c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com)

UNDATED _”Holiday stress”hadn’t reached the Blue Ridge when 10 singers stopped recently for breakfast in West Jefferson, N.C.

Folks were enjoying a slow start on Saturday. They noticed the exuberant strangers, but went back to eating and visiting. We, the singers, settled in for eggs, grits, biscuits and gravy. “Do you know the story of `Field of Souls’?”a fellow singer asked me. This song from the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir’s repertoire has captivated us. We are working hard on this retreat to learn it. It seems the lead singer is a former crack addict, whose wife reached the end of her rope one night and asked the New York congregation for help. At that very moment, the man came home from a toot, felt a sudden urge to visit the church, and found there an entire congregation praying for him.”It broke him on the spot,”my friend said. Now his tenor voice soars in a song of faith.

As food arrived, someone in our ensemble suggested we sing grace. Our director found an A, and we sang. Others in the restaurant were delighted. Two invited us to the mountain community’s annual music festival at the elementary school.

This moment reminded me of another. We were 16-years-old, members of the Shortridge High School Madrigal Singers. Christmas shopping was in full swing in downtown Indianapolis. We rode the escalator at L.S. Ayres & Co. and sang the Renaissance era’s songs of faith.

Holidays can be about commerce or about religion. Our moods can be grim, frenzied and filled with obligation, or our moods can be tender, exuberant, lighted by candles. Or, as is most likely, the eight weeks bracketed by Halloween and Christmas (No. 2 and No. 1, respectively, in retail sales) can be all of the above, as we are whipsawed by the ongoing tension between religion and culture.

In one sense, religion lost the battle long ago, as it provided names for cultural events but little of their content. It isn’t a big step from Michaelmas being the name of a school term in pre-modern England to Christmas being a commercial bonanza around the globe.”Silent Night”serenading shoppers at Target in October isn’t much different from using hymns as background music for royal celebrations.

Religion and culture will always do battle, because they compete for the same limited space. Congregations and fast-food outlets fight for the same suburban corners. Congregations, community charities and the Internal Revenue Service compete for the same dollars. Christian book stores compete with Barnes & Noble. Children’s choirs compete with Sunday-morning soccer leagues.

As an institution, religion wins some and loses some. But the real field of souls isn’t tax laws or school rules, it’s the woman who exhausted her own resources to help the man she loved. The real field of souls is the young man sitting with his wife and daughter in a Blue Ridge restaurant, who hears music, smiles and says,”I play banjo.” The interplay that matters isn’t the tense confrontation between religion and culture, but the less self-serving encounter between faith and life.

Pastors will mount the expected festivals, but their real ministry will be sitting quietly with the widowed and distraught, for whom”holiday cheer”is an affront.

Parents will watch children in pageants, but ministry will happen when a mom helps a”Mary”into her costume. Singing groups like ours will perform, but faith will blind us in a mountain cabin when the depth of a man’s battle with crack makes his song more than music.

We will walk the brightly lit aisles of Target, hear”Silent Night”and see a sea of merchandise beyond our reach. As we mentally tally the gap between means and desires, faith will walk into our worry. No pledge card, no neon, no”Sale Today!”Just a companion on a stressful journey.

Many people around West Jefferson, N.C., make their living raising Christmas trees. For them, as for most of our consumer culture, Christmas is the make-or-break season. No problem. Faith has survived more than commercialization.

Faith will sit with worried tree-growers, anxious merchants, harried clerks, nervous”Marys,”crack users and crack sellers. Long after churches and malls have taken down their decorations, faith and life will take their quiet walk.

MJP END EHRICH