Rezori: Of Christmas, Christians and pagans

Christmas is the time when we celebrate being Christians as if it was a damn good party, not just a precarious balancing act between sin and our natural rights to pleasure.

Yes, at Christmas we're allowed to go all out — from Jesus to Santa, from eggnog to rum.

Of course, there are those who would remind us that by celebrating Christmas we're not being good Christians at all but throwbacks to paganism.

Just Google the words 'Christianity', 'influence', and 'paganism', and you get the full debate.

Pagans making fools of themselves

We're told there's absolutely no proof, not even in the gospels, that Jesus of Nazareth was born on the 25th of December or anywhere near that date.

We're also told that Christmas falls on the winter solstice, when pagans went nuts drinking and dancing and making fools of themselves, suggesting that it's not the spirit of Christian love and devotion which makes us engage in the same kind of behaviour this time of year, but the pagan legacy we never stamped out completely to our everlasting Christian shame.

And the debate doesn't stop there. How many other pagan influences have there been on what we as Christians believe in — how many other pagan customs, how much pagan thinking, how much pagan everything?

Ronald Nash of the Christian Research Institute refers to such questions as "liberal efforts to undermine the uniqueness of the Christian revelation."

Douglas Painter of Lit Journal sees it the other way. He argues, "We learn more through acceptance than through denial and repression."

With all due respect to Nash's point of view, I'd like to take Painter's argument one step further.

How much else could Christians have accepted from pagans but didn't because we considered our revelation so superior?

What could Christians have accepted from pagans in this part of the world?

I put this question to Hans Rollmann, a professor of religious studies at Memorial University, who referred me to a book called Makkovik: Eskimos and Settlers in a Labrador Community by ShmuelBen-Dor.

The book, based on observations made in 1962 and 1963, tells a familiar tale.

Inuit had to ditch everything

Both the settlers and the Inuit were members of the Moravian mission church.

Falling in line with the Moravian worship was no great deal for the settlers. They came mostly from a Protestant and thus Christian background and had only minor adjustments to make.

The Inuit, on the other hand, had to ditch everything, and what little they couldn't ditch tied them even more to their new faith.

Their deep fear of the raw spirits they used to believe in, for example, made them crowd into church with far more commitment than the settlers.

Their former respect for their shamans also made them accept Moravian priests as the absolute authorities over their lives.

Arguably the set-up was so skewed from the start, a fair synthesis of the two original beliefs was impossible.

One was the conqueror, the other the conquered.

But if the conqueror doesn't learn from the conquered, what does the conquest really amount to except destruction?

A growing crowd of visitors leads to rackets

Ben-Dor describes how the settlers and the Inuit of Makkovik went separate ways with their respective civic holidays.

The Inuit had the Naluyuts on the day of the Epiphany in early January.

Naluyut is the Inuit word for non-believer. On the day of the naluyuts, some men would dress in shabby, loose-fitting clothes, mask their faces, and visit house after house to reward good children and frighten bad ones. Each visited family would leave its house and followed the procession to the next house. The crowd grew as the visits continued. Inevitably, there would be rackets.

The settlers had Sports Day on Easter Monday. There were komatik races in the morning, other races in the afternoon.

Both festivals served to release social tension but, according to Ben-Dor, in critically different ways.

The emphasis of the Sports Day was on individual achievement, the emphasis of the Naluyuks on collective experience.

Towards the end of his book, Ben-Dor writes as follows:

"There is little doubt that the settler mode of life will eventually triumph in Northern Labrador although it is impossible to predict how and when. The merits of this trend are debatable. Some will regret the loss of the 'Eskimo way' while others will claim that the Labrador Eskimos have been fortunate."

Who will draw the line on who goes to heaven?

Today, it's clear that the Inuit accepted (or were forced to accept) a lot from the settlers. It's not so clear what the settlers accepted from the Inuit other than a few tricks of material survival in a harsh place.

What the settlers might have accepted from the Inuit (and no doubt a few did) is that even the unconquered and untamed world harbours profound truths, that wild spirits have every bit as much to offer as orderly celestial agents like angels.

Even Pope Francis seemed to be coming around to that view when he recently consoled a little boy by suggesting he might see his deceased dog again in heaven.

If dogs can go the heaven they must have souls. If dogs have souls, so must other pets like cats, hamsters, canaries.

Who then, and with what clever argument, will draw the line between pets and the rest of the creation? Who will presume to claim the authority to exclude anything at all?

And this brings us full circle to what most agree Christmas is all about in the first place.

Maybe, just maybe, love and compassion do serve us best when we need our eyes opened to the way things are — whether it's the pain of a boy who's lost his pet, or an entire people's protracted struggle with having to give up its own culture and being forced to replace it with somebody else's.