Yes, Danny, There was a Jesus

It’s taken me almost 83 years to understand that old chestnut about the New York editor who, contrary to a local Scrooge’s literalism, had to assure the young Virginia that, yes, there was an old bloke named Santa Claus. Things have suddenly become complicated because this old ex-Catholic agnostic lives in a German household where three year old Danny is a baptized Lutheran and his mother Hilly belongs to her church’s choir whose members recently gave Danny a five volume set of Bible stories for his third birthday (in German, and I am bilingual at a kindergarten level).

Mother sits by, occasionally correcting my shaky pronunciation or translating an obscure verb.

I stumbled along with the first episodes—on the flood, and David and Goliath (he loves every time Goliath gets stoned!) But with Book III we reached the Birth of Jesus. His Evangelical kindergarten, by the way, entertained their elders two days ago on the little stage of the local Hilton hotel. There were pseudo-scandalized adult titters as our young Mary and Joseph tried to comprehend the Angel Gabriel’s fertilization news.

Now the Bible is not a Catholic forte. I take it Luther took most umbrage at how the RC’s had replaced the Bible with Mariolatry and other fakelore. (I can still spout my altarboy’s Mass Latin, but I’d flunk the simplest SAT test on the Holy Book.) So I try to mask my skepticism from Danny as I repeat (and repeat, ad infinitum) those simple tales of the Augustan census, and the inns without rooms,and the shepherds and the Three Wise Men and their star. Even as I identify with compassion for the poor embodied in these tales. Long decades of reading philosophy intervene! I want Danny to learn compassion! But the old stories creak. How to tell those stories with conviction.

Thus was I thrilled serendipitously to read in the Christmas eve edition of the International Herald Tribune no less a spirit than Umberto Eco Op Edifying on an analogous subject: the spectacle of three teenage kids of nonbelieving parents in a secular culture trying unsuccessfully to comprehend great art in their ignorance: a 15 year old girl with a book of art reproductions and two 15 year old boys just returned from the Louvre, elated but uncomprehending! Eco groused that most Italian kids knew about the death of Hector but not of St. Sebastian.

“It’s impossible,” he continued, “to understand roughly three-quarters of Western art if you don’t know the events of the Old and New Testaments and the stories of the saints. Who’s that girl with her eyes on a plate? Is she something out of “Night of the Living Dead?” Come on: Your answer! Eco rails that “they cram students’ heads with the Stations of the Cross while keeping them in the dark about “the woman clothed with the sun” who appears in the book of Revelations.”

Eco concludes his sweet and highly credible harangue with the speculation that “the plight of those 15-year-olds who didn’t recognize the Three Wise Men, suggests to me that our vast information network conveys fewer and fewer facts that are truly helpful and more and more that are totally useless.” (IHT, 12/24-25, p.6.)

Twitter away, folks!

Reminds me of Thoreau’s reaction to New Englanders’ too enthusiastic about the newly laid Atlantic cable. “And what will be the first thing that comes into the broad flapping American ear? That the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough?” Heh, Henry, life here ain’t no rentless Walden. My Heine wife insists I translate my new Bible stories into English as we stumble along, so Danny at least can become bi-lingual.

Merry Xmas, and to all a decent accent.