That which is not assumed is not healed. That which is united to God, that will be saved.”
— Gregory the Theologian
There is so much to be said about Christmas but essentially nothing to say that hasn’t been said before. But that’s okay, because Christmas isn’t about saying anything new, it’s about saying what’s been said for the last two-thousand years: that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” This confession is not only the basis of Christmas but also the ultimate reason for all the truly good things associated with it. At the very real risk of sounding like a broken record (or worse, a broken Dennis Prager), American culture has drifted pretty far from that confession, and so we have simultaneously begun to lose the other goods that come with Christmas, such as family and community.
In the spirit of not saying anything new, I’d like to call attention to the impeccable It’s A Wonderful Life as the greatest Christmas movie of all time. It occurred to me in a conversation with my wife recently that the film is a kind of swan song for the last vestiges of collectivist thinking in American culture, from a time when it was still acceptable to say, “Shame on you” because “shame” had not yet itself become an object of derision. While many of the specifics of the film’s postwar world may have faded into historic quaintness, like the cars, the outfits, and the lingo, the thematic elements have only grown more relevant with the passing of time.
Most basically, stripping away the charming old automobiles and Norman Rockwell set dressing (much as that would doubtlessly hurt the experience, at any rate), the movie is a story about the American individualist grappling with his lost potential. It’s about a man who looked forward to what every American does — to realize himself as he travels the world, to live his dream, to pursue a meaningful career — coming to grips with banal domesticity. But the peace George achieves in the end is not through surrendering to that banality, but through a thorough re-enchantment of his life embodied in the visitation of the supernatural (an angel gets his wings) but realized in the beauty of the already-present elements of his existence (everytime a bell rings), specifically the belonging engendered by his relationships.
Everyone must grapple with the problem of lost potential as he ages. Each person is born with near limitless potential, but the process of realizing it necessarily entails the sacrificing of alternatives. Each man can only be one man, each woman one woman. This is not a uniquely American issue. I think the more specifically American vanity is the delusion that the realization of one’s own potential is a process of escaping sacrifice, of living the dream, of having it all, of becoming everything in oneself. Of all the good things It’s A Wonderful Life says, the most important for our day is that life is worth living, and further that this fact is evident more in the collective human experience than in the individual.
George inadvertently disenchants his own life because he expects to find value exclusively within the confines of the way he has shaped his world according to his vision, that is to say, his will to power. He therefore views all compromises, accidents, and diversions from his desire as impediments to meaning. Who does that description resemble today apart from literally everyone?
It would be easy for us to cynically dismiss the story because, surely, if a rosy-cheeked angel showed me all the good I’ve added to the world — and if indeed there was as much wholesome fare to see as in the movie — then of course I could be a sappy silver-screen optimist, too. But the moral of the story isn’t that throwing oneself off a bridge will give you twenty-twenty vision of meaning. Faith is the moral. For those who watch the movie, the question is whether or not they will choose to live their lives as though loving others will, in the final summation, create meaning, as though they could see the curtain pulled back someday on an invisible realm of purpose and goodness. It dares the viewer to a leap of faith, faith that loving sacrifice of some part of one’s self, identity, dreams, and will is actually what creates the eponymous kind of life.
That is to say, that the faith being made sight for George in the movie is in the hope of love. It is the conviction to action that self-sacrifice rather than self-centeredness is the avenue to meaning, wonder and joy. And love is decidedly not a fact of individual experience. It is inherently, necessarily, indispensably, naturally and definitionally relational. Love is what elevates individuals to the collective, what adheres us to family, community, country, and most importantly, the body of Christ.
It’s A Wonderful Life glows with faint collectivism because it’s still warm with Christian meaning. It’s the same reason why even post-Christian secular culture can’t help but make Christmas about vague allusions to that meaning like “family,” “giving” and “joy.” Christmas is collective because Christianity is collective.
As John 1 describes the incarnation of our Lord, the author quickly pivots from the metaphysics of the birth of Jesus to a description of the monumental event’s significance in relational terms. Jesus, in John’s words, comes to “His own people” to make those who receive Him “children of God.” That’s because these concepts are all part of one thought. The incarnation, through its role as the epitome of revelation, makes sense of our relationship — our collective, singular relationship, not just our individual relationships — to God, which in turn makes sense of the Church’s collective interrelation as one people. In bringing His people to Himself, Jesus also brings His people to each other.
George’s life is wonderful because of the web of relationships that provides a kind of shelter for identity that is lost in the age of hyper-individualism. The relationships that build that shelter are meaningful because their substance is love. Their substance is love because God is love, and that substance is celebrated at Christmas because the love of God was given a face, so to speak.
The collectives to which we all inevitably belong are, just like the individual lives that compose them, intended to have God as their aim and therefore do not function without God as their source. John Vervaeke describes the loss of meaning in Western cultures as “domicide,” the destruction of home. The Christian faith historically held up the roof that American society took shelter under together. If the current epidemic of loneliness is any indication, we cannot replace Advent with “the holiday season,” “Merry Christmas” with “happy holidays,” and St. Nicholas with a Coca-Cola mascot without also replacing the ties that bind with dreary isolation.
But, I don’t want to wade through the blood and the bones of the “war on Christmas.” I only want to suggest that the love of God is not merely to persons but to a people. Jesus did not come to each man and woman merely separately, but rather in coming to Him as individuals we go out as one body. The love of God can be appreciated in silent meditative prayer and contemplation, but it can only be fully witnessed in the company of others. Apart from this truth, we are wont to become mindless, lonely, zombie consumerists.
Much like with church in general, American culture has a nasty habit of shifting the focus of Christmas to what each individual gets rather than contributes — hence the rather silly normalization of buying “gifts” for oneself, which hardly fits the definition of a gift. Truly, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Receiving is not what generates the community, giving is. Receiving is in this sense more-or-less incidental to giving. The birth of Christ is a demonstration of the specific character of God’s love. It tells us that the love of God, the love we must imitate, is love that descends from on high and sacrifices itself for the sake of even those who do not deserve it. It’s the love of a God who humbly comes to His own people knowing He will die scorned by the same. The love that creates Christ’s Church out of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation is the love that prefers giving to receiving.
All of that may seem obvious to us in the ruins of Christendom because our culture retains much of the same sentiment on the surface. But generations of plucking the fruit without watering the roots creates famine. As C.S. Lewis would put it, we’ve aimed for earth rather than Heaven and are on track to end up with neither. We must bring our adoration before the child born of a virgin in a stable in Bethlehem because His Kingdom and His righteousness come before all else, and only in seeking them first do we have all else added unto us.
But the shelter of Christianity never really collapses, as long as the Spirit preserves the Church and the Scriptures the gates of Hell cannot and will not prevail. The Church has always been in the world but not of it. The structure of community coalesced in and through and around the love of God can only truly die if God’s love could somehow pass away. The Apostle Paul has some reassuring words in 1 Corinthians 13 about the (un)likelihood of that outcome.
So, in the spirit of wishing all who read this a merry Christmas, don’t undermine the goodness of Christmas with worldliness, but don’t buy doom and gloom either. There is indeed a profound darkness upon the West today, a darkness of ignorance, despair, and isolation, but “the darkness has not overcome” the light of the incarnate Christ. The world around us is doing all it can to deprive Christmas of its true joy and hope, but the wonderful fact is that they simply cannot. Our Lord lives and reigns, and nobody can take that away from those to whom Christ has given the right to be God’s sons and daughters. Christ does not command His Church to be a city on a hill, He simply states that we are. It’s a non-negotiable fact. By abiding in and believing in God’s love revealed at Christmastide, we become active participants who propagate love. Love begets love, it is by its nature shared. By becoming sons and daughters, we necessarily become brothers and sisters. Just as George Bailey doesn’t “self-realize,” our potential is only realized in the realm of love established with the birth of its King. Love is therefore the fuel of human purpose.
Let Christmas be a celebration of love, first God’s love to His people and then the love for one another that flows from the never-ending spring of Christ. No one can snatch God’s people from His hand, in which He holds us together. Those who are in Christ have Him forever, and therefore we who are in Him have one another forever. Christmas isn’t about our plans or how well we can execute them, it’s about the love of God and love of those who bear His image, because “love never fails.” The Kingdom is in our midst, and by belonging to our kind, Jesus allows us to belong to His Kingdom.
Merry Christmas to all, and may the Lord bless and keep you!
He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. — John 1:10-14 (KJV)
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. — Galatians 3:28 (KJV)
Being Kindled 
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