I lost my faith right before Christmas in 1956. I read in my kid version of the World Book Encyclopedia that Santa Claus was a “legendary” figure. I made inquiry of my parents regarding the meaning of the word. Follow-up questions were posed. It turned out that there was no Santa, and the architecture of childhood myth came tumbling down.
Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy were lies perpetrated by well-meaning parents. This embryonic skepticism grew to include disbelief in God, Jesus and the afterlife. If Santa couldn’t deliver the toys and the Easter Bunny couldn’t deliver the candy, then Jesus couldn’t deliver us from our sins.
My apostasy only deepened in college and law school. Modernity is in large part the story of how science overcame superstition. Mankind’s focus shifted from the supernatural to the natural world. God was no longer necessary to explain things, or to keep the masses in line. The one-two punch of Newton and Darwin knocked out God. I enjoyed confronting friends and family on these matters. I became comfortable in my intellectual smugness, sitting on a perch of disdain, looking down on people of faith.
But then my world began to shift under my feet. My parents died. Dear friends died too early. I started taking blood pressure medicine. My kids grew up. I had grandchildren. I learned that science had significant limitations. The idea of a universal truth is absurd. Our world is incomprehensibly large and forever unknowable.
So although the faith I lost in late December 1956 has not been found, I am thinking anew about the beautiful story of the Nativity. The details of the virgin birth to be followed by a mankind-saving crucifixion and subsequent resurrection still seem a little far-fetched. However, we live in a time when frightening wraiths and specters lurk outside our homes.
The Nativity with its co-mingled threads of joy, hope, peace, selflessness and the possibility of a redemptive future resonate today just as it has for more than two thousand years.
Saturday night I baby-sat my 2-week-old grandson Cole. As he lay in my lap in the quiet dark, sleeping peacefully, I thought of the story of the Nativity.
It made me feel good.
