On Humbug, Loss, and Hope

I'm so glad Christmas is nearly here. I'm not that keen on it anymore, really, but at least it means that the Run-Up To Christmas is nearly over.

I'm not sure when I first became the bah-humbuggy sort of person that I am now. I'm also not sure whether my dislike of the season has grown as I've changed, or as the world has changed.

Was this season always this frantic, this febrile? I don't think so.

I need to make something clear: I've got no problem with December being party-time. It's dark and miserable this time of year, and people need perking up. But it's the paradoxical deification of Christmas that I can't stand. The eager count-downs (“it's only 10 more sleeps till Christmas!” proclaims the DJ), the ludicrously po-faced perfume adverts, the incessant sleigh-bell backing added to anything that moves, the fake snow, the canned carols. From the juggernaut-like build-up an alien might presume it was God's bodily return we were expecting on the 25^th. The Advent irony of this doesn't really need spelling out.

It all seems rather like a sort of giant opposite-of-a-pearl: layer upon layer of irritants accreting around an infinitesimal scrap of beauty.

Ah, the carols. Maybe that's where this all gets personal for me.

When I was a boy I sang in a church choir. Once, I was the lone voice singing the first verse of 'Once in Royal' into a dark, waiting, silence. After my voice broke I learned the tenor parts, and sung all the favourites so many times that I still know most of these off by heart.

So perhaps it's familiarity breeding contempt. That's certainly part of it. It doesn't help that some of the most popular carols are stuffed full of sentimental imagery and annoying moralising directed at hapless Victorian children.

But that's not all of it.

I enjoyed singing those carols in the church choir too. To feel – to be – part of something that had being going on long before I came along; calm, secure, enveloping, and full of story. Suggesting beauty, order, hope.

I mustn't sugar-coat the past. My childhood, like all childhoods, had its share of anxiety and pain. And my adolescence was messed up by stress and ill-health. But there was definitely hope. Hope that was never defined, articulated, questioned, or even acknowledged. Hope that underlying everything there was a Reason.

And now, here I am, forty-odd years later. Our society seems frantic in its attempts to conjure, ex nihilo, a sentimental spirit of Christmas past, decked in carols from a religion almost nobody believes, set in a landscape of snow and sleigh-rides that we seem unlikely to see again (unless the gulf stream switches off, in which case we may end up with more snow than we'd like). While I look on, feeling superior in my cynicism.

It strikes me that sentimentalism and cynicism are opposing but equal errors: they are both things that happen to hope when it decays.

(Fruit left too long can sometimes go soft: the delicious sweetness can turn into collapsing mush. Or sometimes fruit can go hard, especially if it stays on the tree: its living flesh turns to withered, shrunken, woodenness.)

So we're all in the same boat really: I certainly have no reason to feel superior.

This is where I have to make a choice. A blind step in the darkness, one way or another

This is what I chose. I know the unbelievers among you will easily be able to knock logical holes in it – so can I. But I choose it nonetheless...

The funny thing is that, when I think of the hope I had, it feels so real. Real enough to touch, to smell, to embrace. More real, I think, than when (I believe) I was 'in' it at the time. And I realise that grief for hope lost is a sign that not all is shrunken hardness, but that there is still life, hidden inside.

Or as Rumi, the Sufi mystic, puts it:

"Why did you stop praising?"

"Because I've never heard anything back."

"This longing you express is the return message"

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup. [1]

What about the world around me – this ceaseless slush of sentimentalism? It's no answer to blame it all on commercial interests: they just reflect back, amplified, what people want. If no-one wanted endless sleigh-bells (including on Tesco self-service checkouts – quelle horreur! ) we wouldn't get them. But why does the Run-Up seem to be growing in intensity as the years pass? I suggest a parallel: the increasing doses a heroin addict needs to try to achieve the feeling of the first hit; as CS Lewis puts it, 'an ever-increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure'[2].

But the memory of that original pleasure – that scrap of beauty at the middle of the anti-pearl – must still be there at the middle. If it wasn't, all the flim-flam wouldn't have anything to work on.

As Matt Haig says in an excellent Guardian article [3]

'Christmas can get to us, sure. But it can also help us. If we edit out all the noise, we can close our eyes and remember a time when we believed in magic and miracles...

...I realise now that, growing older, we can uncover magic as often as we leave it behind.'

I think, too, of people who decorate their houses and gardens with lights for Christmas. Strings of LEDs everywhere, inflatable santas, twinkling electric icicles, glowing reindeer on the lawn. Time, effort, and money spent on something that I, snobbishly, think is tacky. But I choose to see every sparkly, lit-up home as a creative act, not made for profit, nor for climbing up a greasy pole of ambition, but out of enthusiasm, a sense of fun, and love.

Happy Christmas!

[1] From 'Love Dogs', trans Coleman Barks, from Rumi – Rumi - Selected Poems, Penguin Classics

[2] The Screwtape Letters, C S Lewis, HarperCollins

[3] Shopping is hell and kindness is therapeutic – what I learned from being depressed at Christmas, Matt Haig

A short walk at the end of the year

This afternoon I went for a short walk in Highfield Park. The sun was about an hour from setting, and the wind was still strong after the recent storm. That perfect soft light you get in mid-winter lit up the tops of a bank of birches in colours reminiscent of a Klimt painting: golds, browns, reds. I made a point of wandering through the little copses, comparing the sound of wind made in different trees, and being astonished by how loud a noise one tree can make. The birds were mostly quiet, presumably cutting their losses and sitting huddled in the thickets.

To my surprise I found my eyes filling with tears.

Perhaps I had spent too long before going out pondering the pros and cons of getting a dog, as people do when they fear they can't have children or, in my case, fear that they will always be alone.

Perhaps it was an awareness of the people I know and love who are worrying about what the next year will bring, who suspect it will consist of worsening health, or new ways to fail.

Perhaps it was the sense of an old year sliding away, turning recent experience into fallible memory.

Perhaps it was the knowledge of the apparent fragility of my faith, immersed in a world which views it as an anachronism that can be allowed to die, surrounded by honourable atheists.

Perhaps it was none of these things (and all of them)...

Love Dogs (by the Sufi mystic Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks)

One night a man was crying,

                    Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with the praising,

until a cynic said,

                    'So! I have heard you

calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?'

The man had no answer to that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr*, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage.

                    'Why did you stop praising?'

'Because I've never heard anything back.'

                    'This longing

you express is the return message'

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs

no one knows the names of.

Give your life

to be one of them.

(*Khidr lit. “the green one”. Barks describing him as existing 'on the edge between the seen and the unseen', and as being 'the personification of the revealing function of the metaphysical intellect, the '”prophetic soul”', and suggests that 'he may be a partial source, along with Druidic lore, for the enigmatic Green Knight in the Middle English poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”'. He has also been identified with the Green Man of European mythology.)