China, and the ‘meanings’ of Christmas

In many of the places I went to during my recent visit to Beijing–and certainly,
throughout the whole of Incheon airport, in South Korea–I found massive,
very obtrusive manifestations of a certain view of “Christmas”. In
the Wangfujiang shopping district of Beijing there were huge inflatable Santas.
Tinsel hung from every eave.

In the lobby of our hotel, the smell of industrial-strength glue rose endlessly
from a specially constructed little Christmas “hut”, topped off with the requisite
sheets of cotton-wool “snow”. At its door, quite inexplicably, one
or sometimes two young Chinese women stood in a glamorized version of a
“Santa” outfit– red satiny mini-dress, Santa hat, black boots– doing as
far as I could tell just about nothing except stand there self-consciously
amidst the piles of pre-wrapped “Christmas presents” for hours on end. Were
they also on offer as merchandise? Who knows?

From the PA system, meanwhile, endless streams of Fa-la-la-la-la or Hark
the Herald made up just about the entire repertoire of the week’s muzak offerings.

On one of my last days there, the CNN went out from the hotel-room cable
offerings so I started flipping channels. Came on the local channel
CCTV with a 20-minute rendering in English of local and world news. Quite
well done, I thought. Afterwards, a magazine-type piece on the theme
of “the growth of Christmas observance in today’s China.”

“More and more Chinese people are learning about the spirit of Christmas,”
the earnest announcer said, over shots of department store Santas, and of
shoppers picking out red-and-green Christmas doodads from the shelves.
“This enables us to learn more about western culture.”

They showed a clip from an interview with a middle-aged woman who explained
that, “A few years ago, ‘Christmas’ was only noticed by younger people. But
nowadays more people even of my age are buying Christmas gifts.”

The announcer came back on to explain that ‘Christmas’ could stimulate commerce
in more ways than merely through the sales of Christmas-related items and
Christmas gifts. “Christmas concerts and other events also give opportunities
for commercial sponsorship. In many different ways Christmas can help
commerce.”

Oh yes, an invaluable window onto today’s western ‘culture.’

Well, I know that the present Chinese rulers seem very wary of genuine
Christian religious observance (as of other cultural phenomena like Falun
Gong/Falun Dafa that seem to operate outside of the government’s wide-reaching
means of social control.)

But still, I find it intensely depressing that in their own relentless push
toward commercial advancement so many influential Chinese seem to have recruited
such a grossly distorted version of “the message of Christmas.”

Of course, it makes me think a lot about what facets of Christmas it is
that the West shows to people in China. But it also makes me feel a
little uncharacteristically eager to try to defend what I consider to be–if
anything is–the real “message of Christmas.”

Okay, I come at this from a complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship
with Christian belief. (Not helped by the time I spent in Lebanon watching
Falangist militiamen go to battle against their Muslim compatriots with stickers
of the Virgin Mary plastered onto their rifle butts.) But I’m at a place
now where I certainly recognize Jesus of Nazareth as a great and inspiring
teacher, and regard most aspects of his life including the circumstances of
his birth as deeply revealing, too.

I mean, there the guy was, born after his mother was forced by the diktat of
an authoritarian foreign ruler to travel while heavily pregnant from Nazareth
to the place of Joseph’s registration, in Bethlehem. Not an easy trek
in those days.

Then, of course, there was “no room in the inn”: for them, and she had to
give birth while sheltered in a stable… Reminds me of the many reports
of Palestinian women in the present day forced to give birth at checkpoints
before the young foreign soldiers staffing the checkpoints will let them through
to the nearest hospital.

So, moving right along, we end up with an adult teacher who spreads a message
of peace, love, nonviolence, and caring for the poor and the outcasts from
from society. Also, along the way, he takes on the doctrine of election
(chosen-ness) by stressing that even non-Jews can be part of the beloved community
that he seeks to build. “In Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew,”
as S. Paul put it later– a message of universalism and non-tribalism that
was of particular relevance to people of true Christian adherence some 1994
years later, during the (intra-‘Christian’) genocide in Rwanda.

On the peace, love, and nonviolence aspects of Jesus’s teachings, it is
important for me to go back to the original teachings of the Sermon on the
Mount– “Blessed are the peacemakers”, the need to “turn the other cheek”
toward persecutors, to “love the sinner even while hating the sin”, etc.,
etc– rather than looking at all the accretions that “Christianity” came
to encumbered with in later centuries.

In particular, I consider it important to “excavate” the true Jesus, the
true “Christianity” from all the legacies it acquired much later, after it
became the belief system of state during the troubled fortunes of the Byzantine
Empire. (That was when the teachings of pacifism and nonviolent engagement
became subsumed under the doctrinal innovations of “Just War” theory, etc.,
etc. )

It makes me a little angry at the success achieved by my namesake, the Queen
Mother Helena, in bringing about the “conversion” to the Christian faith of
her son, the Emperor Constantine. I really do believe that Christianity
as a belief system was more authentic, more true to the teachings of Jesus
of Nazareth–and amazingly, more pregnant with hopefulness for the future
of all humanity!– when it was still the religion of the outcasts, the marginalized,
the persecuted…

It is important to me, too, to connect with the historical origins of Jesus
of Nazareth, as a person who was both a Palestinian and a Jew, and who proclaimed
values and a belief system for all of humankind Still, the historical
rootedness of where he was born, where he grew up, where he preached, and
where he was crucified as a political prisoner remain important for me. (Saying
from Sister Helen Prejean: “If Jesus Christ had lived in today’s era we’d
all wear little electric chairs around our necks, not crosses.)

The 140,000 Palestinians living in Bethlehem are still encircled by the
tight movement-control barriers that Israel’s occupation army has maintained
around the city for nearly two years now. Once again this year, the
Israelis prevented the Palestinians’ elected national leader, Yasser Arafat,
from visiting the Palestinian city, Bethlehem, to express his Christmas greetings
there. A Reuters story from Bethlehem today reports:

Draped over facades above Manger
Square shops starved for customers were new protest banners saying “Stop the
Wall. Don’t Turn Bethlehem into a Ghetto” and “The Holy Land Doesn’t Need
Walls, But Bridges” — along with a huge portrait of Palestinian President
Yasser Arafat.

Palestinians want Israel to scrap
the barrier rising through the West Bank and incorporating some Jewish settlements
in occupied territory which they seek for a state.

Fifty Palestinians added to the
somber atmosphere in Manger Square with a sit-down protest to demand the return
of relatives who were militants expelled abroad in a May 2002 deal that ended
an Israeli siege of gunmen hiding inside the Nativity church.

Somewhere under half of Bethlehem’s people today are Christians, and the
rest are Muslims. Palestine’s indigenous Christian population, it is
important to remember, are not people who were converted to the faith
by well-meaning Western missionaries: they are descendants of some of Jesus
of Nazareth’s very first converts. People whose ancestors were Christians
long before anyone in Western Europe had even heard of Jesus! (The Brits,
and many other European peoples, were converted to the Christian faith by
emissaries sent out from North Africa– we remember that far too rarely.)

So I like to think about some of my friends who are Bethlehemites at this
season. Or the “Sahouris”– residents of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem,
which is the place considered by local Christians to have been the site of
the famed “Shepherds’ Field.” During the first Palestinian intifada
against Israeli occupation, back in 1987-93, the Sahouris maintained some
extremely courageous campaigns of nonviolent resistance against the occupation
authorities. Including a lengthy, very Gandhian, tax-resistance campaign
that the Israeli authorities countered by confiscating and then selling at
public auction many of the household goods and other possessions of the participants.
Truly a moment of infamy in Israel’s history.

Or, I could think of so many of my Palestinian friends in occupied Jerusalem,
living under a foreign regime that has squeezed them at every turn. Many
of those friends are Christians, others Muslims.

When the International Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine Conflict,
that I was a part of, visited Palestine and Israel in June 2002, our main
base there was in the (locally controlled) Young Women’s Christian Association
building in occupied East Jerusalem. I love the courageously steadfast,
gracious, and welcoming people of the East Jerusalem YWCA!

One year in the late 1980s I visited there with Bill and our still-young
daughter Lorna, and Doris Salah, who was then the Director of the YWCA, gave
us a gift that we have treasured ever since. It is an entire creche
set made up of figure 6-7 inches high. Each one is cleverly constructed
around a “body” made of pipe cleaners, wadding, and fine-denier stocking
fabric, and has garments hand-sewn by young women participating in YWCA embroidery
projects. All the figures, female and male, have little clothes that
are close representations of traditional Palestinian garments– including,
for the women, the distinctively embroidered dresses from nearby Palestinian
towns and villages.

Women, you say– but how many women are there in the traditional
Christian creche set?

Well, in this one, there are five. In addition to the three shepherds
and the three “wise men”, this crèche set has no fewer than four wise
women in attendance, as well.

I mean, let’s face it, who do you think would have been in attendance for
the young woman Mary in the days after her delivery? Men?? I don’t
think so!

So every year, we get out the box of Palestinian crèche figures and
put them out in our living room or dining room. Right now, we’re at
my mother-in-law’s place in northern California so I can’t rush over and
take a photo of the crèche scene. But when we get home I’ll
try to do that…

So there we are: my meaning of Christmas… A meaning a long
way distant from the strictly commercial view of it that I found in Beijing,
and that can be found nearly everywhere in the USA, too… Distant,
too, from the “Christianity as triumphal state religion” version that we find
too much here in the West… No, the version I resonate to is the one
that stresses peacefulness, love, sharing, giving, and re-connecting with
family, friends, community, and the whole of humanity.

So whoever you are, dear reader, Happy Christmas to you, Happy Hanukkah (Festival
of Lights!), Happy New Year– and may we all of us deepen our experience of
love, understanding, and connectedness.