Presence

The Simplicity of Christmas

There’s a tendency in all times to think that everything in the present day is more complicated than it was in previous times. Christmas is no exception to this, but anyone whose memory spans a complete generation or more will know that things truly are different about Christmas today. The arsonists in our midst who’ve been setting fire to nearly every aspect of our societal life that threatens their decades-long deconstruction project have had Christmas in their sights for decades, and the effect has been devastating. For an eloquent description of what was lost, I commend to you this thoughtful reflection. But be careful about whom you share it with, because a little Jewish girl’s fond memories of Christmas is one of those narrative-busting images that could land you in trouble these days if you’re not careful.

Most Christians, myself included, were happy to share Christmas with the larger world. And this for its own sake, not as some contrived evangelistic project, as our cynical detractors are fond of imagining to be the sole horizon of our inner life. Whatever you thought about the baby at the center of it all, there was much to enjoy. Most people took it as an occasion for genuine, even if superficial, expressions of good will and joy. It gave hearty sanction to that salutary human tendency to always look for reasons to celebrate. It even had its own aesthetic, complete with a special dispensation to be gaudy. For this holiday, for this season, the rules of proper decor were suspended.

With so much of what united us swept out of the way, we’ve come full circle. I cannot single-handedly recover the simplicity of a time when men were free to live and love, instructed by their own hearts and minds, and not constrained by the stern gaze of the censor. The restorative task congenial to my ability is to articulate a conceptual simplicity. Peel away the layers, from the sublime to the cheesy to the obnoxious, and you find that Christmas is about presence. Immanuel, God with us. The Ancient of Days coming into history as a little baby to show us that we need not fear his wrath. Even the awful fact that this baby has come to bear his wrath on our behalf is backgrounded for the moment, couched in statements of salvation and deliverance mercifully truncated as to the how and the where.

The idea of presence is on my mind in particular this year, and not merely in terms of God’s presence with us. He made billions of us because our presence with one another is intended to be a powerful echo of His presence in our midst. But the via negativa is often found to be our most prolific teacher, and presence makes its most powerful impression on us when it’s transmuted into absence. This is the first Christmas that I and my five siblings will spend without our parents. Our Mom passed away nearly three years ago, and our Dad was taken from us this past Spring. The absence of our parents is made more poignant still by another unprecedented circumstance. For the first time ever, I and my family will be unable to be with my siblings and their families at Christmas, due to an unavoidable circumstance.

This is, of course, not a unique situation. It’s an eternal feature of the human condition that the sufferings of absence are quite inseparable from the blessings of presence, and holidays often serve to amplify this reality. The connection between these polar opposites is not merely conventional or accidental, but something woven into the very fabric of our existence. What are our privations and sorrows after all, if not the shadows cast by the joys and unmistakable tastes of divine glory that come to us in the shape of things we touch and see and people we love, in a world filled with signposts to a better one?

Consider first what we learn from temporary separations. Absence does not diminish the reality of human bonds but rather serves to intensify our sense of them. The very solidity, centrality, and forever feeling of a family connection that make a separation hard are what actually make the separation not as big a change as it may seem to be at first. Proximity and interaction are important, of course. But these are inherently changeable features of a relationship, and they are the means by which a reality is established that, in a healthy relationship, does not change. As we’ve learned from the 2,000+ year conversation started by Plato, changeable things are by nature not as valuable as the things that don’t change. These unchanging truths are what matter to us most of all. Our experience of family may change, but the underlying reality of it is not of necessity diminished by this. If it changes at all, it is strengthened.

But what are we to say about this when faced with the finality of death? We cannot deny that there is a qualitative division between the two concepts of separation, which threatens to drain away every last drop of comparative relevance. For the Christian, however, this threat is illusory. I had a conversation with my father nine months ago that we both wondrously observed we would remember in Heaven. I stood beside the starkly solid reality of his casket a few weeks later and recounted that mutual assertion, still confident of its veracity, possessed of a conviction that trumps mere molecules.

Blessed be he who loves You, and his friend in You, and his enemy for You. For he alone loses none dear to him, who loves them in Him who cannot be lost.

-Augustine, Confessions Book IV

I’m well aware of how this assertion appears to non-Christians, and to be honest, probably to some Christians. I believe, however, that how I know this to be true and how I might lead someone to the same conviction are entirely different questions. My non-Christian friends will be happy to know that I’m not in this post concerned with the latter, though I do rest in the conviction that “wisdom is justified by all her children” (Lk 7:35).

The connection between presence and absence, however, is not only an assertion of religious faith but something of which theist and non-theist alike are sensible. We swim through time, unable to grasp the moments flowing by. Past and future are boundless in extent, and the present is but a point that vanishes into infinitesimal nothingness if we try to examine it. We thrive in a consciousness of the ever-flowing present, but this is, after all, an abstraction. Our was and is and will be are all aspects of one reality. All the moments we’ve shared with those now absent are not lost. They happened, and no one can change that. More than that, they live within us, as we have been so shaped by them that we carry them with us as part of our being.

This Christmas, if you're sorrowing over the absence of someone dear, I hope these thoughts can be helpful. And may they also enable you to dwell on the special blessing of the presence of those whom time has not yet parted from you.

And whatever you think about presence or absence, don't let the dividers have their way with your thoughts and words. We owe it to one another to say what’s in our hearts.

So to all my Christian and non-Christian friends, I say with warmth and heartfelt joy:

Merry Christmas!