WINDOWS ON WINTER

Adam Gopnik is a true romantic. His 50th anniversary Massey Lectures, Winter: Five Windows On The Season, magnificently exhibits this quality. The title of each window begins with the letter R – Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter, Remembering Winter. The series was broadcast The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s  Radio One and published simultaneously by House of Anansi Press in November 2011. It made for good listening; and at $22.95 it’s a good buy.

The repetition in chapter titles sounds almost too cute, though alliteration is  characteristic of English romantic poetry. Each chapter is filled with ample content drawn from Gopnik’s vast knowledge of literature, music, art, religious traditions, sport and personal experience of Canadian winters he knew in his and my home town of Montreal, Canada. Twenty-two pages of the bibliography and three pages of permissions at the end of the book show how much research went into the preparation of these lectures.

The romantic attitude to winter came as one of the benefits of the Industrial Age in Britain and Northern Europe. Prior to that winter was to be endured for people not wealthy enough flee to a warmer climate. Central heating developed during Britain’s Industrial Age made greater enjoyment of the season possible. It became easier to go inside and look at winter from the windows of a more comfortable home. I remember doing that in my boyhood home near Montreal where winters were sometimes quite severe.

Vivaldi’s Winter from his opus Four Seasons and Samuel Johnson’s poem, “The Winter’s Walk,” voiced a bitterly negative view in the mid-eighteenth century. Just two decades later in 1785, William Cowper’s, “The Winter Evening,” presented a totally inverted view. Quickly followed by William Wordsworth, Hans Christian Anderson, composer Franz Schubert, poet Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, and artist Caspar David Frederic brought the romantic attitude to full flower.  After the defeat of Napoleon, not by Russian armies but the Russian winter, Pytor Vyazemsky and Alexander Pushkin had their opportunity to join the chorus that made winter “invigorating – even joyful – and always sexy.”

Reality set in when Gopnik turned to Radical Winter in his second lecture. The still elusive search for the northwest passage and the race for the north and the south poles told the truth about the extent of human endurance. Franklin’s bitter defeat by the ice and the many futile searches for his stricken expedition made for great adventure and great suffering. “They went in search of absolute winter – and got it, good and hard.”

A not always hidden imperialism clouded their vision perhaps more than the perpetual winter they discovered. In his return from apparently reaching the north pole, Robert Peary stole the right to claim success from fellow American Frederick Cook who got may have got there first. Instead of acting like a hero, Peary “did everything that made him look like a schmuck…. In one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in the not-very-auspicious record, Peary, in 1894, carted away the three (scared) meteorites (of the Greenland Inuit) – and sold them to the Museum of Natural History in New York for forty thousand dollars.” One of the meteorites weighed one hundred tons. The Inuit had used the meteorites for centuries as their sole source of technology to eke out a survival existence by skinning walrus and whales for food, clothing and transport.

Gopnik’s third lecture/chapter on Recuperative Winter bears the sub-title of The Season in Spirit. Here he traces the origin, development and ultimate return to the roots of the annual festival of the winter solstice. Known by various names throughout history, it is best recognized in Western Christianity as Christmas. It did not start there, but was taken over from the Roman, Celtic, Norse and Jewish cultures. Many of the non-religious features of our modern celebrations come from non-Christian sources. Today our religious celebrations are hidden by commercial interest in the season that began, Gopnik claims, with Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Thomas Nast’s Santa Claus and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.

Gopnik begins this chapter quoting Christina Rossetti’s famous carol of the Victorian era, In the bleak midewinter, frosty wind made moan.” In the end he finds our modern Christmas anything but recuperative. “One thing we can say for certain: the symbolism of the modern, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden, double-faced Christmas is winter symbolism. We need warmth in order to enter the cold and at Christmas we need the cold in order to assert the warmth, need the imagery of the bleak midwinter in order to invoke the star above the stable.” It’s a persuasive thesis and antithesis. So far, we have not yet found an adequate synthesis.

Sport dominates the fourth window on winter, but what Gopnik sees most is his beloved game of hockey. He feels that the most Canadian of movie or television documentaries could be made of the unique way three amateur teams in Montreal at the turn of the 20^th century created the game he loves so well. Though the game had been invented elsewhere, they were the first to play by defined rules – drawn from rugby, no less, later augmented by rules from other sports.

Competition and even conflict existed between the three dominant cultures of Montreal at the time. These were the elite English minority centred on McGill University at the foot of Mount Royal, the French in their majority status throughout the eastern part of the city, and the poor Irish Catholics from the Point St. Charles area near the St. Lawrence Rivver. Hockey gave the three a creative outlet that made the success of the new sport possible. Though hockey is not the only or the oldest winter sport, Gopnik believes that the present, professional and American-dominated National Hockey League, detracts greatly from the beauty of his favourite sport.

Winter is having a hard time getting here to southern Ontario this year. Overnight on December 30-31 we lost scarce snow cover on the ground for the third time. That’s not at all like the winters that I and Adam Gopnik remember in Montreal in our youth. In his final chapter, Gopnik writes about Remembering Winter because it is changing. We remember it in two ways: “We use it as a blank slate … where everything is scrubbed away.” And we remember it after it is over. “We set our winter clocks by the storms we’ve known.”

Those are happy memories for both Adam and me.

A WINDOW ON CHRISTMAS

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone,

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

                                                                  

To Adam Gopnik, the carol that best expresses what the festival is all about is Christina Rossetti’s poem In the bleak mid-winter. Rossetti wrote the poem in 1872 at the request of Scribner’s Monthly for a Christmas poem. It became a carol when it appeared in The English Hymnal in 1906 set to music Gustav Holst.

We know who Rossetti and Holst are, but who is Adam Gopnik? He is an American author, born in Philadelphia, PA, educated in Montreal, Canada, the son of professors at McGill University. He now lives in New York with his wife, Martha Parker, and two children, Luke and Olivia. His essays are most frequently published in The New Yorker. Claiming to be a secular Jew, he is very knowledgeable about religious traditions and cultural history in general. His essays frequently reveal that he is also an expert on fine art.

Gopnik’s most recent publication is the simultaneously printed edition of 50^th anniversary of The Massey Lectures, broadcast over the CBC radio network in November 2011. Entitled Winter: Five Windows on the Season, the book presents a highly readable overview of the literary, religious and cultural character of what most Canadians regard as an inevitable, if not wholly enjoyable experience. Just how extensive his research was for this series of lectures is dramatically expressed in the 32-page bibliography at the end of the book.

Of greatest interest to me is his third lecture/chapter on Christmas. He gave it the composite title of Recuperative Winter:The Season in Spirit. He believes that the Christmas holiday is “a holiday that is eclectic, banged together, yet remains the central winter ritual, the central mystery, the central rite of our year end celebration.” It has always been so since the ancient Romans and later Jews began to celebrate this festival of lights in the Saturnalia and Hanukkah respectively, centuries before the Christian scriptures were written and their liturgies celebrated the birth of Jesus.

It is not happenstance that our modern Christmas, Gopnik writes, is more northern and wintry as it has evolved since Victorian times. It is here in the northern hemisphere that we experience the solstice most notably. Darkness sets in in late afternoon and snow is a much anticipated part of the season.

The material and the spiritual, the religious and the secular, became inextricably intertwined during the Industrial Age of the mid-19^th century. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Britain and Thomas Nast’s Santa Claus in the United States epitomize the transformation of Christmas into the supreme expression of materialism wrapped up in religious charity we know it as today.

Or is it really the very opposite: a mysterious religious festival wrapped in the tissue and ribbon of excessive materialism? “More abundance means more doubt,” he writes. “A festival of pagan lights becomes a festival of progress and poverty – and ends as a festival of overabundance and anxiety.”

Ambivalence has always been inherent in Christmas as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and celebrated in the liturgies of the Church since the 4^th century C.E. Check out the ambivalence in  the biblical narratives themselves. Numerous English versions are available online. Consider some of these details:

The Holy Family featured in so much Christian art had to travel on foot the torturous distance from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea. Mary was in the final stages of her pregnancy. There was no room for them in the inn at Bethlehem when they finally arrived. A host of angels praised the birth of the Saviour in a stable. Their song of glory to God and peace to the world symbolized that this was a divine and spiritual event. The Magi following a star from the east – perhaps even from as far as China – to present the world’s most expensive gifts to the Christ Child. Then the Family was forced to flee to Egypt to escape the brutality of Herod’s massacre.

Gopnik is not critical of our contemporary Christmas celebrations. What he has done is give us a reality check of how we really do celebrate this season. Is it with mixed motives or hypocrisy? Could it be both?

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CELEBRATING THE NATIVITY

The original meaning of the word “Christmas” was the Mass celebrating the birth of Christ. From the church's point of view, a better word to express the meaning of the event we are now preparing to celebrate is “The Nativity.” Or perhaps even more simply, “The Birth of Jesus.”

Now greatly encumbered with creedal and cultural overlays, it is difficult to discover the historical event and its true meaning. A close study of the two narratives of the birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke show how the early Church developed those stories. They built  their stories on the Hebrew scriptures read each week in their synagogues where the first Christians worshiped. From the perspective of those early Jewish Christians, Jesus was the Messiah, the fulfilment of their scriptures.

A quick search on the Internet will reveal how contentious and confusing is the debate about the historicity of the person, Jesus of Nazareth, let alone his birth as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Even the most reputable scholars disagree on how factual each narrative is. For example, N.T. Wright, former Bishop of Durham, in the Church of England, and John Shelby Spong, retired Bishop of New Jersey, in the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. are at opposite poles on the issue.

It is noteworthy that most of the hymns and carols sung in celebrating the Nativity take a simple, literalist approach in relating the story. Among the best examples in the traditional carols Silent Night, Holy Night and The First Nowell. Indeed, many of the traditional carols are paraphrases of the birth stories.

A relatively recent outburst of hymnody in the latter half of the 20^th century has brought many new hymns to the attention of worshiping congregations. Voices United, a hymn collection published by The United Church of Canada in 1996, includes a number of late 20^th century hymns not yet thought of in the same category as traditional Christmas carols.

Some of these new hymns depart from the usual repetition of the biblical stories. Brian Wren’s Oh, How Joyfully, set to an 18^th century Sicilian melody, and Frederic Kaan’s Down to Earth, as a Dove, to a tune from the 16^th century, are two examples that express the true meaning of the nativity rather than its literal details. A third instance is Marian Collibole’s Ring a Bell for Peace, which marks the promises of our Advent liturgies – peace, joy, hope, faith – as fulfilled by the birth of Jesus.

The earliest religious song of Christmas still used today is the familiar Of the Father’s Love Begotten, sung to a 12^th century plainsong melody. Another Latin antiphon from the 9^th century O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, was translated by John Mason Neale, an Anglo-Catholic clergyman of the mid-Victorian era. Neale also translated more than sixty other hymns from the Latin and Orthodox traditions.

Today, we Christians complain that the religious celebration has been overtaken and almost obliterated by the relentless advance of secularism. Historical analysis shows that the facts should be reversed. The Christian Church captured and reversed what was originally a Roman fertility festival of renewal of life in the natural world celebrated at the winter solstice. 

In the simultaneously published edition of the Massey Lectures for 2011, entitled Winter, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in November, Adam Gopnik presents pentetrating analysis of Christmas celebrations as primarily secular. Gopnik summarized his analysis with the briefest of conclusions: Our modern Christmas celebrations date from the Victorian romantic era of English and American family and economic life. Its chief features are not the Nativity of Jesus, but Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol and cartoonist Thomas Nast's Santa Claus. Christmas today he says is “a winter holiday meant for kids.”

A review of Gopnik’s study will be the subject of our next blog entry.

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IS CHRISTMAS OUTDATED?

Now, there’s an impertinent question. But realistically, with commercialism  now dominant in our cultural environment, that has to be asked of our Christian Advent and Christmas celebrations and worship.

Here’s what commercial preparations for Christmas are like this year where I live: Sears’ Wish Book catalogue arrived in July. Christmas decorations went up soon as Hallowe’en was over. Advertising and sales started at the same time. Black Friday madness spread to Canada the day after American Thanksgiving trying to keep Canadians at home for their Christmas shopping. And so on … and on … and on….

It isn’t as simple to fix as suggested by the once popular slogan, “Put Christ Back into Christmas.” Many who attend our Christmas Eve service doubt the whole story, but cannot bring themselves to admit it. Do their childhood  memories still haunt them?

Nor are the traditional “Christmas Pageants” sufficient to dispell the ghosts of Christmases past. Everyone expects the same drill telling the now familiar composite story: The Babe born in a manger in Bethlehem while angels sang overhead. Shepherds hastening from their pastures and three wise men arriving from the east carrying symbolic gifts.

Or was it that way? The narratives in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels cannot be pushed together without doing violence to both.

Of course, biblical scholars have long raised serious doubts about the whole legend of the Nativity. It is story but not history, they say. Two of the four Gospels, Mark and John, make no mention of it. In one of his letters written a decade or more before the earliest Gospel of Mark was composed, the Apostle Paul didn’t say anything except that Jesus “was born of woman” and “born under the law.” Paul knew Jesus’ brother, James, but said nothing more about his parents. He seems to have assumed that the birth was perfectly natural for any human being then or now.

Progressive views have tried to turn the Christmas story from doctrine to reality. Geza Vermes has written one of the best studies of the event in his The Nativity: History and Legend. (London, Penguin 2006). He presents the “virgin” birth as a totally human event in the life of the Mary. He suggests that she may have been a child bride who had not yet begun her menstrual cycles. So she was still a virgin in terms of Judaism of that day.

John Shelby Spong states unequivocally in his latest book, Re-Claiming The Bible In A Non-Religious World (HarperCollins and HarperOne, 2011): “While no reputable scholar today thinks of these stories as literal history, we do find some historical links in the stories that we can use for dating purposes.” He cites King Herod’s death as recorded in 4 BCE, so Jesus must have been born before that for his birth to have been historical. Contrary to his usual counsel against literalism, is that his attempt to make it history? He doesn’t mention that it was Saint Dionysius the Small who established the year 1 as Anno Domini. That wasn’t until 625 AD/CE.

For several hundred years after the Christian faith tradition began its spread from Palestine to Rome and beyond, the Church did not mark Christmas at all. It wasn’t an important feast on the Christian calendar. Now, like any other religious holiday in the present secular and multicultural age, it is becoming less and less important for most people.

The local congregation where I worship is waiting to see if the traditional three Christmas Eve service will be well attended this year. An online discussion about the beginning of Advent raised serious concerns about the discouraging downer of the scriptures read during the four Sundays of Advent before Christmas.

The question for all Christian churches is whether we change our liturgical celebrations of Advent and Christmas to match the advances of modern biblical scholarship or match the massive impact of commercialism.

And yet ….. A colleague writing the back page article in The United Church Observer for December 2011 has told us to “stop looking for theological loopholes and simply rejoice in the mind-exploding miracle of the birth of God in the very human child of Bethlehem.”

Isn’t that what Christmas is about?

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