Everyday hauntings suggest that ordinary life is no less sacred than within the walls of a church.
Everyday hauntings suggest that ordinary life is no less sacred than within the walls of a church.
When you’re a kid, Christmas is about the presents. Now middle age has made me maudlin, it still is about the presents – but in a different way. It’s about people’s presence as much as the gifts they give.
Cue the eye roll, sure. But I’m serious. Even if Christmas is stripped of religious significance for many Australians, our relationship with treasured gifts gives us away. If we get sentimental about our things, it’s because we treat them sacramentally – as bearers of the presence of another. So even the biggest agnostic may be kind of religious without realising it.
Each Christmas, for instance, I find myself haunted by the ghosts of presentspast: by friends and family who over the years have given me, variously, a novelty Batman mug, a crocheted Anne of Green Gables doll, a now-tattered origami lantern and an unruly orchid with no two flowers facing the same direction.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t exactly go gaga over these random gifts that now, inevitably, clutter my apartment. But even if they don’t “spark joy”, I can’t toss them. Every time I see these gifts, I think of the people who gave them to me.
There’s a link here with the more “official” sacraments of Christian tradition, like the bread and wine of the Eucharist that represent, in some mysterious way, Jesus’s body and blood. Through religious rite, ordinary objects gesture beyond themselves to a different order of reality.
But plenty of us are closet sacramentalists: people who may not identify with any faith who, nonetheless, have a sacramental approach to everyday life.
The journalist Nadine von Cohen writes movingly about her kettle that leaks everywhere and turns off mid-boil. Yet she can’t part with it because it once belonged to her cherished mum.
“When someone you love dies, everything they owned, everything they ever touched seems sacred,” she writes. “Whether or not you ever saw your loved one use or wear an item is inconsequential. It was theirs and so you vow to treasure it forever.”
Everything they ever touched seems sacred. When material objects are invested with the presence of others, we find ourselves straying into spiritual territory rather quickly. The kettle isn’t just a kettle, but a talisman charged with love and grief. You drink your wrenching loss and wild hopes – of someday, somehow seeing her again – along with that tea.
Not every time, of course – that would be creepy. But these everyday hauntings suggest that ordinary life is no less a sacred space than within the walls of a church.
“We leave memories in everything we touch,” observes the novelist Sandra Newman. “If I pick up a pebble, I put it down haunted.” Not just stones, either. Souvenirs, heirlooms, homes, stories and, of course, gifts: each bears the trace of people and their imprint on the world.
If that goes for everything within the world, perhaps it’s also true of the world itself. There isn’t much difference between the kettle-keepers and religious believers for whom all things bear a trace of the love of God. As Pope Francis writes in his papal letter on care for the Earth: “The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.”
According to this way of thinking, the whole world and every good thing in it is infinitely more than what it appears to be: it is also a relationship marked by divine love. . Everything that exists is, in the end, a gift.
And gifts evoke gift-givers. Perhaps contrary to their reputation, the religious among us are following the logic: they believe that everywhere and in everything we are haunted by the God who made and gave us all things. (Admittedly, things get confused when believers dodge their responsibility to steward the Earth and its resources – but that’s a rant for another time.)
But God does not remain an absent presence. At Christmas, Christians believe the giver behind all gifts shows up in the flesh: in the birth of Jesus Christ called Emmanuel, which means “God with us”.
That’s the haunting and mysterious claim at the heart of Christmas.
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