Christmas Is Real

 Just as there are holy places, sites of pilgrimage imbued with the presence of an angel or a saint or special in some other way, so there are holy times and Christmas is among the holiest. Whether or not Jesus was actually born on December 25th is largely incidental. This is the time he is deemed to have been born. The proximity to the winter solstice when the sun appears to come back to life in the Northern hemisphere is important but that is not the whole story. The incarnation of the divine light in the world is the main reality and the solar phenomenon is but a reflection of that in the physical dimension. The spiritual always precedes the material, not the other way around as our benighted age generally assumes. The Incarnation was at a special time and it gave a special quality to that time by its very nature.

In the past the church understood the idea of holy times very well with her feasts and festivals, all celebrated liturgically and acting as focal points in the year, stations on a railway line one might almost say. But it is not just the association with an event in Christ's life that is significant here. There is a real quality of time involved, an extra abundance of spiritual presence. Other religions have their festivals too but I have the impression that these do not travel well despite the fact that we are now required to give them almost equal consideration. Maybe it takes time for time to acquire sacredness. That and the energy of human devotion. At any rate, in the Western world the time around Christmas has a special holiness which even the materialism of the present era has not been able to destroy.

Time and space are the vessels in which God creates. They are his pen and paper. I am not Catholic but my wife and children are and over Christmas I had the choice of either going to a service at Westminster Cathedral on Christmas Eve or to the local Catholic church on Christmas Day. I was told that the church you go to doesn't matter. What matters is celebrating mass. Fine-sounding words but in my opinion wrong. They remind me of a time I visited Downside Abbey, a beautiful Benedictine monastery in the Gothic revival style in Somerset. This was in the 1980s and an ugly modern building, a library, I think, had just been tacked onto the side of the abbey. "What a horror"(or words to that effect), I tactlessly said to the monk who was kindly showing us around. "Not at all," he rejoined "if you have spirituality in your heart the outer conditions are unimportant". He had quite misunderstood that beauty within requires outer beauty. That doesn't mean it should depend on outer beauty but nor should it treat the beautiful and the ugly as equal. That is an insult to God and a desecration of creation. I chose to go to Westminster Cathedral rather than the late 20th century concrete pile in my vicinity. In such surroundings the spirit is elevated rather than diminished and crushed.

All this to say that although God is present at all times and in all places, there are certain times and places when he is more present or when more of him is present. Christmas is one of the times he is most present because that is when he really did become present in the world.