By Luiz Coelho
Many of you might be enjoying this cold day, drinking a cup of hot tea, and resting at home with the heat on and the fireplace burning. Snow might be falling outside, and surely Christmastide and this Epiphanytide have been cold as well. Easter, on the contrary, will signalize the beginning of warmer times, and the blossoming of flowers and new life coming. Fields that are covered with snow right now will be full of joy to celebrate the Resurrection of the Lord. And next year, the same cycle will start over again.
However, I have lived most of my life in the Southern Hemisphere, and holidays and seasons have been very different to me. Christmas, to us, is at the beginning of Summer, and in some places is followed by temperatures that are close to 100 F degrees. Easter, on the contrary, marks the beginning of Fall, and therefore is always followed by the retraction of nature as it prepares itself to the upcoming winter. On the other side of the planet, and to a large number of believers, none of the environmental metaphors associated with Christian holidays match.
And yet, those feasts mean to us as much as they mean to those who live in Northern lands, to a point that new habits were created to situate them in time and space. To me, for example, it is very awkward to think about Christmas without the warm weather, open windows and outdoor parties. Epiphany is never the same without processions and the reenactment of Kings’ parties under the hot sun. And Easter always presupposes the coming of Fall, and its gentle weather after months of a torrid Summer.
Nevertheless, we were impacted both by cultural aspects brought by immigrants (mostly from Europe) and also by recent globalization. So, even though sometimes our Christmas carols were deliberately changed to substitute elements such as “snow” by “bells” and other more neutral words, we still deal in a supposedly contradictory yet surprisingly harmonic way with Christmas trees covered by fake snow, Santa Claus, exuberant Easter flower arrangements and other elements that could easily be misunderstood as cultural imperialism in these times of political correctness. Yet, they are cherished by us and have their special place in this symbolic world that do not necessarily need to make any sense.
An English friend, now a missionary in Rio de Janeiro, was impressed by how all those elements that seem so contradictory actually work together. It was still weird to him to spend Christmas without the cold weather and specificities of his own cultural and religious traditions, even though he was surrounded by references to them, adapted to a tropical summer. “It’s all about the Incarnation” – he finally settled. Surely it is, and I would expand that idea even more… It is all about a God whose mysteries are so greater than any references to space and time that, regardless of where we are, or who we are, His message will be always fresh and anew.
Luiz Coelho, a seminarian from the Diocese of Rio de Janero, spends part of the year in the BFA program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His Web site includes his art and his blog, Wandering Christian, on which he examines “Christianity in the third millennium, from a progressive, Latin American and Anglican point of view.”