the hovering santa god
This Christmas I decided to hang back in England for the season instead of making the long journey home to Atlanta, GA. I have a very bad little quirk in my wiring that propels me to over-schedule my life to death and after awhile, if I am not taking care of myself, I begin to feel that fragments of my soul are breaking away like great iceberg pieces of the Antarctic shelf in the throes of climate change. Besides, I’ve hardly been gone long enough to be really missed, though I am sorry to my mother.
So I am here, filled to the brim with traveling and small, concentrated time with some dear friends. England and Germany and trains and a lot of miles in a purple minivan.
The beginning of this travel month was this past Saturday when I drove friends to the airport, just a couple of hours north in Manchester. I was excited to drop them at the airport and then take another tour of the city. It had been a full year since I was properly in the city of Manchester and I was looking for a bit of time to rediscover her.
Manchester reminds me a lot of the town I live in, Birmingham. They have a similar feel, but Manchester is a lot cooler. There’s more of an artistic, hipster, bohemian vibe to it. At the very least, there’s a lot more vintage clothing shops to be found.
Yet they are both cities that grew to prominence on the backbone of the Industrial Revolution. They both have never been particularly noted for their museums or their tourist attractions. Manchester has some popular football teams. Birmingham has.. well… Birmingham has heart, I guess you could say. It’s home almost the way Atlanta is home.
The most striking similarity that I find between the two cities is this: they both are filled to the brim with shopping. Chain stores abound in both places, most of which can be found in either location. It seems that as the industrial vigor of these cities has wound down that the best way to replicate an economy is to build several H&M clothing shops within a three block radius.
I think this is a trend in the west, in America as well as England. With less production we look around for other ways to maintain a certain standard of living. This results in a lot of people going out to buy scarves. There’s little production of the goods that once propelled these cities to the economic top, but that’s okay. We’ll buy another scarf.
The unemployment rate in the United Kingdom was just released today: 8.3% are out of work. That is the highest it’s been since 1994. In my homeland, the good old U.S. of A.: 8.6%, according to Google Public Data.
With so many people out of work in this society, it seems odd to me that there are still so many high-end retail shops. I was passing through the side alleys of these shops in Manchester and I saw the streets crammed with people in the freezing rain. I stepped into the vast central square of the town with the dozens of little pre-fabricated huts of the German Christmas Market. You could not move sideways or forward for the humanity everywhere. I saw a woman trying on a hat and I heard her exclaim: “I NEED this hat in my life.”
But I know that many of us don’t have jobs. I know that many of us are living in a house of cards. I know that there are moms and dads that are elbowing their way through the crowds with this sense of stress, this anxiety that they need to perform something at Christmas. I say this because I feel it in my own heart, that often we move away from gift giving and hospitality for the sake of the love we share with those we care about and we slowly slide into performance, into competition. It seems like a market based economy and market based relationships. Will we be okay, you and I? Will you return my need for security and identity if I am able to give enough? Will you accept me if I am able to meet what I believe are your expectations of me?
In the middle of all of this I looked up and saw a towering Santa Claus, fully erect with helium, sitting on town hall. It was like he was presiding over the whole thing, gently swaying in approval. I think that’s when it really hit me that we have made Santa Claus a false god; the graven image of consumption.
Please hear me: this is not about returning to the true spirit of Christmas: the “Jesus is the reason for the season” speech. I’m not really talking about that at the moment, though I do believe there’s certainly space for that in our reflections.
Our economy is based on consumption and in a down year or two (or five) the shops are looking forward to Christmas to boost the bottom line. We have to buy so we can get paid so we can go out and buy again. But it’s not a static line from year to year.That would be one thing, but what it is a line that shoots ever upward, or we hope it will. We hope that we can buy our way into a bigger house and a nicer car. We hope that we can buy our way into satisfying lives.
The entire time, Santa Claus is the image hovering over all of it at this time of year, an exclamation of our toil all year long. The golden calf of our age.
Santa Claus, in himself as a tradition, is not the enemy. I don’t have any problem with Santa Claus as he is, and I certainly have no qualms with the ancient and charitable St. Nicolas, of whom our current Father Christmas descends from. I’m not saying we should overthrow the giant Santa in the square. It’s just that we have unconsciously made the concept of our modern Christmas into an idol, a false god, one that will make everything right if we can just take in enough of the products around us.
I work with university students in England. Our organization seeks to share the love of Jesus through community. We are not trying to force people to convert to our beliefs, we’re simply trying to love them where they are and point them into the direction of the places where we have found life. It happens to be that we have found life in Jesus, but we accept everyone into our little community whether they believe in anything or not. We seek to passionately love what many would call the “lost cause” in evangelism. Not because we believe that we’ll convert them in the long run, but because we want to live out the commandment of Jesus to love our neighbor.
Loving your neighbor in the context that I am in means being 29 and finding yourself at a lot of bars and parties with a bunch of drunk 20 year olds. It’s amazing the conversations that we have, the confessions that are made.
As it turns out, a lot of these kids are really depressed. They are some of the smartest people that I know. They are abounding in humor and talent. They are good kids. But they are horribly depressed, as they have no problems telling me when it’s late and they’ve had a lot to drink. I love them dearly and I want to help but I often find myself feeling lost. Where do I start? “You are loved. You are okay. You’re not so alone as it feels.” When the subject of God comes up, my responses are usually along the lines of, “God loves you regardless of what you do or how good you are or how badly you feel about yourself.” This is usually taken as good news, even to many who don’t believe in any god at all. I was at a party last week, standing outside and chatting with a guy I’ve slowly gotten to know over the past several weeks. I turned to him and asked, “Have you noticed that everyone seems to be really sad?” His response? “Yeah, I have noticed. I’m one of them.”
These same kids, on anti-depressants, do a lot of drinking. Some do a lot of drugs. I’m not making judgements. You can form your own. I realize that they will probably mellow out as they get older. The world’s economy will hopefully survive their lifetimes and they’ll be able to get jobs. But the sad thing to me is that they will most likely be trading the drugs of their university years for the drugs of their adult lives- which is to consume, to worship the Santa idol hovering over the marketplace. The reasons for wide-spread depression in our societies is complex. I wouldn’t want to offer a simple diagnosis. It’s just a fact that many of the people I know are clinically depressed. It’s my opinion that we tend to, depressed or not, fill the gaps in our lives with things that offer a disappointing return.
The truth is that the same thing is happening amongst the liberal atheist in the American Northeast and the conservative evangelicals of the American Southeast. Many of us are trading one drug for another to distract us from something that’s missing. We’ve taken an idol in place of something that could potentially and truly fill our hearts.
They do not work, these idols. It’s obvious to observe the university student and want to shake them and say, “Don’t you know that this isn’t going to make you happy?” That’s easy, right? Walk into the Manchester square and say the same thing to the girl trying on the hat. It’s going to seem not only foreign, it is going to make you seem like a madman.
The whole time I was walking around Manchester I was drifting in and out of stores. I found myself subconsciously making plans of things that I was going to buy next month when I had a little extra money. I started building shopping bags in my mind of the things that it would be nice own. I could feel endorphins rush into my brain: so much pleasure in just the idea of buying things. It won’t work. It never ever does.
I’m not saying that we should crash the economy by not purchasing Christmas presents. I do realize that without spending our markets wouldn’t exist, which means that I too would also not have a job. I’m also not talking about Tea Parties or Wall Street or any of the other machines to be unwired by protest. I’m not against them, it’s just that this is not what we’re dealing with here. It’s our hearts that are stake, our souls. It’s not a renovation of the system-at-large that we’re called to live in, it is a new earth, a kingdom that we are part of building. You can tell a kid at a party that he can’t drink himself out of sadness. Can we say that to ourselves when we consider our purchases in light of the call to love our neighbor?
What will make people happy? Is it Jesus? It’s easy to say that there is some form of religious construct that we can adopt that will fill the gaps in our hearts with, that Christ is just another form of medicating.
I happen to hope my life that Jesus resurrected from the dead and that he really is the only thing that’s truly worth following. Yet, I have to be honest with myself and realize that if my faith is a mixture of some songs and services, being nice and maybe giving some time to the poor, yet I am still green-lighted in my conscience to fill my heart with more things that I don’t really need, things that drive me further from loving my neighbor in any real way, then I have to ask some serious questions about whether I’m following any kind of real God at all.
I pray that there is life in Jesus without consumerism. But is it worth the price of what it means to take myself off the endlessly spinning wheel?
I hope so. But even more, I hope I have the courage to find out.
