“Why Do the People Imagine a Vain Thing?”

I remember our local schoolteacher warned us +45 years ago against Christmas consumerism, and in favour of a more thoughtful lifestyle. Consumerism was presented at that time as a new evil, something that would soon go away, if we all made our efforts. The funny thing is, it didn’t go away and I’m still doing my best to promote the idea of our schoolteacher. The message I hear now is not different from the one of 1975. Our society is filled with noise. People buy a lot of stuff. They chat, but don’t listen to each other. All news is about the search for Corona scapegoats. While everybody is longing for a warmer and closer society, we only seem to talk about the future realisation of this. Instead, we need to reflect and be patient. It is a very typical Christmas message. You would expect this Christmas could be different, as we are clearly discouraged by the circumstances from engaging in too many superficial activities. Why couldn’t we experience a more spiritual Christmas in 2020 and realise our schoolteacher’s dream?

It struck me while I was listening to Händel’s Messiah: the answer is very simple. The schoolteacher’s wish is exactly the reason why Christmas exists. Händel's Messiah sings “Why do the nations so furiously rage together and why do the people imagine a vain thing?”. Christmas is inherently our yearly spiritual message against the vanity that is inevitably part of our life. For our survival, we humans have no choice but to chat and fight and not-listen and buy fancy stuff. The idea of a serene Christmas is just our yearly counterweight to this chaos. Our spirituality is not meant to destroy our hyperactivity, but rather to compensate for the extreme effects of it. Our life will always be balancing between vanity and humility. We don’t need to change this. We even need vanity to survive. Let us go shopping! We only need to continue paying attention to our Christmas spiritual messages as well. Banning them from newspapers, television and internet would be a bad idea. But in the huge data stream we have today, do these messages still get a fair chance to reach everyone?

Picture: De profeet Jeremia door Rembrandt - www.geheugenvannederland.nl : Home : Info : Pic, Publiek domein, Wikipedia