Perhaps there's a tragic symbolism in Friday's trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee by a mob of Christmas shoppers. The mob broke down the doors, knocking the employee to the ground where he was kicked and stomped by the crowd as they rushed headlong into the store to lay their hands on some trinket.
When the holiday becomes a celebration of consumption, an orgy of spending, rather than the birth of the Son of God people no longer think much about good will and all that pious nonsense. All they want is the latest technological googaw to put a little significance in their otherwise empty lives, and heaven help whoever gets in their way.
Paramedics try to save the life of the Wal-Mart employee who was trampeled by shoppers last Friday.
The votaries of secularism have largely succeeded in draining the public observance of Christmas of any real meaning. They've emptied it of transcendence, mystery, and awe and every reason it once gave us to feel warmth and love toward our fellow human beings. They've left us instead with a day the meaning of which is to join the desperate throng stampeding like cattle to grab the latest gadget. The malls, our post-Christian cathedrals, do their part by supplanting the timeless, sublime beauty of Silent Night with tawdry assaults on the spirit of Christmas like Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer - a tragically apposite piece of inane seasonal flotsam.
We've been told for so long that, just as there's nothing transcendent about Christmas, there's nothing transcendent about us. We have no soul. There's no imago Dei. We're just naked apes, the accidental product of chance, chemistry and physics, so no one should be shocked when we act like the herds of dumb brutes that our intelligentsia insists we are.
Once upon a time the symbol of Christmas was a child, our Redeemer, lying peacefully in a manger, shrouded in peace, wonder and gentleness. After last Friday the symbol may well be a frenzied mass of mindless people crushing a man to death in their meaningless lust for material junk.
RLC
