Christ Climbed Down
Sermon by Steve Edington
December 19, 2004
Christ climbed down from his bare tree this year and ran away to where there we no rootless Christmas trees hung with candy canes and breakable stars. Christ climbed down from His bare Tree this year and ran away to where there were no gilded Christmas trees and no tinsel Christmas trees and no tinfoil Christmas trees and no pink plastic Christmas trees and no black Christmas trees and no powder blue Christmas trees hung with electric candles and encircled by tin electric trains and clever cornball relatives. Christ climbed won from His bare Tree this year and ran away to where no intrepid Bible salesmen covered the territory in two-tone cadillacs and where no Sears Roebuck crèches complete with plastic babe in manger arrived by parcel post, the babe by special delivery... Christ climbed down from his bare Tree this year and softly stole away into some anonymous Mary's womb again where in the darkest night of everybody's anonymous soul He awaits again and unimaginable and impossibly Immaculate Reconception the very craziest of Second Comings.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. from A Coney Island of the Mind. New Directions, 1958.
The first time I ever heard this poem it was delivered with a British accent. I was in my sophomore year of college, and an honest-to-God English English professor was spending the year on campus in some kind of professorial exchange arrangement. Shortly before the Christmas holiday break he visited an English class I was taking, and in the course of his conversation with us said he had a Christmas poem by a Mr. Ferlinghetti that he wanted to read to us. The name meant nothing to me at the time. He read "Christ Climbed Down" in its entirety. (What you just heard was a slightly abridged version).
As he read I felt my breathing quicken a bit, and I went into frown mode. I couldn't quite pin it down, but I was sure I was hearing something terribly sac religious. I was still firmly ensconced in my evangelical Baptist upbringing, and anything that gave off even the slightest hint of making light of, or demeaning, Jesus Christ was just simply not a good thing. It sounded like Jesus was being trifled with, and that the celebration of his birth was being ridiculed. And even though I knew that a lot of the trappings of the Christmas season, that this Mr. Ferlinghetti (whoever he was) was having a little fun with, really had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus anyway, I still felt like my religion was being put down by some stuffy British academic reading a poem by some guy from California.
Then he got to the last lines: "Christ climbed down... from his bare Tree... this year... and softly stole away into... some anonymous Mary's womb again... where in the darkest of night... of everybody's anonymous soul... He awaits again... an unimaginable..and impossibly... Immaculate Reconception... the very craziest... of Second Comings."
I didn't quite hear, much less fully grasp, all that was being said in that last verse at that moment, but the idea that the Second Coming-"the very craziest of Second Comings"-as the line goes, is really a rebirth of all that Jesus represented within "everybody's anonymous soul" switched on a light bulb for me. This wasn't quite the same Jesus as the Supernatural Savior whom God had dispatched to suffer and die for my sins-and that was something I'd doggone well better believe if I wanted to save myself from the punishments of Hell. The notion that "everyone's anonymous soul" was the true locale of "the craziest of Second Comings" caught me off guard. It made a crazy kind of sense in a way that actually frightened me. Frightened me because it posed a challenge to my religious world view at the time-a view that I was doggedly determined to hold onto in the face of all this "liberal thought" I was being exposed to, even at a state university in southern West Virginia.
It would be far from correct to say that my whole 19-year-old religious world view came tumbling down in that moment, because it didn't. I didn't walk out of the classroom as a suddenly reborn religious liberal. That was a process that took a few more years. But hearing this poem, especially the last verse that comes after Ferlinghetti has had a little fun getting in his jabs at some of our seasonal silliness circa the early 1950s, provided one of the first cracks in my near-fundamentalist consciousness, as to what the true nature of not just Christianity, but religion itself, might and could be. In much more recent years I've had the opportunity, on a couple of occasions, to meet the author of this-and scores of other-poems. I don't know how many of you may have had the experience of coming face to face with someone who had a hand in re-arranging your brains but I found it rather mind-blowing. I actually had to thank the man for making a mess of my life sometime back when.
I'll do a little more with this poem in a few minutes, but first I'd like to take you on a brief side excursion into the life of its author. I know I've told parts of this story in previous sermons, so if you've heard any of this already I ask your forbearance for the next couple of minutes. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, by all indications I can gather, grew up a pretty straight-arrow, nice Italian-Catholic boy, from Yonkers, New York in the 1920s and 30s. He was an accomplished student and an Eagle Scout. He reported for active duty when the Second World War broke out; and by the time D-Day arrived he was a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy and commanded a submarine chaser as part of that momentous Normandy invasion. About a year and a half later he'd been relocated to Nagasaki, Japan in the aftermath of the atomic bomb being dropped on that city. That proved to be the experience that re-arranged his brain. The rationale for dropping the bomb notwithstanding, his awareness of the human capacity to inflict mass death upon other human beings made an indelible impression upon the young Lieutenant Commander Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was just three years ago he that looked back on this experience in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: "Before I was at Nagasaki I was a good American boy. I was an Eagle Scout. I was the commander of a sub chaser in the Normandy invasion. Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States Government as to what atomic bombs can do."
I believe it was witnessing death on such a massive scale, which demonstrated the utter fragility of life, that challenged many of those who were of an artistic, poetic, or literary bent to be advocates for life in the face of the possibility of widespread human destruction of human life. Life looked cheap and highly expendable. How do we then stand for life's essential holiness? This was the challenge that faced the generation coming of age during and after the Second World War. This kind of consciousness was part of the impetus that gave rise to what came to be called the Beat Generation writers.
So, wherever Ferlinghetti's life may have been headed, it took a turn after his World War II experience. The war ended. He studied for a time at the Sorbonne in Paris where he earned a doctorate; and then settled into San Francisco where, in 1952, he and a partner opened up bookstore and small press outfit-giving it the Charley Chaplinesque name City Lights-that operates to this day. His store and press became one of the primary outlets for the literature of the Beat Movement. The man who was one of the mid-wives, as it were, of this movement-and who now at age 85 has become its elder statesman-is still going strong as a poet, painter, essayist, and businessperson. And I've come a long way since I was first introduced to him, by way of his poem "Christ Climbed Down", at the age of nineteen.
Mr. Ferlinghetti has come to disavow the Christianity as a matter of faith and doctrine. But, as this and other of his poems indicate, he seems to remain fascinated with the person of Jesus and his continuing presence in our world. And the same goes for me-on both counts. And it is Ferlinghetti's poem-from one non-Christian to another as it were-that helps provide me with a reason to continue to honor and celebrate the birth of Jesus.
I mentioned earlier that my hearing of "Christ Climbed Down" for the first time had the effect of re-arranging my brain. At that time, however, I had neither a language I could speak, nor a framework of understanding in my mind, that allowed me to get a good handle on what that brain re-arranging was all about. That came later. It came when I realized that stories, myths, and legends are not about events that happened out there somewhere in time and in geographical space. They are about what's happens "in here", inside of us, instead.
Yes, I believe someone named Jesus of Nazareth did live and did carry forth a ministry that is approximated in the New Testament Gospels. But those Gospels are shrouded in myth and legend. And myths and legends about things that happen, as Mr. Ferlinghetti puts it, in "everybody's anonymous soul." I don't know that it was immaculate or not, but when I grasped that it was a significant, and very meaningful, "reconception" for me. If there are going to be any "Second Comings"-of the craziest kind or not-they will come, and only come, in the lives we choose to lead, the values we seek to embody, or incarnate, and the willingness on our parts to be bearers of life and life abundant in the face of the many kinds of deaths that diminish, demean, belittle, or destroy life.
For the Christian the message in this story, legend, or myth is that God decided to give humanity another chance by appearing on earth as a human being; first in the form of a helpless child, and later-when the child grew up-as an adult human being who tried to bring those with whom he came in contact to a fuller realization of their own humanity while also teaching the ways of love, compassion and justice. That the life and teachings of this wise and humble man, and the religion that came to be generated in his name, have become-in the hands of some, and I must emphasize some-an instrument, or means, of perpetuating bigotry, fear, and division is something infuriates me nearly above all else. But that's a subject for another sermon. I want to stay on the "good will" side of the street today.
I respect and honor the Christian interpretation of this legend. (In fairness, I should say "interpretations" as there are many ways of understanding it even within the Christian communion itself). As a religious humanist the message I take from it is that life keeps giving us another chance and another challenge with each new life that comes into the world from "some anonymous Mary's womb again." How we respond to that challenge is-as I just noted-in our hearts and our hands.
We have each and all been given a life which we can use to say "yes" to those things that nurture and enhance life, and say "no" to the principalities and powers that would diminish and destroy life. We can use that life to be a witness for peace even in the face of all that threatens or denies us peace. And within this community here we can use the lives we've been given to attend to and celebrate the joys that are in our midst; and we can reach out to those who are experiencing their times of pain, loss, and despair that are inevitably visited upon all of us over the course of our lives at some point in those lives. In the birth of Jesus, I see a paradigm for each new life that comes into the world, and a reminder that each such new life is also about my life-and about our lives-and the human responsibility to which each new life calls us.
One of my predecessors in this pulpit from the late 1940s, the late Rev. Ernest Sommerfeld, penned some words, that might, in his mind, have been part of an imaginary dialogue with a more traditional colleague or friend:
"'Why do you celebrate Christmas? You do not believe in virgin births. You do not believe that Jesus was a deity. You probably do not believe in angels.'
True, but we believe in songs which are born in the hearts and minds of people. We believe that some stories deserve to live forever because of that they tell us about ourselves. The angels singing an anthem of peace and good-will deserve to be heard forever because they are there are angels in human hearts. The humble shepherds, who have ears to hear and hearts to receive a message of joy, deserve to live to the end of time. The wise men, so faithfully seeking the way of the star, deserve to go in search again each year as long as years shall be, for they are the story of the quest for ourselves."
I met one of Rev. Sommerfeld's sons up at Ferry Beach last summer and we had a pleasant conversation. I told him that some of his father's words are still spoken from the Nashua UU pulpit on occasion. He told me about how-in the late 1940s, mind you-that his father got into some hot water here when, on a Sunday prior to Thanksgiving, he took up a collection to benefit a worth cause in the community. I told him we've gotten past that now.
I'll close by going back to the words just quoted. When Rev. Sommerfeld says that the Christmas story is the story of a "quest for ourselves" he was not, I am sure, saying it in a narcissistic or self-indulgent way.. He meant that it is quest to know our deeper selves, our truer selves, our healed and reconciled selves, and our hopeful selves. Most important it is the selves we have to offer and share with one another. My hope is that the stories-modern and ancient-and the myths that are related at this time of year will aid and inspire us on such a quest.
Stephen D. Edington
December 19, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
