Look who can't sleep after the family celebrated New Year's and all went to bed...
Happy Seven, everyone. Can't think of a better subject to start the year with.
skylarburris said:
I am not myself a fan of the Fortunate Fall. There was nothing fortunate in the fact that Christ had to suffer and be crucified---yes, it was fortunate for us, given our fall, that He was willing to do so--but how much more fortunate if we had never required it! This I think is perhaps what the author meant by "keeping Satan in Christmas"--the reminder that Christmas isn't just about beauty and joy and peace and all that...Yes, it's a joyous thing that He was born, and yet it is a sad thing that He had to be born. Or maybe we should just party and save all that morbidity for Good Friday.
Yes on the last point; and no, it's not sad that He was born. I'm a fan of the Fortunate Fall point of view, although the phrase "Fortunate Fall" is a new one to me. It works for those who take the salvation story literally as well as those of us who embrace some or all of it figuratively. (Same benefits, less intellectual trouble.) I can't separate the acts of creation and redemption. I can only understand them as a holistic act of God knowing what He was creating all along -- encapsulating the idea of the redemptive act however many years after the first men walked the earth, and applying however many years afterward -- and doing it anyway, despite the knowledge of future pain to the self as the price of love. To me that's a basic example to every living person who knows love, a strain of reason in salvation history that anyone can relate to, with or without quibbling over the historicity and science of the stories that reveal the point in scripture.
As for "keeping Satan in Christmas" -- uh, whatever works for you. I can't deny the words in the songs we keep singing. However, those negative references seem to always imply a message of freedom -- a reason to no longer worry, because God is among us. The messages taken in whole tend to be positive.
I can empathize more easily with certain examples in the modern stories -- I'm a dark-humor kind of guy and do tend to like Christmas tales with an edge.
It's a Wonderful Life works not because it's sentimental, but because it gets so dark at times. George Bailey is one messed up sumbitch. If you don't know what I mean, watch it again with fresh eyes. Look at him, the drunk, crazy bastard who's lost all control of his life. Watch Jimmy Stewart make some of the most psychotic faces in cinema when he realizes how much worse the world can actually get without his existence. He looks crazier than Jack Nicholson in some of those shots. This is my idea of the kind of guy God can deal with.
Even
Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer works -- the Rankin/Bass version with the animated puppets -- but for all the wrong reasons. My kids and I laugh out loud at how perfectly awful everyone is in that story. Even Santa is a butthead who rejects Rudolph for being different, until he turns out to be useful. What BS! Sometimes the dark-humor view of things emphasizes positive lessons, so I see our snarky enjoyment of such shows in the positive light. In other words,
Rudolph works as an unintentional satire of itself. Only as such can it join the ranks of productions like
A Charlie Brown Christmas that strike a blow against the modern materialism of the holidays.
The way dark, scary views of the world and human nature work so well in stories emphasizing positive Christmas messages makes me find some agreement with the point about "keeping Satan in Christmas" -- even if I'm not likely to phrase it that way again. It's even consistent with the tradition of celebrating Christmas around the time of the Winter Solstice -- which in ancient times, meant the life-threatening nights stopped getting longer and the days finally started getting longer again -- probably the best metaphor of the Christmas message the natural calendar had to offer, the promise of light and life emphasized by the time of darkness preceding it.
Again, happy New Year everyone!