Dear Friends,
Advent is the season during which we prepare ourselves for Christmas, and for most of us Advent is a season of happy expectation because for most of us Christmas is a celebration that brings with it tidings of comfort and joy while visions of sugar plums dance in our heads. But not everyone is so filled with giddy happiness at Christmas. For a significant portion of the American population, Christmas is a time of sadness, disappointment, stress, and depression, and it can be hard for churches to make room for and to give voice to those whose experience of Christmas is less than joyful.
Two years ago I came across a Christmas sermon by Robert Louis Stevenson, which remains one of my favorite essays by a man who has a well-deserved reputation as a novelist, but who is, I think, underappreciated as a moral philosopher. Stevenson’s Christmas Sermon is interesting because in it he looks at Christmas not so much as a celebration of Jesus’ birth but as a season at the end of the year, during the darkest days of Winter, when it’s impossible not to contemplate one’s mortality and to consider what it means to live well. As such, in the sermon, Stevenson gives voice to those for whom Christmas is less than joyful, and in doing so he finds spiritual richness in Christmas’ shadow.
This isn’t to say that Stevenson’s thoughts on Christmas are entirely gloomy. In fact, after providing a fairly solid critique of the prudishness of Victorian morality, Stevenson writes,
Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
He then follows his admonition to gentleness and cheerfulness with a strong call to social action:
“But the truth of [Jesus] teaching would seem to be this: in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that we are to give away to the man who has taken our cloak. But when another’s face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceivable and surely not desirable.”
Yet undergirding all of this is a solid (dare I say Scottish Presbyterian) familiarity with human frailty.
To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner–call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
This is not the stuff of traditional Christmas Eve homilies, and it certainly isn’t the kind of holiday message that fuels the hedonistic materialism of the Shopping Mall Holiday Season. It’s not how I experience Christmas, and it may not be how you experience the holiday, but it is an expression of how many folks do experience Advent and Christmas. For too long those of us who are happy in December have pitied those whose experience of the season is less than joyful; it’s a far better thing, I think, to listen to their wisdom.
Anyway, I recommend the Christmas sermon, particularly if for you Christmas is less about eggnog, mistletoe and clogged shopping mall parking lots, and more about reflection on the mysteries of life that lie hidden in the dark of winter. Here’s a link to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Christmas Sermon.
A Blessed Advent to You,
Ben