Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys asks questions about the reasons for commemorations. Reflectiong on the ceremonies that surround Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday each year, Bennett suggests that the purpose of commemorations is not to enable people to remember, but instead to enable them to forget.
Bennett writes:
“Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”
If Remembrance Sunday is about forgetfulness, about an avoidance of the nastiness of the story. If Remembrance Sunday is about domesticating and sanitising and ceremonialising the horrific realities of war, don’t Christmas celebrations perform a similar function for the narratives of the birth of Jesus?
Standing in a shop, the anodyne sound of a classic music station included a carol sung by the choristers of an English cathedral. Boys and men from upper middle class backgrounds, dressed in strange attire, gathered in a place of privilege, sang of the birth of a child in poverty.
It is all sanitised, deprived of its power, stripped of any detail that might cause offence. Tonight, an archbishop from a background of wealth and influence, a man who lives in a palace, will stand and preach at a gathering of the elite about Jesus of Nazareth.
What can anyone whose entire life has been one of privilege know about the realities of the life of Jesus of Nazareth?
But, of course, it is not intended that people should take too seriously the story of the birth of this child. The grand ceremonies are not about remembrance of the child, they are about forgetfulness. The last thing the bishops would desire is that people take to heart the tale of this child.
To take to heart the tales told by Matthew and by Luke would be troublesome for those who are attached to the church as an institution, for those tales would make people ask what a child born in poverty has to do with vast, ornate medieval buildings. The stories might make people ask how one can begin with the dirt and filth of a birth on the floor of a byre and get from it men dressed up in silk robes.
There is little in the church’s commemoration of Christmas that engages with the reality of what is described by Matthew and Luke, but isn’t that the intention? The church doesn’t want humility, it doesn’t want poverty, it doesn’t want the nasty realities of what the birth of Jesus really meant.
What the church wants is to sustain itself, to continue in the future as it has in the past. Confronted with the choice between, on the one hand, telling the story in all of its horror and going out to support those who still face such horror, and, on the other hand, seeing Christmas as typified by such moments as the carol service at King’s College, the church chooses its flamboyant liturgies and its highbrow music. There is no desire to include anything that jars with the sensitivities of those in the pews, anything that provokes a negative reaction from those listening to the words and the music.
Christmas services are designed lest we remember, for remembering would be a dangerous.
It is much safer to sing mystical songs from medieval Latin than to accept the prosaic reality of a homeless birth and the life as a refugee. Much more reassuring to sing about bells and drummer boys, than about the horrified shrieks of mothers whose babies have been murdered.
No-one wants the real Christmas tale. No-one wants blood and excrement and coldness and fear. No-one wants a tale of outcasts and oddballs. No-one wants a Christmas story that is too close to the tales told by Matthew and Luke,
The church hides the story, for it is a story it sees as better fotgotten.