The Eternal Mystery Of Christmas
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
I grew up in South Florida, and when Christmas came, we sunburned children, as innocent of snow as of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” felt the anxiety of imposters settle over us. On our schoolroom calendars, mittened kids, otherwise just like us, skated on frozen ponds, while frost incised the windowpanes of living rooms where families gathered around a blazing Yule log. For us, Christmas was the season of the first oranges and tangerines of the year.The jacaranda trees were beginning to bloom, their intense purple flowers a public snub to Santa and his shivering elves. In all the propaganda of a “White Christmas,” with its distant dazzle of icicles and the curlicues of wood-smoke from expectant chimneys, I felt, as my grandmother would have said, “like a poor boy at a frolic.”
In 1950s Miami, Christmas still had the trappings of a “northern” holiday, in the sense that it seemed a celebration designed for a world where cold was king, not for our muggy shores. Even then I longed in vain for what Wallace Stevens called “a mind of winter.” But our vegetation was unapologetically lavish; not only jacaranda but gardenia, flame-vine, oleander, hibiscus, and allamanda displayed a perverse pleasure in blossoming most riotously in December. Our one “Christmas plant” was the lurid poinsettia with its neon tones, a house plant I found interesting only because its sap was toxic.
Christmas seems to demand a certain austerity of vista. It’s hard to grasp the significance of Christmas as nativity when every plant and animal in sight is throbbing with procreation. Birth in the midst of winter should appear as something rare and singular, privileged and precious. Only much later in my life, after years of trying assiduously to cultivate a wintry mind, did I begin to understand that Christmas had more to do with what Robert Frost called “inner weather.”
This seems obvious, but is it? At Christmas most children – lucky children, anyway – feel exceptionally loved and cosseted, if not shamelessly spoiled. I now wonder whether this has to do not only with parental love but with an unspoken and frightening intuition of the utter helplessness and vulnerability of children, even the richest and the most pampered. What more powerful illustration of this than the Christian belief that God was born on Christmas Day; that is, not the Pater omnipotens, the Almighty Father of the Creed, but a squawling, fretting, gurgly infant, not yet able to lift his head unaided or to focus his eyes. And no doubt, even in Bethlehem, with a well-filled and pungent diaper – remember those “swaddling clothes” – needing urgently to be changed?
The notion of God as an infant, “mewling and puking in its mother’s arms,” is so bizarre that the mind is disinclined to wrap around it. Yet, on one Christmas Eve long ago, I unexpectedly experienced the notion’s force, and it has left me puzzling ever since.
My wife and I were in Paris and decided to attend midnight mass at Notre Dame. By 9 p.m. the vast church was packed, and our only hope of catching a sporadic glimpse of the service lay in squeezing our way toward one of the pillars to the right of the high altar. Amid thoughts of “no room at the inn,” I began to appreciate those wintry Christmases that had mocked my childhood.
Notre Dame is unheated, and a sharp cold crept from the great stone floor along my toes and up my flinching calves. When the organist began to play, the whole cathedral trembled. The music was palpable; it vibrated upward from the floor and shook your very bones. We knelt on those vocal stones not only to find some physical way of evincing our awe but to feel our own flesh turned momentarily to music by the tremors of responsive stone, as if in this tiny and transient fashion we, too, could somehow experience the mystery of Incarnation.
As we rose again, my eye fell on a bronze plaque set into the cathedral floor. It said that on this very spot, on Christmas Eve, 1886, the poet Paul Claudel had stood and experienced the sudden moment of vision that eventually led him back to the Church. I knew that his conversion had taken him some five years of interior struggle after that night, mainly because of embarrassment, that scourge he liked to call “human respect.” In fact, it was only after he fell in love with a married woman while on shipboard to China and had a passionate affair with her, which she ended, that he succeeded in finally responding to that earlier “call.”
I’d been reading Claudel for a long time and consider him one of the two or three greatest modern French poets. His immense oeuvre, comprising plays, poems, essays, biblical exegesis, and reams of correspondence, had dazzled and inspired me. His poetry, however “orthodox” in its Catholic subject matter, is marked by wild, tactile imagery and the subtlest verbal music. Thus, in the fourth of his “Five Great Odes” of 1910,the 42-year-old Claudel could exult in language that brought into clashing collocation images drawn from the Old Testament, French peasant life, and a startlingly tender touch of youthful romanticism:
If the vintner does not stride boldly into his vat –
Do you think me strong enough to trample my huge harvest of words
Without growing tipsy on the fumes?
Ah, this evening is mine! This vast night is mine, night’s great gulf illumined
like a ballroom for a young girl at her first dance!
Claudel’s dramas, from the early “Tete d’or” and “La Ville” to “L’annonce faite a Marie” (translated as “The Tidings Brought to Mary”) and “Partage de midi” (“Noontide Partition,” a play about his adulterous liaison), struck me – and still strike me – as the only French theater of Shakespearean grandeur and scope. Much of Claudel’s verse was set to music by such composers as Honegger, Milhaud, and Poulenc; the great organist Marcel Dupre (who frequently performed at Notre Dame) composed an especially moving “musical commentary” on Claudel’s “Chemin de la Croix.” The 12th poem of that superb sequence ends with the line, which had always haunted me, “This God is enough for me who is held between four nails.”
W.H. Auden, no admirer of Claudel the man, would write (in his elegy for Yeats):
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling for his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
(To Auden’s credit, he cut this patronizing stanza from a later revision.)
Claudel, I knew, had been “converted” that Christmas Eve because he had an abrupt and overpowering sense of “the eternal childhood of God” (“l’enfance eternelle de Dieu”), an insight commemorated on the bronze plaque at my feet that night. I’ve pondered this phrase for a long time, and it seems to me to be both disturbing and profoundly fruitful. Claudel doesn’t say “the eternal childhood of Jesus” but “of God.” His intuition that momentous evening was of God as not simply innocent (though that, too, is an oddly startling thought), but as vulnerable, helpless, somehow unprotected. And if God exists in an eternal childhood, might He not also be playful, curious, open-hearted, and even, at moments, naughty?
Could this, too, be what another brilliant French-Catholic writer, the novelist Georges Bernanos, had in mind when he said that in his life and in his writing, he had striven to remain “always faithful to the child I was?” Was it related to what T.S. Eliot, in one of his early “Preludes,” had suggested when he wrote of “some infinitely gentle / infinitely suffering thing”?
Taken as a theological proposition, Claudel’s sense of God as eternal child raises thorny questions: Is God self-centered like a child? Mischievous? Messy? More pointedly, is He not responsible for what happens in the world? But this isn’t the pronouncement of a theologian: It is the spontaneous, perhaps logically unjustifiable, yet compelling insight of a poet.
I was moved that night to find myself inadvertently in the same spot where Paul Claudel had stood at such a turning point in his life. His phrase has stuck with me ever since, though I can’t say honestly whether I find it, in the end, uplifting or somehow monstrous. I do know, however, that it represents a summons to keep alight some original and unsophisticated awe at the naked mystery of life in its pristine beginnings. When I see a very young baby, the phrase comes to mind, perhaps just because a newborn child is so unlikely, so improbable, a wonder. The Charpentier Mass that made Notre Dame shake has just about faded from my memory, but the phrase continues to prickle. Is it even, like some hypotheses of particle physics, unlikely or weird enough, to be true? I don’t know, but its mere possibility hovers over Christmas Eve for me, whether among the snowy streets of the north or under the violet shadows of the jacaranda tree.