Christmas is a time of joyful preparation. Over the centuries this has tended to become the shining-up and decoration of homes, the stocking up of food and drink for family and friends, joining in the merry round of parties.
The joyful preparation for the coming of the Christ child has been submerged in the festive welter even though good priests in their Advent sermons keep reminding us about the fundamentals of this season of redemption and God’s love.
The priests fight a losing battle against commercialization and the impulse to indulge and have fun. They also increasingly battle a growing tide of God-denial which is emptying churches and trying mightily to suck dry the wells of belief.
Religions have blood-soaked histories, which justify the scorn which hard-core rationalists like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, pour on them. But Professor Dawkins and his fellow atheists go further than condemning the cruelties, hypocrisies and inconsistencies, not to say frequent lunacies, of all religions.
They reject contemptuously the concept that there is a God. They can find no evidence that God exists, they look almost with horror upon any belief in an afterlife as a childish delusion, they find faith in the revelations which underpin all religions absurdly misguided, and to them the coming of Christ in all His glory at Christmas is simply a beautiful fairy tale.
In particular, the hard-core rationalists point out that the explanations given for the origin and development of human life by the theory of evolution, plus the inexorable march of science, make completely unnecessary the existence of an Originator or Ultimate Explainer and Protector which mankind required through most of history to make sense of all that was going on around them.
Anyone reading Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, for instance, will find it hard to deny that he completely destroys any faith there may be in what used to be for centuries one of religion’s most powerful arguments for there being a God – look at the wonders of nature and the universe and mankind itself; surely there must be a Creator responsible for all this glorious complexity just as if you were to walk across a field and find a beautiful golden watch in perfect working order you surely must assume there is a Watchmaker and a supremely gifted one at that. Well, read Dawkins if you want to understand why this reasoning in finding a way to God’s existence is utterly flawed.
I get tense and fearful when I get ready to read Richard Dawkins and his fellow atheists. I get this way because, like most of us, I have immortal longings in me and these authors set out to destroy conclusively any basis for such longings. I want to believe in God.
I like to think that morality, the tremendous gulf between good and evil, is based on a higher ordering of things. I hope to experience after death some explanation, absolutely unknowable in our present state, of how and why it all has happened.
So desperately limited is a life’s span, brief as a stray leaf falling, that I find it comforting to have faith in a credo which includes all these things. But these men of the highest intelligence and learning are entirely convincing in their logic and in their dismissal of such soft beliefs. I suffer when I read their books.
It takes time to recover from consulting these crusading rationalists. And one never can afterwards attain the serene certainty in all those marvellous stories learned at a mother’s knee.
But I fall back on the sense that men are somehow much more complex than rational beings pure and simple, and that rationality is only one element in the human experience. In the end, for instance, I believe that the tremendous feeling of gratitude for the wonders of life, for life itself, which so often inspires me requires an object, someone or something, to be grateful to.
And in my confusion between uncertainty and faith, as always I resort to the truths of poetry and I recall and say over again the poem written by Paul Celan, a Jew born in Romania who spent much of World War II in Soviet labour camps and whose inmost spirit was ravaged by both the horror and the beauty of the world:
Psalm
No one moulds us again out of
earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing, the no one’s rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we
sang
over, O over
the thorn.
And this year again on Christmas Eve I will go to Midnight Mass and, despite everything the brilliant calculators say, I will pray and I will try my best to believe.
