just:words

Christmas season brings a feeling of two souls in one body: On one hand, I am the person who has sung theologically framed carols (and all the verses!) for longer than many of my friends or students have been alive … and I love these songs.  On the other, I don’t attend worship services these days and haven’t been to church (I don’t think?) since 2016, and I generally don’t miss it aside from the music. (I wrote a post about that a while ago.)

Off and on these past several years, I’ve posted about my journey out of Evangelical Christianity.  While I can’t say that I’ve journeyed TO anything in particular, I can report that I’m a lot more satisfied with my worldview when it’s not dominated by emotional manipulation and guilt trips in the name of Jesus. My relationship to faith now is complicated, but I am far happier with a bundle of unknowns than I was living in an echo chamber of false security.

Christmas ought to be (and often is) one of the best seasons in religious liturgy. The music is generally top-notch; the worship space is alight with extra sparkle everywhere. With apologies to the whole “but Easter is MORE IMPORTANT to the Gospel Story!” downers, I love the Advent season for its hopefulness and beauty. (Pour one out for the exhausted people on a church’s music team — it’s an incredibly demanding season. If you have any complaints about *whatever* your worship director is planning this year, stuff them back into your ass. Please.)

The older I get, the more meaningful it is for me to understand what I believe and what I hope to be true.  I’m genuinely not sure where “Christianity” falls in that schema.  I was raised in “faith” from before my earliest memories.  In the Christian paradigm, that is the blessing of the Covenant: that the children of God’s faithful never know a day when they are not aware of who Jesus is.  From an outside and more objective perspective, it also means I have no idea the extent to which my faith journey is genuine spiritual experience vs. wandering around trying to make sense of a worldview imprinted on my brain and heart long before I had any agency over how I view the world.

I’m not here to attack people who raise their kids in their faith tradition.  But Evangelical / Fundamentalist Christianity (they are the same stream now in America, showing they always were on the same theological tree, just with one more “fun” and palatable than the other) goes real hard on the notion of “making sure” their kids “keep the faith,” and I’d like to suggest that maybe this constant barrage isn’t fair to their offspring nor is it wise. If you don’t trust the Holy Spirit has the ability to draw your children to Himself and to the faith, then what exactly is the foundation of your belief system in the first place?

So what value is Christmas to someone figuring out if they’re even still related to Christianity?

Christmas carols talk a lot about the hope that the birth of the Messiah brought into a dark world, and the promise of salvation through God sacrificing His son.  I feel like I’m standing at the threshold of a warm room with a cold dark night at my back. I don’t particularly want to walk in a cold world of materialism and non-faith. (Truly.). I’d prefer to be in the warm room where it’s easier to say “God will fix it” and “all will be right in the end” and “this world is not our home.”  But that’s a very easy and tempting path away from genuine, harder questions about this world: why it’s structured the way it is, and what constitutes truth or faith or belief.

(Don’t expect answers from this post. I only expect to kick up more questions the older I get; “answers” are a young person’s game.)

My favorite carols are the ones with 4-6 verses written by folks like Charles Wesley: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” or “O Come O Come Emmanuel.”  Not only are the tunes excellent singing — seriously, the alto lines can be so lovely, in contrast to so much of the hymnal — but the words carry more than sappy sentimentalism of so much pop Christmas music. The lyrics are steeped in Old Testament language, written by people who probably actually read Isaiah or Psalms or Ezekiel and that language was in their bones and on their lips every Sunday thanks (most likely) to liturgical worship structures where multiple Bible passages are read to the congregation weekly.

I don’t mind “Let It Snow” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” but it’s interesting to me that almost no secular holiday song really sticks around much once it’s had its moment in the sun.  Lots of new songs get written and abandoned as one-off filler material on albums that are otherwise some famous artist crooning through songs they likely learned as a kid at church (or church-adjacent).  But even the local rock station can be found playing some metal band’s version of Joy to the World or the Trans-Siberian Orchestra rocking out to The First Noel.  (I really like August Burns Red’s rendition of Carol of the Bells, which you can find here on Youtube.)

Thinking today on verse 3 of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”:

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.
Mild He lays His glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.
Hark, the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King!

That line about the Sun of Righteousness repeats a prophecy from the book of Malachi, specifically chapter 4 verse 2.  I’ve always loved the poetic nature of the archaic use of “wings” for the rays of the sun, bringing to mind imagery from statues and carvings of the ancient Near East.

Malachi is a short book — don’t read just the verse but consider taking time for the author’s entire sermon about what actual righteousness looks like. (Hint: it’s not paying lip-service to how much one loves and worships God while doing everything possible to steal, lie, and cheat. Very appropriate messaging to the 80% of Evangelicals who voted for Tump three weeks ago.)

So I sit here not knowing if that verse by Wesley, restating prophecies from an ancient text, is “true.”  I hope it is. I would love for there to be a God in the world who is a Prince of Peace, a Sun of Righteousness who will come to pick up humanity from our absolute shit and hatred and evil and pull us toward Himself, scrubbing off the decay and un-twisting the bent and broken corners in our hearts.

But I genuinely just don’t know.

I feel it’s more important for me to be honest and say, “I don’t know” than to try to make it so for myself.  Belief is not something to argue yourself into or out of.  To me, doubt is a component of faith, not its enemy.  

Advent season is for the doubters as much as it is for the believers. I prefer to live with the complexity and cognitive dissonance of honesty.  Truth will remain true whether I “believe” in it or not; of that, I am certain.  And in that I can trust.

May your holiday season, however you celebrate it, be a blessing to you and those around you.