6th December 2014

Tendring Topics………on line

‘The time draws near the birth of Christ………’

          We are in the Christian season of ‘Advent’, the few weeks before Christmas when it was customary for Christians to prepare for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ ‘In a lowly cattle shed’ in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago.

            Sadly, except in churches and chapels, there’s little evidence of the celebration of one of the most important events of the Christian year, though there are plenty of reindeer, toboggans, Christmas Trees, Christmas fairies and Santas to be found.  It is though, difficult to find unequivocally Christian greetings cards in the shops. News bulletins on tv and radio tell us that primary school children nowadays perform in ‘mid-winter festival’ plays at Christmas time instead of the traditional Nativity Plays that have been part of the pre-Christmas life of primary schools for generations. Ask at any post office for Christmas stamps and you’ll be shown the, admittedly very attractive, secular ones.  You have to make a special request for some of the ‘Madonna and Child’ first or second class stamps that are now available every year.  They’ll be found for you, though it may be made clear that it’s an unusual request.

            It is said that the female partner (at one time I’d have said ‘the wife’) of a young couple on a pre-Christmas shopping trip was attracted to a particularly bright display in a shop window.  She returned disgusted to her partner, ‘D’you know; over there, they’re even trying to drag religion into Christmas!’   All of this is said to be because we are a multi-faith and multicultural society and public celebration of a Christian festival might cause offence to those of other or no faith.  I’m convinced that that is total nonsense.   It’s a strange religion that takes offence at the story of a young woman who takes shelter in a cattle-shed to have her baby on a cold winter’s night in Palestine.   In any case we don’t mind Jews, Muslims and Hindus observing their holy days.  It is surely patronising and insulting to suggest that we Christians respect the faith of others and they do not.

            The real enemy of the Christmas story is the spirit of consumerism and greed which does its best to replace the real Christmas with an artificial one of greed, selfishness, gluttony and booze – one in which folk of any faith (but preferable of none!) can take part wholeheartedly.  I find it useful to personify that anti-faith spirit as the great god Mammon, manifest to us mortals in his unholy trinity of productivity, profitability and cost effectiveness.  Mammon’s Christless festival is centred on 25^th December but its true unholy days are appropriately named Black Friday the last Friday in November, and the week following 25^th December, when devotees queue for hours, then riot and quarrel with each-other in their eagerness to acquire the very latest consumer-desirables a little cheaper than they could get them at any other time of the year. Meanwhile the thousands rejected by Mammon (he is quite arbitrary in his choice of favourites) have to queue at Food Banks to keep themselves and their families from starvation and, as they shiver in the December winds, have to choose daily  between eating and heating.

             Sixty years ago former Poet Laureate the late Sir John Betjeman wrote a satirical poem Advent 1955 about the commercialisation of Christmas in those days. Here are a few lines from it:

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell'd go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax

 The devotees of Mammon have learned a trick or two since those days.  They no longer ‘raise the price of things in shops’.  They temporarily reduce them and call it a pre-Christmas Sale.   There’s more profit on lots of things sold at a lower price than on just a few things sold at a higher one!  And those who manage to persuade potential customers that there’s a special, ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap, day called ‘Black Friday’ are on their way to becoming  millionaires.

Chancellors of the Exchequer have also learned a trick or two!   I began spare-time freelance writing in the early ‘50s and by the end of the decade had acquired several regular clients. In those days editors would send regular contributors a bottle of single-malt whisky, or something equally worth-while, as a Christmas present.   When such presents became no longer ‘tax deductable’ those annual editorial offerings dwindled to ‘a really nice Christmas card’ or perhaps ‘a useful commercial calendar’!   Sir John finished his poem with a rhyming verse that has stuck in my memory as summing up, not only the real meaning of Christmas, but what it is that is unique – and very special – to the Christian faith:

The time draws near the birth of Christ,

A present that can not be priced,

 Given two thousand years ago.

And if God had not given so,

He still would be a distant stranger

And not the baby in a manger.

Our God is not a distant stranger.  He is still to be found in the baby in the manger and in the suffering man upon a cross - and today, in those who serve and love their fellow men and women, who prefer co-operation to competition, and who make peace not war.  We Quakers believe that everyone in the world of whatever race, colour or creed, has ‘that of God’, a divine spark, within his or her soul.  It is that within us that leads us towards kindliness, forgiveness and peace and away from anger, vengeance and greed. That divine spark is, says St. John in his Gospel, ‘the true light of God’ that shines in the darkness and cannot be overwhelmed by it.