Prepared to Drown: Deep Dives into an Expansive Faith
A monthly podcast featuring informative and diverse voices exploring contemporary topics ranging from religious deconstruction, anti-racism, and sexuality to holy texts, labour unions, and artificial intelligence.
Prepared to Drown: Deep Dives into an Expansive Faith
Episode 3 - Baptism by Eggnog
In our Christmas-themed episode, special guest Councillor Gian Carlo Carra joins Rev. Bill and Rev. Joanne for a deep and provocative discussion about the enduring power of a story proclaiming "peace on earth, and good will to all people", the alleged "war on Christmas" (spoiler alert: there isn't one!) and the importance of communities in maintaining hope for love to break through in our world today. You'll also hear who makes each panelist's "nice list", and join Joanne on the hunt for egg nog. And, one final present under the tree: we left the microphones on to give you all a taste of the live music we enjoy at each recording session!
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Bill
00:02
It's nearly Christmas and we are turning on the mics again to talk about what this season means for our faith, our world and the God we're all trying to understand. No sugarcoating, no perfect nativity scenes here, just an honest look at the messy, beautiful story of a God who shows up in the most unexpected places. And this time we're bringing some holiday spirit and a special guest, ward 9 City Councillor Giancarlo Carraz, joining us and coming along for the ride. You'll never walk on water if you're not prepared to drown. Well, christmas is all about diving into the mystery of incarnation, of love breaking through and of hope showing up in the dark. Baby, it's cold outside and at these temperatures I can walk on water. I'm Bill Weaver and this is Prepared to Drown Deep Dives into an Expanse of Faith. Welcome to our Christmas episode Baptism by Eggnog. And so here we are, and it is just before Christmas and it is busy and it is crazy, and it is starting to get a little bit colder outside, and we are here with episode three of Prepared to Drown Deep Dives into an Expansive Faith. So thanks for joining us, whether you are part of our live audience here tonight or whether you are listening online.
01:10
In the lead up to Christmas. We are glad that you are here and with us tonight. Ricardo de Menezes actually had to send his regrets at the last moment. He was going to be a part of our panel, but we still have a robust conversation ahead of us because we still have with us the Reverend Joanne Anquist, to my right and further to my right, our special guest tonight. I am so glad that he is here, city Ward 9, city Councillor Giancarlo Carra, who has been City Councillor since 2010. So right about the time that I was finishing University, this guy was already in the halls of City Council working for the good people of Calgary and beyond, and him and I have had the opportunity to work on a couple of different things throughout the years and definitely respect his vision and his desire and his work for justice in the city. So thank you for being here tonight, and I'll turn it over to you to actually introduce yourself a bit as to why it is you became a freaking politician.
Gian Carlo Carra
02:04
Well, it's an honor to be here, and what a great vibe. This is a really cool scene. It's nice to have a conversation in front of a live audience. As Bill said, I've been a politician for a really long time.
02:17
Now I'm in my 15th year of service and I became a member of Calgary City Council because before that I had a 10-year career in sustainable urban design and regional planning and basically I worked with cities, towns, developers, communities across North America, bringing some expertise to the question of how do we move away from auto dependency and being just a place where you need a car to survive, and how do we get into the project of building a more sustainable city or town or region based on walkable neighborhoods networked with sustainable infrastructure systems. And so my training and my practice was about bringing the nuts and bolts of how you do that, and you know there's a lot of most of the standards that we've written are designed for cars moving at 50 kilometers an hour. Human beings move much slower than that and we've forgotten how to lay out our habitat as human habitat, and my expertise was in what human habitat looks like, how do you build it in a functional and a safe and an integrated way. And it was also about once you'd sort of worked with people people who were faced with the idea of getting 5,000 new neighbors over the next couple of years. A developer who was freaked out about trying something different but excited at the opportunity. A city that had been talking about sustainability and equity and justice and things like that, but didn't know how to actually walk that talk. Once you'd gotten everybody in a room and created a vision of how that could actually work, you realized it was against the rules, because all of the rules and regulations that we built in North America over the last 70 years have really been about creating automobile habitat. And so you had to write new rules and regulations so that the local city council or regional council or whatever could pass them into law, so that that vision could actually be built in brick and mortar. And that's really your gateway drug for becoming a municipal politician, because that's really what our municipal politicians do they preside over the rules and regulations whereby we build the world that we share together.
04:33
And so in my spare time, as I was working continentally, I had an academic research job at the city of Calgary where I was trying to sort of understand where we were in the history of North America and the project of getting back to building walkable cities and transit-focused neighborhoods and all of that and more sustainable regions, and I realized that we're in a really tipping point moment in history. And to understand how that fits into where we came from and where we're at and where we're going was part of the academic research I was doing. And then I did a bunch of community activism in East Calgary communities. I was the president of the Inglewood Community Association for seven years. I worked extensively with the communities of Greater Forest, lawn and I think about East Calgary as sort of the Brooklyn of Calgary. I think of it as you know, brooklyn is the largest borough of New York City and they say if they were a city on their own right they'd be the third largest city in North America. They're a city of working neighborhoods and landscapes that built, you know, not only New York City but America, and I think of East Calgary that way too. I think of it as working neighborhoods and landscapes that built the Calgary we live in today and, because of their diversity of people and place, are actively building the city that we're becoming, which is a very different city than the city we've been for the last several decades, and that's what cities do they change all the time.
05:59
So, after seeing what was emerging around North America, after talking about it in a sort of a dispassionate and academic way, and also about rolling up my sleeves and working with local communities, by 2010, I'd reached this breaking point where I realized I had to either give up on Calgary, which was building a say-do gap it was talking about sustainability, but it was really not interested in changing anything it was doing and I was butting heads with the planning department.
06:31
I was leading developers who were interested in working with me to slaughter because they were banging themselves against rules and regulations that weren't interested in changing.
06:40
I realized I had to either give up or I had to do something radical.
06:43
And I chose the radical path and became a city councilor, and I was very lucky to get elected alongside Nahed Nenshi, who is another person who deeply understands cities, and we were off to the races and it's been a struggle, but it's also been incredibly rewarding, because Calgary is big enough to really matter on the global scale and we're consistently winning you know, global livability index awards and stuff like that but we're also a small enough place where you can make change, and so it's an amazing laboratory and we're also, like you know, one of the most automobile dependent places in North America. But at the same time, you know, we have an incredible transit system. But at the same time we have an incredible transit system, the AECOM group that the province just hired to sort of come up with a brand new green line after 10 years of study in two months. They could not believe the transit ridership in the city. They were like are you guys kidding me? We've never seen this kind of transit ridership in such a small city.
Bill
07:42
Well, and as a guy who just bought his first bike in 20 years this past summer, like the bike networking and bike YYC community here as well, right.
Gian Carlo Carra
07:50
Exactly Active transportation. We are a tale of two cities, right, we are the worst of the worst when it comes to automobile-dependent suburban sprawl and we are also right at the cutting edge of doing everything right and we've always been that. Two stories, and so there's there's a tension in this city. That that's really interesting and that and it's been rewarding to serve for the last I'm on my 15th year of service so, in the spirit of really awesome segues, let's talk about two stories tonight.
Bill
08:24
Let's start with the story. Uh, the story that I think is probably familiar to most of the people sitting in the room here A story of an unwed teenage mother and her betrothed that have wandered all the way to Bethlehem, the city of David, for a census that Caesar has declared, for a census that Caesar has, uh, has declared. And, uh, when they arrived there, uh, colloquially or culturally we would say there was no room at the inn, which I'm sure Joanne is going to pounce all over in a moment when I let her Um and uh, and so, uh, a child is born in a manger, uh, in in a stable, and, uh, this begins a story of shepherds and angels and becomes a focal point of so much of the Christian tradition, especially after the 1800s, but all the way throughout our history, and of our tradition, this Christmas story, this nativity story. So I'm actually going to turn it over to you, joanne, first because I know you've got a lot to say about the nativity and at the same time, while doing that and opening it up for you to unpack that as you want, to the question that I'm asking both of you to start with is, when push comes to shove.
09:36
Here we are on the threshold of Christmas next week. Everything kind of grinds to a halt, I think, by and large in our city for a couple of days, unless you work for the church, in which case you've got a few more days afterwards, and then we start to at least shift into Christmas mode. So what, for you, is the reason for the season, the reason for Christmas, the reason for everything we go through? Is it this Bethlehem baby? Is it the fat guy in the suit that's going to come down your chimney? Is it the Hallmark Channel and its vast array of selections? But I'm going to turn it over to you, joanne, to start us off on the Christmas story and what the reason for the season is.
Joanne
10:21
Yeah, well, I think it's important just to put out there to begin with that these are mythologies, right? This is not history happening. That's been recorded down. It's important to remember that, because all the things that are in the story are reflective of this idea that there's this child born, this savior of the world. And how is it going to be different? He's going to set up a kingdom, or now we call it kingdom that is in opposition to the empire. That is a reflection of how, if we come together and work together, there's a place for everybody. So it's really important in this story that, or one of the stories, there's two right. So there's the shepherd story. You know where the shepherds come from the field and then there's the wise man story. In the shepherd story, it's really important that the people who greet this new king are the marginalized right. That's an important part. That's an important part.
11:22
But in that culture and this is why Bill knows this is my sort of bugabair that I've been dealing with the last few years is this idea that there was no room in the inn In first century Palestine. Animals were kept on the bottom part of the floor and the upper floor was where people slept, and it wasn't the inn, like a hotel, it was the house right. And so Mary and Joseph, when they came, because everybody was in town for the census in this story, they had to stay with the animals on the bottom floor because on the top floor it was full. Mary was not there giving birth with Jacob, with Joseph as the midwife, like that was not what was happening. I'm sure she was surrounded by relatives hospitality is so important people. They were there for this birth. They came together for Joseph and Mary and they weren't this you know poor couple who everyone you know didn't notice. Um, in a culture like that, where there's a lot of marginalized people because the empire has made this space, you take care of each other.
12:30
So the reason for the season for me and I always say I wish we put as much effort into easter as we did to christmas, because easter is the story that actually grounds the christian faith, the idea of renewal, new life, a new world. Christmas is a fun time and for me Christmas has been the Christian gift to the world. Okay, so even in countries that are not predominantly Christian, they celebrate Christmas, they celebrate Santa Claus, they give gifts, they buy things. But hidden in all that, the commercialism of Christmas which you could rant against are the words the angels said peace on earth, goodwill to all people. And for me, if just for one month in the year, the message in the world doesn't seem like it this year, but the message in the world is peace on earth, goodwill to all.
Bill
13:38
That is the greatest gift that Christmas can give to the world, to me.
Joanne
13:40
Do you want more? No, I'm good. I'd really like to talk about Brooklyn actually, but no, but yeah, no, it's great. I love the Christmas season because you do get people who just for a moment or two will think oh, it's not about me necessarily. There's a bigger story here and that's a gateway drug to the community of Christ.
Bill
14:03
If you ask me A lot of gateway drugs coming onto this podcast today Fantastic stuff. So, giancarlo, you have heard that and I'm sure you encounter the best and the worst at this time of the year in politics and in the city the recognition that certainly this seems to be kind of the season, the time when we certainly hear the calls to charity and donations and the good work that a lot of folks are doing. But right alongside that, obviously the temperature is getting colder and we're kind of reaching the end of a year and a lot of people are taking stock and a lot of people are starting to situate themselves for 2025 as well. And I'm curious, when you hear this vision, this idea of you know, like we can all come together and work together and there's enough for everybody, how do you think we're doing as far as that is concerned right now in our world?
Gian Carlo Carra
15:04
That's a huge question and I appreciate the contextualization of the story of Christmas. I brought up Brooklyn of Calgary because I grew up in New York City and I think about New York City as traditionally the world's second home. It is an amazing pluralistic project and sadly, my hometown of New York City has sort of become a cautionary tale of extreme societal inequality and ultra gentrification and it is no longer a place for everyone and there is such a huge population of people like my parents got married there and are living in the same apartment they moved into 58 years ago. They're still there hanging on, but the demographics are shifting and I live here now in Calgary as a proud Canadian and the thing I love most about Canada is the project of pluralism that Canada seems to have picked up the mantle from from New York and is still moving forward, although it is absolutely, in this day and age, a contested project. So one of the first things I think about as a representative of a pluralistic, democratic society is the fact that we do grind to a halt for Christmas. We take many, many days off, we exchange gifts, and this is something that transcends just Christian people, but we are a society of much, much more than Christian people with a variety of different traditions that are, I think, steeped in our common humanity, and I think that what I'm always interested in is the universality of Christmas and the fact that it resonates with everybody.
16:43
But also there's sort of a grievance that's taking place. Like you know, I spoke about my role as a change agent city builder and I always talk about the war on cars, right, like you know. Like you know, people are always afraid of the war on cars. The war on Christmas is like the war on cars, right, don't worry about the cars, they're going to be fine. We just spent the last seven decades building everything for them. They're going to be around forever. We just got to eke out a little bit more space for more people, and I think people who are worried about the war on Christmas shouldn't be worried. They should be, I think, much more plugged into how the universal message of peace and goodwill and taking care of each other is something that resonates with everyone, and that's, I think, why, regardless of your tradition, people are interested and supportive of taking a break and focusing on those things.
Bill
17:40
Yeah, what do you think about the war on Christmas, joanne, because certainly we hear about it all the time.
Joanne
17:45
What do you mean? There's a war on Christmas. We have two statutory holidays. At Christmas in this country, there are Christmas things on every. They paint Christmas things on every window. There's Santa Claus in the mall. Like this is no war. I think what people are trying to say is you know, it should be a faith holiday, right? They're Christians like right wing Well, more conservative Christians than I, am, for sure and they feel like Jesus is lost in all of this. And I'm like Jesus can take care of himself. Right, let's just celebrate this holiday, the fact that it's Christmas. There's no war on Christmas.
Gian Carlo Carra
18:29
I'm just gonna jump in for just one second and say that. Absolutely. In my experience, the people who are most concerned about the war on Christmas are, honestly the least faith-based or at least the least on side with what Jesus would want us to be focused on.
Joanne
18:47
But it's code, right? So this is the whole thing with our culture now. Is so when you say there's a war on cars, for instance, what people think is my lifestyle, my single family home with my nice grass in the suburbs is under attack, right? That's the code that they hear. So if we, you know, like George Bush was the one who said we feel like SUVs and driving with gas, is our culture right? And that culture is this? Well, yeah, it's not inclusive. It's this kind of, you know, white culture, if you want it, western culture, western European culture that's been transplanted into North America.
19:31
And the war on Christmas is the same thing. Well, we used to celebrate this way. Now everyone is celebrating Christmas, but it doesn't mean anything to them because they aren't Christian per se, and so we're going to lose our tradition. And you know, as a Christian minister, I'm like I'll celebrate Christmas in the church with people of faith in really meaningful and deep ways, and we'll talk about the idea that this child is the one who is to bring peace to the world, and we'll talk about salvation, or salve for the world. That is there and that's our tradition. And, you know, let's go all in in our communities, but the Christmas that is celebrated in culture. There's no war on Christmas. Nobody is trying to stop you from being Christian.
Gian Carlo Carra
20:18
I'm going to ask a provocative question to the two ministers here.
20:21
The two reverends here, because you know and I don't know the answer to this, but I will say I do know that there is a huge. I just equated the war on Christmas to the war on cars, but I know that the war on cars has to do with a deep-seated insecurity about trying to sustain the unsustainable right, and I don't know whether that plays a part in people's fears about Christmas. I suspect it doesn't right. I don't think there's anything unsustainable about peace on earth, goodwill to all people and a reset moment to really focus on taking care of each other. I don't think that that's an unsustainable proposition, but I do think that there are elements of Christian culture that feel like they are under attack from an increasingly pluralistic society.
Joanne
21:17
Well, here's the thing where I'll push back on that is that, um, I mean, we just at the church did this whole series on Carol off's book, which was? We just at the church did this whole series on Karoloff's book, which was? What is it called?
21:30
At a Loss for Words, right Conversations in an Age of Rage, in an Age of Rage and one of the words was woke right, which is, you know, the whole idea of stay awake, particularly in the African American community, was like, you know, there is systemic bias everywhere and you got to stay awake, particularly in the African-American community, was like there is systemic bias everywhere and you've got to stay awake because otherwise you're going to be bulldozed by it essentially. And then it gets appropriated and taken over and it becomes this thing, and so then you get this list of peace on earth. That's a lefty thing, it's a political thing. Goodwill to all people, that's a political thing. Lefty thing, it's a political thing. Goodwill to all people, that's a political thing. So even something as simple as the table is big enough for everyone and there's enough for everyone and we should have peace on the earth and goodwill for all becomes a political thing in our environment.
22:16
So this whole war on Christmas is trying to claw I the idea, um, that this is a christian country, not a pluralistic country. I totally agree. And it's the, the lefties, who want to, you know, open this country to everybody and anybody, and we're going to have all these different faith traditions and they don't share our values, and on and on and on. You hear this conversation because people, like we learned in a class in theology people are not afraid of change, they're afraid of loss. They're losing something in their tradition by this watering down of the story of Christmas.
Bill
22:56
And to be clear whether they actually are or not right the perception of loss regardless of the reality, right, well you feel, if someone else has the same rights that you do, that you've lost something which you haven't. Exactly.
Joanne
23:08
They've just been given opportunity. So I actually think that message peace on earth and goodwill to all is a pretty radical message.
Bill
23:18
So I would say, like my sense of things, purely again my sense of things is that really what it comes down to is like the radical nature of this idea that there could actually be peace on earth for everybody. Right, not peace on earth for all Christians, right. Peace on earth for everybody is challenging and scary enough for folks. When you reach the point of going, oh, wait a minute, that means I have to actually be okay with that person over there. Right minute, that means I have to. I have to actually be okay with that person over there. Right, which, hold on a second.
23:50
I've spent my entire life being afraid of that person over there for something that I don't even know why. Right, I was just raised to be afraid of and I, like I, I remember the day that my parents told me like the stuff that we spent a lifetime having to learn, you just knew right, and I see it in my kids too. Right, the stuff that I feel were the like, the things that were the social causes of my day that you had to fight to gain any ground on my kids just naturally, like their community just knows it now. Right, like because of the work that's been done in previous generations. But there are still things that I think people maybe legitimately fear, but paint with the wrong brush perhaps what that fear is. I think it's okay, for I shouldn't say it's okay. I think there's an understandable reason why, especially in the world that we live in today, and especially the world that we live in in the last two months, my daughter should be afraid about walking alone at night. I think that is a justifiable fear. Where it gets twisted is when the perception becomes people who live there or look like that or have these characteristics are the people you need to be afraid of, and so there's a whole piece around peace on earth and goodwill for all. That requires you to go like hold on a second. It is the person who looks like that as well. That's a part of that circle, and when you come face to face with your own inability to let go of the baggage you're carrying, it is easier to turn around and say no, no, like I'm right, my fears are justified. So therefore, yeah, no, like they're trying to take something away, they're making this into something it's not supposed to be. This is they're attacking what's supposed to actually be the case, like, interestingly enough, the idea of keep Christ in Christmas.
25:42
You go back far enough, you'll find out that the early Christian writers, the church fathers, the first, you know, kind of patriarchs of the church back in the early 100s and 200s, they didn't want Christ in Christmas, they didn't want Christmas. Christmas was not supposed to happen. And I do actually have one. Origen was his name. He wrote between 185 and 245.
26:09
And he actually wrote that only Pharaoh and Herod have birthday celebrations in our scriptures and according to the biblical accounts, each of them stained the festivals with the shedding of human blood. So in the book of Genesis, pharaoh has his chief baker killed on his birthday and Herod agrees to behead John the Baptist on his birthday. And so Origen wrote, and I quote not one from all of the saints is found to have celebrated a festive day or a great feast on the day of his birth. No one is found to have had a joy on the day of his birth or of his son or daughter. Only sinners rejoice over this kind of birthday. And he goes on to say good saints are filled with the Holy Spirit and curse the day they are born, such as the prophet Jeremiah who says cursed be the day on which I was born prophet Jeremiah, who says cursed be the day on which I was born.
27:10
And so Origen's whole attitude is that Christians and birthdays are not something that should go hand in hand, that birthdays are in fact a pagan thing that should be kept as far away from Christianity as possible. And he ends his whole writing on birthdays with saying only the worthless man who loves things connected with his birth keeps birthdays and festivals. So from the very beginning, christ wasn't supposed to be in Christmas. For the early Christian church it was supposed to be an Easter religion. The resurrection, the renewal, the rebirth, the conquering of death was supposed to be what marked the tradition. And Christmas became this weird festival celebration that in fact was tied to other pagan rituals in and around that time, largely around the end of the harvest season. So this fear that we are somehow losing something the founders of the faith would argue it's something we never wanted to have to begin with. Get rid of it. It should not be a part of what we're doing.
Joanne
28:19
But let's be honest. When people are afraid of losing stuff, it's stuff that's happened in the last couple hundred years right. When people say I want to sing old hymns, they don't mean Martin Luther, they mean Jim Strathdee from the 70s.
Bill
28:32
I invited people not to go down that road with you today, so it's totally up to you if you want to open that door.
Joanne
28:39
It was just an example. People, just an example. But here's the thing about these stories. So they were wandering around the Christian community Even before there was a canon.
28:50
There were these birth stories, these narratives that were around like 80, long before origin, and those are the stories that people gravitate towards. It's hard to understand resurrection, but a baby's born in a stable, oh, and they had a long journey and she was pregnant. And, oh, scandalous, right, mary's included in the scandalous I think it's in Luke's or is it Matthew's genealogy. There's four women and all of them are sexually suspect. Every single one. One's a prostitute, one tricks her father-in-law into impregnating her, so it goes on and on. So, mary, this story of Mary who's pregnant and it's by the Holy Spirit or whatever, this is this really scintillating, scandalous story. So people gravitate towards that.
29:41
But at the same time, you have these early fathers who are trying to figure out, when Christianity is still kind of, you know, not the empire's religion, how can we get the celebration of our traditions along with these pagan traditions that are being celebrated? So you know, you have the solstice and Christmas comes around the solstice, you have Easter and it happens around the spring. Yeah, so that's almost this underground celebration of Christmas, and it's also, though, the way that it's written is. It's setting up this story against the empire story, where they will behead someone on their birthday or they're capricious and just exert this power. The whole story is we also have a king, but he isn't like your king.
Bill
30:29
Yep.
Joanne
30:30
He is born in a manger, not in a palace, and he is welcomed by the people on the margins, not by the people with all the power and the money. So the Christmas story sets up this anti-empire story so that it can be celebrated in a way where, yeah, you don't have to behead anyone or show your power, you know, belittle peoples to show how great you are. That's not our story. And so, again, you started with the two different worldviews.
Bill
30:58
That's exactly what's set up in those Christmas stories, so in that culture at that time, the idea that peace on earth and goodwill to all people can be achieved in a way that is not Pax Romana right, Not the peace of the empire through might and power and conquering Peace through justice Wildly.
Gian Carlo Carra
31:14
we live in a time, though, where the Republic is fading into empire, and the people who are dragging us there are the ones who are expressing grievance and are expressing a lot of Christian faith involved in that who think there's a war on Christmas?
Joanne
31:32
Yeah, same people?
Bill
31:34
Yep, they are, that's absolutely right. And the rhetoric is very much again becoming this rhetoric of conquering and power and might and suppression, right.
Gian Carlo Carra
31:42
But it's also about the little guy overthrowing the status quo.
Bill
31:47
That's keeping everyone down, and yet it's the empire that sort of co-opted that which is Well, exactly because it's not the little guy right when push comes to shove. It's not actually the little guy that's doing it right, it's just he's harnessed the narrative right In a lot of ways. So, talking about, you know, like tying this story to the story of the empire, there are a great deal of parallels that actually occur in the story. So in the Roman Empire the festival is actually Saturnalia and Saturnalia I found what's his name here Lucian of Samasota actually wrote an instruction manual for people who were going to celebrate the festival of um, saturnalia in the empire of rome at the time, and, and so this is what he wrote let every man set in context. Let every man joanne's here. So um be treated equal, not you, joanne, yeah well, at that time that's really true let
32:49
every man be treated equal, slave and free man, poor and rich. No one may be ill-tempered or cross or threaten anybody. When you eat together, take the couch where you happen to be. Rank and family and wealth shall have little influence on privilege. All shall drink the same wine and neither stomach trouble nor headache shall give the rich man an excuse for being the only one to drink the better quality. All shall have their meat on equal terms. The waiters shall not show favor to anyone. Neither are large portions to be placed before one and tiny ones before another, nor a ham for one and a pig's jaw for another.
33:28
All must be treated equally. When a rich man gives a banquet to his servants, his friends shall aid him in waiting on them, right? So, like this whole upside down kind of twist, equality for everybody exists again long before, like 200 years before, the Christian birth narratives even start to play in, right. So it's a fascinating kind of look at just how much we appropriate in our mythologies, in our Christian mythologies, how much actually comes from the influence of the empires or the neighbors around the societies that are building them, right.
Joanne
34:11
Well, even the birth from God, that God's the father right. And again they mistranslate the text from Isaiah where it says a young woman shall conceive and bear a child, and they make it into a virgin, which is not actually what that word means, but still the idea that God is somehow the father of Jesus. The Romans had their Caesar was born of God too. I mean lots and lots of sort of gods and humans, through mythology, come together to create these sort of demigods which you could say Jesus is as well right, to create these sort of demigods which you could say Jesus is as well right.
34:57
So there is a universal message, though I think that that's clear this peace on earth, goodwill to all people. You know that sounded like Mary's Magnificat, you know, just really expanded out right where she says the rich are going to be brought down and the lowly are going to be brought up, and the people have been hungry, they're going to be fed, and the people have been hungry, they're going to be fed, and the people who had everything, they're going to be hungry. This idea of the upside down world is embedded in that story and it's embedded in all of our stories because we see cross-culturally that we aren't what we could be. We are not our best selves.
Gian Carlo Carra
35:27
Coming out of the pluralistic society that was the Roman Empire right, that's right.
Bill
35:34
So, at some point in time you get to flick the switch and not be a politician right. You get to go home at the end of the day, I hope, and find a few moments, or next week maybe, have some time with family. What for you as a family man, as a man, as a citizen of Calgary? Not Giancarlo the city councillor, but just Giancarlo the city counselor, but just Giancarlo the man, the father, the husband.
Gian Carlo Carra
35:59
What is the reason for the season for you, when all is said and done next week? Well, it's definitely a time to try and unplug a little bit from the more than full-time job that is being a city counselor and spend time with my family and the extended family and with neighbors and with friends and the extended family and with neighbors and with friends. In the lead up to Christmas, of course, we've spent time in community. The other day we were at the Salvation Army helping them with their gift, with their toy drive. With their toy drive, they basically provide toys for parents who are having a hard time purchasing toys for their children, and it was quite something to see.
36:46
We spent some time in the back organizing the toys, but I also spent some time in the front taking a lot of Ukrainian people and a lot of Muslim people through the rooms that were arranged with toys for different ages of children and different genders of children and different focuses of children. But I think about that and I think about, you know, making sure that the people in my circles are well-fed and have their needs addressed and some of their wants addressed as well. I would say the other thing that we're doing is we're donating some of our surplus budget to the people who need the most help, and this year we decided to put a lot of our support behind the LGBT community, and particularly the trans community, who are being vilified and punched down on in this place right now. You took something from my second half.
Bill
37:44
Right there. I'm glad you mentioned it. Say more about that, because that was something that I was going to bring up in the second half.
Gian Carlo Carra
37:51
Well, I mean, maybe we segue into that as part of the second half, but I am completely committed to the Canadian Project of Pluralism, to the idea that we're all in this together as people.
38:06
I mean, I think if COVID was going to teach us any lesson, it was that we are all in this together and we have to work together to keep each other safe and alive and healthy. And in many ways the fact that we stepped up and we limited deaths and we found a vaccine, that sort of bent the curve on that, is amazing. But the blowback against that's been astonishing. I think the people who view themselves as special islands, detached from anyone else and successful because of their own special light or because their God favors them over all others, I think they're raging against that lesson and that rage is sort of bending reality right now. And I think that there are a lot of people in our society who do not enjoy full-fledged citizenship and who are systemically oppressed. And I think it's very unfortunate to live in a time where more and more government is interested in punching down and creating another than they are in creating space so that everyone can achieve equity and equality.
Bill
39:27
So maybe we'll actually stop right there. That's a good place for us to be able to stop and think and kind of take stock of where we're at, and we will have a brief intermission and then we will return and continue, because we still got Santa, we still got the Hallmark Channel.
Joanne
39:42
But you forgot the eggnog.
Bill
39:44
What about the eggnog?
Joanne
39:44
We should have had some here.
Bill
39:46
There is some here.
Joanne
39:46
There is, oh, okay, they put it out after oh, thank you I. Oh, okay, they put it out after. Oh, thank you, I love eggnog.
Bill
39:53
Well, there you go. So Joanne's going to go get some eggnog. I'm going to get some eggnog too, and we'll be, back after a brief intermission.
39:58
Agreed, thank you. Thank you and welcome back to Prepared to Drown, second half of our Christmas episode. We have talked about the Nativity. We have talked about peace on earth, goodwill to all.
42:25
Intriguingly enough, even in England and in New England back in the 1600s, there was very little peace to be had. In fact, we reached the point. In New England in the 1600s, there was very little peace to be had. In fact, we reached the point in New England, in Massachusetts, where Christmas was in fact illegal. The Puritans had had enough of the rowdiness and the drinking and the debauchery and the carnival-style celebrations of this harvest festival that it was outlawed and illegal and you would in fact pay five shillings in fine if you were found to be celebrating and if Ricardo was here. I even found out that factory owners would change work times on Christmas Day to prohibit laborers from being able to go to church, because if you were to go to church service you would have missed the start of your shift and been fired for it.
43:18
And in the end, again, it was not Jesus that saved the Christmas holiday in the 1600s, or in the 1800s, even at that point, but it was in fact Clement Clark Moore who saved Christmas for all of us writing his poem, a Visit from St Nicholas, which many of us know as Twas the Night Before Christmas, and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse right, and very soon after followed by the visitation of the three spirits from A Christmas Carol in 1843.
43:53
So in a mere three years again, or six years, rather. Not Jesus that saved the Christmas season, but Santa Claus and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. So, based on all of that, I wanted to have a little fun with Santa, if we could. To start it off, he makes a list and he checks it twice, but I am curious. I don't want to know who's on your naughty list, but I'd like to know from each of you, looking at the world around you right now and all of the great uncertainty of it, who is on your nice list this year.
Joanne
44:30
Oh man, that takes a lot more thinking, doesn't it? Wow, well, okay, my nice list. I can give a nice list and I often talk about my son here who works for the source or the distress center and he, uh, manages the warming shelters one of them that's at the journey church, which is at the end of um at tuscany, and he has been having to speak to the media and having you know because the neighborhood is like why are? Why are these people in our neighborhood? They should be downtown somewhere.
45:17
You know Things like that happen and that church has stood firm against the neighborhood and continues to offer their church as a warming center. I've mentioned it before in this podcast and now that the Alberta government has decided to defund the Calgary Homeless Foundation, like that kind of work is really under threat and we live in a really cold city and these warming shelters and these ways that we try to care for the homeless are so important. So all those people who are out there, you know the dope team checking on folks and taking them to appointments and making sure they're housed, and you know doing the check with the people who are unhoused to make sure they're still alive. These people are God's angels, and they're on my nice list.
Gian Carlo Carra
46:16
Yeah, that's a great answer. And you know a huge shout out to all the frontline workers and you know so many volunteers in this city. That's another place where Calgary, by the way you know, is a tale of two cities. You know. Anywhere else you go in North America and you have the amount of time spent just driving around the city in a car. The amount of volunteerism goes down, down, down, and the amount of driving we do and the amount of volunteerism just doesn't make sense. We're just a huge outlier in that regard and there are just so many people in our community who give so much. So that's a great answer.
46:51
I'm going to pull it back one more notch and just say one of the things I do as the Ward 9 counselor is I try and talk about the unique and special elements of what makes my constituency my constituency, and I've already talked about it as the Brooklyn of Calgary. But we are also the most diverse set of communities in the city. Calgary has never been more diverse in terms of our pluralism than it is right now. But very often different groups sort of go and live amongst themselves, and so you have rich people congregating here, you have South Asian people congregating here, and it's only in the communities of East Calgary, specifically Greater Forest Lawn, where everybody lives together in community. There's a guy at the University of Alberta who's been doing this 10-year project, dr Jared Wesley, where he goes into rooms of Albertans and he asks them to draw a typical Albertan. And if you're in Southern Alberta, they draw a white, middle-aged male cowboy named Bob, and if you're in northern Alberta they draw a white, middle-aged male roughneck named Bob. And the fact is we're no longer a province of Bobs, we're a much more diverse place.
48:13
So the latest map that I produced is who is Ward 9?
48:18
And we did a deep dive into our diversity and we were trying to figure out how to talk about that and we sort of had this nightmare image of sort of like drawing caricatures of different races and how much trouble we'd get in for doing that.
48:32
And we said, no, you know what we're going to do. We're just going to go to the actual community and celebrate the leaders. And so we actually wrote a map of who is Ward 9 and we called out like incredible people throughout the communities of Ward 9 who are on the front lines doing incredible work across the spectrum. So they're all on my nice list and and we just published them out several weeks ago. The other thing I'm just going to say is that it's never been harder to be a politician than it is right now, and in many ways it's an own goal, like because we are heaping a lot of anti-valor upon ourselves as civil servants, because I think we've forgotten our role as civil servants. So my nice list includes people who seek public office to govern and to do the hard work of governing, as opposed to people who seek public office to engage in the permanent campaign of politicking.
Bill
49:32
Cool, I'm going to add to my nice list as well an expansion, actually, from both of you.
49:39
I'm always worried about implying my naughty list, which Joanne kind of did with her nice list, and I'm going to pile on as well and say that this has been a difficult year for a lot of vulnerable minorities in our province and in our world, and certainly the most recent news being the defunding of the Calgary Homeless Foundation.
50:04
But I mean before that there were other groups as well, and certainly the LGBTQ community has spent the last several months deeply in fear of implications of legislation that's been handed down, and we've been able to, even here at McDougal, encounter some of the folks that knew it was coming and were prepared before it happened to be able to provide support and a message of hope and begin the work of advocacy and preparing all of the and begin the work of advocacy and preparing all of the campaign stuff that needed to happen to begin to at least try to fight some of this stuff, but also, in the middle of the fight, be able to make sure that those people who are going to be the most impacted by it would at least hopefully know that they were not alone and that this was not the end of the story and that there were a the end of the story and, and that there were a whole lot of people who were prepared to stand in the breach and fight on their behalf.
51:02
So, again, like the volunteerism that goes along with that, the energy of both hope and defiance, even at Calgary Pride in September, all of it was just a true testament to the enduring spirit and strength and resiliency of a community that I think is really heavily investing right now in making sure that people know that the road's been long and they're not really interested in going back down it. So they are definitely on my nice list as well, as I'm just going to say it all those junior high kids that were prepared to walk out against the legislation back in February, knowing that my kid was one of them and the courage that it took to do it and to endure everything that followed afterwards as a result, right. So I find great hope in how quickly communities will rally around each other and support one another when they're coming under attack, knowing that obviously, the war on Christmas is not that kind of an attack.
Gian Carlo Carra
52:12
I'm going to just jump in here and vibe off of you and say that one of my favorite things to do in my job is talking with school kids, and when I go and meet with school kids any age you know, they can be high school, junior high, elementary school I'm just really amazed at what our kids are like these days and I just feel like if we can just hold on long enough to hand over the reins to them, we'll be okay.
Bill
52:39
We just got to quit breaking stuff before we give it to them, yeah.
Joanne
52:43
Well, you know, it's an interesting thing how precarious that culture we're trying to build is really, because in the last election in the US, what they call the alpha is that the kids who are just turning 18 or 19?.
Bill
52:59
Oh, gen Alpha, Gen Alpha.
Joanne
53:00
They grew up in Trump's America and that was normal for them. So there was this shift, not a majority, but a significant enough amount, particularly with young men whose ideas have shifted away from that pluralistic society and so going back to those politicians who want to govern and create that, like you, Giancarlo, that is such a gift to us as a culture, because if those people are not there, like proclaiming over and over and over again and never taking for granted what we can build together, then young people don't have an example of that and they think normal is the individual is the most important unit and my rights are what's most important, and I fear in this province that that's where we're headed as well.
Gian Carlo Carra
53:53
Right, I really appreciate you calling that out and I think that that is an alarming trend because generally we look to the younger people to be the most idealistic amongst us and we are seeing that alarming trend. I'm going to step on a third rail right here and just say I'm shocked that in Israeli society it's the older folks who are more liberal and protesting against the rising fascism of the Israeli government and the younger folks are much more hard right and that's what's driving a lot of the nightmare that we're seeing there right now.
Joanne
54:32
Because they've been raised in Netanyahu's Israel. Yeah Right.
Bill
54:37
Yep.
Joanne
54:37
That's so important. I mean one of the reasons why I became a minister, because, as I've said, bill and I have had this discussion a lot. This could be a failed project, this whole Christian thing, but it's a noble failure is the way I always put it, because what has happened in the Christian culture is that because the more conservative, now Christian nationalists, which is, you know, when I was a kid, raised in the evangelical church, that was like the furthest thing from our minds. In fact, the church people tried to stay out of politics. They really saw the difference between the church and politics and don't get involved in politics.
55:17
But this move to create a Christian story that is like an empire again, that is nationalist, that is not inclusive, is very frightening to me because we lose Jesus, this little baby born for peace on earth. We lose it in that, and so for me to keep proclaiming a sort of more progressive Christian story is so important that we not lose our voice. And as a minister in the United Church, we've had a progressive voice and we are struggling, struggling, struggling as a denomination, and there is this tendency to think how can we get more people in the seats, you know, how can we keep this thing going and the institution becomes more important than the message. But if we lose this voice, this progressive Christian voice and the only Christian story is the conservative you know I'm going to heaven, you're going to hell. My religion is right all the time. If the story of a God who loves all is not proclaimed loudly enough, we will lose that as an option in the Christian tradition.
Bill
56:29
Really.
Joanne
56:30
Yeah.
Bill
56:31
Okay. I'm at risk of being the optimist on this panel here.
Joanne
56:35
So I think there's always a remnant. There's always a remnant. There are always people who are proclaiming. You know that, the essential Christian story, that there is a table that's big enough for everyone and everyone has a place. There's always a remnant, but there's a tsunami of no, everyone doesn't have a place, and Jesus is for me, and the empire and Jesus belong together. You know, just Trump is selling Bibles Like that's all you need to know.
Bill
57:03
That's all you need to know. But at the end of the day it's into that kind of a world that an infant is born in a manger when there's no room at the inn. Joanne, and in all honesty, that's the kind of gritty, like in-breaking love that I'm kind of waiting for right now, right Like I've never been the touchy-feely love guy on the ministry team by any stretch of the imagination.
Joanne
57:29
Notwithstanding, you do pastoral care …
Bill
57:32
I do pastoral care right. But let's be honest, my understanding of love, even as pastoral care is concerned, is the, you know, like go five rounds, get your butt kicked and then spit out a tooth and get up and do it again kind of love, right? So like that's kind of what I'm waiting for in the world, right? This is, I think, the challenge right now, more than anything, is, how do you not lose hope in the midst of this tsunami that you're describing right? And this really is the crux of the Christmas message that was never supposed to be a part of the faith, right? Is that, even when it is that miserable, even when the empire is that powerful, even when the hatred and the cruelty and the misery and the inequality and the injustice is that strong, god finds a way for God's love to break through? Right, and it's a myth, it's a mythology, it's a story, but it has so much more power than the stories of hatred that the empire will use. I mean, we will live in fear for years, but love will always win.
Joanne
58:35
Right, right, right, I agree completely. But in terms of the voice that we used to have as a denomination, for instance, the national voice, where they always like to say that the moderator used to meet with the prime minister to talk about the church in Canada, and certainly the United Church has lost that and as a denomination we may fail. That's really what I mean. I believe, in these times that we are moving into, where there is this. You know it's the Trouble with Normal Bruce Coburn song from the 80s.
59:04
You know, planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage. Suddenly it's repression moratorium on rights. What did they think the politics of panic would invite Right? And it's repression moratorium on right rights. What did they think the politics of panic would invite right? And and it's like every time I hear that song I'm like we're in that space again. So what saves us? You know, like Bruce Coburn went, and I was just in Guatemala uh in in, uh May, no August. And what saves people in the middle of oppressive governments Do you know Military governments horrible things is each other.
Gian Carlo Carra
59:37
Yeah, it's the power of community right.
Joanne
59:38
Power of community, and so if the Christian story is going to survive, it's because we have small communities of faith that continue to beat at the darkness till it bleeds daylight, to use another Bruce Coburn line, that is.
Gian Carlo Carra
59:55
Bring another Bruce Coburn line, that is, bring in the Coburn.
Joanne
59:58
Kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight. Small groups, small groups of people who continue to say the empire will not win, hatred will not be the cultural norm, yep, and that whatever is happening out there in here.
Bill
01:00:15
You're safe. You're wanted, you're okay.
Joanne
01:00:17
Yes, right, yes, yes.
Bill
01:00:21
And that's the best you can hope for in the midst of this right Is that good people will stand and be counted where it matters, and that constant traditional Christian promise that even this too shall pass, that the only true certainty is not even death or taxes. It's God's love is the only true certainty in all things.
Joanne
01:00:48
Well, it is true, but sometimes you're waiting for 200 and 300 years and it's really hard to be in the breach.
Bill
01:00:55
Absolutely.
Joanne
01:00:55
And carrying the love will win. In the midst of love, losing over and over and over again, which has seemed to happen in the last few years, it can be really disheartening. That's why we need each other. We need each other.
Bill
01:01:12
There's a story in the book of Jeremiah. That's why we need each other. We need each other. There's a story in the book of Jeremiah when Jeremiah is supposed to share God's word with the people, there's a prophet that comes right before Jeremiah, that's Hananiah, who's telling everybody don't even unpack, You're in exile now. Don't unpack, You're going to be back in the promised land in two years. And God tells Jeremiah no, no, no, go tell them, not two years more like 70 years right and Jeremiah goes I don't want to go tell them that because they're so happy right now.
01:01:44
But Jeremiah knows, like, what you're telling me is that I have to go tell people not in your lifetime, right, this will happen. This promise will happen, but not in your lifetime, right, right, this will happen, this promise will happen, but not in your lifetime. And his entire time as a prophet is spent in the ruins of the promised land, in the ruins of Jerusalem, prophesying to people who are all living in exile, telling them do the best you can where you're at, thrive, where you are for now, because not in your lifetime and you still need to live.
Joanne
01:02:13
Seek the welfare, thrive where you are for now because not in your lifetime and you still need to live. Seek the welfare of the city, yep.
Bill
01:02:17
Seek the welfare of the place that I have sent you, because in its welfare you will find your own Yep Right, and that's the power of community, right there again.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:02:25
Yes, absolutely. So. I have a question for you guys, because I'm really appreciating this conversation and earlier we talked about. It's not that people fear change, it's that they fear loss, right? I also think that there is a rising tide of people who fear complexity, who are sort of empowered and want simple answers to complicated problems. They want to know who's the good guys and who's the bad guys. They want to know who's right and who's wrong, what's black what's white, what's the problem and how do you fix it?
Gian Carlo Carra
01:02:54
And they want daddy to tell them. And life is infinitely more complex than that. And so I see a big challenge before us is how do we breathe nuance back into what is becoming a very simplistic and false narrative? Because it is and there are no simple narratives. So how do you tackle that as ministers?
Joanne
01:03:22
Well, yeah, it's really important. I loved Marcus Borg was this great writer and minister theologian who talked about Christmas stories, for instance, and he talked about in pre-critical thinking, which is no complexity how you went to Sunday school and Mary wore a blue robe always right and the shepherds were definitely there in the stable and that star was in the sky. And you spend all your time trying to. When you're in this pre-critical thing, this is what I believe. Don't tell me anything else because it's too disturbing. And then you get into this stage where you're like, oh, do I really believe in a virgin birth? How did that happen? And oh, how could Mary be wearing blue, for instance? Or all those shepherds really in the fields came, there's a whole choir army of angels, and you start to deconstruct that story and you get into what he calls the critical phase, right, which is everything is wrong.
Bill
01:04:28
Everything is, or at least suspect, a suspect.
Joanne
01:04:30
Suspect everything and a lot of people leave the faith or leave any endeavor that they believed in strongly.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:04:36
Critical race theory, yeah, all those things.
Joanne
01:04:39
All those things. So it's like you're right here and you can't get past that. And then the hope comes in at least in the Christian story is when we move into post-critical thinking, which is kind of a re-mythologizing right.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:04:52
And an appreciation of myth and story as being fundamental to who we are.
Joanne
01:05:01
That's exactly right. So then you read the story back on the story and you enjoy that Mary's always in blue because they used to paint her in the Middle Ages in blue because it had to do with royalty. So you have enough information that you can take back to those stories and read them in a new way and they're actually life-giving. So I feel like education is a really important part, and a liberal arts education. You know not just. There has been this move in probably the last 20 years to make all our education about finding a job and making money right and that leaves us bereft of complexity in our society. If we don't celebrate art and music and philosophy in a way that helps us to embrace a world that is bigger than, am I going to work minimum wage or am I going to be an engineer?
Gian Carlo Carra
01:05:50
Am I a good guy or a bad guy? Am I a winner or a loser?
Joanne
01:05:52
That's exactly right. You know the whole and, rand, you know that there's makers and there's takers in society, like that became in the tech world in particular, like it's this whole thing, like that's the way the world is and we, so we have to engage, not in a way that is we're going to take sides, you know, like the cancel culture which happens all over. That is this exactly that. This is wrong and we're you're, you're gone. Do you know? And that that is because we've lost nuance, complexity and understanding that people are complicated, situations are complicated, and if we infuse those with love, we will have a broader understanding of our fellow humanity and how we can build a society that is more just. But if we lose in our education system all those really important elements that don't have anything to do with making money, they only have as their end to build good citizens, we will always be in black and white.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:07:07
So one of my big I don't want to say muses, I don't want to say my goddess, jane Jacobs, was an incredible writer and she came onto the stage in the middle of, at the end of the 1950s with an incredible book called the Death and Life of Great American Cities.
01:07:27
And then she wrote three more books that were all about how the project of civilization and economies and culture were all intricately tied in an ecological way. And her last book, writing from Toronto and she started out in New York but of course, moved her entire family to Toronto to avoid her children getting drafted into the Vietnam War she wrote a book called Dark Age Ahead and she, as an older scold, was telling us look, many civilizations have risen and then fallen into dark age, and there are things that happen to every civilization that falls into dark age, and one of the things she talks about is the loss of complexity and the loss of the stories of who we are, of the stories of who we are. And if you don't know who you are, you don't know where you came from, you don't know who you are, and if you don't know who you are, then the future is not. And so I appreciate everything you're saying, and the need for that sort of that critical thinking, but also that post-critical thinking, to understand the importance and the power of stories.
Bill
01:08:31
Yeah, I'd say like, for me, the piece that I'm always reminded of, constantly, is that the story matters, right? More than any of the stats, any of that kind of work, right?
Gian Carlo Carra
01:08:43
I think politicians are learning that in a big way too right.
Bill
01:08:47
And so, interestingly enough, it was a really terrible example that worked way too well back after 9-11 in the US I cannot remember who it was, but one of the youth ministry kind of emerging church people of the day reworked the story of the Good Samaritan in real time, I think the week after 9-11, and changed the identity of the characters in the story so that it was a Muslim person who stopped to help the injured person on the side of the road.
01:09:24
And I was trying to illustrate this idea that the minute you like what was so revolutionary in Jesus' time about that parable was that the person you were supposed to hate was the only one who acted the way they were called to act. And you're forced to confront the identity of this person and recognize that, yeah, they totally could be this good Samaritan Well Samaritan, obviously, but this good person that is truly a neighbor in the story. And it was such a cheesy example, but it was powerful in the moment, right In a US post-9-11, immediately post-9-11 culture where, if you were a Muslim worshiper, you feared to leave your house for any reason because of the violence that was waiting for you on the streets from every passerby. And so my constant reminder throughout most of my ministry has been the minute there's a face on it as opposed to a category, people change their relationship with it.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:10:35
And that's what we tried to do with our map, where, instead of creating categories, we talked about the actual people. Yep.
Bill
01:10:42
And that's the like across the board. Tell people who they are, tell people who the people they fear are. Put a face, a name, a relationship to it, and people will always change the way that they engage in the conversation.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:10:56
And that's complexity in the face of simplicity, right.
Bill
01:11:00
So all of that to say, I'm aware that we are running really close to the end of time and I want to kind of wrap things up if we can. But again, we've talked a lot about story today. We've talked a lot about the mythology of the nativity and, again, the importance of story and the power of story in our world building and in our ability to hopefully work towards that idea of peace on earth and goodwill for all. I always try to dust it off whenever I can. I try to dust it off whenever I can. That for me one of the most influential Christmas stories that I ever read as a young person that took on new life when Kermit took the lead on it.
01:11:41
Eventually, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and certainly Fred, the nephew of Scrooge, and so the quote from Dickens when Fred is arguing with Scrooge and trying to invite him to come to dinner and Scrooge is saying that Christmas is a waste of time and Fred says but I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come around, apart from the veneration due its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that as a good time, a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time, the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good and it will do me good, and I say God bless it. And that was 1843 that those words were written.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:12:48
And were those radical words at that time, or was that expressing the zeitgeist of the time?
Bill
01:12:55
Interesting question. I was not around then. Yeah, certainly it was part of the again.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:13:03
The return to Christmas.
Bill
01:13:05
Six years before that right, a Visit from St Nicholas was written and there was like. And there was like, I would say, the clash between the Puritan movement and the rowdiness of Christmas, as it had been up until that point.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:13:20
The Saturnalian-ness of it all. Well, yeah, and the pageants.
Joanne
01:13:23
In the Middle Ages they used to have Christmas pageants on the streets right.
Bill
01:13:29
Yeah, in New England back in the 1600s, Christmas was actually a time where folks would cross dress and then break into each other's houses and steal stuff and like it was a full on like carnival kind of style of like. There were street theater, performers and a lot of drinking, a lot of rowdiness, a lot of like low grade crime and this was what the Puritans were really pushing back against. Was that this was what the Puritans were really pushing back against? Was that this was not how good Christian people behaved in public or ever right? And out of all of it there was almost this rise of, can I say, the religion of like the religion of the domestic kind of Christmas, the family, like coming together, more laid back, retrospective or introspective, reflective kind of Christmas that Santa and Scrooge were all kind of part of building right.
Joanne
01:14:25
The Charles Dickens brought it into a family celebration instead of a church, because the 12 days of Christmas go from Christmas Day to Epiphany. Exactly that was the holiday you went to church at Christmas, and so they they created this space where it's actually a family holiday and it's all beautiful.
Bill
01:14:42
Yeah, yeah, was it the zeitgeist?
Gian Carlo Carra
01:14:44
Couldn't really say I imagine it was not on the bleeding edge, but it was on the leading edge of that sort of movement to build the Christmas that we appreciate today.
Bill
01:14:53
edge of that sort of movement to build the Christmas that we appreciate today, sure Before the commercialism crept in in full right. It was still a holiday of values, and well, I shouldn't say it's not now.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:15:04
It's not now. We haven't talked about commercialism much in this that's going to be the big missing link in this little conversation about Christmas.
Bill
01:15:05
I feel like it gets enough air time. I'm going to leave here and go try to buy some presents for my children this weekend, in the spirit of not being a complete hypocrite. So I'm going to say final words from both of you. Joanne, you can go first Christmas baptism by eggnog We've talked about a lot tonight your final words, and then I'm going to give our guest again. Thank you so much for being here tonight.
01:15:43
It has been a privilege to have you and I'm going to give you the closing words before we roll out, but we'll let Joanne go first.
Joanne
01:15:50
So I'm just going to go back to that idea about we need to understand complexity more in our culture, which understanding complexity helps us to celebrate Christmas in its commercialism, its fun and all that kind of thing, and also recognize it's an important myth in building a better world. Like two things can be true at one time. You know we don't have to choose that. So I would say to all those people out there in podcast land and the ones sitting here like find joy this Christmas, however you can, and know that you are beloved of God and that a baby love it of God and that a baby, vulnerable, marginalized, born to poor people somehow saves the world.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:16:44
Well, I don't feel like I should follow that at all, because that's a great wrap-up and I just want to thank you for a very complex conversation steeped in story that appreciates the universal truths that have always been a part of this time of year for people across the world and are an important part of our society right here, right now, as diverse and pluralistic as it is. This is something that resonates with all of us, and it's always nice to take a break and spend some time with loved ones and reflect and be introspective, so thank you so much for the opportunity to set myself up to do that well, well, thank you very much for being here tonight.
Bill
And with that, folks, we are out.
Joanne
01:17:35
What about you?
Bill
What about me? I said I was giving you the last word, okay.
Joanne
01:17:40
I don't want to leave you out, Bill.
Bill
01:17:41
All right. So my last words are going to be, as always thank you to the United Church Foundation for their support of this program, and thank you to everybody who joined us here in public and those of you that are listening online. And, if you've enjoyed the conversation, help us continue the conversation by signing up on our Patreon and checking us out wherever you listen to your podcasts. But with that, this is the end of 2024 for us in podcast land and we will see you in 2025 when we return in January. Thanks for listening and take care of yourselves, and Merry Christmas.
Gian Carlo Carra
01:18:12
Merry Christmas.
Bill
01:18:15
Thanks for taking some time to celebrate in this season with us on our special Christmas episode. If you've enjoyed the conversation, don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to join us on Patreon. To keep the festive spirit going, prepared to Drown is recorded live each month at MacDougall United Church in Calgary, alberta, canada. If you're in the area, we'd love to welcome you to a live recording, wishing you a joyful Christmas season and a new year filled with wonder. Until next time, take care and keep the light shining.