The Advent Power of the Christmas Tree

We decorated the Christmas tree the Sunday after Thanksgiving this year.

“It seems too early,” my husband complained.

“Christmas decorations are up everywhere else, and we’re behind, ” my 14-year-old countered.

“This is the only day that the whole family will be here until Christmas,” I said, as I realized that in a few hours my son would be heading back to college after his brief Thanksgiving break. “It’s going up today.”

Settled.

I don’t know how others decorate their Christmas trees. We are great collectors of ornaments, both humble and grand. Nearly each one prompts a story that is retold every year, with titles like “The Origin of the Enormous Fake Dragonflies” or “Why We Won’t Toss the ‘Sputnik’ Ornaments Dad Made in Third Grade”.

My son and daughter aren’t little any more. They space the ornaments nicely instead of clumping them all in one place, a foot from the bottom branches. Every year their questions are more sophisticated, and they hear the stories in new ways. And so do I.

Don’t tell my kids, but putting up the Christmas tree is a rich, spiritual, and deeply powerful Advent ritual in my family. We connect ourselves to a long, complex narrative that blends family story and esoteric symbol; we construct a place where past meets future. As we navigate this overcrowded tree, we reluctantly separate out some things that are too damaged to keep or that have lost their meaning. And we keep some things for inexplicable reasons best called “mystery”. For example, the beakless, blue chicken made the cut again this year. “I like it, don’t throw it out,” someone declares. And it stays.

The lights go on, and we thrill at it. Over the next four weeks this tree will draw me. I will play with the arrangement, regularly moving ornaments around to fill empty spaces. I will sit in a tree-lit room and contemplate. I will remember. I will think ahead.

To be sure, our family has other rituals that are more specific to this pre-Christmas season. Each night we put symbols on a little Jesse tree -- origami decorations that tell the story of Salvation History and count down the days till the Christ arrives. On Sundays we light our Advent wreath and sing O Come O Come Emmanuel.

But the Christmas Tree itself does the holiday on its own terms. With its pagan past and decorations that are more reminiscent of family vacations than of the Holy Family, my tree doesn’t exactly foretell a baby born in a manger stall. In its glorious ambiguity it layers the many narratives of this time of year. It makes room for all of it in its bendy, manufactured branches. And each year there is still space for more.

In his book, The Legend of the Bells and other Tales, John Shea retells a Cherokee story, “Why Some Trees are Evergreen.” After the Great Mystery makes the plants and trees, he wants to give a gift to each according to its ability. So he set up a test, challenging them to stay awake and keep watch over the whole earth for a week. Most of the trees nod off by day three, but the cedar, pine, spruce, and fir and their kin are still vigilant when the Great Mystery returns at week’s end. Their reward is to remain green forever, so that even in the deadness of winter, animals could find warmth and sustenance in their branches.

Tell stories. Ask questions of the symbols. Hold the past in your hands. Find time. Make room. Stay awake until the Great Mystery returns. These are the subtle, Advent invitations of the Christmas tree. I’m not sure I’d be ready for Christmas Day without them.

- Barb Ballenger

Your turn! What stories does your Christmas tree tell? Let us know in the comments.

Is Christianity Intellectually Respectable?

The following essay is the Rector indulging in a favorite topic. I fully acknowledge this may be entirely beside the point for many people. I write it knowing that our members are sometimes challenged by critical and skeptical remarks about their faith and would like to have more resources to answer.

During my three years of seminary, my nagging question was, “Is Christianity Intellectually Respectable?” Growing up, I learned that the highest calling was to be a ruthlessly skeptical intellectual who delights in tearing down the pretensions and falsehoods of tradition. Then, I had a conversion experience and returned to my Christian Faith during college. How would intellect and faith hang together in one soul? Seminary - an academic gathering of people of Faith - seemed like a good place to figure this out. 

The easiest answer to my question was to simply say that faith is a private feeling that is to be respected but not held to account by reason or other systems of understanding the world. This might be called the “live and let live” approach. Faith – however – is not only private. It is public. It relies on language, narrative, tradition, and practices that take up space in the world, make claims on behavior and can be shared between people. If it were purely private it would be impossible to communicate the Faith one person to another. 

Much has been written about the origins of the “live and let live” approach in Western Culture. In part, it comes from the fear that religious claims tend to be held as absolute and therefore lead inevitably to conflict and violence unless they are made private and relative. While based on the experience of religious warfare in Europe during the 17^th Century, this point of view strategically ignores the spiritual resources that support sobriety, humility, and non-violence within the Christian Faith.

 

The second answer to my question is embedded in the example above; i.e. ignore the full texture of the Faith and reduce it to a simple punch line, such as “Religion leads to violence.” I will call this the “reductionist approach” where we either dismiss Christianity in a brutal summation or make Christianity intellectually respectable by reducing it to another discipline of thought, which has wide appeal and public credibility. For example: “Faith is best explained by psychology.” Freud reduced thousands of years of religious development to the oceanic feeling we vaguely recall from our mother’s womb. Or we could use Marx; “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

The problems with reductionism are many. At its best reductions are suggestive. Basically we are taking one disputed discipline and applying it to another disputed discipline as if one is totally sensible and the other is not. “All religions are the same” is another classic reduction. Once again, all the particularities of a tradition are brushed away as if they are disposable and the truth is somehow a separable reality underneath or outside the particulars. It is akin to saying that we can think without language, when, of course, we cannot. Language and thought are completely intertwined, as is the religious experience of God and the particular tradition in which you live your faith. It is also interesting to ask this: “When we make the judgment ‘All religions are the same,’ where am I standing?” From where do we gain that perspective that judges all religions? It is a little like climbing one mountain and saying, “All mountains are the same.”

What is fun for me, as an intellectual Christian, is to poke holes in these odd habits of thought which take delight in passing judgment on my beliefs without applying the same scrutiny to their own assumptions. Often, critics of Faith are poorly equipped to explain their own positions or how their perspective is also formed by a tradition as much as by some logical argument. The ‘new atheists’ often fall into this category. They parrot arguments that have existed since David Hume in the 17^th century as if they were freshly invented and never disputed.

 

Another great reduction that I hear frequently is “Science explains everything.” The notion seems to be that science has a privileged access to reality and that all forms of thought – poetry, literature, politics, and religion – can be described exhaustively by math, genetics, and physics. While I am huge fan of science and its results, this is a problematic overstatement for both scientific and philosophical reasons. (And I rarely hear actual scientists say it!) Put most simply, if genetics explains everything then chemistry must explain genetics and then we should give up on chemistry too because chemicals are made of atoms and physics explains that. So science itself has its own reduction ad absurdum problems!

Should we explain Jane Eyre through an equation? Will translating literature or religion into chemistry, physics, or genetics really shed more light or exhaust the well of meaning and treasure held in our culture and traditions? It certainly can shed light. My dispute is with any claim to be an exhaustive or total explanation.

The problem is that folks use ‘explain’ exhaustively and without nuance. Often the results contradict the scientific discipline of connecting conclusions to data. For example, much of what Darwin wrote is wonderful and true but there are real debates about natural selection, the notion that organisms adapt to gain comparative advantage so as to pass on their genetic material. Disputes in the science don’t seem to stop other folks from turning natural selection into a schema that explains all human behavior. As is often the case, the original insight gains a second life as a metaphor and enters the culture detached from the original argument and data.

 

So where does this leave us? 

Martin Smith famously said, “Your need for intellectual respectability is so important to you because it protects some idea you have about yourself. How does that self-concept give you value? What would it mean to let go of that egoistic notion? Would it feel like dying?”

The fact seems to be that we all live in an ocean of tradition. Our concepts, language, and practices are all mediated through tradition and culture. They limit what we can know and how we can know it. This is true for science and for poetry. The philosopher Otto Neurath used the metaphor of a boat. We all live in a boat. We like to tell ourselves that our ideas and perception are original and free, somehow floating outside of history, tradition, and language, but really we are in boat that was handed down to us. We also like to think we can rip up the whole boat at once and start over. In that case, we will drown. The best we can do is learn everything we can about our boat and tinker with it one board at a time.

What I learned about my boat is this; I can only live my life inside the narrative I have received. The good news is that the narrative is full of resources, contradictions, open-ended sentences, and mysteries that make life an adventure full of growth and opportunity. The narrative can expand and communicate with other religions and other disciplines too. What I learned is that my boat is partly made from my family history. My mother reacted to her Southern Baptist upbringing by moving as far as she could into liberal, intellectual theology. That was her liberating journey, but it did not need to be mine.

So, is Christianity Intellectually Respectable? I believe it is, because I can give an intelligible account of my faith that is accountable to public curiosity and humble about its own limitations. For me, this meant sacrificing the illusion that my intellect somehow transcends tradition. Spiritually, I needed to learn how to assent to, even submit to, my place within the flow of ideas and history. From this primary spiritual act of assent and submission, I have been richly blessed.

- The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel