'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

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.