Dr Martin ManserghEach year is marked by three important religious festivals, Christmas, Easter, and St Patrick’s Day, which recalls the coming of Christianity to Ireland at the dawn of recorded Irish history. Each of them is an occasion for families to come together or to contact each other.
Christmas especially is a time to remember those outside the family who need help and generosity, whether here at home, or in poverty-stricken and war-torn parts of the world.
The nativity story is a stimulus to the imagination. ‘No room at the inn’ is as exclusionary as Jesus’ promise that “in my Father’s house are many mansions” is inclusive.
Having visited the church in Bethlehem, reputed to have been the infant Jesus’ birthplace, now located in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I prefer to stick to the imagination, including pictures from illustrated books of Bible stories from childhood. The same applies to the River Jordan, today not much wider or deeper than a farm ditch, the Garden of Gethsemane, and to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, supposed to contain the sites both of the crucifixion and the tomb.
First Christmas
The first Christmas took place in a political context, as has every Christmas since. The Roman Empire under Caesar Augustus at the height of its power, according to the Gospel account, had ordered that everyone was to be taxed in their home place. Then as now governments like to keep tabs on people.
There were also local kings, including Herod, visited by the three wise men from the East, who were suspicious of his intentions, and decided to go home another way.
When I first met my future wife Liz at university in 1968, she was acting the part of Herod’s mother-in- law, in a mid-19th Century German play Herodes und Mariamne by Christian Friedrich Hebbel, and was dressed and made up to look ferocious (in an attractive sort of a way). One of the most evocative of the 16th-Century painter Brueghel’s works is his setting of the Massacre of the Innocents in a Flemish village.
To this day, families are being slaughtered from the air, not far away from biblical sites, in Syria. First Century Palestine was not a stable or happy place either, and yet it was the birthplace of a religion and a morality of immense and enduring power.
There have always been conscientious objectors to Christmas. No doubt at some point, a secular multiculturalism will start querying its place in national life and claiming its celebration is insensitive to those of other non-Christian faiths.
One of the biggest mistakes made by the English puritans was to ban Christmas, on the grounds that it encouraged disorder. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the reprobate uncle of the female house-owner, Sir Toby Belch, retorts to the puritan steward Malvolio’s censures, with the immortal line: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Even now, there are clergy and others who feel that Christmas is too commercial, and that its meaning has been lost.
Charles Dickens’ famous morality tale A Christmas Carol attacks the idea of a utilitarian meanness and indifference towards Christmas. Scrooge “carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas”, which he greeted with “Bah! Humbug”.
After visions of his own past, present and bleak future, he has a complete change of heart, embraces neighbours and family, gives his low-paid employee a raise, and takes a lively interest in his crippled son, Tiny Tim, who was unlikely to live without help.
Scrooges
It is dreadful, if even a handful of employers, boardroom Scrooges, choose this time, shortly before Christmas or early in the New Year, to inform employees that their jobs are terminated or that their pay or entitlements are being drastically curtailed, so that large shareholder directors can have more funds to wheel and deal.
The end of the year is a time to take stock, to look back, often at what we have failed to do, as well as what is achieved, and resolving that next year we will try to do better.
Societies, organisations and individuals often find themselves having to deal with unexpected situations, very different from the life course they might have desired or planned. It is then that the possession of religious and ethical values particularly counts.
In the past, life was sometimes likened to a pilgrimage. That did not mean everything had to be solemn. The pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, going to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket, the archbishop slain by four knights in 1170 at the behest of Henry II for not being sufficiently compliant, entertained each other with stories along the way.
The tradition of religious pilgrimage lives on and thrives. More secular pilgrimages make up a lot of tourism.
Compared to the past, much of humanity, particularly in more developed countries, has far more choice, when it comes to exploring the world. People, places, and events can be accessed on screen, as can many branches of knowledge.
A great democratisation has taken place. It is impossible for any single person to keep up with all the advances in many different fields. Not every development is progress. There are always choices not just between good and evil, but in treading around many ambiguous moral minefields.
Since the 1950s, tremendous advances have been made in most directions, which give hope for the future, provided we can avoid self-destruction.
Surviving past dangers only to encounter new ones is part of the story of humanity. Tragically, Northern Ireland has only recently been able to consolidate a new lease of life after a costly and bloody conflict.
If there were one wish, it would be for people to show mutual respect within and between religious faiths for their own beliefs and traditions and those of others, and for a more harmonious coexistence with those who espouse independent ethical value systems.