Son Of God: Yum!

I’ve been eating my ‘Advent’ calendar for a week now. I must say, Well done Laura Secord (whom Heritage Moments tells me is some kind of heroine): excellent, excellent job. I still miss the old calendar from when we were children, the one with the felt Christmas tree and the twenty-five Velcro-backed felt ornaments, the star being for Christmas morning, of course. My brother and I took turns from year to year. That calendar was the best, but this one is a good approximation.

So, at the La Trappe store – which used to be run by, you guessed it, Trappist monks – this is a season to stock up on Santa-shaped chocolate lollipops and suchlike. One of the things that always creeps me out about the store now that they’re gone is the uniforms: employees wear these black ‘aprons’ over white clothes in an approximation of the Trappist habit. In other words, they’re trying to look like monks. What, do they think no one will notice the difference? Sadly, this may actually be true in some cases.

Despite the ‘resemblance,’ I’ve not yet found one of them to discuss radical Catholic theology and Church happenings with while paying for my cheese. O liberal (and heretical) Trappist monk at the cash register, how I doth miss thee!

Along with the calendar, one of the things marking my approach to Christmas is setting up the crèche. The original one had its own little stable with a grass-like roof that tended to shed, a loft and a barn-like main area. I would put all the little porcelain figurines – once liberated from their bubble wrap – lovingly inside the stable, whose floor is much like its roof. Jesus and the angel of course have to wait until after the Christmas Eve Mass. The three kings get lined up in various places and I move them a bit closer to the Nativity scene each day: look at them go! Unfortunately there aren’t figurines of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt. *awkward cricket chirping*

There has been a more recent one with bigger figurines and no stable. I think they’re shinier. I don’t actually remember much about it. But the most recent one, which we’ve used for the past two years, is a Veggie Tales version of the crèche and characters. Two attached peas are dressed as sheep, for example, and one of the other people is an asparagus spear. On top of the crèche is a star that sings something unintelligible, supposedly a little Christmas song, when you press it. Since Veggie Tales are used to teach children, this can’t be sacrilegious, though I admit it feels that way somewhat.

At La Trappe, they sell a variety of approximations of the Nativity scene. This itself is not a problem. The problem is that some of them are made out of chocolate and marzipan. Now that just seems so wrong, eating the baby Jesus, manger and all.

I know, I know: we eat the actual Jesus when we receive Eucharist, so what makes this so different, especially since it isn’t real? I think the difference – the gap between reality and a replica – is exactly where the problem lies. Because Eucharist is real, a real gift with substantial effects on us and on the world, allowing us to participate in a reality greater than our own, which includes the entire life Incarnate of Jesus Christ. So yes, we are actually eating the baby Jesus, but it is real and spiritual food, making-present the very reality to which it points.

While chocolate and marzipan are also real food (no kidding?), they lack this manifestation. The chocolate baby Jesus figurine symbolizes the reality of Christ in the same way a crèche does: by providing an image of that which we believe, an image inherently containing that belief in who the Christ child is. That this is not an ordinary baby, though to all appearances and according to all rationality, he is precisely as ordinary as any other human being. What we have in the chocolate Jesus case is someone consuming that reality for nothing but transient, meaningless pleasure.

I doubt that even a vehement atheist would seriously consider eating an Icon or a crucifix. Why then would the baby Jesus be any different? Because the baby Jesus is most clearly a joyful offering of God for all the world, because Jesus is for all of us, because he’s cute? Maybe. Ultimately, it doesn’t really manner. What it expresses is that we’ve turned Jesus at his birthday into something to be consumed like an object, like anything else; it expresses a rejection of the beginning of the greatest Story ever known, and therefore all the rest of it as well; it expresses the modern meaninglessness of the Christmas Celebration - a profound transformation of faith into an occasion for a possessiveness that turns one away from God through a desire for things.

Maybe I’m overstating things: you will have noticed that I do that sometimes. But it feels to me almost like a desecration of the Nativity, eating the cornerstone and meaning of faith.

p.s. I am eternally grateful for this title to my source of inspiration.