From Golgotha to Bethlehem

On having Christmas in the dark

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“If you take a pilgrimage to Bethlehem,” wrote the Neo-Calvinist theologian Klaas Schilder, “then you must immediately take a pilgrimage to Golgotha. The world wants to go to the former without the latter. They like Christmas, but not Good Friday. But we go to both. The shepherds went to Golgotha from Bethlehem. We go the other way. We must first understand Golgotha in order to celebrate Christmas.”

There can be a risk, maybe higher in lower Protestant circles, of taking this idea so far that hardly any time is allotted for meditation just on the Incarnation, just on Christ’s birth. Without a proper liturgical calendar to carve out set numbers of days at set times for meditating on set things, there’s a temptation to make every day an “everything” day, even Christmas Day. In Schilder’s severe rhetoric, there is perhaps also a forgetfulness of those who are drawn to God first through wonder and beauty, only later grasping the cross and the agony. Let the “Christmas Christians” come, and do not hinder them.

But Schilder is right inasmuch as we can’t really understand Christ in the manger, truly and fully, without understanding Christ on the cross. Indeed, this is the prophetic word of Simeon to Mary: “And a sword shall pierce through thine own soul.”

This Christmas, people in my circles were discussing the news of an unimaginably brutal new murder case, which I’m not going to describe in any detail at all in case you’ve avoided hearing about it. Consider yourself spared if you have, and if you haven’t, please follow my example in the comments section. It frustrated me that I saw more than one Christian on social media putting images from it into my feed. I compartmentalized and moved on, as everyone must, and perhaps as a writer I have a greater capacity to do this than some, though perhaps that’s not a good thing. But I’m human, so I thought about it, and it was difficult, especially because it was Christmas.

It’s always better if you can find wise friends to talk out these things with you. One of my younger writing friends is a skilled EMT who hasn’t quite seen it all, but he’s seen a lot more than most young men his age. He writes eloquently here about possibly the worst Christmas case he ever handled, a visibly abused baby who stopped breathing forever as he was trying to keep her alive. Sometimes he also shares tidbits from his shifts on night watch at a psych ward.

As we were discussing some other tragic things on his mind to pray over, I was getting the latest update from the beginning of a close friend’s cancer fight. The prognosis is cautiously hopeful, but not certain. She’s a wife and mother of daughters who are growing up to be a lot like her. She’s scared. Obviously.

Various other prayer requests bled into the corners of my feed. Various other tragedies came to my mind as I did my typically sporadic, woefully incomplete mental run through the friend list of people I needed to wish a Merry Christmas. To one friend, I said that I hoped he’d simply found something merry in it this year.

At church this Sunday, I heard about a former member I’d never met, a man in profound mental distress who was waiting for a committee to decide whether he’ll be a ward of the state or be allowed to have a somewhat normal existence at home with his wife. The pastor shared this news in his usual soft-spoken, understated way. He handled it with appropriate sadness, of course, but not as if it was something sensational or out of the ordinary. It was life. He was talking about life.

But this too is life: Last night, my young EMT friend was checking vitals on a man who’d attempted suicide, saying “I’m sorry you have to be here on Christmas.” “Better place than where I was trying to go,” the man said.

This too is life: This summer, he told me about two roommates in the psych ward—a blind man in his 60s with night terrors, a deaf man in his 70s who’s attempted suicide. The deaf man took it upon himself to become the blind man’s guide and butler. He tried to explain this to my friend one day, in that loud, kind of mushy deaf guy voice: “I just, you know, it gives me a different perspective on things.” My friend says he looks exactly like the old guy who beats himself at chess in the Pixar short.

And this too is life: This Sunday, we went Christmas caroling in the church neighborhood, trekking down a rather bruised-looking, dead-end street. One of the church boys served as our designated elf, running back and forth with little gift bags and seeing who was home. We’d given no warning, so we never knew. I quietly worried a bit that our elf might be greeted less than warmly at some point. One house was flying a black flag with a hand giving a giant middle finger. Another house looked barely bigger than an outhouse. Several had “No Trespassing” signs.

But sometimes, people were home, and people listened. One woman came out who looked like she might live alone. I couldn’t tell if she was happy, because her face was all twisted to one side from some cause mysterious, and it left her unable to smile. But she took a bag and nodded to us, and let us finish before disappearing back inside.

The cold was miserable, seeping right through my boots and freezing my toes. “Once your toes go, everything goes,” said my cheerful friend who’d come dressed to the nines like a 19th-century gentleman, skating down the street in his loafers. He could be counted on to carry the tune for everyone else in a hearty baritone.

A mother came out beaming with her family, going back several times to make sure her several kids joined her. An older woman with short-cropped hair came out of a house with a Pride flag in the window. Some college girls came driving down the road squealing, “You guys are the coolest!” and whipped our their phones to film us, bouncing up and down with glee as we sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” for the 42nd time. We had printed only three songs in our bulletins, you see, and no one was feeling bold enough to make everyone venture onto thinner ice. Sometimes we were organized enough to decide whether we were going to sing a second verse of “Hark the Herald” or launch into “Silent Night,” and sometimes we weren’t.

I smiled and thought about how much better assembled this was when my mom took charge in my old neighborhood—carefully scoping out houses ahead of time, distributing sheets with multiple carols, bringing a pitch pipe, telling everyone to BUNCH so that we could hear each other and stay on tune. My crew had done literally none of these things. But we hadn’t needed to. Somehow, it was all right. It would all be all right.

We caught one younger couple just as they were driving away. They rolled down the windows and listened raptly. “Nobody’s ever sang on this street before,” the man said.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth

The everlasting light

The hopes and fears of all the years

Are met in Thee tonight