Image Courtesy: wikipedia.org
Years ago when my daughter was young and, courtesy my wife and I, found herself with two religious backgrounds in her cultural memory, I tried to demystify things so she’d see a bigger horizon.
I told her that all religious celebrations ought to done lighting a single but very beautiful candle. Those sitting around this candle must watch the flame shivering and dancing to their collective breathing, which was an important collective energy they brought with them. Those watching the flame burning would sit there silently dreaming of a better world where no one would ever have to go to sleep hungry. They would think of what this meant for their own good until the candle melted down into nothingness.
In that world that they would dream up, there would be place for everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs. There would be much happier people but also a far happier Earth, because the forests and hills and rivers and the creatures that inhabit it would be accorded the same respect as given to well-to-do human beings.
Dreaming, whether in the day time or at night has never unfortunately been made a part of ritual and religious practice, so this suggestion will probably be laughed at and ridiculed.
It will be hurled into the present, where alas, all celebration and the festivity accompanying it, seems to have been taken over by ‘market forces’. Such celebration and festivity is there for a person’s birth and marriage, and of course, in a far more organized fashion, on specially appointed dates in all our religions considered auspicious for a variety of reasons. It is easy to see this bursting at the seams in a big fat wedding in New Delhi, much more difficult in a church or cathedral.
In any case, is it fair to suggest that all such festivity and celebration has been taken over by business interests rather than, shall we say, for theological reasons?
Probably, but I’ll leave speculation on this to come from those like me, who have retired from their respective religious beliefs. For me, I’m afraid, Christmas and New Year celebrations are just another reason to ‘shop, eat and celebrate’. There’s no star over Bethlehem or any other place. There’s a huge billboard, with a fat, red-faced Father Christmas carrying a sack full of goodies announcing bargains.
Every single feature section of a newspaper, or glossy magazine, is either giving out recipes, or telling you which swanky restaurant is serving roast turkey and cranberry sauce. You pass shops with almost grotesque scenes of the nativity standing next to fake Christmas trees decorated with blinking lights and fake snow, and fibre glass rocks painted the wrong colour holding up a plasma TV or whatever. Everywhere seems to be an enhanced, market-induced merriment.
Even the roads have fallen to this marketing spell. Car and bike sales are up. When the chill sets in on an evening, children in half torn clothes and grubby feet join their migrant parents at the traffic lights, wearing caps that have fake reindeer horns made in China, while they shiver and wipe snot from their noses. The caps are bought, many of them. Laughing every time they make a sale, the children run with the notes to their mother, who tucks it in her blouse. After they do this in the cold for two hours, crossing the road from one side to the other, the family goes to a wada-pao stall. The children get one each, and share a glass of tea. The parents share one, but have a glass of tea each. Then they’re back on the road.
It's all very bizarre. It’s like everyone just wished away the glaring existence of the poor.
I come from a generation that genuinely believed that by 1978 we’d do away with poverty, or come very close to doing so. Today, as the parties pass midnight, as Honey Singh blares from the speakers, poverty is just collateral damage. The party must go on…
And not as if the celebration of Christmas itself is not riddled in controversy. Someone recently shared with me a mail sent out by a history teacher to one of his students who sent him a mail about what Christmas meant. As her message to me read: “The Vatican archives are now open and the history of the Catholic Church, never glorious, is now openly seen to be a viciously devastatingly visceral one, particularly against Jews”.
The history teacher’s mail bears repeating in full, which I will do without the list of detailed footnotes that followed it:
“Permit me to differ. And to try and leave the past behind.
“As is now fairly well-accepted, Christmas was not "originally… a Christian religious holiday" at all. December 25th was the last day of the Roman festival of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum notes “In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Saviour’s birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been.”
So let us celebrate Christmas by all means, but for the right reasons. Let us celebrate the march of civility, gentleness, and the revival of the idea of a shared humanity two centuries ago.
"The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern carolling)". (Judaism Online.) Because of these free-spirited qualities the Puritans even banned its observance in the American colonies (1659-1681).[i] It was only domesticated into a family festival in the Victorian period (just as St. Nick was domesticated).
“Your message, in the spirit of modern theological ecumenicism, also tries to portray Christmas as a time of joint Christian-Jewish celebration. Nothing could have been further from the truth for most of history. Well into the 20th century, it was a time of dread for the Jewish minority in Europe, because it was a time for Christian anti-Semites to run riot, accusing Jews of having killed Christ.
“As part of the Saturnalia carnival throughout the 18th and 19th centuries CE, rabbis of the ghetto in Rome were forced to wear clownish outfits and march through the city streets to the jeers of the crowd, pelted by a variety of missiles. When the Jewish community of Rome sent a petition in 1836 to Pope Gregory XVI, begging him to stop the annual Saturnalia abuse of the Jewish community, he responded, “It is not opportune to make any innovation."
“On December 25, 1881, Christian leaders whipped the Polish masses into anti-Semitic frenzies that led to riots across the country. In Warsaw 12 Jews were brutally murdered, huge numbers maimed, and many Jewish women were raped."
“Nor were these Christian mobs spontaneous; they were often Church-organised.
Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, “Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome’s taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily.” Thankfully such days are behind us.
“So let us celebrate Christmas by all means, but for the right reasons. Let us celebrate the march of civility, gentleness, and the revival of the idea of a shared humanity two centuries ago. Let us celebrate the (recent and easily reversible) march of tolerance, rationality, empathy and non-violence in many parts of the world, made possible by the processes of secularisation and religious scepticism unleashed (in the West, parts of the East already had much of this) by the Enlightenment. Let us celebrate this recent freedom to believe differently, or not believe. It was a battle fought by men and women who were often forced sacrifice their lives, and often also died in great pain.
“Let us honour, this Christmas, those — all those — who sacrificed their lives so that we could be free.”
And in any case, while they suffered in the past, many Jews in Israel today, may have forgotten even infamies committed on them more recently, within their own living memory.
‘Silent Night’ takes on a dark meaning in Bethlehem, birthplace of Christ. The occupation of Palestine has never stopped. Violence is a fact of life. A recent article I read says that Bethlehem is home to misery.
“Three refugee camps that were meant to be only temporary, 25-per-cent unemployment, lands constantly confiscated for the expansion of illegal Israeli settler-colonies, the Wall cutting the landscape and people from each other – can hardly be expected to host a happy party and tell exciting stories…Christmas celebrations this year in Bethlehem are scaled down out of respect for the shuhada[martyrs] – more than 120 Palestinians killed by the Israeli army since the beginning of October; out of respect for their families as well as the injured, the imprisoned, and the shuhada of the future”.
Christmas is a time for giving gifts. Mine, this Christmas has been the beautiful novella, ‘The Testament of Mary’ by the brilliant Irish writer, Colm Toibin. As one reviewer, wrote of the book: “With deceptively modest prose. Toibin presents the Virgin Mary’s story as one of human loss rather than salvation. By doing so he gives us a Mary to identify with rather than venerate”.
One should at least be happy that the Christian right wing in this country has not yet termed this book blasphemous and had it shredded. But who knows, by next Christmas, the book may not be there.
Here’s an extract that brings this Christmas and New Year essay full circle:
‘He was the Son of God,’ the man said, ‘and he was sent by his father to redeem the world.’
‘By his death, he gave us life,’ the other said. ‘By his death, he redeemed the world.’
I turned towards them then and whatever it was in the expression on my face, the rage against them, the grief, the fear, they both looked up at me alarmed and one of them began to move towards me to stop me saying what it was I now wanted to say. I edged back from them and stood in the corner. I whispered it at first and then I said it louder, and as he moved away from me and almost cowered in the corner I whispered it again, slowly, carefully, giving it all my breath, all my life, the little that is left in me.
‘I was there,’ I said. ‘I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.’
The writer has a background in theatre, education and journalism. He is the author of "Eat Dust: Mining and Greed in Goa", Harper Litmus, imprint of Harper Collins publishers.
References of Books referred to by the author:
The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum
The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín