(G.K. Chesterton)

They say that all people of a certain age can remember where they were when they heard the news of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. I certainly can. I was standing at the top of a staircase in a college hall of residence, and I can still remember the mingled feelings of disbelief, sadness, and a rather guilty excitement that the news provoked in me. I can also recall where I was when I heard about Marilyn Monroe’s death, and Bobby Kennedy’s, and John Lennon’s, and a whole host of other significant moments, some of which have helped to define our history and our culture, and others of a more personal nature which are best kept to myself.
I can even remember where I was when I was told there was no Santa Claus. I was walking home from school with two girls – both called Joan, as it happens – who were two or three years older than I and so, to me, were fountains of worldly wisdom and experience. (The gulf that separates a seven-year old from a ten-year old is unimaginable at this remove.) ‘There’s no Father Christmas,’ one of the Joans said. ‘It’s just your mum and dad who buy the presents.’ I’d probably heard this before, but never from people so mature and so credible as these two, and it is quite possible that this particular declaration confirmed what I was beginning to suspect anyway, and corresponded with my own growing doubt about Santa’s ability to squeeze his ample frame down narrow chimney pots and to visit every child on earth in one night. I ran the rest of the way home and confronted my mother with my anxieties, but her brave attempt to restore my childish faith was to no avail. Innocence was over. I had entered the adult world. Precisely on cue, at the age of seven, I had reached what Catholics call ‘the age of reason’.
And I was to remain in this apparently reasonable frame of mind for well over twenty years, and when my nephews and nieces were born I was very uncomfortable being part of the whole Santa Claus hoax. This may have been the result of a growing disenchantment with Christmas itself which led me at times, to say (with some degree of affectation) along with that old curmudgeon George Bernard Shaw, ‘Like all intelligent people, I greatly dislike Christmas.’
What helped to change my point-of-view was the essay, Why I Believe in Santa Claus, by Shaw’s arch intellectual rival and close personal friend G.K. Chesterton. This made me realise that the Christmas madness, so deplored by the puritanical Shaw, was a psychologically necessary season of the human soul, and that Santa Claus, far from being a creation of Victorian sentimentality, as modern cynics would have us believe, is really a personification of a gracious and grateful attitude to life, which is as old as the human race, and which now, as much as ever, we need to celebrate and to promote.
Evidence of the necessity of Christmas can be found in its ubiquity. All cultures seem to celebrate it, and they celebrate it in similar ways, generally by reversing the customary routines and presuppositions of life. In the northern hemisphere, this is the darkest time of the year. The sun has barely risen before it sets again, and it spends the best part of the few daylight hours poised just above the horizon, causing maximum inconvenience to motorists. It is not difficult to imagine our ancestors, fearful lest it should disappear altogether, devising ceremonies of sympathetic magic to encourage the declining sun to reverse its direction: if we want the sun to break free from its routine, they reasoned, we must break free from our own. In the Roman Saturnalia, celebrated between 17th and 23rd December, this inversion of custom and routine was almost total: all the normal affairs of state and business were suspended, and the people gave themselves up to the mad pursuit of feasting and revelry. According to Sir James Frazer, this break from normal routine was nowhere more marked than in the relationship between slaves and masters: ‘The distinction between the free and the servile classes was temporarily abolished,’ he writes in The Golden Bough. ‘The slave might rail at his master, intoxicate himself like his betters, sit down at table with them, and not even a word of reproof would be administered to him for conduct which, at any other season, might have been punished with stripes, imprisonment, or death. Nay, more, masters actually changed places with their slaves and waited on them at table; and not till the serf had done eating and drinking was the board cleared and dinner set for his master’.
Turning everything on its head was a call to the sun to turn round. It was also a nostalgic glance backwards to a supposed Golden Age, the age of the god Saturn, where there were no wars, when the earth brought forth abundantly, when slavery and private property were unknown and all things were held in common.
The human race has always felt that things were better in the remote, mythical past – hence the story of the Garden of Eden in the Jewish scriptures – but what is experienced and celebrated as a memory is really an aspiration: this is how it could be, and for just a few days in the year we’ll live as if it were so.
Santa Claus is part of that aspiration. He represents an attitude to life that is the complete opposite of the one that we encounter in our customary dealings with the world. When we cease to believe in his ‘peculiarly fantastic goodwill’ (as Chesterton expressed it) we open ourselves up to far more insidious influences.
We enter the dreadful world of the quid pro quo. We learn that the normal human operating principle is: you buy me this and I’ll buy you that; you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. And, what is even worse, we are soon introduced to the basic rules of commerce: there are no free lunches; nobody does anything for nothing; everyone has his price; trust is for fools; we are defined by what we own. When we dethrone the demigod Santa Claus, we elevate the oldest deity of all, Mammon, the omnipresent, omnipotent god of the market-place, whose priest is Scrooge, and who exhorts us all to take what we can where we can, and sees to it that a footballer can earn in one week what an average worker will earn in ten years, and what half the world’s population will never earn in a lifetime. Instead of receiving our talents and everything else that we have as unmerited gifts that we can share with our brothers and sisters, we treat them as commodities that we can exploit for our own personal advantage.
How different is Santa Claus, who gives us everything for nothing; all we have to do is to go to sleep or to pretend that we are asleep. Some years ago, the English comedian Eddie Izzard said that Christmas was great when he was a child. He got lots of fantastic stuff and all he had to do in return was to stick a few bits of tinsel of a piece of coloured paper and give it to his granny. There were no thoughts of getting what we deserved then, no preposterous claim like Cheryl Cole’s in the L’Oréal adverts that ‘I’m worth it!’
We really do have an unmerited belief in our own worth. We may not have as much as others, and we certainly would like more than we have, but we’ve worked for these things and so we deserve them. Willingness to work hard and to postpone gratification are, in middle-class circles, not only demonstrations of our prudence and common-sense, they are virtues. And we are virtuous! How God must love us! Our wealth is a reward for our virtue. We deserve what we have. We’ve even invented a category for those who don’t have so much but are virtuous too – ‘the deserving poor’ we call them, to distinguish them from the undeserving poor, the troublesome, noisy, uncooperative, non-virtuous poor.
But with God, we are told in the Gospels, there are no such distinctions. God makes his sun shine and his rain fall on all alike, without recourse to our hierarchical categories. This is what St. Paul was saying when he told us that we are saved by grace; ‘grace’ is just the theological term for ‘peculiarly fantastic goodwill’. Christianity teaches us that God creates and sustains us, not because of anything we’ve done or will do, but simply out of ‘peculiarly fantastic goodwill’. All we can ever do in return is the moral equivalent of sticking tinsel on bits of coloured paper.
Santa Claus is a wonderful symbol of the universe’s continuing benevolence towards us, a benevolence that we can neither exhaust nor deserve. Reacquainting ourselves with Santa Claus, and the topsy-turvy world he stands for is the only hope we have of reversing our current insanity and of establishing a just and equitable society with peace and peculiarly fantastic goodwill to all.
The two Joans don’t realise what they robbed me of on that fateful journey home from school: it took nearly half a century for me to realise it myself.

Bill Darlison

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Mark 6:30-44

The apostles came back to Jesus and told him everything they’d done and taught. There was so much to-ing and fro-ing that they’d not had a chance to eat, so he said to them, ‘Come. Go off by yourselves to a secluded place and rest for a while.’ They went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted spot, but many people who’d seen and recognised them as they were setting off ran on foot from all the towns and arrived at the place before them. When Jesus disembarked he saw a huge crowd and he was moved with pity for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. He began to teach them many things. It was already late and his disciples came up to him and said, ‘This place is off the beaten track and it’s getting late. Send the crowds away so that they can go into the surrounding towns and villages to buy themselves something to eat.’ Jesus replied, ‘You give them something to eat.’ They said, ‘It would cost six months’ wages to feed them all!’ He said to them, ‘Go and see how many loaves you have.’ When they’d found out they said, ‘Five, and two fish.’ He told the people to sit in groups on the green grass, so they sat down in groups of fifty or a hundred, looking like so many garden plots. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he blessed and broke the bread and gave it to his disciples to distribute. He also divided up the two fish. They all ate their fill and, after five thousand men had eaten, there was enough bread and fish left over to fill twelve baskets.  

Mark 8:1-10 In those days, when once again there was a big crowd of people with nothing to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, ‘I’m concerned about the crowd because they’ve been with me three days and they’ve not eaten. If I send them off home hungry they’ll faint on the way, and some of them come from far away. His disciples replied, ‘Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy these people in this lonely place. Jesus asked them, ‘How many loaves have you got?’ ‘Seven,’ they said. He gave orders to the crowd to sit down on the ground, and taking the seven loaves he gave thanks, broke them, and gave them to the disciples who distributed them to the crowd. They also had a few little fish, and when he’d blessed them he told them to distribute these too. They ate their fill, and they collected up seven baskets full of leftovers. There were about for thousand men. Finally he let them all go. 

Story: The Monkeys and the Caps 

Aurangzeb sold caps for a living. He would travel to a village, set up his stall in the market place and sell his caps to the locals. One day, while travelling from one village to the next, he was very tired. The sun was shining, and he’d had a busy morning, so he put down his heavy sack of caps and sat down in the shade of a mango tree for a snooze. After an hour or so he woke up refreshed, but when he picked up his sack he found that it was empty. ‘Where are my caps?’ he thought. ‘I’m sure this sack was nearly full when I went to sleep.’  Just then he looked up into the tree and he saw a gang of monkeys each with a cap on its head. ‘Hey, those are my caps!’ shouted Aurangzeb. ‘Give them back to me!’ But the monkeys just seemed to mock him, imitating his shout. So he pulled a funny face, and each of the monkeys pulled a funny face, too. But they wouldn’t give him back his caps. He picked up a stone and threw it at the monkeys. They responded by throwing mangoes at him. He was really angry now, and in his frustration, he took off his own cap and threw it to the ground. The monkeys took off their caps and threw them to the ground! They were imitating him! Without further ado, Aurangzeb picked up all the caps from the grass, put them in his sack, and went on his way, thinking how clever he’d been to outsmart the monkeys.           

Fifty years later, Habib, Aurangzeb’s grandson, was selling caps. He’d inherited the family business. He was travelling from one village to the next on a hot day, and he felt he needed a rest. He sought out the shade of a mango tree, put down his sack of caps, and sat down for a snooze. He woke refreshed after an hour, but when he picked up his sack he found it was empty. ‘Where are my caps?’ he asked himself. ‘I’m sure this sack was nearly full when I went to sleep.’ Then he looked up into the trees and saw dozens of monkeys, each with a cap on his head.  How could he possibly get them back? Then something stirred in his brain. He remembered a story his grandfather had told him many years ago, about how he’d outwitted some monkeys by getting them to imitate him. So Habib stood up. He put up his right arm; the monkeys put up their right arms. Habib put up his left arm; the monkeys did the same. Habib scratched his nose; the monkeys scratched their noses. He pulled a face, rocked from side to side, stood on one leg. Each time the monkeys copied him. Then…….Habib took off his cap and threw it to the ground. The monkeys didn’t respond. So Habib tried again. He put up his right arm, his left arm; he scratched his nose, he pulled a face, rocked from side to side, stood on one leg. Each time the monkeys imitated his actions. Once again he put his hand to his head, took off his cap and threw it to the ground. No response from the monkeys.           

Feeling miserable, Habib picked up his empty sack and began to walk back home. He hadn’t gone far when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked round and saw a monkey with a big smile on its face. ‘Do you think you’re the only one with a grandfather?’ asked the monkey. 

‘War is God’s way of teaching Americans Geography.’Ambrose Bierce 

Last Thursday, the 21st June, would have been my father’s one hundredth birthday. He was born on 21st June 1907 but, sadly, he died just a little short of his 72nd birthday, in April of 1979. The 21st of June is also the anniversary of my ordination as a Unitarian minister. I became a minister on 21st June 1994 at a ceremony held in Unitarian college Manchester, where I had been a student.             So, the 21st June has special significance for me. But the significance of the day extends beyond my own parochial concerns. June 21st is the day of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the day on which the sun seems to change direction. Since last December, the sun has been moving higher and higher in the skies of the northern hemisphere; now it begins its slow journey downwards, the days becoming gradually shorter and shorter until, on December 21st, when there is barely any daylight, it will change direction once again.           These two solstice points – along with the two equinoxes – always had great significance for our ancestors, who were much more aware of these celestial cycles than we are, and who celebrated the ‘stations’ of the sun with parties and bonfires, singing and storytelling. Ancient sites in Ireland and Britain testify to the importance of the solstices to ancient peoples. Newgrange is primarily associated with the winter solstice, but Stonehenge marks the summer solstice, and there would have been plenty of activity around these two sites on Thursday last, as well as on the Hill of Tara in Co. Meath, and at Dowth in the Boyne valley. In some parts of the world, there have been revivals of ancient dances, in which men and women move in snake-like procession through the streets, imitating the undulating movements of the sun in its yearly cycle through the heavens.            Today, Sunday the 24th June, is St. John the Baptist’s Day, exactly six months before Christmas Eve because, you remember, St. John the Baptist was said to be six months older than Jesus, and the Gospels consistently contrast these two figures, associating them, in my opinion, with the two solstices. Jesus, ‘the light of the world’, is born when the light is born in December; John is associated with the midsummer, when the light starts to decline. As John himself says in the Fourth Gospel, ‘He (meaning Jesus) must increase, but I must decrease’.41              On the day of the summer solstice the sun enters the zodiacal sign of Cancer, the Crab, but the crab is only one of a number of creatures that have been used as images of this sign: the tortoise, the crayfish, and the lobster have at various times and in various cultures been used to represent Cancer. These creatures have one thing in common; they seem to be embodiments of the principal of reversal, because they appear to be constructed inside out. The crab’s skeletal system is on the outside – as anyone who has tried to eat one will be aware. What’s more, the crab moves in a strange way, scuttling rather than walking directly, moving forwards, backwards, and sideways in an apparently random fashion. This may give us a clue as to why Jesus is shown making such an apparently ridiculous journey in chapter 7 of Mark’s Gospel. The text tells us that he went from the region of Tyre and Sidon to the Sea of Galilee through the middle of the Decapolis. If you consult a map of the area (see page 65) you will see how strange this journey is; it has been compared with travelling from London to Cornwall via Manchester, and it has given scholars no end of trouble for centuries, and fuelled numerous theories. It shows that Mark didn’t know his geography too well, they say, or that he was probably not a native of the area. But, in reality, it is a little joke by the Gospel’s author. It shows a crab-like, scuttling, to-ing and fro-ing movement, and it is Mark’s way of putting yet another Cancerian signature on this section of his Gospel.            The zodiacal sign Cancer reflects the crab in a number of curious ways. People born at this time of the year often present a hard shell to the world, as a means of protecting an extremely vulnerable inside. Cancerian people are highly emotional, but guarded and defensive, with a strong sense of family identity, an appreciation of traditional values, and a concern for history and ancestry. The past has an enormous influence on the strongly Cancerian person, and it is absolutely appropriate that the world’s greatest literary celebration of the past, Marcel Proust’s A La Récherche du Temps Perdu – Remembrance of Things Past – should have been written by a Cancerian. Proust was born on July 10th 1871, and, according to his biographers, he spent much of his time wrapped, crab like, in a cocoon of blankets.      Cancerians are nurturers and protectors, figuratively putting their arms around those close to them, in an attempt to shield them from life’s vicissitudes.      America, ‘born on the 4th of July’, is a Cancerian country. This sounds absurd to the modern ear: ‘How can a whole country be represented by a single image, and have a collective identity?’ we ask. And yet, on one level, these attributions do seem to be appropriate. The iconic images of American life – ‘the flag, mom, and apple pie’- are all connected with Cancer, as is food in general, and popcorn, another iconic American image, is itself an expression of the Cancerian desire to eat forever and never get full or fat! In the figure of the zodiacal man, Cancer is shown as being associated with the stomach. (Incidentally, archetypal Cancerian Proust was constantly plagued by his stomach. Apparently he informed his doctor that he couldn’t even drink a whole glass of Vichy water at bedtime without being kept awake by intolerable stomach pains. And what is it that sparks off the remembrance of things past? A madeleine, a plump little cake which looks as if it had been moulded in a scallop shell! And what job did Proust say he would like to do if he weren’t a writer? Bake bread! Cancer again. The universe is a strange place!)42     The Crab manifests in other ways in the American psyche, and I was amused in the 1980s when President Reagan began proposing his ‘star wars’ project, whose intention was to place a ‘protective shell’ around America to keep out all enemy missiles: ‘protective shell’ was the actual term used. The so-called Monroe Doctrine – American isolationism – is another political expression of Cancer, as is the persistent call for those ‘family values’ which all American politicians must claim to espouse if they are to have any success whatsoever at the polls. Even the apparent obsession of American visitors to Europe with discovering their ancestry, and explaining with some precision that they are one eighth English, two fifths Danish and three tenths Cherokee, reflects the sign Cancer, and it is strange to think that Mormonism, the one major world religion which can claim a uniquely American birth, has a preoccupation with genealogy as one of its distinguishing characteristics. You may be inclined to retort, rationalists that you are, that the American obsession with genealogy is simply a feature of their colonial past. A good try, but it won’t work. You don’t find nearly the same preoccupation with ancestry among Australians and New Zealanders.     And, of course, we may tend to think of Americans as great world travellers, but, in reality, they are not. Only 21% of Americans hold passports. While researching this figure on Google, I came across the following on a website called Yale Global: 

As the world becomes accustomed to the American way of life, Americans are tuning out the rest of the world. US citizens have paid less and less attention to foreign affairs since the 1970s……… The number of university students studying foreign languages has declined, and fewer Americans travel overseas than their counterparts in other developed countries. News coverage of foreign affairs has also decreased. Why are Americans withdrawing from the global village? 

     ‘Withdraw into your shell.’ It’s a perfect image of Cancer. Yesterday, having completed this sermon, I settled down to read the Guardian, and what did I find? An article by the American novelist Sara Paretsky which reinforces this very point.   In America today, we seem to prize the self-reliant ideal more than ever. In fact, so much do we prize it that we don’t want to pay taxes to support the common good. In one hyper-wealthy Silicon Valley town, where houses commonly sell for more than $2m, the streets are full of potholes: when I visited, I was told that town residents would rather ruin their own cars than pay taxes so that someone else could drive in safety.The American dream is of a private home with a private yard, in which each child has their own room, their own iPod, their own computer, and, by the time they’re 12 or even younger, their own mobile phone. We spend our waking moments plugged into our Game Boys. We seem to withdraw as far as possible from each other encased in our own worlds.       Strange, isn’t it, that another great icon of America, Walden, by Thoreau, which every American child has to read, and which has become a Bible of self-reliance describes a withdrawal from normal society and an attempt to live in virtual isolation. Thoreau was born on 12th July 1817, making him a Cancerian.     Withdrawal, ancestry, traditions, clannishness, food; these are all associated with the sign Cancer – although I must stress that they are not the exclusive concerns of people born in late June and early July; they are human preoccupations and tendencies, and all human beings have to come to terms with them. These are the principal themes of this little section of Mark’s Gospel (from 6:31-8:26) as even a cursory glance will show. The only episode that seems a little out of place is the account of Jesus walking on the Water, but even this relates to Cancer, since Cancer is a Water sign and Jesus’ ability to walk on the water is a symbolic account of the spiritually evolved person’s dominance over the turbulent emotions symbolised from time immemorial by the waves of the sea. In addition, one of the decans of Cancer, that is, one of its surrounding constellations, is Argo, the magical ship of the Jason and the Argonauts which was said by the Roman writer Manilius to be ‘the ship that conquered the water’. Here Jesus, whose name, by the way, is just another variation of the name Jason, is shown making a symbolic conquest of his own.            But the dominant image of this whole section concerns food. It begins with the account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand (which occurs, you notice, after Jesus asks the apostles ‘to withdraw’ for a while), and it goes on to discuss the Jewish obsession with dietary laws, the tradition of ritual cleansing before food, and later it deals with ‘the leaven’ or yeast of the Pharisees. We’ve only got time today to look very briefly at the feeding stories. Notice, there are two of them. This has given headaches to traditional commentators for many years, some scholars suggesting that Mark included two accounts of the same event, showing himself to be less than a competent historian – just as Jesus’ strange journey shows Mark to be a poor geographer. Liberal scholars who view the Gospel as ‘exaggerated history’ will often explain these stories by saying that all the people really had food hidden away, but they were too mean to advertise the fact; but after listening to Jesus they were ashamed of their selfishness and willingly shared what they had and everyone was satisfied. But this kind of explanation – harmless enough in its way – is rather patronising to the Gospel’s author, implying that he allowed evangelistic piety to cloud his judgement.            But the author of this Gospel was no fool to be patronised, still less was he a poor historian or a poor geographer. In my view he was nothing short of a genius, and he knew perfectly well what he was doing. He deliberately has two feeding stories because he wants to make a very important point relating to Jewish clannishness. The stories are indeed the same except for a few details. But the details are crucial to a proper understanding of their meaning. Bread and fish are used in both – for reasons which we will discuss on another occasion44 – but while the feeding of the Five Thousand takes place in Jewish territory, the feeding of the Four thousand occurs in a predominantly Gentile area. And the numbers are significant. In the feeding of the Five Thousand, the predominant numbers are 5 and 12 – ‘Jewish’ numbers – the ‘five’ reflecting the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, considered to be Judaism’s holiest books; and the 12 representing the twelve tribes of Israel. So, in this incident, Jesus is shown feeding the Jews. The predominant numbers in the other incident are 7 and 4, readily identified as ‘Gentile’ numbers: the Jews believed that there were 70 Gentile nations (the zero is irrelevant in this kind of numerology) scattered around the ‘four corners’ of the earth.             So, the two stories show that God’s spiritual ‘manna’ is to be distributed to all people, not just to the Jews, and read together, they constitute an attack on the narrow exclusivism and parochialism which characterised much Jewish thinking at the time the Gospel was written, and which have characterised much religious thought and practice before and since that time. Taken together, these stories ask the same question the monkey asked in the story I told the children this morning: ‘Do you think you’re the only one with a grandfather?’ Or, to put it another way: Do you think that your people are the only people who have traditions? Do you think that God only speaks through your prophets and your religion? We will explore these vital issues again next week when we will have another look at the Cancerian section of Mark’s Gospel.