Christmas Wish

I have one wish for Christmas.  Stop celebrating it please!  Every year the US fires up this billion dollar industry that spans 3 or 4 months.  There are tons of traditions and ideas and novelties.  There are countless TV specials all talking about wishes and meanings.

But you know what, it's a really simple holiday.  It's really of no significance at all to anyone who isn't a Christian.  But for Christians, like me, this is one of the two most important memorials of the year.  But it isn't about snow, or lights, or gifts, or sharing, or a warm community feeling, or a dog finding his way home or some old man reuniting with his son.  And it definitely has nothing to do with stupid cheap cups.  It's a memorial of what we believe to be a pivotal moment in history.  The event where THE GOD takes on human flesh.  But if you don't beleive this, it's just the birth of some ancient guy, so why do you need to make such a fuss over it?

If you want to celebrate a mid-winter holiday, go right ahead!  Just stop trying to coopt my Holy Day.  What would you think if someone decided to have a barbecued pig for Ramadan?  Or a kegger for Passover?  Or ate all the food on the butsudan at Obon and covered it with cheap plastic balls?  So why is it ok to trash this Christian holiday?

The answer probably has to do with so-called Christians themselves.  Many don't understand the day either.  Or have grown up in the midst of all the other crap so they actually associate all that with Christmas.  Many I know may include some Bible reading or church service as the obligatory tradition, and then go right on with any other cultural event of the season.  But they'll be hot to make sure you leave Christ in there!

Once again, I'm not knocking those events in themselves.  I'm just saying that isn't Christmas!  So just stop calling it that.  Keep Santa Claus and snowflakes and trees and presents.  Just don't keep Christ with that mess!  Better to drop it altogether.  If you did, I might actually be able to find some of it fun.  But as it is, it's a season of painful disrespect of the single most important part of my life.

Leave Christmas for those of us who hold this to be a serious part of our lives to keep as we should.

Other Side

I'm pretty sure I've never blogged about this.  At least not in any discernibly direct way.  But I'm going to give it a shot.  This blog is primarily a way for me to process thoughts or feelings.  As such, it tends toward the confusing and angry, occasionally the mystical.  But that of course is not all I experience.  It's just that times of clear understanding or emotion don't need processing; they're just experienced.  So I don't write about them.  This other side makes up a significant portion of the contemplative Christian experience, at least for me and for many I read about and talk to.  It's hard to describe, so I'm going to muddle on.

Right now, I'm coming off a brief mild illness.  Just a cold.  But it follows a stressful period and I have received it gratefully as an excuse to rest.  I've been overwhelmed by a sense of peace in it.  Just a deep soul-whisper of "thank you" for bringing me into the rest I could not give myself.  Throughout it I've felt at ease.  I've felt cared for.  The back of my mind has been haunted by strains of music of a gentle love toward me and from me toward my God.

Please know that for me, this word 'God' is loaded very differently than most may use it.  It's like the deepest self-giving love you may feel for a loved one, combined with an awe or respect given a hero or excellent father, and a sublime (look this word up) reverence as if looking into something huge and vast and powerful, yet gorgeously beautiful.  There is nothing of punishment, nothing of justice.

Jody Foster echoes it in Contact when she cries in the fetal position in her journey.  CS Lewis describes it in the Pevensie children burying their faces in Aslan's mane.  It is a safety and a rightness found because of the power sheathed in gentleness, like a small Tarzan baby sound asleep in a gorilla's arms.

This is not why I became a Christian, but it is why I stay a Christian.  This is why I can't accept any form of Christianity that takes away from this.  This is irresistible love.  This is looking into the dark chasm of the universe and finding everything you've secretly hoped for and never even admitted to yourself looking right back at you and smiling with a face that is more human than your own.