I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together — as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions — which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.
I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.
(Via Out of the Woods Now.)
1 comment:
Interesting Joyce quote. Christmas makes Christians of us all, just as Montezumo's revenge does.
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