Keep Satan in Christmas

Editors’ Note: This essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Hillsdale, Michigan, on December 1, 2024. The transcript has been edited slightly for clarity and length and was republished with the author’s permission.

I have a very high opinion of Christmas carols. But let’s face it: we are about to be inundated with them, both the religious and the secular ones. Perhaps far more of the latter than the former. And that is perhaps a regrettable fact.

But let me make it clear from the start that, despite my provocative title, I am not an implacable foe of what might be called “cultural Christmas,” by which I mean all the ways that Christmas has been domesticated into a time of binge sentimentality, spending, eating, giving, and nostalgia. Instead, I take the view that this is a very hard life, with unsought trials and tribulations beyond number arriving at our door every day, a life in which our joys often turn into immense sorrows overnight, without warning, and anything that improves the lives and softens the hearts of our neighbors, opens our hearts to an appreciation of one another, and encourages us to be loving and generous with one and all, is to be affirmed, not scorned.

And so much of the world’s ephemera is redeemable. If St. Augustine believed that even the works of Egyptian culture could be repurposed for Christian uses, then surely we can be similarly resourceful in how we think about our own cultural artifacts. If they fall short of being works of sanctification, that doesn’t mean they are completely devoid of good aspects. (I’ll take Mame Dennis on Broadway singing “We need a little Christmas right this very minute” over a great many far more sophisticated sermons and political speeches.)

What I want to emphasize, though, is that Christmas is a beacon of light entering into a world of darkness, the real world that we inhabit, when we are willing to be fully aware of it. Even with all our comforts, all our technological and medical miracles, all our prosperity, this world remains a vale of tears, as it always has been. There is so much sadness, so much grief, so much longing and unfulfillment, so much brokenheartedness all around us if we endeavor to notice it. It is almost unbearable to take it all in.

But Christmas challenges all of that. It is not just a matter of us letting go of pinched spirits and ungenerous hearts, throwing our hats up in the air in joy, and letting our generosity overflow into gifts and feasting. It is much more than that. Christmas is God’s invasion of our often sad and diminished world. He is performing an intervention, coming upon us like a tidal wave, or like a light suddenly flicked on in the kitchen of a cheap student apartment, making all the cockroaches scramble out of sight.

We are currently in the midst of the season of Advent, a word that refers to something that is coming, to the expected arrival from outside or beyond of something new and unfamiliar. It can be like the anticipation of presents under the Christmas tree, something good that we know is coming, and in fact that has already come, even if we make believe for a while that it hasn’t come yet, and don’t even allow ourselves to say the word “Alleluia.”

But Advent refers not only to this pretend-waiting for Christ’s Nativity, but our very real waiting for Christ’s return; it designates that betweenness, that provisionality, “for the time being,” but “not yet,” in which we exist. Remember that the great hymn “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending,” which is generally sung at Advent, is actually an expression of Judgment at the end of time:

Lo! He comes with clouds descending!

  Hark! the trump of God is blown,

And th’ Archangel’s voice attending

  Makes the high procession known:

       Sons of Adam!

Rise, and stand before your God!

In the Anglican tradition (my tradition), Advent hymns are as full of the second coming as they are of the first. This is how it should be. Advent is the prelude to God’s two invasions of our world—our world, with all its mixture of beauty and misery, love and betrayal, glory and pain—by the overwhelming power of His illumination and judgment.

If I were king—and we can all be thankful that I’m not—I do not think I would seek to rein in our Christmas excesses, behaving like some slashing latter-day Oliver Cromwell, turning off all those energy-wasting Christmas displays, closing down shopping malls, and banning the song “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” from the public airwaves during the Christmas season. True, I might be tempted to make a solemn royal proclamation about the importance of our recovering Christmas as a consecrated time and point out how much more tasteful and spiritually nourishing our fine Anglican hymns are than the alternatives. But more likely, I’d let things take their own course.

There is some justification for that path, beyond the justification that people should be free to do as they please. For one thing, the popular imagery and narratives of the Christmas season are far from being malignant. Movies like Miracle on 34th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life tend to prepare the way for the development of a mature Christian sensibility, even in those who are not preparing themselves for such an eventuality. Santa Claus may not quite be what the theologians would call a “figure” of Christ, but he at least offers us a preliminary foretaste of what it means to live in a moral universe in which justice and charity are brought together. His story prepares the heart and the mind for bigger and better things. Besides, stories always pack more of a punch than precepts—and they manage to account for complexity far more adequately. And so much the better, when the stories are shared by an entire culture.

So, while I could wish that our “cultural Christmas” was better than it is, I am also of a mind to say that we should be grateful for what we have.

But that does not mean we shouldn’t be wary. Anything that softens the heart may soften other things. It may soften perceptions that need to remain firm. That is the truth behind the admonition in my title. But let me return to that later, and for now, turn to Christmas carols, arguably the best part of our cultural Christmas.

A Christmas Mainstay

A number of years ago, a friend made a nice observation about his experiences of successive Christmases, one that has stuck in my mind as equally true for me, and perhaps for many of us. He observed that every year there seems to be a particular Christmas carol that grabs his attention early in the season, often because one particular line or image in that carol suddenly opens itself to him, revealing a fresh meaning that he’d never before noticed.

I’ve had the same experience. Maybe you have too. An example: I remember being struck a few years ago when, in listening to the French carol we call “O Holy Night,” a song I always tended to find both schmaltzy and unbearably tedious, just going on and on, often sung by people who didn’t really have the vocal talent to sustain its many dramatic high notes. But this one time, I noticed the words

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

Till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.

Maybe it was just a quirk of timing, but those last eight words—he appeared and the soul felt its worth—struck me, and I wondered why I had never noticed them before. I now listen to “O Holy Night” with respect, always hopeful that the singers can hit those high notes without making me cringe. Whenever I hear those eight words sung, or sing them myself, I remember the thought behind them: that Christ’s appearance makes the soul of man feel its full worth.

I believe others have similar tales to tell: of carols, or snatches of the lyrics of carols, that somehow come suddenly to life for them. The experience of hearing and singing and sharing these familiar carols year after year is like the best experience of liturgy, in its combination of familiarity and fresh moments of discovery, when universally known words that have for years rolled across one’s lips in rote repetition suddenly blaze forth with meaning, vividly and achingly true.

Like the oldest and best liturgies, these songs are no one’s personal property, time and usage having wiped away nearly all distracting fingerprints of authorship and “originality.” Instead, they belong to the ages, and to all of us. They are old friends to us, and like the best old friends, they are comfortable and reassuring, and yet also full of mysteries and surprises.

Our Christmas carols are among the most precious shared possessions of our fragmenting, fraying culture, and for all that we abuse them and demean them, they seem to remain imperishable. The last thing I would want to do is to seek to curate them and weed out all but a selection of the most worthy survivors. I would rather let a thousand carols breathe, and give them the air to do it with. Their variety is one of their best features. You never know which one will speak to you . . . or when.

There are constant reminders of the darkness, if one has ears to hear them, running through the great liturgy of our Christmas carols, with their memorable evocations of bleak midwinter, snow on snow (“In the Bleak Midwinter”), sad and lowly plains (“It Came upon a Midnight Clear”), the curse imposed on the earth itself by man’s disobedience (“Joy to the World”), the half-spent night (“Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”). The spooky and antiseptically sterile depiction of winter in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and its cinematic adaptations is, in that sense, very close to this spirit of the older carols, and to the biblical account of the matter—much closer than the hearty merriment of modern, rosy-cheeked seasonal songs like “Sleigh Ride” or “Winter Wonderland” or “Let It Snow.” Those songs are lovable, and loved, but the older liturgy of the carols tell a different tale. The older lyrics, which reflect a much bleaker and more fearsome experience of winter, are laced with evocations of spiritual darkness. They help us remember why it is symbolically right, even if may be historically wrong, for us to celebrate Christ’s birth in winter.

Staying Aware of the Darkness

We are constantly reminded to “keep Christ in Christmas” and to remember “the reason for the season.” And of course, we should. But, if I may be permitted to put it this way, we must also remember to keep Satan in Christmas, and not skip too lightly over the lyrics that mention him. For he and the forces he embodies are an integral part of the story. It utterly transforms the way we understand Christmas, and our world, when we also hold in our minds a keen awareness of the darkness into which Christ came, and still must come, for our sake. He appeared, and when He did, the soul at last knew its worth.  

Later in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” the visiting angel tells the shepherds in the field that Christ has come “To free all those who trust in him/ From Satan’s power and might.” Being subject to that “power and might” is, as we are likely to put it these days, the default setting of our human existence. But the Christmas story plays havoc with all such defaults. It reveals the putatively normal and settled features of our world to be something very different from that. They are the ruins and aftereffects of a great and ancient calamity, the tokens of a disordered order. And there is no greater vestige of that disordered order than Satan, the force, we are told, that initiated it all. To be freed from his power lifts the veil of illusion about who we are and what we were made to be. The soul at last knows its worth by knowing the limitlessness of God’s love. This means that the “comfort and joy” of which the song speaks are not merely outbursts of seasonal jollity, a time when we let down our Scrooge-like defenses and start hugging everybody. They bespeak the ecstatic gratitude of escaped prisoners who recognize that, in and through Christ, the entire cosmos has been transformed, and their lives have been made new. Nothing can ever be the same again.

And yet, we have to be reminded of that fact.

When my wife and I lived in Oklahoma, our church there had the services of a retired Episcopal bishop, the Right Reverend Bruce Macpherson, former bishop of West Louisiana, an exemplary priest and a thoroughly humble man. He used to tell a story about his grown daughters having a conversation about family memories of the holiday season. And they would always begin by saying, “Remember how Daddy always ruined Christmas by preceding it with Advent?”

What they were teasing him about is our Anglican practice of deliberately withholding from ourselves the full joy of Christmas during the whole season of Advent, which of course includes refraining from singing the great Christmas carols, or uttering the exclamation “Alleluia!” until the moment itself has arrived. 

The daughters’ feelings were understandable. In both a figurative and a literal sense, they were impatient to open their presents. But there is a reason for the delay. Rightly understood, Advent is a time of waiting, of reflection, of repentance, of amendment of life, but above all of preparation—preparation for a fresh reception of the astonishing gift that came to us with the first Christmas. It is an encounter our souls need to experience, again and again, so long as we live, and we always need to make ourselves ready for it.

Why do we need to experience it again and again? The darkness does not go away. Christ has come, and yet still the darkness is there. The longing, unfulfillment, and brokenness all around us are still there. The black ship with the black sails lingering on our horizon is still there. It has not sailed away. Not now, not yet. And this “not yet” is the Advent in which we are still living, even after each Christmastide has passed.

But the light that Christmas shines into the darkness can make even the bleakest midwinter into a landscape glistening with promise. So may it be for each of us, this and every Christmas. And as we celebrate this season, let us give special thanks for the inestimable gift of our Christmas carols, which give us such comfort and joy now, and perhaps give us a foretaste of what it will be like, when “not yet” has finally, in God’s time, yielded to “now.”

Image by Studio Multiverse and licensed via Adobe Stock.