed—also honors pagan solstice celebrations. And references to holiness “from on high” reflect pagan cosmology, which imagined gods and goddesses living up in the heavens. Sun gods were popular then, and pagans accepted Christ as one of them. They called the Lord’s Day of Christians the Day of the Sun, giving us the name “Sunday.”

It is easy to understand the huge importance of the sun to people with no electricity during the dark days of December. As the ever darker days switched to ever lighter days, people rejoiced. Like the pagans of old, we like to light up the night, but their bonfires have given way to our electric lights.

The first celebrations of Christmas did not happen on December 25. They began on January 6, today the feast of Epiphany in the West. That used to be the winter solstice until a calendar adjustment moved it to December 25 and a later adjustment to December 21. This is the reason our Christmas comes a few days after the solstice. Eastern Orthodox believers still celebrate Christmas on January 6.

Not all Christians celebrate Christmas. In American colonial times, Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, and Presbyterians opposed the festivities because of their pagan origin. As this history suggests, the date of Christmas has no connection with the day Jesus of Nazareth was born. There is no possible way to know what that was. But believers aren’t the only ones who thrill at the story of an exceptional child born in humble surroundings.

During my childhood, Christkindchen, the Christ Child, brought Christmas. (Pronounce the German words with a short i.) When kids in school noticed that the Santas in town were fake, I wondered how they could ever have believed they were real. Our family miracle was much more believable.
We celebrated Christmas through most of January, reveling in Christmas music by singing and harmonizing with piano and radio. In my youth it was still possible to hear the sacred music of the season after Christmas Day, and I miss that.

Why do people stop Christmas music and throw out the tree on the day after Christmas? Apparently there’s no point in celebrating any longer when spending for presents is over. Commerce has spoiled what used to be a sacred time of year. Media reports on Christmas are all about earnings. What a distance we have come from observing the holy course of nature and a holy birth!

I suspect many of us hate the buy-and-spend frenzy but don’t know how to stop it. As more people get sick of the commercial merry-go-round, I hope they will find the courage to withstand materialistic pressures and to give in meaningful ways.
Do we hear outrage over this sacred season being exploited for money? No, we hear complaints about saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” As if Christians were the only ones with festivals around the winter solstice!

If we really cherished Christian values, we would joyfully include all religious traditions in our celebration. Spiritual meaning is what makes Christmas taste good.
We can make the good taste last. Let’s stop buying useless junk that degrades nature and reflect on the precious child inside every human being.

Inquisition Revisited

Every time I hear about another punishment meted out by the Vatican for acts of grace and courage I wonder what it will take for the Church universal to finally unite in opposition against the tyranny. Now it’s a 92-year-old Jesuit who is barred from priestly service for supporting a womanpriest. The Province of Jesuits “regrets” Brennan’s act. It chose the wrong act to regret. What will it take?

Inquisition, December 5
The Vatican takes ever bolder control of Catholic lives. The latest jaw-dropping move of this increasingly oppressive regime was to expel Roy Bourgeois from his Maryknoll community because he supports the priestly ordination of women.  Bourgeois has been internationally acclaimed for his peace and human rights activities. The Maryknoll superior general from 2002 to 2008, Fr. John Sivalon, decried the Vatican’s order as meddling in Maryknoll affairs and interfering in the integrity of the society. How will Maryknollers around the world, both men and women, respond?

I would like to see the society publicly, calmly, and courageously embrace Bourgeois as one of their own and commend him publicly, calmly, and courageously for his heroic actions in behalf of peace and justice.

He won a purple heart for his service in Vietnam.

He lived and worked among the poor in Bolivia for five years.

When his friends, Maryknoll sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, along with two other women, were raped and murdered in El Salvador, he became an outspoken opponent of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

He has served nearly five years in federal prison for non-violent protests.

His courageous stand for women priests against the sexist stance of the Vatican continues this heroic action. No greater prophet or saint lives among Catholics today. And it is no surprise that the Vatican opposes such a person. Bourgeois acknowledges that many priests fear losing their jobs, pensions, and sacramental power if they speak out about the ordination of women. But, he said,

I’d rather eat at a soup kitchen and be free rather than not do something that I’m called to do.

There are parallels between our time today and the reign of the Inquisition. This was a tribunal searching for and combating heresy during the twelfth through fifteenth centuries when Roman Catholicism dominated in Europe. Heresy was any belief different from the prevailing opinion held by the hierarchy of the day. In our popular consciousness, torture and the Inquisition go together, and this association is not without justification. Today we do not see the rack or thumbscrews; we do see banishment, excommunication, and financial hardship.

Also fear and excessive caution. I am angry that the greater Church lets itself be bullied by the Vatican, but I understand that the majority of “the faithful” still live in a Catholic culture of exaggerated respect for orders from the hierarchy. It’s of one piece with awe and respect for the Sacred, which hierarchs presume to define. Those who know better, who are aware of hierarchical abuse, have given their lives to the institution and see no practical way to oppose it without incurring the painful consequences that Bourgeois appears willing to accept. Would I be as courageous?  I don’t know.

Free of institutional ties, I would abandon this religion if I did not have dear personal ties to it and spunky articles in the National Catholic Reporter that model integrity and courage. Often it’s the editorial, such as the latest one explaining why the Vatican’s stance against women’s ordination is untenable.

NCR joins its voice with Roy Bourgeois and calls for the Catholic church to correct this unjust teaching.

In another NCR article, AnthonyRuff responds to the clumsy Mass translation imposed by the Vatican after refusing to accept a well-crafted one. He writes,

When it comes to liturgy, Catholics are quite patient. Most Catholics have no reason to track the dirty politics behind the scenes of how the Vatican centralized and micromanaged the translation process beginning in 2001, threw away 17 years of transparent and collegial work on a very fine revised English translation, and botched the new missal by making some 10,000 mostly ill-advised changes at the last moment.

And when they're attending liturgy, most Catholics are probably also not tracking the convoluted and inelegant language of the new missal. . . . people's reduced attention to liturgical texts is a significant piece of why "it worked."

The new missal has shown us how a secretive central authority, absent mechanisms of accountability, can impose its will.

My disgust with liturgical language centers on sexist God-talk, which reduces the Holy Source of All to a set of humanlike males. I was hoping that the linguists and other experts working for 17 years would come up with language that conveyed a truly exalted sense of the Divine. We never got to see the fruits of their work. Instead, the Vatican imposed words even more worshipful of male gods.

Vatican attacks on fresh, evolving developments in spiritual awareness are increasing rancor between hierarchy and Church universal. But its attempts to hold the Church in the traditional mindset will not stunt spiritual growth. Spirit does not take orders from the pope.