This article by Operation Noah campaign strategist Mark Dowd originally appeared in the Catholic Herald.
There are some sermons which will always live on forever in your mind. The first Sunday in Advent at a parish in north London some three years ago. No sooner had the melodic strains of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" died down than the priest let rip. And yes, I think the finger actually did wag at us.
"Of course we can have the crib up. Of course we'll see the shepherds and the animals," he assured us. "But we're not putting the baby Jesus in there until the Midnight Mass. I know other churches don't do it like that. But Our Lord comes at Christmas and not before."
In a stroke of serendipity, later that afternoon on the television, I saw a credit card advertisement which was urging viewers to "take the waiting out of wanting". I recalled Freud's definition of civilisation as the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct. Never before in human history, I suspect, have we been as bad at pondering, contemplating and opening up that space inside us which allows the light of God to illuminate our minds and hearts.
From the fourth century, the Advent season was kept as a period of fasting as strictly as that of Lent. In the Anglican and Lutheran churches this fasting rule was later relaxed, with the Catholic Church doing likewise in due course, but still keeping Advent as a season of penitence. These last few decades have seen the motor of high street consumption and shopping frenzy put paid to such notions of temperance and restraint. However, in these fretful times of the credit crunch, is this an opportune time to be radical: quite literally, to get back to our roots?
At Operation Noah, a faith-based community that urges the care of God's creation to be at the heart of our outlook on the world, we're running a "Reclaim Christmas" anti-consumption campaign that attempts to "put the waiting back into wanting".
A young couple that reflect this central message are Mark and Tamsin Cuthbert who live in King's Heath in Birmingham. Their commitment to the Christian faith is easily evidenced by the very names given to their two young daughters - Grace and Hope. Last year, they decided to treat the festive season in a radically new way.
"Things were a little tight because I'd given up work to look after Hope," explains Tamsin, "so we made an effort to shun the High Street and make our own presents." Dozens of jars of chutney with pears from the garden, simple hand-crafted jewellery and even domestically fashioned Christmas cards. Apart from staying within a much more affordable budget, we actually ended up giving out more presents to people."
Moreover, it proved altogether better for the family as Tamsin's slightly less dexterous husband Mark joined in and also did little four-year-old Grace.
"There's a togetherness that you get from being creative that you simply don't get from sharing around the shops with hordes of strangers," says Tamsin. She has a point. And how many of us can say we've cherishingly bestowed gifts to our loved ones that have been fashioned by our own fair hands and not assembled on some distant Chinese production line?
It's a real unknown as to whether this is likely to be the pattern of things for years to come as the spectre of peer group pressure begins to tell on her young children as they advance through the schooling system. How will they convincingly head off the rasping accusation that "Mummy and Daddy don't love me because I haven't got a new iPod?" For now the Cuthberts are simply happy to cross that bridge when they come to it. In this quiet part of southern Birmingham, it's definitely a case of "pray now, buy later".
If this Christmas is anything to go by in Britain alone we'll get through around 125,000 tons of plastic packaging - that's the weight of nearly 8,000 double decker buses.
December is a month when we use up "stuff" like no other month. So picture this for an image - mindful of all this, on this first weekend of Advent I'll be standing alongside Birmingham's Anglican bishop, the Rt Rev David Urquhart, as we kick-start Advent with a service of worship - not in the nave of St Philip's Cathedral or under the stained glass of St Martin's opposite the Bull Ring. No, at a city centre recycling plant. A short service of worship will have the aim of connecting worshippers to a deeper realisation of the impact they have on the world around them.
This Advent message will be taken with zeal to the City's shopping centres as the faithful bestow presents to unsuspecting members of the public - quality possessions from the City's homes. And then to cap it off: an evensong service of praise for Creation during which we pause and reflect on the coming gift of a small child among us in the God-made-flesh.
Bishop Urquhart says: "We are asking people to stop before they shop and think of other ways of celebrating Christmas this year. Most of us have unused gifts or mistake-buys at home that could make a great gift for someone else such as a DVD, a once-read book, an unwanted toy or unopened toiletries.
"Go and take a friend out for dinner - offer them a few hours of labour in their garden," he advises. He even mentions a novel concept for hard-pressed parents: babysitting vouchers.
"We want to remember the value of a gift is not measured by how much money it cost. At Christmas we remember the gift of Jesus - the most wonderful gift to humanity - was not wrapped in cellophane or badged with a designer label."
These are themes which have been taken up by a team of drama writers. TenTen Theatre have specialised in recent years in getting hard-hitting scripts on issues like chastity and fidelity into Catholic schools and colleges. Next year they'll be touring Britain with a new work on knife crime. A Present For the Future is a work that Operation Noah commissioned from Marc Norris and Martin O'Brien. It centres on a young boy called Thomas who is distinctly unhappy at the fact that he has not got the 42-inch plasma television set he was demanding for Christmas. In this family there is plenty of money and food around but no one seems especially happy.
Thomas and his sister Grace are then taken back in time to the Christmas of 1945 where they see their grandparents in a post-war world of rationing food. Children are making go-karts with wooden crates and the children from 2008 are mystified as to why people with so little (comparatively speaking) are so happy. When the final act unfolds, they are in the Christmas of 2045 and see a world where the lights are on an hour a day due to energy cutbacks and a society ravaged by environmental destruction.
It's just like Scrooge and A Christmas Carol: if you want to shape the future you have to undergo conversion in the here and now. Young Thomas is cast as the arch materialist, but his sister, Grace, has a deeply religious instinct and pines for a simplicity which is based on the example of the Nativity story.
"The last time I checked," she tells Thomas, "Jesus was born in a humble stable and not the lobby of the MGM Grand." I can empathise with Thomas. I remember the excitement of the visits to Santa in the grotto at Pauldens' department store on Market Street in Manchester in the mid-1960s. I recall the sofa smothered with boxes of glittering wrapping paper. I think I made a connection that this was all because my parents loved me, but it was never really that clear where the "Christ" bit was at Christmas. Yes, like so many of us, our religious sensibilities were getting worn away by the tides of secularism at the very time of the year when they should have been foremost in our minds.
So this Christmas, I'm going to take a cue from a wise old bird of a priest who heard my confession many years ago. He didn't dish out the predictable "Three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys." He told me to focus on being "intensely present" to those around me. To stop. To listen actively and to try and heal through the sheer business of being. "Do nothing to judge or pass comment on them," he said. "Just let them know that you are there for them. Like God is. Unconditionally."
The more I thought about how hard this was, the more I pined for the formulaic penance of the Hail Holy Queens and the Glory Bes. We think we can attend to these needs in others by thrusting a box into somebody's midriff and pronouncing it "job done". Let's face it - it's papering over the cracks. So this will be my Advent and Christmas challenge. It will be better for the bank balance certainly. But it is not going to be easy.
Mark Dowd is campaign strategist for Operation Noah (www.operationnoah.org).
