It’s almost Christmas; time for some stories.
When I was a kid, not only did we put up Christmas lights, but we adopted a most American holiday tradition: driving around looking for good light displays. My late mother would not let a Christmas Eve go by without repeating, on the drive south through Biddeford Pool, the line from my older brother, “Christmas lights! Hope we see more!” I think he said that a few times in the days prior to Christmas 1985; she said it probably a hundred times per yuletide for the next 30 years. It was cute.
Our moms deserves a home like this to spend Christmas in; our dads taught us everything we know about exterior illumination; we hope these displays add to our mother-in-law’s enjoyment of the holidays; our father-in-law will notice and inevitably point out that the little lights are not twinkling; we hope it enhances our cousin-in-law’s holiday spirit (Eddie! Kathryn?). National Lampoon begs the question: why do we do this?
In ancient history, people thought the sun would be reborn on the winter solstice. So they had bonfires and lit candles. Doesn’t this make sense? The darkest days of the year need something. Our ancestors lit a bonfire and feasted for Saturn’s birthday. Sign me up.
The ancients gave way to the Christians, who inevitably kept the good tradition of bringing light to the world at Christmas. Outdoor Christmas lights are more recent. I guess it was hard to keep the candles lit in the winter winds. While the protestant Germans had the good sense to bring their Christmas trees indoors, it wasn’t until electric lights came along that us Americans led the way in putting up some lights outside. And now we’re in an endless cycle of mutually one-upmanship in exterior illumination.
Just when the Massachusetts nights seem to begin right after lunch and appear to be their darkest, we raid Home Depot, start soldering in the basement, and run up outrageous electric bills. That angry feeling of untangling lights and freezing your fingers off? That’s the American contribution to Christmas traditions. For me, of frustrated untanglings, bulb testing, and frozen fingers, the experience begs the question of why I do it at all.
It is probably not a much more complex explanation than we put up lights because it is dark. And as the old story has it, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’
There are things in that old story about us that have never stopped being relevant. We hear in the old story feelings we think about during these times but mostly don't know how to name. At the end of it, if you're not familiar, there's a resurrection. Just as the lights break our experience of seemingly endless darkness, resurrection breaks up the totality of death—maybe it isn’t the end of our stories. This light and this hope have a quality of otherness that makes you think they may be eternal; Christmas lights are too different from the mundane, unilluminated streets to just fall away. I don't know if that's true, but I think it's a very good thing to hope for.
Like my brother said, Christmas lights! Hope we see more.
Reading
I hadn’t planned to put a link into this essay at all, but then along comes David Brooks, this morning, with an essay that eloquently illustrates the things I vaguely gesture towards.
Here’s the thread Brooks pulls through his in his finding of faith:
When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences.
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In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious.
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At least for me, these experiences didn’t answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further.
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I experienced an acceleration of those moments. This time they were not mere spooky experiences, but illuminations — events that tell us about the meaning of life and change the way we see the world.
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The name we give to these conversations and ways of life is “religion.”
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[Religions] provide the sacramental symbols that point to ineffable truths and rituals to mark the transitions in our lives. They give us peoplehood, a tradition of music, emotion and thought, an inheritance of spiritual treasures. As Rabbi David Wolpe once wrote: “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”
If you'll permit me to extend the quote from this rabbi: Spirituality lights a candle. Religion puts up Christmas lights.
The Shock of Faith
It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be