Summary: Once again, Christmas finds me in the office honoring what has become a shibboleth for me. By going into the office, I can escape some of the seasonal ridiculousness of the kind of nastiness into which Christmas has degenerated.
Yet, in the silence of the office, insulated from The Donald’s objectionable and nasty cultural appropriation of this holy incarnation season, And his recasting of it is some kind of political Festivus, I’m reminded not only that God’s passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of our Savior, but also that God and God’s holy church remind us that we ought to have a preferential option for the poor, the oppressed, and those who have no place to lay their heads. God will come again in glory to judge the quick and the dead, and will take note of how we have treated the least among us.
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In the nearly 30 years since I was admitted to the practice of law, I have maintained a more or less constant shibboleth of coming into the office on Christmas Day. In the silence of the office, with no phone calls, no interruptions, no unwanted human interaction, I actually find a place to get some work done, but perhaps more importantly, to find a quiet place for meditation in this Incarnation season.
I came across a new word recently, coined by a high school student who shows what his teacher called “signs of greatness.” The word in question, used to describe our current situation, was “fucktangular.” Certainly, with the traitor-in-chief Donald Trump at the head of our affairs, the situation this Christmas can only be described fucktangular.
What, after all, can we say when Gospodin Trump, in a fit of pique, holds the United States government to ransom for his ridiculous border wall? What can we say one Gospodin Trump treats Christmas like Seinfeld’s Festivus, subjecting us all to a recitation of his usual diet of lies, falsehoods, and childish grievances? What can we say as we learn that on this Christmas day, another child, this one a boy of eight, died in the custody of the United States government?
Moreover, what can one say when one sees a homeless person, with all his worldly possessions crammed into a shopping cart, making his way with a kind of sad, weary dignity, from one side of the street to the other? It came home to me forcibly in that moment that, as a Christian, a Catholic, an Anglican, an Episcopalian, I profess and confess a deep and abiding faith in a God Who took human form that we sinful humans might be reconciled to God. God made for that holy purpose an icon of Godself to draw all humankind to God. So, too was I reminded of God’s ineffable presence looking out into the Whitewater Wash and seeing another homeless person sharing his or her meager foodstuff with a murder of crows, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is something fucktangular in the way modern American society tends to organize itself. It reminded me that there is something indeed fucktangular about the heresies implicit in the so-called prosperity gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformists. It reminded me that there is something fucktangular in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I don’t think God ever intended the Incarnation of the Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump has emboldened all of us to live down to the worst aspects of our Originally Sinful human nature, we should, instead of accepting his invitation, which is, after all, an invitation to live according to the perverse “gospel” of Antichrist, try to get in touch with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative.
For when we examine the Lucan infancy narrative, the one we hear about at every Christmastide, the one that has become such a treasured possession of the Western mind and the Christian Republic, it’s easy to gloss over a very simple, foundational, reality. Simply put, our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Worse, the Lucan infancy narrative also reminds us that they became refugees fleeing Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents.
In short, the Holy Family represented precisely the kind of people against whom Gospodin Trump and his supporters are holding the government hostage to build their absurd border wall, to go Qin Shihuangdi one better. Yet, as I pointed out in my last post, Wanli Changcheng (The Great Wall of China) did not keep out the barbarians whom China desired to exclude. Instead, the Manchu turned Wanli Changcheng at Shangaiguan, conquered China, and, in the end, became more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.
And if Wanli Changcheng proved unavailing, so, too, will Gospodin Trump’s border wall. Indeed, we have the assurances of the Savior Himself that Gospodin Trump, and all his minions of Antichrist will not prevail. For when the Savior comes, he brings with him what Gandhiji called the power of powerlessness, the ability of nonviolence to overcome all terrors. For we who are Christian, we who are Catholic, we who are Anglican, we who are Episcopalian, preach the faith of God Incarnate, of God among humanity, of God crucified, of God conquering death by death.
The baby in the manger or the mature man with his disciples supping for the last time in the upper room may not have been much to look upon, but the power of God is ineluctable; the power of God can turn every wall, it can reduce every fortification, and it can do so in the manner in which French playwright Edmund Rostand described a beautiful young girl gaining access to a grim fortress by convincing the sentries to grant her entry: “she smiled at them.”
On this Day when we commemorate the Incarnation of the Savior of the World in that manger in Bethlehem more than 2000 years ago, we acknowledge His conquest of our sinful hearts by acknowledging the smile of that beautiful Child.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney. He lives in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the city Council, and he practices law in Rancho Mirage. He is a religiously Conformist member of the Episcopal Church, that denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with her pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
