Thursday, December 24, 2015
By Dr. Emily Heady
The excesses of Black Friday and the frenzy of the holiday shopping season have in recent years prompted a culture-wide dialogue about what, if anything, the spirit of commercialism and the spirit of Christmas have to do with one another. Voices are loud on both sides of the debate, and they do not necessarily fall along strictly ideological or religious lines. Christians both condemn the crass commercialism of the season and remind people that the magi brought gifts; atheists defend Christmas precisely because of its commercialismor they argue that the fact that we need the excuse of Christmas to go shopping is itself a problem for non-religious people everywhere. Christmas, it seems, may or may not be about Jesus, but it”s certainly about spending.
The seminal modern-day Christmas text, Charles Dickens” A Christmas Carol, framed this debateperhaps unwittinglyin 1843. For Dickens, Scrooge”s conversion was spiritualhe woke up a new man, “quite a baby” as he puts itbut he signals his conversion with economic activity: charitable gifts, the purchase of a large turkey, and forth. Dickens” text may be read as the first wholly acceptable secularization of the Christmas season, but Dickens is up to more than that, for his text draws attention to the connection between the inner spiritual life and its external, incarnate manifestations. Although Jesus Himself had no place to lay his head, He hardly shied away from talking about money. And if you look at someone”s expense log, you can know a lot about who that person is. Dickens knew this, and he gave us Scrooge as a reminder.
Part of what Scrooge”s spending buys for him on Christmas is access to the same sorts of heart-warming experiences that we collectively associate with Christmas. Even the most secular among us won”t deny the power of Christmas to choreograph feelings of togetherness, warmth, and good will to men. Charities know this: a 2012 Guidestar survey found that most charitable organizations receive the majority of their donations between October and December, due in part, surely, to approaching the end of the tax yearbut due as well to the collective sense that as the weather turns colder, hearts should turn warmer. This is the part of the Christmas season that we don”t talk about muchthough perhaps we should, for it provides a rich avenue for engaging the culture in a discussion about something more significant than the commercialism of Christmas.
The idea of a “warm heart” is itself a biblical concept. In Psalm 32, David finds that until he confesses his sin, his heart burns with a desire to speak the ugly truth about himself; Jeremiah also associates a burning heart with a need to speak God”s truth that he has bottled up inside. By the New Testament, the usage has shifted into a more positive register, as heart-burn comes to signify the presence of the Word within. As the disciples recount they experience of talking with Jesus on the Road to Emmaus, they ask, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” And this is John Wesley”s account of his moment of conversion: “In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther”s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
Dickens wrote five Christmas books during the 1840s; A Christmas Carol was the first, and The Haunted Man was the lastand The Haunted Man revolves more than any of the others around this question of what it means to have a warm heart, and what, precisely, that has to do with Christmas. The book”s protagonist, Redlaw, is an Oxbridge chemistry professor who has been nursing a broken heart for most of his adult life. The backstory is hazy, but we learn that Redlaw”s best friend married his dear sister, treated her poorly, then disappeared; meanwhile, the sister, his only consolation, died after having given birth to a son. A phantom appears to offer Redlaw a dealhe can forget his past suffering, but if he chooses that, he”ll also cause others to do the same. Redlaw takes the bait, and he is immediately horrified to find that with the erasure of memories of suffering, so also does he lose his ability to extend human kindness to othersand the others around him, usually so warm to each other, lose it as well. The only person unchanged by Redlaw is a street urchin who has, the narrator tells us, no memory of kindness or suffering at all; he is, for all practical purposes, an animal. Cold hearts indeed!
During this season of Christmas, we can take a lesson from Redlawor Dickens, ratheras we try to engage our culture more fully. Instead of throwing ourselves headlong into tired debates about the commercialism of Christmas, perhaps we could recontextualize one of the terms that”s so often invoked in this season: “heart-warming.” A heart-warming gift, Redlaw shows us, is one that acknowledges the past. Our hearts warm when we acknowledge our sin and feel the weight of our salvation; our hearts warm when Scriptures are opened afresh to us, and signs from long ago clearly point to Christ; our hearts warm when the suffering of the pastwhich we all have, and which we all carry more heavily during the holidayscan be seen as undergirding the spirit of fellow-feeling that is supposed, even for the atheists among us, to characterize Christmas. This Christmas, let us not buy ourselves into forgetful oblivion, but rather remember and embrace the grace that has brought us thus far.