Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Thursday December 11, 2008

For reasons which I do not pretend to understand Christmas Season has for as long I can remember been a 'sad' time for me. Perhaps I am not as spiritual as I should be, but City Sidewalks dressed in holiday style turn me off, always have. And the insane rush is not my cup tea either. I do love the carols, the little church plays with otherwise sane people dressed in bathrobes with towels around balding heads, children dreaming that carrying a doll baby to the manger scene is the beginning of a stellar career on Broadway.

While the venue is made to look like a stable and the people like shepherds and a chosen few like Mary and Joseph the place does NOT smell like the first Christmas in a stable. I love this panorama of Christ. I get more than a little put off with the supposed grand pageants where people who need buckets in which to carry tunes honestly believe they are the living end. But, overall I do like the spiritual part of the day.

I do not cater to the infringement by other groups, be they religious or secular on the day chosen for centuries to celebrate the birth of the saviour. I know we do not know the day of His birth, yet I rejoice that He was born and lives today. I will, at great risk point out a parallel to practice of suborning the Christ celebration with another, utterly sinister attempt at usurping this day.

The December 23, 1940 issue of Time Magazine told of the then present and increasing nightmare of Nazi Germany. As you look about in the year of our Lord 2008 and many competing voices for rights and attention at Christmas consider the following comments from a voice, a distant 68 years ago:

"Flat as a pfennig (penny) has fallen the neo-pagan celebration of the Nordic Yule at the winter solstice, sponsored by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg and other extremist Nazis as a substitute for Christmas. Not since the Reformation has Christian feeling in the Reich been more intense. This Christmastide will see millions of Germans quietly celebrating a Christian Christmas. Protestants and Catholics alike will sing that best-beloved of carols, Silent Night, in the fervent hope that the silent night will be followed by the dawn."

Can you, in your wildest imagination, comprehend the flak such an article would generate in today's enlightened, tolerant world, especially in Time Magazine?

I doubt that pagan celebrations rivaling, even surpassing the Nordic Yule of the Nazis bother a generation of ignorant Christians who are bereft of a modicum of history. Can it be that a Zeitgeist more sinister than that which drove Hitler is running amok in our fair land?

Is it any wonder that people of thoughtful perception become depressed at such a mess. The Germans of 1940 certainly did while they prayed for the dawn.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2008 Use with credit

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