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Since I started doing popular science theater more than three decades ago, my literary essays have mainly focused on education. This has intensified since I have been writing for the IFE Observatory, where I almost always combine pedagogy with some other subject, such as science, art, linguistics, or philosophy. This December, the theme is Christmas and, inevitably, the religion that gives rise to it.
Talking about religion (or perhaps we prefer the term spirituality) obliges anyone who publishes in secular media to be discreet and aware of the bad reputation of these terms. I am convinced that, in many cases, this poor reputation is due to the bad, awful education we have received in what we call spiritual matters. The saying “Prevention is better than sorry” applies perfectly in this case, given the terrible experiences we generally have had since childhood with everything related to church, clergy, dogma, religion, sin, guilt, and the like. Later,when we were older (and hungry for reliable knowledge), we felt horror when we found those terms in texts that hurt or at least offended our judgment (and that still harm and offend it).
Can I do something different in this text? I have tried—whenever I can—to show that, in general, we are unaware of what spirituality is. I have tried to make scientists see that the theological and mystical are present in great thinkers of the twentieth century, even those of an analytical nature who have cemented the current science theories. To the rationalists, I have insisted that names like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas—privileged fathers of Catholicism—are referenced frequently in contemporary philosophy. Ultimately, I have wanted to convince my readers that if we truly want to renounce religion, we must have clarity—at least personal clarity—about what we are moving away from.
Notwithstanding this apparent firmness of mine, I confess that as I write this, I am tinged with a certain redness and shame. Perhaps it is because I was raised amid a coalition between the religious and the scientific, in which the criteria of science eventually prevailed, and yet, repeatedly, I return to my origins and am assailed by the longing for that unknown and transcendent something.
In the middle of the last century, the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano lamented that her God was barely tolerated. Today, it is much more common to see people from various backgrounds, including academicians, openly showing their interest in spirituality. This does not mean their spirituality is always consistent and serious. Certainly, our postmodern world has fallen to the extreme of trying to get all individual claims accepted. I do not think it should be that way, but I also do not believe that scientific and rational criteria can define the value of any “truth.” It would seem much better to me to search for an education that brings our thinking closer to what we realize we can never know and, therefore, to a resignation to our ignorance (a resignation that can also be understood as a resignification of human knowledge in slightly more humble terms).
The following essays reflect on topics that, because it is Christmas time, may be better tolerated by those who are still scandalized by linking education with anything that sounds like spirit. The first approaches Christmas from a perspective that is not idyllic but sensible to the young students, who are waking up to this world as wonderful as it is barbaric. It is a way of showing them an intuitive interpretation of art. The second essay—more explicitly pedagogical—critiques canonical rituals and reflects (let’s say, “Christmassy”) on how an authentic spiritual education could be present in our lives from childhood.
Christmas Passion
On April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, several squadrons of German and Italian planes flew over a small town in the Basque country called Guernica and bombed and machine-gunned the inhabitants. It was a cruel slaughter. Several scholars have analyzed the causes, and almost all of them conclude that it was a test to train Nazi troops, who years later ─in the great war being prepared─ would repeat it in other parts of the world. General Francisco Franco (later Dictator of Spain) publicly highlighted the strategy and tried to blame the massacre on his Republican enemies but was unsuccessful.
As soon as he heard of this terrible event, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso decided to capture the subject in the painting that the Republican government had recently commissioned him to do. His work, Guernica, represented Spain at the International Exhibition in Paris and aroused controversial, approving, and disapproving comments; it became one of the great icons of universal painting.
I confess that in my youth, my idea of the painting coincided with that of the German critics in Paris, who said it was nothing more than “scribbles that any child can paint.” However, I was ignorant, just like those critics. I remember one thing I did not understand was how the destruction of an entire village could be represented by the image of a few people in a cramped room. Despite its size (almost eight meters long by three and a half meters high), the work did not have the spectacularity that I thought the subject deserved, which would be more in keeping with an endless landscape of burned houses and people fleeing, as in those war paintings I had seen by classic authors.
The painting was exhibited many years later at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where I was fortunate to see it. Although I had already advanced a little in the knowledge of art, the painting failed to move me. Lamenting my impassibility, I bought a brochure about the painting on the spot and went to a coffee shop to read it. A text provoked a real epiphany in me: the word “Birth” jumped out at me from those pages, alluding to those small handmade Nativity scene pieces that present the birth of Jesus, revealing to me at once the whole meaning of Guernica. How could so much time have passed without my hearing the painting’s explanation, known to all the experts?! I looked at the cover of the brochure illustrating the painting… and there it was! Christmas transfigured into an infernal drama, with its very cramped stable, its Virgin Mary and the dead baby Jesus in her arms, Saint Joseph also murdered on the floor, the star of Bethlehem at the top degraded to an electric light; the dove, barely outlined, a symbol of a fallen and dying Holy Spirit; the mule and the ox, converted into an enraged bull and a horse wounded by a spear in his side, as anticipation of Jesus Christ on the cross; and finally, those three female figures who burst onto the scene, desperate and suffering, and who could well represent – in this subversion of the Portal of Bethlehem – the Three Kings.
That was it.
There was no doubt that Guernica represented the death of Jesus as soon as he was born. I hurriedly turned the pages to dive into the details of that explanation, but what I had envisioned was not there: no portal, no Christmas, no dead Jesus. I had misunderstood: The word birth did not refer to traditional nativity scenes but to something likethe birth of a new epoch inaugurated by the famous painting. I had imagined it all.
I quickly tried to find out from other sources if a version of my interpretation existed, but I could not find anything. No critic alluded to the interpretation that I had unexpectedly felt, and it was years later when I came upon the text of a connoisseur who agreed with me. Recently, I have discovered some essays that do. The versions differ in some nuances, for example, in the meaning of the three females or that of the bird, but they refer to the same mythology that gripped me resoundingly that morning.
Maybe Picasso did not have that version in mind, or not consciously, or maybe he did, but he never revealed it so as not to offend millions of believers. I understand that he never wanted to talk about the ” meaning “of his work. However, if he were aware of it, he would also have known that Guernica would cease to be a withering lightning bolt in the eyes of those who had betrayed the Spanish Republic supposedly to defend Catholicism – and not because he did not make it explicit.
Whatever version we have of Guernica, the death of those men, women, and children in the Basque village is like so many other civilian populations; today, it inevitably extends to the tragedy of the incursions into Israel and the much more atrocious bombing of Gaza. That is why I suggest that, at least in this season, we look for a moment at Picasso’s painting with Christmas eyes to remember those tragedies that surround us and that we turn with a sad smile to that almost invisible flower in the hand of the dead Saint Joseph, the last redoubt of hope, broken but still present.
Santa Claus and Guilt
In my youth, there was a time when I sought the meaning of life in religion. It was the religion my parents had instilled in me but whose catechism I had learned mostly from my grandmother. That is why, the day I entered the church and received Communion for the first time in many years, she was the one I approached to tell. Filled with joy, she exclaimed, “What joy, and to whom did you confess?” The heaven that felt close suddenly returned to its height: I had forgotten that, to receive Communion, one must confess at least once in the past year.
“I didn’t,” I said.
Her heaven also collapsed, much lower than mine: instantly, her face fell, and she seemed to lose a couple of kilos. I had committed a grave sin. Fortunately, I had spent enough time away from religion that my grandmother’s fright not only did not scare me but, on the contrary, made me move even further away from Catholicism.
Not many years later, my elder sister, who was also searching for spirituality, asked me to visit a priest who had been a great preceptor to her. Father Manuel Jiménez Fernández was one of the great Mexican scholars of the Catholic Church: a theologian, historian, counselor in the Second Vatican Council, participant in the excavations of the monastery of the Essenes at Qumran… It was he who, in the long hour and a half he dedicated to me, clarified, among other things, my concerns about that grave sin that I had supposedly committed some time before. “No, no sin,” he said. “You did well to receive Communion. God does not put obstacles in the way of anyone who wants to come near Him.”
Father Jimenez also explained to me that in previous centuries, confession was not an act of a single and quick session but a long process of self-knowledge that involved numerous encounters.
Just a few days ago, I came across the controversial subject of confession again while reviewing the second chapter of one of the most beautiful and disturbing books on pedagogy and psychoanalysis I have read. The book is The Cause of Children, written in the 1980s by the great French psychoanalyst and pedagogue Françoise Doltó (many of my readers have heard of her), who never stopped publicly acknowledging her Catholicism and facing continuous criticism for it. In the chapter I am referencing, entitled “Let the Children Come to Me” (a well-known phrase of Christ in the Gospel), Doltó delves into overlooked issues when considering the sacraments of Confession and Communion. They serve me now to reflect on how poor religious education (for example, through the awful catechism that so many of us receive) has influenced us to misinterpret spirituality.
I do not want to raise questions about the reality of the spiritual in our lives. I prefer to point out, following Doltó, some of the obstacles we face when we want to inquire about that possible reality. The French pedagogue explains how, at the beginning of the 20th century, during the papacy of Pius X, the minimum age for receiving First Communion was lowered to seven, always preceded by a Confession. “This decree of the Catholic Church,” Doltó tells us painfully, “uselessly blamed all the young generations of our century in the name of the same Jesus whom children supposedly could approach.” She explains this radical statement: no child can truly review his actions spiritually at that age. Seven-year-olds can only assess the consequences of their actions by the reaction of adults, that is, by whether they approve or disapprove of them. A child “is happy or unhappy according to whether he receives congratulations or punishments from his educators.” It is an age when, if forced to “confess,” the child will confuse “imagination with thought, unconscious desire with action, saying with doing, and, worse, God with his parents and teachers.” The child who confesses “calibrates good and evil before God according to the whims or neuroses” of the adults closest to him so that the sacraments only “induce in him guilt instead of trust in himself and others,” which is his true mission. With this “distrust of oneself and others” and this “fear of experiences,” Doltó continues, guilt spreads everywhere.
Many will say that those cases where children make their First Communion before the age of nine or ten are isolated cases. I do not think it matters. In fact, given the immaturity that abounds in our world, it is not uncommon for the faithful to approach the confessional with this sad and unspiritual confusion between the divine and the human. Many of us know, moreover, that this confusion that Doltó refers to regarding parents and teachers also extends to priests in general (a symbol of authority like few others) and intensifies in the confessional. Kneeling there, most children and adults believe they must give an account of their actions to the man dressed in a cassock in the confessional box. Ashamedly, they await their reprobation and forgiveness when true repentance has nothing to do with being held accountable, reprobated, or ashamed, much less with being forgiven by another human being.
Taking this to the Christmas context, it is precisely the confusion between the divine and human planes that encourages that, after bringing girls and boys closer to a mysterious Santa Claus who loves them (that is, someone quite close to God), we perversely end up asking them to resign themselves to the fact that all of that was just a lie from adults (one more?). In my opinion, a correct spiritual education would allow children to fully believe in that loving being who thinks of them and wants their happiness and would accompany them during the disappointment of the fantastic part (for example, when Santa makes or buys the toys from advertising and tours all the homes in the world in a single night), always taking care not to harm the loving bond with a transcendent being.
I end this text by recommending that everyone watch that wonderful film classic called Miracle on 34th Street (I know the 1947 version, which is on YouTube) so that at least for a few hours we can recover the authentic Santa, emissary of God. , to be genuinely spiritual… and therefore a little crazy compared to our human, all-too-human Christmas.
Translated by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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