Advent 2020: Secret Stories

 My text is an article by the late John Le Carre  and those alternative nativity narratives I posted earlier.

I don't have any scholarly insight into those narratives, no deep study of their history and transmission.  I don't slight such scholarship by my ignorance or omission, I'm really just approaching them as a critical reader would, noting particularly that the nativity from Luke seems to dominate, as it does for us today.  We should stop here to notice that there are two nativity stories in the canonical gospels and they are irreconcilable, although we mash them together every year.  Matthew's version has the star and the Magi (and the Massacre of the Innocents, which everyone but Catholics, I think, ignores); Luke's version has the census, the shepherds, in fact all the angels, as well as four songs.  Luke's version is the one we all seem to prefer, though we bring Matthew's Magi and his star to the "stable" we imagine Luke was referring to (I'm not sure when stables came into vogue, but I'm pretty sure they weren't available to the ptochoi, the poorest of the poor, like Joseph and Mary were.)  Why can't they be reconciled?  Matthew has the holy family in Bethlehem from the beginning; they leave because of the Massacre of the Innocents, and spend time in Egypt before returning to Nazareth, where Jesus was known to have come from.  Luke displaces them from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of the census (which, so far as we know, never occurred), and sends them back again, with no intervening trip to Egypt.  Luke also never mentions Herod, a primary antagonist in Matthew's story.  But that's not why I have you here.  I'm really just trying to point out there were many nativity stories, and as they caught the imagination of later believers, they grew and became more, well...interesting.

And that's where Le Carre comes in.  He writes about his early experiences as a member of British intelligence, in two revealing stories.  The first involves a man he and his colleagues are convinced is an agent, an operative, a "real spy."  The man is senior to them all, in age and stature in the office, and works alone in the attic of the building they all work in.  As Le Carre says, the higher up you are, the more important you must be (it's a bit of his dry humor at work, but also an observation on how much we invest meaning into matters we don't fully understand, and come, more often than not, to wrong conclusions).  Le Carre is taken by this man out on a "mission," to a small pub near the Austrian border with then (circa 1950's) Communist Czechoslovakia, there to meet a man coming across the border with sensitive but vital information which will be paid for with a briefcase full of cash Le Carre is carrying.

Except the man never shows up and the two are obviously not regulars at the bar, and when Le Carre clumsily drops the gun he's been carrying for protection, the room clears out in a hurry.  They go home late and empty-handed, and Le Carre confesses that only years later did he figure out there was no informant, and no money in the briefcase he never opened, and no rendezvous.  The whole thing was invented by the older man.  He was not, as Le Carre and his coworkers assumed, an M.I. 6 agent. "He was one of those forgotten souls whom military bureaucracies dump on distant shores and forget about for years on end."  Out of sheer bordeom, Le Carre now surmises, the man invented a scene from a spy novel for his own purposes, mostly to convince himself he was still useful, still important, still needed.  The man left that office shortly after the event:  removed, decamped, asked for a transfer?  Le Carre doesn't know, but wonders.

The other story is just as telling.  Another faceless British bureaucrat in an office handling classified files.  Handling them because he and Le Carre are vetting applicants to M.I. 5.  Files this man checks out never return.  He is questioned:  he is innocent, he insists.  Others are misplacing the files when he returns them; or losing them; or taking them.  Not him.  Finally the investigators come to his office, and ask for the keys to his file cabinets.  Everyone in the building has file cabinets which must be locked when they are not in the room.  The man, hunched over his desk (Le Carre at the other desk) hands over his keys without looking up.  They open the cabinets...and find all the missing files.

The man told Le Carre a story, at another time, about an experience he had in New York city, on a liaison visit to the FBI.  Every day, he said, he returned to his room, to find he was on a different floor of the hotel.  Nothing changed, except the floor.  The room was the same; his belongings precisely where he'd left them, nothing disturbed:  but a different room on a different floor, nonetheless.  Only the FBI, he confided, could have pulled off such a switch.  And why?  To smoke him out; to see if, like Kim Philby, he was a mole.

So he hid his files in his office.  Only then could he be sure the FBI wouldn't change them, as they had done his hotel room.

You can take from these stories that spycraft is so morally deficient (you lie about who you are; you betray everyone not on "your side") as to be mentally damaging.  That's certainly in keeping with Le Carre's primary thesis in his work.  But Le Carre draws another conclusion:  we love secrets, and we trust, above all, "secret" information.  The conclusion he draws is summed up in one paragraph:

The superbug of espionage madness is not confined to individual cases. It flourishes in its collective form. It is a homegrown product of the industry as a whole. Is a cure at hand? I doubt it. The most down-to-earth citizens from the real world, appointed to oversee the spooks’ activities, turn to clay in their hands. Faith in spies is mystical, fuelled by fantasy and halfway to religion. They’re a protected species in our national psychology. Our banks and financial services may collapse, our economy may be going through the floor, our road and rail system may be a catastrophe, our Millennium Dome a laughingstock, the cost of fuel, energy, and water rising by the week, but our spies are immune to all of it. Never mind how many times they trip over their cloaks and leave their daggers on the train to Tonbridge, the spies can do no wrong.

Because we love James Bond and stories of intrigue the same way we love movies about con jobs?  Maybe.  But I think it's because we love secrets.  I think it's because we accept, almost instinctively, that secret knowledge is the "real" knowledge.  If it's hidden, it must be worth uncovering.  If it's not widely known it must be a "real" information.  If everybody knows it, what power is that?  Secrecy, hidden information, closely guarded data, must be hidden for a reason.  And then when we know what few others do, we, too, are important.

Which brings me back to those nativity narratives.  There is, in the scriptures, a "secret Mark," which was supposed to be reserved to only certain people.  Some remnants of it remain in some published versions of the Gospel of Mark.  Other parts of it can be found in scholarly texts, but are still not widely available, millenia after they were written.  Biblical scholars know about "gnostic" texts which were supposedly preserving "secret knowledge" that only certain (i.e., special) people could know.  But Biblical scholars also agree that such secrecy is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.  Still, we love secrets; and we love stories.

Le Carre's work is mostly about the danger of secrets.  Not their revelation, but the energy it takes to keep them hidden, and the damage such secrecy does to the secret keepers.  In the first story, the secret was that the "agent" was a nobody.  His need to live up to the reputation he carefully cultivated, that he must be an M.I. 6 agent, led him to do foolish things.  In the second story, the sheer effort at maintaining fealty and secrecy and trustworthiness pushed the man to becoming completely untrustworthy, because it pushed him into paranoia.  Extremes, but instructive examples nonetheless.  We love secrets; and we love stories.  We especially love stories that tell secrets.

The infancy gospels I posted clearly patch together the stories from Luke and Matthew and then add details and "secret" information.  The Arabic infancy gospel expands the Lukan nativity, with a cave replacing the "inn," and an old woman added for her wisdom and midwifery skills (not needed, which is why no gospel tells us about Mary's labor and delivery.  See?  Secret knowledge!  Now we know, but so many people don't!  Shhhhh!)  And there are added stories of miracles to prove Jesus was God from birth (part of what Matthew and Luke were trying to establish) and because who doesn't love a good miracle, like swaddling clothes that won't burn.

The infancy gospel of James takes us inside the mind of Joseph as Mary gives birth, again in a convenient cave (there are centuries of illustrations of the Holy Family in some kind of cave or grotto at night).  This story wants to give you the experience of the blessed moment, as it switches to first person to try to make the story of the birth more believable.  I remember the birth of my daughter somewhat this way:  everything moving but nothing moving until, like a miracle (I still call it so though it happens every day), a new person not before in the world, is suddenly and wholly in the world (and holy, too, I'd dare say.).  It wasn't quite the Ted Hughes poem (we'll come to that, at Christmastide), but I understand that poem better now than I did before then.  But what do I add to the story of my daughter, or my relationship to her, by telling you that?  Much, really?

The episode of the midwife and the birth is, again, to make concrete and real what can seem too abstract and distant in the narratives of Luke and Matthew.  We want drama, the same way that "spy" in Le Carre's early experience did; and we will have it if we have to invent it.

Most of these are apologetics, works written to defend against criticism of the doctrine of the incarnation.  That explains some of the elaboration on the tales from the canonical gospels.  But we do like secrets.  We like to think there is something more to the story, and if we just knew that, then we would have something!  Then we would know!  That desire is good, and laudable.  But it also leads us to believe conspiracy theories and outlandish claims and to think we alone truly understand what, in our ignorance, we don't understand at all. 

Le Carre's stories in his essay are about ignorance filling in the gaps in experience, but not with understanding.  In the second case, the truth is revealed, but was it revealed to the investigators?  Le Carre tells the story of the trip to New York as something he learned; he put that together with the discovery of the files and made his own solution to the problem of "why?"  In the first case, the "agent" disappeared.  Le Carre conjectures, based on his experience and probably some knowledge the "agent" was never in M.I 6, about what happened, and why.  But it's conjecture.

The nativity stories are trying to explain the inexplicable.  They are not historical accounts; they are more in the nature of apologetics.  Matthew wants to connect Jesus of Nazareth to David, and to make his claim Jesus was the Anointed root back to his birth, rather like the Egyptians did with Pharoahs.  He also connects it to the writings of the Hebrew prophets, especially Isaiah, one of the most important of the prophets.  Luke connects his story to Hebrew Scriptures through songs:  Zechariah's Benedictus and Mary's Magnificat echo the triumphal songs of Moses and Miriam; and Mary's song stands in a line of women who praise God with song because they give birth, or are pregnant.  The song of the angels and the song of Simeon connect the story of Zechariah to the birth of Jesus to the recognition of Jesus, this time by his own people rather than by foreign scholars.  The stories connect to each other even when they don't.  Luke has no Magi, Matthew has no shepherds; they still manage to tell the same parts of the same stories.

And the parts they leave out?  The details that would make it more dramatic, give us more knowledge, perhaps let us in on the secret?  We can provide that ourselves, if we really need it.  But if we start with the bare bones of the story, where Mark does with Jesus being baptized, and move out in chronology from there to Matthew's stories, and then Luke's, we soon find the stories are less important than what they tell us.  And if we can't explain just what they tell us, if the best we can do is be like Mary, and keep all these things in our heart (and what did she do with them there?), maybe that would be the best Christmas observance of all.

Who knows?