Something there is that loves a quiet Christmas. Christmas cards portray scenes of docility and tranquility, and our well-wishing carries adjectives that we do not normally use when greeting one another - ‘peaceful’ is the pinnacle of these. Having rubbed its mind raw on materialism from mid-autumn to late December, our culture references Christmas Day as though it is a mild solstice sedative to get us through to the New Year. We eat and sleep in the space in between, often in consternation as to the day of the week and the date in the year. Even some hospital emergency departments report that injured people hold off on attending on the 25th December, only arriving on Boxing Day or the days after for fear of breaking the seasonal spell along with their bones.
But what if Christmas is not quiet? What if our lives are stubbornly unquiet in this season, and what if our world seems to epitomise the opposite of goodwill and peace? More deeply, when taken back to its original roots, what if Advent is inherently designed to be a season of crisis - a time when dislocation and disquiet are the disturbing materials out of which the whole story is built?
Crisis as a productive place
Many of us view crisis as a synonym for emergency or disaster - something to be avoided at all costs, an untoward reality that carries little good for those who encounter it. This is a serious mistake. Crisis is crucial to all story, it is the driving force not just for challenge but for change, for the productive things that happen in the people who inhabit stories, fictional and non-fictional.
In his wonderful study on the nature of story, John Yorke states,
Every crisis is the protagonists’ opportunity to kill off their old selves and live anew. Their choice is to deny change and return to their former selves, or confront their innermost fears, overcome them and be rewarded.1
When taken in this sense we can see that crisis is woven into Christmas in powerful and beautiful ways. The uneasy and enforced Roman peace of Palestine in the first century is suddenly imperilled by a refugee family and their newborn, who will subvert the whole idea of power. The house of Herod trembles at the arrival of men seeking a Messiah king. The status quo, the non-ideal circumstances for which people have settled, cannot remain in place once Jesus arrives.
Even the individual crises of the first Christmas are productive. Mary’s life is intersected by news that will change her and the whole world forever, Joseph has hard decisions to make about his relational life and his reputation, the Magi have to voyage across hard terrain and inherited belief systems to reach Jesus, and the shepherds’ world is luminously upended in an instant.
Crisis as an echo of the Christ story
This idea of Christmas as crisis permeates stories which take the season as their backdrop. Think of almost any popular Christmas movie or story, and someone or something is in crisis - often the existential reality of Christmas itself. In these stories lead up to Christmas is marked by struggle, by new responsibilities and by key choices that will be determinative for families, communities and perhaps even society. Even in such joyously unpretentious comedies such as Elf, crises are the rails on which the whole story runs.
This can be witnessed in our more parabolic and significant Christmas stories. Perhaps the most enduring of these is Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The emotional and psychological story of a man confronted by past, present and future continues to find resonances with us - whether in the now ‘canon’ muppetisation of the story, or recent dramatic productions of the tale such as the Rabbit Room Theatre’s well received work in Nashville.
even identifies a conversion theme in Ebenezer Scrooge’s Christmas morning awakening stating that,Part of the brilliance of Dickens’s tale is his depiction of the growing awareness that Scrooge undergoes during each journey with the spirits, each foray a separate pilgrimage bringing its own progress.2
Central to this personal epiphany are a series of crises that have brought about a redemptive change in the humbug heart of Christmas’ most hardened critic. Crisis is the productive event in this man’s life which brings him into the ‘living anew’ that John Yorke describes.
Normalising our Christmas crises
All of this should relieve us of the pressure to have a ‘peaceful’, ‘quiet’ or even ‘merry’ Christmas. Merriment and quietude are to be embraced when we have them, of course, but not being in possession of them over a two day period is not symptomatic of dysfunction in us. If our Christmas finds us in crisis, displaced, disappointed, confused or perhaps wrestling with uncertainties, we can be sure that these are every bit as much a part of the Christmas ‘spirit’ as the golden-glow imagery of the season’s best marketing. Whether our crisis is internal, emotional, familial, financial, or vocational, entering into the Advent with those kinds of loose ends and heart-pangs lines us up with the best Christmas stories, and the original Christmas Story from which they all spring. It could be that what you see as the end of your world is the beginning of a new one - that you are in the midst of the same redemptive processes that we see at work in our most beloved Christmas characters, and that radiates from the Christ event that Christmas marks.
So, please, have as a quiet, peaceful, tranquil and merry a Christmas as you can - but if your lot is crisis this Christmas, you are in good company and in the good hands of the One who can work good things from it. He is the one who first wrote Christmas as a crisis, and who is author of your story as well.
Yorke, John. Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them (p. 16). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Swallow Prior, Karen. The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (p. 91). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Beautiful, true reflections.
Thank you.
A timely word for our house.