So here it is, two days before Christmas, birthday of Christ the Savior, etc., and I am feeling sorry for the Christian clergy, at least some of them.<\/p>\n
Along with Easter, this is their big religious holiday. The Incarnation of God\u2014in their theology. And they have to beg<\/em> people to put down the presents and turn off the flat-screen television and come to church.<\/p>\n “You don’t even have to get dressed up for the Savior of Humankind,” they cry. “You can come in your jammies!<\/a>”<\/p>\n Forget the “War on Christmas<\/a>,” that is a big concession right there. White flag, don’t shoot! We know the prezzies are more important, but can’t you just tie your bathrobe and come to church for a little while?<\/p>\n True, some of the Anglicans and Catholics and those Orthodox who observe December 25 <\/a>try a little harder. And a good Midnight Mass on December 24th appeals to the “imagistic” rather than the “doctrinal” mode of religiosity. You remember it with your body, with all your senses\u2014the darkness, the candles, the music, the physical presence of other worshipers.<\/p>\n (But the talky-talk Protestants and the “we don’t really commit to anything” Unitarians can’t go there.)<\/p>\n Or this<\/a>:<\/p>\n We have a 4:00 p.m. Pajama Mass on Christmas Eve. It\u2019s a service dedicated to and directed by children from the congregation and from the community. We have a very cool combination of the very elderly, who don\u2019t like to be out late, and the very young.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Because church is mainly for the very young and the very old?<\/p>\n The other thought haunting some Christians is the whole “Pagan customs at Christmas” issue. A reporter for a Christian news site interviewed me just the other day about that.<\/a><\/p>\n What I did not tell him was this: Your whole ritual calendar is a mess. If we contemporary Pagans know anything, it’s calendars.<\/p>\n Consider that if Jesus was born when shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by nigh<\/a>t, he was born during lambing season\u2014in the spring. His execution and resurrection also occur in the spring, during and after the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach)<\/a>\u2014and its history includes the Jews in Egypt daubing lambs’ blood on their doors. There is this whole sheep thing going on.<\/p>\n So to avoid the spring-spring clash, the birthday is moved to the winter solstice\u2014and I don’t care if the Christians copied Pagans or the other way around, really.<\/p>\n Mapping Jesus’ life on the annual cycle makes for an odd calendrical cycle. He is anticipated during Advent (late November-December), born at Christmas, shown forth at Epiphany <\/a>(Jan. 6 in the West), killed on Good Friday, and resurrected on Easter Sunday. Then he hangs around for forty days, only to vanish on Ascension. <\/a> After that, his disciples experience mystical illumination on Pentecost<\/a>\u2014celebrated a few days later.<\/p>\n And that is it\u2014nothing for the next six months except various saints’ days, etc.\u2014if you are in a liturgical church. For the talky-talk Protestants, there is not even that\u2014in fact, not much after Easter.<\/p>\n Even in my Christian boyhood this arrangement struck me as poor planning. Why cram all the good stuff into less than half of the year?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So here it is, two days before Christmas, birthday of Christ the Savior, etc., and I am feeling sorry for the Christian clergy, at least some of them. Along with Easter, this is their big religious holiday. The Incarnation of God\u2014in their theology. And they have to beg people to put down the presents and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24,43],"class_list":["post-3617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-yule"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-Wl","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4911,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4911","url_meta":{"origin":3617,"position":0},"title":"Revising the Story of Christmas","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"It is an article of faith (an appropriate word here) for contemporary Pagans that Christianity stole holidays left and right from our spiritual ancestors, particularly Christmas. Here Mollie Ziegler at Get Religion, a blog about the critical examination of religion-writing in the (mostly) American media, gets into some of the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Christianity\"","block_context":{"text":"Christianity","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=christianity"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7671,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7671","url_meta":{"origin":3617,"position":1},"title":"The Complicated History of Santa Claus and American Christmas","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 25, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Ah, Christmas traditions. So complicated, so misunderstood. Take Santa Claus, American version. Not a survival of colonial New Amsterdam except in a literary sense, he was pretty well invented by the prolific writer Washington Irving in the early 19th century. And he was connected with Dec. 6th, St. Nicholas' Day,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Yule\"","block_context":{"text":"Yule","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=yule"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3589,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3589","url_meta":{"origin":3617,"position":2},"title":"Should Paganized Yule Carols Be Encouraged?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 16, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Evangelical Christians are always swiping slogans and memes from media or popular culture and Christ-fying them. On the Baptist Church signboard that I pass on the way into Pueblo, I have seen \"Got Jesus?\"\u2014an obvious steal from the dairy industry's \"Got milk?\" campaign. Here are more examples of \"Christ-ification.\" (\"Got\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":595,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=595","url_meta":{"origin":3617,"position":3},"title":"The Demons Downtown","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 11, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The Colorado Springs Independent is out with its annual \"You're Sooo Colorado Springs\" round-up.To fulfill my obligation to be a religion blog, I'll list a few observations that readers from outside the \"Protestant Vatican\" might enjoy.You're sooo Colorado Springs if . . .10. You plan to meet friends for coffee\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Colorado\"","block_context":{"text":"Colorado","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=colorado"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":576,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=576","url_meta":{"origin":3617,"position":4},"title":"I still call them \"Christmas\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 14, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"I still call them \"Christmas cards\"When I was new to the Pagan movement, I was militant about saying \"Yule\" instead of \"Christmas.\" I managed to train one of my sisters to employ the same usage when speaking to me; the other one never really noticed.This year, we are enjoying this\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":339,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=339","url_meta":{"origin":3617,"position":5},"title":"Midnight (imagistic) Mass A few\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 25, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Midnight (imagistic) Mass A few nights ago, M. and I were sharing reminiscences of Christmases long past, including the experience of Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. It wasn't the content of the service that mattered, but the experience: the waiting all evening, driving to the church through quiet streets, the explosion\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3617"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3620,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3617\/revisions\/3620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}