Christmas and Common Humanity

A concert in the Altes Rathaus by a brilliant young Macedonian pianiste. A presentation by one of the country's leading artists, Ernst Fuchs, of a splendid book recording his artistic achievement. A lunch in the Cafe Landtmann, warm and cosy, as a prelude to crossing the Ringstrasse to the Christkindlmarkt, crowded, kitschy, but somehow a pleasing place to mingle, to socialise, to drink a hot punch together, to enjoy sharing a sense of hope and promise with everyman and everywoman.

This is Vienna in the countdown to Christmas 2003; and it's cold. There's not much snow or ice yet or biting winds from the Arctic; but, through its persistent drizzle, the weather's mood is as seasonally bleak as we might expect.

Later, there'll be Christmas trees and exchanges of gifts in the warmth of well-heated apartments. There'll be rich food and wine, family parties and larger celebrations. Those who have not yet left for the snowfields will plan to go after Silvester.

There's an elegance in all this that persists 87 years after the death of the Emperor Franz Jozef in 1916 and the collapse of the empire two years later.

Elegance - and tradition; and a warmth that contrasts strangely with the chill often too characteristic of the warm-as-toast southern Queensland to which I truly belong.

Is that all that Christmas has become?

At some time in the next couple of weeks, we'll attend a church service. Perhaps we'll join thousands of others to celebrate the birth of Christ or the coming of the New Year at Stephansdom or one of the city's other cathedrals; or maybe we'll worship alone or with a few locals at a nearby church.

That will be, for most of us, all the "religion" we'll endure. We might give a few moments thought to the promise of Paradise in the afterlife and to the moral teaching in which Christianity excels, however much the practice of its adherents falls short, to guide and govern us today.

The rest will be almost wholly and unambiguously secular.

Does that matter - or matter all that much?

One of the depressing features of the modern "market" economy and society is that it gives so little time or opportunity to enjoy the simple pleasures of life - or even the more "sophisticated" pleasures that modern technology has brought us in such plenty.

To be simply happy - to be enjoying life - spontaneously - and to have even the smallest feeling of empathy with our fellow creatures has become a luxury in which we seldom have the opportunity to indulge.

A quick drink with our family and friends, a quick and casual "romantic" relationship that we know lacks depth in feeling or time, are more the norm for our lives now than was once the sad exception.

If Christmas provides some means of bringing people together, of creating even no more than a passing illusion of some sort of social togetherness and common humanity, it is more than worthwhile for those reasons alone.

Perhaps, in a world that has become so fiercely negative towards social virtues and so overwhelmingly permissive in individual self-indulgence, we might ask whether the world would be better without even the largely secular, market-oriented Christmas that we have now. We have so little in which we can rejoice together, in which we can feel even the most superficial brother- and sisterhood, that the answer must be "no."

So let's keep whatever little we still have and see whether, perhaps even as early as next Christmas, we might - just might - have just a little more.