Merry Christmas! We all know that greeting comes a bit early, but you’ll must forgive us for putting the newborn Jesus within the crèche preemptively this 12 months, as this column can be on hiatus next week in honor of the Nativity. And Boxing Day, after all.
Longtime readers may keep in mind that last 12 months our Christmas column focused on certainly one of the nation’s great writers and his entertaining essay on Santa Claus: “John Updike: Suspicious of Santa but keen on Christ.” In 1997, America honored John Updike with the magazine’s Edmund Campion Award for his contributions to religion and letters; Updike’s speech (reprinted in America) on the occasion is a good looking reflection on faith and fiction. Considered one of John Updike’s close friends through his life and in addition his onetime biographer was George W. Hunt, S.J., editor in chief of America from 1984 to 1998 and writer of (amongst much else) John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art.
George Hunt: “Whether it is true, as Aquinas said, that God created the world at play, then a fortiori God was definitely at play—partying—when he re-created that world within the image of his Son.”
I used to be graced to know Father Hunt during his final years, when he was living at Fordham University, where for a few years he headed the Archbishop Hughes Institute on Religion and Culture after his retirement from America. He all the time made me consider an Oxford don, erudite in ways beyond my ken and yet also possessing a vigorous and mischievous humorousness.
When Father Hunt died in 2011, former Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent wrote: “My friend George Hunt is dead and my heart is heavy—not for him because I do know he’s with the God he served so faithfully all his life—but, after all, for myself.” He was frequently awed by Hunt, Vincent noted, “not a lot by what he had read but by what he had remembered of what he had read. He was blessed with a simply superb mind and I believe he enjoyed using it. He read nearly on a regular basis. I’m not being hyperbolic once I claim he read not less than three full books every week.”
George Hunt: “What sort of an earth lets pass on to our kids? Shall or not it’s one wherein the Word would need to be enfleshed?”
Each editor in chief of America puts his own particular stamp on the journal, and the magazine took a more literary tone than usual during Hunt’s tenure. (It also featured an awesome deal more about baseball than it does as of late, notes this writer with a harrumph.) This was due in no small part to his own finely wrought contributions to the magazine, including quite a few temporary essays on Christmas. In each of them one can feel the love Father Hunt had for the craft of writing itself, in addition to his deep and nuanced tackle religion. (Along with his literary pursuits, he earned a doctorate in theology at Yale.)
Here is Father Hunt at Christmas in 1987:
Christmas surely is the warmest of seasons, the privileged time of memories, gratitude and gift-giving. But because it celebrates the Incarnation, the union of the Timeless with Time, surely it must even be the season for contemplation on time itself, on our flesh’s fragility, on the earth wherein the Word selected to dwell. For now we have merely inherited and for a time borrowed the earth and its seasons from our parents and their parents before them. All of the memories now we have and share are inevitably linked with this earth—its odors, its sensations of cold and heat, its textures, its colours, its sounds. Are we grateful for this creative Word? What sort of an earth lets pass on to our kids? Shall or not it’s one wherein the Word would need to be enfleshed? If we will not be serious about these earthly subjects, who will imagine us once we discuss heavenly things?
And here in 1991, with cultural references each high and low (Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” had come out that 12 months):
Too often through the Christmas season we’re distracted—shopping, cards, colds, travel—in order that, as T. S. Eliot put it, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” The primary letter of John (4:10) distills the meaning into one sentence: “On this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us.” The sign that we recognize the meaning is that we love one another. But this love is just not philanthropy or liberal sentimentality or a warm benevolent glow: It’s a love that should be history-shaking (our own private histories), disruptive of our dearly-held conventional values, generative of a newborn, non-beastly personality. A Christmas love.
And again, in 1994; this time, Father Hunt offered an unusual tackle the meaning of grace, once perhaps value remembering during holiday festivities.
At Christmas time we appreciate more what theologians term, in perhaps an excessively abstract way, the mystery of “grace.” “Grace” simply means a “party,” replete with the positive connotations of the word that our language admits. For “parties” are directly convivial occasions, festive get-togethers and in addition companionable unions between the like-minded. Whether it is true, as Thomas Aquinas said, that God created the world at play, then a fortiori God was definitely at play—partying—when he re-created that world within the image of his Son.
Divine grace described as God partying? Not exactly Karl Rahner here, you’re pondering. And yet Rahner is strictly the reference point from which Father Hunt began—he had been reading a set of Rahner’s homilies when he wrote those words. Regarding God’s party, he had this to say:
But an R.S.V.P. is attached to the invitation. As Karl Rahner reminds us, the Word within the announcement means: I like you. Our answer should be an echo of that word: Yes, I heard, I can be there at your party.
Merry Christmas! And as George Hunt and Karl Rahner were wont to say, party on.
George Hunt: “As Karl Rahner reminds us, the Word within the announcement means: I like you. Our answer should be an echo of that word: Yes, I heard, I can be there at your party.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Christmas Spectacular,” by America poetry editor Joseph Hoover, S.J. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each latest and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this can give us a likelihood to offer you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
Theophilus Lewis brought the Harlem Renaissance to the pages of America
William Lynch, the best American Jesuit you’ve probably never heard of
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Leonard Feeney, America’s only excommunicated literary editor (so far)
Joan Didion: A chronicler of recent life’s horrors and consolations
Completely happy reading!
James T. Keane