Narcissism vs. an orientation of incarnation

Elizabeth Scalia, who blogs at The Anchoress, has a great piece at NRO on how modern "holiday" greetings seldom reflect a sense of anything greater than a desire to let recipients know what a great year the sender has had.

Not sure how it occurred to her to use Duke Ellington as a launching point for her overall observation, but it works out  great:

The story goes that if the legendary composer and orchestrator Duke Ellington had met you, and gotten his hands on your mailing address, you’d have gotten a Christmas card from him. It may not come at Christmas, but at some point during the year, his personally written and signed greetings would grace your mailbox.

“Duke Ellington and I exchanged Christmas greetings each year,” wrote Joe Delaney of the Las Vegas Sun. “Mine were sent in mid-December. Duke sent his when the spirit moved him.”

She then cites her own example of what most of us experience as we open our mail in December:

The cards we are receiving at our house this year, though timely, have seemed relentlessly self-absorbed and unseasonal; the majority of them are not even cards, but photographs. They are pictures of families — or at least of the children, no matter how old — posing in bathing suits on a beach, or with a parrot on a cruise, and with nary a manger or an angel in sight.
Well, why would there be when, in fact, these messages are not really about Christmas at all. They’re about the selfie-ness of the senders, for whom even the recipient has become an irrelevant detail — an acquaintance confirmed via printed label stuck to the envelope. Not a pen is lifted, nor a name scrawled; not a warm sentiment is betrayed. The message is, in essence, “We had a nice vacation this year and liked this picture so here it is, and oh yeah, Happy Holidays.”
There is something profoundly anti-Incarnational about it all.
Incarnation is a process; it is actually a succession of processes — an ongoing pursuit of becoming. Incarnation involves intention and then consent, but not in isolation, and not just once; the consent happens again and again. It is a consent to be present; a consent to see, to hear, to listen, to respond, to love, to ache, to surrender in order to attain the fullness of that intention with which it all started.

The narcissism on display in these “holiday greetings” suggests no intention to seek out a greatness beyond ourselves; it consents to only the barest engagement with an ever-diminishing sense of social obligation. As such, it is empty and void; the “nothing” that is only possible without God. For with God — the angels tell Mary — “nothing” is “impossible.” 

Then she riffs off (excuse the pun) the signature sign-off to audiences with which Duke closed concerts over the course of his 50-plus-year career: "Thank you.  We love you madly."

In the noise of the world and our harried distractions and self-absorption, we lose track of the mystery and message of Christmas: that we are meant to be an Incarnational people, a people of intention, consenting to be aware of each other, fully present to each other, alive to each other, affirming each other, for God’s sake.
Duke Ellington used to tell his audiences that he loved them, and madly. Nat Hentoff, in a fond piece, quoted him: “It’s true. I love those people madly. . . . Maybe 30 years ago I used to think, ‘I play for myself. I express me.’ And an artist has to please himself first. But . . . when someone else happens to like what you’re doing too, this brings on a state of agreement that is the closest thing there is to sex, because people do not indulge themselves together unless they agree this is the time.”
Intention, consent, seeing, listening, being present, affirmation. It is an Incarnational way of living that perhaps only someone like Ellington, who kept Christmas well and understood its secret, could manage.
In 1974, Hentoff was the glad recipient of an April Christmas card from the Duke, who died weeks later, in May. “What came back to me as I looked at that card was what sideman Clark Terry told me: ‘Duke wants life and music to always be a state of becoming. He doesn’t even like definitive song endings to a piece. He’d often ask us to come up with ideas for closings, but when we’d settled on one of them, he’d keep fooling with it. He always likes to make the end of a song sound as if it’s going somewhere.’”

That’s the Incarnational process.  

As I said in my own Christmas post a few days ago, I am nobody's expert on Christian living, but as this season and year draw to a close, I am increasingly inclined to see the point of a human existence as finding ways in each moment to give.  Not generic giving.  We are not generic individual creatures. And, as Scalia points out, a sense that we "ought" to give is what leads to greetings that really come closer to saying "dig me" rather than "I love you."