Reading
The Tree with Lights in it.
When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw ‘the tree with the lights in it.’ It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in forests of fall, and down winter and spring for years.
Then one day I was walking….thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with lights in it.
I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.
I stood on the grass with lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.
Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colours died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing.
I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.
I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it.
The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in space through the crack, and the mountains slam.
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek)

Those of us who have reached a certain age will no doubt remember Spike Milligan’s famous Goon Show song, ‘I’m walking backwards for Christmas’. The first verse goes:
I’m walking backwards for Christmas
Across the Irish Sea.
I’m walking backwards for Christmas
It’s the only thing for me.
As far as I can tell, it’s a song about unrequited love. A young lad falls in love with ‘an Irish colleen’, but she spurns his advances and sails across the sea. Now he’s reminiscing about happier times, hence the backward movement.
For all its daft lyrics, Spike’s song, - unconsciously perhaps – captures the essence of this time of year, because from time immemorial, late December has been characterised by the principle of reversal, of doing things the wrong way round. And the reason is simple: last Wednesday, the 21st of December, was the day of the winter solstice, when the sun halted its downward movement and began its steady climb up our northern skies; the days have started to get longer, the nights shorter. In former times, before electricity and central heating, it was a period of great celebration, and in some cultures it was customary to mirror the sun’s change of direction, and perhaps symbolically to ‘encourage’ it, by doing things widdershins.
The Romans, whose customs we inherit in large measure, celebrated the feast of Saturnalia at this time of year. It was named in honour of Saturn, the planetary god associated with the zodiacal sign Capricorn, which the sun enters on 21st December, and the festivities lasted for a week or so, from 17th to 23rd December. It was the most popular feast of the Roman year. Catullus describes it as ‘the best of days’, and Seneca complains that the whole city is in a bustle. Pliny the Younger, no doubt a prototype of Scrooge, tells us that he used to retire to his room while the rest of the family celebrated. People would visit friends, give gifts – particularly wax candles, probably in honour of the returning sun at the solstice. Certain social restrictions were relaxed, and the social order was inverted. Gambling was allowed in public places; slaves didn’t have to work, were treated as equals, and were even allowed to wear their master’s clothing and were waited on at mealtimes by their masters. The Roman poet Lucian tells us that ‘the serious is barred, no business is allowed. There is drinking, noise and games and dice, feasting of slaves, naked singing, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water……’ And the people would greet each other with the cry, ‘Yo Saturnalia!’, which those of us who are tired of ‘Merry Christmas’ might try to revive.
Many of our own midwinter celebrations can be traced back to the Roman Saturnalia. The office party is a good example. Normal rules of decorum are suspended, hierarchies are ignored, and people behave in audacious ways that would earn them a severe reprimand at other times. Pantomimes, too, reflect the theme of reversal, male and female changing places; the dame is invariably a man, the prince a woman; the powerful are humiliated, the humble exalted. Even the wearing of paper hats – which are traditionally in the shape of crowns – is an echo of Roman days, and symbolises an imagined golden age, before social stratification divided us from each other, and we were all kings and queens.
Such symbolism is the basis of our human hope; it says to us that, just as the sun can change direction and move from darkness into light, so can we. It suggests that there was a time when things were simpler and fairer, and it holds out the promise that one day we will find it again. That’s why the image of the little child, which is Christianity’s contribution to the seasonal symbolism, is such a powerful one. The birth of a baby is a sign that the world is constantly capable of renewing itself.
And, of course, as we hear again and again at this time of the year, ‘Christmas is for the children’. This is how we justify it. We would hate people to think that we celebrate it because it is a psychological necessity, which I’m becoming convinced it is, so we invent the excuse about it being a children’s festival. I can remember nearly 40 years ago, when my sister’s children, Jane and Sean, were tiny, and all the adults in the house – mother, father, grandparents, and me – were waiting in anxious anticipation for these bewildered children, who could barely talk and who had no idea what all the fuss was about, to open their numerous presents. The excitement was ours, not theirs. We were reliving our own childhood vicariously. Christmas reconnects us with our own childhood, to a time when the world was magical, before it became ordinary and humdrum and tedious. And this is the great paradox of Christmas: we say it is for the children, but children don’t need it. The world is magical enough to the very young; that’s why they are ready to play as soon as their eyes are open in the morning, and why they rarely go to sleep willingly at night. Life itself is enough to excite the child. As Alison Gopnik, who is a professor in the psychology department at the University of California at Berkeley, says, ‘babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life than adults are.’ (What I Believe but Cannot Prove, page 139) That’s why, to the very young child, the wrapping paper and the boxes are every bit as interesting as the toys. As we get older, says Gopnik, we lose our conscious awareness of things, and begin to do them automatically; experience loses its colour and its excitement, and we become disenchanted with the world. Remember Greg Lake’s Christmas song, ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’? When he was a child, he says, ‘he looked to the skies with excited eyes’. Now that he is a grown up, he ‘wakes with a yawn, at the first light of dawn.’
This gives us some idea why Jesus said that unless we become like little children we cannot enter the kingdom of God, which contrasts sharply with what St. Paul says. Paul, you will remember, in the classic passage from 1 Corinthians 13, tells us that when we were children we thought, spoke, and acted like children, but now that we are grown up we have put away childish things. Paul congratulates us for doing so. But then, Paul was a theologian and an intellectual. Jesus was not a theologian, but he was a pretty astute psychologist, who knew that only when we can rediscover the fresh vision of childhood, a vision of wonderment, bewilderment, gratitude, and awe, will there be any hope for us. ‘The consciousness of the child,’ says Alison Gopnik, ‘is the consciousness that makes us grateful to be human…..for babies, every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide-and-seek is Einstein (coming up with the theory of relativity) in 1905, and every day is first love in Paris. (Page 141)
The 17th century English mystic, Thomas Traherne describes his own childhood delight at the world in these terms:
The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world, the green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And the young men glittering and sparkling angels and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the streets, and playing, were moving jewels!.....The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds, nor divisions; but all proprieties and divisions were mine; all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted; and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which I now unlearn, and become as it were a little child that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God will come when the bandages are taken from our eyes, when the world is re-enchanted; when we walk backwards from our sophisticated, cynical, jaded adulthood, to the excited aliveness of childhood. Then Roy Wood’s dream will be realised and it will be Christmas everyday. Then we’ll cease to be slaves of money, sex, entertainment, and status, and we’ll all be kings and queens once more, joint heirs of the Kingdom of God. Until that time, the tree with lights in it must be our Christmas tree, our crowns must be flimsy paper ones, but even these, Christmas trees and paper crowns, can, for a few brief hours on Christmas Day, remind us of our calling and of our destiny.
Rev.Bill Darlison December 25th 2005