Light On Dark Water

NOTE: This piece originally appeared in the National
Catholic Register in 1982.

Once I saw Santa Claus. Not some bogus fellow in the mall, but
the real thing, in the sky: sleigh, reindeer, and all. It was
Christmas Eve and I was about four years old. An aunt of mine was
out in the backyard, lighting sparklers and throwing them into
the air, and I was one of several children watching from the
living room window. Some after-effect of the flashing and
spinning lights combined with my high excitement to give me a
brief and vivid glimpse of the reindeer, the sleigh, and the
bright red suit.

I’m pretty sure I screamed. I know that all of us
scrambled up the stairs and dove into bed, believing that if we
saw Santa he would bring us no presents, and hoping that he
didn’t know I’d spotted him. For several Christmases
I held on to my belief in that apparition. I recall testifying to
its truth in an elementary school debate on the existence of
Santa Claus. But at some point I was forced to admit that I had
been mistaken.

Today I believe in God, heaven and hell. Doesn’t it seem
likely that I am deluded now in very much the same way as I was
when I thought I had seen Santa Claus? When I was a child I
believed in a man at the North Pole who would give me a bicycle
if I behaved myself. Now I believe in a Person in heaven who will
give me eternal life if I behave myself. This is an open-and-shut
case, isn’t it? Surely the cynics of the world must be
right in ascribing religious belief to a childish credulity.

Cardinal Newman, who of course commanded a mighty intellect
himself, strongly mistrusted human reason. Though he affirmed
with the Church that right reason always leads to God, he saw
little of right reason around him and feared that the use of the
intellect in his time tended toward “a deep and plausible
skepticism.” He was right, of course. And the most
important word in that phrase is “plausible.” The
opinion that belief in God is wishful thinking is plausible. The
charge that I became a Catholic because I was unable to face life
without Santa Claus is plausible.

But it is false. I don’t intend here to attempt a proof
of the truth of Christianity, but I would like to point out that
analogies such as those which compare God to Santa Claus can be
quite misleading. Chesterton notes, in Orthodoxy (a
wonderful book which you should read if you haven’t
already), the curiously skewed nature of reality: “Life is
not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.”

An alien intelligence examining a man would find him almost
perfectly symmetrical: He would find “an arm on the right
and one on the left…the same number of fingers, the same
number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even
twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and
then, when he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there
was a heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he
was right, he would be wrong.”

Have you ever noticed how much of our folk wisdom seems to
contradict itself, how many common-sense proverbs take opposing
stands? “Haste makes waste” seems at cross-purposes
with “strike while the iron is hot.” “As the
twig is bent, so grows the tree” is challenged by
“blood will tell.” And usually both are true; it is a
matter of discerning their proper application.

We are often told, and it is quite true, that we should learn
from history. We know the familiar warning that those who do not
learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. But, paradoxically,
it is our study of history which gives us the adage
“history never repeats itself.” The invader from the
sea is driven off, the coasts fortified and a steady watch
maintained; the next time, the invader comes from the
mountains.

It is the same in the intellectual life of an individual or a
culture. Our critics, determined not to be mocked for rejecting a
young Beethoven, make themselves ridiculous by praising frauds.
And the skeptic’s boast that he has seen through all
illusions becomes the quaintest illusion of all. The equation of
God to Santa Claus does not hold up. To mention one major
discrepancy, we observe that every child ceases almost at once to
believe in Santa Claus when he is told that the presents come
from his parents, whereas there is no such clear alternative
explanation for the things we hold to be gifts from God. Many
people who are atheists in practice nevertheless stop short of
declaring with certainty that God does not exist and call
themselves agnostics. I have never met anyone who remained
agnostic on the question of Santa Claus past childhood.

Like the single heart on the left side, the existence of God
is a striking asymmetry in the cosmos, but one which nevertheless
seems correct and appropriate. It confirms our intuition that the
world is orderly but not uniform. And there could be no more
appropriate symbol of this pattern than the thing so prominently
associated with the observance of Christmas: the gift.

A gift is an interjection of something gratuitous and
uncalled-for into the fabric of ordinary life. It is by
definition undeserved (else it would be a payment) and by
implication unexpected. The world is full of gifts. I note, for
instance, its beauty. I hold the beauty to be real and have
nothing to say to those who hold that it is entirely in the eye
of the beholder, as I have nothing to say to those who claim that
all morality is entirely subjective. A little while ago I was
looking at a hunting magazine. To judge by the number of pictures
of beautiful animals appearing in it, the hunters of the world
must agree with me that a deer or a mallard duck is very
beautiful. They need not have been. They could have been
perfectly functional without being lovely. I think God loves
their beauty. I also think it is a gift to us, since we have the
consciousness to rejoice in it.

A gift is the essential act of love, which is why “to
give oneself” is rightly used as a description of the
sexual act, and why fornication and prostitution are so ugly. In
a true gift there is no hint of obligation or self-interest. It
is above justice. The idea of a fair exchange is a worthy idea
and one which has the beauty of order. The idea of a gift is not
only a better and higher thing but also—and here is one of
the luminous secrets hidden in the idea of God as
Creator—the thing which came first. We tend to see
giving as something added on to a relationship, after the demands
of fairness have been satisfied. But it is not so in our
relationship with God, for our existence is itself a gift, and we
would know nothing of fair exchange had we not first been the
recipients of a splendid gift which we could not possibly have
deserved, since before it we were not.

At Christmas we celebrate an even greater gift. God lost
nothing in making us, but in taking on our flesh He took on our
pain. He suffered it and made it possible for us to be freed from
it, which we could not have done for ourselves any more than we
could have called ourselves into existence. Thus Santa Claus,
though his role has gotten out of hand and should be reduced, is
an appropriate piece of folklore for the season: an old man who
loves children so much that he does nothing all year except make
things to give to them. At Christmas we celebrate with gifts the
perfect Gift. And that is why we are, and should be, merry.