'I Do in Part Believe It'

Shakespeare never ceases to amaze me. How does he get it so right, time and time again? He rarely speaks of Christmas in any of his plays. But in the opening scene of Hamlet he does, and what he says rings so true we hardly need another mention. Bernardo and Marcellus, two officers of the guard at the Prince of Denmark's gloomy castle, are engaged in a nervous conversation with Hamlet's friend, Horatio. They are discussing the ghostly apparition--which we later discover is Hamlet's father--that has just appeared to them for the third successive night. When the cock crows the wraith disappears. Then, still shaken, Marcellus muses.

Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad:
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor with hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and gracious is the time.

These sentiments resonate with me. Which of us has not sensed a special aroma that seems to hang in the air during this season? Despite the deadening hype and the deafening jingle of the cash registers, there is something magical going on. But we can never be of one mind about it.

And the bard knows that too. After Marcellus has finished rhapsodizing about the hallowed time and wholesome nights, Horatio responds, "So I have heard and do in part believe it."

Horatio's "in part" saves the scene from melting into mere sentimentality. The Christmas season is a very mixed bag. Psychiatrists tell us they know exactly what to expect beginning just after Thanksgiving--manic shopping sprees, despondent drinking binges, and obsessive food gorging.

But they miss the most important syndrome. It is the spiritual schizophrenia that arises from our desperate view of Christmas: the incarnate love of God in a provincial stable--and our confusion over what to do about the angelic cantatas, the mysterious star, the enigmatic emissaries from the east, and the curious ineptitude of the evil king. "So I have heard," we murmur with Horatio, "and do in part believe it."

Is there a cure for our two-mindedness? I think there is. Christmas is just the right time to let ourselves soar with the poetry, the music, and the old, old stories, and to shed the crippling literalism that has in the modern era become the main obstacle to mature spirituality. The problem with what is sometimes called "the modern mind" is not that it is too critical but that it is tiresomely pedestrian. Literalism is a scourge, a disabling disease of the spirit. And, ironically, it afflicts religious fundamentalists and secular atheists in equal measure.

It is a kind of color blindness, a blight that incapacitates its victims' capacity to notice the truth that glimmers below the surface of song and metaphor, of poetry and legend. The fundamentalist insists it is all literal, and demands we believe it all. The atheist also insists it is literal, and rejects it all. Together they play out the unending Punch and Judy show of modernity, shrieking and whacking each other with big sticks. But this puppet show is too sad to be funny.

Continued on page 2: »