Montclair Presbyterian Church

Dear Friends,

Advent is the season during which we prepare ourselves for Christmas, and for most of us Advent is a season of happy expectation because for most of us Christmas is a celebration that brings with it tidings of comfort and joy while visions of sugar plums dance in our heads. But not everyone is so filled with giddy happiness at Christmas. For a significant portion of the American population, Christmas is a time of sadness, disappointment, stress, and depression, and it can be hard for churches to make room for and to give voice to those whose experience of Christmas is less than joyful.

Two years ago I came across a Christmas sermon by Robert Louis Stevenson, which remains one of my favorite essays by a man who has a well-deserved reputation as a novelist, but who is, I think, underappreciated as a moral philosopher. Stevenson’s Christmas Sermon is interesting because in it he looks at Christmas not so much as a celebration of Jesus’ birth but as a season at the end of the year, during the darkest days of Winter, when it’s impossible not to contemplate one’s mortality and to consider what it means to live well. As such, in the sermon, Stevenson gives voice to those for whom Christmas is less than joyful, and in doing so he finds spiritual richness in Christmas’ shadow.

This isn’t to say that Stevenson’s thoughts on Christmas are entirely gloomy. In fact, after providing a fairly solid critique of the prudishness of Victorian morality, Stevenson writes,

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

He then follows his admonition to gentleness and cheerfulness with a strong call to social action:

“But the truth of [Jesus] teaching would seem to be this: in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that we are to give away to the man who has taken our cloak. But when another’s face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceivable and surely not desirable.”

Yet undergirding all of this is a solid (dare I say Scottish Presbyterian) familiarity with human frailty.

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner–call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

This is not the stuff of traditional Christmas Eve homilies, and it certainly isn’t the kind of holiday message that fuels the hedonistic materialism of the Shopping Mall Holiday Season. It’s not how I experience Christmas, and it may not be how you experience the holiday, but it is an expression of how many folks do experience Advent and Christmas. For too long those of us who are happy in December have pitied those whose experience of the season is less than joyful; it’s a far better thing, I think, to listen to their wisdom.

Anyway, I recommend the Christmas sermon, particularly if for you Christmas is less about eggnog, mistletoe and clogged shopping mall parking lots, and more about reflection on the mysteries of life that lie hidden in the dark of winter. Here’s a link to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Christmas Sermon.

A Blessed Advent to You,
Ben

Friends,

For my contribution to the Contact this week, I’m sending you something I wrote while sitting in the library of the Iona Abbey. As I wrote this, the howling wind was lashing rain against the leaded glass window that afforded me a wonderful view across the water to the Isle of Mull.

I’m sure I’ll be telling you more about my stay in Scotland in the coming weeks, but for my first report on my time away, I’d like to tell you about an experience I had while visiting Shrewsbury in England on the first day of my trip. I was in Shrewsbury because it is the birthplace of Charles Darwin, and on my trip I was trying to finish up a book that, in one chapter, tries to address what I consider to be the unnecessary folly of those who, in the name of faith, reject Darwin’s ideas about Evolution.

The passage is below.
May God’s spirit blow through you like the Scottish wind.
Warmly,
Ben

***

On the night I stayed in Shrewsbury, as I was preparing to leave my hotel, to go out into the rain and find a simple dinner before collapsing in jet-lagged exhaustion into comfort of my bed, a young violinist started talking to me in the hotel lobby where I was using hotel’s meager WiFi service. He was free with suggestions about where I could find a nice dinner that wouldn’t break the bank, and he invited me to join him and some of his friends, later in the evening, at a nearby pub, where he told me the best jam session in all of Shropshire would be taking place.

The invitation made me feel a little bit nervous. Part of me still felt like a child who’d been warned never to talk to strangers, and I wasn’t sure if the violinist inviting me would misinterpret a visit to the pub as an invitation for further romantic overtures, but I went anyway, and I’m glad I did because it was a magical experience. The pub was tiny, and the room we occupied —no larger than my study at church—didn’t really hold all of us. The musicians included the aforementioned violinist, three guitars, a bassist, a mandolin player, a guy on banjo, and a gentleman with a penny whistle; those of us without instruments included the wife and daughter of the banjo player, a tourist couple from somewhere in the south of England who seemed to the in the very springtime of romance, a lonely-looking trans-woman and me. The music ranged from traditional Irish jigs, to bluegrass, to the Beatles, by way of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the Delta Blues. Those of us without instruments sang.

All the musicians played well, and as the evening turned to night, and as we sang song after song, I came to experience deep joy and a sense of belonging born not of nationality or of personal familiarity, but of music and of fellowship between people in from the cold and sharing the warmth of a small room, heated by a fireplace, bodies, and beer. I have no idea if any of the people with me in the Shrewsbury pub were people of faith, but I do know that religion deals in the currency of such moments, when a diverse and beautiful gathering of God’s children come together to make music, to share friendship and to extend hospitality to strangers.

When yet another musician showed up with a dreadnaught guitar, I gave up my seat and walked back through the rain to my hotel. It was 11PM in England and I’d been awake for more than thirty hours; I needed sleep. There on dark, damp streets of an English town I realized that Darwin’s detractors don’t just misunderstand the science of evolution, and they don’t just read the bible in ways it was never meant to be read, but they also misunderstand what it means to live a life of faith. Religion’s finest moments don’t happen when defenders of a relatively modern way of reading the Bible are able to banish evolutionary biology from high school classrooms; rather, religion is at its best when the people of God make music together, singing in such beautiful harmony that they become impatient for all in the world that is ugly, violent, unjust and unkind.

And nothing Darwin–or his detractors for that matter–has ever done, can compromise the Christian faith so long as Christians remember to come in from the cold, to sit down by the fire, and sing, welcoming the stranger and creating beauty, with all that true beauty means for justice and peace.