I love NPR. I've been an avid listener since high school. By "love", I don't simply mean that it is my primary news source. I mean "love" as in I actually look forward to Science Friday, and Talk of the Nation, and I feel like Terry Gross and I are (or at least could be) good friends. I adore her. Weird. I know. But it's like a work of art to me: form and function all rolled into one little radio station.
Anyhow, while trying to counter the influence of high school drama on my life (it is embarrassingly easy to get sucked into when you are around teenagers all the time - like a cultural vacuum) I was reading up on a few news stories on www.npr.org this morning. I ran across this feature article: Selling the Bawdy Side of Christmas. It's a fairly average little commentary about the ever-increasing secularization of Christmas. Nothing, really, that I didn't already know. What I did really enjoy, however were the following included quotes (italics added by me) by Amy Laura Hall, a professor of theological ethics at Duke University (regarding the holiday juxtaposition of sacred and secular that has so many religious folk in a tizzy these days) :
"Christmas was, from the beginning, both holy and horrible, sacred and scary. There isn't an easy way to make it all hygienic, because the incarnation mixes God up with sheep poop and sinners." In the end, she says, it's somewhat fitting that Christmas has become an admixture of naughtiness and niceness. The contemplation of the humanity of the holiday — as well as the holiness — may make it more real than ever. As Hall puts it, "We doubt, with Thomas the disciple, that a Jesus all spiffed up and safe is real."
Kudos to Miss Hall. This is the most spiritually true and profound thing I have heard all week.
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