Category Archives: Yule Blog

This is the twelfth day of Christmas and so the annual Yule Blog is shutting down. The Christmas season ends on a high note, with the Feast of the Epiphany — also known as Three Kings’ Day, the day on which Christians traditionally commemorate the visit of the three wise men to the infant Christ.

As a kid I always had some trouble understanding the business about the three wise men and the gifts. Gold always comes in handy so I could see why you would bring gold to a baby — but what on earth were frankincense and myrrh and why would anybody give them to a child? I figured myrrh might have something to do with myrtle, like the crepe myrtles that bloom so beautifully in South Carolina. So maybe the myrrh was flowers for the mom?

The frankincense had me completely stumped and it wasn’t until I visited Oman a few years ago that I really knew what it was or what it looked like: it’s the waxy resin of a tree that grows in the desert and when burned it gives off a rich smell; it’s a principal ingredient of incense. If you are ever lucky enough to visit the astonishingly beautiful and welcoming country of Oman you will have many opportunities to buy some for yourself at many different qualities and price levels. If your trip is like mine, you will also have the experience of seeing road kill camel on the highway and you will visit the tomb of the prophet Job where you will learn that he was fourteen feet tall and a Muslim.

Today on the traditional Christmas calendar we celebrate Epiphany. The Christmas season, at least in the West, has finally come to an end; the wise men reach the manger, give their weird gifts to the baby, and they, the Holy Family and we move on to the next phase of our lives. Continue reading →

As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over my short life as a writer on religious matters and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.

There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write about religion. Many people, both religious and non-religious, are affected by the religious beliefs and cultures around them; few of us know enough about how religion works and how different religious faiths and traditions shape the world views of the people and nations with whom we interact.

But it’s also true that writing about religion has its perils. One is that religious writing stirs up powerful and sometimes angry feelings. There’s a reason why our grandmothers told us never to discuss politics and religion at the dinner table.

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Connections between the adult Jesus, his childhood and the family in which he was raised aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the gospels don’t offer much help; whatever the gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether, and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching his career. John has a short prelude and then does the same thing. Matthew and Luke give us the infancy narratives with a couple of sketchy references to childhood (flight into Egypt for Matthew, visit to the Temple in Luke) and that is pretty much it.

To make the connection between the baby Jesus and the man, you have to do something that often makes Protestants uncomfortable: study Mary. This late in the Christmas season, I haven’t yet written much about Mary, other than to write about her virginity. That is a characteristically Protestant and American failing. Throughout the Islamic, Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic worlds, the Virgin Mary isn’t just a figure in a storybook. She’s the object of widespread popular devotion. Continue reading →

By now, the Three Kings are well on their way to Bethlehem, and the Christmas season is drawing to a close. But the Three Kings (actually, ‘wise men’ according to Matthew’s gospel) aren’t just bringing their famous three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They bring with them another set of questions that we have to wrestle with a bit if we are going to see Christmas clearly.

The story is pretty and the ideas are rich: but what actually happened in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago? How much of the Christmas story is “real” and how much of both this story — and ultimately the entire record of the the Scriptures — is historically accurate?

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Two years ago at this time New York city was paralyzed by a blizzard; thankfully, I was visiting family outside the city when the snow fell and was able to hole up in my house upstate where I teach at Bard College. There was plenty of snow up there, but around Bard people know how to deal with big snowstorms. The streets were clear, the stores open and I was a quiet New Year weekend grading termpapers and otherwise tending to business.

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Back in the beginning of the Christmas season, I wrote about the way the gospel Christmas narratives “roll the credits” by giving genealogical tables that link Jesus to Jewish history. In contemplating Christmas, we should never forget that the first Christmas was first and foremost a Jewish event. Mary, Joseph, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the baby: they were all Jewish. And as the baby Jesus moved toward adolescence and adulthood, it was Jewish religion, Jewish literature, Jewish culture and Jewish history that shaped his personality and his mind.

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Now it gets tough. Yesterday’s post looked at what divides Christians and other theists from atheists; today we cut deeper and look at what separates Christians from believers in other religions.

And the truth is that nothing separates Christianity from other religions like Christmas. That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means irritate and antagonize people all over the world.

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Yesterday I posted an essay about how theists and atheists are the not all that different from each other; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life. Life, we feel, amounts to more than eating and scratching our various itches, and whether or not we believe in God, we want to do something real with our lives. We have one itch that mere scratching won’t fix, and that is the itch to understand what life is all about and live meaningfully by the measures that really count.

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Five go-old rings!

Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2012-13 Yule Blog, where we aim to keep the holiday fires burning right up through Twelfth Night on January 6.

Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a pretty holiday about presents and elves. Christmas is serious business, at least as Christians understand it. The birth of the baby in the manger is connected with the murder of the babies in the streets of Bethlehem and indeed to the sorrow and suffering that have marked the long and bloody journey of the human species. Christmas is the unveiling of God’s plan to save us from ourselves without stripping our moral freedom from us.

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Yesterday, we looked at why the gospels make such a point of saying that Jesus was born of a virgin. But there is more to the story than the absence of a biological father. What kind of home was Jesus born into? Who were Mary and Joseph, this couple who go to Bethlehem, can’t get a room, have the baby and ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.’ What is that supposed to be about?

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It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close. Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own: “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing I know not a man?”

Don’t worry about that, says the angel. “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

In other words, Jesus would be born of a virgin, a woman who had not, in the biblical sense, known a man. Continue reading →

The documentary sources for the Christmas story pretty good by the standards of the ancient world, but few and short by the standards of our time. Of the four “gospels” (books in the New Testament that offer narratives about the life and death of Jesus), two provide information about Jesus’ birth. A third offers a theological reflection on the meaning of his birth, and the fourth (the gospel of Mark) says nothing about Christmas at all. Continue reading →

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! Chrismas is a tense morning wherever the Meads gather, as we jump whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other person’s presents. I’ve never known anybody to actually get an extra present this way, but we are nothing if note determined and we all continue to try. If you call us on Christmas Day, don’t expect anybody here to answer with “Hello?” and give you a chance to say “Christmas gift!” We are onto this trick and to protect our rich hauls of presents we always answer the phone with an aggressive “Christmas gift!” to get in first. So don’t call us unless you are ready to part with a present. Continue reading →

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care at the ancestral Mead mansion; and as I settle down for a long winter’s rest I am taking a break from politics and war, sort of, to do some good old fashioned Yuletide blogging.

In particular I want to blog about Christmas itself and what it means. Somehow my generation decided to leave this part out when we passed down the traditions and the lore we were taught to the next generation: we’ve bought a lot of Christmas presents but we were too busy to think much about the meaning of the story or to teach the next generation much about this holiday and the religion which it defines. Continue reading →

As a kid I always had some trouble understanding the business about the three wise men. Gold always comes in handy so I could see why you would bring gold to a baby — but what on earth were frankincense and myrrh and why would anybody give them to a child? I figured myrrh might have something to do with myrtle, like the crepe myrtles that bloom so beautifully in South Carolina. So maybe the myrrh was flowers for the mom?

Continue reading →