FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Christmas Approach

Rant Number 469

You get an e-mail from an unknown sender. Ends up in your trash bin, you are about to delete it as spam when...something about it makes you pause. The content is puzzling, unedifying, maybe even vile and vulgar and yet...and yet, something about it just makes you restless. The message draws. You try to forget about, go about your daily work and chores but the funny e-mail does not leave you alone. Eventually, you decide, absurdly, to devote yourself to finding out its origins, its meaning, its sender.

Jorge Louis Borges’ wonderful Sufi tale, The Approach to al-Mu’tasim, follows a similar – if not electronic - outline. A Muslim student in Bombay kills – or he believes he has killed – a Hindu in a riot. In flight from the law he falls into the company of thieves and robbers – the lowest human scum. However, despite their degradation, he thinks he discerns in them a peculiar reflection. A person, a man, a being, something higher. A figure whose beauty and glory shines even through infamy...All he knows the person is called al-Mu’tasim. The fugitive determines to find him.

The rest of the story is a boundless, perilous adventure throughout India. The student’s vicissitudes encompass the whole human condition, from mathematics to fornication. Eventually, in a second-hand bookshop, from behind a cheap bead curtain, he beholds a streaming radiance. He realises the inconceivable, the ineffable al-Mu’tasim is behind the curtain. He draws it aside and enters. The story ends.

Christmas – the predictable, corny, even tiresome date falling on 25 December – could well be about al-Mu’tasim. Or the sender of the strange e-mail. No, don’t howl in disbelief! Surely everybody knows what the feast is about? The Christmas trees, the lights, the decorations, the kids, the presents, the office parties, the booze – even the occasional crib – surely it is all too well-known?

Yes and no. Despite the official holiday, the church ceremonies and the pious platitudes about world peace, for masses of human beings in the West Christmas today is an irrelevance. How many today really entrust their whole life to a Saviour Child born in a manger 2000 years ago in Palestine?

God, to Western man, has become an unknown, anonymous, shadowy being. Awful? Again, as the Chinese say, yes and no. Maybe this is a new start. A window of opportunity. Because God is indeed in the Bible, as the Prophet Isaiah says, aDeus Absconditus. (45:15). A Hidden God. But, as Luther argues, intimations of that hidden, awesome majesty drive men into the arms of the Deus Revelatus, the revealed, manifest God. A god always gracious for humanity.

Search into yourself. Where does the e-mail come from? What does it portend? What do you want? What do you desire? What do you crave for? A better job? Money? Power? Marriage? A friend? A lover? The mysterious e-mail could signify any of those. Al-Mu’tasim too could stand for them. Or maybe just nonsense. A prank? Could it be?

In the beginning was the Word, says St John. The Word. Translates the Greek Logos. So the Apostle does not use ‘Christ’ or ‘Messiah’. The Gospel of St John was addressed to Greek-speakers. They were not expecting any Messiah – a Jewish concept. So St John speaks of the Logos. Something they knew. The Reason, the Logic, the Unity, the Meaning underlying the Cosmos but also their beings, their minds, their lives, everything.

Yeah! Rationality. Logic. Great but...not quite it. Too abstract. Pale and bloodless stuff. Can’t turn human beings on. Salvation will not come from Professors Dawkins and Hawkins. St John of course has another word handy to explain the meaning of Christmas. He who dwells in love dwells in God and God in him, he writes. Love does it.

Yes, love. But too many clerical chinless wonders like the Bishop of London, too many humanist idiots on the BBC, even many cunning politicians, from Cameron to Milliband, bang on about love these days. The splendid word has become inflated, overdone, cheap, a cliche’. Its rediscovery can only lie at the end of a quest, a search, an adventure. Or perhaps in the obvious, who knows?

Christmas. How do you make it known to the heedless, frantic shoppers of London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, etcetera? They don’t give a damn about Transcendence. How do you convey its true, tremendous meaning?

Look at the Encounters - Lonely Hearts - section in The Times. What are men and women seeking? The pubs, the clubs, the museums, the art galleries, even the brothels? What do people who throng those places seek? The coarse journalists, the media, the oligarchs, the celebs, the Big Brother brigade, the slobs, the cops hunting for the villain? What do they look for? Many different, irreconcilable things? Or, underlying it all, just One Thing? Or is that a will-of-the-wisp? A useless fruitless search? Fragmentation rules OK then?

Deus Absconditus. The Hidden God. The God who hides himself. Yet He who reveals himself. Bishop Robinson in his Honest to God and Paul Tillich in his thick theology wrote of the dimension of depth. Whatever deep inside you drives you and rules you. That is depth. Find that. Delve in that. You will find God there. (Wallahi! Dangerous, eh? But also, because of that, thrilling.)

Al-Mu’tasim. Was the name of one of Gaddafi’s son, shot in the end. But Borges’ haunting hero is unkillable. He draws the searcher irresistibly on by the power of Himself. Behind the cheap beaded curtain – is there the Holy Child of Bethlehem? A simple babe lying in a manger? A child standing for all children in the world? The rich and prosperous, the middling ones, the starving, the disinherited? The child you and I once were, the baby all past and future humanity will always pass through? The fruit and symbol of love. The subject of the never-ending, gorgeous, heart-warming story: love?

Maybe this is a fresh way to look at Christmas. A message from above. To find out the sense, the meaning, the purpose of life. Exciting, no?

Merry Christmas!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli