Sir, – Searching for the “real” meaning of the intense mid-winter celebration that is Christmas is somewhat misguided as it yields many meanings, sacred and secular. However, there is no denying that it forms an integral place in Christian life and in western culture. It cannot be easily disentangled from what are construed as more ungodly pursuits.
This is the time when we and millions of others step aside from our day-to-day preoccupations and dream a while about the truth embodied in story and song that centres around the birth of a child in Bethlehem.
The early Christians had little interest in the birth of Christ, hence only two of the gospel writers, Matthew and Luke, deal with it.
The gospel writers were not writing biographies of Jesus, but each in their own way was harvesting the fruits of their engagement with the oral tradition of story, memory, imagination and myth that informed their lives; they were speaking to different audiences with different purposes.
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Celebration of the birth of Christ was not introduced until the third or fourth century.
Wonder and imagination are the key launching pads for our response to this compelling festival of singing, decorating, giving and receiving, forgiving and forgetting as, just for a few days, we turn our backs on the familiar and sometimes oppressive daily round.
The human world is not definitively determined by the way things are but by our imagining the world as it could be.
We all search for salvation from our sometimes oppressive daily round, escaping for a while from our limited sense of what we can become.
No matter how tough-minded we see ourselves, it is liberating to allow a little tender-heartedness to enter our lives as we reflect on the miracle of the birth of a child that transforms the cold eye of reason. – Yours, etc,
PHILIP O’NEILL,
Oxford.