The Santa Claus Quandary

The first fight I ever remember having with a friend was a not-so-philosophical debate regarding the dubious existence of the man, the myth, the legend: Santa Claus.

It was my best friend, and at five, that was a considerable portion of my world.

But the other sizeable portion, of course, was my family. And my family had told me that Santa was real, and in all my years of barely cognizant life I had never known them to lie to me, so I believed them.

Then one day I came home from kindergarten with this dramatic story about the argument with my friend and how I had defended our family honor. My older brother couldn't bear for me to lose a friend over the dude in the red suit, and promptly took me to the closet in my parents' room to show me the gifts that would have been from Santa that year.

My parents might have been able to convince me, even then, that it was their own stash and, Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but they agreed with my brother - it wasn't worth the loss of a friendship, and it was time for The Talk.

The thing is, my mother - being a bit flowery with words and charmingly poetic in her perceptions of all matters of life - still believed in Santa Claus. At least, she said, Santa Claus' spirit was real.

I find it pertinent at this point to note that, future theologian or not, as a child I thought Santa Claus was like God's brother from another mother. I mean, I think I had a good idea about what was in Jesus' job description, but who was God to me at that point?

He sees you when you're sleeping; he knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake!

Sure, God was more powerful (all year long!) and less materialistically affectionate than Santa seemed to be, but it was difficult to differentiate them enough to understand why my spiritually-inclined mother would explain to me that one exists (sometimes as Spirit) and the other does not exist (except in spirit).

As most "emerging adults" evaluate decisions their parents made in order to form their own parenting philosophies, I have since wondered: if I ever were to have children, would I tell them that Santa Claus is real - in spirit or otherwise? For the most part, I believed that I wouldn't.

Sometimes religious families don't share the Santa story because they consider it a "secular" tradition or because it seems to teach - eventually - disbelief, especially disbelief in a seemingly omnipotent, benevolent being basically hailed as Divine around some Christmas trees.

Despite my own initial difficulty separating out the "characters" of God and Santa Claus, this ultimately was not a major problem. Atheists and cultural theists may not entirely understand what I mean when I say this, but by the time I had a personal experience of what I understood to be God, the difference was abundantly clear: Claus could feasibly still exist in whatever form people please, but I can't attest to that so long as I have no experience or reason to affirm it for me. Sort of the way I don't blame atheists for not seeing sufficient evidence for God. I think it would be worse for someone to lie about what they believe or don't believe than not to get the facts straight, whatever they may be. The reasons I have for a belief in God are sufficient evidence for me, and to be the most authentic person I can be, I can only attest to what I believe to be true as genuinely as I can.

Thus the concern I have is not that a child would equate Santa and God, or that their inevitable Santa-crushing moment may shake their faith. I believe in a God who is revealed and made known in various ways, and I believe that faith-shaking moments too often lead to spiritual growth to want to ward them off entirely.

Rather, my concern is simply this: I don't know that I can tell my child that I believe something I don't. It may be a fanciful, wonderful story; the spirit of giving may be alive and well indeed; but Santa Claus as he has come to be known and shared throughout the ages is not a tradition in which I'm that sentimentally invested.

I suppose I could imagine telling stories about Saint Nick, and presenting it that way, or even simply asking children what they think and letting them go through a natural progression.

Last year I saw the Finish film called "Christmas Story" about the orphaned Nikolas, who begins delivering toys to the children of the families who have taken him in year after year, and finally to children throughout the locale. I enjoyed it in its entirety, except for the ending, at which point (SPOILER ALERT) jolly old Saint Nikolas flies off into the moonlight on his inexplicably airborne reindeer-drawn sleigh, waving and winking and whooping out Macy*s Santa belly-laughs. And I know it was obligatory - any kid-friendly film can't risk spoiling the Santa industry for a young viewer. But it would have been such a beautiful movie even without it, and I sort of wish they had let it be.

In spite of all of this, or perhaps in light of it, I admit I've been pondering this quandary from the other end of the spectrum lately. Why? Because I read this piece online and, besides my own mother's more in-depth explanations to me about why she became a firm Santa-espouser, it is perhaps the most beautiful pro-Santa 'argument' I've ever come across. Having read this letter from a mother to her child who demanded the truth, I might consider changing my own stance on what I would tell my hypothetical, nonexistent offspring - and when, and how.

Click here to give it a read. It really is rather beautiful, and it would make my Mama weep with happy Santa-spirit warm-and-fuzzies.

The Garden: A Revelation

When Hilary Rhodes of Woman at the Well sent me the post she wrote for this blog based on one of mine, her theological and historical exploration originally culminated in a beautiful personal testimony, which I loved even more than the insightful analysis of grace. I told Hilary that these parts' length and content (related, yet quite different) suggested to me that they should indeed be two separate pieces, so what you've seen this week is that first portion.

Because the second part is so personally meaningful, Hilary would like to make WATW its home, and I agree. It moved me, though, and so I'd like to make a point of recommending it to you and directing you over to WATW to read the full text. It's a descriptive piece about a spiritual vision she experienced; a story of depression and consolation, fear and grace.

Hilary and I differ in much of how and where we were raised and the theological and political landscapes around us. We have walked individual and intersecting paths. But I feel a sense of camaraderie in both her writing voice (particularly in her more personal writings) and in many of the issues she confronts. The blend of ideological differences and similarities between us, in fact, serves to remind me how simultaneously unique and intricately connected the parts of the Body of Christ truly are.

And so it is my pleasure to introduce to you Hilary's visionary tale:

I can’t tell you the moment I lost my faith. Sometime when I was about 14, when I was old enough to understand how shallow and fear-based and resistant to questions and dismissive of real need my experience of it had hereunto been. This was followed with six years of becoming an increasingly angry atheist. I can, however, tell you – almost to the hour – the moment I found it again:

The night of Thursday, September 6, 2008.

It was two months before one of the most heated presidential elections in history. I’d just come off a tearingly difficult, lonely, and isolated sophomore year of college, where I’d battled depression so severe that if I didn’t have anything to do, I’d stay in bed until 3 PM with the shades shut. I was saved by a deep friendship with an absolutely wonderful guy in my psychology class. (Matt, shout-out time.) But I’d been struggling over the summer again, and although I was about to take off to Oxford University and fulfill one of my longtime dreams, I was faced with a dialogue that was (especially on the right wing) about nothing but fear and despair. About the “destruction of America.” About this scary dark-skinned guy with the scary “Muslim” name. About how there might not be time for me, and my future family and children and grandchildren.

I was lying in bed in the darkness, crying. Just so scared. So scared. I was screaming in my soul. I was in agony. I couldn’t even breathe.

I couldn’t do it alone. I just couldn’t. It was too big for me. It was too much. It was beyond my ability to bear. And so I did the only thing I could:

I asked for help.

I listened to it echo in the walls. I watched headlights pass on the ceiling.

I eventually subsided into a troubled sleep.

And that night, the Word came back.

This is what I remember...

Read more.

The Cost of Grace

by Hilary Rhodes, contributor

Today, I’d like to expand on Kim’s last post about “deceptive Christian tippers,” and to do so through the lens of my current muse: Dietrich Bonhoeffer.


Source

Bonhoeffer, as you may know, was a German Lutheran pastor who died a martyr – he was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, days before it was liberated by the Allies – for his single-minded, incredibly courageous, uncompromising efforts to resist Hitler and the Nazis. Thus, his writings (Cost of Discipleship, Christ the Center, Ethics, and more) are uniquely positioned to speak to us on the true role of a Christian in the savage twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our call to social activism, and how – in his case – to reconcile it with the bluntly pacifist message of Jesus, who famously instructs us to turn the other cheek and not resist an evil man.

CHEAP GRACE

As I read Kim’s post about Christian diners who leave come-to-Jesus tracts for their restaurant servers in place of cash tips, it occurred to me that this was a great way to explore Bonhoeffer’s conceptions of “cheap” and “costly” grace, almost literally. The diners may feel that by leaving an instruction manual on how to obtain “eternal life,” they are doing their waiter or waitress a much greater and lasting service than if they’d merely left them a temporal, worldly gift of money. But the questions raised are twofold:

1) How can this anonymous, tight-fisted, downright pharisaical method of drive-by evangelism possibly communicate the life-changing, radical, and completely counterculture nature of the Gospels?

2) In fact, can there be any benefit to it besides the fact that it makes the diner feel as if they’ve “done their part”? Or is it just a low-risk, cop-out, “don’t look at me” method of proselytizing that indeed sets the public perception of Christianity back still further?

Bonhoeffer would characterize it as the latter. In The Cost of Discipleship, which I am currently reading, he opens with an admonishment to the Christian community to take a hard-eyed look at their methods of preaching, and judge whether this leads people to the actual Word of God, or is intended instead to protect the “look but don’t touch” insular country-club nature of many churches. He then examines his own Protestant heritage, and how Martin Luther kicked off the sixteenth-century Reformation with the radical idea that not good works but rather grace alone is sufficient to redeem an individual.

There’s many a theological discussion to be had about Luther and his message, not least his rabid anti-Semitism. But Bonhoeffer’s focus for exploration – and mine – is how the concept of grace, and its function in Christian life, has become grossly misunderstood and devalued. Luther’s proposition that God alone confers salvation has led, as Bonhoeffer points out, to a sense among many contemporary Christians that they can live a life identical to their secular counterparts in nearly every respect. Save for going to church on Sundays, certain taboos in vocabulary, and, yes, leaving evangelical tracts in place of tips, they can live essentially as they did before, confident that grace has been put to work to wipe out the rest of their transgressions. It becomes “the justification of sin, rather than the justification of the sinner in the world.”

Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace,” and characterizes it as the greatest threat, bar none, to a real, vital Christian calling in this day and age. When Christianity is lax, lazy, and easy, when it demands nothing from us and is palatable to the suburban everyman leery of scary words like “sacrifice” and “suffering,” it completely loses the radical quality on which it was founded. It becomes Christianity without Christ.

So what’s the answer? How can we maintain a distinctively Christian identity? Or will this build the exclusionary walls even higher, if Christianity has an entrance exam harder than Harvard’s?

COSTLY GRACE

The commandments of Jesus are deceptively simple. “Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come, follow Me.” When asked how to obtain eternal life, he doesn’t break out a phonebook-sized manual of rules and regulations. He merely affirms the Commandments first given to Charlton Heston Moses: Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Honor your father and mother. Love God with all your heart, soul, body, and mind. And love your neighbor as you love yourself.

I’ve written several entries at my own blog dealing with the nature of these commandments, and how we (present company no exception) so often fail at putting them into practice in daily life. But the other thing to keep in mind is that Jesus is always, uncompromisingly, and brutally honest about what the cost of discipleship entails. When He calls you, you can’t stop to bury your father or say goodbye to your loved ones. You can’t set your terms and then follow. You can’t follow when the stock market’s doing well. You drop everything, and follow. Period.

This is also the hardest thing we can ever do. Bonhoeffer puts it just as frighteningly: “When Christ calls a man, he calls him to come and die.”

Because in fact, we do die. Maybe not in actual martyrdom, as Bonhoeffer did, but in everything we were before, our old habits and neurotic fixations and judgments and beliefs and cop-outs. We burn away. We do sell everything, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, or otherwise. And in stripping ourselves of these worldly accoutrements, we are thrown into a new life where we are forced to rely completely on the Divine Mercy.

And in so doing, we don’t give up everything and get nothing for our trouble. We receive the Pearl of Great Price. We receive, in this utterly necessary, transcendent sacrifice, the gift of costly grace. Our life is no longer our own, and has been bought on a heavenly account we can never pay back – and don’t have to. That story has already been told. The story of how love overcomes evil, the truth of all human reality. The power of death, and our own death, has been broken forever.

It’s done. It’s been done for a while. On a beautiful spring morning almost two thousand years ago, two women in Jerusalem met a man they thought was the gardener. And it ended.

It’s not about blood and guts. It never was.

Hollywood’s never figured that out.

THE CROSS

Like many Christians, I like to wear a cross necklace. It’s another easy and low-risk way of displaying religious conviction – that is, when it isn’t just a throwaway fashion statement. But for Bonhoeffer, it’s a reminder of nothing more or less than our own absolute commitment to follow Jesus’ path, even unto its uttermost end.

We each have our own crosses to bear. Starting out on a spiritual journey will, I promise, show yours to you pretty darn quick. And it’s a scary proposition. It explicitly includes suffering, and that death I mentioned above. So why would we, as creatures who are naturally averse to pain, choose to do that to ourselves?

What if our cross to carry was to humbly accept the unconditional love and mercy of God, for ourselves and for everyone we meet? To yield ourselves into the arms of a Divine who is so deeply in love with us that He did not consider the life of His Son too high a price to pay for our redemption?

Does that sound so terrible? So dangerous, so exclusionary? So self-righteous, so bloodstained, so many of the adjectives that are (sadly, and truly) used to characterize the exploits of many people who have called themselves Christian throughout the centuries?

For Bonhoeffer, this was the ultimate core of his call to resist the Nazis. He understood that Jesus was not preaching a message of passive acceptance, the life of cheap grace, to sit back and let the most evil dictator of the twentieth century – perhaps in all of history – seize control of his beloved home country.

To turn the other cheek didn’t mean to become collaborators, either active or complicit. What it was, was a call not to fight the Nazis on their terms. They wouldn’t be brought down by Bonhoeffer and his fellows becoming them.

Because the Sermon on the Mount, possibly the most gloriously counter-intuitive message in all of human history, is a call to action. To demonstrate, to create, to live the Kingdom of Heaven, and the perfect love of God. Here. Now. Forever.


Hilary Rhodes has recently launched her own blog at Woman at the Well, where she ruminates on issues of social justice, courageous faith, the creative life, and more. Although Sarah Lawrence College is regularly cited as one of the least religious schools in America, it was there that she rediscovered, and fell in love with, her lost childhood faith – except on a hundred orders of magnitude more, in depths of experience and mercy that she never, ever thought were possible. For more on that, keep tabs on WATW.