"On The Fourth Day of Christmas . . ."
Roger Dick
Sunday, December 28th, 2003

Well, we got through another frenetic Christmas season. The economy has finished its feeding frenzy and will move on to . . . Valentine’s Day?

Last week I wanted to confirm a suspicion, so I reread Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Nowhere could I find the words Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Bethelem, Messiah, manger, shepherds, angels, Christ. G. K. Chesterton, among other things a brilliant literary critic, points out that Dickens had to invent three creaking ghosts to persuade Victorian materialists like Scrooge to believe in Christmas. Looking at our society, however, it’s glaringly ironic that Dickens got it exactly wrong. Christmas has not converted materialists; instead, materialists have perverted Christmas. Sure and no wonder Scrooge loves Christmas, Christmas is a little money-maker, y’knaw.

One of my saddest memories is of driving through an alley in Minneapolis the morning after Christmas and seeing a tree upside down in a trash can. “How’d they do that,” I wondered? You’d have to get up pretty early to get the lights and ornaments off and get the tree in the trash before ten.

Tradition itself tells us that one day is not enough, that we need a whole season to celebrate “the leaping down from heaven of God’s son.” Today is only the fourth of those twelve days. Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night for Queen Elizabeth as the crown of the 1601 Christmas season. And according to the finest of the Medieval Romances, the fourteenth century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, King Arthur and his table celebrated Christmas a full fifteen days.

So how do we lose our sense of wonder? The villain, of course, is habit, repetition, taking things for granted. Viktor Frankl quotes Dostoevski’s terrible definition of our species: “Man is that being who can get used to anything.” Even in a concentration camp a prisoner could simultaneously watch a corpse being dragged out of the barracks, its head bumping down the stairs, and continue to eat his soup.

If you have a favorite picture, one way of making sure you will seldom see it is to hang it on the wall. I guarantee that you will be oblivious to it all but two or three times a year, probably when some guest asks about it.

Another memory from thirty-some years ago: holding my two-year-old son in my arms in the backyard. He pointed to a nondescript sparrow gasping, “Bird! Bird! Bird!” Well, we know who was alive and who wasn’t.

Is it possible to keep our sense of wonder alive, to continually see the world with fresh eyes? I think it is, because the people I most admire have somehow managed to retain their sense of wonder.

One of them is the English writer G. K. Chesterton, who left this world the very same year I entered it. In Orthodoxy, his spiritual autobiography, he says this world itself is more fantastic than any fairy tale. How fantastic “that the rhinoceros does exist” but “looks as if he didn’t.” Or “one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.” He has words for Scrooge and Oscar Wilde: “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.” At one point Chesterton claims that any price is a small price to pay for “so much as seeing a woman.” He convinces me that I should be willing to live on bread and water, from Christmas to Candlemas, for a glimpse of such a creature.

It reminds me of the sixteen-year-old Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. She’s been raised on a deserted island with only her father for company. After a shipwreck she see’s a young man for the first time in her life and says, “O Brave new world, That has such people in’t!” Would that the Vatican could, in like manner, see the wonder of woman.

This world can be just as treacherous as any fairy tale. 833 years ago tomorrow, four days after Christmas in the year 1170, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his cathedral by four knights of King Henry II.

This world is more mysterious than any fairy tale. People once believed in “the music of the spheres.” They believed that each planet emitted a musical tone as it moved through space, and together they made a heavenly music. How silly. This from the StarTribune about a month ago: “Astronomers have for the first time detected, from 250 million light years away, sound waves emanating from a supermassive blackhole, the deepest sound ever found - a B-flat that is 57 octaves below middle C.” Eat your heart out Jim TenBensel!

So, how do we keep our sense of wonder? Sometimes it happens to us unawares, a moment of rare beauty enchants us, like seeing the merest fingernail of moon with the evening star riding beneath it. Or a freezing rain that glazes all the trees, turning them into glass. Or as the old song says, “A foggy day in Londontown.”

At such moments we may remember those heartbreaking lines from Our Town where Emily says, “I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. . . Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. . . .Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? - every, every minute?”

Fairy tales themselves can help us return to this world with fresh eyes. It should come as no surprise that one of G. K. Chesterton’s great admirers was J. R. R. Tolkien. Yes, I know, Hollywood and the Minneapolis paper have discovered that there is a religious dimension to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Well, Duh? There are also echoes of the Old Testament, the Icelandic sagas, and Beowulf. Sixty-five years ago, just before World War II, Tolkien gave a brilliant lecture at the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland, a serious, learned, seventy-page defense - of fairy tales.

He says, “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”

He says that fairies and elves are not necessary to a fairy-tale, but enchantment is. If we don’t know what he means by enchantment, think of a child playing with a cardboard box, totally happy, imaginative, oblivious of time and space. And that box can be anything, a fort, a crib, a prison, a race car, a hill, a castle.

Or think of a crowd coming out of a movie, maybe with tears on their cheeks. Ask them what they’re crying about. Point out that they were merely watching images of light and dark playing on a flat screen. Go even further and point out that those images were of people pretending to be other people, and those other people probably never existed. I’m sure they’d consider you an insensitive lout, incapable of enchantment.

Musicians are magicians and can put us under a spell.

Beyond enchantment, Tolkien says that the fairy-tale is the opposite of the great form of drama we admire - aristotelian tragedy. Since we have no word for it, he coins the term “eucatastrophe,” the “happy ending.” He says that the mark of the true fairy-story (or romance) is “joy.” In the “eucatastrophe” we see, “a sudden and miraculous grace. . . (that gives us ). . . a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” . . . When the “turn” comes in a fairy tale, there is “a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to tears.”

It reminds me of those old radio episodes of The Lone Ranger that began “From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver.” The Lone Ranger and Tonto are bound and gagged and left to die in a burning bunkhouse. Even Silver and Scout have been bound and gagged. No help there. It looks like the end. And then, very faintly, on a whiff of wind, you hear, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dum. Can it be true? Then louder, ta-dum, ta-dum . . . Oh, my God, yes! The cavalry is coming! Oh, just in the nick of time! Oh, we’re saved!

I find the same moment in my favorite Christmas carol. “Long lay the world in sin and error pining, ta-da, ta-da, til he appeared and the soul knew its worth. A thrill of hope, ta-da . . .the weary world rejoices.”

And it’s at the end of the Gospel of John. Imagine Mary’s grief and desolation, her giving up that pipe dream, dumbly resigned to dragging out the rest of her dull existence, as she says to the gardener, “Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.” Imagine the unexpected “turn,” the “Great Eucatastrophe,” ta-da . . . her disoriented, delirious joy when the great escape artist says, “Mary!”

Tolkien soars to his conclusion. “The Gospels contain a fairy-story. . . which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories.” Among the many marvels of the gospels “is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. . . The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. There is no tale ever told that human beings would rather find was true. . . But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men - and of elves. . . The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them.”

Sunday after Sunday I see all of you stand, hold hands, and profess that you have a Father - who is a Great King - in a faraway country. That would make all of you - princes and princesses - living in exile.

You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

Merry Christmas!