Two Cheers for Kristof and Keller

Posted on December 23, 2016 by hessd

Only two, though.  I am saving the last one for a better resolution of the dilemma.

I want to think this morning about Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times, which you can see here.  (For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, the hyperlink is below on the word “of.”)

Maro Chermayeff, Shana Goodwin, Ashley Judd, Nicholas KristofAnd I want to start with three comments. First, I am grateful to Nicholas Kristof for asking the question, Timothy Keller for providing some answers, and to the New York Times for publishing it on the front page—of the electronic version, at least— two days before Christmas. Thanks to all.

Second, I am probably not an evangelical myself. My friend, Bill Teague, of Langhorne Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania, says that I am. I think he’s just being gracious. He is an evangelical himself and we have had delightful talks over the last thirty years or so and I think he wants to offer that status to me as a gift. But even Bill says that I am a “minimalist evangelical.”

Finally, when my father taught me how to drive a car (an old stick shift pickup truck), he said, “OK. Now you are not going to be completely satisfied with the way anyone else drives.” And as in many other things, he was right. Once you know how you would do it, the way anyone else does it doesn’t seem quite right.

Like Tim Keller, I have had this conversation a lot of times. Nearly always, I walked away from the conversation still friends, as I am sure Keller and Kristof are. I count that a good thing, although it is not the only good thing. And because I have “learned to drive” in this conversation, I am not entirely happy with the way Keller drives. I’m not really critical of him. I just know that I do it differently.

For instance, Keller winds up making two points about orthodox Christian beliefs. One iskristof-1 that you have to have them. The other is that some doctrines that seem fully dispensable to me, seem crucially important to him.

As to the first, I would be really wary of identifying the holding of a particular set of beliefs as “being a Christian.” Especially in a country whose history has been predominantly Christian. Are we really saved by what we believe? Really? Not through relationship with the God whose character and intentions we understand through the life and ministry of Jesus? Really?

It is to take care of difficulties like this that I have come to identify the whole corpus of Christian beliefs as “Christianity.” Christianity is, in that sense, like Pythagorean geometry. It starts from the premises and proceeds through logic and evidence to answers to a whole bunch of questions of application. But if I misunderstand one of the premises or if I lose my way in reasoning myself from one conclusion to another, what happens? If Christianity is a “discipline” like geometry, I have failed. If it is a relationship with God, understood in the light of Jesus, the relationship doesn’t go away. What parent among us can imagine that only the child who is perfectly in line with our expectations is going to be welcomed home?  And faith is, as in the picture, a kind of trust.

So I see the business of “being a Christian” not as Keller sees it—believing in the crucial doctrines—but as a relationship that will survive substantial degrees of heresy.  The church could not, but a Christian could.

kristof-3Then there is the question of what doctrines are really crucial. The virgin birth? Really? Keller bases his argument on the idea that if there really is a God, we have no idea at all what He is capable of. [1] Keller is right about that. We cannot know. On the other hand, we don’t need to know.

It is true that many New Testament works present Jesus as “without spot or blemish,” but it is also true that these presuppose the Jewish sacrificial system in which the purity of the sacrifice is crucial. The church has taught at times that Jesus saves because of the good example he was. Some have said that whatever his life and death were about, they did nonetheless produce a historical community bound by love and committed to obedient sacrificial living within God’s (renewed) Covenant. I think of “sacrificial atonement” as a metaphor. There are lots of metaphors. And many of them have no need at all of the virginal conception of Jesus. [2]

So my argument with Keller is that the virginal conception is not a crucial part of the body of Christian doctrine as I imagine it. I wouldn’t say that about the resurrection of Jesus, however, and that puts me right back in the “miracles in modern times” soup along with Keller.

What I can say confidently is what Keller says: something happened. After Jesus’s death, something happened to his followers—and not to anyone else—that turned them from from losers hiding in spare rooms to dynamic evangelists moving the crowds and daring the authorities to stop them. What did that?

I don’t know. The several New Testament witnesses don’t have the same notion of what kristof-4happened or, indeed, of what “resurrection” means. You can say that Jesus acquired “a spiritual body,” but no one knows what that means. You can say he went to “heaven,” if you want to hang onto the geocentric picture of the universe which was common coinage in the time the gospels were written. You can wear yourself out on what the resurrection “was.” I wish you well. My interest is in what the resurrection “means.” It means—the witness of all New Testament writers supports this—that the life of Jesus, which was understood at the time to have ended in defeat, actually ended in triumph. God raised up this Jesus whom you crucified. (See Acts 2:36 for a concise formulation). That is what it “means.”  (Skepticism is still, as you see in this picture, an aspect of a relationship, just as faith is.)

But, to tie these two ideas together and get off the stage before the audience starts throwing fruit, let’s say I can’t find my way to believing that Jesus was resurrected and let’s say that his resurrection is logically crucial to the integrity of the whole argument. Is God going to reject me because I continued to believe in Him and His son and His work although by rationale was faulty? Really?

I don’t think so. If I thought there was a heaven and if I thought I would meet God there, I could imagine Him taking me by the hand and showing me where I screwed up—how, once I put this piece back into my doctrinal armory, the resurrection would be necessary and would make perfect sense. But, in this little fantasy, God did not damn me because of the mistake I made.

I would have been prodigal in my thinking, but still, I would be His son.

[1] Sorry about the pronoun. I don’t believe God can be meaningfully thought of as having a gender. I just like to stay as far away as I can from any sentence that will require me to say “Godself.”
[2] Joseph Fitzmyer and Raymond Brown, both Roman Catholic priests, argue with each other as scholars and friends about whether Luke really has a doctrine of the virgin birth. Fitzmyer says no on textual grounds; Brown says yes on the grounds of literary format.

Posted in A life of faith, Theology, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A White Male Working Class Tantrum

Posted on December 22, 2016 by hessd

There is no question in anyone’s mind, I am sure, that I am talking about the 2016 election season. Not the outcome of the election particularly. I could have made the same argument I am about to make if Hillary had won. I probably wouldn’t have but I could have. It’s the election, not the outcome.

And it is the response of mainline voters I want to consider here. I want to reject some proposals I have heard and offer others. The response is really what is on my mind today, but, of course, tantrum-4the best response will have to be based on what it is responding to.

Donald Trump was elected by the tantrum vote. People who are thinking of how to respond should begin by understanding that.

Here is a little background. In calling it a “tantrum” [1] I don’t mean to imply that there is nothing to protest. The privilege of “whiteness” is under attack everywhere. People who are looking at how “whiteness” is being defended need to remember that it never needed to be defended before. That is the main thing in the minds of the defenders. Maleness is widely derogated in casual conversation. If you remember the “dumb blonde” jokes of a bygone era, you get the idea. All you have to do is substitute “man” for “dumb blonde” and the joke works just fine. The working class has been losing both political and economic power for many decades now. [2] They have been, in the “deep story” Arlie Russell Hochschild [3] tells about these voters, standing in line for a long time, but people keep cutting into line in front of them. It’s not fair!!

So, to reiterate, it is not as though there is nothing that needs to be opposed. The question is whether throwing a tantrum is the best way to oppose it. This year, it worked better than anyone thought it would.

Let’s start back a little bit. Richard Ball published an intriguing article in a sociology journal in 1968.  It had this title—“A Poverty Case: The analgesic subculture of the Southern Appalachians.” “Analgesic subculture?” Really? This is a subculture oriented to killing the pain of their failed lives. It involves drug abuse, alcoholism, loss of stable social structure, and the active subversion of anything that could improve their lot in life. None of this helps to improve their lot, of course, but it make it hurt less. And when the pain is constant, that matters a great deal.

Imagine now that a leader comes by who says that the reason for all this suffering can be tantrum-7clearly identified and that it is “them.” The power of this leader does not come from any solution to the problem, but only with a way to fix the blame for it. This is very satisfying in several ways. First, if it is “their fault,” it is not my fault. Second, making them “pay” in some way for what they are doing to us is a perfectly satisfactory substitute for actually dealing with the issues. I may still be dying from the diseases my work reliably causes and still desperately poor and alcoholic, the the new problem—the gift of the leader to people like me—is that “they” don’t respect us.

Ha! Well, Mr. Big, we just elected one of our own and defeated one of yours. How do you like them apples?

A tantrum, you will notice, is not oriented toward policy at all. Not toward rejecting the policies of the past (who knows what those are?) nor toward demanding policies for the future. It is not oriented toward solving the problems I know I have, but on making the people who look down on us sorry they were not more respectful.

That recalls to my mind a wonderful scene from the film version of Needful Things, in which the chief schlub, having fallen completely under the control of the Devil, reveals to the other people in the town that he has strapped huge amounts of explosives to his body and is going to blow them and the whole town up. “You’re going to pay,” he keeps saying. “You’re going to pay BIG.” This from a man who is just about to blow himself to bloody pulp and seems not to have noticed. [4]

So what is a liberal to do?

The most thoughtful and sensitive liberals I know propose that we sit down with angry conservatives and get them to confide in us—to tell us just what it is they are throwing the tantrum about. There are quite a few things wrong with that, it seems to me. Unless it is a rope-a-dope strategy and unless you have trained for it (as Mohammed Ali did) you are going to get tired long before they are. Second, they are going to complain about things that are demonstrably false and you are going to want to correct them, gently, by saying that the grievance they just described has no basis in fact. That will not work.  And third, my experience in rewarding tantrum-driven behavior is that it evokes a good deal more tantrum-driven behavior. It is working, after all. Why should they change a strategy that is serving them—“serving them” please remember, has to do with feeling better, not with solving the problems that define their lives—so well?

So what’s better than volunteering to be a liberal piñata until the angry conservatives get tired of beating you with a stick? I suggest civil conversation with people who have different values, different policy preferences, and different blind spots than you do.

tantrum-3Let me describe how that would work and then you can tell me that it doesn’t solve the problem as I framed it and then I will tell you why it will work anyway. [5] I propose that we sit down with conservatives who are willing to have a civil conversation based on the different values each of us seems to have. Our job, the job he and I are working on, is having this conversation in a way that is honest and sustainable. If we succeed, it will be because of our teamwork. If we fail, “we,” not one of us, will have failed.

We are, in short, “colleagues” so far as this discussion is concerned. “Honesty” and “sustainability” define the boundaries of the conversation. [6] Each of us knows how to say “acceptable things” to the other. If these acceptable remarks do not reflect our own understanding of the society and the polity, then we will have gone “out of bounds.” Each of us has a sense—not quite so acute as the sense of what we ourselves believe—of what risks we might run that will destroy the future of this conversation. We need to try to withhold those things. Not withholding them would be going out of bounds.  Sustainability is more important than any one of them. The relationship may very well grow robust enough that it will tolerate remarks that would have destroyed it earlier. We can hope that, but we can’t presuppose it.

Honest and sustainable conversations about the welfare of the country we both live in and both love. That’s the solution.

tantrum-6But, you say, that doesn’t end the tantrum. No. It doesn’t. You are quite right. But it may well do two things that are worth doing. The first is that it may change the relationship between the policy-oriented leaders of the “Less Government” school of thought and their angry and self-destructive supporters. The second is that it may change the relationship between the “More Government” people (myself included) and the “Less Government” people.

Neither of these is a forlorn hope. Do you remember how many people supported President Clinton’s hopes for abortion that was “safe, legal, and rare?” That is a formulation that recognizes the different hopes of different groups and doesn’t demonize anyone.

Do you remember how much Republicans favored George W. Bush’s proposals for systematizing our immigration policies? It was a wonderful idea until it was proposed by Barack Obama. [7] Then it was a terrible idea. My proposal would not change the nature of the tantrum vote, but it would give conservative leaders resources to oppose it and that is something they want to do.  The tantrum will constrain them as well once they take office.

Do you remember when feminism touted the right of every American woman to make her own choices and have the kind of life she wanted? That standard requires the professional women to honor and value the choices made by women who want to be wives and mothers. It would, plausibly, require the homemakers to honor and value the careers and the childlessness often chosen by professional women. But when homemaking women are “anti-feminist” by the choices they have made, then “feminism” includes only “these” women; it excludes “those.”  What kind of feminism is that?

Those are, to pick just three, sets of conflicting values we could reconsider in the kinds of conversations I am proposing. And, although you might not think it, foreign policy decisions are even more open to value consensus that these few domestic policies.

Besides, for people like me, what else is there? I’ve always been a fan of the adage that if there is only one horse running in the race, you know who is going to win.

[1] The dictionary to which I have easiest access defines it as “a violent willful outburst of annoyance, rage, etc.”
[2] In a small experiment I used to use in my public policy courses, I would set up a system that was structurally unfair to four fifths of the population. This system separated the conservatives in the class very neatly from the liberals. The liberals wanted to change the system so that it was fair to all; the conservatives wanted to secure the favored statuses for themselves.
[3] Hochschild’s book is called Strangers in Their Own Land.  It is superb.

[4]  This guy is the poster boy for the tantrum voters. His name is Danforth Keaton III and is often called, for obvious reasons, “Buster.” The bomb is intended to punish the people who dissed him by using that name.
[5] I am not proposing, by the way, that this is all that should be done. I favor massive bureaucratic intransigence, down and dirty political infighting, litigation wherever current legal practices allow it, and huge efforts to reconnect traditional Democratic voters to the party, not just to the candidates. I am focusing in this essay on what people like me and my friends should do.
[6] While I am not talking about standards of decorum like that used in the U. S. Senate (My friend, the honorable Senator from Kentucky, seems to have missed the argument I was trying to make.) On the other hand, such formalities used to make it possible to discuss policies that would not have been possible otherwise and that is the testimony of generations of Senators.
[7] Except, of course, with conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who is given credit by some for scuttling it singlehandedly. I don’t think he did that, but he undeniably ignited hope in the hearts of the most bitter opponents who were beginning to think they had lost.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

David’s line–I’m just the driver

Posted on December 14, 2016 by hessd

I am teaching a Bible study with a couple of old friends.  That will happen in just a few hours.  My friend Fran has a dramatic flair and her idea for today was to pass out the parts of the Infancy Narrative that occur in Luke’s account.   Not Matthew’s account.  No borrowing!  So much as one Wise Man shows up and we go on to the next reader!

Well…Luke’s account is pretty good for Mary, but it’s really thin for Joseph and I got the part of Joseph.  There are three (3) references to Joseph in Luke’s account and not so much as a single speaking part.  We learn that Mary was engaged to me and that I am “of David’s line.” [1]  Then I haul Mary and her fetus to Bethlehem.  Then Mary and her son to Jerusalem.  Then back to Nazareth, where Luke thinks we lived.  Then all three of us down to Jerusalem for Passover, some years later.  That’s it.  I’m mostly a carrier service.

So anyway, here’s what I wrote.  I hope Fran doesn’t gong me and go on to the next reader.  I did add some other material–the mileage and the altitudes, for example–but nothing from Matthew. So here’s my contribution.

“Hi. I’m Joseph. “Joseph” like Jacob’s son, Joseph. Here is my story as the writer Luke tells it. I didn’t get along with him all that well, to tell the truth. He was a lot more interested in Mary. Now the other guy, Matthew, I liked him a lot better. He really wanted to hear what the whole story was like for me.

So here are the few fragments Luke wrote down. I will try to adapt it to your culture, so you will understand what it felt like—just a little bit. I knew Mary’s family of course. Up in the hill country where we lived, everybody pretty much knows everybody and they and I contracted for the marriage between Mary and me. Then I went home and got back to work.

When she showed up for the living-together part of married life, she was pregnant. All I know is5d1d03fd11e339bfd67d71eebe636aa8.jpg I wasn’t the father. She said she that had had a vision and that this was all God’s work somehow and that there was no shame in it. She also said that God said we had to name him Jesus. There haven’t been any Jesuses in my family as far back as I know.  Even in this picture, all you see is my back.  Luke must have taken the picture.

As you will discover, my part is mostly just to take my family to different places.

First, we had to go to Bethlehem because of Caesar’s census. It’s 85 miles by the shortest way, but that’s through Samaria and we aren’t supposed to go through Samaria. David the King grew up just outside Bethlehem, so that’s where people from his line are supposed to go and that includes me.

It was a long way and Mary was really really pregnant. I found a barn that was pretty comfortable and Mary delivered the child there. It would have been a pretty restful night after all that work, except that we had visitors all night who just wanted to see the baby. I said, “Hey, we are Jews. There are lots of babies around.” They said they wanted to see this particular one. OK. Maybe we can get some sleep tomorrow.

The next week we had to take go to Jerusalem so Mary could be purified [2] and so I could make an offering to God (redeeming the first-born child), rather than just leaving him in the temple, which, as it turned out, might have been easier. And old man and an old woman at the temple made a big fuss about him.

5a1a7dd7a4e0a61faa2f5777967552c0.jpg I had to get everybody back home to Nazareth. When Jesus was right on the edge of the teen years, we wanted to go to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. So I loaded everybody up again and made the trek down south and then up the hills to Jerusalem—which is a thousand feet higher than Nazareth. It’s a climb, let me tell you. And then he got himself lost and Mary and I had to go back for him. That kid! He looked me in the eye and said that we should have known he would be in “my father’s house,” he said. Pretty mouthy, I think, but the scribes at the temple seemed to think he was something special. I should have just left him with them, but that’s not my part. I am a transportation service. So I took them all back home again.”

[1]  That was when it occurred to me that “David’s Line” sounded like a bus route and since all I do in the story is haul my family around, I decided that I must be a bus driver.  Not a pilot, like that Pontius guy.

[2]  Luke has both of us being purified.  He got some other things wrong too.  I really liked Matthew better.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Depth in a Superficial Story

Posted on December 8, 2016 by hessd

I want to tell you two stories today. They are related, so I don’t want to put them into separate essays. The first is just personal. It has to do with the transition my mind made from a superficial made-for-TV movie to an intriguing question. And then, while the question (still unanswered) is holding my attention, I discover a deeply buried but very important theme. In the second part of this combined post,  I tell you about the theme and go on and on about it.  It is about healing.

The first story is about the made-for-TV movie that I saw on the Hallmark channel. I don’t want to recommend the movie. My friends would never forgive me. [1] I wouldn’t have watched it myself had I not walked in on it when Bette was watching it and sat down with her to watch the end.

I have a real resistance to Hallmark-channel movies and that is what brings me to today’s dilemma. The show I watched with Bette is called visitor-4A Christmas Visitor. I have seen several of the main actors in other, more demanding parts, and I know they can act. It is not their fault that this movie doesn’t require them to do any. There is “the dad” (William Devaney); and “the mom” (Meredith Baxter); and a son and a daughter—and a “visitor.” That’s pretty much it.

So here’s the dilemma. When I watched (the last part of) it with Bette, I realized that this movie was working with a metaphor I needed help with. Of course, the neat confluence of my need for help in thinking about a metaphor and the basis of the movie in that same metaphor does not make it a good movie. But it does make it a movie that I am going to be attracted to.

The metaphor can be described in any number of ways. I have two in mind. Here is the one that came first to my mind: “God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” (The language is Paul’s in 2 Corinthians 5:19) There is nothing religious about the movie. I would say that this connection I made is really just a religious application of the theme of the movie. So the second use of the metaphor I had in mind was “agency,” (literally, “doing-ness) and I have a great interest in personal agency. What does it mean , for instance, to say that one person acts by means of the actions of another person?  What does it mean when you reject agency, yourself, and remain passive and miserable?

“God was…reconciling the world to himself” is a very serious claim. It is, in fact, so serious that it gets in the way of working out what “agency” means. Here is another one; this one doesn’t have that problem. And to save having to look it all up and get the names right, I’ll just tell it the way I remember it.

This is from an old Rock Hudson/Doris Day/Tony Randall movie; probably Pillow Talk. Hudson is a big guy and Randall a little guy. Little, but rich. They get into a conflict and Randall, the little guy says to Hudson, the big guy, “How would you like a punch in the nose?” They are at their cars. Hudson is sitting in his; Randall is standing by the back seat of his limo. “I’d like that,” says Hudson, starting to get out of his car. “George,” says Randall to his chauffeur, “Give that man a punch in the nose.” George unfolds himself from behind the steering wheel, all 6 foot 5 and 280 pounds of him. It is not the scenario Hudson thought he was accepting, so he gets back in his car and drives off.

I said it wasn’t serious, you will remember. But is still about agency. Randall would have been the agent (actor) who caused a fist to hit Hudson’s nose even though it was George’s fist. Stay with me. Randall was, “in George,” hitting Hudson in the nose.

Not that hard, you say. Simply instrumental. If Randall had used a crowbar, you could have said the same thing about the crowbar. Randall acts “through the crowbar” to hit Hudson in the nose. And that’s right. But no one says that Randall was “in” the crowbar. No one says that Randall “became the crowbar” for the purpose of crushing Hudson’s nose.

So “in” and “through” don’t always mean the same thing and they do not mean the same thing in A Christmas Visitor. In fact, in A Christmas Visitor, they mean nearly the same thing Paul meant when he said “God was…in Christ…” You see why “through Christ” (which is also true) is not enough. And it is not enough for A Christmas Visitor either.

Plot

Very briefly, the Boyajian family allowed their son John to enlist in the army and become a green beret. He was killed in Operation Desert Shield and the rest of the family, as we meet them at the beginning of the movie, has yet to recover. On Christmas Eve, George Boyajian, the father, picks up a hichhiker named Matthew and, having determined that he has nowhere to spend the night, brings him home with him.

From the time Matthew walks into the house, odd things begin to happen—all of them good. George has decided that what he really wants for Christmas is healing in his family. That happens. The daughter, Jean, wants her breast cancer to go away. That happens. Carol, the mother, wants to feel close to her son, John, again. That happens. And then “Matthew” goes away, having revealed himself in the last 15 seconds of the movie as their son, John, who is indeed dead, as the army has informed them, but who is, nevertheless, “in” Matthew. John is, in fact, “the Christmas visitor” although no one knew it

So now I have seen this not very good movie many times, reaching deeper into the characters and the dialogue and finding things that fascinate me. The movie has helped me keep this odd inquiry of mine alive. I have continued, by using the movie, to wonder just what “in” means in the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus.

The Healing Theme

But as I have watched the movie, I have stumbled on another theme that attracts me and it is tracking down that second story that I have in mind for today. It is “healing.” George, finally, has had enough and does two important things. First, he clearly asks his wife and daughter for “healing.” That’s what he wants this Christmas. Second, he goes out and does a bunch of Christmas things: stamps, lights, a tree, etc.

Jean, the daughter, is a victim of her parents relentless mourning for her brother John and also of a recently diagnoses breast cancer. The story doesn’t quite come to saying that Jean is welcoming the cancer, but it is true that she needs to give her cooperation to “Matthew” so he can heal her.

This “inner healing” is a difficulty for scriptwriters, so they have arranged for a much visitor-5more visible healing. Jean has been rejecting, or at least has not been enjoying, memories of old times with her brother, John. The two kids are shown in a flashback, decorating the tree and and a direct result of their playing round, breaking one of the five points of the star. John, still in his character as “Matthew,” heals the star and in that way restores the memory to Jean. [3]

Carol is the most interesting one to me and she is the one whose healing first caught my interest. Here is the little sermon from “Matthew” that does the job.

When we lose someone we love, it doesn’t mean they’re not with you anymore. You just have to find them in a different way. John’s spirit is here. It’s everywhere. It’s in this house. It’s in your heart. Just don’t push him away. Embrace him. You’ll always have that.

Notice “just don’t push him away.” This is something Carol has been doing. It is not something we can see as viewers and if we did see it, we would excuse it because she is “a grieving mother.” She excuses it in herself on those grounds. But “Matthew” IS John. He is the one she lost. She doesn’t know that, but we viewers do. And knowing that gives an extra dimension to what “Matthew” says as if we are hearing every single note as a chord.

Just before “Matthew’s” little sermon about loss, Carol says to him that it is an awful thing to lose a child. Matthew responds, “I understand it’s a great loss.” Carol responds, “It’s an unbearable loss.”

The point of that exchange, I see in retrospect, is to help us see that Carol sees herself as someone who has been done to. She is passive.  She has no agency of her own and the fates have done terrible things to her. When “Matthew” says, “Just don’t push him away,” Carol begins to see that that is what she has been doing.  She has been an actor, has exercised her agency.  And it was to push John away.  And when she sees that, she sees that “healing” is going to require that she stop pushing him away. And that is what she does. When she returns his “Merry Christmas,” we know that she has found a way to move on.

And when everyone has been healed, “Matthew” moves on. In the final roadside moment with George, George says, “Why did you come to us?” And we begin to think that he knows who he is talking to. “Because you were right,” says “Matthew,” “It was time.”

visitor-2“It is time for healing” is what George said back at the beginning. And John knows that. We don’t know how he knows. And because he knows that, John comes to them as Matthew. John is credible as Matthew, but just barely. He knows too much and even after he explains everything away, the Boyajian family is not quite convinced.

But because George knows, John’s last line to him is, “Merry Christmas…Dad.” Then, as he walks away, he gives this salute. And then, briefly, becomes John in every way. He looks like John. He salutes like John. And then he turns away and becomes “Matthew” again, just before he disappears.

[1] This “recommendation” stuff is not for sissies. I recently recommended a wonderful movie called Tangerines to some old friends. It is about the Abkhasian rebellion in the former Soviet state of Georgie and it is a terrific anti-war film in which there is not a single line condemning war. Unfortunately, my friends went to see Tangerine. Here is the summary of that movie from imdb.com: A working girl tears through Tinseltown on Christmas Eve searching for the pimp who broke her heart. My friends still look at me funny when I recommend a movie to them.
[2] George says, early in the movie when it is too early to know what it means, “We’ve done this long enough. It’s time for us to get back to Christmas” (or words to that effect). In the last scene, George, who known, now, who “Matthew” asks, “Why did you come to us.” And “Matthew” replies, “Because you were right. It was time.”
[3] “Matthew” finds the broken point in the cardboard box and he and Jean glue it back together. Then he “finds” a battery in the box and puts it in the star and when they put it on the tree, it lights up. Everything “Matthew” does strains credulity just a little, but he is a healing presence and no one is willing to reject him. So they “believe” everything.

.

Posted in Movies, Political Psychology, Sustainability, Theology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

“This isn’t told for sentiment”

Posted on December 4, 2016 by hessd

Every other year, I study Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. [1] By happenstance (see footnote 1) the Luke years are the even numbered years, which means that I study Luke in the presidential years and in the midterm election years. Luke’s notion of the ministry of Jesus emphasizes gentleness and healing, so it turns out to have been a good choice, especially this year. [2]

The first thing that happens in Luke account of the birth of Jesus has to do with the birth of John the Baptist. [3] It takes Luke a little while to get around to considering the birth of Jesus at all and this year, I am going to follow him in that.

Zechariah, the father of John, is a priest and has been chosen by lot to go into the Holy of zechariah-1Holies in the temple and burn incense. The angel Gabriel appears to him and calls him by name and gives him the wonderful news about the forthcoming pregnancy of his aged wife.

Zechariah knows several very good reasons why this event is unlikely and he shares them with Gabriel. That always seemed to me a reasonable thing to do. [4]

18 Zechariah said to the angel, ‘How can I know this? * I am an old man and my wife is getting on in years.’ 19 The angel replied, ‘I am Gabriel, who stand in God’s presence, and I have been sent to speak to you and bring you this good news. 20 Look! Since you did not believe my words, which will come true at their appointed time, you will be silenced and have no power of speech until this has happened.’ (Luke 1 in the New Jerusalem Bible).

That always seemed harsh to me. Abraham said the same thing—using the same words—and God didn’t seem ruffled. Mary will say nearly the same thing later in the chapter, and Gabriel is not offended. What is it about Zechariah?

It is at that point in his lecture that Raymond Brown, my mentor in all this, speaks the line I have taken as the title of this essay: “this isn’t being told for sentiment.” Yes, it is true, says Brown, that Gabriel’s response seems harsh, but Luke is not trying to help you analyze Zechariah’s interview with Gabriel. Luke is trying to remind his hearers of something. “Gabriel,” he wants them to say, “haven’t we heard about Gabriel before?”

zechariah-2Yes, you have. That’s the best answer. Remember back to Daniel 10:15?, the only previous appearance of Gabriel? [5] Gabriel was telling Daniel about the events that will mark the end of this era and Daniel was struck dumb. Well, here is Gabriel again and Zechariah is struck dumb. So…what does the fulfillment of God’s promise to Zechariah have to do with the end of the era?

OK, if you were looking for an answer to that question, you will have to look elsewhere. The answer I am looking at belongs to a different question. My question is, “Why is Zechariah struck dumb?” and my answer is, “Luke is trying to direct our attention to the climactic event—the birth of the forerunner of the Messiah.”

In the light of that, I would say that the question I always asked is not a very good question. I always wanted to know why Gabriel was so mean to Zechariah, especially since Abraham and Mary asked the same question without any retaliation. The question that now seems to me to be a better question is, “What does Luke mean by trying to bring to our ears echoes of Gabriel’s encounter with Daniel?”

The question I was asking was, using Fr. Brown’s word, “sentimental.” It looks for the meaning in the interaction of the two members of the conversation. The question I am now offering you might be called “referential.” Gabriel is there because of what his presence will refer to. It is that “Gabriel…Gabriel…I’ve heard of him somewhere before?” response.

This is a dilemma for modern Christians. All we really want to do, we say to ourselves, is to “read the Christmas story.” But that is disingenuous. We must ask Luke to enter into our world and use only the references we know or we must try to enter Luke’s world and the world of his hearers and to understand the references they knew.

I phrased that as if it were a choice. In pretending it is a choice we can make—we change or Luke changes—I was trying to be funny. I do seriously believe that we have a choice to make, however. One option is to insist that the passage means and should mean what a superficial reading gives us. What? Gabriel didn’t like Zechariah? It’s not good to question God when you are being offered a favor? Leave your incredulity behind when you enter the Holy of Holies?

The other choice is to learn what Gabriel’s presence means. What was Luke trying to tell us by putting Gabriel there? Matthew didn’t use any angels at all; just dreams. Gabriel is not essential to “the story;” he is essential to Luke’s story. And when we find out why Luke thought that situation would echo in the ears of his hearers, we can ask what that lesson means to us.

zechariah-3I can do that. I think the appearance is supposed to mean to Luke’s hearers what the sound of the gun at the beginning of the last lap [6] means to fans of track and field. It means that the race is almost over and if you had a move to make, this would be the right time to make it. [7] Jesus said that over and over in his ministry, but I think it is a mark of Luke’s art that he introduces it into the story of John’s birth.

Someone will surely point out that I have merely exchanged one problem for another. That’s true. Instead of fruitlessly wondering about why Gabriel was mean to that nice old man, I can wonder what it means to me that Luke thinks of Jesus’s birth as inaugurating “the bell lap” of the race we are running. I don’t know what that means to me, in fact. But I do think it is the dilemma Luke intended to offer his hearers.

I think that wrestling with the issue Luke intended for us to wrestle with is the right thing to do.

[1] Originally, it was just a matter of chance, like the division of Senate seats into three parts in the first meeting of the Senate. Obviously, if you are going to elect a third of the Senate every year, you are going to have to make some distinctions and all of the Senators who have to make that decision were elected at the same time. The choice of which Senator got to serve a two year term, which a four, and which a six was entirely random the first time. The first time I chose an infancy narrative, I chose Matthew and it happened to be an odd-numbered year.
[1] “Gentleness and healing” belong in this life only. The “life after this one” is a life of reversal and if you had a comfortable life here, Luke’s picture of what awaits you is the least comforting one I know.
[3] Verses 5—25 and 57—80 and about John and his parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth. In Luke, Elizabeth, the mother of John, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, are cousins.
[4] The young boy who is told by the suddenly changed Ebenezer Scrooge to go and buy a turkey is incredulous. “Walk-er!” he exclaims, meaning something like, “You can’t be serious.” That’s how Zechariah responded and it makes as much sense to me as it did to Charles Dickens when he wrote it.
[5] There aren’t many angels as separate beings in the Old Testament—angels with names and duties. They begin to become prominent when the Jews return from captivity in Babylon, bringing little pieces of the Babylonian cosmos with them.
[6] They use a bell at the University of Oregon, my alma mater. It works just as well and it is so…Oregon.
[7] The one I remember best was a 10K race dominated by Frank Shorter and Steve Prefontaine. Pre just sat on Shorter’s right shoulder until the bell sounded, then he moved decisively into the lead and won the race.”  I saw that race.

Posted in Advent, Biblical Studies | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Read this book

Posted on December 2, 2016 by hessd

Today is the beginning of my blogging year (Blogging Year 2017) [1] and I’d like to start by recommending a book. The book is Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

It’s a good book for right now, I think, because the “American Right” has just risen up and bitten political liberals (like me) in the butt. All over America and all over the rest of the world, people are asking, “What were they thinking?” [2] Hochschild’s answer is that they weren’t thinking. They were feeling. So this is a potentially fruitful topic for “the new year.”

arh-1Hochschild is a wonderful choice to begin the new year. She is a sociologist at Berkeley and has written on some very sensitive topics. She came to my attention when I read The Managed Heart: the Commercialization or Human Feeling. [3] in 1979. It was an adptation of what “labor” means from the Marxist notion to a much richer sense that is broadened to include “emotional labor.” To study that, she studied flight attendants, who are paid to maintain a certain emotional demeanor and who suffer, as a result, from what Hochschild calls “charm depression.”

Her method of study is to go sit down with people and get to know them and the learn about their lives. Then she brings her own keen mind and her sociological training into play and devises a way to represent what she has learned. That’s what she did this time, too. She went to Lake Charles, Louisiana and got to know a lot of Tea Party voters. She got to know them across the span of all their life conditions and interests, including politics.

The politics is what particularly interested me, of course and particularly her emphasis on “feeling rules.” Every culture tells you how you ought to feel about some event or relationship. And when you don’t feel that way, you wonder what is wrong. [4] And the culture tells you also what resentments and angers and sadnesses are “appropriate.” Think about the “anger” and “mourning” in the subtitle if you are looking for examples.

I have now recommended the book and appreciated Dr. Hochschild. And now I would like to use her book to make one small point. This is the point: you can’t weigh the costs and benefits of a policy if you don’t have any policy goals. Consider this grievance: [page 69]

At a meeting of the Republican Women of Southwest Louisians, across-the-table talk of regulation focused on the promotion of fluorescent or LED light bulbs: “The government has no right to regulate the light bulbs we buy,” one woman declared. “I made my husband change all my light bulbs back to the old ones.”

If I were there to reason with this group—a fool’s errand, surely—I would begin by saying that it is hard to have to change from products and practices we are familiar with. I would use a self-deprecatory example. maybe, about how I had to get used to a different kind of cake mix. Then I would say that as uncomfortable as change can be, sometimes it helps to achieve a goal we all want to achieve and in those cases, the discomfort is worth it.

Then I would say that America (not “the United States”) has begun to work very hard to reduce the amount of energy we use. I might, in some settings, talk about the harmful effects of global warming, but with this group, I might try “energy independence.” I might, if encouraged, make a snarky remark about “oil-rich Arab states” and how dangerous it is to give them power over us.

And then I would say that their grievance—having to change to more energy-efficient light arh-4bulbs—is actually an important part of achieving the goal. I might remember to call it “our goal,” hoping that that term might cause them to think of themselves as “Americans” and not as the “victims of federal regulation.” At that point, the wheels would come off the wagon.

You cannot work in the cost/benefit frame of reference if there are no policy goals. If there is no goal, there is no benefit that comes from reaching the goal, and if there is no benefit, then any cost at all, will outweigh it. The smallest inconvenience; the least grievance. Even a new kind of light bulb.

But, of course, it isn’t really the light bulb. The light bulb is just an instance of a larger category—“the government has no right to regulate us.” And the feelings of resentment about government regulation are so intense and so near the surface that reasoning about “how to reduce energy consumption” will not survive. [5]

And the feeling rules apply because we have “every right to be angry” when the government invades our lives and tries to tell us what to do. The feelings are attached to the regulatory process. They have nothing at all to do with energy consumption or, indeed, any other policy at all.

You can’t justify the means by reference to the ends if there are no ends. “Feels good” and “feels bad” is the whole range of policy responses. Along with a little “don’t tell me what to do,” which amplifies the resistance to every policy initiative, not only from the national level, but from the state level as well.

That, Hochchild says, is what is driving our politics. You can’t reason with it, but for people like me, it might be a good idea to try to understand it.

[1] There are, of course, reasons why I start at the beginning of December, but they need not detain us here.
[2] In the U. S., “they” refers to Trump voters. Everywhere else, it refers to all of us. That embarrasses me, but I think it is largely true.
[3] Whoever writes her subtitles is worth his or her weight in gold—not saying it isn’t Hochschild herself.
[4] I have tried and—so far—failed to establish the word orthopathy to refer to “having the feelings you are supposed to have.” This word would join orthodoxy (believing what you are supposed to believe) and orthopraxy (doing what you are supposed to do). You can find those two words in any good dictionary, but you will not find my proposed word, despite both the logic of it and the need for it.
[5] Leaving aside for the moment that this is the energy dependent part of a state that has mortgaged itself to attract oil companies.

 

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Thanksgiving, 2016

Posted on November 25, 2016 by hessd

Whenever I begin to formulate a sentence about Thanksgiving, I think of my mother painfully contorting the sentence into “We have so much for which to be thankful.”  She was determined to avoid ending a sentence with a proposition if she could possibly avoid it.  And then I usually think of Winston Churchill who, mocking the same rule, referred to something as “an indignity up with which I shall not put.”

I really do like Churchill’s take better.  Sorry, Mother.

A more evenhanded culture would insist on a national day of lamentation, to balance off the national day of thanksgiving.  We could skim through our calendars for the past year and highlight the good things and…oh, I don’t know…lowlight, I guess, the bad things.  But “evenhanded” is no way to build a culture and we are all probably better off because of that.

My goal for quite some time now has been to find a really good retirement center and to get us there–Bette and me–before I turned 80.  Did that. I am so thankful for that that the words I really want will not likely be available to me for some years.  I won’t even be 79 until next month and our apartment here in Holladay Park Plaza in Portland, Oregon is a really good apartment in a really IMG_0424.jpg retirement center.  This picture shows a little of the living room and a little of Bette.  She is having a wonderful and warm conversation with her first mother-in-law, who lives in North Dakota.  I am in the kitchen kneading dinner rolls for our upcoming Thanksgiving feast at the home of a much-prized stepdaughter who lives here in town.

Bette is looking east, the direction our “back porch” faces. [1]  Outside, you can see what Oregon is really supposed to look like by Thanksgiving.  It is cool and wet, always with the promise of what Oregonians call “sun-breaks.”

When you get old–that’s the category I place myself in–you have lived a lot and a lot has gone wrong.  And…not to be all Sammy Sunshine about it…experiencing these things gives you a whole new register for appreciation.  Imagine a twenty-something who, on waking up in the morning, says, “Wow!  The arthritis pain in my thumb is barely noticeable today!”  This kid knows nothing at all about arthritis pain and on his behalf, we can all be happy about that.  On the other hand (no pun intended), he does not have the buoyancy I feel when some ordinary bad thing–arthritis is just one example–is not happening.  The experience of an old person enables him or her to celebrate the fact that something is not there or that it is not happening right now.  Woohoo!

It helps me a great deal when I remember that the “thanks” at the first thanksgiving IMG_0423.jpgwas about the likelihood that fewer people in Plymouth Colony would die in the coming winter than had died in the previous one.  Roughly half the population, as I recall the story, died during the first winter.  Imagine that for just a moment.  We are now into the second winter and the leaders of the colony are saying to each other, “How wonderful.  Thank God there are fewer deaths this winter than last.  The colony may survive after all.”

There are other way to mark the day, of course, and this cartoon suggests several of them.  If it were up to me, the Redskins (from Washington) would play the Patriots (from Foxborough) every year at Thanksgiving.  This year, the Redskins are playing the Cowboys.  Really…what kind of history is that for our children to learn?

[1]  The “front porch” is across the hall, just outside our front door.  It is my favorite place to sit and write and greet our neighbors/

Posted in Getting Old, Society | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Richard and Mildred Loving

Posted on November 22, 2016 by hessd

Peter Debruge in his May 16 review for Variety explains why the film Loving just didn’t have enough pop for him. In addition to the objection I am going to cite, there were other more technical criticisms that I accepted with pleasure. But this one—this is the reason I went back to read the review.

Loving is, Debruge says, “a film of utmost sensitivity, but not nearly enough outrage.”

loving-2I think that is what I liked best about it. It would have been easy to turn the story of this quiet and courageous couple into a “storming of the barricades” kind of story. And doing that may have been truer to the cause, but it would not have been true at all to the Lovings. [This is the actual couple, by the way.  The actors, Ruth Nega and Joel Egerton, look remarkably like them.]

The short version of the plot is that Richard and Mildred loving ran off to Washington D. C. where it was legal for a white man and a black woman to marry, before returning to Virginia where it was not legal for them to be married. Someone—we never find out just who it was—informs the police and they come out in the middle of the night, arrest the couple and put them is prison.  A picture of that arrest is shown below.

Mildred writes to Attorney-General Bobby Kennedy many years later, after watching TV and seeing the D. C. police protecting black protesters in Martin Luther King’s march on Washington. Kennedy refers the matter to the ACLU who take it to the Supreme Court, where they win Loving v. Virginia in a case that constrains the actions of all states on interracial marriage. [1]

I have followed the politics of interracial marriage from a distance. According to our loving-5federal system, such matters are properly addressed by the states, rather than by the federal government, but states are not free to take away rights guaranteed to citizens of the United States. Just what those guaranteed “rights” are has been a matter of controversy for a long time now.

But longer than I have cared about interracial marriage, I have cared about the difference between what moves us to act and what moves us to understand. I don’t want to argue, of course, that the two are always at odds, but many times they are. I think Debruge’s point could be rephrased to say that director Jeff Nichols’ treatment, while it is admirably suited to understanding, is deficient as a call to action.
Most of the time, I would rather understand an issue than act on it. I know there are people who would rather act on an issue than understand it and I value their contribution to the general welfare, even as I lament what they take away from domestic tranquility.

With that in mind, I want to tell you about the hardest part of the movie for me. “God made robins and sparrows,” says the sheriff as I recall the quote. “Separate.” He is explaining to Richard Loving that he and his wife have violated not only the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, but also the “laws” of God. The sheriff is quite sure he understands what the laws of God are. The judge in the case feels the same way.

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

I think the robin and sparrow analogy is a really bad analogy. I don’t like bad analogies. They lead to bad thinking which leads to bad conclusions and often to bad law. And when the sheriff made his remark about robins and sparrows—it wasn’t argumentative, he was stating a clearly observable fact and knew that everyone agreed with him—my first response would have been to object to the analogy.

loving-3Set that against the quiet certainty and the authoritarian control of Virginia. There was no question that the sheriff would throw Richard Loving in prison and might even set the bail too high for anyone to reach. The threat of imminent punishment loomed over the conversation and I knew immediately, as I sat in the theater, what a struggle it would be for me to pass by that analogy.

I would have passed it by because I would have been afraid. But that conflict—I prize careful speech but I am afraid of the consequences—would have been difficult and I am not entirely sure I would have made the prudent choice. I have not always made that choice. And sometimes I have paid the consequences. And sometimes it has been worth it.

I would recommend Loving to anyone who cares about the issue and who has the patience to let the story tell itself. It is not a movie of high drama, but I think it may affect us more deeply for that reason.

[1] And was cited in Obergefel v. Hodges, where the same logic was applied to same sex marriages.

Posted in Movies, Politics, Words | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Protecting Vulnerable Communities

Posted on November 19, 2016 by hessd

I’d like to share with you a few lines from political writers and a comment I heard last night from a local pollster. Then I would like to push them around on my plate for a little while, like green beans I am not yet ready to commit to eating.

If I don’t like where they wind up, I might just shove them under the mashed potatoes, the way I used to. If you don’t like where they wind up, you can shove them anywhere you like. What could be more fair than that?

I got this recently from Jeremy Bird, who runs a sort of activation network for President Obama.

If you’re anything like me, you’re still sorting through the events of the past week and a half. It’s hard — there’s no way to sugarcoat that. Vulnerable communities are feeling like this country has turned its back on them.

That sounds right to me. On the other hand, I have been reading messages just like this from Obama’s organization for so long that maybe it just sounds familiar.

But his expression “vulnerable communities” lit up for me on this reading because I had just read Frank Bruni in the New York Times. Bruni said.

From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused.

The Democratic party, according to Bruni, has ignored a lot of vulnerable communities, particularly poor white working class communities. That sounds right to me too.

Bruni points to many in these working class communities who are “hurt” and “confused.” They are also poor and, to a great extent, without hope. And sexist and racist.

vulnerable-2So if I am the Democratic party, trying to lodge Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, these communities present a problem for me. If I say that “poor” is the part of their life I want to bring into focus, I face the difficulty that there is nothing I can do about it. The jobs that once made them solidly middle class are gone and they are not coming back.

If I say that “sexist and racist” is the part I want to focus on, I am solidifying my hold on some very important other voting blocs—feminist women and men and LGBTQs. No one says these “vulnerable communities” are hurt or confused. They are just victims.

So of these two kinds of “vulnerable communities”—vulnerable in different ways, granted—we declare one to be victims and offer our support and the other to be victimizers and offer only blame. I would think that strategy would be very popular among the victims and deeply resented among the people who are called victimizers.

There might be a short way to say this. As a Democrat, I care deeply about the welfare of my vulnerable communities, but not very much about the welfare of yours.

vulnerable-1Add to this collection of thoughts the remarks of Tim Hibbitts, a widely respected local pollster. In reflecting on all the white working class votes that Bill Clinton had won and that Barack Obama had won, but that Hillary Clinton lost, he remembered that Hillary had gone to coal country in West Virginia and told the miners and former miners that coal was gone and wasn’t coming back. She was right, said Hibbitts, about the coal jobs. But saying it there to them made her seem callous.

That caught my attention. Tim didn’t say anything else about coal, but my mind went on and imagined that Trump had visited the same setting and had promised to bring coal production and use back to full strength. And then I thought how that would make him seem to these vulnerable “coal communities.”

If he did that, it was all flim-flam, like so much else he has done. But people don’t know for sure about the future of coal. [1] Maybe they don’t care much about long term economic projections. But they know how to care that one of the candidates seemed not to care about them and the other seemed to care a great deal.

vulnerable-3I began by talking about “vulnerable communities.” These are communities of several kinds. Then I added the notion that whether a candidate seemed to care about me—about the particular way I am vulnerable. Hillary, in telling them the truth about coal, told them also that she didn’t care about them. Trump, in lying to them about coal, told them also that he did care about them. A sophisticated electorate would have chosen the teller of truth over the liar.

My father used to tell a story that seems to have stayed with me. He imagined a boy who said about his mother, “The old lady don’t bitch like she used to.” Then a boy who said, “My mother doesn’t complain as much as she once did.” [2] “Each boy, “my father would say, “is conveying the same information about the mother. He is conveying very different information about himself.”

This is a hard place for Democrats to be. No one wants to say “my vulnerable communities but not yours.” Not out loud, at least. And it is a hard thing to ask of a voter. You have to say that the problem is poverty and I have no idea how to help you. Or you can say you are terrible people, being both sexist and racist, and I am going to try to protect the people you are abusing.

It has been awhile since I have run a political campaign and as I look at this dilemma, I am glad I don’t have to design a campaign or find a candidate to solve it.

[1] If you go to cleancoaltechnologiesinc.com, you will see amazing possibilities. I have no idea whether they would work, but I am confident they will not be tried.
[2] Note: Dad had four sons and no daughters and he cared a great deal about the social setting of language.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

“Jesus is the reason for the season.” Really?

Posted on November 15, 2016 by hessd

There are so many ways for Christians to be unhappy about the way “Christmas” [1] is celebrated today. I have given it up, myself, in favor of Advent. It saves me so much grief. And why, really, should I expect anyone to celebrate my holiday when I don’t celebrate theirs? Really.

reason-2I remember when I first heard that line-Jesus is the reason for the season— and when I first saw it on a billboard. It must have been some time in the 1950s. Surely it was somewhere around the time that Stan Freberg wrote and performed Green Chri$tma$. [2] I was in my teens in the 1950s and America’s culture was in the middle of a post-WWII rebound. [3]

Obviously, I did not accept the messages my culture sent to me as characteristic of a post-war up-tick in conservative positions and sentiments. I took it as “what America is like,” or, really, “how things work” in the broadest sense of the term.

Clearly “Jesus” in the slogan is the alternative to the pervasive commercialism that Scrooge represents. So…Jesus, not shopping, is the reason we celebrate Christmas.

reason-4It is not, however, why we celebrate “the season.” Our forebears, Christian and pagan, worried that the sun, traveling further and further south in the winter, might not decide to come back this year. And when the sun “stands”—which is what the -stice part of solstice means—we could breathe a collective sigh of relief and begin to anticipate the sun’s northward journey. [4] And we would celebrate the anticipation that the present cold and dreariness will not be how the world ends, but that warmth and hope will return again.

That is “the season.” As Christians moved up into Europe, they very sensibly weighed the difficulties of cranking up a brand new festival as opposed to just hijacking a festival already in place. They decided that the celebrations of the winter solstice were a good time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the Messiah, so they dumped Advent right on top of what Ursula LeGuin (in her Earthsea writings) calls “the festival of sun-return.”

So in Christian countries in traditional times, Christ was “the reason for the season” by virtue of the church’s mandate. No reason, after all, to turn away from figgy pudding if you don’t need to.

reason-1But then, starting early in the 20th Century, economies in Europe and North America began to rely heavily on consumer demand. The more occasions there are to sell things, the more things we can sell and the better off the economy will be. And after all, in Matthew’s account, the “Wise Men” did bring gifts to the Christ child, so why shouldn’t we give Barbies and Tonka Trucks to our own children? It may not be “the reason for the season,” but it is one of the things we do on Christmas day.

I still remember when “the season” meant “the Christmas season” and good taste required stores to hold off on the paraphernalia of Christmas until after Thanksgiving. I remember active opposition to stores who broke that taboo and “jumped the gun.” But more and more, “the season” has been defined as the time of commercial excess beginning shortly after the back-to-school sales are over.

That’s what “the season” now means. It means Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. And “beginning early” now means beginning that season—roughly the days before Halloween —early. There can be no coherent “reason” for a “season” that begins in October and runs until January. It can be an extended time of appeals to customers, but there is no cultural coherence in that.

And when we have travelled that far, we are in a position to stop and notice the most outrageous word in the slogan. It is “the.” The definite article notoriously requires a single object. A polygynous husband may not introduce any of his wives as “the wife”—only as “a wife.” That’s just how English works.

reason-3And it works the same way, silently and imperiously, in “the reason.” There is, the logic demands, only one reason for this season and we are here to tell you what it is. This will be a revelation and a disappointment to the Druids who celebrated the return of the sun long before Christian missionaries arrived. It will sadden and impoverish a whole swath of merchants who see “the season” shrunk back to the days just before and just after Christmas. Both parties—the Druids and the Retailers—have a lot of reasons to reject the demand that the article “the” places on their reasons.

On the other hand, they have every reason to continue to pretend that there is such a season. A “let’s spend money” season would not be broadly appealing as a cultural meme, but “let’s celebrate THE SEASON by spending money” works just fine.

Last year, for instance, my Starbucks put a banner on the pastry case that said “Tiding so Delicious.” The only word in that banner that has a historical connection to the old celebrations of Christmas is “tidings,” as in the King James Version’s ringing, “good tidings of great joy.” This year there are red cups—they are being used now, still two weeks before Thanksgiving—that say “Share the joy.”

I would love to share the joy. How about I treat you to a grande egg nog latté?

So there is no “reason for the season.” Why would we ever have imagined there would be? There are lots of reasons why we celebrate the October to January period the way we do. And I still get my Advent to celebrate so I’m not complaining.

[1] “Xmas” in C. S. Lewis’s sarcastic account of how the winter solstice is celebrated in countries where commercial secularism is the basic assumption of society.
[2] Although he was a preacher’s kid, Freberg takes the religious argument in this parody only halfway. “But don’t you realize,” he has Bob Cratchit say to Mr. Scrooge, “Christmas has a significance, a meaning.” Freberg doesn’t go so far as to suggest what it is, but he does suggest that there is only one. Still, his little skit was banned on a lot of radio stations as impious.
[3] The role of women, the meaning of work, and the significance of “religion,” largely main stream Protestantism where I lived, were all explicit repudiations of the pre-war hedonism.
[4] When I say forebears, I am thinking of people living in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, the solstice marking the shortest day comes in June.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment