Each day the news makes us aware that our society is disordered. But something not often found there is the sense in which it is an eating disorder that is blighting the life of western societies. Here I am not referring specifically to those recently recognised diseases that many people painfully suffer from such as bulimia or anorexia nervosa, but referring more generally to the unhealthy social values that feed them.

What is this social plight but a consumptive affliction composed of consuming too much but being satisfied only momentarily? (Those suffering from such as bulimia or anorexia, for instance, consume too much of an image which subsequently renders them unable to ingest the nutrition needed for their physical health.) Goods, experiences and sensations are marketed as those things that we require in order not merely to make our lives more manageable and easier (whether they be household ‘labour saving’ items, or even forms of medication designed to ease our health ailments), but even frequently as items that enhance our very humanness (so that without them we are something less than fully human). But this kind of consumption does not satisfy, and indeed cannot by its very nature. If we were to rest content with what we had then the stalls of the consumerist marketplace would be overturned and consequently rendered closed for business. It is in the interests of the relevant companies that the products are not merely enjoyable or useful but that they are temporary and need to be replaced, supplemented, and consumed again, ad nauseum.

‘We are what we eat!’ is a commonly voiced message from health awareness groups. What are we when on the consumerist diet, with its increasingly empty, self-absorbed spirituality of consumption? Increasingly empty, self-absorbed people.

In this context, then, the Christian memory of the original Christmas-event constitutes not a spiritual supplement to diets that are lacking something for the health of their dieters. In the Christian story, Christmas is the beginning of the call to practice new a dietary requirement. What does God give us? Not goods, but the Good, God’s very creative and living Self (Jn 1), and the recreation of our selves in Jesus Christ. Perhaps a eucharist (the Lord’s Supper) on Christmas Day would make an appropriate display of this (after all, Christmas is the ‘mass’ of ‘Christ’). The silence in the event would remember that the silence of the babe is tragically and terribly echoed not in the life of those who have nothing to say because their lives are immeasurably fulfilled, but rather in those who have silence enforced on them – those who suffer all manner of injustice. The babe’s silence echoes the silence of the Word enfleshed before his executioners. And that enforced silence, that rejection, is endured and judged by the lavishness of God’s Self-giving. Christ is raised to speak God’s creative Word of life again. (But that Christ is experienced by much of the world not as Physician of our dietary disorders but as himself one contagiously diseased is testimony more to the illnesses of those who claim to schedule his appointments for him than to his healing freedom.)

Christians, then, are not to plead that people eat less or go on a more rigorous diet. Rather, they proclaim that the manner of society’s feasting is, ironically and tragically, itself a spiritual famine, a starvation diet. And, of course, starvation diets can only lead to one thing – death! The memory of Christmas proclaims the need for us to change our very eating habits, to fast from our consumption in order to discover our special dietary requirements. In other words, we are to learn that as creatures (those created) our very creative ground is the Word of Life (Jn. 1:4), and learn how God’s creatures are thereby created to enjoy his world and contribute to its feeding when it is hungry (this is the foretaste of the heavenly feasting).

In the light of this the festivities of consumers may well look like the self-indulgent revelry of idolators feasting on the remains of a God forgotten (Ex. 32:6). Is there a more appropriate and disturbing image of Christmas celebrations than those that pander to self-gratification, strongly encourage significant increases in consumer spending, and forget and replace the birth of the One who died bloodily with one who is constructed to make the colour red synonymous instead with our Christmas excesses? We are what we eat! May God grant us a creative dis-ease with this way of ‘living’ in his world!

[This and other papers is available at the following website: http://www.oocities.org/johnnymcdowell]