One Reason for the Season

It seems as though each Christmas I find myself wondering why I enjoy Christmas music, decorations, and the preparations we make at the church for the Holiday season. Much of these things are pagan in nature and somewhat weird on the surface. The songs seem tacky at times and I suppose the movies might get old.

But I love Christmas. I love being a pastor around this time. We have a wonderful buzz in the offices and there are plenty of things to do and more hours to work and yet everyone is happy to do it because it's good work.

I was thinking about my enjoyment of Christmas, I remembered this quote from Garrison Keillor's introduction to his book, Good Poems for Hard Times.

"The common life is precarious. I fear a future in which America becomes a loose aggregate of marauding tribes - no binding traditions, no songs that we all know, not even "The Star-Spangled Banner" or "Silent Night," no common heroes, no American literature - only the promotional lit of race and ethnicity, our people unable to name their senators, their only political experience via television, their only public life at Wal-Mart."

Each year, my brother and I attend a midnight mass at a Catholic Church in the heart of the city. There, in the hallowed architecture of the cathedral, everyone sings. It's one reason I love church. It's one of the last places in our society where people get together and sing just to sing. They're not performing, they're not trying to win money and they're not even trying to appease a god, they just let their voice join with the other voices around them in order to experience something of heaven. And it's not because they're staunch religious nuts or generational Catholics, but it's because they are touching just the fringes of something they've been missing for a long time.

There's nothing like singing together. And while not everyone knows all of the old hymns like "How Great Thou Art" or "Come Thou Fount," I can say, "O come all ye faithful," and you can finish by singing, "Joyful and triumphant!"

I think Christmas helps me understand a new side of worship: it's a corporate thing. When our congregation softly sings "Silent Night," or I hear a packed cathedral in downtown Portland sing "O Come O Come Emmanuel," I suppose I am reminded that we have not forgotten one another, we just don't get together often enough.