Day 34 - The Feast of St. Friend

I was in a second-hand bookshop in Liverpool recently. They had no Where’s Wally, nothing very trans, and no Doctor Whos worth speaking of, so I was looking in the theology section, which was a pretty decent size. Someone has died, or retired somewhere too small for all these books, I reckoned. And I had a sense - maybe something spiritual, or maybe just the superstitious sort that I used to have, that hitting all a city’s charity shops, you would always find one perfect item set aside for you, that there was something here that I needed to discover. I prayed that if there was a book here that I was meant to get - the sort that would suit my needs, and appeal to me more than most, God would put it at my fingertips, or alight my eyes on it.

Within a minute, I found a thin old beige hardback with its spine printed the wrong way, the European way. You know, you need to tilt your head to the left to read it. It was printed on the old, solid sort of paper I associate with cheap editions, and find very pleasing. Its title was THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND, and really there is no title anywhere which could tick all my boxes the same way that did. I knew this was the one. It begins: “Something has happened to Christmas, or to our hearts; or to both.”

I read some of it on the way home, and the rest yesterday evening. ‘The Feast of St Friend’, a 1911 piece by Arnold Bennett, and it’s a wonderfully written book about our feelings in the run up to Christmas, and really I’d like to read you the whole thing, but I shan’t. Here is a favourite paragraph from chapter one:

“Even today, the spirit and rites of ancient Christmas are kept up, more or less in their full rigour and splendour, by a race of beings that is scattered over the whole earth. This race, mysterious, masterful, conservative, imaginative, passionately sincere, arriving from we know not where, dissolving before our eyes we know not how, has its way in spite of us. I mean the children.”

The whole thing is a look at how we obsess over the spirit of Christmas, delight in it utterly as children but come to it as a chore as adults, and how this seems to be the case for every generation, but that the celebration of it can’t have started as a chore. There must have been a time, and there must have been a way, that Christmas is a joy.

It comes down to two things, friendship and social justice. Or to put it another way, it comes down to goodwill. The book has some great pages on social justice -

“It is a curious fact that the one faith which does really flourish and wax in these days should be faith in the idea of social justice. For social justice simply means the putting into practice of goodwill and the recognition of the brotherhood of mankind. Formerly, people were enthusiastic and altruistic for a theological idea, for a national idea, for a political idea. You could see men on the rack for the sake of a dogma; you could see men of a great nation fitting out regiments and ruining themselves and going forth to save a small nation from destruction; you could see men giving their lives to the aggrandisement of an empire. And the men who did these things had the best brains and the quickest wits and the warmest hearts of their time. But to-day, whenever you meet a first-class man who is both enthusiastic and altruistic you may be sure that his pet scheme is neither theological, military, nor political; you may be sure that he has got it into his head the notion that some class of persons somewhere are not being treated fairly, are not being treated with fraternal goodwill, and that he is determined to put the matter right or perish”.

That’s an amazing page and a half from chapter 3. It starts with a fantastic perspective on what moved people most through history, and it turns out what was true in 1911 is very true in 2023, or whenever you hear this. I’m big on social justice, as much as I fail in practical terms. I’ve said more than plenty of times that people in poverty and it debt, and travelling people and trans people and disabled people and probably a lot more groups one could name are in bad situations which in many cases are worse than they were five years ago and need concerted action - which I do not know how to effect. This chapter is largely about faith - but not really spiritual faith, per se, as it’s quite a humanist book to find about Christmas in a theology section - but about where people still have faith today in an age of scepticism. People have faith in the need for social reform and the possibility of social reform, and believe innately that things ought to be, and can be, made better. And the book brings this all down to goodwill - not in its American meaning of ‘charity shops’, but in its often-ignored Christmas meaning of goodwill to all men, to all humanity, treating one another with right attitudes, and that all right actions should grow from that.

On the basis that charity begins at home - though the book never raises that phrase - it suggests social justice and goodwill should start at home. And the book proposes that goodwill relies chiefly on imagination, and if you lack it you cannot show goodwill. You need to be able to imagine the life of somebody else, the motivations they have, and fundamentally why they do the things that annoy you so much . Focus on one person in your everyday life who annoys you the most: “he may be your butler. You may be his butler!” - or maybe it’s your your wife or husband, and so forth, and try to imagine that they have a life that’s not all about being deliberately annoying. And that imagination, which these days we’d probably just dub empathy, is where your goodwill can begin. If we spent more time really thinking about our friends and their lives, thinking in depth, and imaginatively says the book, we would find it far easier to think of gifts they might like for Christmas — because the giving of gifts shouldn’t be primarily about commerce and obligation but about making a connection and bringing some real, human recognition in a world which can feel lonely and disappointing. As adults, we realise half our life has gone, and we’re no more likely to achieve the second half of our ambitions than we achieved the first half — and that, having not reached lasting contentment or happiness, we probably won’t reach it in our remaining years. The one thing that can brighten that - in this fairly humanist view of Christmas, is to learn that someone has actually remembered you, and genuinely thought about you, and reached out gladly.

It’s an amazing book, and I’m very glad to have found it. It’s readable, quotable and thought-provoking, and I look forward to reading it again with gusto when Advent sets in. I will end with closing words of its chapter on the rise and boons of social justice. “Whether the growth of the idea is due to the spiritual awe and humility which are the consequence of increased scientific knowledge, I cannot say, and I do not seriously care”.