Christmas Angel Stories: The Loss of Physical Religion

The Christmas Angel series illustrates an odd and influential attitude-shift over the last three hundred years.

The Christmas Angel series is a set of seven books in which an angel carving, originally created in the mid-1700s, brings together different M/M couples, each in a different time period.

All the books are worth reading. The first three books are the best with Anyta Sunday's clever Shakespeare-tribute Shrewd Angel making a surprise, stellar appearance as number 6.

From a historical point of view, here is what interests me: the first three books use the angel in frankly paranormal ways (but not so much that a plot is lost). In addition, the angel is frankly pro-physical love, neither embarrassed nor squeamish about it.

Eli Easton starts off the series with the origin tale: Christmas Angel. The angel is a fully-fledged character, full of humor and goodwill and a wink. She exists outside her representative, the carved version--like Saint Winifred of the Cadfael Mysteries exists outside her bones. Also like Saint Winifred, she is down to earth, shrewd, and a fan of romance.

Summerfield's Angel by Kim Fielding comes next (if you read them in order, which isn't necessary, but I more or less did). The angel appears again as a character with a message. This time she is even a little bossy!

The angel makes less of a character appearance in Jordan Hawk's Magician's Angel. But her statue is part of a magician's act and she absolutely would not mind.

The books that follow are worth the low price (approximately $4 per novella) but the angel becomes more symbolic, less vital and human and real. L.A. Witt's World War II piece handles its soldiers well (as usual) but the angel seems a bit disconnected from the tale. N.R. Walker's Vietnam War piece--though interesting in its own right--heavily implies that the angel is prudish about human love. And R.J. Scott's tale ends far too abruptly and fails to pay off the angel's possible paranormal whisperings.

Anyta Sunday's Shrewd Angel (1990) is not only clever but satisfying since the angel statue does play a role within the plot. And there is some suggestion of paranormal interfering. But not much.

Over the course of the books, the paranormal element fades while the angel becomes a far more fastidious character than established in Easton's origin tale. Less the frank and fleshy nuns of Brother Cadfael (or even the well-lived nun of the Father Dowling Mysteries) and more like--I'm not sure. I have a hard time thinking of a literary comparison since I don't read religious books with prudish nuns or angels. (Or watch shows with them either.)

I don't know if the change was on purpose--that is, the authors determined beforehand that the angel's role and attitude would change over time. Or whether the choice of authors for each book explains why the angel changed over time. Whatever the cause, the outcome oddly enough matches up to changes in the last 300 years, changes that have resulted in modern conflicted shock and reproach.

We 21st Century folks like to imagine that we are so bold and brash and frank and--depending on who's talking--salacious and obscene and indecent and pornographic.

The fact is, we aren't anywhere close to any of those things, no matter how we present or criticize ourselves.

Truth: In many ways the Victorians were more

honest about sex than modern Americans.

20th Century Bohemians were far more

fastidious than they liked to pretend.

In other words, we're offended by everything: women breastfeeding in public, the idea that God might not be opposed to sex, bare bodies bathing or dressing together, religious ceremonies that focus on the physical form, frank discussions of sexual matters, women as sexual beings, men as sexual beings, varying sexual orientations that don't fit into labels, people sharing rooms, people sharing bathtubs, people giving birth at home, other people being present during births, National Geographic magazines, the nude in art, romance paperbacks, romance paperback covers, songs that mention sex, manga, bawdy humor.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that all this offense is coming from the right. Or that all of this shocked unease is coming from religious people. Christianity makes a good scapegoat. But old-time Christianity had no trouble discussing sex as a reality. From Paul to Augustine to young pregnant single girls praying to the Virgin Mary, sex was something real to grapple with.

The testicle joke at the beginning of Witness is far more

realistic to agrarian cultures than modern attitudes account for.

I maintain that the two biggest influences on our modern attitudes regarding sexual matters are the growth of privacy and the worries of intellectuals. As human beings gained privacy (post 1750), we become far more prudish. In an earlier post on Votaries, I called this "prudish prurient permissiveness whereby a partially clad body is instantly sexualized by those who take offense and by those who take an interest while both the offended and the interested are scandalized at the idea of having to share a bedroom or bathroom."

Reality: Puritans told bawdy jokes. And slept together before marriage. And knew all about sex since living near animals kind of gives the plot away. They were well-aware of the vagaries of the human, physical form.

Never trust a historian or a politician or an offended commentator (and there are lots of those out there) that tries to tell you that once upon a time, people were ever so naive and closeted and didn't know all the things we know. Instead, ask yourself what our ancestors would find to laugh about when it comes to us.