Cathedral City, December 25, 2019 –- 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, to deal with the quotidian crises of koyaanisqatsi, by which the Hopi described a “life out of balance.”
Every time I try to overcome koyaanisqatsi, this Advent and Christmas season, to banish that Thing in the White House from my contemplations of the season, Donald Trump goes and does something new to replenish the endless aquifers of outrage bubbling beneath the surface of American society. Just a few days ago, for example, The Donald delivered remarks to American troops in Afghanistan in which he unburdened himself off a lengthy litany of grievances against Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Party, and loyal Americans who believe that his conduct rises to the level of “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” What made The Donald’s Festivus-like gripe and grumble session so objectionable was that he was delivering his remarks in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces in a context that should have been entirely apolitical.
The other occurrence that impinged upon this Advent and Incarnation season was an editorial in Christianity Today —the evangelical magazine founded by the late Billy Graham— calling for Donald Trump’s removal from office, and the ineluctable Nonconformist evangelical Protestant backlash against it. The editorial was not itself heretical, but the backlash against it manifested all the worst sorts of ethnonationalist Protestant heresy that has become so dangerously prevalent in this country.
As one who stands somewhat on the theological right, that is one who believes in the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, the Grace of the Sacraments (all seven of them), the Latin Catholic Deposit of Faith, the Apostolic Succession, and the triad of Scripture, tradition, and reason, I have never had a great deal of patience for Christian denominations which stand on the theological left edge of the Reformation, but which seek political power by aligning themselves with the political right. It is always been curious to me how, in America, the theological right and the political left overlap, and the theological left and the political right overlap. In short, show me a Christian of the theological right, and I will almost inevitably be will to show you, in that same individual, a person on the political left.
Of course, if this year we have not seen The Donald trying to hold the government of the United States hostage for his ridiculous border wall, we still see The Donald systematically betraying this country and her interests to the Russian State. We see The Donald systematically disassembling the American security relationship with Japan and the Republic of [South] Korea; we see The Donald picking tariff battles with China but saying almost nothing about Beijing’s systematic repression of the Uighurs in East Turkestan (Xinjiang). We see The Donald failing to defend American values or promote American interests abroad. We still live in a time of koyaanisqatsi.
But worst of all, here in our own country, we see The Donald, guided by that unspeakable golem Stephen Miller (a Shonda for the goyim, worthy of being read forever out of the Congregation of Israel, declared herem, and forever uncountable toward a minyan), pursuing policies that, in 1945, would have brought any German before the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. How can we speak of modeling American values, how can we speak of modeling Christian values, how can we speak of living the truth of this Incarnation season when we remain silent in the face of evil policy that sanctions the breaking up of families, the caging of children, and turning a blind eye as infants and teenagers languish and die while in the custody of ICE, the Border Patrol, or other American bureaucracies?
Particularly at Christmas, when millions of Americans renew their yearly conversation with that Lucan infancy narrative which, across 2000 years, has become one of the most precious possessions of the Western mind in general and the Christian Republic in particular, how can we ignore what is going on in our own backyards? We have become conditioned and indifferent to daily outrages against the human person, human rights, and human dignity. We ignore the caged children; we look the other way when we see a homeless person, with all her worldly possessions crammed into a purloined shopping cart, making their way with a kind of sad, weary dignity from one side of the street to another.
For me, as a Christian, a Catholic, and Anglican, and Episcopalian, who professes and confesses a deep, absolute, and abiding faith in a God Who took human form in order to reconcile us simple humans to God, and who made for that holy purpose an icon in the form of Jesus Christ to draw all humankind to God, I find myself badly conflicted on this Christmas. Over against revolting expositions of far too many Americans declining God’s invitation in Christ to be, in the words of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings “better than that,” a great proportion of the American people instead prefer to gravitate toward the perverse blandishments of Antichrist, expressed in the hateful words of Donald Trump.
Yet, even as God Godself became incarnate from the Virgin Mary in human form in Jesus Christ, quietly rebuking the powers of koyaanisqatsi and of the powers that be with what we might now call Gandhiji’s paradox of the power of powerlessness, we can see even among us signs of God’s ineffable presence in a world that organizes itself rather without reference to first things and to eternal things. As happened last year about this time, God vouchsafed all of us who could see a small assurance that God’s ineffable presence as I looked out again into the Whitewater Wash and saw there a homeless man, sharing his meager foodstuff with a small flock of pigeons, in a kind of Franciscan feast of the impoverished.
It reminded me then and there that there is indeed something fundamentally out of balance in our lives, something koyaanisqatsi, as the Hopi hight say, in the way contemporary American society organizes itself. For there is something truly koyaanisqatsi about the heresies implicit in the so-called Prosperity Gospel beloved of so many evangelical Protestant Nonconformist. There is something koyaanisqatsi in the way we have appropriated the Christmas narrative and twisted it into something I cannot imagine that God ever intended the incarnation of our Savior ever to represent.
In a time when Gospodin Trump and his minions of Antichrist have sought to entice us to live down to all of the worst aspects of our originally sinful human nature, when our institutions are trying to push back by impeaching him in the hopes that he may be removed from office, we should answer with a resounding “no” to Trump and all that Trump stands for.
Instead, we should reacquaint ourselves with the eternal truths contained in our Christian Incarnation narrative. We should reacquaint ourselves with the inconvenient truth that our Savior, his mother Mary, and Joseph were situationally homeless. Not only that, we should also remember that Lucan infancy narrative reminds us that the Holy Family 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, the Shonda golem Stephen Miller, and their supporters have been accustomed to fulminate. However, their fulminations will prove unavailing. For we have the assurances of God Incarnate in Jesus Christ 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 rebuke and overcome all terrors. For we who have welcomed into our hearts this beautiful Child, we who have believed and preached Christ crucified, we who have borne witness to God conquering death by death, can be assured, as Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans that
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:37-39)
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 the Beautiful Child.
And as we know that the beautiful Savior is with us, we know that we, too, can rebuke, resist and overcome the evil that is this day in our midst.
The Savior of the World is at hand!
Oh! Come let us adore Him!
Merry Christmas!
-xxx-
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 relentlessly nice denomination of Christians who like to eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and drink tea with their pinkies extended. The views contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
