c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Christmas seemed simpler when we made lists, checked them twice, went to church, and gathered with family to see what Santa had done. Now we watch ourselves being ourselves.

It’s front-page news that more of us are shopping online this season and fewer are going to Wal-Mart. We hear that department stores are staging a comeback and that secular holiday songs appeal to us more than religious carols.

We know that 38,000 workers accepted Ford Motor Co.’s farewell offer, that technology managers are underwhelmed with Microsoft’s new operating system and office suite, and that shrinking confidence among employers, manufacturers and consumers is causing the bond market to anticipate a recession.

In the self-absorption of this information age, shepherds outside Bethlehem watch the sky for rockets, not for angels, and Mary’s story has become a film whose box office we will monitor. It is nuclear saber rattling that we hear coming out of Persia, not wise men seeking Messiah. On the road where Paul once proclaimed Messiah’s coming, the pope prayed facing Mecca and hoped to undo his maladroit comments about Islam.

Christmas has always been accompanied by “alarms of war” and doubts about humankind’s future. Why else did the Incarnation happen in the first place? What seems new today is that we hear the alarms and then take polls assessing our attitudes about what we hear. We track our doubts and wonder how they will affect trends in our own behavior.

We are audience to ourselves, a self-contained system of action, observation of action, observation of observation, and reaction to observation.

How does anything new or startling enter that system? With difficulty. We seem to care more about whether Katie Couric is making it as a news anchor than about the news she reports. We watch President Bush watching us and seem less concerned about what he is actually doing.

It isn’t that we are clueless revelers in a Bethlehem inn whose stable is hosting something unprecedented. We are thoroughly clued in: We track tourism in Bethlehem and evolving attitudes about Nativity scenes in public places. We watch film clips of “Joseph” dealing anxiously with “Mary’s” pregnancy.

But we’re like the family that films itself celebrating Christmas and then, in later viewings, watches itself interacting with the camera. Was there a pure experience of reality in there? Who knows?

One thing seems clear: as the Christmas story becomes a backdrop to ourselves reciting the story, it takes more and more for the story to break through. The issue isn’t coarseness of culture or epidemic secularism. The issue is our self-absorption. A story about God taking human form to lead humanity in a new direction becomes a play within a play, actors-in-role watching other actors-in-role, and waiting for applause.

My suggestion _ more Christmas pageants, but with this proviso: no video cameras, no seeing the event through a digital camera lens, no watching the latest girl to play Mary and comparing her to last year, or the annual debate about using a live baby or a doll. Just the story, as lived by nervous children, and just our own tears _ as we sense what God has done for us.

KRE/JL END EHRICH

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)