Faerie Christmas

It seems as though I do love Christmas after all, as once again I have resurrected this page to talk about it.

Christmas has temporarily removed me from Scotland, and I was alarmed to find out, days after I left, that a Scottish minister, in the name of defending Christmas, has attacked pretty much all of my favourite things: The Scottish Church, Truth, Christianity, and Faerie Stories.


A ‘fairy tale’ gospel


In an article for the Scottish Herald, Rev Frater has, with the self confessed agenda of getting bums on seats, announced that he will be removing the miraculous elements of the nativity story  this year: “No more going home with fanciful, fairy tale assumptions destined to make Good News seem incredible.” People can't believe this stuff, so the time has come to remove ‘the truth from the tinsel’.

Aside from completely backing him about the tinsel – horrific, gaudy stuff that should be removed from truth, lies, and staircases alike, I think he's missed the point. I'm not sure which point. Possibly all of them. No pragmatist has ever got it so wrong:

The thing is, in so many ways, the Christmas story is absolutely a faerie tale. A persecuted people forlorn and without hope, under great oppression. A wingéd Angel appears to announce the arrival of a prince to rescue them. He is born to a young virgin and the stars interrupt their routine to point out his impending approach. The wise and noble travel to see him; the poor and humble abandon their flocks to honour him.
The evil King attacks but is unsuccessful.
The weary world rejoices.

Making the incredible credible


But, of course, it differs from your average faerie tale in a crucial way: it starts wrong. Every faerie story starts the same way, doesn't it? I don't really need to spell it out.
Once upon a time, in a far off land…

It starts at an unknown point in an unspecified place. Even this year's big faerie tale for many starts a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away – Star Wars is frustratingly impervious to historical criticism.

Not so with this, my favourite faerie story of all. The first chapter starts with “In the days of Herod, king of Judea”. So, a time and a place. The second chapter: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” An historical event plus detail to hold it up again. And, forgive me for being dull, but third chapter begins: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea…” I cut it short – that one goes on a bit.

All of that, of course, as far as the story is concerned, contains specificity to the point of tedium…but we must remember the ‘incredible’ story they surround… That unbelievable, fantastical faerie tale… bathed head to toe in historical truth.

The suggestion is that we ditch the miraculous, and tell only the believable bits of the nativity. The problem is, what will we write? Mark Twain, the author of Huckleberry Finn and other boyhood adventures of mine, travelled all around the British Empire, gathering for himself a trove of true adventures and sights. In his diary he recorded the difficulty of having his stories believed:

“Truth is stranger than fiction…” he wrote, “because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

The True Faerie stories


Before C.S. Lewis came to be a Christian, he stated his distrust for myth and fantasies to his friend John Tolkien: “myths are but lies breathed through silver”. Beautiful, but false. Intended and destined to deceive.


And, because this is how all people communicate, Tolkien responded by writing him a poem, in which, if you can't be bothered to read my excerpt, he demonstrates that legends, faerie stories and myths have always confronted men with deeper truths than their escapist reality:


Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things not found within recorded time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight
…
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have tuned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

Myth become fact


Of course, what I am not doing is saying that the gospel is a myth: Lewis was the leading literary scholar of his age and declared that there was no way that he could, as a professor, even suggest that the gospels were legends, simply because that was not the style in which they wrote. Instead, he says we must accept the gospel as both:

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact…To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

This ‘imaginative embrace’ is no liberal wooliness – it is the conjuring of the feelings that faerie stories bring us – the deep longing for things to be right again, the pangs against death, the stirring of the heart at acts of loyalty and sacrifice and, as ever the aspirational longing for the happy ending.


The End


In St Andrews, back in Scotland, Tolkien once gave a lecture on faerie stories. He said ‘the [gospel] has not abrogated legend, it has hallowed it – especially the happy ending’.
And right he was.

All this has just been to say that I'm definitely keeping the faerie tale in my Christmas story this year.


I didn't ruin Star Wars for you, but here’s a spoiler for the final ending of our magnificent faerie story. At the end of the Bible, we are told in the book of Revelation what will happen when things are concluded:


The prince returns. He kills the dragon and marries his bride. He lives with his people...
Faerie stories don't actually end properly, either, do they? They just kind of fade out.

…and they all lived happily ever after...
Merry Christmas.

The day Santa saved Christmas

This is my first post in six months, so I thought I'd ease back in with a seasonal story.

       Well, it's Christmas. (Notice, real life whos of whooville, that I'm writing that sentence in late December, not the very second that Guy Falkes has been reduced to ashes). And for those with a modicum of good taste and decorum, we are plunged into distress by the fact that the world is suddenly become gaudy: People's jumpers are interactive, tinsel is draped upon things sufficiently stationary to have tinsel draped upon them, and my barista is asking me if I want my coffee to taste of pumpkin (!?).

       This isn't a guest post by Ebenezer Scrooge (quite the opposite, if you read on). These objections are (just barely) my own. The ones I'm more likely to hear from others are along the lines of 'look how we've lost the true meaning of Christmas - it's all Santa and presents now.' Of course, this is mandatorily said in an ironic tone because it's such a cliche by now, but people don't mean it any the less.
       One I heard (genuinely!) the other day was "So, do you think it's a coincidence that 'Santa' is a perfect anagram (is there such a thing as an imperfect anagram?) for 'Satan'?"
(The  answer to that question, if you're wondering, is "Yes, yes I do think it's a coincidence - largely because J.K. Rowling didn't author reality - you need more than an etymology dictionary, GCSE latin and a proclivity to crosswording on Sundays in order to work out who real-life goodies and baddies are.")
       I digress.

Santa knows more about the true meaning of Christmas than you do

If you're over the age of eight, you may want to stop reading - I don't want to spoil anything for you.

Santa Claus is real.
      Of course, you know this - 'St. Nicholas' is the answer to one of the easy warm-up questions to the office 'pub-quiz' painstakingly put together by the most irritatingly keen person who works on the desk opposite you. But, of course, your annual reminder of dear St Nick is soon left in the dust as you are rightly distracted by being forced to contest being unfairly deducted points for saying 'kings' instead of 'wise men'... So it's probably fair to assume that you've never really dwelt on who he is.
      You know, at least, that he's a saint - but this hardly narrows a chap down - the word 'saint' covers all manner of... people. He could be anyone from a 12yr-old French King or an Apostle to a man who lived his whole life on top of a pole or an Anglo-Roman soldier who rescued princesses from dragons. (If you can name all four, then I suppose you must actually be the insufferable pub-quiz guy...and I apologise.)

     As you start to think about it, you could probably make an educated guess from the basic legend of Father Christmas that St Nick was a generous sort of chap, who jollily doled out presents to the poor and had a peculiar penchant for brandy - like a kind of tipsy combination of Robin Hood and Alan Carr.

We can get back to all that though - the best introduction to St Nicholas is at the theological council that met in Nicaea in the year 325.


    I just write stuff like that to sort the wheat from the chaff, so kudos for staying with me - St. Nicholas, or Santa, as we shall now call him, sat through this council (presumably in full red velvet and bobbled regalia) while a man named Arius stood up and began to tell everyone that Jesus was not fully God - he described Jesus as being the first creation of the Father, but of completely different 'substance'. Alarmingly, the majority of those present seemed willing to go along with this. This may sound dull, but this council would determine what the churches across the globe would be teaching for centuries to come (did God come down to man, or did God send someone whom he made?).

      Of course, poor Arius couldn't have known who was in the audience: Jesus's deity is crucial to the message of the incarnation, which is what we celebrate at Christmas...and that's kind of Santa's jam.
     Well, as you may well imagine, Father Christmas was enraged by this (this is all true). He leapt up and smacked Arius in the face (we've been left with a charming mural of the event):

     Santa was dragged off to spend a night in the cells, while Arius held the chamber. Yet, by morning, Emperor Constantine was compelled to have him released and re-present him to the council. Santa walked back in and presented the truth about Jesus. They were persuaded and Arius evicted (huzzah!).

     (I should add, at this point that even though this story is true, that's not why St. Nicholas became Santa... but nonetheless, it's pretty cool that he actually did save Christmas...)

Proportional response

"He's one of us, then!", you cry - he's a doctrine basher who's been mythologised by consumerism!

    Actually no - St. Nick did, we concede, spend some time behind bars for punching a heretic in the face...but let's apply proportion to two points:

i) This is the fourth century - any dealing with a heretic that didn't involve kindling was pretty tame...

ii) He only did it once.
     I know that sounds like a toddlers excuse, but what I mean is that for the rest of his life (both
     before and after this), he was known for backing up his teaching with outrageous generosity and
     love, rather than a closed fist.

     So, if we are to mimic him at this time of year (and we should - because he knows how to Christmas - he literally IS Santa), then we should imitate those proportions.

The seriousish bit 

     What, then, do we say the true meaning of Christmas is? Christ the Lord made himself utterly vulnerable, and, in complete humility, came to bring hope to the hopeless (us).

     D.T. Niles once wrote, in order to combat the assumption that Christians were militaristic doctrine bashers who wanted to foist their beliefs on people, that evangelism is nothing more than 'a beggar telling another beggar where to get free bread'.

      So, here is my Christmas message: if you do find a dangerous heretic waxing lyrical at an historic church council this Christmas, by all means sort him out.
     What's probably more likely, however, is that you come across beggars, both metaphorical and otherwise. What should be an implicit challenge here is for you not to know anyone who is lonely or hungry this Christmas (I know you have space at your table.)

But how about you try not to know anyone who doesn't know the truth about Christmas either?

     The world is hungry: religion marches through it armed to the teeth; no one trusts those in power; and so we claw over one another like scavengers, trying to get that promotion, or research grant or whatever more basic necessity.

     So, my corny Christmas suggestion is that we give people some good news - the humble God-King, borne and born in humility, come to give himself for us, that we might have rest... it'll do for a start.


It's not wrong to give and take presents. And Santa is a hero. (More good news!)

Merry Christmas.

For unto us a child is born,

Unto us a son is given,

And the government shall be upon his shoulder.

And His name will be called

Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God

Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace

In defence of looking into the darkness

This piece has been taken down to be published more fully elsewhere.

True Virtue

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by."

Greeks can't spell Hercules

Heracles, in the days of his youth, was walking along a path when he encountered a crossroads. At the entrance to one of the two paths stood Arete, the goddess of virtue and at the entrance to the other was Cacia, the goddess of vice.
Each tried to persuade the hero to endeavour down her path. Cacia offered first - if he would walk her path, he would have wealth and pleasure above and beyond imagination. Arete, though, offered a life of struggle followed by glory.

Heracles chose the path of virtue, and I'm sure disney has given you a fair indication of the type of struggle he had before, at the end of his struggle against Hades, being invited to join the gods on Mt. Olympus.

I hope you don't find all this boring.
So what's my point? My point is that we too have changed our perception of what virtue is. Arete stood for self-sacrifice, kindness, loyalty and everything in between.
But the greeks didn't enjoy the stories about her, (being a goddess of virtue, they tended more toward Little House on the Prairie than the Game of Thrones-style sex and bloody violence that people wanted.)  So they told very few stories about her and the goddess faded into a word - and the word meant virtue. In time, though, due to evolved usage from Homer, and the complicity of translators, it came to mean, not 'virtue', but 'effectiveness'.

Dull bit over. Promise.

Looking into the soul of a society

One can tell rather a lot about the values of a society by words that they change the meaning to. Colloquially, the use of the word 'gay' as a generic insult in the 90's was indicative of the prevalent homophobia that still existed. Similarly, the term husband, for the german-language fans out there, is a genderless term for house(hus) owner(bunda), demonstrative of a patriarchal society - the male spouse must, of course, be the homeowner!

Liberal point-scoring over, my point is that we have overseen a change to what we perceive 'virtue' to be: We regard things as 'virtues' which are completely alien to character and simple accidents of nature.

Not being different

Yet these things are demonstrably key factors in the choosing of our Christian leaders. Charisma, ambition, 'magnetic-personality' - these are the words I hear as future leaders are being considered. Most obvious, I suppose, would be the special regard to intelligence. In reference to character, to comment on a man's intelligence is about as profound as calling him tall.

Don't get me wrong, just as height and strength once made leaders into talismans as we marched into battle, so do charm and intelligence make our pastors into figureheads.
But those battle-leaders were as equipped to wreak havoc as they were to pursue and instil justice.

Quite simply, we shouldn't be looking for figureheads. We need True, humble leaders. And, of course, from that pool of men and women will rise some greats. The fruit will always be of the same DNA as the root.
The Church is no longer distinctive in this regard. We value the same things that the world does.
Leadership is not a virtue, it is a function. A vital function at that - so much so that one in possession of such a gift might be tempted to say to the hand 'I have no need of you'.

To delve into cliche, I wonder which of us would have picked Moses the stammerer as our voice to the most powerful man on earth.
Is it with resignation that we say that Man looks on the outside, but God looks on the heart? That's not God gloating that he has x-ray vision - it's a clear imperative on how we are to choose those who will lead us under God!

No pragmatists here, please

When the Church is weak, as it could be well-argued to be in the UK right now, we are tempted to excuse pragmatism: to, for the sake of the gospel ask fewer questions pertaining to character and holiness of our leaders. We instead look purely for those who can get things done. Who can speak with fluidity and charm. Who are good at networking and have the charisma to draw people in.

None of these are bad things. But none of these are virtues in and of themselves.
Nor are they requirements of leaders.

Ironically, it's the connection with Heracles that I believe led the evolution of the word to be regarding (and I quote) 'manly qualities' and, in time, 'excellence, of any kind'. Paul instructs us to meditate upon ἀρετὴ (arete) - perhaps etymology is not quite what he had in mind, but as a well-Hellenised man, I am mostly certain that he meant 'virtue', rather than 'being good at manly stuff'.
I'd sooner follow a good man than a smart one. This shouldn't even be a dilemma for the Christian. Our victory is assured... all that remains is the manner in which we live, what to do with the time given to us, and whether we will appoint generals of the same calibre as our king.

I have far more to say on this - some of which is in this old post.

Zack Eswine has learned this lesson the hard way and says this:

"To desire to be an overseer is marvellous thing. Aspire to greatness in it! Aspire to frequent the unknown, to bless the unnamed, to lose your fame and your reputation among the influential, in order to take a stand against appearance-making as a way of life and ministry. The woods await you… he will meet you there. Jesus, the famous one." (I've told you to read this book before. Please do)

So here you stand at the crossroads - take off the lumbering armour of your status and ambition, for the road is long.
Load your sling with pebbles. There's a lot of work to be done.