So here I am in snowy Boulder, Colorado on Christmas Eve. We (the wife, the mother-in-law, the aunt and uncle-in-law) are going to the 9 o’clock mass this evening at one of the Catholic churches in town. This will be my third Christmas Eve mass in a row.
The first was in Boulder, in 2004, at a church on the Colorado University campus so liberal that, after the church had a fire some years back, they rebuilt the pews in a semi-circle radiating out from the altar because the old back-to-front orientation seemed too cold and hierarchical (God forbid the Catholics be too cold and hierarchical!). About half the service was performed by a lay member of the congregation, a woman. The other half was performed by the flamingly effeminate priest who had an unfortunately inflated sense of his own ability to weave pop culture references into a Christmas Eve sermon.
Last December we were in Jacksonville, Florida for Christmas, which, as you might guess, is a surreal city in which to celebrate Christmas. Actually, Jacksonville’s pretty much a surreal place to do anything–it’s all strip malls, massive gated communities with screened-in pools and golf courses, segregation, and general near-future dystopian ambience. We foundthe church in the phone book, and were treated to a very eloquent homily from the African priest.
This year we’re back in Boulder, driving across town to celebrate with Boulder’sbest priest, Father Terry Ryan, a Paulist who, I’m told, tells great stories of the wars he used to fight with his sister when they were growing up in the Bronx, and then somehow weaves those stories into moving lessons on the love of God. I’m looking forward to it.
As for the Jewish aspect of all this — i.e. that I’m a Jew — I haven’t quite figured it all out yet. Neither my wife nor Iis religious, so our observance, such as if it is, is mostly cultural. She’s done Passover and Hannukah with my family, and I’ve done Christmas with hers. Both of us have our anxieties about our children getting swallowed up by the other’s religious tradition. As every American Jew knows, Hannukah doesn’t really hold a candle to Christmas, which is symptomatic of the fact that American culture is mostly a Christian culture. On the other hand, the general Jewish-y vibe of my family is much more powerful a social fact than my wife and her mom’s Catholicism (there are also just a lot more Oppenheimers — my parents, my two brothers, my sister and I — than there are Grogans).
Masculinity is involved here, too, in a complicated way. The stereotype of the sensitive, enlightened Jewish man obscures how strong the patriarchal tradition is in Judaism, even in (or perhaps even more in) the secularized version of it with which I was raised. For me, it means, I fear, that there would be something profoundly emasculating about having kids (particularly boys) who seemed Christian. It would be the ultimate symbol of my failure as a Jewish man.
My therapist tells me that once my kids are born, I’ll be so focused on making sure they’re happy that I won’t worry about all that stuff. I hope he’s right.
Merry Christmas.
