Real meaning of Christmas calls for respect

We don’t all agree on the meaning of Christmas – but tolerance ensures we can accept that

A SCHOOL in Ottawa cancelled its Christmas concert this year in favour of holding a “holiday-themed” craft night, and decided to hold a February Fest instead. The Christmas concert was deemed too exclusive because some students did not celebrate Christmas and apparently had to sit out the rehearsals for the concert, often with the principal.

Oddly enough, the most vociferous protests came from parents who claimed to be non- religious, but who saw the cancellation as an affront to their culture. Understandably, they saw a February Fest as fake and liked the idea of getting into the mood for celebration by doing traditional things like singing carols at Christmas.

An opinion poll at about the same time claimed that only about a third of Canadians see Christmas as being about Christ. The majority see it as a celebration of goodwill, while more women than men see it as being a family time.

Here at home, outrage has focused on the theft of a statue of baby Jesus from a crib in Waterford and leaving it in bits. However, the cancelling of a Christmas concert or the smashing of a plaster statue of Jesus probably do not signal any kind of war against the “real meaning of Christmas”.

The latter was probably a simple act of vandalism, while the former was probably just a muddled attempt to include people, an idea quite in tune with the idea of Christmas as a season of goodwill, even if the mechanism chosen was clumsy and counter-productive.

Christmas for many Irish people is a family time, a time to relax, a time to shop, eat and watch lots of British television. For a significant number, it is a much-loved religious feast.

For those who no longer really see it as anything to do with Christ, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has some advice. He recently urged lapsed Catholics to have the maturity to say: “I don’t believe in God and I really shouldn’t be hanging on to the vestiges of faith when I don’t really believe in it.”

In other words, maybe just skip the midnight Mass this year that you planned to attend for sentimental reasons?

Is he right? I don’t know. The church I attend will be packed this Christmas Eve, full of children who don’t have a clue how to behave in a church and parents who will be mildly put out to discover they have gone and changed the words of the Mass without consulting them. It is very tempting to wish they would stay at home.

Tempting and perhaps more Pharisaic than Christian? Wasn’t it Jesus who reprimanded his disciples for trying to prevent children getting close to him? (Perhaps in a few years, few will understand that reference to the Pharisees.)

But whatever about Christmas or Easter celebrations, what about parents who just see First Holy Communion as a rite of passage and have no intention of attending Mass regularly, much less attempting to raise the child as a Catholic except in the most nominal sense?

Ignoring for a moment the numbers who would ring Joe Duffy if it were suggested to them that their children don’t take part in First Holy Communion or Confirmation, is it time for parents to decide whether they are in or out?

Again, I don’t know. Do we really only want the fervently committed in our churches? Ask me on a different day and I might give you a different answer, but I don’t think that becoming a holy huddle of the like-minded is the solution, either. If people are searching for meaning, I don’t believe it right to exclude them at any stage of the journey.

Christopher Hitchens, who died recently, appeared pugnaciously free of any doubt. Given that he saw all religion as a dangerous conspiracy and tyranny, he would suggest that only idiots would even contemplate being part of it. During his last illness, he said – half-jokingly, but still seriously – that he, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins should set up hospital ward visiting schemes.

The visitors would meet the terminally ill and, instead of encouraging them to become more religious, they would tell them that if they only had three weeks to live, there was still time to live them, free from fear of the priest.

Yet Hitchens would have rolled his eyes to the heaven he did not believe in at the idea that any literate person could afford to be ignorant of the Bible as literature. However, seeing the Bible merely as a valuable heritage but with no real core truth – other than some of its morality – is just as dismissive of religion as any of Hitchens’s other polemics.

Hitchens, in his glorious, eloquent prose, frequently condemned religion as tyranny, but the God he rejected, and indeed the fear and irrationality he associated with faith, are not recognisable to most believers.

He also ignored one of the cardinal values of the modern age – tolerance. That much-abused word does not mean approval, but the opposite. Tolerance is only required when you find someone’s beliefs or actions offensive, but you defend the person’s right to believe or act in that way, in the interests of democracy and human rights.

Tolerance does not mean to pretend, as they seemed to think in that Ottawa school, that Christmas does not happen. Instead, it finds a way to welcome others, to share a cultural heritage that is alive and real, but not imposed.

Merry Christmas.