Christmas and the mystery of practice

Today is Twelfth Night, the 12th day on from Christmas day, and in some churches the end of the liturgical season of Christmas. Traditionally it's when decorations come down, and it has me reflecting on my experience of Christmas this year. 

I have long found the run-up to Christmas (i.e. most of December) to be exhausting, stressful and depressing. I feel considerable effort involved in buying presents, writing and sending cards, planning food. I often experience sensory overload from the bombardment of lights and sounds in shops and on streets. Society demands excess consumption. The time is suffused with memories and nostalgia, which can be pleasant but also painful. And there's a considerable degree of emotional labour - as a parent, one has to perform Christmas for the sake of children, but also to show a degree of enthusiasm (even joy) for the season to avoid spoiling it for others, whatever one's own feeling. 

I won't continue in this vein for fear of being equated to Ebeneezer Scrooge or The Grinch, but you get the idea. I do really like spending time with my family in a relaxed and celebratory way, and the repetition of happy rituals (watching The Polar Express, singing the final verse of O Come All Ye Faithful on Christmas morning and so on) can be very special. And I have a genuine fondness for mince pies, mulled wine and lebkuchen. But there really is just so much of it all.

My negativity about all this has often been tempered by religious practice - the series of special services, prayers, liturgies and songs which have been devised for the Christmas season. They do interweave with the secular Christmas events - some people would make little division between them - but they give meaning and purpose to the season. The midnight Christmas Eve service has long been a particular favourite, from attending it with my family as a child, through my father leading services in various churches, to a couple of times when I led them myself. And there are a wealth of church resources which argue for a reduced emphasis on the material Christmas in favour of a more relational one, such as Advent Conspiracy. The concept of incarnation, that God should take on human flesh and be born in poverty, is one that inspires so much of the best of Christian theology (my own graspings on the topic are best found in a sermon that I gave five years ago on a much-misused passage in the gospel of John). In a somewhat dualistic fashion, I sometimes have contrasted the religious Christmas with the secular Christmas, to the detriment of the latter. 

However, my somewhat meandering spiritual journey has led me back to Quakers, after ten years in the United Reformed Church (I've reflected on this in blog posts on 'sojourning in silence and systems' and 'on being a nomad'). Quakers are lovely people, with deep spirituality that expresses itself in often very radical action, profoundly inclusive values, and a form of silent worship that is different every time and (at its best) extremely profound. But they/we also have a 'testimony' (a collective practice) against following the traditional church practice of setting aside particular 'times and seasons' as special or different. We should be open to the religious message of Christmas every day, just as we should be open to every day being Easter or Pentecost. Janet Scott wrote thirty years ago that: 

We might understand this as part of the conviction that all of life is sacramental; that since all times are therefore holy, no time should be marked out as more holy; that what God has done for us should always be remembered and not only on the occasions named Christmas, Easter and Pentecost.

Although Janet Scott observed in 1994 that the testimony seemed to be dying of neglect, it has changed somewhat: practically every Quaker will celebrate Christmas in its secular form, but I know few Quaker meeting houses with Christmas trees and none with special acts of worship. One might or might not hear people speaking in December in our meetings for worship about themes relating to Christmas. This year, Christmas Day was a Sunday; in my meeting, there wasn't even a normal meeting for worship held at the meeting house because not enough people were available, though a few gathered on Zoom. The huge emphasis on the religious aspects of the Christmas season is absent in most of Quaker practice.

Of course, I could go to other churches; I did so when I was previously a Quaker, and both this year and last, I was at an Anglican service on Christmas morning with family. But I wouldn't be getting the same steady experience of publicly exploring and celebrating the incarnation week by week, unless I chose to spend all of December at another kind of church. 

But religious experience is all about embodied practice - people coming together as a community to live their faith and explore it through forms of ritual behaviour. The great scholar of religion, Karen Armstrong, observes that this goes back at least as far as the 6th century BCE, and the Greek rituals known as 'mysteries'. Of these mysteries, she observes: "it was not something that you thought (or failed to think!) but something that you did" (The Case for God, 2009, p.60). Moreover, it is clear from Armstrong's work that these actions only make sense in the context of communal practice: we make sense of the world together, and express our faith together, through action. 

So one can only practice Christmas (as a religious form) in combination with others, as part of a religious community. The individual believer can surely dip in and out of Christmas rituals (many a church minister has enjoyed ironically saying "see you next year" at a Christmas service to those in their congregation they won't see until next Christmas) but their experience is very different from those who participate in many Christmas services over a period of weeks. And thus if one is part of a religious community that does not practice Christmas services in an explicit form, then one has the choice of either absenting oneself from that community, or going along with this practice. 

In the coming year, I will be writing on a new module about Systems Thinking in Practice, and specifically ways to become a better practitioner. And as someone who has spent a lot of time in faith communities, I find religious practice to be an example I keep coming back to (although perhaps not in teaching materials, for fear of putting students off). My colleague Martin Reynolds (quoted by another colleague, Ray Ison) defines practice as:

human interfaced activities – processes, including speech, conversation and knowing – that effect transformation in situations (what people, or groups, do when they do what they do – a state of “doing”).

In other words, practice - whether it is systems practice, religious practice, or another form of practice - is made up of processes that change situations. By being part of a religious practice that explicitly emphasises Christmas, or one that keeps it tacit, changes the situation in which we find ourselves - into one which treats the Christmas season very differently. 

I can't say how this will affect me in the next Christmas season. It is certainly my hope that I might find the way to express the mystery of the incarnation throughout the year. For a believer in the Christian understanding of God, this ought to affect one's own life, to change one's own practice. The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote:

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1400 years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.

So perhaps when December next arrives, I'll be better prepared to experience both the religious Christmas and the secular Christmas through an appropriate form of practice. May it be so.