Category Archives: Yule Blog

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?

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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.

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Connections between the adult Jesus and the baby in the manger aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the gospels don’t help much; 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.

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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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Last year 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 up at 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.

A fresh fall of snow is a lot like a new year.  For the first few hours, the snow is pure and fresh; then the people (and the dogs) come out. Gradually the snow is trodden down, plowed into icy heaps, and begins to turn various unsightly colors as the soot from passing cars and various other substances defile it. After a few days it is an ugly, unsightly mess, and one longs to see it cleared away. Continue reading →

Earlier this week I blogged 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. Human life 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 itches that scratching won’t fix.

On this sixth day of Christmas, I want to blog about how theists and atheists are different. While both groups think life means something, we understand that meaning in different ways.

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Now it gets tough. 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 divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from other religions.

If Christians saw that little baby as nothing more or less than a beautiful symbol of human innocence and love, there would be no problem. Even recognizing him as an important teacher and religious leader does not raise many hackles. Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet and the predicted Messiah; Islam has no trouble with the idea that he was born of a virgin, and the Virgin Mary is a popular and well respected figure for Muslims. When it comes to his moral teaching, much of what Jesus says is unexceptionable. The Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have others do unto you) has its analogs in many religious traditions. Jesus’ summary of the moral law (Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself) is also something that people from many different religious traditions can take to heart. Many non-religious people (and non-Christians like Mahatma Gandhi) have been inspired by Jesus’ example and teaching. If Christians were simply celebrating the birth of a moral teacher on Christmas, the world would be a more peaceful place.

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Five go-old rings!

Happy fifth day of Christmas, and welcome back to the 2010 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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So: they ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.’ What is that supposed to be about?

Manger is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes were used to wrap up the limbs of newborns so they wouldn’t injure themselves by moving too much.

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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 →

In Matthew, the Christmas story and its immediate sequel runs from Chapter One, verse one through the end of Chapter Two at verse 23 [or Matthew 1:1-2:23 as this is usually written]. In Luke, home of the longest and most elaborate Christmas account, the story runs from Luke 1:5 through 3:38. In the gospel of John, 1:1-1:18 give his version of the story.

If you invest twenty minutes or so reading these accounts you will know as much as anybody else in the world about the written history of the birth of Jesus; these are all the written sources from within one hundred years or so of his birth that exist.) Continue reading →

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! We are having a tense morning at the ancestral Mead home today, jumping 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 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.

That was a mistake. On behalf of us all, I apologize, and this Christmas I’ll be doing my little bit to make amends. Continue reading →