THE NATIVITY
The diversity of modern Canada is much spoken of and written about. But there was never a time when Canada was not a multicultural country. Before the Europeans arrived, the indigenous peoples, Dene and Inuit, were diverse in language, way of life, and belief. And even when the dominant population, after the sixteenth century, was European, there was diversity within that community: diversity of language and way of life, and much difference of belief despite a superficial uniformity of creed; apart from a few pockets of Jewish settlement, the Europeans were ostensibly all Christian; but the cultural divide separating Catholic from Orthodox and Protestant was wide and deep.
In the last fifty years, however, the cultural picture has changed greatly. Massive immigration of non-Europeans has introduced a kaleidoscope of languages, attitudes, customs, and beliefs. And in a world which has become more and more materialistic and secular, there are now many Canadians who do not have any religion as an active part of their lives. A few of them are militant atheists. But most of them are simply indifferent.
Committed Christians, of one stripe or another, are strikingly dissimilar in practice and theory, when it comes to liturgy and moral precept. This gives rise, sometimes, to friction between denominations, and even within denominations. But all the denominations, it can be safely said, have in common an insistence on the two inarguable fundamentals of the faith: on the Incarnation of Christ in the birth of Jesus, as commemorated at Christmas; and on the Redemption of the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus, as commemorated on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Everything else, so to speak, is the trimmings.
It is not only Christians, however, who observe Christmas and Easter. There are public holidays on both occasions, legislated back in the days when Canada was a predominantly Christian nation. Canadians of other beliefs take the time off as an unearned but gratifying bonus, as too do Canadians of no belief at all. But there are many Canadians of really marginal belief, if any, who participate in the celebrations, especially at Christmas, in a way that is both cynical and hypocritical.
Christmas, indeed, for many Canadians has become, notoriously, a season allegedly of good will, but actually of gross commercial enterprise, a shoppers’ extravaganza that caters to the baser part of our nature, to greed. In adults, this is cloaked by misplaced generosity, by the desire to please others by bestowing expensive gifts — implying that the lives of others can best be enhanced by adding to what they possess, usually a luxury item, not something they really need. In children, the greed is quite naked: there is an open lust for the latest costly toy — a lust created by repetitive advertising, and magnified by peer pressure.
The commercialization of Christmas has been much deplored in many quarters. But the criticism has done nothing to mute the hucksters or dampen the sales. The stores still, every year, pretend that they are entering into the true spirit of the season by playing tapes of “Jingle Bells” or “Santa Claus is coming to town” or even the queasy chromatics of “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”.
All of this may be repulsive, and it is probably inevitable in a society debauched by wealth, even though the impression of wealth is a delusion spawned by the credit card. But there is nothing new about such goings on: they are, in fact, a throwback to the origins of Christmas in pre-Christian antiquity.
Long before the Christian era, peasant societies celebrated the winter solstice (on a date called December 22nd, when calendars were invented), as heralding the return of light after months of deepening darkness. In ancient Rome, the celebration, called the Saturnalia, lasted for several days and was the occasion, of much feasting and jollity and, in many quarters, licentiousness. When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, in the early fourth century, the Church acquired the power to impose its own observances on society. Pagan customs, however, were not so much suppressed as adapted. For example, if people were used to having a celebration in the third week of December, they should be allowed to go on having one: they should even be encouraged, as in the Saturnalia, to exchange gifts and be festively merry, though preferably not promiscuous; and this should not be to mark the winter solstice, but to commemorate the Nativity of Jesus.
This permissive merry-making, such is human nature, often led to excess, and consequently to condemnation — notably in Puritan England. But where respectability ran rampant, as in Victorian England, Christmas became the occasion of mawkish Dickensian sentimentality. That should have been emetic enough for any discriminating taste. But the future had worse in store: Christmas as vehicle for advertising agencies, retailers, and competitive shoppers. Whatever vestiges remained of the sacred, unfortunately, were swamped in a flood of tinsel on the tree and baubles in the stockings.
Swamped, but not wholly erased. After a few drinks on Christmas Eve, many revellers give voice, with maudlin enthusiasm, to what they remember of Christmas carols. “Silent Night”, they intone, fruitily solemn and off key, faltering on some of the high notes, but dredging up, from somewhere, most of the words; even “round yon virgin mother and child”, they warble, never pausing to ask themselves if they believe in the Virgin Birth — which of course, they don’t.
Or, to a more cheery tune, they bellow out “The First Nowell”, with something like accuracy until they reach the last phrase of the music, which they invariably get wrong. They are having a great time of it. But it never occurs to them to wonder what life would have been like in the Judean winter for poor shepherds, or how extraordinary it was for the idea of salvation to be announced to them rather than to the mighty of the world.
The carol ended, they pour another round; and the party goes on. Later, they will sleep, with whiskied snores, and hope the kids won’t wake up too early, clamouring for their stockings.
Meanwhile, there are yet others attending church. The attendance is well above average, because some have come, with a kind of shameless nostalgia, for whom this is a once-a-year event: they do not otherwise go to church, except for a wedding, which to them is not a sacrament but a social rite. Even they, though, are moved by the ceremony. As who would not be? For whether the Nativity story is held to be powerful myth or is believed in as powerful truth, its impact is enormous: it embodies the kind of hope that speaks to human need and bids us, for an hour or so, to love one another.
That ancient message, in all the churches over many years, has been delivered in some of the most stirring words ever written. And it has inspired some of the most beautiful music ever composed. Not just for December 24th and 25th, but throughout the Christmas season.
J.S. Bach, composer of enormous masterpieces like “The St Matthew Passion”, composed a cradle-song for the Virgin, “O Jesulein süss”, of surpassing simplicity and poignancy. It is shot through with tender love, but shadowed with the knowledge of Calvary to come.
Two-an-a-half centuries earlier, another simple song, “The Coventry Carol”, enshrined the grief of mothers who lost their infants in the Massacre of the Innocents. And in an earlier century still, in the Gregorian chant “Vox in Rama”, that same slaughter was commemorated gravely but with indignant sorrow.
It is in these small pieces, so focused and so tightly knit, that the essence of the Nativity is somehow conveyed more aptly than in larger works. A vast panorama like “L’Enfance du Christ”, by Hector Berlioz, has many merits. But Peter Cornelius’s short and modest song about the journey of the Three Kings says everything we need to know about the Epiphany. Similarly, Gustav Hoist’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s “In the bleak midwinter” is an evocation of the Stable more eloquent than any more extensive one.
The match of Hoist’s tune and harmonies with Rossetti’s text is so perfect that it is almost impossible, for those who know it, to read the text without hearing the music along with it. Nevertheless, the text is unquestionably superb — and very moving. A few other poems belong in the same league, for it is not only composers who have been touched by the genius of the Nativity. In our own time, two poems leap to mind, by T.S. Eliot: “Journey of the Magi” and “A Song for Simeon”, respectively about the Epiphany and the Presentation of the Christ-Child in the Temple.
Both scenes, and many other Nativity scenes, were luminously portrayed by the Renaissance masters. For it is through painters, as much as through poets or composers, that we glimpse miracle: the promise of a world redeemed, made flesh in the birth of a child. That, obliquely, is what every new parent, Christian or not, can relate to.
And when at last our dying civilization is put to rest, the Nativity is one of the things that a future historian or archaeologist will treasure. Not in some exhumed tape of the latest crooner treadling his way through “Adeste Fideles”, always with one wrong note. But somewhere in the ruins, an unbroken 78 rpm disc of Karl Erb singing “O Jesulein suss” or a mildewed but legible volume of Christina Rossetti’s poems, or an unfaded colour photograph of “The Adoration of the Shepherds” by Hugo van der Goes.
That painting is one of the great masterpieces of the late fifteenth century; and in many respects it sums up the pure response of the mediaeval world, at its best, to the Nativity. The dominant figures, in the centre foreground as might be expected, are the Virgin and the Child: she, painted very large, young, serene, and magnificent; he, naked on the ground at her feet, tiny and helpless. Attendant angels reflect the supernatural quality of this birth. But that quality intersects with the mundane; the stable’s rudimentary rafters offer little shelter from the weather of life; to the left, next to an elderly and respectful Joseph, ox and ass peer at the newborn, at once their maker and their fellow-creature; and in the background, the wing of a Gothic building is visible, placing in particular time an event which is always contemporary. However, it is in the portrayal of other human figures, and in their relative sizes, that the true meaning of the Nativity is conveyed. In the lower right-hand corner, several people are present in a group: they are reverent, affluently robed, not much individualized, and painted, quite small; it is as though they have a right, like anyone else, to be there, yet it is not to them that the message has been given but, significantly, to the shepherds. Above them, painted large, the three shepherds are portrayed as roughly clad peasants, each with his own striking personality, part of the common ruck of humanity that the Child has come to redeem. In their poverty and adoration, they dwarf the well-to-do lower in the frame, whose worship has the perfunctory air of a slightly smug Sunday service.
Hugo van der Goes captured something timeless but for ever timely in his vision of the Nativity. It spoke eloquently to the faithful in his day. But it speaks just as eloquently today to any who come to the Uffizi in Florence with their hearts and minds open to what it has to say. Maybe its message is lost on the faithless or the unfaithed in a civilisation that seems to have lost its way — certainly the acolytes of Mammon offer no alternative worth a moment’s heed. Even so, though, history does assert a non-sectarian truth: that this species of ours, so constantly verging on extinction through its own corrupting greed, constantly reverses its gadarene rush to the cliff’s edge, by somehow turning back to its instinctive appetite for good, for truth and love. The when and how of that, no one can predict. But in some form or another, in some unannounced time and place, there will always be a new Nativity.
At least, we can but hope.
