Christmas Again

COMMENT

CHRISTMAS AGAIN

F this changing world it is well that we have a few dates

and customs to tie to. Never, perhaps, since man began

his pilgrimage from and toward the unknown, have his

tools, weapons, productions, ideas, been shifting so rapidly

as now. From the sloop to the liner; from the wagon to the

motor-car, the airplane; from the rifle to the machine-gun

and lethal gas; from the pioneer cabin to the skyscraper;

from the candle to the Mazda bulb-all these enormous

episodes are but symptoms and symbols. Governments go

crashing to ruin around us, carrying with them systems

and theories. Democracy, which seemed so safely in-

stalled a mere half-century ago, so surely heading for

conquest over kings and despots, is challenged by new

tyrannies, by dictators self-commanded to set the world to

rights.

And even the fundamental intangibles are slipping, slid-

ing, melting away. A great nation is outlawing religion,

renouncing the long-accepted moralities, exploding the

family, hitherto the foundation rock on which the state

has built its institutions and its dreams. Reform, that

iconoclast who has snatched away the wine-cup, now

threatens to attack the calendar, to standardize the wilful

earth's irreconcilable orbit into thirteen monotonous

months instead of the temperamental twelve which now,

three by three, proudly measure out the seasons for us.

And even the stars in their courses are no longer sure of

their place and date, for a wizard Jew in Germany swings

them back in enormous curves and annihilates space and

time with diabolical equations.

What are we? Where are we? Whither are we going?

These questions, by no means new, seem more poignant

today, and their answers more uncertain, than for many

centuries. All is drift and flux in new immensities, and the

little landmarks, the familiar harbors, no longer invite us;

ancient portals no longer give us rest. We cannot hesitate

-we must move on, accepting all the modern lights, which,

like the three-billion-candle-power beacon on the Palm-

olive Building, throw a long beam across the night.

Amid these immensities and uncertainties an ancient

festival like Christmas is a temporary refuge of stability.

In it we may guard our little personalities, cherish our

loves and other treasures, and yet, through the stained-

glass window of its symbolism, look unabashed into the

infinite. So many hundred years, in all the countries of

Christendom, kings and peasants, the bourgeois, the hero,

the slave, have saluted the day with songs and enriched it

with gifts, lighting their little candles on the altar of their

hopes. Like those our ancestors, we gather in groups

together around our hearth-fire or a lighted tree, in wor-

shipful or unconscious commemoration of a birth in a

manger long ago, of a woman's kinship with beasts and

gods, of a little child's divinity. Whether we take the

gospel story literally or symbolically, its poetry is perfect

truth. Even so is every birth of a son of man a reminder of

our kinship with beasts and our communion with wise men

and angels.

The Christmas anniversary brings home to us not only

the familiar human relationships, but those deeper, more

fundamental blood-brotherhoods inherent in life's mys-

terious origins. H. M.