(Via Johan de Haan)

It’s that merry time of year once more when churches morph into a placid haven for every simple soul haunted by baseless illusions of broadway grandeur and a soapbox for off-key musicians of every kind. Indeed, for the humble admission price of lending one’s ears to bronze age drivel, and the timeous surrender of hard-earned pennies into a refashioned sock, the theatre has literally come to a house of worship near you. For those of you misfortunate enough to have observed the “the Starry Messenger”, one can rest assured that one’s dose of churchly drama will not provide quite the same length of dreariness however, the central message is of course eerily similar. In the many generations since the non-event of the virgin birth, adults of our species can still be observed donning their fake wings and re-enacting the preceding non-event of a young woman being confronted with a heavenly creature boldly announcing the magical expropriation of her womb. So enthralling do adherents of the christian faith find this tale that it is of course the standard fare of December sermons and has been for as long as one would care to investigate. So enticing are the economic benefits of its reproduction that to the extent that playstations and sugary treats have not usurped its once unquestioned dominance, the fairytale is rehashed, rephrased, reproduced and stamped into the starry eyed innocence of the young with wanton abandon.

Were I a man of superstition, prone to wishthinking, I would long since have come to the unavoidable conclusion that in a deviant act of heavenly, or hellish, tomfoolery, a power greater than I has assigned dark comedy to haunt me wherever I would rather not go. Indeed, how else but by black magic is one to explain the fantastical comedy of events that I had the pleasure of witnessing at one such theatrical production. Deep into the very midst of this churchly affair, with the communal act of cannibalism having been completed and with the usual misconstruction of the Isaiah prophecy having found its way into the liturgy, a veiled maiden appeared from behind a curtain with the name Mary. Young and beautiful she was, humming to herself in blissful ignorance and youthful naivety, quite unaware that her fertility and features were such as to tempt the very gods into a pre-marital sexual affair. Suddenly, from the behind the same curtain, accompanied with the customary burst of special effect smoke, appeared a heavenly minion, winged and blonde, dressed in the very whitest of robes, truly an angel of the most high. In a raspy voice, intermingled with the tell-tale fuzz of an amateur sound director, a promise was made, a prediction of a holy and immaculate conception of a child, as so selectively told in the Gospel of Luke. Predictable, as all prospective teenage mothers would be hasty in doing, notice was had of the fact that such reproduction is quite uncommon and Mary, rightly so, queried “how is this possible, I am but a virgin”. To which the angel of god responded in shameless fashion, “That’s OK, God will come on you”.

Any godless heathen with a certain degree of experience with any combination of sexual relations would of course be hard pressed not to exploit this exchange for one’s own amusement in so serious a setting but from various corners of the house of God, the grunts, grimaces and giggles were audible, and whilst it began with what were no doubt a bunch of bored adolescents, the rumbling quickly spread and the cast of actors were struck by a moment of stunned silence as they realized the implication of their poor choice of words, no doubt berating the biblical scholars of the latest rehash of the New International Version for retaining such phrases in so sexually enlightened an era. Noticeably Mary’s cheeks took on a bashful red hue, suggesting but for a moment that this particular actress may have been more knowledgeable of earthly matters than the simple Jewish maiden she had been asked to portray, god’s will notwithstanding.

Naturally, quite instinctively, one is drawn to the enviable dilemma of how best to regale future generations with the happenstance of this fateful day. Does one cite the colorful antics of Trevor Nunn’s “A comedy of errors” in comparison, or does one gather the jovial amongst you around one’s favourite barstool repeating by way of annual tradition this story until it becomes a legend in its own right, a pro-fairyism if you will? Then it struck me, yet again, that in the midst of this serving of infantile humour and comedy one is confronted with the stupendous ignorance and idiocy of it all. The merriment in this tale is not one of language or circumstance but rests on the absolute absurdity of the tale itself. Here I was, drawn once more into the religious company of my fellow men and women, many of whom seek to maintain that the creator and heaven and earth, the loving patriarch and ruler of all, based on a mistranslation of an ancient text, and in correction of a wrong he himself had created and could have erased at a whim, sent himself as himself to be himself as a man, to be born of a virgin in the backward waters of primitive Palestine for no other reason than that he sought to have himself crucified to satiate his own thirst for a human sacrifice. Not only that, but that this magical manifestation of a god walked the earth justified by nothing but biological impossibility and cheap trickery and who by deed or revelation alone would leave nothing in substantiation of this alleged supernatural endorsement.

The infantile humour is not to be found in a moment of awkwardness, a flash of hypocrisy or the pitiful insistence by believers to impregnate each other and their young with this shameless concoction, it is to be found in the entire construct of the christian faith, the rank idiocy of its founding principles and the communal madness which still haunts our species to this day. This Christmas, when the faithful speak of good tidings, heavenly hosts, magical stars and god incarnate I beg but a moment of reflection upon a due and appropriate challenge, that as queried by David Hume, we ponder briefly the challenge of the more likely: That the whole natural order is suspended or that a Jewish minx should tell a lie?