Essay

Christmas culture

Creed

13 December 2023

6 min read

The deep changes Christmas drives

From Longfellow’s deep peals of the bells, to Dickens’ Scrooge, to the miracle of No Man’s Land becoming common ground, conversions begins with Christmas.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A abstract image of red people-like shapes against a red background

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

It was 1914, Christmas on the Western Front. Here, from trenches scarring the Belgian countryside, echoed not the sound of war, but carols—the song of soldiers, bold, vibrant, and clear.

Not every sector heard the sound. But Ernie Williams, of the 6th Battalion Cheshire Regiment, did. Across his sector, he heard a chorus of German carols converge with English. Even more miraculous: both sides emerged into No Man’s Land, shaking hands, taking pictures, exchanging gifts—enemies who, just hours earlier, were trading hot lead, now kicking a football back and forth.

The miraculous ceasefire was, at the time, both a media spectacle and a propaganda nightmare. The Daily Mirror published private letters from the front with details for a captivated public. The military high commands from both Christian nations worked to censor the story. The images of enemies together contradicted propaganda carefully crafted to demonise one other.

The men prosecuting the war from desks believed this epidemic of goodwill could extinguish fighting spirit. But they could never deny that at the front, one sector of No Man’s Land had been converted into common ground. Enemies met as converted men, if only for a moment—converted to a wider way of seeing and being, alive with possibilities for peace.

For a moment, enemies became what they really were, brothers—in defiance of their own Christian nations. This is, for us, a clear line of sight into the marked difference between the Spirit of Christ and the semblance that is Christendom. A Christmas conversion if there ever was one.

Scrooge has always pointed modern people towards Christmas conversion and its deeper economy, away from the business of bottom line towards brotherhood.

But this conversion on No Man’s Land makes the “Believe!” sign hung atop Macy’s Department Store in New York City seem shallow. The M&S Christmas advert, trite. Yet these are the conversions we know, the ones we experience year and year, season after season, without much consent or choice. It’s a manufactured conversion, not towards the brotherhood of humanity, but to the bottom line. Our coffee cups, converted from drab white to ruby red. Commercial jingles add sleigh bells. In all kinds of ways, daily life converts us towards a season of consumption called Christmas.

But who denies this? I’m stating the obvious: capitalism, materialism, consumerism. Every -ism a shoddy container of Christmas Spirit. We know this truth. We make it the moral of our stories. We’re moderns after all.

Grateful as ever to the Dickens, our benefactor of Christmas. Scrooge has always pointed modern people towards Christmas conversion and its deeper economy, away from the business of bottom line towards brotherhood. This deeper economy of concrete choice and the reality of conversion came straight from the mouth of Marley’s ghost, framed by an epiphany of regret:

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

The gap between knowledge and wisdom, theory and experience, is widest at this point. We thrill ourselves to watch Scrooge find that “everything could yield him pleasure”—like the Christmas morning churches with bells “ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!” But is this our conversion?

If we’re honest, perhaps the bells of churches don’t always resound in our ears with hope, glad tidings, and peace. Our eyes and ears are on Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Myanmar, on a world teetering, careening, towards another Christmas of contradiction—songs of peace on earth in a world at war with itself. In this chaos, church bells—if they’re heard at all— can be heard as a mockery of suffering, a maligning of the oppressed, a fanciful hope in a violent world.

It’s what Longfellow heard, an American contemporary of Dickens, during the American Civil War. Longfellow wrote the poem that would become a classic carol, 'I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day' in 1863, at the fever pitch of the war. At the time, a war that was only magnifying personal tragedy and crisis. He was both grieving the death of his wife while trapped in an excruciating period of waiting, to learn whether his wounded son, an officer in the Union, would live or die.

As he wrote, Longfellow found in himself the reality that disillusionment had given way to despair,

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

We talk of Scrooge being damned at Christmas, less so of disillusionment and despair. But even so, despair rises like a tide in us. A cynicism confused with honesty, drawn out by the gravity of seemingly unrestrained cycles of violence, chaos, and evil.

Whether we be damned or despairing, we need conversion. And it’s here where we meet that truly decisive question: converted to what exactly? What draws us up out of damnation or despair? What sort of conversion turns No Man’s Land into common ground, enemies into a carolling chorus of converted men?

We see a glimmer as Longfellow goes on,

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

From the deep peals of the bells, to the new man Scrooge, to the miracle of No Man’s Land becoming common ground, these are a fragmentary glimpse into the conversion that begins with Christmas but also outlasts it. It is the mystery and meaning and majesty at the heart of everything, incarnation: God With Us.

God’s solidarity with the weak is revealed in his becoming weak. His identifying with us as the demonstration of his love for us. His rejection by us never canceling out his love and its endless desire for reconciliation with us. These endless dimensions of incarnation, of an intrusion that startles the status quo, elicits nothing short of conversion.

Conversion is the only way to see and savour Christmas. A change marked by an expansive opening of wider vistas, a new way of seeing and living, the ushering in of new possibilities, of shattering the fatalities and necessities that claim to define and determine our lives, that keep us from changing since “that’s just the way things are.”

All this from a Jewish baby—not a precept, proposition, or program, but a person—born under the rule of Herod and Augustus, a person in whom our hopes and fears in our waitings and longings collides. He forever tells the truth that it is not the high command of Christian nations or the glitz of luxury that builds common ground, but the weakness of God, a God in a cradle in the world that is no man’s land. This person is the mystery and meaning and majesty that creates the common ground where enemies are made brothers, the person in whom God and man commune with peace on earth, good will to men.

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Creed

Death & life

19 November 2024

5 min read

“Shortening death” sidesteps the real battle

We need to do more than protest bad deaths, we need to protest death itself, it's more than biological.

Tom Dove

Tom is a physician and completing a theology doctorate.

A hand drapes over the side of an object out of shot.

Michael Schaffler on Unsplash.

What is “death”? It’s surprising the term has received little attention in the assisted dying discussion so far, because more hangs on the answer than one might expect. At a press briefing, Kim Leadbeater MP stated that the assisted dying bill she is proposing is about “shortening death, not ending life.”

But what meaning does “death” have here?

The current bill defines neither “death” nor “dying.” Granted, it implies a biological definition. The bill speaks of administering approved substances to “cause that person’s death” and of capacity and decision-making around “ending life.” These fit the understanding of death with which the medical profession operates—death is the point in time when the combined functions required for human life cease. It is a one-time event, the end of physiology, and so is recognised by a combination of physical signs.

Death, then, is a diagnosis.

So, too, “dying”—though here the waters are murkier. Setting aside sudden deaths, medical talk of dying takes us out of binary territory. Dying speaks of a process, of the “terminal phase.” Within medicine a diagnosis of dying heralds the expectation that a person’s death will occur within hours or days. And so, the focus shifts. The task of care is no longer the coordinated work of investigation, preserving life, and treating symptoms. Now attention is on bringing relief to the process of dying.

The bill seems wise to much of this. Though definitions of death and dying are absent, the bill does define terminal illness—“an inevitably progressive condition which cannot be reversed by treatment” and from which the event of death “can reasonably be expected within 6 months.” And so, it clearly distinguishes terminal illness from biological death and, implicitly, from dying.

Of course, terminal illness and biological death are related. Terminal illness is irreversible, and where terminal illness leads is death. Or, you might say, it leads to the end of life. Apart from the timescale of six months, the same may be said of ageing: ageing is irreversible, and where ageing leads is death. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment was puzzling to me. I suspect what she really meant was “shortening terminal illness.” If so, this is confusing because, within the framework of the bill, “shortening terminal illness” and “ending life” are identical. It seems she was getting at something else.

“It seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.”

Stanley Hauerwas

I suspect Kim Leadbeater was echoing a conviction at home in the Christian faith. That is, try as we might to keep death at a distance and restrict it to a faraway frontier, the life of human beings involves death. I don’t simply mean the biological death we witness—the deaths of friends, relatives, or even strangers. I mean death intrudes upon the way we experience life. Death is more than simply biological.

The fear of death belongs in this category. For some, the impending loss of relationships and joys casts a shadow over life, giving birth to apprehension. Death is not simply a factual matter but something that exerts power and influence. Or take disease and illness. Built into the notion of terminal illness is the idea that the sickness borne by a human body will ultimately bring about that body’s death. That body already speaks of its death. Death is making itself felt in advance.

And so, death is more than a biological event. Even living things can bear the marks of death.

This is no novel claim. The creation account recorded in the Bible says that in the beginning, there was good. But an intruder appears. In the wake of humanity’s choice to go its own way rather than the way of its Maker, death arrives on the scene. And death is an imposter—not simply a physiological fact at the end of the road, but a destructive and alien presence in God’s good world.

Understood in this way, death is not something that God intends humans simply submit to. Death is something to protest. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment gets at something important: this kind of death should be protested. The marks of death should not be accommodated, because they do not belong to the goodness of what God has made.

At the heart of the Christian faith is God’s own ultimate protest against the force of death. Christians celebrate that God himself came in the man Jesus to “destroy death.” This is plainly more than biological. Jesus came to free humanity from the entirety of death’s grip. Hence why, when Jesus speaks of “eternal life” he means more than endless biological existence. He means liberation from all the havoc that death brings to bear within God’s world. To the Christian imagination, the power of death must be protested because God protested it first.

The question is how to protest death. Within the framework of the bill, shortening death or terminal illness is identical with ending life. This is the only form protesting death can take.

But the Christian faith makes a far more radical claim: God alone overcame death by dying. This is the point: Jesus was the one—the only one—who emerged resurrected victor in the contest with the power of death. In seeing his death and resurrection, an unshakeable hope emerges. Death is not the victor. And this hope stands above our present experience of death—in whatever form—and, at the same time, calls us to join the protest.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas once wrote: “it seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.” I have deliberately avoided discussing suffering, not least because it would take me too far afield. Yet Hauerwas has put his finger on what I’m getting at. Protesting death—in the big sense—belongs to the Christian faith. Protesting suffering and pain, economic and racial injustice, fractured relationships and broken societies, are all part of this protest. But can eliminating those who live within the shadow of death be part of this protest? I think not. The Christian faith believes there is only one who can overcome death in this way, and that is God himself—who has already done it.