Christmas According to Mark: A Deconstructing Advent & Christmas

I'm normally very bitter about Christmas. I don't like crowds, shopping, and gimmicks. However, being a Scrooge is no fun.

Instead, I have been rethinking the Advent and Christmas season a little bit, as reflected in my two previous posts. This morning I was thinking about Advent again. The Advent wreath contains four candles arranged in a circle and one candle in the center of that circle. Often times when I think of circles, I think of Jacques Derrida who noted how circles are defined by a center, but the center is not part of the line that is the circle. In effect, the center is something transcendent to the circle ("Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences").

The concept of center is, well, central to how we understand Advent, Christmas, and life in general. Around the Advent wreath are candles representing hope, peace, joy, and love, concepts connected like radii to the center of the circle, connected to Christ and Christmas through the stories of Jesus's birth.

And already the circle is starting to re-de-fine and un-define. There are multiple Christmas stories, stories of Christ being born in and to humanity in Jesus. There is the story in Matthew, the story in Luke, the baptism of Jesus in Mark, and the abstract story in John, not to mention a number of stories that never made it into the canon.

I'm particularly interested in the stories that aren't birth narratives, but tell of Jesus' coming to Earth. The book of Mark opens: "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." According to Mark, the Good News of Christianity has nothing to do with Christmas, which is an understanding of Jesus, Christ, and the Gospel quite contrary to the portrayal in Matthew, Luke, the Nicene Creed, and the month of preparation Christians have observed for centuries, not to mention the long celebrations of the US "Christmas season."

If the author(s) of Mark were to celebrate Advent, they wouldn't be waiting to celebrate the birth of Jesus, but rather the coming of Christ's movement in the life of people. For Mark, this coming didn't happen when Jesus was born, but rather when Jesus was baptized, reborn not of man and woman, but of God solely. In this story, Jesus' virgin birth was of God, not Mary.

And thus, Advent and Christmas are de-centered. Hope, peace, joy, and love are no longer connected to Christ through the generally-accepted reconstruction and assimilation of the stories Christmas. They may still be connected to Christ, but Jesus as the Christ--"born of the Virgin Mary"--is no longer that which defines them for this or any season.

Since deconstruction is not destruction, a de-centering of Advent and Christmas is not an end to Advent and Christmas. Advent can still be a season of anticipation--of hope, peace, joy, love, and Christ. A deconstructed Advent sees the themes inevitably and forever interconnected and interdependent, instead of four dependent on the one. Furthermore, a deconstructed Advent will embrace the interplay of anticipating and receiving, the already and the not-yet, of God's absence and presence, and of absence in presence in relation to hope, peace, joy, and love.

Christmas deconstruction will re-remember Christ in the various aspects and stories of Christ's "beginning" on earth, a beginning lacking an originary event. That is, Christ never came, but has always been coming and has always been here (to use some more deconstruction terms: a "hauntology" of Christmas in the "aporia" between presence/absence).

A deconstructing Christmas is one where "God so loved the world," not "God so loved all the people I love." Christmas would then lose and gain significance. It would lose the significance of gift-giving to those we love and being with those you love, it would no longer be a holy day (holiday), a day set apart and other than the rest of the days, because it would give significance to the rest of the days of the year by recognizing the Other and Otherness by asking for generosity, for hope, for peace, for joy, for love, for Christ, for "the Christmas spirit," to be a year-round thing, so these things are born every minute, not once a year.

A deconstructing Christmas would be an active holiday where significance needs to be created, not inherited. For all of these abstract terms--generosity, hope, peace, joy, love, Christ, Advent, Christmas--are merely abstract terms with no center defining. If we are to use them at Christmas or ever, they need to be embodied. Words don't mean, they are given meaning.

And so it was in Mark with Jesus. Jesus wasn't born the Christ. Jesus became the Christ by giving that term meaning--that was the beginning of the good news. Christmas is a time not only to remember, but to actively remember by continuing to create meaning for Christ, by continuing to create Christ, to birth Christ.

My Advent Hope & Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"

Today I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. The book is a story of recollections from a girl who was raised for the sole purpose of donating her organs as an adult, donations resulting in her death. She and a number of other clones were raised at a unique boarding school that treated the clones similarly to normal children with a liberal arts education.

Their school, Hailsham, was unique because most other clones were treated as commodities, not people. Near the end, the characters weigh whether or not it was good for them to be taught to believe in their humanity or if they should be treated like the commodity they end up being.

One character asks, "Why Hailsham?" Why be taught to create art, to appreciate art, to be more than simply healthy, but also to enjoy life when, in the end, you are not seen or treated as fully human. Why Hailsham if you're going to be ignored and die in the end?

"Why Hailsham?" is a question from everyman and -woman when "Hailsham" is understood to be the home (-ham) from which one hails. Now the question is not only by and for the characters in the book, but also for us. Why life? Why are we raised to seek pleasure and think our lives are significant when we die at the end and donate our organs--and the rest of our bodies--to the cycle of existence?

Side by side with this question about the meaning and enjoyment of life, we are presented with the questions about another's quality life, about the Other's quality of life. What a natural progression: when pondering the meaning of one's own life, you are pondering life in general. If your life has meaning and deserves enjoyment, then the lives of others have meaning and deserve enjoyment.

"Never Let Me Go" left me with conviction. I act as if my life is meaningful, yet my life stands on the shoulders of suffering based on systemic issues about which I cannot change by myself or in a timely fashion.

Yet, today is the first Sunday of Advent, a time for hope, specifically hope for the coming of Christ. The church I attended this morning lit a candle for awareness instead of for hope. How appropriate for Never Let Me Go. In the novel, the main characters become more aware of their status in regards to the rest of the society and the more aware they become of themselves and the world. This awareness raises more questions than anything. The elevation of awareness gives rise to the need for hope--hope for meaning and hope for a better tomorrow.

By "a better tomorrow," I mean a tomorrow in which all life that is meaningful has the opportunity to enjoy life. Hope for fair trade practices, philanthropy, love of neighbor and equality regardless of your race, religion, gender expression, sexuality, nationality, or ethnicity. Hope that those who are hungry will receive bread and that those who have bread will be hungry for justice. Hope that the luxuries of life will not mean the suffering of those less fortunate. Hope that the poor will teach the rich lessons and, in turn, the rich will give the poor opportunities to turn their lives around.

And my hope is built on nothing less than Christ effecting that change. By "Christ" I mean God's transformative power--love. In this season of Advent, it is appropriate that my hope is for Christ's advent. However, my hope isn't a traditional Advent hope. I am not hoping for the second coming of Jesus. Rather, I am hoping for that same Christ we saw in Jesus to be in us. If humanity is to be the body of Christ, then the only hope for advent is that we embody Christ, that we embody the advent of Christ. Our hope is in a holy trinity: God, neighbor, and self.

I hope we will embody that Christ enough to turn the world upside down, like Jesus did before us.