OPINION:The commercial world has captured Christmas and we have to accept the church has lost it
MAYBE THE Christian churches should drop the word Christmas – just part with it. Maybe the time has come to recognise that its meaning can survive only by letting it go. Maybe believers have already lost the word anyway. It now belongs elsewhere.
Because Christmas is a word, it is a symbol, a meaning – creating reality. Every word creates a meaning in those who hear it. Something happens in the subconscious when any symbol, any word is used. This something is an experience that influences our thoughts and behaviour. The word Christmas generates an experience. The time has come for Christian leaders to ask themselves what this experience is – for churchgoers, and certainly for others now.
To confirm what I have suspected for a few years, I asked 10 of my friends – all baptised – to spontaneously complete this sentence: “When I think of Christmas I think of . . .”
The answers were: “days off”, “shopping”, “parties”, “presents”, “Santa for the kids”, “going home”, “a rest” and variations of these. From only one of them I got the word Jesus. By any measure all of these are morally good people and a few of them are churchgoers.
Once again this year, priests and pastors will speak about the original Christmas event and its meaning, stressing how it gets its origin from the birthday of a man called Jesus who for believers is God in human flesh.
Churchgoers will be exhorted to think about it, to experience it more deeply and to believe more fully in a God enfleshed for love of us. Their heads will bow in agreement as they hear the original meaning of the word Christmas once again. Perhaps most will do this even while they visualise their family celebration or already smell the turkey soon to be shared with friends. Perhaps the children too will listen even while they think of their presents. But outside these few moments, the churches have lost the word Christmas.
For the past few weeks, we have all been getting another experience of the word Christmas in every shop window, on our car radios or even from the beautiful robin-on-a-tree cards that come from our friends for whom the feast has other meanings. Advertisers have skilfully poured these other meanings over us too.
Since the Spanish invasions of their countries, the people of Latin America have celebrated Christian feast days as expressions of faith at some level.
Without any overt persecution of the church, one military government contributed greatly towards secularising 60 per cent Catholic Uruguay in about 10 years. The anti-church government did not try to change this directly. Their strategy was to rename the feasts. For instance, Holy Week became Tourist Week, Good Friday became Beach Day and Christmas Day became Family Day.
The secularising forces in Uruguay knew the power of symbolic words. They knew that all symbols generate and carry emotionally experienced meanings. They gradually changed people’s experience by changing words. Symbols evoke and motivate, and the use of new symbols changes experience.
Back to the word Christmas. Before and during Christmas time, we priests and pastors stress the etymology of the word – Christ’s name – in our preaching. We do this in the hope that the Christian experience is nurtured or generated in people’s experience. But it is only after Christmas church services that many people go about celebrating what the word Christmas primarily symbolises for them. The etymology of the word is not the issue; it is the experience.
Because of the frequency, skilfulness, associated imagery and intensity that now links the word Christmas with other meanings, it is worth asking what is happening after the preacher’s words any Sunday. The etymology of words has become irrelevant and ineffective in touching the subconscious with the desired meaning.
No matter how clearly the pulpit homily is delivered or how sincerely it is listened to, the church meaning of the word Christmas has lost or is losing its effectiveness for many. Information does not always lead to transformation. Nor does exhortation.
For communities of faith the time has come to rescue the true Christmas experience. It is now necessary and still possible to find an alternative in-house word for the feast and for use among believers.
We can accept we have lost the word – we can let the commercial world have it; it has earned it. And in fact we have no other choice.
Among ourselves we could use the term The Nativity – Natividadin Spanish, Natalein Italian – for use within the churches. Clergy could get used to saying "We are now approaching the feast of the Nativity" and "The Nativity is a beautiful feast" and "Our Nativity services will be at these times" and "The priests of the parish wish each of you a blessed and happy feast of the Nativity."
I felt some disappointment when a few of my closest believing friends sent me beautiful Santa Christmas cards. Words are powerful symbols over some of which we still have in-church control.
Just as the word Christmas now generates the thought of Santa Claus and of shopping sprees, nativity is also a meaning-loaded word. It can be an invitational faith-generating word for those who believe. And perhaps it can also invite unbelievers to ask just what it means.
Yet, even for churchgoers it is possible that merely recalling the event might blur the meaning of the event – God’s self-emptying and the Divine’s rejection of power, calling us and enabling us to live only by the power of powerless loving in selfless caring for one another.
Desmond O’Donnell is an Oblate priest and a registered psychologist. desomi@eircom.net