Be far more retro!

Here's my article for December:

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Christmas is often a time when we indulge in nostalgia, recalling happy memories of past Christmases with family, friends and loved ones.    And perhaps trying to re-create those memories by carrying on family traditions, listening to the classic Christmas songs, and putting up the same decorations in the same place.  A visit to church for a carol service might also be part of an attempt to re-live those treasured times.  Because nostalgia plays such a big rôle in our experience of Christmas, it is a common theme in Christmas advertising, where companies try to persuade us that buying their products will help us replicate the feelings we cherish.

Fr. Philip Hall, the parish priest of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church of All Saints of Lincolnshire, Lincoln, wrote in his November newsletter of a current advert trying to persuade us that the “magic of Christmas” is to be found in retro-style decorations. However, he says, “we need to be far more retro”!  If we want the 'magic' of Christmas we need to go back not to our childhood, or even to the idealised Victorian Christmas, but we need to go back 2,000 years to remember the spiritual roots of our celebrations.

One reason we often look back to a 'golden time' of Christmases past is that those celebrations, especially when we were children, were responsibility-free – all we had to do was enjoy the presents, the food, the parties, the people.  We didn't have to worry about arranging them or paying for them; they just magically appeared!  As adults, the necessary but mundane, behind-the-scenes preparations often take the lustre off our enjoyment of the very experiences we work so hard to create.  No wonder we want to feel Christmas like a child again!

What we long for is a re-enchantment of Christmas, and not just of Christmas but of the whole of our lives: we wish it could be Christmas everyday, as long as it's the 'magical' Christmas we remember, not the pressurised adult version!  Fr Philip is right that if we want to re-enchant Christmas and our lives we need to be far more retro and go back to the source: Christmas is 'magical', not in the sense of wizards but in that it reveals to us another realm of reality beyond the mundane, natural universe; it reveals the super-natural to us.

Religions might affirm that the supernatural exists, or even that we might enter the supernatural realm after death, but Christmas tells us something far more wonderful; that the supernatural realm entered our natural realm as the baby Jesus, so that the supernatural could dwell amongst us, and our mundane world could be re-enchanted.  A re-enchanted world is one that has a meaning and a purpose; a naturalistic world, one that exists through blind chance and the laws of physics, has no ultimate meaning or purpose and is dis-enchanted.   Jesus comes to offer us life in all its re-enchanted fullness (John 10:10) that as we live in relationship with him, he lives in us. So if you feel discontented with the mundane, why not come to church and be far more retro?