When I was a child, one of the things I loved best about Christmas was the music, particularly the old hymns and carols. I didn’t care very much for Rudolf and Frosty and their ilk; it was the sacred story of the holiday, as told so poetically and evocatively in the carols, that moved me. I loved the tunes and the words; I could sing the old carols over and over again and never tire of their beauty. When I left the church in my early 20s and became an atheist, I had to figure out what to think about this beloved music from my childhood.
I can remember the day I decided to stop going to church, but uprooting the church from my psyche (and giving up my beliefs about god and an afterlife) turned out to be a much longer and more complicated process than just staying home that one Sunday morning. For the first five or ten years after I left the church, I was almost aggressively secular in my observation of Christmas. Not only did I avoid midnight Mass; I didn’t play or sing any of the old carols, or listen to them on records. For a while in the early 1990s I considered not celebrating Christmas at all. Luckily I had children, and their presence kept me from totally severing my ties to the holiday. It might be irrational for an atheist to celebrate a Christian feast in any way, but I came to realize that Christmas is so much more than that.
After awhile I really missed the old music, and eventually I started letting it back into my life for no better reason than that it made me happy to have it there. I remember listening to the radio one morning in the mid-1990s, a few days before Christmas, and hearing “Ding Dong Merrily On High” for the first time; I was enchanted by the song, and wondered why I’d been so eager to cast all this music out of my life in the first place. As I gradually reclaimed more and more of my favorite Christmas music, much of it sacred, I had to wonder what exactly it meant to me. I do not believe that god exists, or maybe it’s better to say that I don’t believe that humans can say anything meaningful about whether there is a deity and if so what it is like. So why do I love Christmas carols so, and other sacred music as well (Requiems and Masses and Magnificats), when I don’t believe in the literal truth of the words?
Several years ago I was listening to Handel’s Messiah at Christmas time and realized that even if I don’t believe in the literal story that it tells, I do believe in redemption. It’s like reading a novel: The story I’m being told is just a fiction, but it tells the truth anyway about something more general, about human experience. I believe in redemption because it has happened to me (in a totally secular, mundane way). And the Messiah is full of words that have deep metaphorical significance for me. For example, on a dark winter day, the part about how the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light has a lot of appeal. Everyone has times of walking in darkness, literal or figurative, and hoping for a great light to appear and illuminate life and self. The light can be the literal return of the sunlight, or it can be mental or emotional light from the recesses of your own mind, from a friend, or from the words or music or images left behind by someone long gone.
And in Christmas carols, these metaphors are so often couched in beautiful words. O Little Town of Bethlehem has always been a favorite; when I was a child my mother had a book of poetry that included the lyrics. The silent stars going by, and the everlasting light shining in the dark streets—something in my soul still thrills to those images. Maybe the Christmas story moves me in part because it happened in the middle of the night, and there’s a star in the story. “Skies are glowing, the heavens are cloudless…”. Some of the carols focus on the central figures of a mother and a child, also an emotionally moving image.
Back when I was still going to church I heard some verses of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” that you don’t normally hear and was very taken with them, especially the verse about how with the ever circling years comes round the age of gold. The verse before that begins, “Oh ye, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low, who toil along the climbing way with painful step and slow, look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing” and it expressed perfectly my idea that even during bad times, there is hope for better times in the future. And I still believe that life often goes in cycles and if you can get through the bad times, the good times usually come back around again. Everything has a limit, and contains the seed of its opposite. The yin-yang symbol expresses this truth with the drop of white in the black, and the drop of black in the white. I don’t believe that a deity is going to come and reward his long-suffering people, but I do believe that better times almost always come again.
When I let sacred music back into my life, I was acknowledging its power and beauty and meaning even though I interpret those things on a metaphorical level. (When I look back at some of the things I was taught as a child, I have to wonder how on earth anyone could take them literally.) But for the sake of consistency, it still sometimes seems that I should banish anything church-related from my life entirely. I still wonder how to justify not banishing these things. How can I expect this country to lay aside supernatural explanations and to embrace a rational, skeptical, naturalistic view of life (which I believe it urgently needs to do) if even an atheist like me can’t stop singing along with some of the old Christmas songs? If I don’t believe in god, surely it can’t be right to enjoy music that extols his glories or pleads to him for mercy?
But this music expresses human emotions and yearnings that are meaningful even in the absence of the god they refer to. I guess I see them as mythology, and as one variation on an endlessly embroidered theme that humans have been developing in many ways down through the millenia. I appreciate the way art can take an everyday event or a common element of human experience and find ever new ways to express how it feels and what it means. The mix of elements in the holiday season as we celebrate it across this country today expresses the way people in this time and place have dealt with the story line that all humans in temperate latitudes have been given: the seasonal fluctuations in light and dark, warmth and cold, and what they mean.
And this is the variation of the theme that I grew up with, so it’s woven into my personal history. One of the reasons I love sacred music so is that a lot of the music from the times and composers I love is sacred music. If you like listening to Bach’s choral music, for example, which I do, you will have to figure out a way to listen to sacred music even if you don’t believe in god. And the Christmas season has acquired such deep emotional resonance, and so many meanings that revolve around family and love and home and friendship and continuity, and is embedded so firmly in my psyche from the years of my childhood, that if I didn’t somehow make peace with the fact that much of the words to the carols are about God, I would have had to cut myself off from something of great value to me, if only for its connections to my younger self.
When I was talking with someone about the meaning I found in this season, I talked of cycles, of the light shining forth in the darkness, of the solstice: knowing that the days have gotten as dark as they will, and rejoicing that the light will start to come back. (I should also have mentioned that it’s possible to find beauty and value in the dark, and to disengage from the 24/7 rush of life in the early 21st century in favor of the slower winter rhythms of nature and enjoy the opportunities for contemplation and reflection.) He said that I was confusing the Christian Christmas story with a much older pagan story, and I said that they were so intertwined that it was impossible to entirely separate one from the other. Christians took a story that was ancient when they found it, and they turned it to their own purposes, but the roots go way back. When I see people decorating their houses with green things and glowing things, I think about how this taps into a very ancient wish to ward off the dark and to remind ourselves that the light and the seeds of the green growth of summer are still there.
I guess what I enjoy is the things this tells us about the human psyche, the ways we draw together against the cold and the dark and provide comfort and warmth for each other, the yearning toward the light, the hope for the return of better times. It’s become encrusted with many things I find objectionable: the belief that a deity will provide the redemption we seek, the cloying pious sentimentality that so often pervades the Christian Christmas story (if “The Little Drummer Boy” vanished tomorrow, that would be wonderful), the frequent hypocrisy involved in much of the talk of peace and love, the shallow commercialism, the competitiveness over gifts or decorations, the crass opportunism of merchandisers. But at the core of it I believe there’s something deeply human that is worth keeping. I’m alternately amused and baffled and upset by some of the current celebrations of the ancient rituals of winter, but overall I’ve come to live with them as the particular manifestations in my time and place of some relics of our deep past. The story of the accretions humans have built around the basic astronomical facts of the seasons are not quite as uniformly beautiful as the pearl that the oyster builds around a grain of sand, but they are nonetheless fascinating clues to our minds and our history. And the memories of my own past are in the end too dear for me to be willing to leave behind their soundtrack, incongruent as it is with my present beliefs. I don’t live my life based on belief in God, and I’m not going to go out and declare war on those who listen to other carols or to no carols at all. I hope I’m not hurting the atheist cause so much after all if I sing along about how every valley shall be exalted.
Whatever your seasonal beliefs and celebrations, I wish you joy and peace and beauty.
