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In the bleak post-Christmas midwinter

In the bleak post-Christmas midwinter

Last updated on: December 29, 2024 at 9:15 pm by Dan Peterson

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In the bleak post-Christmas midwinter 2024-12-29T21:15:14-07:00 Dan Peterson

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An un-groomed path in the winter (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

When I was young, the weeks-long build-up to Christmas was always followed — usually by the afternoon of 25 December — by a severe let-down. After at least a month of mounting anticipation, Christmas was done. The presents had arrived, which was wonderful, but the surprises were past. There was nothing left for me to look toward. (I’ve never cared much about New Year’s Eve.)

My relationship to Christmas is substantially different than it once was. I’ve long since learned where presents really come from, for one thing, and my understanding of its religious significance is (I hope!) much deeper than when I was a child or even a teenager. Still, there is an undeniable sense of disappointment as Christmas recedes into the past. And that is perhaps especially so now that I’ve moved up to Utah from my native Southern California. I used to think it miserably cold when nighttime temperatures sank to into the fifties. The often-snowless cold of Utah Decembers and Januaries, though, is a very different matter, with its frequent inversions, its barren and leafless trees, and its short days. A line from the “Chronicles of Narnia,” from the first book of the series to appear in print, which was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), has long come to my mind in the days after 25 December:

“It is winter in Narnia,” said Mr. Tumnus, “and has been for ever so long…. always winter, but never Christmas.”

We haven’t been entirely in the doldrums, of course. On Saturday, for example, we had a lunch party with the members of the reading group — the Gadianton Polysophical Marching and Chowder Society — to which we’ve now belonged for several decades. (My wife and I are the youngest members of the group, though, and we’ve been losing friends over the past several years at an increasing pace.)

One of the things that I’ve most enjoyed doing in the days since Christmas, however, is something else that we did on Saturday: My wife and I took our five-year-old granddaughter to University Place Mall in Orem and visited the Giving Machines there. “It is,” truly, “more blessed to give than to receive,” and we enjoyed our time with the Giving Machines very much. (If you haven’t done anything with the Giving Machines yet, please don’t miss the opportunity: “Share Your Light at a Giving Machine.” And if there are no Giving Machines near you, or if they’ve already closed, you can still donate online. But don’t delay! The 2024 Giving Machine campaign will end shortly.)

We concentrated our donations largely but not entirely on food. We also donated cute little piglets, which our granddaughter loved. (They are adorably pictured on the symbolic cartridge that one buys at the Giving Machines.) We want our grandchildren to understand the joy of giving to others. Saturday helped a bit with that.

The replica of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s “Christus,” the resurrected Christ, as it stood for many years in the North Visitors Center on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A word, by the way, about the saying, which is attributed to Jesus at Acts 20:35, that “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” It occurs in the Acts of the Apostles, which was written by Luke the Evangelist. But it doesn’t appear in any of the four gospels — including Luke’s own. So where did Luke get it?

Moreover, the fact that Luke was apparently quoting from a source that we no longer possess — and that he refers to the saying of Jesus as if he considers it well known to his readers — proves beyond reasonable question that the New Testament gospels as they have come down to us do not represent a complete record of the teachings of Jesus. This should, of course, already have been obvious from the fact that it would take only a relatively few hours to read through every word of Jesus that is recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — even allowing for the fact that very many of them are repeated at least three times (in the synoptic gospels). That is relatively little to show for the roughly three years of Jesus’ public ministry — even when we include the nine words of Acts 20:35 in the King James Version (six in the original Greek text). The question, then, is how many of the words of Jesus are lost? What portion of his teaching do we still have?

Which raises yet another question: If we were somehow to recover some of those missing words from Jesus — let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that they have been established to be demonstrably authentic — how would mainstream Christendom react? For example, would our Evangelical Protestant friends welcome the discovery, or would they resist it? Would they be willing to expand their canon? And the question extends well beyond the words of Jesus alone. Would a hypothetical retrieval of Paul’s lost letter to the Corinthians be welcomed?

The Alamo, in San Antonio, Texas (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Saturday’s BYU football victory in San Antonio’s “Alamo Bowl” over the University of Colorado is being described as a high point in the school’s football history and in its athletic history more broadly. With its Heisman Trophy-winning wide receiver and its very successful quarterback and its glamorous superstar “Coach Prime,” Colorado was favored to win. But BYU’s victory was solid, very visible, and deeply satisfying. It has been widely covered. However, here’s another very good story connected with the game, and it comes from the very heart of the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™: “BYU’s donation drive ahead of Alamo Bowl caps season of service: BYU alumni take part in Cougs Care service projects at road football games”

It raises the burning question: Why can’t theism and theists just leave us alone? On top of all of their other crimes against art and music and literature and families and human health and just about every other good thing, must they also attempt to pollute the purity of sports?

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