It is December and thoughts are turning to carol singing and to the question of whether the object of our carols was a special baby or a random ordinary one.
But first; I want to look at the word random. It reflects an idea that things can exist and happen for no reason whatsoever. To be random, there is no prior thought, no aim, no planning no pattern, in fact nothing lying behind an outcome. It is unpredictable.
Yet in real life randomness is nigh on impossible to find, as everything seems ultimately predictable and, as we understand more about life’s variables, we increase predictability. This is proven by increased reliability (if not longevity) of manufactured products. Even animal and human behaviour seems to be largely predictable.
We do not see randomness around us, and this is because we actually know that when anything changes, something has caused it. Despite this however, it is also true that a kind of randomness can be feigned, as with Ernie the premium bond computer.
The modern Ernie has electric circuits which mirror the cogs of the WW2 German coding machine Enigma. In that machine, each wheel/cog had a unique meaning which then interacted with multiple other cogs with different meanings. After a few turns the original message came out as groups of letters in a seemingly random order. However, as neither Ernie nor Enigma is really random, it is possible to backtrack to their original codes.
As each Christmas approaches I think about how some folk believe that randomness brought about the universe and all life. Their view is that each of us is a random life form on a random planet. From that it can be said that everything thing we see, or hear, smell, taste or touch is random, we have come from nowhere and are going nowhere. Our thoughts and feelings are illusory within the chemistry of our brains the rest is nothing!
Isaiah Berlin, a twentieth century thinker put this case rather assertively when he said that we “could believe him in his suspicion that, … life has no meaning except that which we give it”, and that, ‘Those who believe in an all embracing God … are pathetically deluded.”
On that basis, and although he reckons I am pathetically deluded, I wish I had the same confidence in my own powers of reasoning as he had in his, because it seems to me that behind the Christmas message is something that could make us reflect that maybe our own powers of intellect are not infallible. Maybe, just maybe, we ourselves are not able to give meaning to the world. Maybe there is a purpose behind creation and that the Christmas baby raises the possibility that we can ‘tap into’ the creative force.
However, December is not just the time for thought it is also the time for action. The tups have done their work and the ewes are on special rations, the bees are bedded down for winter and the Ross Cobs are on grass, grapes and a range of grains plus apple, in preparation for their starring role on the Christmas table.
Throughout the parishes folks will be planning meals, buying presents and preparing to welcome family and friends. The list is long and, despite planning something is invariably forgotten. However, on Christmas morning, some hundreds of local folk have planned to be in Church to sing carols and share the hope brought to them by an extraordinary baby.
In conclusion; I return to this month’s opening comments about prior thought or randomness and have concluded, that I would rather sing carols about hope in the baby than sing to Isaiah Berlin’s nihilistic certainties.
However, John Betjeman summed it up far better than can I, and so I leave you with the final verses of his poem “Christmas”.
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare –
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/787
View from the Pew 