Omega
Post by beth on Dec 28, 2010 18:34:25 GMT -5
The Wall Street Journal asked author Anne Rice to write a response from the perspective of a believer. Here is what she had to say.
Anne Rice’s Christmas Confession
Earlier this week, comic, actor and filmmaker Ricky Gervais offered up his argument for atheism, and Wall Street Journal readers responded. In this follow-up essay, bestselling author Anne Rice presents her thoughts on what Christmas means for believers.
I am a Christmas Christian. I always have been. For me, the image that most deeply and significantly reflects the crucial truth of my faith is that of the little Christ child in the Manger, surrounded by his loving parents, the shepherds who have come to pay Him homage, and the three magnificent magi approaching with their precious gifts.
Is there anyone in the Western World who is not familiar with the Christmas iconography, who has not seen some representation somewhere of the Bethlehem tableaux?
Most of us have seen it countless times, on the walls of museums in great paintings, in the greeting cards that arrive in the weeks before Christmas, in the little statues we ourselves place beneath the Christmas tree, oftentimes with a snow covered wooden stable, to remind us that Christ has come into the world again this Christmas Eve.
It’s no secret that erudite biblical scholars question the Christmas story. No one knows after all when Our Lord Jesus Christ was born. And many hold that the “fabulous” infancy stories were late additions to the gospels, seeking to make a myth of a birth that is shrouded in obscurity. Some maintain that the placing of this glorious little story in the dead of winter was a shameful attempt to graft the myth of Christ upon the midwinter festivals of a dying paganism through which people had celebrated for centuries the miracle of life surviving the darkest and coldest days of the year.
Is it not beautiful to think on it, the way our ancestors since time immemorial gathered around their great flickering fires, or sat down to banquets of plenty as the winds howled and the snow fell upon roofs and fields, and the sun all but vanished in the shortest days of the year?
Was it a slick move by the early church authorities to celebrate the birth of Christ in the middle of winter, or was it perhaps an accidental stroke of genius that connected the powerful story of Christ’s birth to the time of the year when poverty and want are felt most keenly, as Dickens put it, and when people struggle so valiantly to keep the faith that times will be better, that suffering, deprivation, cold, will inevitably come to an end?
There is a season for all things under Heaven and it seems to me that the church chose exactly the right season for the Christ to be born.
The story of the Incarnation is, after all, not like any other. Here we have the greatest inversion perhaps that the world has even seen. In the person of the Christ Child, the Maker of the Universe has come down to be born a helpless infant in our midst.
All who look at the Christmas Crib understand that the Divine Son of God will grow like any other human child, becoming a young boy and later a man, and that His journey with us will last some thirty to thirty three years before He will die with us, just as we ourselves die. As we all know, His resurrection will then offer us the hope that we too will survive not only the worst of winters but the only supernatural event we can know this side of heaven, the extinguishing of our physical lives.
Is there a more beautiful love story in our literature than that of God coming to be with us, coming to suffer the mundane and vulgar indignities of our physical world?
I do not know of any.
And when I ponder the never-ending journey of Christianity through history, I wonder if it is not the story of the Incarnation that gives the belief system its seemingly eternal power: the single idea that the God who made us is one of us, that God is beyond us yet became human as we are, returning inevitably to Heaven with a body as human as our bodies, even marked in eternity with the wounds of His cruel physical death.
But the genius of the Christmas Crib is that you do not need theology to approach it. You do not need any bloody atonement theory to touch the Christ Child’s outstretched hand. The story is complete there without the horror of the cross. Christ has embraced our helplessness. Christ has enshrined our physicality within the limitless power of the Maker of all things.
In a world in which religions alienate and confuse, in which hierarchies struggle with corruption and believers often turn bitterly and in defeat from the warring orthodoxies of Christ’s followers, the Christ Child merely gazes from His bed of hay at all comers, saying quietly:
You are part of me. I am part of you.
I am always and forever here with you.
If “civilization as we know it” were coming to an end with predictable falling bombs and fleeing populations, if we had to clear out of this house with only a handful of possessions for a post apocalyptic world of ruin and struggle, what would I take with me to preserve for generations yet unborn who might never know the millions of texts we hold to be classics, for whom the pages of the bible might disappear?
I’d take the Christmas creche — the child, his quiet and patient parents, the ragged shepherds with their sheep, the faithful ox and the donkey, the Wise Men in their gilded raiment come to gaze in unquestioning awe.
I’d clutch those little statues to my heart, and hope to leave them somewhere safe where others might inevitably find them — gathered in their ancient configuration — and ponder the mystery of the child’s humble birth amid rich and poor, animal and human, snow and straw.
The creche tells the story I believe in more surely than the printed word. And it always will.
Whatever we face, in the physical and emotional winters of our lives, there is always faith that the God who made us will never abandon us, that he will be born again inside each of us, ever ready to help us save ourselves.
blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/24/anne-rice-on-the-true-meaning-of-christmas/
Anne Rice’s Christmas Confession
Earlier this week, comic, actor and filmmaker Ricky Gervais offered up his argument for atheism, and Wall Street Journal readers responded. In this follow-up essay, bestselling author Anne Rice presents her thoughts on what Christmas means for believers.
I am a Christmas Christian. I always have been. For me, the image that most deeply and significantly reflects the crucial truth of my faith is that of the little Christ child in the Manger, surrounded by his loving parents, the shepherds who have come to pay Him homage, and the three magnificent magi approaching with their precious gifts.
Is there anyone in the Western World who is not familiar with the Christmas iconography, who has not seen some representation somewhere of the Bethlehem tableaux?
Most of us have seen it countless times, on the walls of museums in great paintings, in the greeting cards that arrive in the weeks before Christmas, in the little statues we ourselves place beneath the Christmas tree, oftentimes with a snow covered wooden stable, to remind us that Christ has come into the world again this Christmas Eve.
It’s no secret that erudite biblical scholars question the Christmas story. No one knows after all when Our Lord Jesus Christ was born. And many hold that the “fabulous” infancy stories were late additions to the gospels, seeking to make a myth of a birth that is shrouded in obscurity. Some maintain that the placing of this glorious little story in the dead of winter was a shameful attempt to graft the myth of Christ upon the midwinter festivals of a dying paganism through which people had celebrated for centuries the miracle of life surviving the darkest and coldest days of the year.
Is it not beautiful to think on it, the way our ancestors since time immemorial gathered around their great flickering fires, or sat down to banquets of plenty as the winds howled and the snow fell upon roofs and fields, and the sun all but vanished in the shortest days of the year?
Was it a slick move by the early church authorities to celebrate the birth of Christ in the middle of winter, or was it perhaps an accidental stroke of genius that connected the powerful story of Christ’s birth to the time of the year when poverty and want are felt most keenly, as Dickens put it, and when people struggle so valiantly to keep the faith that times will be better, that suffering, deprivation, cold, will inevitably come to an end?
There is a season for all things under Heaven and it seems to me that the church chose exactly the right season for the Christ to be born.
The story of the Incarnation is, after all, not like any other. Here we have the greatest inversion perhaps that the world has even seen. In the person of the Christ Child, the Maker of the Universe has come down to be born a helpless infant in our midst.
All who look at the Christmas Crib understand that the Divine Son of God will grow like any other human child, becoming a young boy and later a man, and that His journey with us will last some thirty to thirty three years before He will die with us, just as we ourselves die. As we all know, His resurrection will then offer us the hope that we too will survive not only the worst of winters but the only supernatural event we can know this side of heaven, the extinguishing of our physical lives.
Is there a more beautiful love story in our literature than that of God coming to be with us, coming to suffer the mundane and vulgar indignities of our physical world?
I do not know of any.
And when I ponder the never-ending journey of Christianity through history, I wonder if it is not the story of the Incarnation that gives the belief system its seemingly eternal power: the single idea that the God who made us is one of us, that God is beyond us yet became human as we are, returning inevitably to Heaven with a body as human as our bodies, even marked in eternity with the wounds of His cruel physical death.
But the genius of the Christmas Crib is that you do not need theology to approach it. You do not need any bloody atonement theory to touch the Christ Child’s outstretched hand. The story is complete there without the horror of the cross. Christ has embraced our helplessness. Christ has enshrined our physicality within the limitless power of the Maker of all things.
In a world in which religions alienate and confuse, in which hierarchies struggle with corruption and believers often turn bitterly and in defeat from the warring orthodoxies of Christ’s followers, the Christ Child merely gazes from His bed of hay at all comers, saying quietly:
You are part of me. I am part of you.
I am always and forever here with you.
If “civilization as we know it” were coming to an end with predictable falling bombs and fleeing populations, if we had to clear out of this house with only a handful of possessions for a post apocalyptic world of ruin and struggle, what would I take with me to preserve for generations yet unborn who might never know the millions of texts we hold to be classics, for whom the pages of the bible might disappear?
I’d take the Christmas creche — the child, his quiet and patient parents, the ragged shepherds with their sheep, the faithful ox and the donkey, the Wise Men in their gilded raiment come to gaze in unquestioning awe.
I’d clutch those little statues to my heart, and hope to leave them somewhere safe where others might inevitably find them — gathered in their ancient configuration — and ponder the mystery of the child’s humble birth amid rich and poor, animal and human, snow and straw.
The creche tells the story I believe in more surely than the printed word. And it always will.
Whatever we face, in the physical and emotional winters of our lives, there is always faith that the God who made us will never abandon us, that he will be born again inside each of us, ever ready to help us save ourselves.
blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/24/anne-rice-on-the-true-meaning-of-christmas/
