Andrew Clavin’s Breaking: Christ is Born blends satire and theology as Santa Claus mocks "mini Bernie Sanders" elves and Trump-era tax cuts, while Dr. Dwight Lindley frames A Christmas Carol as Dickens’ Christian manifesto—redemption through charity. The host contrasts Scrooge’s greed with Stewart’s self-sacrifice in It’s a Wonderful Life, arguing both films hinge on perception shifting reality, then pivots to C.S. Lewis and Augustine: Christ bridges eternity and time, making salvation a done deal. Rejecting moralistic Christmas clichés, the episode ends with "Joy to the World," affirming Christ’s arrival as humanity’s ultimate redemption—beyond politics or relativism. [Automatically generated summary]
In keeping with this season of miracles and magic, we have the most miraculous, magical guest of all back with us in the studio.
Hey!
Hey, Santa Claus!
It's me, Santa Claus!
You are!
Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come back to us again.
No, biggie.
I needed the smoke.
Can you not smoke at the North Pole?
Oh, you're kidding me.
With the elves, you like one lousy stoke.
The fetching is unbearable.
And Drew, if it's not one thing they're complaining about, it's another.
Oh, I'm allergic to smoke.
I can't eat anything with nuts in it.
Stop grabbing my butt.
They're never happy.
They sound almost like Democrats.
Oh, no joke.
Plus, they live to be 150.
So it's like an entire toy factory full of mini Bernie Sanders.
Cute, tiny little Bernies with their pointy hats and their little slippers with bells on them and their firm round little butts.
I wake up screaming, Drew.
That does sound somewhat nightmarish, a little bit crossed between a nightmare and a fantasy.
But let me, you know, I keep hearing about this.
I keep hearing about this war on Christmas.
Is that a real thing?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, but fortunately, that other fat guy, you know, the one with the red hat who brings joy to the masses.
What's his name?
You got me.
The president of the United States.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Him.
Fortunately, he got us tax reform.
So I'm giving every elf a 2,000 candy cane bonus.
It's already kicking in.
Yeah, plus, I'm planning to spend like $2 billion on infrastructure in the Midwest.
I think it'll keep them happy for, you know, like five minutes.
You're just a giving person.
That's the way you are.
You know, I've been accused.
So aside from that, is there in fact a war on Christmas?
Are you kidding me?
Oi, have you been to Starbucks lately?
They're monsters.
Plus with the cups.
Whenever I fly, listen, the war on Christmas, a lot of talk about it.
I have a different view than most.
Because when I'm flying over one of these commie countries, you know, like North Korea, New York, suddenly the reindeer start shouting, flack, flack, flack.
I mean, at first, I thought they were just playing some of their reindeer games.
Oh, because believe me, these reindeers with their games.
Ugh, don't get me started.
It's like grandma's worth 15 points.
Yeah, we get it, guys.
Every year, they're animals.
Anyway, they start yelling flack, then shells start exploding all around me.
You're kidding me?
Wait, they're actually firing on you?
There's a literal war on Christmas?
What am I talking to myself here?
Yeah, it's a war.
There's rockets flying through the air.
There's bombs bursting.
It's like the star-spangled banner up there, Drew.
I'm screaming at them.
I'm saying, what are you doing?
It's me, Santa Claus.
And I'm bringing toys, presents to good little girls and boys.
And then I take an RPG right in the kisser.
The moms is.
Who would try to shoot down Santa Claus?
I know, right?
I'm an actual saint.
Hey, hey, Drew.
Hey, Drew, you know what the Santa in Santa Claus stands for?
Saint!
I'm usually tremendously popular.
Well, you know, let me say, I believe that no matter what, the spirit of Christmas will live forever.
Oh, I mean, if you say so, I'm just a guy riding a sleigh through a literal kill zone.
What do I know?
Well, listen, before you go, would you say, wish Merry Christmas to my audience?
What audience?
Ho, ho, ho, ho.
See, you believe in Santa Claus, but he doesn't believe in you.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey, life is tickety boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky.
Hooyah! Keys Tracker00:02:44
Ship shaped tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, where else do you get an interview with Santa Claus?
Come on.
All right, it's the last show of the year.
This is it.
The Clavenless holidays are upon us.
We're going to talk about Christmas.
We'll talk about a Christmas carol.
We have a professor, Dr. Dwight Lindley from Hillsdale College, Victorian literature professor who will talk to us about Charles Dickens and a Christmas carol.
We'll talk about Christmas movies.
I have a Christmas movie quiz that I'll put before you.
And then, you know, we'll talk about some taxes, cutting taxes.
I don't know.
Something.
We'll think about something.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, if you're still looking for stuff to put in your stocking, here's the thing.
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And it's kind of like ways.
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I have, seriously, you lose your keys when you're hiking.
It's awful because you have to go down the mountain and then you have to go back up the mountain to find your keys.
But with a tracking device, you can find them really quickly.
You know where they are.
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Really fun gift to give somebody, especially somebody like me who is absent-minded and loses everything.
So, you know, I once pointed out, and I have pointed out probably more times than I should have, that when you're worried about stuff, you should always ask yourself, am I worried about stuff that is actually happening or am I worried about stuff that I think may happen?
You know, the stuff that's out there in the future.
Trump's Pay Mandate Repeal00:12:30
And when I look back at this year, really, you know, so much of so many of the things that I worried were going to happen didn't happen.
And they didn't happen in the strangest way.
Like I worried that Donald Trump was going to revert to his Democrat instincts, especially with the Republicans kind of bobbling the ball on healthcare.
But instead, through the wonderful manipulations of God, who's God manipulating history, the Democrats were so hateful and the media was so hateful and so dishonest and so, you know, their resistance was just a constant barrage of attacks that they didn't give Trump any room to move to the left.
If they had done what I told Republicans to do, which was play the cards you're dealt, if they had said, okay, you know, Trump is president, we're not going to impeach him.
There's no Russia collusion.
Let's now deal with the president we have.
If they had done that, I think Trump would have been a lot more amenable to shifting toward the left.
Bad for us.
But through the wonderful mercy of he who runs the world, they didn't give him any room.
And now we've had this fantastic, fantastic year for conservatives.
It's just been great.
And I just want to take a quick look before we start talking about Christmas, because it really is Christmas, at some of the fun that was to be had yesterday as they celebrated this tremendous tax bill, which I really do think is going to do everything that the Republicans say.
One of the congressmen, the Democrat congressman, was complaining that they said it would do everything but help the Cleveland Browns win the Super Bowl.
It would not surprise me at this point if the Cleveland Browns won the Super Bowl.
And you know, Trump, the other thing I've been saying all year is that Trump learned stuff.
He learned stuff.
The Trump who was elected could not have wrangled the cats in the Congress to do what he wanted him to do.
But Trump learned that it was a chaotic process, that he didn't have all the power in the world.
And instead of doing what Obama did, which was go for his pen and his phone and just ignore the Congress, he wrangled, he learned to wrangle the cats.
And he did.
You know, it's obviously, he was a big, he got a lot of help from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
Can't do it without those guys.
We on the right sometimes beat up on them because they don't do, they're institutional guys.
They don't do the kind of thing that the radio talk show hosts tell us they should do because they're out there in the midst of it trying to get all these different people with all these different agenda together to get them to do what they want to do.
And it's hard.
And Mitch McConnell is a realist.
He knew that he had to do something or else he was going to lose everybody.
They're telling us the polls are showing a complete disaster in the midterms.
What I would tell you is don't worry about it yet.
We do not know what's going to happen.
So I just want to take a quick couple of looks at some of the fun cuts that came out yesterday because Trump had this big love fest out on the Capitol, out on the steps of the White House.
And he had this wonderful thing, I think it's cut number two, where he thanked the gang.
I want to thank Mitch McConnell.
I want to thank, what a job.
What a job.
And I want to thank Paul.
They're going to speak.
They're going to say a few words.
But Paul Ryan and Mitch, it was a little team.
We just got together and we would work very hard, didn't we?
It seems like it was a lot of fun.
It's always a lot of fun when you win.
If you work hard and lose, that's not acceptable.
He likes that winning, our president, and he certainly won a big one this time.
He won't be signing this until January because if he signs it now, then they would have to basically adjust the budget.
And the idea of the government living within its means is too horrific for them to contemplate.
But here was my other favorite cut: Trump, as he was getting together for a work meeting, he pointed out, which no one, which he hadn't done up until that point, that the bill repeals the individual mandate.
And this is just a wonderful Trumpian moment.
The individual mandate is being repealed.
When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed because they get their money from the individual mandate.
So the individual mandate is being repealed.
So in this bill, not only do we have massive tax cuts and tax reform, we have essentially repealed Obamacare and we'll come up with something that will be much better, whether it's block grants or whether it's taking what we have and doing something terrific.
But Obamacare has been repealed in this bill.
We didn't want to bring it up.
I told people specifically, be quiet with the fake news media because I don't want them talking too much about it, because I didn't know how people would.
But now that it's approved, I can say the individual mandate on health care where you had to pay not to have insurance.
Okay, think of that one.
You pay not to have insurance.
The individual mandate has been repealed.
What I love about this is he's just right into the face of what he calls the fake news media.
He says, We didn't talk about it because we didn't want you to talk about it.
And they didn't, really.
They didn't catch on to this.
And now he says that's effectively a repeal of Obamacare.
That's not quite true.
There's all kinds of different ways, but it does take away a major crutch and something that was just un-American and unfair, forcing Americans to pay for something that they didn't do, as Trump himself said.
So just compare that for a minute.
If you just want to, if you want proof, if you want proof that the Democrats and the media are basically the same people, just compare that for a minute to what you got from Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
This is cut six.
Chuck, chuck, chuck.
All right, let's hear the real one.
Now we know they're popping champagne down Pennsylvania Avenue.
There are only two places where America is popping champagne: the White House and the corporate boardrooms, including Trump Tower.
Otherwise, Americans have a lot to regret.
After all the president's promises, after all Republicans brazenly, brazenly transparent misrepresentations to the American people, the true face of what Republicans stand for has been revealed.
So when people find out that they're getting a tax cut, which they're going to have to find out through their actual paycheck, because they'll never hear it on the news.
Listen to this media montage just to prove that the media and the Democrats are the exact same people.
They're all working for the same team.
Here is the media montage of reporting from our friends at Newsbusters.
reporting on this tax bill.
I think I'm having too much fun at this point.
I have to go on vacation.
Here's the real coverage of the tax passage: the White House calling it a middle-class miracle.
The president there surrounded by Republicans of the White House today.
The biggest tax cuts will go to the wealthy, corporate America, and Republicans then argue that that money saved will then be reinvested in jobs and pay raises for the middle class.
But will that happen?
Not everyone is convinced, but the president is beaming.
The Christmas promise he made is coming true.
The president calls the tax plan a middle-class miracle designed to deliver tax cuts for all American families.
But corporate America gets a much bigger tax cut.
We are making America great.
Again, you haven't heard that, have you?
And earlier in a cabinet meeting, the president flaunted those tax benefits for big business.
Our plan also lowers the tax on American business from 35% all the way down to 21%.
That's probably the biggest factor in this plan.
That cut for corporate America is permanent, but income tax cuts for individuals expire in eight years.
So let me just go very quickly through why those reports are just slanted and false.
First, of course, the idea that there's somehow a giveaway here.
Remember, the money that the government takes belongs to the people it is taking it from.
Second, that corporations, when corporations get a tax cut, corporations don't pay taxes.
You pay their taxes.
The corporation writes the check to pay the taxes, but you pay for the product, whatever they're doing, whatever their tax goes up.
You think they don't raise their prices?
Of course, they raise their prices and you pay their taxes.
So their tax cut, their tax cut, not only is going to affect you there in terms of pricing, it's also going to affect you in terms of whether you have a job already.
AT ⁇ T is announcing bonuses for people.
They're announcing billions, billions of dollars of new investment in the United States.
Lots of corporations were doing that yesterday.
It was a cascade effect.
It's been amazing.
And the idea that that's not going to affect you is crazy.
And of course, the other thing, I mean, the three things are one, it's not a give back because the money belongs to you, not them.
That's the first thing.
Second, you pay corporate taxes.
You pay the taxes that you pay the money that the corporations pay in taxes.
And of course, the final thing is the obvious one is when they keep saying, well, rich people get more taxes back.
Rich people pay more taxes.
The Democrats feel that all the money, all the money belong to them.
And the idea is that it's their job to spread it around.
And that's not true.
The money belongs to the people who made it.
They literally created the wealth.
It's theirs.
And stealing from one person at gunpoint is wrong.
Stealing from everybody with government guns is just as wrong.
There's no way that that becomes suddenly right.
So, you know, look, they could have reported this in an objective way that said it might not work.
It might work.
They could have done it from both sides, but they just give you the Democrat talking points every step of the way.
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Well, I want to start talking about Christmas because it's just enough politics already.
Dickens And Transcendence00:08:55
Have we got the professor?
Are we still waiting?
Okay, you know what we're going to do?
We're going to start to take a look.
Oh, we do have him.
Oh, good.
All right.
Well, I'm going to then, in that case, we're going to talk about Charles Dickens first because Charles Dickens has done so much to create the image of Christmas that is in our mind.
Today, have I got, is he ready to go?
Excellent.
So today I have Dr. Dwight Lindley.
He teaches Victorian literature in the English department at Hillsdale College.
He instructs about the works of Charles Dickens as well as other authors of the time.
He got his PhD in literature from the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas.
He is a member of the North American Victorian Studies Association.
Dr. Lindley, are you there?
There you are.
Hi.
Hi, how are you doing?
Very well.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
I know it's Christmas time and everybody's busy.
So I want to talk about Charles Dickens.
I mean, he is one of my favorite authors, and the Christmas Carol, to me, is one of the great works of wisdom literature, one of the few works of wisdom literature where we can identify an author.
Dickens really did create a lot of what we think about Christmas, didn't he?
I think that's right.
I think he's sometimes spoken of as the inventor of Christmas.
And there's a new movie out with this title right now.
I think he didn't invent everything about it, but he had a very focused vision for what he thought it should be.
And he imaginatively really charged his society and all of us with that vision.
So I think he's really left his imprint.
Do you know where, does anybody know what the source of that vision was?
Sure, it's complex, but I would argue it's a fundamentally Christian vision, something that he was inspired to try to return imaginatively into his English readers,
but in a new way that wouldn't just simply repeat, wouldn't just simply repeat the words of the Gospels regarding the incarnation and the miracle of Christmas, but would kind of represent it within the context of London, Victorian London.
So he was kind of modernizing the idea of the Gospels into the world that the people, that his readers were living in.
That's right.
I think so.
I think he wanted to be very palpable and kind of incarnated in his world.
If you want.
Now, how did he come to write a Christmas Carol?
What was happening to him when he turned to that story?
Sure, sure.
It was 1843, and he was already a well-known author, not kind of magnificently successful as he would become later, but he was well-known and he was hard up.
He was in debt and needed some money quick.
So he wrote this story and, you know, it's one of these things where a felicitous occasion presents, you know, this possibility of saying something amazing.
You know, he wasn't planning to write this book, but then he had to.
And something amazing comes out of it.
He did it for the dough.
He was hard up.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson said 100 years before that, you know, it's a fool who works for anything but money.
Now, we can exaggerate that, but Dickens was definitely working for money.
What I would just say is that in spite of that fact, or just along with that fact, is the fact that he's saying this elicited something really profound from him, which then really became like a major fascination and kind of almost philosophy for him for the rest of his life.
This was a really important book for him.
For him, too.
Personally.
Yeah.
And did people, and did people know, recognize the book when it came out?
I mean, did they like it?
It was an immediate hit.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it was, he printed something like 6,000 copies of it at first, and it sold out almost immediately.
He had to hurry up and print more.
It was immediately popular.
So, so talk about, you were saying that this affected him.
Talk about why you think this book is so, I mean, it's been made into a movie maybe a million times.
There almost is outside of the Gospels and maybe how the Grinch Stole Christmas.
There almost is no other Christmas story that you can revisit like this.
What is it about this story that affected him and that affects everybody so much?
Sure, sure.
I've thought about this before.
Why is it so striking?
And why do we want to hear it again?
One thing I think is that he's responding to a basic desire in Western readers, which is at Christmas time to have some kind of meaningful encounter with transcendence, with a world that's beyond ours, which nevertheless comes close to ours and charges it with meaning.
You know, that's what the incarnation is.
That's what the nativity, the Christmas story is.
And so that's in the water in the West.
And Dickens responds to that in his stories.
I mean, in this story, he brings that other world close to his world, to our world even, and has it charged this world, his world, with significance and meaning and moral value.
And you said, I think we want that.
I think so.
I'm sure we do.
You said that it affected him.
I'm not sure I'd ever heard that before.
How do you feel it affected Dickens?
Oh, yeah.
So in later years, after he wrote the Christmas Carol, A Christmas Carol, he would look back and refer to it as underlining his, let's see, what did he call it?
I think he called it his Carol philosophy.
He was like, this is, for him, he wasn't a philosopher, right?
He wasn't a theorist or something, but he thought that this story caught up the things that were most important to him.
And they keep on coming up in all of his books after this.
What I mean is, especially, one, the importance of children and the poor and how they are a special, they're special ultimately to God, but they're kind of like, they have a fundamental importance in a society, the least of these, right?
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, fundamentally, fundamentally important for Dickens in all of his subsequent books.
And he really kind of brought that to the fore here in this book.
Interesting.
And then the second, yeah.
And then the second part, sorry, and then I'll be done, is he thought we each have a fundamental capacity for personal change, for conversion, right?
And so that happens with Scrooge, obviously.
But he believed that that was at the heart of what it means to be a human.
You have a capacity to change.
You have freedom.
It's a drama.
It's amazing.
And that affected me.
You know, that's so interesting because it really plays into what you said before, the idea of suffer the little children to come unto me and giving to the poor and repent and change metanoia in the Bible, all that stuff.
He basically brought the gospel into Victorian England.
And in doing that, he kind of brought it Victorian England to us because we're still living in that story.
That's right.
No, that's right.
It's so beautiful.
It is.
We want to stay there.
Yeah, it's beautiful.
Dr. Dwight Lindley of Hillsdale College, thank you very much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
I hope you have a Merry Christmas.
My pleasure.
Merry Christmas, Andrew.
Bye.
Just remarkable that basically Dickens had to write his own gospel.
And they did call it, they called it the fifth gospel when it was published.
He had to write his own gospel to learn the gospel.
I think that's so typical of an artist that he has to recreate the world.
Perfect Day Reflections00:16:00
So I want to look at some of my favorite Christmas movies and just see if, here's the quiz.
See if you can see the theme that I see in all these stories.
You know, there are Christmas movies that everybody loves that I am not as fond of.
You know, that people talk about, oh, the movie White Christmas, which, by the way, I watch all the time, but it is junk.
It's great junk, but it's good.
Die Hard, great movie.
Not a Christmas movie.
I'm sorry.
It's just not a Christmas movie.
And Christmas story.
Everybody likes that.
And it is sweet.
And I grew up listening to Gene Shepard, who was kind of in my day, he was the hip cool radio announcer that only the really in crowd knew about.
And so it was cool to know about him.
So when it became a hip movie, it was kind of strange.
But here are a couple of movies that you won't, you don't know, or you might not know.
You might know some of these.
One is a 1940s picture called Remember the Night, which is, if you haven't seen this, I really recommend it.
It's Barbara Stanwick and Fred McMurray.
Barbara Stanwick is a shoplifter.
Fred McMurray is, she's a thief.
And Fred McMurray is the DA who goes to bust her, but he starts to fall for her.
He doesn't want to leave her in jail over Christmas, so he takes her home to his country home.
And she discovers the kind of the joys of that.
Here's just a very brief part of that.
I can play a piece.
I used to play in the 10 Cent store.
Was that a big night?
I can sing the end of a perfect day.
Willie.
Well, I can.
Well, so can everybody else.
Come on, Willie Snake.
All right.
gave for the joy that the day has brought.
So that obviously she comes into this kind of country home and it starts to transform her life.
And remember, we're looking for a single theme in all these pictures.
The ending of Remember the Night is a shocker.
It really is a fascinating movie.
And here's another one you may have seen.
I love this movie, The Bishop's Wife with Carrie Grant and David Niven and Loretta Young.
David Niven is an ambitious bishop, obviously.
Don't watch the remake of it.
I can't remember what it's called, The Preacher's Wife, I think, with Whitney Houston.
But this picture is absolutely terrific.
It's so touching.
It's so moving.
It's adapted by Robert.
One of the writers is Robert E. Sherwood, a very famous American writer.
It's an ambitious bishop trying to raise money to build a cathedral, and he's neglecting his wife, and he's neglecting the things that are important.
And Carrie Grant is an angel who comes down to help him out.
And here is a scene where the bishop is too busy to visit his, the small priest who has got a boy's choir.
So Loretta Young, as the bishop's wife, goes and visits with the angel in tow.
And the guy is embarrassed because none of the kids, the kids are all out in the street.
I'm afraid some of our boys are a little late.
We really should begin, but I don't see how we can.
It's really quite embarrassing.
But you know, it is a little difficult to compete with basketball and Christmas.
They're all good boys at heart.
I know they are.
They'll show up.
I hope so.
Hello, Bobby.
Hello.
What do you sing?
I sing first soprano.
You good?
Well, how about giving out?
Me alone?
Well, you got George up there.
Hello, George.
Hello.
Well, what do you say?
Okay.
Are you ready, Mr. Duffy?
Oh, yes.
Oh, sing to God, your hands of darkness.
We loving our children in faith.
The Lord is born this happy day.
And fuse the sky with songs of gladness.
Disperse the shades of moon and sadness.
The Lord is glorious happy day.
You'll sing for what your limbs are.
If you've never seen this film, you really have to watch it.
I love the little quiet touches, like the fact that the angel knows the boys' names, but nobody really points it out.
And it happens throughout all little touches like that throughout the film.
He calls them in off the streets, and they all come gathering with these beautiful voices.
Here is another movie that is quite—this movie, seriously, if you haven't seen it, watch it this Christmas.
You will love it.
Here is a movie that is a little bit on the serious side.
It's not for everybody.
It is really obscure.
It's called The Holly and the Ivy.
It's a British film adapted from a play.
It's got the great Ralph Richardson in it and Celia Johnson, who, if you ever saw Brief Encounter, she's the lady in Brief Encounter.
And it is about another preacher who has a very, very troubled family.
And I could only find, I couldn't find a clip from it.
I could only find part of the trailer.
So here are just a brief collection of small scenes of all the people coming for this family reunion to this terribly troubled household run by a very serious preacher who is trying to serve God and his parish but is neglecting his family.
Did you forget we're coming off, Nick, dear, how nice to see you.
I didn't think you'd be here.
Let me take that.
What are you hanging around here for?
I thought you'd be overseas be now.
Maggie, you're not happy, are you?
Who is?
Oh, plenty of people.
Perhaps.
If they're stupid enough, why must you always crackle like ice?
Holly?
I didn't know it had to spell.
Yes, in the stalks when you break it.
You know, it's in the carol, bitter as any gold.
Mary Ball, sweet Jesus Christ, for to redeem us all.
Why don't you tell the truth?
That's a whole trouble.
You can't be told the truth.
It's a great movie.
It's not a happy movie, although it's very uplifting.
It is a very uplifting movie because the spirit of God is out throughout even the troubles that these people are in.
So finally, I've got the two, my two favorites and everybody's two favorites probably.
It's a wonderful life.
It's a wonderful life gets run down a lot.
There are people who don't like it because I don't think they're watching it carefully enough.
It is a very, very difficult movie in a lot of ways.
Somebody once said that one critic, a famous critic, I was talking to personally, he said it's much darker than people think it is.
And I said, no, it's not darker because critics, intellectual critics always think things have to be dark in order to be good.
I said, what it is, is it's much more realistic than people think it is.
And I don't have to tell you the story.
I'm sure you've all seen it.
But these are the two cuts from one cut from It's a Wonderful Life and one from A Christmas Carol to sort of give away the theme that I'm looking at here.
Here is where Jimmy Stewart comes back after seeing how horrible the world would be without the self-sacrificing life that he has lived.
What the Sam Hill are you yelling for, George?
George.
Bert, do you know me?
Know you?
You kidding?
I've been looking all over town trying to find you.
I saw your car piled into that tree down there, and I thought maybe you, hey, your mouth's bleeding.
Are you sure you're all right?
What's your...
My mouse bleed.
Zoo's petals.
Zudo, there they are!
Bert!
What do you know about that?
Merry Christmas!
He goes back to this little town he's been stuck in all his life, and suddenly it's beautiful.
And of course, I've pointed this out before that It's a Wonderful Life is the mirror image of a Christmas carol.
It is the most generous, most self-sacrificing man learning from a supernatural source what the world would be like if he hadn't been born, whereas Scrooge is about the stingiest, nastiest guy in the world being shown by a supernatural source what the world is like because he was born, how bad things are.
And here is the moment where Scrooge, after being visited by the three spirits and the ghost of Jacob Marley, wakes up and finds he is not dead as he was in the future, but very much alive.
Tell me, what day is it?
What day?
What?
Christmas day, of course.
Christmas day.
Christmas Day.
Christmas Day.
And I haven't missed it.
The spirits must have done everything in one night.
Of course, they can do anything, can't they?
Of course I can.
Are you quiet yourself, sir?
What?
I don't know.
No, I don't think so.
I hope not.
What?
The curtains are still here.
They're still here.
You didn't tear them down and sell them.
Everything's here.
I'm here.
And the shadows of things that would be can still be dispelled.
And they will be.
I know they will be.
I don't know what to do.
I'm as light as a feather.
I'm as happy as an angel.
I'm as merry as a schoolboy.
I'm as giddy as a drunken man.
A Merry Christmas, Ebenezer.
You old humbug.
This is Alistair Sim, by far the best Scrooge.
Don't let anybody tell you differently.
And the reason is because he doesn't play him as you see him as a cranky old man.
He plays him as a man with an inner life who believes, who really believes in his philosophy, which is, of course, a destructive, greedy philosophy.
Each of these movies in its own way, and what makes, to me, It's a Wonderful Life so realistic, each of these movies emphasizes the one theme, that the world right this minute is beautiful.
The world right this minute is perfect and joyful and wonderful.
And the only thing that changes in these movies is the man, is the person who is looking at the world.
Everything that happened to Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life has still happened.
His life is still a small life that didn't, he didn't get to travel the world.
He didn't get to build the big buildings.
That doesn't change at all in his life when he comes back, but suddenly it's all beautiful.
It's him.
It's him who has changed.
And what's changed about them?
And you saw that in that wonderful scene from Remember the Night where the guy starts to sing is what is he saying when you come to the end of a perfect day.
It's already a perfect day, you know, and that and that's what these people haven't seen so far.
What has changed that makes them see this?
Of course, it's Christmas, but Scrooge says, I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.
I will live in the past and the present and the future.
The spirits of all three shall strive within me.
And the thing is, the past, the present, and the future are what we call eternity.
People think, C.S. Lewis pointed this out, people think that eternity is a really long time, but it's not.
It's all time in a single moment.
It's all time now.
And this is St. Augustine said, in the eternal, nothing passes away, but that the whole is present, but no time is wholly present.
And let him see that all time past is forced on.
So he says, in the eternal, nothing passes away, but the whole is present.
In time, things have to pass on.
C.S. Lewis made this point, and I found what is apparently the only surviving broadcast of the broadcast he made during the war.
This was in 1944.
He was asked to make broadcasts about Christianity to remind people what they were fighting for, to remind people of what their civilization was based on.
And of course, that became his great work.
Those talks were put together into his great work, Mere Christianity.
This is C.S. Lewis explaining that God lives in eternity.
Almost certainly, God is not in time.
His life doesn't consist of moments following one another.
If a million people are praying to him at 10.30 tonight, he hasn't got to listen to them all in that one little snippet, which we call 10.30.
10.30, and every other moment from the beginning to the end of the world is always the present.
So in the birth of Christ, in the nativity, eternity enters time.
The vision of eternity, the logos, the sense of eternity, enters time in the person of Christ.
And we talked to Knowles for these last couple of weeks about, you know, the different stories.
He has been reading a book I recommended to him, Saint Benedict, which I recommend to everybody.
He wrote a trilogy of very tiny, very beautiful, I called him Saint Benedict, Pope Benedict XVI.
He will be St. Benedict, but he's still Pope Benedict XVI.
And he wrote this lovely trilogy of very small books about the life of Christ.
They're all of them beautiful.
The one on the nativity is especially beautiful.
And we talked about how in doing this, there's this meeting of the all-powerful God with the free will of Mary in the Annunciation.
She has to agree to this.
She has to agree to take care of this child.
This child now becomes a helpless child, dependent.
God, the king of the universe, the creator of the universe, becoming dependent on these individual people in time.
And we talked about the wise men, the Magi, who Benedict points out, you know, that there was an idea among the Greeks, among the Greek philosophers, that their wisdom came from Egypt, that it came from the East, and that they were just kind of translating that wisdom into philosophy, and it becomes Greek philosophy, which becomes very much our philosophy and the basis of all our philosophy.
And that the Magi came to visit Jesus, and then they went home by another way.
In other words, the things that they thought, the wisdom that they had, the Zoroastrianism, even the Judaism, all the different philosophies, the philosophy of Aristotle went home by another way, became a different kind of philosophy because it became charged with this eternity that had entered into time.
So what I want to talk about in the last few minutes of the show of the year, I want to talk about what that means to you, because who cares about them, right?
Who cares about the magic?
All them people are dead.
What about us?
What does it mean for us?
Because a lot of people tell you, people who tell you that the whole meaning of the incarnation is be good or you go to hell.
Don't have sex.
Don't drink.
Don't be gay.
Don't do this.
Don't do that.
And, you know, some of that, some of it is good advice.
You know, some of it I would say.
Live clean, you know, take care of yourself.
All of that is good advice, but I do not think we needed the king of heaven and earth to incarnate himself and die in order to teach us that.
I think everybody knows a little abstinence is good for you, a little, you know, self-control, all of those things are good.
The point of Christmas, you know, Christmas is something that happened.
The Eternal Has Come00:06:37
It happened.
It's done.
Gospel, the word gospel means good news.
And that's what it means.
This is delivering good news of something that has already happened.
God has lived and died and lived again, and it's done.
This is delivering the good news.
And what does it mean?
It means you're free.
You're saved.
When they say you're saved, it means it's over.
Stop worrying.
The work is done, you know?
And recently, I've been thinking a lot in my own life about how much nothing Christ asks us to do and how hard it is to do it, how hard it is.
Let me just read you this little part that's not from the Christmas story, where Jesus says, which of you by being anxious can add even one cubit into the measure of his life?
And why are you anxious concerning what you wear?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They toil not, neither do they spin.
Yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
But if God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith.
Be not therefore anxious, saying, what shall we eat and what shall we drink?
Or wherewithal shall we be clothed?
For after all these things do the Gentiles seek, for your heavenly Father knows that ye have need of these things.
But seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow, for the morrow will be anxious for itself.
Don't worry, Christ is born, relax.
And, you know, people read this and they think it's about you don't have to work, the money will come.
Of course, I don't think that is what it's about.
I think it is about the fact that you are saved.
The work is not yours to do.
The eternal has come to earth.
It has lived and died and lived again.
And now you know that your life in time is based on eternity.
So what does that mean, right?
What does that mean?
What's your purpose now?
Well, first of all, it means that you were made an eternal creature.
You are the life that you live in time is really a life that is also being lived in eternity.
And eternity looks different.
In eternity, we know because Jesus was here.
In eternity, your ailments are healed.
All your ailments are healed.
You can walk on water.
You don't have to be afraid because there is no death.
Death, you know, when Jesus returns, we realize that death has been defeated.
It's over.
And, you know, there's a line in Zen.
I practiced Zen for a long time, a wonderful practice, by the way.
And there are little riddles that you kind of meditate on.
They're called koans.
And one of them is, what is your original face before you were born?
And it's supposed to be mysterious, but it really is saying to you that you were made an eternal creature, a perfect creature.
And you know, and I know, and every one of us knows that we are not that creature now.
But what if we lived with the faith of eternity?
If we lived in faith that we are living in eternity, what would that world look like?
And Jesus kind of tells us what it would look like when he says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these.
Well, when you see the world as eternal, it looks different than when you see it, for instance, in politics.
I'm always saying politics is the opposite of religion.
Well, you go to politics and write, politics is all about judging the other guy, fighting the other guy, defeating the other guy, even hating the other guy.
On one side of politics, you usually have people who want to tell you the rules.
You know, they want you to live in a very constrained way.
They're going to tell you what your social life should be like, what your sexual desires should be, all these things they want to tell you.
We'll call them the right.
We'll call them the right-wingers.
On the other side, you have the left-wingers who are always telling you, you know what, there are no rules.
There's no reality.
Everything is good.
It's all good.
And, you know, you have to basically put up with whatever anybody says.
If some guy tells you he's a girl, he's a girl, and there is no reality.
But what if both are not quite right?
What if the fact is that there is a reality?
And the only time we ever saw it was in the person of Christ.
And now it's kind of in darkness.
We're kind of left behind into this mysterious world.
That reality, I mean, I think this is obviously true.
We know there's a reality.
Nobody turns right when they want to go left.
Nobody turns left when they want to go right.
We are all living in a world of facts.
We are all living in a world of facts.
But each of us is bringing a fresh new meaning to that world of facts.
That is the work of creation that you do every day of your life.
It's the work of creation that you do that makes you in the image of God.
You are creating a world.
Maybe the world comes to you in meaning by being a mom.
Maybe it comes to you in meaning by being a doctor.
Maybe it doesn't come to you through your work.
Maybe it comes to you when you go and sing in the choir at church or some charity work that you do.
Maybe you are bringing a meaning that no one has a right to judge if you're not hurting anybody else.
And all these desires that you have that cause you so much trouble, they're all good.
All your desires are good.
They were given to you by God at the beginning.
As long as you don't sever them from God, if you keep your desires attached to God, you will find that they don't attach, for instance, to money.
You may make a fortune without ever thinking about money.
Remember, Jesus says all these things will be given to you, or you may never see any money and you may never need it.
You may never miss it.
So that's why you're thinking about the wrong thing.
See, each of us, each of us at one point, has a unique reality to bring, and each of us is living in the same reality.
And that's why you don't judge your neighbor.
That is why you don't judge your neighbor.
Obviously, you have to stop him if he's doing something criminal, but you don't judge him because you want to be together with him in his creation, his individual creation, but you also want to know what it is that you share between you.
Where is reality?
That is why it increases your joy to let it go, to let go of your judgment, to let go of your guilt, to let go of your fear, to let it all go and live in faith of that internal world in which death is no longer there.
Sickness doesn't matter.
All these things not only will pass away, but they have passed away.
Christmas is good news.
It is good news.
It's already happened.
It's good news.
And I know that each of us comes to the manger.
We all come to the manger through our sin.
We all come to the manger in trouble.
We all come to it betrayed.
Everyone who trusted in the world, every one of us, we all of us trusted in the world and all of us were betrayed.
Maybe you were betrayed by the way your parents treated you or the way some woman or man broke your heart or the way you didn't have enough money or the way you got all the money in the world and found it didn't solve your problems.
We all come to the manger in sin and in trouble because we trusted in the world.
But now, congratulations, you have seen eternity in time go home by another way.
All Come to the Manger00:01:43
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
It's been such a joy talking to you all year.
I'll be back in the new year to talk to you again.
Meanwhile, Merry Christmas.
Joy to the world.
Joy to the world.
Oh, joy to the world.
The Lord is come.
Let her receive the key.
Let every high debate roam.
In heaven and nature sing.
And heaven and nature sing.
And heaven and heaven and nature sing.
Oh, joy to the world.
Joy to the world.
Oh, joy to the world.
Sing for the rest.
Let many songs in flight.
The Andrew Klavan Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
Technical producer Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jessua Albera.
And our animations are by Cynthia Angulo and Jacob Jackson.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.