Grace and the Grinch

I’m home with a sick four-year old today, which means I’m also home with the Paw Patrol. This morning began with “The Pups Save Christmas,” an episode in which Santa crashes in Adventure Bay on Christmas Eve, losing his reindeer and scattering presents over a wide area. It’s up to Ryder and the pups to help Santa or “Christmas will be canceled.” Naturally they pull through.

There’s more to the episode than that, but I was struck for the first time by how many Christmas shows and movies center on a team of good characters helping Santa “save” Christmas. They have to work to make Christmas happen, otherwise there’s a real possibility that it won’t. “There won’t be a Christmas this year” is an oft-repeated foreboding in these stories.

By contrast, think of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” a story the daring of which has been lost on us through sheer familiarity. The Grinch, not just a villain but a Satanic figure, does all he can to stop Christmas. He removes all of the Whos’ material means of joy, all the trappings of Christmas that characters in other stories work to save, and Christmas still happens. “It came without ribbons,” he says in outrage that turns to wonder. “It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags.”

“Paw Patrol” and other “save Christmas” stories show us the logic of magic or paganism—or, for that matter, computer programming, which is more like magic than devotees of either science care to admit. Certain conditions have to be met to get the desired result. If presents, then happiness. Mistakes or missing parts will crash the whole system. All of these stories have a lot to say about “Christmas spirit” and “believing” but this rhetoric is belied by the stories themselves, which always feature a desperate race to help Santa on his way.

What “The Grinch” shows us, on the other hand, is the logic of grace. It shows better than any other Christmas entertainment the pure gratuitous gift of Christmas, a gift that comes into the world through the goodness of someone else and that we have no control over. We can reject it, as the Grinch does at first, but we can neither make it happen nor stop it.

The nearest that that episode of “Paw Patrol” can get to grace is to assert that “Christmas is about helping others,” which is still making Christmas happen through your own best efforts. Again, compare the Grinch. Having put a lot of work into stopping Christmas and failed, he is transformed by it. You might even say converted. The grace given to the Whos extends even to him, and he returns the literal gifts that have proven, through grace, immaterial to them. Now that the presents and ornaments and roast beast don’t matter to him either, he has the grace to share them. Material blessing comes from joy and grace rather than the other way around, which is the Grinch’s starting assumption—and that of a lot of other Christmas stories in which mere mortals have to create the conditions for Christmas themselves.

This is the wonderful paradox of Christmas. The promise that Christmas will happen no matter what we do is a purer hope than any moralistic message about spending time together or helping others. Joy comes from grace, and that joy will produce everything else that makes Christmas meaningful—including helping others. We just have to let it transform us.

Bede on a medieval Scrooge

From Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, V, xii, a chapter in which he relates the story of Dryhthelm:

About this time, a noteworthy miracle, like those of olden days, occurred in Britain. For, in order to arouse the living from spiritual death, a man already dead returned to bodily life and related many notable things that he had seen, some of which I have thought it valuable to mention here in brief. There was a head of a family living in a place in the country of the Northumbrians . . . who led a devout life with all his household. He fell ill and grew steadily worse until the crisis came, and in the early hours of one night he died. But at daybreak he returned to life and suddenly sat up to the great consternation of those weeping around the body, who ran away; only his wife, who loved him more dearly, remained with him, though trembling and fearful. The man reassured her and said: ‘Do not be frightened; for I have truly risen from the grasp of death, and I am allowed to live among men again. But henceforward I must not live as I used to, and must adopt a very different way of life.’ Then he rose and went off to the village church, where he continued in prayer until daybreak. He then divided all his property into three parts, one of which he allotted to his wife, another to his sons, and the third he retained and distributed at once to the poor. Not long afterwards, he abandoned all worldly responsibilities and entered the monastery of Melrose, which is almost completely surrounded by a bend in the river Tweed. There he was given the tonsure and entered a separate part of the house allotted him by the abbot, where he entered upon a life of such physical and spiritual penance to the day of his death that, even if he had kept silence, his life would have witnessed that he had seen many dreadful and many desirable things that remained hidden from others.

First, because I am me, I cannot read Bede’s account of Dryhthelm’s shocking return to life without thinking of Ray Stevens and his Uncle Fred.

Second, one of the stranger lines of criticism I have heard of Dickens’s Christmas Carol is that no one, especially not a hardened moneygrubbing capitalist like Ebenezer Scrooge, would change his ways because of one night’s bad dreams. This critique has always struck me as odd—and is probably more ideological than artistic anyway—but in case any proof were needed that Dickens’s fable has some truth to it, here is a real world example. Even if you explain away Dryhthelm’s death and resurrection and his vision—which I am disinclined to do, though this story seems tailor made for the kind of pop debunking common today—we’re still left with someone who radically reordered his entire life on the basis of what he saw over the course of one night. And Bede goes on to tell us that Dryhthelm “forwarded the salvation of many by his words and life.”

One side note—a big difference between Dryhthelm and Dickens’s Scrooge is their starting point, as Dickens takes pains to show just how much of a wretched miser Scrooge is while Bede notes that Dryhthelm already “led a devout life with all his household.” A good example of how the devout are not necessarily holier than anyone else, just more aware of their own need for repentance—as Dryhthelm would have been the first to admit.

If you want to find out what, exactly, Dryhthelm saw of hell, purgatory, and heaven during the hours he lay dead, you can read the rest of this passage at Project Gutenberg here. It’s striking. The translation above is that of Leo Sherley-Price for Penguin Classics, from which I’ve quoted here before.

Shooting at the Stars

Illustration from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

One of my favorite kids’ Christmas books, one I have delighted to share with my kids since I discovered it a couple of years ago, is Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix. This book does not retell the nativity narratives of the Gospels and there is not a manger scene to be found, but the truth of that story pervades this one.

Shooting at the Stars is based on the true story of the Christmas truce of 1914. The First World War was only in its fifth month by December of that year but had already shocked Europe with its destruction and death toll. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in a war that modern technology was supposed to have ended with a quick and humiliating defeat for one’s enemies. Despite these high hopes on all sides, the overwhelming firepower of modern warfare stopped armies—with horrific losses—and forced them down, into the earth. Trench warfare had already arrived and was a settled reality, especially on the Western Front. Then, over a few days at Christmas, impromptu, unofficial ceasefires brought men from both sides into no-man’s-land to chat, exchange gifts, and celebrate the birth of Christ with real peace on earth—peace made only more real and striking by the context.

Hendrix frames his retelling as a letter home from Charlie, a teenage English soldier. Over the first several pages, Charlie describes the miseries of life in the trenches and Hendrix’s clearly well researched illustrations give the boy soldier’s descriptions weight. We see the rain, mud, the standing water that could flood soldiers out of the holes in the trench wall where they could sleep, and the Western Front’s notorious rats. Freezing temperatures come as a relief because the cold makes the ground solid again.

from Shooting at the Stars, by John Hendrix

Then comes the miracle, “a tale so wonderful that you will hardly believe my account!” On Christmas Eve the English hear the Germans singing “Silent Night”—wonderfully rendered as blackletter calligraphy the color of candlelight, hovering over no-man’s-land—and Christmas trees appear all along the German front lines. That leads to a joke shouted over from the German side, a can of jam (mentioned prominently in They Shall Not Grow Old) heaved over from the English side, and two officers from the two warring nations stepping out of their trenches and walking toward one another to meet in the middle. Hendrix, through his careful pacing and his luminous illustrations, makes these officers’ simple handshake a powerfully emotional moment.

The first thing the soldiers do with their truce is to help bury each side’s dead, the numerous unburied corpses being a somber but important fact about the Western Front that Hendrix rightly includes but keeps kid-friendly. From there the soldiers meet, play soccer with a cracker box, take photos together, and exchange souvenirs, humble tokens like buttons and belt buckles—and one wonders at the accidental appropriateness of the German motto struck onto their belt buckles: Gott mit uns, “God with us.”

But the war intrudes again and the truce cannot last. One officer coming up from the rear berates the men in the front lines: “He said we had acted like traitors to Britain—but how could a day of peace be treason?” Hendrix thus subtly but powerfully contrasts the peace that Christ came to bring with the ideologies that possess modern people—in this case, nationalism and militarism, but it could just as easily be any other ism to which we find ourselves committed today.

A friend of mine who read my short Goodreads review a few years ago told me that, as he read Shooting at the Stars with his son, when those first two officers shook hands and Charlie writes that “For one glorious Christmas morning, war had taken a holiday,” his son stopped him and said, “That's wrong. It's more like the holiday took the war away. Right, Dad?” Amen to that.

Well researched, with a good introduction and afterword and a glossary that will be helpful to younger readers, but, more importantly, beautifully written and illustrated, Shooting at the Stars shows what the hope of the incarnation means in a world as broken and destructive as ours. If Christmas can redeem even a few days in the trenches of the Western Front, how much more can the hope born that night in Bethlehem accomplish before he is through? Shooting at the Stars is a must read, a worthwhile addition to your family’s cycle of Christmas stories, and one that makes that truth and that hope all the more real.

Merry Christmas, frohe Weihnachten, and pax in terra.

Hallmark Xmas Movies on the Sectarian Review

Merry Christmas! Earlier this week, I sat down for a chat with Danny Anderson of the Sectarian Review Podcast, his wife Kim, and fellow guest Chris Pipkin. This week’s topic: the Hallmark Christmas movie phenomenon. We had a real blast talking through our own histories with Hallmark, the rise of the Christmas movie machine, how we pass the time while enduring these movies, what these movies do and do not do well, and, perhaps most importantly, what these movies are trying to say—if they’re trying to say anything. I had a great time recording this and hope y’all enjoy listening.

So drop your snooty big city fiance, head to a small town that’s planning its annual Christmas event, wrap up in a tasteful and modestly priced scarf, bake something, decorate something else, and listen in while you wait for the inevitable third-act snow!

You can find the episode embedded below, or at iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine purveyors of podcasts.