Christmas is not so much about childhood as the memory of childhood, that time when we felt the world to be the extension of our imaginations in time and space, and felt, consequently, that terror and ecstasy of being responsible for everything, of possessing the power of transforming the world to fit our deepest desires. Growing up as I did during the Depression gives all my memories of Christmas a dark intensity, full of longing for toys never received, and each Christmas, the unquenchable hope that this time the miracle would happen.
I must admit that all my memories of childhood are almost exclusively of toys. Adults and most children were like trees in a forest through which I wended my fearful and cautious way. Toys were the sensuous objectification of my ability to recreate the world in my imagination, to make even the humblest object sacred. I can remember in intense detail every toy I possessed, their colors and shapes, their tactile presence in my hands, the minute markings of wear that gave each of them a history. That sheer, direct, unmediated experience of the physical world has never been surpassed. Most children, I think, live with dark and violent emotions. The loss of childhood innocence is not so much a moral issue as that gradual blunting of our responses, the ebbing of our unique, individual passions and perceptions, the deflation of the intensity of the world to a physical husk. The tragic separation of matter from spirit.
My archetypical Christmas was my tenth one. The world was stumbling out of the depths of the Depression into world war; my father finding his first steady job in five years, at the New York World's Fair, of all places, a stunning symbol of hope in a city sunk in the grayness of poverty and fear.
As a child, I had become somehow convinced that adults had the power to read children's minds, so that I was constantly struggling between attempts at extreme secrecy to protect my private world and emitting mental beams of laser intensity on birthdays and Christmas in hope of receiving some absolute object of desire as a gift. Coming right out and asking for something seemed out of the question when money was so scarce. The toy that I was sick with desire for that year was, in any case, the most expensive thing I had ever wanted. A medieval castle, cunningly made from interlocking pieces of printed cardboard, complete with moat and drawbridge with an inner courtyard and tower. It seemed, in the store window, impossibly large and completely out of reach. But it was, and remains, in my mind what the French call an objet de virtu. Its power and delight did not depend on its usefulness or on my need. It existed in its own joyful right, radiant with beauty, and it gave me comfort to know that it existed at all.
Christmas came, in that magical descent into wintry night and glowing lamplight that transformed even the seediest street in our neighborhood into a world of private glamour. Like many Italian families, we celebrated Christmas Eve and presents were opened at midnight. By that time I would usually be ill from feverish expectancy and the refusal to leave the living room Christmas tree for fear of missing even the smallest moment of the great event.
That midnight, by some miracle no one in the family can remember or explain, my castle appeared under the tree. It was the last pure confirmation of belief in the power of my imagination to transform the world. That night left a traumatic legacy on my subsequent career as world reformer and artist. All that night I lay in bed contemplating what had happened and luxuriating in the plans I made for playing with my toy castle.
The next day, Christmas Day, after Mass, the relatives arrived, bringing a small threatening cadre of cousins. I was prepared. I had placed the castle carefully behind the tree, masked by the snow village and American Flyer trains at its base and I stood unobtrusive guard all day. I did not reckon with one of my favorite cousins, a girl whom I perceived as having no interest in my little male bastion. But she was intrigued by the view from our bay window in front of which our tree stood. I could only watch, dumbstruck, as she deftly slipped into the space and planted a new patent leather shoe on the tower of my castle. My cries and tears brought help. My father, even in those days before scotch tape, did an admirable repair job. But my castle was never the same. I still loved it and played for hours with the toy for years to come, but only with that poignant mixture of love and pain that marks the onset of adult life.
To fall in love with the physical world must be what incarnation means. To leave the safety of pure spirit for the dangerous immersion in fragile nature. That God should enter the world, not as some spiritual or mental manifestation, but as a child of flesh, the most helpless and vulnerable of creatures, is beyond comprehension, but essential to our understanding of what religious experience is. Incarnation is far more mysterious to me than resurrection. Life after death seems really no more difficult, on reflection, than life before death. The mystery of the world is not how or why but that it exists, the philosopher tells us.
The seductive appeal of Catholicism, for me, is that it asserts the continuity of the physical and spiritual worlds: the Mystical Body, resurrection of the body, the glorified body after the last day. All doctrines that redeem nature, not revile it. It is the idea of nature as separate from spirit that produces materialism in the worst sense. If nature is not imbued with spirit, then we can, as we have, treat it with impunity, mere dross to be consumed and excreted as we pursue some platonic ideal. But, if we see the world and everything in it, no matter how humble, as having the potential of embodying spirit, we are obliged to treat it with respect and see, as an artist does his materials and the child its toys, infinity in that grain of sand.
The failure of our consumer society is in squeezing out of matter all semblance of spirit, of co-opting our deepest imaginative values and turning them into disposable commodities. Is it still possible in a world proliferating in expendable products to humanly relate to any artifact? To feel love for and delight in something human beings fabricate is essential to our spiritual well-being. Is deprivation and poverty the only way to find value in possessions? Children are inundated with toys, targeted by the most sophisticated marketing techniques available. And yet, left to their own devices, I think they still have the capacity to choose and relate to toys in deep, personal ways. For when toys arrive as a gift that shows understanding and insight, they respond with a delight that transcends greed. For gift giving is an art, not a business; it is to truly recognize another person, to show true attention. And attention is a form of love.
The magic of childhood lies in that feeling that the world is part of ourselves. Children feel the Mystical Body implicitly. We adults are only just beginning to formulate a language for this perception of the world. Ironically, technology is making this a world in which we communicate at the speed of light and travel at the speed of sound. But our private experience and perception remains isolated and fragmented. We feel alone in the rush of events and our political and economic structures are premised on that isolation. We must find a way to co-opt the technological, material world, not condemn it, and to invest these forces with our spiritual values. History is replete with these transformations. This country, stricken spiritually as it is, was/is, an example of reinventing human society in a way that seemed inconceivable to the old world. What it will take to achieve this transformation I can't begin to address here, but I suspect it has something to do with children and toys. Inside every adult is a child struggling to get out.
