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Wolf on Christmas and the “Megachurch” and the Meaning of Feast and Festival

The new sacraments—conduits of grace—in the Age of Willow are the yuppie pastor, the Praise Team, and the Sacred Video Projector. But their superfluous nature is manifest in that even they can be set aside in place of “family time” around the tree. These things are important, but they cannot give what the enfleshed Savior […]

The new sacraments—conduits of grace—in the Age of Willow are the yuppie pastor, the Praise Team, and the Sacred Video Projector. But their superfluous nature is manifest in that even they can be set aside in place of “family time” around the tree. These things are important, but they cannot give what the enfleshed Savior can—which is the whole point of Christmas to begin with. ~Aaron Wolf

Mr. Wolf does a fine job elaborating the liturgical, specifically Eucharistic reasons why Christians should assemble to worship and glorify our God on Christmas and, indeed, for any festival of the Church. I also recommend everyone to review the entire “Battle for Christmas” collection of articles on the Chronicles site.

What I might add to his article is a more general criticism of Christian participation in what Josef Pieper might have called the pseudo-festival of “religious” Christians celebrating Christmas without any actual festivity. As Pieper has laid it out in his book on the theory of festivity, In Tune with the World, festivity requires at least two things: it must be public, and it must be an interruption of mundane, ordinary time. Sitting at home with the folks on Nativity to the exclusion of public, corporate worship is almost an act of anti-festival, a negation of a holy day, the transformation of sacred time into something profane, or rather a mark of indifference on a day when all attention should (certainly for Christians) be on the contemplation of the astonishing and miraculous birth of the Child Who is before the ages, the glorification of the Incarnate Word and His salvific condescension for our sake, and the veneration and praise of the All-Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary together with St. Joseph the Betrothed.

Feasts and festivals are extraordinary events, and there are few in the Christian calendar more extraordinary than the Feast of the Nativity (Pascha probably being the only more important), on the occasion of which St. Gregory the Theologian enthused in his homily on the Theophany (at which time in the fourth century Nativity and Epiphany were celebrated together), “Christ is Born! Glorify Him! Christ from the heavens, receive Him! Christ upon the earth, be ye exalted!” There could be nothing more hostile to Christmas as a Feast and as a glorification of Christ than to stay at home and “spend time” with the family, as if going to church were somehow a menial task to be set aside during “the holidays.” It is ideally the menial and the everyday that one should set aside on a festival day, not the feasting to be set aside for more of the everyday. There is no reason in the world why families could not give festival together where they, as Christians, are supposed to be. Christ is Born, Glorify Him!

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