This is the second year in my memory that I have not listened to a family member read a pair of newspaper articles my grandfather had clipped about Christmas. If you don't know this about me, I'm agnostic bordering on atheist, but my grandfather was a Methodist minister. He grappled with ethics and lessons of good and evil both in his role as a religious leader as well as in his job at BU as a professor who taught society and ethics. I'd like to share the essence of one of articles that he would read to my family throughout my childhood and which someone in my family has read at the annual gathering each year since his passing:
"Who Took Herod Out of Christmas" is an article about how the story of Christmas is not just about the baby Jesus, not just about a miracle, not just about a manger, not just about Mary and Joseph. The article starts by saying that perhaps those that lament the loss of the story to the consumerism we see that has taken over the holiday for so many may be looking in the wrong place. Those that lament the loss of their soap box have long been neglecting a key component of the story: Herod. The story is also about evil, selfish evil, powerful evil, a nearly inconceivable evil. It is about a king who, concerned only with his own power, sent an order to kill all the babies. The article points out that this evil has been glossed over far too often in the telling of the story and the figure made out to be just a boogeyman, if mentioned at all. Perhaps this glossing over is because, in the darkest days of the year, days that are depressing enough already, it can be just a little too much for us to handle. But let the thought of the story sink in. It is a story of a king who sent his army out to kill massive numbers of babies. The story of Christmas is one of an earthly power seeking to destroy for no other reason than to maintain its hold on power. It is dark and troubling.
And yet this is not something that we only see in religious stories or in fables or in the movies, we have seen this story played out in our recent history. We've seen atrocities the world wide, with children being separated from their parents and detained in hostile conditions. We've seen genocides. We've seen the powerful of our world demand that we sacrifice the welfare of our children for some other "good", a "good" which is almost always entirely to the benefit of the powerful and not to the benefit of the meek.
The story of Christmas should be told in its entirety and not watered down to make it more easier to take, for it is in recognizing the darkness within the story, it is in understanding the presence of evil and thinking about what drives that evil, that we can more fully appreciate the story and learn from it. And it is in recognizing this evil that there is even greater impact in the other power of the story choosing to be born into this world in such meek and understated terms... but the meek/understated terms is the focus of the other clipping, so I'll leave us there.
Thank you for letting me share with you what has been an important part, and a missing part, of my Christmas these last two years. One more thing that has been missing from my Christmas is the sharing of a particular song which I'd like to share with you now: May the Light of Love by David Roth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVBYERSwc2E
