Have you done all your shopping yet? I’ve not even begun. I will soon, but not just yet. I’ve got too much to do.
Have you experienced any “Bah Humbug” moments yet?
I noticed one from a friend of mine. She posted a “Meme” on Facebook. A cartoon depicting two figures. The first is putting up Christmas decorations and saying to the other “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” to which the other responds in far less enthusiastic way “It’s not Christmas though is it Barbara, because it is still XXXXXXX November.”
The Meme was a protest against how soon Christmas had begun this year, especially in the shops etc. I replied to the ”Meme” stating “Just to be an annoying pedant. It’s Advent, it began on Sunday. If you want to be truly liturgically accurate Christmas doesn’t actually begin until sunset on Christmas Eve. None of us want that, so please no more Bah Humbugging. “There followed many other complaints about the celebration of Christmas coming too early, people putting up their decorations too early etc. I put up mine on Tuesday night. I have gone much further than I usually do. Molly is certainly enjoying this. It seems she loves stealing baubles from the tree and playing with them. I have had to move Father Christmas and his little helpers out of her reach. Many folk have been telling me off all week for doing so, telling me I wasn’t allowed to until Thursday 1st December, to which I replied that Advent had already begun. It’s funny how folk suddenly get all Puritanical about these things from time to time.
I get where this all comes from, especially as it has been Christmas in most of the shops, since the beginning of November. There has been a Christmas tree in Café Nero for weeks. I know this because Molly stole a bauble from their tree several weeks ago. It has been her favourite toy since then.
The “Bah humbugging” about the early celebration of Christmas stems from this sense of over commercialisation and the thought that the spirit of the season will be lost. It seems that for many Christmas has become an almost secular exercise. Afterall less than half of the population now identify as Christian, at least according the figures published this week, from last year’s census.
Is it true though. Have we killed the spirit of the season with this over commercialisation? I’m not convinced. I think the spirit lives on and actually is present in the very act of such celebrations and even the buying and commercial activities.
If we look purely at the surface, there appears little evidence of my view. The Christmas season appears to be mass consumerism gone mad. The worst excesses of which seem to form in that most hideous of American imports “Black Friday”, which in reality is linked to the American holiday of “Thanksgiving”. We have not taken that part on, just “Black Friday”, not the giving of thanks bit. This occurred over the weekend that Advent began. And yet there is the spirit of Christmas in the spiritual elements of “Thanks Giving”. This is surely something that can be extended into this Advent season and on into Christmas itself. The spirit of Christmas is surely about giving thanks for the gifts we have been given and expressing this thanks in our lives by using our gifts in this our lives. We can become gifts to this our world, we can live in and through gratitude.
This can be exemplified in the presents that we buy for our loved ones, as they can become gifts. If chosen and wrapped with loving intention, then surely even this commercial activity is spiritual in nature.
In “The Gift” by David Blanchard, distinguished between a gift and a present. How the gift has a far more deeply spiritual and heartfelt significance than merely a present. It touched a part, deep in the heart of me.
Now of course the word “present” is something the spiritually inclined are obsessed with in our current age. So many talk of the gift of the present moment, that this is where life is. I’m certainly not one to wish to argue with these thoughts. That said I wonder if sometimes we become so obsessed with the present that we forget about the gifts we carry with us that we have been given in those many moments in the past. Too often we wish to lose what has gone before in our intense focus on the present that we fail to embrace the gifts that have come throughout our lives. I have come to believe that to truly embrace the moment, to be truly present requires me to be fully engaged with every moment of my life, for there the true gifts of life emerge.
Perhaps to truly live in the present moment is to bring our whole selves, every breath of our lives and perhaps every life that has made our life into this sublime moment.
This year I have reflected much on my life, perhaps more than I have for a while. I have thought much about the gifts I’ve been given throughout my days. Gifts I have not always appreciated at the time. In fact, many I failed to notice when they were given. The gifts of the love given by the precious people I have shared my life with, some who are no longer physically with me. The things they took the time to show me, how to do things and just how to be; the times they made me laugh and cry; the joy that they brought to my being. Gifts given freely from their heart to mine.
I’ve also been thinking of the many gifts I was simply born with, that I have not always made best use of, the Graces of life. I have been contemplating how I can make better use of these, the ultimate of free gifts, not just for myself but for the good of all?
Here's an extract from a prayer I shared during the Advent service.
Now is the moment of magic,
and here's a blessing:
we already possess all the gifts we need;
we've already received our presents:
ears to hear music,
eyes to behold lights,
hands to build true peace on earth
and to hold each other tight in love.
How do we make good use of the gifts we have been given from the beginning and throughout our lives? How do we bring these gifts to life in this beautiful present that is right here, right now? How do we make best use of the gift of life?
I will leave that one with you to ponder…
For most of us Christmas is about the giving and receiving of presents, but not necessarily about the gifts we both give and receive.
I suspect that the tradition of giving and receiving gifts at Christmas time is linked to the three gifts of the Magi “Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh”. Gifts of great value 2,000 years ago, although only gold has retained its worth today. Now in early Christianity the journey of the Magi was celebrated on the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of January, the 12th day of Christmas, hence the Carol “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a partridge in a pear tree”…etc...)
The early Christian church did not celebrate Christmas as we do today. The tradition of giving Christmas presents is really a modern one. By Victorian times the culture of gift giving and the mythos of Father Christmas, St Nicholas or Santa Claus was beginning to take hold, immortalised in the fiction of Dickens and the like. As the twentieth century moved on into the twenty first this culture developed into mass consumerism. Today it would seem that buying, wrapping and giving gifts has become nothing more than a mechanical chore and one of the worst examples of mass consumerism going. Is this really what Christmas is about? Is this really giving by heart? Is this really the spirit of Christmas? Well it is if we select, give and receive these gifts in the spirit of love. In so doing we bring the spirit of season alive, by incarnating the words from my favourite Carol “In the Bleak mid-winter”…
“What shall I give him? Give my heart”
I believe that the true spirit of Christmas is the heart, that this is the gift of the season. Christmas above everything else truly is the season of the heart. When we truly give our gifts to others we are giving them our hearts and when we truly give from our heart to another we are somehow bringing that heart of God alive and that spirit is once again incarnating in life.
This is the religion, the spirit that can still be discovered beneath the ribbons and the wrapping paper. This is the spirit that can once again come alive if we engage in the giving and receiving of gifts and not merely presents. This is one way in which we can truly begin to become a gift to the world.
When I really think of the gifts I have been given the greatest is of course life itself. This is of course the ultimate free gift. The ultimate unearned grace. It is easy to say we are grateful, for the gifts we have been given, whether at Christmas or throughout the year; whether they are material or spiritual in nature. But I am not so sure that this is what gratitude actually is. Gratitude is anactive thing, it is more than giving thanks, it is doing something with the gifts we have been given.
This is something to reflect on over the coming weeks as we approach Christmas. To consider the gifts that we have been granted and to perhaps think of the gifts we would like. To remember, but not passively, let’s instead make it an act of remembrance, of all that has been freely given to us, gifted to us. Let’s also make from these gifts a true act of gratitude for all that is our lives. Let’s become a part of the gift that is life itself and express this in our being. Let’s become the gift to the world. And pour out this gift on one another and to all life, in all that we feel, all that we think, all that we say and all that we do…
Below is a devotion based on
the material in this "blogspot"
No comments:
Post a Comment