Light Dawns In A Dark Cave

Hope at Christmas

Click here for an explanation of the symbolism of the Nativity icon

I don’t plan on writing on Christmas Day, so please accept this message of hope and gladness on Christmas Eve. I have just returned from Sunday liturgy, and I’m so full of happiness. (And by the way, if you are in Budapest, please come tomorrow, Christmas Day, to the English-language Divine Liturgy at the cathedral at Petofi ter 2; Metropolitan Hilarion will be celebrating it.) A Catholic friend messaged me while I was in church. She said she knows that Christmas must be difficult for me, given the brokenness of my family, and that she wants me to know that she too comes from a difficult family situation, so she stands in solidarity with me. Honestly, this sweet message lifted me as much as Communion did. How kind Our Lord is to give us friends! I need to be a better friend in 2024. Think, friends, about the people you have in your life who could use a kind word from you today — and don’t put off reaching out. You never know. You really don’t.

I want to draw your attention to a couple of messages from other friends — writing that will build you up and increase your joy. The first is today’s dispatch from Martin Shaw, the Englishman who converted to Christianity — indeed, Orthodoxy — in recent years. (You can read Martin’s discussion of his conversion here; he told it to me over pints in this London pub, shown below.)

In his Substack today, Martin writes about the Wild Christ. Excerpt:

A baby is warm in the glow of animals and is remembering everything.

He is alethinos––he is the real. Reality has arrived.

The baby opens its mouth in a cave and a dove flies out. It’s going back, back to the earth’s early stretches and yawns, the whittled tips of her mountains, the yellowed fangs of her wolves, the green sizzle of her jungles, the slow way her continents fuse together like aurochs seeking warmth, then break apart like feuding lovers. This all takes a long, long time. So long our minds can barely stretch around it.

The Christ in Yeshua was present before we laid one hundred and fifty bear skulls in the Chauvet caves and commenced to dancing, before flood, before commandments, before Red Sea parting. And Yeshua is there after heavy Roman nails, reformations, both travesty and kindness in his name. There is no quadrant of time he does not abide in. Spirit hovered like a bird over the waters. The delight of crafting the Earth was upon it. The Grail making was upon it. This joyous burning bush in heavy-freighted universal dark. This womb of grain and whale and mountain and antelope.

In this time of savagery and spell-speech it is good to hear again of the three-that-is-one who hovered over the waters. And now, tonight, Yeshua is held in the arms of young Mary, warm in her glow with the vegetative earth around her. For a moment at least the un-ripeness of humans will have to wait.

What kind of God elects to be born into the dung of the world with a death sentence on its head? This one, obviously. Druids and shepherds turn up to give praise and gifts. Let us say a Celtic prayer together:

I bed down tonight

With Mary and her son.

I will not bed down

With wickedness.

Ingather me lord

Despite my wounds to you

Let me abide this night

In your treasure-house.

Yeshua is the name angelic Gabriel gave. Yeshua, deliverer. On the eighth day of his life when the name is given at temple, Anna the Prophetess speaks praise of the child and what he will bring to the freeing of Jerusalem.

It’s good to think of Anna. Anna is an old-growth tree, married seven years, a widow for eighty-four. Never left the shadows and flames of the temple area, but on this day raises her voice in exultation, spiritually diligent with her belly fasted and a prayer always resident in her mouth. And patient Simeon too, who feels the long-promised spirit as he cries out with this arrival of the Light. Put your ear to the ground in that place and you may hear them praising still.

Read it all! Martin, that supremely gifted bard, makes the Christmas story, and the story of Jesus of Nazareth, fresh and frightening, in the best way. Maybe it takes a man who dedicated his adult life to studying and making present the power of myth to show us the power of the True Myth, and its presence among us, even still. So many of us who grew up with these stories have allowed them to fossilize in our imaginations. And here is Martin, drawn in the middle of the journey of his life out of the darkness, into the Light, bringing the Light to us in these dark days. Glory to God!

I went to Bethlehem for the first time in the year 2000. My idea of the Nativity was shaped by German Christmas carols, and the popular iconography (to speak generally) of American culture. I thought of Jesus being born in a barn. In fact, it was a cave — a cave around which Constantine built a great church. You can pray at the very cave in which the Creator of the cosmos came into this world as a baby boy. This is the spot:

This may be the oldest site of Christian worship in the world. The early church gathered to pray at this cave where Our Lord was born. In the year 135, the Emperor Hadrian, eager to obliterate the memory of Jesus, ordered a temple built to Adonis over the site. The Romans did the same thing to the site of the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. They did not understand that by so doing, they “marked” the sites. Constantine demolished the pagan images and temples, and built churches — the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Read more here about the history of the site. And, here is a recent video of the grotto where the cave is, showing worshipers venerating it.

Think of it: in a dark cave, in the City of David, in a time of oppression, out on the periphery of empire, and in the dead of winter, a baby came into the world, born of a virgin … and nothing would ever be the same. This baby was of low birth, but he was a king. Here we are, over two millennia after his birth, celebrating what happened in that humble cave. The baby is beloved by billions, but the hatred that Herod had for him is still with us too, in the form of our own Caesars in the state and the institutions of our post-Christian society, and also in the form of savages like the Islamists who planned to bomb European cathedrals and Christmas markets, and would have done had the police not foiled their plot.

They hate the baby. They hate we who revere him as Lord. They know who he is. But many of us who say we do live as if we have forgotten. Thank you, Martin, for waking us.

There is a second essay I want to bring to your attention: Paul Kingsnorth’s Christmas message. Paul also came to Christ in the middle of the journey of his life. In his Nativity reflection, he says he sometimes thinks he has been lied to all his life. Growing up in post-Christian Britain, he imbibed the myth of secular progress. More:

Whatever the precise components, I grew up believing in things which I now look on very differently. To put career before family. To accumulate wealth as a marker of status. To treat sex as recreation. To reflexively mock authority and tradition. To put individual desire before community responsibility. To treat the world as so much dead matter to be interrogated by the scientific process. To assume our ancestors were thicker than us. I did all of this, or tried to, for years. Most of us did, I suppose.

Perhaps above all, and perhaps at the root of all, there was one teaching that permeated everything. It was to treat religion as something both primitive and obsolete. Simply a bunch of fairy stories invented by the ignorant. Simply a mechanism of social control. Nothing to do with us, here, now, in our very modern, sexually liberated, choose-your-own-adventure world. We were with Nietzsche, we moderns: we knew the God stuff was self-deluding balls, and soon enough the apostles of the New Atheism would be along to rub it in for us. Dawkins would sneer and Hitchens would bray and the pattern of the 21st century would open up before us: a slow, steady crawl towards a world unclouded by anything that could not be managed or measured by the people we believed we had become.

It was fun, in its way. Now that I look back, I almost wish it had been true.

To his great shock, Paul discovered a few years back that it was false. He became an Orthodox Christian. In his Nativity message, Paul addresses the convulsions in the world today — things we can all recognize — and says that the pagan poet W.B. Yeats and the secular German historian Oswald Spengler both prophesied the death of secular materialism, and the rebirth of religion. More:

What if a human being is not primarily a rational, bestial or sexual animal but in fact a religious one? By “religious” I mean inclined to worship; attuned to the great mystery of being; convinced that material reality is only a visible shard of the whole; able across all times and cultures and places to experience or intuit some creative, magisterial power beyond our own small selves. There is, after all, no current or historic culture on Earth that is not built around God, or the gods. None, that is, apart from ours.

If this is true, then it would make sense that the collapse of the false picture painted by the age of “science and reason” — mind-body dualism, religion as evidence of superstition or stupidity, the ability of ideology or technology to create paradise on Earth — would bring about a return to the mean. And if the mean is what we might call a religious sensibility, then a resurgence of religion itself would be very much on the cards.

I think there is a good chance that, beneath all of the surface culture war battles, below the arguments about free speech and democracy, coursing below all of these necessary and inevitable cultural strains and tensions, this is already happening. It could be that Spengler’s second religiousness is already here.

This is what I see happening — and why I have written this new book about Christian re-enchantment. In fact, there’s a chapter in the manuscript now identifying Kingsnorth, Shaw, and Jonathan Pageau as “three prophets” who are speaking Christian truth in this fresh new way to the post-Christian world. Paul goes on:

In response, we are now beginning to see a resurgence in genuine religion. Personally, and anecdotally, I am noticing this everywhere. In American Orthodox churches bursting with young families. In atheists or neo-pagans suddenly becoming Christians (I plead guilty). In my own speaking events about Christianity, which are suddenly inexplicably popular, and not because of me. Others I know report the same thing: for the first time in a long while, people are beginning to take faith seriously again. Actual religion — the thing that was supposed to die a slow death at the hands of reason — is emerging slowly from the shadows as the new paganism takes hold.

But as Spengler himself warned, there is no guarantee that a “second religiousness” will be an entirely benevolent thing. Knowing what we do of human history, in fact, we can pretty much guarantee that it won’t.

This is such an important point! Please think about it. Over and over, I go back to what the Anglican seminarian Daniel Kim told me two summers ago: that the New Atheism is dead, dead, dead … but his generation are turning to non-Christian forms of transcendence. The occult. Psychedelia. Technology, via obsession with AI, UFOs, and transhumanism. Some will turn to political pseudo-religions. It’s all happening now, and it will intensify.

Paul says the culture war is at best a distraction:

Religion, despite the many calcified failures of its history, is not at root a weapon in anybody’s culture war. Religion and culture reign in separate domains. A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the “cultural Marxists” will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic.

I think he’s mostly right, but not entirely. As Robert Louis Wilken, historian of the early church, tells us here, Christianity requires culture in which to elaborate itself, to become material. The liturgy that Paul and I participate in — that’s culture. Hymns are culture. Fasting and feasting are culture. The cathedrals and the Christmas markets that the Islamists want to destroy are remnants of Christian culture. What Paul gets right is that culture is not enough. In fact, culture is nothing but what Christ himself called, in a different context, “whitewashed sepulchres.” That is to say, the great cathedrals of Europe are nothing but gorgeous mausoleums without the living faith. If Paul means that victory in the culture war means imposing Christian beliefs and values on others, then he’s entirely correct that this is at best futile. We should fight for Christian culture chiefly because it provides space for the Christian faith to live and breathe and infuse life. But without real faith, which has to be born, and reborn, in the caves of our hearts, it’s all in vain. The reason I found the new book The Boniface Option so empty is because it’s all about stoking anger at the enemy; it correctly identifies the enemies, but beyond that, what does it offer? The online world of Orthodox, of Catholics, and of Reformed Protestants is filled with apostles of rage who often see the enemies with clarity, but because they have walled up the cave of their hearts to the tenderness of the Baby and the humility of His mother, their form of religion is stillborn. In that, I am entirely on Paul Kingsnorth’s side.

I only caveat this to say that I don’t think we Christians are at liberty to give up the struggle in the public square, while we still have the liberty to fight. This is a lesson I took from the late, great Vacláv Benda, a faithful Czech Catholic who, at great risk (he went to prison for four years), was a public Catholic, fighting for the liberty of all against Communist totalitarianism. Vacláv believed that Christians have an obligation to serve others, even those who don’t believe. But he also — and this, I think, is Paul’s point — knew that that service, even sacrificially, originated in the worship of Jesus, and the daily dying to self that all the faithful must do. Without that primary experience of the encounter with God, everything we do is in vain.

Paul makes a point that is hard to convey to people today, which is this: that we don’t often understand things until we participate in them. When people ask me about Orthodoxy, I tell them what I can, but emphasize that there’s no substitute for showing up at the Divine Liturgy, for committing yourself to the prayers, the fasting, and the Orthodox way. As Frederica Mathewes-Green first told me, “Orthodoxy is a way of life with an institution attached.” It’s hard for Westerners to grasp this. When I first became Orthodox, as you’ll perhaps recall, a fellow convert told me it would take a decade before we were really Orthodox. She meant it would take that long for us to really see the world with Orthodox eyes. I had no idea what she meant. I had bought books about Orthodox theology. Why couldn’t I just read those, and understand?

Well, the lady was right — and that’s part of taking on the Orthodox mind. You learn that being a Christian is not simply about affirming correct doctrine. It’s more like learning how to play the violin — something that you acquire over time. She wasn’t saying that we were lesser Orthodox Christians, but only that we should be patient, and keep showing up, allowing the prayer, the fasting, and above all the Eucharist, to do its work of transformation. That was seventeen years ago, and what a liberating truth that was for me; it helped me to escape the prison of my head, and to undertake the Great Pilgrimage of theosis.

Whatever your Christian tradition, the same path is open to you. Reading the prison memoir of the (not yet canonized) Catholic saint Silvester Krcmery was where it first occurred to me that the Christians jailed by the Communists — the Catholics, the Protestants, and the Orthodox — were not bound in jail because they were Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestant. They were there because they were followers of Jesus Christ. That’s the kind of attitude I take towards my fellow believers. Yes, we are divided, sadly, in this world, but I rejoice that we share faith in Our Lord, and I greet you as brothers and sisters.

Since I started writing this post, I heard from a young friend who has been out of touch for months. He lives in Spain. He tells me his mother died this summer of a terrible disease, and the inability of the priests to comfort him led him to lose his faith. I’m not sure why he reached out to me today, but I told him that I don’t think it’s an accident. After I send this, I am going to phone him, and listen to his story, and be a friend and a Christian brother to him. Am I sorry to be far from most of my family this Christmas? Yes! But if I weren’t here, under these circumstances, I would not be able to be of service to this sad and mournful young man who no longer believes, but who, I think, would like to. Please pray for my friend S.

I think of Alexander Ogorodnikov’s story in Live Not By Lies: how, amid great suffering in a Soviet prison for his faith, he began to doubt God’s presence. And then the Lord sent him angels, literally, to show him all the souls of murderers who had been executed for their crimes, but who were now in Paradise with their Lord because he, Ogorodnikov, had been in prison to witness to them. This restored Alexander’s faith.

The stories of Benda, Krcmery, Ogorodnikov and so many others give me hope in these bleak days. They all testified, with their words and their deeds, to the truth of Jesus Christ. Suffering did not defeat them — it only strengthened them, because they knew that their Redeemer lives. If those men, who were given burdens far heavier than what life has placed on my shoulders, lived triumphantly, hopefully, and in the joy of the Lord, why can’t I? Why can’t you?

Here’s how Paul ends his piece:

I remember the first time I tentatively stepped into an Orthodox church to attend a Divine Liturgy. I had no idea what to do, or what to expect, or whether I even really wanted to be there. From the outside, to the Western mind, it all looks intimidatingly Byzantine — not to mention extremely long. But something happens when you stand, immersed in it all. You come to feel as if you are being carried down a great timeless river to an almost unfathomable destination that you could never reach on your own. But of course, you are not on your own. Not now. You will never be on your own again. You have come home.

Amen and amen. Read the whole thing — it’s so, so good.

Have you not been to church in a while? Don’t worry about it — now is the time to go home. God is not mad at you. Are you mad at Him? That’s okay — He can take it. Do you feel that your faith is weak? So is mine, so is everybody’s, in a way. If there are any saints in your church, they would be the very last people to discourage you from coming. The important thing is to go, be with Him, honor His birth. It is the birth of hope, real hope. Reality has arrived! Glorify Him! If you stay at home tonight or tomorrow, I can tell you what is likely to happen: nothing. Not a thing. But if you move toward the Light, you might experience a kind of miracle: the moving of the Light into the cave of your heart. There is warmth and illumination in that Light. It is, as Paul says, a river of light, and you are not in it alone.

One of my favorite hymns is O Holy Night, which captures the glory of this night:

O holy night
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night
Of our dear Savior's birth
Long lay the world
In sin and error pining
Till He appeared
and the soul felt it's worth
a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks
a new and glorious morn
Fall on your knees
Oh, hear the angel voices
Oh, night divine
Oh, night when Christ was born
Oh, night divine
Oh night, oh night divine

Whenever I hear that hymn, I recall the snowy day of Advent in 2002, when my then-wife and I took our toddler out to hear the Roches do their annual sidewalk Christmas concert, near Ground Zero. I wrote about it here, in Touchstone. It had been a terrible year, what with living with the fallout of the 9/11 attacks, and with the 9/11 of the Catholic Church (the abuse scandal broke big earlier in the year), of which we were then communicants. Excerpt:

All Catholics who love their Church can agree that we arrived in Advent battered and discouraged. It was difficult for me to see the holiness of the Church amidst the filth of the scandal. In December, I was thinking about this all the time, and carried within me a heavy heart, a sorrowful and anxious burden I even felt that snowy night with my family in Battery Park.

And then I saw something that delivered me from thoughts of Cardinal Bernard Law and all the pomps and works of the American bishops.

As the Roche sisters sang, I noticed an older man, maybe a businessman, attending an older woman in a wheelchair. She must have been his wife. She was wrapped snugly in a gray shawl, her thin face swaddled by a red scarf. Her face looked so forlorn and expressionless, I thought she must be depressed. Then he brought her a Christmas cookie, and she brought her right hand out from under the shawl to take it. Her hand shook violently, and she labored to bring the cookie to her mouth. Parkinson’s. This would account for the frozen expression on her face.

From that moment, it was hard to take my eyes off the couple. The old man was so tender with his wife, fussing to see that she had what she needed, that she was warm, that she felt the touch of his hand. When the Roches began to sing O Holy Night, the old man knelt in the snow, placed his face on his wife’s shoulder, and softly sang the words to her. I could read his lips. His bright eyes brimmed with love and mercy, hers stared into the distance. “O night! O night divine!” they sang, the sisters for the gathered neighbors, and the old man for his wife.

“A thrill of hope,” the song went, and I thought of these New Yorkers who did not leave the city, but who stayed to rebuild and renew their neighborhood, and indeed their broken hearts. I thought of the Cross and the Christmas tree at Ground Zero, and the simple act of commerce at Brooks Brothers, new life where there had once been nothing but smoke and flames and death.

Most of all, I thought of this gentle soul, sharing the cup of suffering with his true love, trying to bring her warmth and consolation and joy. Everyone there has lived through or is living through pain and destruction, and yet here they were, on a magnificent winter’s night, making something beautiful for God.

There is not enough evil in the world to extinguish the good in the hearts of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

It was true then. It is true now. It is true forever. Merry Christmas, friends. Let us pray for each other. I leave you with this hymn from the Roches, about the Light of Christmas (it’s from their We Three Kings album, which ought to be on your playlist). Put this on, turn this up, and sing alleluia!