On the defense of Father Christmas

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Hamlet to Horatio

Sir Ken Robinson once remarked that there are two types of people in this world: those who like to split people into two groups and those who don’t. I get his point. Along very simplistic lines there are two types of Christians in this world: those who embrace Harry Potter and the grandiose fantasy world that is his and those who view it, and importantly anything like it, with a deep, abiding suspicion. What I write now is hardly likely to change any of that but every year this time the same old suspicions are hauled out of the closet, dusted off and paraded before us in an attempt to generate some kind of response.

 One of these is the issue of Father Christmas.

The argument is basically this: let us stop allowing our children to believe in this jolly, fat hail-fellow-well-met who orbits the earth in an impossibly short period of time covering lounge floors with a ludicrous array of gifts. It is a lie so stop perpetuating it, is how the argument seems to go. Before I state my case I do want to confess that I am a Christmas romantic: I love the good cheer of the season, my hopeless yearly attempt at crafting a fit-for-consumption eggnog, my almost hysterical defence of how good eggnog can taste even though the egg is raw (and even though my wife who always ends up making it actually cooks the egg first), the Christmas movies we pull out and make our best, most long-suffering friends watch with us every year, (While You were Sleeping being top of the pile and no, if you did not enjoy it the first time around, it probably won’t be better on the thirteenth viewing). So I love the season. Generally I love it all the way up to Christmas Day which always strikes me as being like that movie which becomes the victim of far too much positive press leading to its release on the 25th.

 So yes, I’m a Christmas romantic. I also happen to think that Father Christmas has his place. Some of my most magical moments as a child were remembering Santa Claus coming by. I remember, living in Discovery on the West Rand, staring out my window and seeing the outside light and believing completely that this was absolutely Father Christmas visiting, saying my goodnights swiftly and making my way off to bed; I could not have been more charged with excitement and expectation. (And for some reason I failed to notice that the outside light was shining no brighter than it did the other 364 days of the year.)

Then one day I stopped believing. I don’t know when exactly but just one day it all became a little too far-fetched. Some children joked about it at school, slightly mocking those who still held to this lamest-of-all belief systems and I seem to remember nodding my head, furrowing my brow and agreeing in a moment that this probably was not true, though still hoping it would not influence my yearly haul of well-earned loot and so continued to kick a ball against the schoolyard fence. (I’m not actually sure I was doing that at the time but in all likelihood I was doing something with a spherical object, noting that about 90% of my waking hours was spent doing that or dreaming of doing that.) A friend’s son remarked, when speaking about the gentle awakening to the myth of Santa Claus, ‘That is the same time as you start receiving clothing for Christmas.’ Touche. The point is I believed and it was wonderful and then I didn’t and it was okay. And, it was natural. It happened in its good time.

 And come to think of it this comes to pass for everyone. I don’t know anybody my age still walking around believing in Santa Claus, no thirteen year old drawing mom aside saying, ‘You know I stopped believing a while ago, but who is going to break the news to dad?’

I see parents necessarily and continuously considering what it means to protect their children - Should I let my child do this? Should my teenager be allowed to do that? There is no single textbook that lays this stuff out and even in households I see parents handling things differently depending in equal measure on their own set of principles and on the nature of the child concerned – let’s be honest, homes with more than one child are not dissimilar to the Wild West and like those cowboys most parents are shuffling backwards and shooting from the hip a lot of the time. It’s messy and so is life and that is okay.

But while parents are trying to protect could I argue strongly that there is a part of a child that needs to be protected almost above everything else: that is, their rich inner world, their vast imagination that allows them to make something absolutely fantastical out of the smallest most mundane object – a piece of board becomes a ship at sea, a cut-out box becomes a space helmet; being a child means occupying that beautiful space where worlds are created and destroyed and re-made all in the space of a quiet afternoon. A place where the improbable becomes real and the impossible not even touching the outer limits of the conceivable. And yes, a chubby guy with a worryingly red nose can bring good cheer.

Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while 1imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Could it be that wisdom dispensed is as much about timing as it is about our supposed truth?

We need imagination. We need the dreamers. We need little people to remind us that it is okay to set aside our carefully crafted doctrinal positions, our often rickety life-philosophies that we as adults have been known to guard with greater stringency than we applied in forming them in the first place. That beyond all that is a world of possibility. The imagination can serve to remind us that all we do not know can be a rich source of life for us.

If this world is to become better it will take people who can dream of something better than what is around us, who will see the impossible being made possible and we need to protect the child-imagination for although the content of the dream can and will change the capacity to dream itself, well, to lose that would be devastating.

Like most of us I worry about our world. I worry about where we are going and the bankruptcy of vision in leaders all around. I believe though that new leaders, great leaders are already born, some of them are very young still but they are already singing songs and putting out milk and going to bed early and they will be dreaming of a world of possibility.

And we are all richer for it.

On dancing to that which you don't understand

Worship leaders at Emmaus. July 2014.

Ministry is filled with these moments of wondering how you got there – like, not in a million years, when I was in school or whatever, would I have conceived of standing in this place doing this thing.

So I found myself standing in a pulpit in Emmaus on Sunday morning getting my groove on - my beat dropped, so to speak.

When ‘us whites’ were training for the ministry we went through some of the embarrassing, egotistical nonsense that most people go through when they are forced to engage with something that they are not wishing to engage with. In this instance it was singing in an African language; we would all gather for morning worship and some person would strike up a Zulu/Xhosa/Sotho hymn or chorus and all the vernacular-speaking Africans would stand and begin to sway and groove and bend down and stand up and wiggle arms and point to the sky and then to the ground and then back to the sky and continued with what, to the untrained English ear, sounded like a drone; always somebody would be banging a hymnbook. Always there were loads of smiles and, if the song ran long enough, a lot of sweating.

You have to understand, this was a strange thing for us; most of us had not witnessed movement and song like this since our youth, when we formed a train and wove through the tables to Kylie’s ‘Do the Locomotion’ after a particularly rowdy wedding reception - this however, was the middle of the day, and these people were sober. (Not unlike Pentecost, come to think of it.)

Well, when English is your language (and the global lingua franca) and you don’t understand a word of what is going on, that just will not do. So some of us stood, still as statues, hands in pockets (if we stood at all) - a gentle, but not so subtle protest against this Godforsaken, unintelligible noise that presented itself as an assault against the senses.

You know, just as Jesus would have us do.

But then a strange thing began to happen: when I stopped protesting against the horrendous injustice of worship that was not in my style and in a language that I did not understand, (although the twenty three years under my belt in this country would suggest I had been afforded the time to learn) when I stopped all that, I kind of enjoyed what I was hearing and feeling.

There is something strange about this awkwardly big Irish body of mine: it loves a beat. I cannot be around a beat without at least one of my feet presenting itself as eager to be included in the rhythm. A foot starts bouncing, then the bottom half of the leg, then the upper half, then the hips then the torso – with a really good beat, the only part of my body I have control of is my head. Well, as much as I have control of this disproportionately large head of mine - and that's tenuous at best.

 

So on Sunday, while in the pulpit, my beat drops. The choir begins to sing Nkosi Yam. It starts gently enough, it always does, but then someone in the choir gets their groove on and begins to move forward, tiptoeing a little (you see, we’re only beginning to get our groove on). The choir then joins the move. Before you know it everyone is in on the act, moving forward to this central point and then out – waves of movement ebbing and flowing. Those who aren’t up front are thrusting hips backwards and forwards in the cheap seats.

And I’m in the pulpit, jiving. I think I look okay but I have seen video footage of myself dancing and so I know better.

But it stops me not at all.

Now this is the thing: I don’t understand a word of the song; they could be harmonising about the power of a particular washing detergent for all I know; I could be dancing along to a political anthem of a party not of my choosing and I’m doing it with glee on my face. (Like the time I was going nuts at a club in my early twenties to an awesome new song only to finally realise that I was the only guy getting ‘jiggy with it’ on a dance-floor full of women, and then realising the words to the song were, ‘It’s raining men’.)

But I’m trusting my church and its leaders.

What I have found is this: in worship, you don’t always have to know what is being said. You don’t always have to engage on a cognitive level. There is a scene in the movie While You Were Sleeping. The family are all enjoying Mass at Christmas. The old lady, Elsie, looking nonplussed and a little irritated, looks at the priest up front and remarks, ‘I like Mass better in Latin. It's nicer when you don't know what they're saying.’

Touché.

So I danced Sunday away and normally when repetition makes me want to lose the will to live I find myself thinking, ‘Yes I know, we’ve sung the chorus to Nkosi Yam forty seven times – and I haven’t got the words right yet - but let’s continue! We’re in touching distance of fifty!’

It’s bizarre to think of my attitude now compared to then. When I first worshipped in a traditionally black African church I watched these guys bending down, tiptoeing forward, and sometimes casting walking sticks to the heavens – a mass worship movement just a few wellingtons short of a full-on gumboot dance. I would look around incredulously, laughing to myself and thinking, ‘This is insane! Anybody else not noticing how ridiculous this looks?!’

Now I stand in the pulpit wishing the beat-bag was mine and longing for a whistle to blow. Bouncing around up and down and every now and then, by God’s good grace, actually matching the rhythmic swell of all the other worshippers around me.

You haven’t truly worshipped in this country until you have learned to love much of what you may never fully understand. For there is one thing this beautiful country will offer you over and over and over again and that is countless opportunities to simply let go.

On being profoundly profoundly deep

"And Jesus said unto a group of theologians, 'Who do you say that I am?'

And they replied, 'You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being,

the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationship.'

And Jesus said: 'What'?"

I love that story. Possibly because it is borderline inappropriate – after all no one likes their Jesus looking like he’s a little slow to catch on. But I like it because it reminds us not to over-egg the pudding with the gospel.

There is a strong argument for keeping things simple.

A number of years ago, when I was a young minister in this church, I remember being quite beguiled by one of the ministers who had a widely celebrated command of the English language and was seen by some as being a bit of a spiritual guru.

He had this knack of saying something with all the angst of the point of his message visibly displayed - he would bend over slightly, curl his hands and his body into himself, much like I would imagine someone imitating ‘pain of new birth’ in an interpretive dance routine. And his points were often full of angst, so he was often in this position and he used words that were difficult to define, hard to pin down – words that left me back in Grade Five wanting to put up my hand to ask, ‘What on earth do you mean?” but feeling like the village idiot in doing so, yet holding to this gnawing suspicion that perhaps I’m not the only one who carried on straight when the speaker took a left turn. So while mid-fold, in an agonising last ditch attempt to get this Herculean point across, he exclaimed, ‘”This is meaningfully, meaningfully deep.” Another minister, close to retirement age himself and thus less beguiled by the wisdom of the elder, who to him was simply a peer – Guru? Please! He’s just Jimmy from back in Seminary, we almost failed Greek together! He would’ve if he hadn’t copied my notes… – and someone very close to me, let out an harrumph and repeated that phrase ‘meaningfully, meaningfully deep’ with such disdain I half suspected that he might just spit it out on the floor next to him.

 

That got me thinking: what is the difference between ‘meaningfully, meaningfully deep’ and say, ‘deeply, deeply meaningful’ or, ‘meaningfully meaningful’ and ‘deeply deep’? I mean, when is it appropriate for the language police to haul your sorry butt off to a holding cell for citing deliberate obfuscation of a fairly simple point or rampant abuse of an innocent, unsuspecting adverb? (And should I be hauled off for using ‘obfuscation’ when say ‘confusion’ would do?)

Because sometimes we as ministers do this, we make things unnecessarily confusing. I once quoted Homer in a sermon, which was not that unusual considering Classical Civilisations was my major at University, but it was met with some confusion. After the service one congregant remarked that he had heard of Homer and Bart, heck even Marge, but was not aware any of them had contributed to some kind of epic story called The Odyssey or The Iliad. And come to think of it, if I was quoting Homer, why wasn’t my quote, you know, funnier? (In this same sermon I meandered through an illustration about Alexander the Great leading my father to remark, ‘Well son, good point, but did it need to be six minutes long?’ leading to a frustrated, ‘Well dad, if people are going to get to the crux of the point, they need a working knowledge of the reasons leading to the Siege of Halicarnassus. Duh.’) The sermon just after this I felt compelled to use the words omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent all in the same prayer – not completely sure, at that time, what any of those words really meant; yip, I’m a slow learner.

And maybe this too is a lesson to any preacher, actually any leader: just because it is interesting to you, does not make it interesting to everybody.

I think there is a balance here. On one hand the gospel is very simple, its truth a glistening, honest, beautiful thing whose simplicity and earthy truthfulness sparkles so enticingly that anyone, even a child, can get a grip on it. But then your journey begins and questions come and simple things segue into more complex things and answers become more questions, and black and white fade to grey; and importantly language is stretched and pulled to breaking point, and words are sent around swirling to give some form to this mystery.

For God is mystery and sometimes words fail us entirely.

I have this habit of remembering things other ministers say; well not everything they say as ministers are by-and-large a rather talkative lot - but insightful things, things that are offered sometimes off-the-cuff and hit me as so profoundly (profoundly?) true that immediately my cerebellum fuses and those words stick in my brain like gum to the bottom of a primary school desk, immovable.

One minister said, “You know, I don’t care for simplicity on this side of complexity that is nothing to me, but simplicity on the other side of complexity, that is a remarkable thing.” A remarkable thing indeed; only I’m not one hundred percent sure what he means.

So I’ll give a shot at what I think it means: I think you can sit with questions. I think you can wonder through the existential maze and sit with a book that insists you open the Dictionary.com window to help you navigate your way through, yet you can still hold to a faith that is beautiful and true, joyous and adventurous, illuminating and inspiring, and by all accounts, quite simple.

That faith that anyone can hold to, even a child.

In some ways I am nowhere near where I used to be. In other ways I love Jesus just as much as I always have, and for exactly the same reasons: Jesus gives my life meaning, Jesus has always given my life meaning, is just that my definition of what meaning is has changed.

This is probably a warning; I see it in religious people. I see it in myself. Sometimes our words, our theology, our immense learning, these can become red herrings, making ourselves seem more important than we are or constructing a purpose beyond what is necessary. So much of what we read in academic circles really falls into the category: who cares? You will find that category after: what do you mean? And right before: who thinks this stuff up? These are all sub-categories under the broader major category: Huh?

I speak this as a lover of learning and one deeply committed to furthering tertiary studies, but you can ask any student, one of our greatest fears nibbling at the back of our minds is that nobody will read this advanced thinking beyond ourselves and maybe some ageing professor in a backwater college with an egg stain from the forties on his tie and sporting a wicked comb-over. And of course, our Supervisor who is paid to read it.

Of course all this learning does have its use – academia makes us better thinkers and we are perilously short of those; it is fruitful. Of course. But just find application for it and simplicity beyond it.

At another retreat, as ministers were sharing, one minister spoke of that particular frustration any preacher feels; he had spent the whole week analysing, praying through and preparing a text for Sunday. Never before had a text been excavated to such depth. He stood to preach believing he had unearthed this wonderful truth only to look up and find one guy sitting in the front pew, as fast asleep as a child after a bed-time reading – snoring lightly, pleasant look on his face; so sound asleep was he that, had he been laid on his side, he could have been cut- and-pasted into a mattress commercial. Ask any preacher - that is about as soul-destroying as it can get.

And so it goes.

So, the next time you are sitting in church and the preacher (possibly me) is boring you to death and you’re losing the will to live and you’re on a very dry descent into Dullsville please just remember one thing: you worship a God who is wonderfully, wonderfully loving and who calls you in turn to be lovingly, lovingly wonderful.