Enjoy this special holiday episode of Digital Jung, available now:
“Something has happened to Christmas, or to our hearts; or to both.”
That is the opening sentence of a little book I recently discovered called The Feast of St. Friend, written in 1911 by Arnold Bennett, a prolific and popular writer of the early 20th century. Fifty years before Charlie Brown lamented about the loss of meaning at Christmas, Bennett was making similar observations.
Giving expression to what he perceived to be a growing sentiment, he wrote, “Christmas is gluttony and indigestion and expensiveness…and Christmas cards are a tax and a nuisance, and present-giving is a heavier tax and a nuisance.” These words, updated with contemporary language, of course, could easily be heard still today. Something has happened to Christmas, and apparently it has been happening for a very long time.
Bennett’s book is actually not a complaint about the state of Christmas. It is a search, in a sense, for a way to return to an authentic experience of the Christmas spirit. But return, here, should not be understood as expressing nostalgia for some idealized past. If anything, it is an attempt to reach back to the origins of what he calls “the festival” in order to experience its living present.
Origin is my word, not Bennett’s, though it is implied in what he writes. By origin, I mean something like the root or the source, or to use the Greek word, the arche. In other words, The Feast of St. Friend, though it may not have been conceived as such by the author, is a search for the archetypal depths of Christmas.
This comes through in the fact that Bennett’s solution to finding the spirit of Christmas is not to emphasize the specifically Christian symbolism of the holiday, but to recognize that the early Christians built their own festival on the bones of a much earlier one. As he writes:
“They took the date of their festival from the universal pre-Christian festival of the winter solstice, Yule, when mankind celebrated the triumph of the sun over the powers of darkness, when the night begins to decrease and the day increase, when the year turns, and hope is born again because the worst is over. No more suitably symbolic moment could have been chosen for the festival of faith, goodwill and joy.”
To put it another way, the energy of Christmas is fueled by an archetypal energy that stretches back before the rise of Christianity. It is the power of the solstice that the early Christian community sought to infuse into their celebration. And it is that power that is needed, he believes, to bring the spirit to the season in the modern era. In this he sees potential for both the religious and the non-religious, which is why he calls it “the festival of faith, goodwill and joy.”
Accordingly, Bennett doesn’t seek renewal in the religious symbols — though he certainly doesn’t reject these or deny their value — but rather in the rituals and customs that have formed around them. It is these customs, he suggests, that hold the potential for the truly celebratory power that can bring life to the holiday. What he is, in effect, doing is attempting to understand the traditions — sending Christmas cards, exchanging presents, feasting, and other oddities like Christmas trees and Christmas crackers — as symbols. He wants us to remember that there is a meaning within and behind those activities that have become perfunctory and, therefore, stressful to us because we have forgotten that these, too, are ritual acts.
Admittedly, it is hard to recognize the ritual aspect of, say, Christmas shopping, given that the whole enterprise has become metastasized into a consumerist frenzy to the point that it is mostly experienced as a rushed and unpleasant hassle, another item added to our already-too-full to-do list. But, ritual it is. Or at least, it is meant to be. One very basic purpose of ritual, as Joseph Campbell reminds us, is to “concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are doing.” This is at the heart of Bennett’s book. Here is how he describes it:
“If then, there is to be a festival, why should it not be the festival of Christmas? It can, indeed, be no other. Christmas is most plainly indicated. It is dignified and made precious by traditions which go back much further than the Christian era; and it has this tremendous advantage — it exists! In spite of our declining faith, it has been preserved to us, and here it is, ready to hand. Not merely does it fall at the point which uncounted generations have agreed to consider as the turn of the solar year and as the rebirth of hope! It falls also immediately before the end of the calendar year, and thus prepares us for a fresh beginning that shall put the old to shame. It could not be better timed. Further, its traditional spirit of peace and goodwill is the very spirit which we desire to foster. And finally its customs — or at any rate, its main customs are well designed to symbolize that spirit. If we have allowed the despatch of Christmas cards to degenerate into naught but a tedious shuffling of paste-boards and overwork of post-office officials, the fault is not in the custom but in ourselves. The custom is a most striking one — so long as we have sufficient imagination to remember vividly that we are all in the same boat — I mean, on the same planet — and clinging desperately to the flying ball, and dependent for daily happiness on one another's good will! A Christmas card sent by one human being to another human being is more than a piece of coloured stationery sent by one log of wood to another log of wood: it is an inspiring and reassuring message of high value. The mischief is that so many self-styled human beings are just logs of wood, rather stylishly dressed.”
The fault is not in the custom but in ourselves. In other words, it depends on the kind of consciousness we bring to the custom, or as Bennett more aptly puts it, the quality of imagination. He is describing a version of what I call in this podcast, the symbolic life. And the method that he offers for the recovery of the symbolic life of Christmas is deceptively simple. He describes it as “the sympathetic exercise of the imagination.”
He suggests a conscious and deliberate “giving of oneself,” a suspending of one’s own point of view and an adoption of the point of view of the other. “To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature,” he writes, “it is necessary to imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary.” He is talking about empathy, of course. He is talking about love. He recognizes that this is not an easy undertaking, but if sincerely practiced, it is transformative. It doesn’t just lead to the performance of specific acts of generosity, he says, “it is ceaselessly translating itself into demeanour.” That is, it doesn’t just change our behavior. It changes us.
This is at the core of the symbolic life, in general. The “sympathetic exercise of the imagination” is directed also to the life of the psyche. We suspend our own point of view and try to imagine into an image from a dream, an active imagination, a fairy tale, or as Bennett suggests, another person. And if we do this practice, it changes us.
So, let this be my Christmas card to you. May we find the ability this season to shake off our woodenness and look beneath the merely obligatory and perfunctory to see what life the customs of the season are trying to communicate to us. May we give ourselves to them in the remembrance that, as Bennett says, “we are all in the same boat — I mean, on the same planet — and clinging desperately to the flying ball, and dependent for daily happiness on one another's good will!”
And, finally, may we find time during this season for the kind of reflection that enables us to touch what is human and whole both in ourselves and in the others around us.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
And my very best wishes for the coming year.
Until next time.
Well put. As Jung noted, when asked why people put a star on top of their Christmas trees, people responded that this was something that was customary. It was a habit whose origin was lost to the mists of time. Summer is born on the winter solstice. Thanks for the well wishes and the same to you.