One of the best books I read this year was Ephraim Radner’s A Time to Keep.  I hope to reflect on it in this space at the beginning of the new year.  Regardless, the book came to mind when reading the Christmas thoughts of Carl R. Trueman over at First Things a few days ago (as both have significant things to say about mortality and the Christian faith).  In his post, gleefully titled “A Merry Pascalian Christmas,” Trueman brings Blaise Pascal’s view of things to bear on contemporary culture, particularly in how we view our bodies and the fact of their frailty.

Above all Christian thinkers, Pascal anticipated and critiqued the spirit of our present age. With his notions of distraction and diversion, he saw both the luxury and the bureaucratic complexity of the French court of his day as driven by a deep psychological need: the desire to avoid facing the reality of mortality. Thus, the French king, who could surely have spent all day merely contemplating his own glory, actually spends every day in busy-ness or occupied with trivial entertainment, for anything is preferable to solitude. Solitude is the context in which our minds move forward to think about our impending deaths.

Death, of course, is not something anyone likes to talk about, even within the horizon of the Christian faith.  Contemporary politics of the body, Trueman asserts, are also made to lead us to believe that our bodies have no final say in things.

If we can pretend that our bodies are of only very subordinate or incidental significance to who we are, then we can pretend that we may ultimately beat their authority. Pascal would no doubt see the psychological turn in our culture as an obvious one: It combines both the therapeutic needs that are met by entertainment and the repudiation of the significance of our bodies.

Yet death is unavoidable and so, when it makes its inevitable appearance, it must be rationalized. This is especially striking with regard to the Immortals of our own day, the celebrities, those High Priests of distraction who serve the most important function of all.

No matter what we declare ourselves to be (or how we view the celebrities around us), though, we can’t get around our mortality.

The metaphysical assumptions of the present age, so perfectly articulated in . . . phrases [like] “You can be whatever you want to be” . . .  are anti-Incarnational at the deepest level. And they are flatly contradicted by our own mortality. Our bodies will have the final word on who we are. No view of reality that denies or marginalizes death can help us to live. That is why Christianity is so important. As Christianity claims, death is overcome not by our pretending it is not there but by God’s going through it. The last temptation of Christ—“If you are the king of the Jews, come down from the cross!”—had to be resisted in favor of the second thief’s prayer, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom!” Christ really had to die that human beings might truly live.

That is why, Trueman suggests, the Incarnation of Jesus and all that it entails for humanity is so significant (and with it, Christmas).  Trueman concludes:

Perhaps the irony of Christmas is that, in its current form, it has become one of the focal points of the culture of distraction, which Pascal so ably critiqued. It is all about consumption, which is just another form of distraction and diversion. It gives us a baby Jesus, helpless and conveniently trapped in a manger, a Christ who is just one more manageable commodity. Ironically, the real message of Christmas is the exact opposite: not to distract us from death but to point us toward death, and then its destruction in Christ. Were death not a reality, Christmas would not be necessary.

The article is a great reflection on the season, particularly as Advent comes to a close and we enter the season of Christmas.  You can read the whole thing here.  Any little thing that can help us remember not just “the reason for the season” but the part that the season plays in the greater story is worth the effort.