NOTE: This piece originally appeared in the National Catholic Register in 1982.
Once I saw Santa Claus. Not some bogus fellow in the mall, but the real thing, in the sky: sleigh, reindeer, and all. It was Christmas Eve and I was about four years old. An aunt of mine was out in the backyard, lighting sparklers and throwing them into the air, and I was one of several children watching from the living room window. Some after-effect of the flashing and spinning lights combined with my high excitement to give me a brief and vivid glimpse of the reindeer, the sleigh, and the bright red suit.
I’m pretty sure I screamed. I know that all of us scrambled up the stairs and dove into bed, believing that if we saw Santa he would bring us no presents, and hoping that he didn’t know I’d spotted him. For several Christmases I held on to my belief in that apparition. I recall testifying to its truth in an elementary school debate on the existence of Santa Claus. But at some point I was forced to admit that I had been mistaken.
Today I believe in God, heaven and hell. Doesn’t it seem likely that I am deluded now in very much the same way as I was when I thought I had seen Santa Claus? When I was a child I believed in a man at the North Pole who would give me a bicycle if I behaved myself. Now I believe in a Person in heaven who will give me eternal life if I behave myself. This is an open-and-shut case, isn’t it? Surely the cynics of the world must be right in ascribing religious belief to a childish credulity.
Cardinal Newman, who of course commanded a mighty intellect himself, strongly mistrusted human reason. Though he affirmed with the Church that right reason always leads to God, he saw little of right reason around him and feared that the use of the intellect in his time tended toward “a deep and plausible skepticism.” He was right, of course. And the most important word in that phrase is “plausible.” The opinion that belief in God is wishful thinking is plausible. The charge that I became a Catholic because I was unable to face life without Santa Claus is plausible.
But it is false. I don’t intend here to attempt a proof of the truth of Christianity, but I would like to point out that analogies such as those which compare God to Santa Claus can be quite misleading. Chesterton notes, in Orthodoxy (a wonderful book which you should read if you haven’t already), the curiously skewed nature of reality: “Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.”
An alien intelligence examining a man would find him almost perfectly symmetrical: He would find “an arm on the right and one on the left…the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, when he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was a heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.”
Have you ever noticed how much of our folk wisdom seems to contradict itself, how many common-sense proverbs take opposing stands? “Haste makes waste” seems at cross-purposes with “strike while the iron is hot.” “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree” is challenged by “blood will tell.” And usually both are true; it is a matter of discerning their proper application.
We are often told, and it is quite true, that we should learn from history. We know the familiar warning that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. But, paradoxically, it is our study of history which gives us the adage “history never repeats itself.” The invader from the sea is driven off, the coasts fortified and a steady watch maintained; the next time, the invader comes from the mountains.
It is the same in the intellectual life of an individual or a culture. Our critics, determined not to be mocked for rejecting a young Beethoven, make themselves ridiculous by praising frauds. And the skeptic’s boast that he has seen through all illusions becomes the quaintest illusion of all. The equation of God to Santa Claus does not hold up. To mention one major discrepancy, we observe that every child ceases almost at once to believe in Santa Claus when he is told that the presents come from his parents, whereas there is no such clear alternative explanation for the things we hold to be gifts from God. Many people who are atheists in practice nevertheless stop short of declaring with certainty that God does not exist and call themselves agnostics. I have never met anyone who remained agnostic on the question of Santa Claus past childhood.
Like the single heart on the left side, the existence of God is a striking asymmetry in the cosmos, but one which nevertheless seems correct and appropriate. It confirms our intuition that the world is orderly but not uniform. And there could be no more appropriate symbol of this pattern than the thing so prominently associated with the observance of Christmas: the gift.
A gift is an interjection of something gratuitous and uncalled-for into the fabric of ordinary life. It is by definition undeserved (else it would be a payment) and by implication unexpected. The world is full of gifts. I note, for instance, its beauty. I hold the beauty to be real and have nothing to say to those who hold that it is entirely in the eye of the beholder, as I have nothing to say to those who claim that all morality is entirely subjective. A little while ago I was looking at a hunting magazine. To judge by the number of pictures of beautiful animals appearing in it, the hunters of the world must agree with me that a deer or a mallard duck is very beautiful. They need not have been. They could have been perfectly functional without being lovely. I think God loves their beauty. I also think it is a gift to us, since we have the consciousness to rejoice in it.
A gift is the essential act of love, which is why “to give oneself” is rightly used as a description of the sexual act, and why fornication and prostitution are so ugly. In a true gift there is no hint of obligation or self-interest. It is above justice. The idea of a fair exchange is a worthy idea and one which has the beauty of order. The idea of a gift is not only a better and higher thing but also—and here is one of the luminous secrets hidden in the idea of God as Creator—the thing which came first. We tend to see giving as something added on to a relationship, after the demands of fairness have been satisfied. But it is not so in our relationship with God, for our existence is itself a gift, and we would know nothing of fair exchange had we not first been the recipients of a splendid gift which we could not possibly have deserved, since before it we were not.
At Christmas we celebrate an even greater gift. God lost nothing in making us, but in taking on our flesh He took on our pain. He suffered it and made it possible for us to be freed from it, which we could not have done for ourselves any more than we could have called ourselves into existence. Thus Santa Claus, though his role has gotten out of hand and should be reduced, is an appropriate piece of folklore for the season: an old man who loves children so much that he does nothing all year except make things to give to them. At Christmas we celebrate with gifts the perfect Gift. And that is why we are, and should be, merry.