“That type of thinking, among other things, sealed my cynicism and tampered down my interest in the Night. But it didn’t extinguish it. I didn’t know it couldn’t.“
On the canvas of that matchless Night, all of the history for the rest of the world’s time was drawn. However, as with so much of God’s story, we know what we need to know, not all we want to know.
I was raised in a home where faith was only discussed when it intersected with some specific literary or historical contribution, not for its eternal and transcendent offerings. We weren’t ever church-going, so what I knew of the most important transaction in human history – that Holy Night – I gleaned from the fields of public displays and odds and ends of storytelling from TV.
This meant, of course, I knew virtually nothing.
Somewhere around twelve years of age, my older brother introduced me to the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem, Christ Climbed Down, which confounded the tension I had intuitively felt between the Christmas story as I understood it and the public celebration of Christmas.
“Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees..”
(In my defense, of course, I didn’t know Mr. Ferlinghetti was a generation’s uber-hip “beat” poet and on the forward edge of post-world war anti-establishment radicalism!)
After that, I cast a wary eye on the Christmas season, suspecting so much of what I knew so little about.
I was quite the Mark Twain admirer in my teen years and finally drilled down to some of his lesser-known, controversial writings and found this:
“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing. “
That type of thinking, among other things, sealed my cynicism and tampered down my interest in the Night. But it didn’t extinguish it. I didn’t know it couldn’t.
I took Mr. Twain’s admonition seriously and began to dissect subjects of interest to me. I dug deep wells into Western thought, literature, and history, always asking, can this be trusted? Is it a documented fact or a meandering supposition?
Doing so, I became a philosophical conservative at the time many of my friends wanted to burn the country down. And yet, somewhere on the edge of my mind was that Night.
Over the years that were to come, I had head-on collisions occasionally with the modernist impulse to demean so much of the Christian faith as fanciful embroidery applied to myths over the centuries.
Some critics would report that much of the early biblical “events” were appropriated from other “religions” that had come and gone; others would scoff, presenting their list of contradictions and inconsistencies proving that the Bible, they thought, was inaccurate. Still, others would burrow in on what they would claim was the oral history of Scriptures, rendering them unreliable.
And, of course, there were plenty of moral revisionists who would fume that the Old Testament, especially, was filled with violence and misogyny. God was a terrorist—a bloodthirsty tyrant who hated women.
I remained agnostic on such claims, amused though in one way that the critics and scholars would spend so much time trying to debunk what they claimed they didn’t believe. Yet I was always mindful that the Marxists and socialists, as a political matter, demanded the destruction of faith, all faith, that challenges their religion of a human-made utopia, and deeply suspicious of the late twentieth-century enthusiasm to self-aggrandize one’s self with the fashionable vestments of “spiritualism” without the rigors of intellectual assent – promoting in essence that we could be our own God’s—a chilling thought.
With a young family of my own, I came to value Christmas, nonetheless, as a time for family and to love in an extravagantly worldly fashion. Yet, somewhere in my mind, Mr. Ferlinghetti’s laments and sarcasm would often mock me. Scorning my sentimentality and compliant submission.
Then, in one hour on one day, everything I thought I knew was blown to smithereens. I heard God’s story. It was no more complicated nor dramatic than that. I hadn’t even prepared myself for the moment. It came unexpectedly and without warning like a furious Derecho. I believed, and that was that.
A generation earlier, C.S. Lewis had written that he was traveling alone when the thought came to him that “of course,” the story of God and his redemption was all true. After years of intellectual doubt, one of the great intellects of the twentieth century took only a single statement to step into the obvious.
I possessed none of Mr. Lewis’ qualifications, but my conversion was as simple.
Now, many years later, I’m still overwhelmed by the Holy Night. The Night that changed everything.
A Baby came into the history of humanity who did not carry the paternal curse of Adam in his DNA; a Man left our history mutilated and crushed, rejected by His own. Yet, the world changed forever.
Everything about the Night contradicts our limited human imagination and what we think we know. The Love that moved that Night is beyond our reckoning. The mercy and grace offered by God’s rescue plan are so daring that they lie beyond our ability to grasp and comprehend.
On this Holy Night, God called His people to quench their thirst at the waterhole called Hope – an everlasting Hope. A Hope that transcends and overcomes. A Hope that promises – and a Hope that is accomplished.
We know so little of the facts of that Holy Night, yet we know so much about its results.
