The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, December 20th. It is the 23rd of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Jacob Marley, and Hell
It’s a Christmas trope this year to look ahead to next Christmas. To Christmas morning, spent reservation-free with grandparents. To Christmas concerts at grade schools, packed together in crowded cafeterias. To bars decked out in holiday cheer, alive without hesitation once more. The places that, right now, sit quiet and dark, loud and bright and full of life again.
Not every revitalized scene will be loud, of course. And not all of them will be bright. Some will still, next year, be quiet and dark, just as they are quiet and dark this Christmas. Some will remain set apart from the rollicking carols; set apart from the raucous laughter, set apart from the elated squeals. Some will be places of frozen nose tips coming in out of the cold. Places of hushed whispers absorbed by muffling coats. Places, if God so winks, shielded in a softly falling snow. A Christmas snow. On Christmas Eve.
I grew up in a Congregational church. Descended from the Pilgrims, historically. One of those “mainline Protestant” churches, a group I understand to contain not only many Congregationalists, but many Methodists, many Presbyterians, many Lutherans, and perhaps half a score of other denominations-within-denominations—in essence, those older churches that are not Evangelical in category and are not Catholic. Recently, I heard the phrase “Yankee Protestants” used to describe at least a subset of us, and I’d imagine that phrasing applies well to Congregationalists, coming out of New England like we did.
I like that phrasing. A share of my affinity for my hometown church comes from its long, open sanctuary. A share comes from its tall, narrow steeple. A share comes from its bell. All these things, together, have long transported me—looking at the building from within and without—to older times. Small towns. Tight communities. Packed pews.
On Christmas night, that old church back home is particularly timeless. It’s quiet. It’s dark. And yet, it’s full of earnest life. Rosy cheeks. Plaid skirts. Candlelight. Choir robes. Lights dimmed in the sanctuary, making those shining over the chancel feel like spotlights. Organ music, low, near-silent, yet roaring and triumphant, proclaiming the good news—which is, of course, this: On a night much like this, to people—people, just like you—God entered the world, helpless and wailing and full of love and life and promise.
That old church is, by my understanding, a bit of an anomaly, in that it is not, as a rule, getting quieter, and it is not, as a rule, getting darker, at least in times outside of pandemics and midnight services. Many churches of its kind are, though. Mainline Protestantism is on the decline. The churches, some of them rich with liberal history (many abolitionists belonged to churches like these), took hard turns in the 20th century towards liberal culture, and have thus—and I should note here that this is my impression, and I’m citing no sources here—been disproportionately blindsided as liberal culture has turned away from religion. I do not believe my old church is what it was when I was a child, in terms of attendance, participation, youth. It’s better than it was a decade ago in those metrics, with talented, engaging pastors at the helm, but even so, I’d guess the median age at many a service is north of that of retirement. Religion in America is melting, and mainline Protestantism is apparently the first sheet of ice in sight of the broiler.
This is, of course, troubling to me. A piece of my heritage, and a piece of my past, and a thread in our cultural fabric. Going away. But it’s more, too.
I’ve long suspected I may have a call to ministry. And so, often, at Christmastime, I’ve pictured myself in a church like that one, there when the candles have been blown out. I see myself unplugging the Christmas tree. I see myself turning off the lights. And then, in those minutes before I lock the doors—in the minutes before I walk across the chancel, the clack or the clop of the dress shoes echoing out across rows and rows of pews—in the minutes before I blow on my hands in a frosty car, snow just brushed from the windshield—I see myself standing, alone, in the quiet darkness of an old, empty church. The same quiet darkness it feels this year. A darkness that will once again be filled. A calm darkness. A secure darkness. A hopeful darkness. One that, like the night, will not last. I will stand in the quiet emptiness of a church much like the old church I long called my own. And I will feel, again, at home. In the darkness of Christmas night.
And so, as I look with fear upon the fade of mainline Protestantism, and upon trends towards new buildings with understandable new needs and understandable new designs and yet some lack of soul, some lack of that connection back through the ages, I fear that there will not be a church to which I one day come home. It’s already hard to find a church home, just as a congregant. In two cities since graduation, and perhaps a dozen other towns I’ve happened upon on Sundays, the majority of mainline Protestant churches in which I’ve worshiped have either been on financial life support, so tied to politics that through its haze I cannot see God, or some combination of the two. Even now, watching online services for a nearby Presbyterian church, I find myself often bracing for some pivot into politics, a pivot that does not, to me, sound like it comes from God. So far, that pivot hasn’t happened, and my shoulders are lower now when I watch that church than they were this summer. So far, I’ve been impressed, and when I drive past that church, I feel hope, but I quickly sprinkle that hope with fear. For what if the other shoe does drop? If it doesn’t, what if what it’s captured is too isolated, and it’s a home I’ll have to leave behind one day without knowing for certain that I’ll find another? What if I am called, or I think I am, and I answer and I get through it all and I land in a lifetime of churches that do not feel like those old churches in which I picture myself? Sure, there are all sorts of things that are and can be churches. “Where two or three are gathered…” But is there not some merit to wanting a church that feels like home?
Three years ago, I was back home for Christmas. Christmas Eve fell on a Sunday, and so we went to church, on Christmas Eve, but in the morning. It was snowing outside. A light snow.
For some reason I don’t recall, I was there early, alone. Mom was singing in the choir, so perhaps I drove with her? Whatever the reason, I had time to walk around the building’s exterior. I wanted a picture of that old church that morning, from the front. The rising steeple. The snow-dusted wreaths beside the doors. The old, dark numbering spelling out ‘1867’ between the bell and a stained-glass window, one of the stained-glass windows that wrap around the sanctuary, each with the name of a founding family of the church at its bottom—families that were also among the town’s first settlers, as the European world made its way northwest from Chicago. I still look at that picture, now and then, and not just because I want to see the old church. Somewhere, thanks to timing and chance and Instagram, I came to associate that photo with “Christmas Bells”—the Longfellow poem.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not a Congregationalist. He was a Unitarian, like many New Englanders at the time. But in New England, at the time, Congregationalists and Unitarians were intertwined societally, with many Unitarian churches having split off from Congregational roots. Longfellow wrote “Christmas Bells” in 1863. His wife had died two years earlier, from a fire. His son had been wounded the month prior, fighting for the Union Army in the Civil War. The poem’s first verse is familiar—it’s a hymn by now, and Burl Ives probably sung it:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
From there, it winds through a daydream, the speaker imagining how all around the world, church bells were ringing out the good news of Christmas in one “unbroken song,” encircling the Christian world.
The daydream, though, is interrupted with the onset of the fourth verse. By war:
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in the next, the speaker laments the continent being torn asunder, before, in the sixth, giving in to the forlorn:
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
It’s a familiar feeling. There is no peace on earth. The things we love are, in some cases, withering. In others, they are already gone. The world is not what we want, not what we love, not what we hope it to be. Our futures, in places, hold dark and quiet, and we do not know what dark and quiet those will be. And yet, on Christmas, it’s all ok. However it turns out, it’s ok. Because in those churches…on a night much like this, to people—people, just like us—God enters the world. He enters it helpless. He enters it wailing. He enters it full of love, and full of life, and full of promise.
And Longfellow concludes:
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
Merry Christmas.
Next week’s essay: On Barnaby, Christmas Morning, and the Meaning of Pets
