XMAS
In Canada, the spiritual traditions of the First Nations have only recently been accorded a measure of the respect that was always their due. For an unconscionable length of time, they were variously ignored, demeaned, and even outlawed. And many of their adherents were bullied into conversion, to the Catholic or Protestant faith the colonists brought with them.
Into that mix there was added, in due course, an ingredient of Eastern Orthodoxy. And although the dominant religious culture was Christian, further immigration modified it with non-Christian adherences to Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Shintoism, to name a few.
Along with this diversity of belief, there was also an accompanying pattern of non-belief, fairly insignificant a hundred years ago, but nowadays manifest in a substantial cross-section of the populace, especially among the young.
Some of these people were convinced atheists or agnostics. Others were people who had just drifted away from organized religion: they might attend a service once or twice a year, for social reasons; but their focus was entirely secular, not sacred. Finally there were people whose lives had simply never been touched by religion: they were out-and-out materialists, never questioning the consumer society they were part of, and indifferent to any spiritual ethos.
A few outsiders belonged to none of the foregoing categories. These were people who found the modern world spiritually empty, but who could not find satisfactory answers in the creeds and practices of any one institutional faith. Theologically illiterate, they cobbled together a hodge-podge of Eastern mysticism and Western rituals, culled from this source or that, and soothed their souls with mantras, incense, and insipid music. They are to religion what snack food is to haute cuisine.
With such a varied audience out there, how does Canadian radio address the matter of God? Most of the time, hardly at all. That is, almost all the programming, whether on the commercial stations or on the public network, pays attention only to secular concerns. What little programming does take notice of faith is largely confined to the celebration of Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter for Christians, with a token nod to Passover, Yom Kippur, and Rosh Hashanah for Jews. Other religious communities, even in an age of political correctness, get virtually no air-time.
Here, though, a distinction has to be made. The CBC, at least in the past, used to take religion seriously on the occasions when the calendar prompted it to do so: monumental works like “Hodie” by Vaughan Williams at Christmas, the “St Matthew Passion” by Bach on Good Friday, “Messiah” by Handel at Easter, these were once presented live by the CBC’s own orchestras and singers. Implicit in this practice, however, but never spoken out loud, was the notion that religion was only important on such occasions, and that no recognition was due to a year-round life of faith. At least, though, what was blandly referred to as seasonal programming did include work by serious composers who took religion seriously.
The same cannot be said for the seasonal programming of the private stations. On Christmas Eve and Easter Eve, they may broadcast a Midnight Mass from a local church, and this burnishes their image as a community service at a time of night when they can’t sell many advertising spots. But during the day, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, their programs are larded with fustian stuff like “Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer”, “Jingle Bells”, “Santa Claus is coming to town”, and “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas”. None of this has anything to do with the Feast of the Nativity; but it is an exact fit with the overall commercialization of Christmas — as is, indeed, to be expected of broadcasters who view radio as a market-place.
While these cultural degradations are rife in the commercial world, both on and off the air, their incidence in the non-commercial world of CBC radio, never wholly absent, has been on the rise. The network disc-jockeys, who have almost entirely replaced live talent, trivialize religion with excursions into the flatland of cliché’d religiosity; and some of them betray an astonishing ignorance of simple facts — not knowing, for example, the difference between Good Friday and Easter, bundling the two occasions together as homogenized components of that secular festivity, the Holiday Weekend.
This is all part and parcel of the contemporary dumbing down of CBC Radio Two, that has alienated so many previously loyal listeners. There, an unenlightened management has embraced a populist approach that substitutes flaccidity for muscle. It abandons any aspiration to address an audience interested in high art, preferring rather a shallow policy of Easy Listening.
Such a policy is a matter for regret, even for outrage. But it is not peculiar to CBC management. It is paralleled elsewhere in our increasingly philistine culture, where the arts are lassoed by the box-office, and where right-wing politicians deride the arts as an indulgence of namby-pamby parasites. CBC Radio Two is not alone in dumping serious music and replacing it with the slack vapidities of semi-literate song-writers. That is in line with current trends in the musical scene at large. And if Christmas, on the air, has forgotten the hard home-truths of the Nativity, in favour of inoffensive sentimentality, is that essentially any different from the dumbing-down that has infected many a church service? Oh, to be sure, there are still churches that have not substituted Pretty Pop for Palestrina. But what are we to make of a church that bowdlerizes Christmas by having children process down the central aisle to the crib, carrying a chocolate cake and singing “Happy Birthday, dear Jesus”?
That is a far cry from the “Gloria in excelsis” ringing out above the stable. And it takes no account of the sadness underlying the joy of birth, in the poignant foreknowledge that the child in the manger is destined for the cross. That, though, is never forgotten in the lullaby carols of the fifteenth century: they have a common refrain of the child weeping over his destiny, and of the mother struggling to console him. They honour the fact that this birth is portent of salvation. But it is a salvation only purchased at a harsh price. And something of that price is foreshadowed already in the circumstances of his coming: in his squalid arrival among beasts, among the poor, in a world of indifference.
One of the most prolific authors of those mediaeval lullaby carols was John Hyman. It is accordingly to him that the following short poem is dedicated.
