Week 52.10 28th December 2010

Tendring Topics…….on line

Christmas – for Quakers!

Way back in September I wrote an article with the above title for ‘The Friend’, a Quaker Weekly Journal. It expressed my thoughts about the importance of Christmas to Quakers. The Editor thanked me but said that it was rather too long for ‘The Friend’. Could I reduce it from 1,300 to under 1,000 words? I could and I did.

The resultant abridged version was duly published in the Christmas/New Year issue of ‘The Friend’. I felt though that the article might be of interest beyond the confines of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and have decided to publish the original unabridged version in this blog. It could even be of interest to some who don’t consider themselves to be Christians.

Here it is – I hope that you may find it interesting:

Christmas - for Quakers

‘How will you your Christmas keep: feasting, fasting, or asleep? asks Eleanor Farjeon in her poem ‘Keeping Christmas.’

Early Quakers would have answered without hesitation, ‘We don’t keep it at all, nor do we keep any other Christian festival’. This was not because they doubted the virgin birth of Jesus, or that he was God’s Word made Flesh, or the accounts of his crucifixion and resurrection, but because they claimed to celebrate those events in their hearts every day of the year.

There are Quakers today who maintain the testimony against observing ‘times and seasons’ but very few, I think, for the same reason as those early Friends. It is likely that many believe that the Gospel accounts of the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, the shepherds’ angelic vision, and the visit of the Magi are all a myth, invented to add some ‘magic’ to an otherwise prosaic narrative. It is no more literal historical truth, and of no more importance, than the story of Adam and Eve or, come to that, the Greek myth of Pandora and her box.

Nowadays, they say, no one really believes the Christmas story and it’s just an excuse for a spending spree, overeating and boozing! Best to forget the whole silly business and get on with daily life, as those early Quakers did some three centuries ago.

Like early Quakers, I do believe that Jesus Christ was God’s word incarnate (made flesh, personified – whichever you prefer). Unlike them though, I think that it is right to commemorate and celebrate his birthday. Do Friends who pay no heed to ‘times and seasons’ ignore their own children’s birthdays or their own wedding anniversaries? If they do, they must have unusually tolerant and understanding families. I think it unlikely that Jesus’ birth occurred exactly as recounted in the Gospels, but I do think that the Christmas story contains a measure of historic truth. I believe too that even if the whole thing were invented, it would be no less important because of the insight it gives us into the deepest convictions of the early Christian Church.

Think about it. The traditional Christmas story proclaims that the mother of the man who was human but also divine was Mary, an ordinary village girl born and living in Nazareth and engaged to be married to a carpenter. She was to bear her son under circumstances that would bring into doubt his paternity and could even have resulted in her facing an accusation of adultery. He was destined to grow up in an obscure village in the remote province of Galilee, far from Jerusalem and the Temple, the centre of Jewish faith and culture. The first reaction of Nathaneal, when he was told of Jesus, was incredulity; ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’

After having been told that she was to be the mother of the future Messiah Mary composed a triumphal revolutionary anthem that makes The Red Flag appear pale pink in comparison!

He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts’
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

It can only have been thanks to the Grace of God that the Magnificat has survived generation after generation of rule by ‘the proud, the mighty and the rich’ to give hope to the poor and to inspire such martyred Christian leaders as Fr. John Ball of Colchester in the 14th century and Archbishop Romero of El Salvador in the 20th.

The birth took place in Bethlehem. The only inn in the town was fully booked. There was no room available. Temporarily homeless, the expectant mother and her husband found shelter in a stable. It was there that their child was born, a cattle trough serving as a cradle.

These were surely strange circumstances to have been invented by those trying to deceive the world into believing that the child was the long-awaited Messiah, destined to redeem Israel.

More equally inauspicious events were to follow. Those who were first informed of the newborn Messiah were not, as might have been expected, the prophets, scholars and priests of Israel. Nor were they the land’s temporal rulers. Rome was ignorant of, and would have been indifferent to, his birth. When Herod heard of it he sought only the baby’s death!

It was shepherds, tending their flocks on the hillside near Bethlehem, to whom the news of the birth was first given. They were well down the social scale and would have been even lower in the estimate of the rulers of the Temple and arbiters of spiritual life. Shepherds couldn’t, by reason of their occupation, obey the Law of Moses to the letter. Sheep need to be guarded and cared for seven days a week. Nature does not heed the Sabbath. Yet, they were chosen by God to welcome the baby who was to change the whole world.

The first to bring the baby gifts that were symbolic of his kingship, his divine nature – and his cruel and untimely death, were neither Children of Israel nor Jewish converts. They were Magi from a distant land, heathen idolaters of the kind that had been roundly condemned throughout the Scriptures. They were surely symbolic of the fact that Jesus was God’s gift to the whole of humanity, not to Israel only.

More was to follow. Within weeks, Mary and Joseph, with the baby Jesus, were political refugees, fleeing for their lives into the land of Egypt. How long did they stay there? No one knows. At least one apocryphal gospel suggests several years. Other authorities believe a matter of months only. Perhaps it didn’t happen at all and was just part of that meretricious ‘Christmas myth’. Perhaps – but early Christians (and early Friends) believed that, at least in the first instance, the Holy Family was dependent upon ‘the kindness of strangers’ and that they lived for months, perhaps years, among the idolatrous heathen.

Those first Chapters of St Luke’s, St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels tell us that when God’s ‘Word’ (‘that was with God and was God from the beginning and without whom was not anything made that was made’ – and is also the ‘True Light that enlightens everyone who comes into the World’) was ‘made flesh and dwelt among us’, he did not make his home and find his friends among the powerful, the most wise or the most outwardly religious. Throughout his life he made a point of his own lack of worldly possessions (‘The Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head’) and of his identification with social and religious outcasts, with the poor and the homeless, and with ‘foreigners’ dwelling in a strange land. ‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things (good or bad) to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’. This, early Christians clearly believed, was the nature of their, and our, God.

I do not know how much of the Gospel stories of Christ’s Nativity is true. I have no doubt though about the truth of that summation. If the Christmas story is ‘just a myth’ what a magnificent myth it is; a myth that reveals fundamental truths more clearly than could any cold recounting of historical events! For Quakers (whether believing, half-believing or disbelieving the familiar Christmas story), this revelation of the nature of God deserves to be remembered and celebrated, if not every day of the year, at least at Christmas time.

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 the Manger.

‘Advent 1955’ by John Betjeman

HAPPY NEW YEAR?

I had intended to put the customary exclamation mark after that New Year salutation. I altered it to a question mark because it is clear to me that for a great many, perhaps most, of us 2011 threatens to be a far-from-happy year. Not for everybody, of course. The chief difference that the seriously wealthy are likely to notice is that when they get their P.A. to insert an advert in the press for an under-gardener, a nursemaid, scullery maid or some other member of the lower classes to perform a menial task ‘about the mansion’ or on the estate, they are likely to have a really tedious number of applications to sort through.

But there, I expect that they’ll get the P.A., the Press Secretary, the Chef or the Estate Manager to sort through them! Strange how – after ten years of ‘New-Labour’ government - the ever-widening gap between the really wealthy and the poor is beginning to replicate the ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ of Edwardian days, but in a third millennium context. It’s much the same really – just that the upper servants; the butler, housekeeper, cook and head gardener, now have different, and rather less servile, designations.

As for the rest of us, I reckon that until now most of us have only ‘heard of’ the government’s saving plans. We have been able to persuade ourselves that they’ll really only affect ‘other people’. We’ll be immune.

We won’t be. As we move into the New Year, whatever may be our age, physical condition or financial situation (unless, of course, we’re millionaires) we’re going to be affected by the swingeing reductions in governmental financial support for public services. Perhaps we’ll be losing our job, either because we are employed in the public service or because we’re in the private sector but much or all of our work is under contract to a public authority. We may be losing our home because we can no longer keep up the mortgage payments and, in any case, falling house prices may mean that we now owe more than our home is worth!

You’re fit, you intend to stay fit and you use the Council swimming pool and fitness centre? It is likely to close, have restricted hours of opening, or vastly increased charges. Perhaps you’re not so fit, or you’re elderly, and you use the public library. That will be affected in the same way. Meals on wheels, social services generally? Expect increased charges and a reduction in services. Refuse collection and street cleaning? Weekly collection is likely to become a thing of the past. Our streets will become shabbier and more litter-strewn. Potholes and broken paving stones will remain unrepaired. Economies with policing are likely to lead to an increase in crime. Going out alone after dark could be unwise – especially as the highway authority may be economising on street lighting!

And, of course, it will be local councils who collect the Council Tax and will have to impose the cuts, who will get the blame! Central Government will be seen as the knight in shining armour to whom the public can appeal to save them from ‘rapacious and incompetent bureaucrats at the Town Hall’.

Well, I do wish all blog readers a happy and peaceful New Year! – there’s no harm in wishing, and no harm in hoping!


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