Gift Giving and the Soul
Advent 2004: week 2by Paul Grant
This is week two of Advent season, 2004. Advent is the Church’s month of preparation for Christmas – one of the three primary Christian holidays. In the spirit of preparation, urbana.org is running a series this year on the theme of the coming Christmas. This week Paul Grant discusses gift giving in a consumer society.
Other essays:
Week 1: Ritual in Worship
Week 2: Gift Giving
Week 3: Home for Christmas?
Week 4: Immanuel - God is with
Us.
If it seems Christmas grows increasingly grotesque with each passing year, it has more to do with our maturing sensitivities than the reality on the ground. The season’s consumerist onslaught is merely a natural evolution of a social course set generations ago.
Holiday gift-giving was the retail economy’s engine at least as early as the 1930s when, at the behest of major retailers, Franklin Roosevelt tweaked the Thanksgiving calendar for a slightly longer Christmas shopping season. Gift giving had become compromised by macroeconomics.
Today thousands of people would lose their jobs if Americans stopped giving Christmas presents. Their livelihood depends on those dollars, and that would be the best of it. The global economy has been held aloft for the last few years by American profligacy; were we to make our Christmas presents by hand this year, like we always talk about but never get around to, the world’s economy could actually plunge into recession. Talk about taking the spirit out of Christmas!
So although Christmas may indeed be getting ever shallower and less spiritual, we’re merely inheriting bad fruit. But we, in this generation, have contributed plenty. On average, North Americans are deeper in debt year after year, living unhealthier lives and overcompensating with luxury at Christmas. Some people are trying to foment a revolution. “Culture Jammers” as they call themselves, they have developed an elaborate secular eschatology of salvation-by-organic-living, which teaches good values in a morally bankrupt system.
The growing “Culture Jamming” movement sees Christmas as the supreme anti-holiday: a season when advertising runs amok, polluting our minds with fears and false desires. Debt and obesity are linked, according to this line of thought, by a structural evil called capitalism, which seeks to tear all human community apart, replacing it with radically individual consumerism. True luxury, Culture Jammers say, is prosperity in relationships, rather than in materialism. A cross between ecologists, health-nuts, and Bolsheviks, the Culture Jammers are an unlikely group to be trying to restore the meaning of Christmas, but they are partly doing a good thing: helping create cultural breathing room, so that people can rethink their approach to Christmas.
In fact, the Culture Jammers may be missing the forest for the trees. The Christmas industry is parasitic on North American culture, but it’s not pure evil. There is something deeply beautiful about gift giving; in fact it may be one of the healthiest social activities we engage in. In a world in which we have structured our very society to generate profit; in a world in which we’ve even begun to view intimate relationships as contracts, gift giving challenges the prevailing economics. Gift giving is an honor and a luxury.
The Gnostic heresy of the first century never actually went away; it’s been with us all along, with different names. Gnosticism taught the existential evil of the temporal world. Only the ethereal, the metaphysical world was holy. The best spiritual approach for people was to shake off their ties to this dying realm, and focus instead on knowledge of spiritual matters. The trouble is, our bodies matter deeply, and so does the world of the here-and-now. When the early apostles went to great lengths to purge Gnosticism from the church, they understood how life- and soul-deadening absolute asceticism could become if left unchecked. They knew that rejecting the physical world was dangerous for our dependency on God.
The challenge for Christians down through the ages has always been: how do we balance faith and actions? How do we live spiritual lives in a material world? Gift giving is part of the equation, because we have received entirely inequitable gifts from God: salvation and the Holy Spirit. Since there is no way we can present to God a gift even remotely approximate to the one he’s given us, we must content ourselves to being indebted to him. And much of the New Testament consists of instruction for how to live in community with others, in light of this new relationship with God.
Taken together, gift giving and gift receiving can break the social chains of contractual relationships, and restore love and mutual dependency. Christmas is, for better or for worse, our society’s primary opportunity for gift giving. Let’s use it accordingly!
Culture Jammers correctly want to subvert the materialistic “McChristmas” of pointless gift giving. But they fail to understand the deepness of life: when we stop giving and receiving, we start buying and selling instead. And giving is to selling as love is to duty. The freedom is gone and with it the soul.
If we want so subvert the Christmas industry, let us not become the thing we hate. Let us redeem the culture of giving, rather than throw away the culture. This season, practice the discipline of gift giving and learn the deepness and consequence of gift receiving.
Give well this year, and receive well. And learn about God through both.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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