December 12, 2004
Rev. Dr. Frank Carpenter,
D.Min.
St. John's Unitarian Universalist Church, Cincinnati, OH
Francis Church’s response to Virginia O’Hanlan has long been just the right thing to get me into the holiday spirit. The holidays are an escape; we rise above the hurly burly of the day to day. We hope for a time of wonder and awe. They reveal the power of fantasy more than any other time in our shared lives.
And the figure of Santa Claus is a revelation of the power of fantasy. To wonder if Santa Claus exists is to begin to wonder about the role of imagination in our lives. The denial of Santa’s existence is just a form of extremism, of fundamentalism, just like denouncing the Harry Potter novels as witchcraft. Denying Santa’s existence would be much the same as claiming that we shouldn’t call him Santa Claus but Saint Nicholas. Is Saint Nick his true name? Or Kris Kringle? The Dutch called this figure Sinterklauss. In 1823 in his History of New York, Washington Irving began this figure’s transformation into the Santa Claus of the well known poem, ‘Twas the Night before Christmas.” [LINK]
If a Santa Claus extremist were to deny that the same figure was Kris Kringle, how much more would a Claussian fundamentalist rant and roar about the suggestion that Santa Claus was really a woman. Yet the ancient legend of Befana may come closer to expressing the meaning of these days of wonder than the happy commercialism of Santa Claus.
Many centuries ago, King Herod decreed that the first born male child and each male child born in that year was to be slain. It was his desire to kill the child reported to have been born the new "King." Soldiers rampaged villages throughout the country murdering male children. One mother became so stricken with grief that she was unable to cry nor accept the loss of her son. She looked and looked around her house for her baby son. She became convinced that her child was not dead, but instead lost. She placed all her child’s belongings onto a tablecloth and bundled it at the end to carry it over her shoulder and set out searching from house to house for him.
To this young mother it seemed much time had passed as she searched yet, in only a few days, she came upon a child. Convinced that she had found her lost son, she placed the cloth sack containing all her son’s belongings at the base of the manger where the child laid. The young father gazed at the face of this stranger bearing gifts and wondered about the many years in this old woman’s past. Her face had many lines and her hair was fully grayed.
The child was Jesus and in gratitude to the "OLD" woman’s generosity, He gave the woman a wonderful blessing. One night a year for all eternity, the woman He named " La Befana" for "giver of gifts," would have all the children of the world as her own. On that night, she would be able to visit each one, bringing them clothing and toys. The night is January 5 each year and the morning of January 6, children all over Italy find their stockings filled with sweet curly candy for being very good or a dark piece of coal if they have been bad. During the night of La Befana’s visit, she is hosted by each family with a plate containing broccoli and spice sausage plus a small glass of wine.
In modern time, La Befana is only seen on rare occasions and indeed lives in the imaginations of small children.
All this talk about whether Santa Claus exists, who the true Santa really is, whether male or female, has its roots in the early days of Christianity. In those days, some years after the birth of the baby Jesus, there was a man who became known by the name, Paul. Paul first appears as a Jewish inquisitor stoning the heretical followers of this Jesus. Paul had a powerful vision and flipped over and became the most well known follower of the Jewish heretic from Nazareth. And he turned against many Jews
St. Paul’s radicalism was to claim that Jews, especially the followers of Jesus, no longer needed to eat kosher, no longer need to be circumcised. Instead of following the Law, said Paul, they should follow the new way revealed by Jesus to him, Paul: the way of faith. Not by good works are people saved, but by faith in the true god and the true message.
Ever since then, people have gotten into the passion of killing each other over their religion, because they no longer followed the law but, like Paul either risked their own deaths or killed others to prove they really, really, did believe what they were supposed to.
The concept of truth is almost alien in most religions. Judaism in not about believing certain percepts of faith, but about following certain practices: eating kosher, celebrating certain events such as the Passover, lighting Menorah candles each evening during this season. Christianity, Paul invented the idea of true faith, true belief.
One of my Professors in seminary, Bob Tapp, told of the time he was in India attending a conference. One day he was touring the city and saw one of the other lecturers at the conference coming out of a temple. He went up to him and asked,“ I thought you said you didn’t believe in god, in the Hindu gods.” The response,somewhat confused was,. “I don’t.” But why then, my professor want to know, did you attend the ritual in the temple? And the Hindu philosopher responded, “I needed it.”
For the Hindu lecturer, there is a difference as far as religion goes between truth, which philosophers get all tied up in, and meaning, what is meaningful for our lives. For us, I think this points to the double use of the word faith. On one level, faith means having a basic trust. You have faith in a person, you trust them. You have faith, you trust that things will work out okay if you do your best. But faith may also be conceptual: The Christian faith affirms that Jesus is the Christ, God. Two different meanings of the word faith, one emotional, the other intellectual. And I would suggest to you that when faith moves into the realm of determining true from false, as St. Paul tries to make it do, it has succumbed to its opposite, fantasy.
Fantasy is not all good. The holidays are a time of wonder, awe, indulging in fantasy. Fantasy, however, is powerful, 24/7 and it is powerful 365 days a year. We need to monitor how our fantasies get confused with what we think is going on. Often times someone may say something and we get defensive. And we respond to them out of our defensiveness. That defensiveness often means we have already started to block off some important information. Why, why do we become defensive? Often because of some ideas we developed in childhood we think apply at this moment. Rather than check out our fantasy about what is going on, we choke up.
This is a powerful process which can capture whole nations in its grasp. Bill Moyers reminds us of this in his recent acceptance speech of Harvard Medical School’s Global Environment Citizen Award. There he said:
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts. [LINK]
Fantasy is powerful in the land. Moyers goes on to talk about how our national environmental policy has been hijacked by Christian fundamentalist vision of the rapture and the end times.
The reality based point of view, unlike the faith-based point of view, is based on the facts. Nothing but the facts some would say. No one – excepting Joe Friday -- has stated this more clearly than the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in the most famous single statement of twentieth century philosophy:
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent
Can we only speak of the facts? The response to Wittgenstein was given long before he was born, indeed, long before St. Paul set up truth as the central fetish of religion. In the seventh century B.C.E. the great woman poet of Lesbos, Sappho simply wrote:
What cannot be said
Will get wept.
Another woman helps us understand why religion has gotten all confused about truth, about why talking about whether Santa Claus exists is such a big deal. Hannah Arendt suggest that our intellectual endeavors have become contorted because everywhere we are demanding “the kind of results and applying the kind of criteria for certainty and evidence that are the results and the criteria of” scientific endeavor. She urges us to consider that truth and meaning are different.
Religion, to paraphrase her, “...is not inspired by the quest for truth but the quest for meaning.” (THE LIFE OF THE MIND, page 15.)
Meaning? Truth? Is the legend of Befana, her search for her child, true? Is the story of her search for her child ... meaningful?
Which is the question which guides us in our daily lives? If we let go of wondering whether the story of Befana is true, what is realized is the power of fantasy: fantasy is guided by meaning. And indeed truth may be just a momentary coalescence in meaning, a brief hardening which only our tears can adequately acknowledge.
Was the child Befana found the Christ child? Let us for a moment understand that question as an expression of a friend’s quest for meaning in their lives. If we go off seeking the true Christ child, the really real historical Jesus, he disappears almost as vaporously as Kris Kringle.
Scholars have gone off looking at the New Testament and found only arguing congregations, bittering debating each other who is the Christ child.
One of the most popular expressions of this quest for the true Jesus is the fiction best seller, THE DA VINCI CODE. In all the various rants about it’s lack of Biblical basis, most criticism doesn’t point out that the major thesis is, as far as I can tell,about the eternal feminine. The novel tells the story of the suppression of the feminine in Christianity. Some find this too pagan an interpretation, but it is such a power fictional presentation, such a powerful fantasy, that it has caught the imagination of many. It’s lifting up the feminine is more powerful than just the suggestion that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen.
Even St. Paul was not as patriarchal, as anti-feminist as the chaste monks who came to define Christianity. St. Thomas fought against the various forms of worship of the Virgin Mary. His efforts were part of a long effort against the feminine by the masculine church. One of the ancient books not included in the final version of the New Testament was “The Acts of Paul and Thecla,” Thecla being a female disciple of Paul.
There was a time, a millennium and a half ago – when Thecla was a household name, at least in Christian households. Her following was huge. Pilgrims flocked to her shrines in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. Devotees committed their lives to her adoration. Revered as a model martyr and worshiped as a saint, in some parts of the Christian world, Thecla vied for centuries with Mary, the Mother of Jesus herself, as the most important person outside the Trinity. (B. D. Ehrman, LOST CHRISTIANITIES, 29 )
But who has heard of Thecla? Outside of a few scholars of the early church? Fantasy is powerful. It has guided the history of the Christian church, it drives our policies. But when properly honored, when at least we accept that we need not kill one other over whether Santa Claus is a member of the Trinity, fantasy fills us with wonder and owe. It is the root of our hope, and why we celebrate the holidays this darkest season of the year.
Was Jesus the Prince of Peace? How shall we answer this? Shall we answer out of our quest of meaning, our quest for peace? Is the answer to this question to be found in the noise from some mountain top? Or from the humble stirrings of the human heart?
The answer for me, comes out of hope, it emerges out of humanity’s moral imagination, it rises from the most simple of longings:
You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Fantasy is powerful in our lives. If we will recognize it for what it is, our quest for meaning, it will be a joyful servant. If we deny it entry, it is our imperious ruler.
Welcome joy, welcome wonder, welcome awe!
Happy Holidays!