All In (Sing!)

So here we are at the doorstep of another Christmas. This is a time of year that tends to be drenched with an awful lot of hope and nostalgia and longing and kitschy expectation. The family will be together and the snow will be lightly falling and there will be candles and cheer and lights and the perfect present (always gratefully received) and funny movies and good food and hot chocolate and eggnog (or perhaps something stronger) and wistful smiles and everything will be magnificent. Christmas, perhaps like no other holiday, has a lot to live up to each year.

Unsurprisingly, Christmas also comes with no small amount of anxiety. There’s a good deal of pressure to engineer an experience worthy of our (impossible) expectations. This morning, I read an article by Andrew Potter who is evidently feeling the strain. He feels the magic of Christmas slipping away as his kids get older. “How many truly magical Christmases do you get with your kids?” he wonders. Maybe eight? Eight of anything isn’t all that many. Tick tock, tick tock. Milk that magic before it’s gone.

Potter is honest about all this:

I worry about Christmas, and try to make up for it with my own private rituals like making sure I’ve listened to enough music, baked enough shortbread, bought enough presents, cooked a big enough turkey. On Christmas Eve, long after everyone is asleep, I’ll lie down in the dark, put on some headphones, and listen to The Shepherd. But it’s not enough, of course. How could it be? The answer to the question of the meaning of Christmas can’t be found in this sort of stuff, no matter how much of it there is.

That word “enough” is a busy little word, isn’t it? In that paragraph and in our lives. We can never seem to do or be enough, despite our best efforts.

Potter describes himself as “a kid raised in the middle-class passive secularism of late 20th-century Canada.” He is unable to embrace the obvious religious response to all this anxiety about never being able to do enough to create the perfect Christmas or prevent it from slipping away. But he gets the appeal. He sees the void that demands to be filled. He’s even lingered around the edge of the religious themes of Christmas, if only of the safely aesthetic variety:

A few years ago we went to a Christmas concert at a church in Ottawa. The whole thing sounded incredible, but during “O Holy Night”, when the boys choir up behind us in the balcony rang out the high notes singing “Fall on your knees; O hear the angel voices” — if you’d asked me to convert right then and there, I may well have.

But of course, he can’t go “all-in” on religion. He’s not a fool, after all. He can appreciate the nice music and perhaps even cast a wistful glance toward those who still insist upon a deeper meaning to the season (or at least preserve the relics). But the article ends, predictably, with a rather uninspiring call remember our mortality, cherish the time we have, stop wasting time on trivial pursuits, etc. This is the only ultimate meaning we are able to wring out of Christmas in our post-Christian times.

My adult kids are long past the age where I am thinking of how to engineer wonder for them or to ensure that they have a “magical” season. I hope we gave them at least eight passable Christmases, but who knows. I’m less interested in magic than holiness, anyway. I am, to borrow Andrew Potter’s phrase, “all-in on the explicitly religious aspect of the season.”

A few nights ago, my kids accompanied me to the jail where I was preaching at the various Christmas services. They helped out with stuffing the treat bags for the inmates and joining the other volunteers in preparing the gym for the Christmas program. When the time came, volunteers could either stay in the gym and participate in the services with the inmates or go out on to the units to sing carols to those who weren’t allowed to leave their cells. I encouraged my kids to go out and sing. If nothing else they wouldn’t be stuck in the gym for three hours! They didn’t need a great deal of encouragement. They’ve heard enough of their dad’s sermons anyway. And so, they sang.

A few nights later, they joined our church as we went around to sing carols to those who were shut in or ill or lonely or who couldn’t get to church for whatever reason. Around the city we trudged, belting out the songs of the season to failing bodies and foggy minds, singing of an unreasonable hope, an irrepressible love, an impossible peace, a stubborn joy that exceeds all our misplaced expectations. We sang songs that are “all-in on the religious aspect of the season” because this is, in the end, what we desperately need, whether we realize it or not.

These were, for me, holy nights. Not because they lived up to my expectations but because they didn’t. My expectations aren’t often holy enough. I too often settle for whatever scraps of magic the season throws my way. Presents and lights and kitsch and chocolate are fine, but they pale in comparison to watching your kids sing the songs of the season to the lowly that need to be lifted up, the hungry who are desperate to be filled with good things.

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin and enter in;
be born in us today.