Christmas falls in the middle of the week this year. Which means I’ll be at my father’s house the following Saturday. On my lips that day will be the words of Psalm 102: “I am withered, dried up like grass, too wasted to eat my food.” And that’s just on the ride over.
The Dangerous Name of Jesus
Oh, all right. It won’t be that bad. The usual gang will be there. Nine adults, four children, three teenagers and a schnauzer. We’ll feast on ham dinner with all the trimmings, served with impeccable taste on festive holiday dishes. Over dessert we’ll dote on the kids, tell dumb jokes and recount the antics of Christmases past. Then we’ll repair to the living room to sip coffee, poke the logs in the fire and open gifts arranged just so under a tall, twinkling, meticulously trimmed scotch pine plucked from the snowy woods of Connecticut.
Come to think of it, if the scene were any more Currier & Ives, we’d all be figures on a souvenir gravy boat come to life.
Can’t you just smell the gingerbread delicately spicing the frosty, midwinter air?
Well, wake up and get a whiff of the grease fire in the kitchen. If there’s a family portrait to be painted here, the job calls not for Norman Rockwell but for Salvador Dali. Only a master surrealist could capture the running religious subtexts that turn all this group’s get-togethers into so many mystifying studies in intra-familial ecumenism.
It’s uncanny. There’s so much passion for Christian discipleship in these hearts, you can practically hear the preachments pounding through the walls. And yet, apart from the pre-meal blessing, if there’s one subject that is absolutely, positively verboten in this place on this occasion, it is Jesus. His name is just too dangerous on this day.
Why? Because the little lot of us make up a veritable microcosm of Christianity in America, circa 2003. Beneath the placid surface of affable familiarity a stranger would observe as the cups clink and the wrapping paper flies, fierce currents of division and estrangement flow. One careless slip of the tongue might set off an inter-familial tsunami so ferocious, it’d sweep our fragile nine-part harmony clear to the North Pole. There it’d solidify in the permafrost until the next glacial epoch.
Sound melodramatic? Take a look around the hearth.
Catholics, Protestants, Cultists Rockin' Round the Tree
Our hosts, my father and his (second) wife, are enthusiastic members of the United Methodist church, arguably the quintessential mainline-Protestant (read: theologically liberal) denomination.
My sister and her husband are evangelical Protestants. They belong to a small, independent congregation of born-again, “Bible-based” (read: theologically conservative) believers near their home in New Hampshire.
My father’s stepson and his wife are entrenched in the International Churches of Christ, also known as the “Boston Movement,” a secretive fundamentalist (read: categorically scary) federation whose escapees have provided a ripe market niche for many a cult de-programmer.
And my brother and his wife — along with their five kids — are, thanks be to God, uncomplicatedly Catholic. Like me. And let me say this: Fearless defenders of the faith are we.
Well, the other 364 days of the year, anyway. On this day, we’re just plain defensive. Can you blame us? Here, amid the hugs and smiles and, yes, the love, there lurk attitudes unspoken, misconceptions unpronounced and pity unexpressed. And that’s just from the schnauzer.
I’m not sure how my brother and sister-in-law deal with the spiritually smoky atmosphere. But I can tell you what I do: Pray for my relatives’ eventual conversion to fullness of communion with Christ. Witness my faith wordlessly. And plead with God for strength enough to survive another Christmas dinner at Dad’s.
But you know what’s really funny about that three-part prescription? Everyone else here is following his or her own version of the exact same regimen. I endure, pray for and wordlessly witness to them. And they endure, pray for and wordlessly witness to me.
What, exactly, do they pray for? Hmm. I have to think about that for a second.
God Bless Us One and All
My dad and his wife pray, I think, for all of us gathered to receive whatever blessings we need to feel good about ourselves so we can be kind to and generous with others. Near as I can tell from these two, United Methodists affirm pretty much everything anyone professes in the name of Jesus, as long as the beliefs professed don’t hurt anyone else’s feelings. Their wordless witnessing consists of being the nicest people in the house.
My sister and her husband pray, I think, for all of us to get saved. The way they see it, a few Catholics might have “accepted Jesus” as their “personal Lord and Savior” — thus securing a spot in heaven they can never lose no matter what they do afterward — but most Catholics haven’t. Not really, anyway. Otherwise they’d change to a church in which the preaching is “anointed” and the people are “deep in the Word of God.” These two witness by slipping off to read the Bible in a quiet corner at some point during the day.
My dad’s stepson and his wife pray, I think, for Satan to release his grip on all the rest of us. Then we’d be free to see that the place God really wants us is in the International Churches of Christ. To them, I think, the evangelicals are saved but in some state of ecclesial error while the Methodists are trying to “church their way into heaven” and the Catholics are caught in the clutches of the Whore of Babylon. Or something like that. These two are polite and cordial people; they witness (here, at least) by being friendly yet unobtrusive. They’ve never said a word about their church — or mine, or any of the others’ — to me. But I’ve heard lots of terrifying tales about the Boston Movement and I’ve spent enough time reading testimonies from former members at Reveal.org that I know these two need all the prayer they can get.
But I ask you: Who among this crowd doesn’t? Including — no, especially — Yours Truly. Like everyone else here, I’m a disciple of Christ working out my salvation with fear and trembling (whether they all know that’s what they’re doing or not). I’ll take all the help and intercession I can get.
And, in many ways, I’m a typical American from a typically fractured family celebrating Christmas in a fairly typical way. So it will be that, once we’re gathered around the gifts, someone will ask someone else to please turn the volume down on the stereo, which will be playing someone’s idea of perfect Christmas music. At which point it will become clear that the music was only turned up so as to drown out the play-by-play of a football game on TV. One of the women will promptly shut this off. “Hey — put that back,” a male voice will intone. “They’re just about to score.”
Second opinions will be voiced. Eyes will roll. Kids with avarice in their eyes and the menu on their clothes will squabble. Silent prayers will be said. And hearts will beat for love of the newborn Savior. May God hear them all.
© Copyright 2003 Catholic Exchange
David Pearson is features editor of the National Catholic Register and author of No Wonder They Call It the Real Presence.
