So Fair a Fancy

"So fair a fancy few would weave
                    In these years!"

-Thomas Hardy, "The Oxen"

The word "myth" comes from a Greek word, "mythos," which refers to "facts which are unverifiable in any empirical sense." That is to say, myth recounts a different kind of truth from the scientific kind. It contains an emotional or felt kind of truth, a truth that we know in our hearts, intrinsically, though it cannot be scientifically proven. We might say that myth is the consummate form of symbolic speech. Myth is like fiction, which, while it is not literally true, I think we would all agree contains much of truth. Myth is a valid way of interpreting our world: not better, but perhaps at least as good as the scientific way.

As Hardy’s little poem suggests, the Christmas story, which is only peripherally alluded to by the kneeling oxen, still captures our "fancy" even though we may no longer believe that it is literally, factually true. Nonetheless, Hardy "hop[ed] it might be so." Though he doubted, he still found the story captivating:

          Yet, I feel
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
          "Come; see the oxen kneel,
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
          Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom
          Hoping it might be so.

Instead of a world charged with God’s grandeur, Tennyson, writing only a little earlier than Hardy, had looked out upon the world and seen only "nature red in tooth and claw." With a terrible, prophetic foresight, the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold envisioned the new world opening before him as "a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night" ["Dover Beach"].

Industrialism, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and modern biblical criticism, among many other things, were shattering the old world of religious certainties. As Arnold wrote,

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

A century or more, and two horrendous world wars later, we are still struggling with many of the same questions that Hardy and his Victorian contemporaries grappled with. This is especially true of religion, which has experienced a resurgence of fundamentalism and fanaticism which even Arnold could scarcely have predicted.

Most credible biblical scholars today believe that the Christmas story--the story of Jesus’ miraculous birth and all its accompanying detail--is a myth. Yet calling the story a myth does it no disservice; in fact, it may allow us, ultimately, to reclaim it.

In his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg, one of the most widely read contemporary commentators on the Bible, makes the point "that stories can be true without being literally or factually true." He writes,

This development is reflected in much of contemporary theology’s emphasis on metaphorical theology. An obvious point that has often been forgotten during the period of modernity: metaphors and metaphorical narratives can be profoundly true even if they are not literally or factually true.

This is as true of the Christmas story as of any other. Borg writes,

. . .I recall the way I heard the Christmas stories when I was a child. I assumed that the birth of Jesus really happened the way Matthew and Luke and our Christmas pageants portrayed it. Without difficulty, I took it for granted that Mary really was a virgin; that she and Joseph really did travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born in a stable; that angels really sang in the night sky to the shepherds; that wisemen guided by a special star really came to Bethlehem bearing gifts; and so forth.

It did not occur to me to wonder, "Now, how much of this is historically factual, and how much is metaphorical narrative?" I simply heard the familiar stories as true.

Postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the Christmas stories once again as true stories, even though one knows with reasonable certainty that the primary elements of the story are not historically factual. Critical thinking in the form of historical criticism sees the story of the virginal conception of Jesus as a continuation of the theme of special births from the Hebrew Bible. It is aware that the story of the special star and the wisemen bringing gifts is not history but rather is almost certainly Matthew’s literary creation based on Isaiah 60. It knows that Jesus was most likely born in Nazareth and not Bethlehem, and so forth.

In the state of postcritical naivete, one knows that the truth of the birth stories lies in their meanings as metaphorical narratives. Using both biblical and archetypal religious imagery, the birth stories speak about the significance of Jesus and about the divine human relationship.

If we can accept that the Christmas story is based upon a myth about the birth of Jesus, a myth about God becoming human, then we are free to search for and to find its truth. To call the story "myth" is not to indict it as false, but to acquit it as true. The Christmas story then becomes a lens through which to view truths about what it means to be a human being.

There is Joseph, a poor but just man, and Mary, his mysteriously pregnant wife; there is the flight from danger; there is a child born ignominiously in a stable, and placed in a feeding trough; there is a malevolent King, infuriated by the threat of competition to his despotic rule; and there are all those slain boy-children, murdered sons of the people of Bethlehem and its environs. Now that is a glimpse of grim human reality if ever there was one.

But it is a marvelous bit of paradox, isn’t it, that in this story the powerful messiah expected by the Jews should arrive in the form of an innocent and vulnerable and even physically threatened infant? To miss the irony of this is to miss much. God becomes a human child, born as are all human children, out of labor and sweat. This is a truth that ought to reverberate in all of us: the divine exists in our very midst; it is not somewhere else! (The greatest crime of orthodoxy was to make this divine birth a once-for-all-time event. We Unitarian Universalists, on the other hand, are free to celebrate the divine that is born in everyone. As Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote with truth, "Each night a child is born is a holy night.")

What is remarkable about the Christmas myth is the way it recaptures the past, including our own past as well as a past we never knew. Myth makes all time eternally present. When we see the world through the lens of myth, when we view the world with "postcritical naivete," we are always given a vision of more, far more, then we actually may have experienced ourselves.

At Christmas, we come face to face with what Emerson called "eternal verities." It is those eternal truths which Hardy points to in his simple poem about the kneeling oxen. The real story lies in all that is not said. It is to be found in the "hoping it might be so" of Hardy’s concluding line.

For Christmas is above all a season of hope. That hope is often belied by the real world in which we live. And that is why we need sometimes to leave that world and enter a different one. As Richard Gilbert wrote in the meditation I shared with you a couple of weeks ago,

Let us play for a time in the field of myth and legend: for news and facts to make it, will be there always. Let us sample the whimsical words of the poets more than the studied works of the scholars. Let our thoughts roam in realms of imagination rather than linger in quagmires of reality.

"So fair a fancy few would weave in these years," but that is my Christmas wish for each and every one of you: that you will find hope, generosity, and love growing in you even in your darkest and most trying times. That, I believe, is the true message of Christmas: light out of darkness, hope out of despair, generosity out of poverty, strength out of weakness, love out of loneliness and alienation. May your Christmas be bright with all the promise of this holy season! God bless you all. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock