Christmas is, as has often been pointed out, the invention of Charles Dickens or more accurately Dickens’ love of Christmas, evidenced in Sketches by Boz’, Pickwick Papers’ and The Christmas Carol’, fixed in the Victorian mind an imaginative image which helped save the festival from its previous neglect. But Dickens also suffered literary critical neglect at the end of the 19th century and as Dickens had rescued Christmas, so GK Chesterton (of Fr Brown fame) rescued Dickens with an enthusiastic, and paradoxical study published in 1906.
Chesterton was far more explicitly Christian than Dickens, eventually becoming a Roman Catholic imbued with the liberty of dogmatism. Nevertheless. Dickens’ feel’ for Christmas is of a piece with Chesterton’s vision of Christianity a vision which Anglicans should never lose sight of especially at Christmas because Chesterton’s faith was rooted in the incarnation.
In Chesterton’s account of Christianity the world is a good and awesome place which should never cease to amaze us and where we should be always taking things with gratitude and not taking things for granted.’ Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no-one for the birthday present of birth?’ And what Chesterton, like Dickens, found so wonderful about the world was the unexpectedness of the ordinary. Both of them had an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence.’ ( the best of all impossible worlds’).
The goodness of the world calls for gratitude and wonder and yet it is also full of evil that vitiates that wonder and creates despair. As Chesterton provocatively puts it, original sin is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.’ The world as it is requires us to be both optimistic and pessimistic, attitudes which each recognise one of the undeniable facts about reality but each of which without the other seriously distorts reality. Optimism and pessimism unchecked lead either to presumption or despair both of which are sins against hope. And hope is only to be found through the prayerful practice of genuine and simple (even in GKC’s case hilarious) thanksgiving on the one hand and humble and self-knowledgeable penitence on the other. In this way we shall somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.’ This world desperately needs changing. And we have to hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing.’ And Christianity makes us fond of this world even in order to change it. and fond of another world in order to have something to change it to.’
In the process of becoming a Christian Chesterton found that faith answered a double spiritual need the need for a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar, the need to find in the world both an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome’ wonder that arises out of gratitude and welcome that acknowledges yet puts aside sins confessed. And the only way in which this could be done was for the creator to renew his creation. Again paradoxically God transcends himself by becoming human that humanity may transcend itself by becoming divine. Or as Chesterton put it, Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king .(there is) only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist’ (the cry of dereliction on the cross). And that pattern of paradox begins in the stable;
The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.
The Child that was ere worlds begun
( . . . We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone . . . )
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.
Christmas, in its trinity of eating, drinking and praying’ is the starting point of the recreation of a life of health, humour, and sanity based on the almost jest whereby the hands that made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.’ And at the end of that life of recreation we shall come home to what in one of his finest poems Chesterton called The House of Christmas”:
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.
And a very merry Christmas to you all
Father Stephen
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker