Barry's Blog

Most of us as parents have faced the dilemma with what we are supposed to tell our children about Santa Claus at Christmas.  In last Friday's Wall Street Journal, writer Tony Woodlief recounted the challenge he faced with his 8-year-old son, Caleb, as the young boy wanted to have a man-to-man talk with his father: "Dad, I know there's no Santa Claus," as he spoke of the sheer impossibility of the physics of the event. " There's no way one guy can visit every home in a single night, and how was he supposed to get into homes without chimneys? And then there was the matter of the zoological conundrum - there is not a single book on nature in their bookshelves that addressed the matter of flying reindeer! But the greatest argument against Santa Claus, young Caleb admitted to his father, was the power of peer opinion - none of his friends believe in Santa Claus anymore. He leaned close to his father, and with a voice taking on the hint of this worldliness, and said to him, "He isn't real, is he?"

Despite the problems inherent in dealing with this mythic figure that holds such a prominent place in our culture at Christmas, there may be more at stake than meets the eye. It may be an important part of our humanness to cultivate a sense of awe, wonder, and delight in our increasingly secularized culture. While mention of magic and fantasy tends to grate upon the atheistic philosophers and "scientists" of our day, like Richard Dawkins, why should they be so irate if it is all an illusion anyway? rWoodlief informs us that Mr. Dawkins is reportedly writing a book that examines the pernicious effect of fantasy tales that promote "anti-scientific" thinking among children. Dawkins reasons that such stories lay the fundamental groundwork for religious faith, which he believes is a form of child abuse.

Curiously, Woodlief reports that recent research at the Universite' de Montreal and the University of Ottawa suggest that children are not overly troubled with learning that Santa is a myth, but that there remains a vestige of belief in God even after they have abandoned Santa. Researchers remain puzzled, and ardent atheists are not amused.

Perhaps the best explanation for this is that fairy tales, and yes, even Santa Claus, awaken and nurture our insatiable desire for the Ultimate Fairy Tale. G. K. Chesterton believed that there has been a great amount of harm and violence done in the name of rationalistic modernism to stifle the important concept that our world displays a "mystical condition." Chesterton, writing of his pilgrimage to faith in God, wrote in Orthodoxy, "I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician."

While this belief in fantasy and wonder may appear as madness to the modern sensibilities of many, who believe all things are to be explained by science and reason (Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al.), Chesterton, and other Christian fantasists, believe that they actually give a better account of the way things really are, and are in fact the saner position. Chesterton observed: "Mathematicians go mad, and chess players, but poets very seldom go mad." He went on to explain, "I am not in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination." To him, the only alternatives to embracing a mystical world was either to go the way of the materialist, who understands everything by scientific principles ("yet for whom everything does not seem worth understanding"), or the madman, who is trying to "get the heavens into his head."

Mr. Woodlief reports that Oxford University Press recently announced that it will be dropping words like "dwarf," "elf," and "devil" from its children's dictionary to make room for words like "blog," "Euro, " and "biodegradable," a blow which he sees correctly as, not just a blow to language, but to children's imagination. 

The fantasy writer George MacDonald, whom C. S. Lewis said "baptized his imagination" when he was a youth of sixteen years old, had a profound influence in Lewis' own spiritual journey to God. MacDonald once observed that it is only by gazing through magic-tinted eyes that one can see God: "With his divine alchemy he turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries."

Is there not a connection here, that  unfolds the wonder and fascination of the story of God becoming one of us in the Incarnation? One day, that grand fairy tale will become true. Or as Lewis once observed, "The Son of God became a man, to unable men to become sons of God."

 Merry Christmas 

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