STAR OF BETHLEHEM

DECEMBER 23, 2021 – Recently, we took our six-year-old granddaughter on a driving tour of local, outdoor Christmas lighting displays. There were the usual “icicles” and the new-fangled “dripping” lights; inflated Santas, looking slightly drunk as they swayed in the artificial wind of their internal fans; life-size Nutcracker soldiers of heavy plastic; lights wrapped around trees; and in yards of the religious set . . . mangers, crèches, and other stable arrangements, some including the whole Holy Host, others projecting intimacy with just the baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and in fuller displays, a “Star of Bethlehem” hanging from a nearby pole or tree branch.

Our granddaughter was drawn especially to the religious decorations. “Look! The baby Jesus!” she’d say, or “There’s the Star of Bethlehem!”

Her surprising familiarity with religious decorations absolved my wife and me from having to explain some very difficult stuff. Santa Claus, on the other hand? His whole deal is infinitely easier to conceptualize.

Where, we asked, had our granddaughter acquired her knowledge of the original Christmas Story? Her other grandparents, it turns out. We’re not privy to the circumstances (my wife and I have by far the most “grandparent time”), but somehow the “Christ” in “Christmas” has been conveyed to our “little angel” by her “religious relatives” on the other side of the political/religious divide that runs through modern American life.

I used to be heavily involved in “church”; my wife, far less so. For reasons and inside circumstances that make a great story, in 2004 I cut all ties—to our home church (ELCA), church generally, and Christianity.

Yet there we were, carting our granddaughter around to see local displays and discovering that she knows “her stuff” when it comes to Christmas. I saw the irony, and without wish or worry, wondered about it. I wondered how her perceptions will develop. Without need to influence her one way or another on the subject, I wondered what questions she’ll ask and how I’ll answer them.

I then wondered—what do I think of the Christmas Story, as the tale is told?

Hmmm. I answer with questions: What civilization doesn’t stand on a foundation of . . . stories? What religion isn’t a belief system infused with ritual derived from . . . stories? What is the essence of stories if not timeless insights into the human condition? In a pluralistic society, how are divergent stories reconciled?

There’s no doubt that throughout history religious dogma and power have run humanity off the rails. Yet, could we live without religion? What would life be in a world ruled by reason without stories? In a word, it’d be “pessimistic,” maybe worse.

In our lives we need the wonder of Christmas, however that wonder manifests. We need “belief in” a “Star of Bethlehem,” neither as a supernatural event nor as an ancient astronomical phenomenon, but as a symbol of hope and enlightenment beyond the cold shadows of the human condition; as part of the story of humanity’s quest to understand . . . our existence. For this revelation I thank . . . our little Christmas angel.

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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson