In Search of A Season

Like most of you, I love Christmas. Unlike many of you I also love winter, both for its connection to Christmas and for its intrinsic beauty. I delight at the first snow and don't tire of it till well into mud season.

In many places these days it's as hard to locate the season of winter as it is the spirit of Christmas. Global warming has winter on the run. Street vendors can't sell mittens in Moscow. Alpine skiers gaze out on green slopes.

As the earth warms, weather grows extreme; drought in China, floods in Europe. On the Pacific coast it's blizzards one season and fires the next. It's so confusing: One day you're sipping summer drinks out on the deck, the next you're sleeping on an airport floor waiting for the runways to be plowed.

When winter isn't extreme it seems altogether absent. Still, we search for signs, in the skeletons of trees, the smell of pine, the slant of the afternoon light, and are grateful for what we find.

Christmas too is subject to extremes. Remember the war on Christmas? While there's no formal truce -- to save face, Bill O' Reilly still fires off a round or two at night -- it's essentially over. On its behalf, let it be said it was the shortest of the Bush wars and the one with the fewest casualties.

When I was a boy, the sisters at Saint Justin's conducted an annual campaign to "Keep Christ in Christmas." But their point was to examine one's own heart, not the hearts of others; to observe, not impose tradition. In a neighborhood that was also home to three synagogues and two Protestant churches, it was how we all got along. I've since learned that any true spiritual path starts with taking one's own inventory.

Christmas enfolds many traditions, not all Christian, or even civilized. As Christianity conquered the Roman Empire it absorbed its religions, adapting their deities and festivals. The first recorded observance of Christmas wasn't until 354 A.D., about the time the Roman God Janus took early retirement.

Christmas co-opted the solstice rituals it displaced, including their music, greenery, lights, drinking and carousing. (The office Christmas party is a lineal descendant.) Christians who wax proprietary about the day should tread carefully; one day the pagans may want their wreaths back and who knows what else.

Oliver Cromwell thought Christmas so debauched he banned it. So did Massachusetts Puritans; from 1659 to 1681 you couldn't cook a Christmas goose in Boston. It wasn't till the 19th century that Christmas took on the trappings we know, owing much to the publication in 1823 of Clement Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicolas" and in 1843 of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol."

A Christian of no certain theological bent, Dickens got closer to the heart of Christmas than any writer since Luke. He saw that a world awash in wretched misery can be transformed by the gentling of the human heart. If you've read him and not believed, try again. As he showed us, not Tiny Tim or even Scrooge himself is immune to being saved.

Dickens' world and ours are too alike in their poverty, greed and general lovelessness. The reigning ideology then -- that the victims were the true culprits and all ill fortune derived of ill character -- was much like ours. We have, it seems, everything Dickensian except a Dickens of our own to hold up a mirror that we may see ourselves better.

After Moore and Dickens came many others: Tchaikovsky, Dylan Thomas, Frank Capra, Irving Berlin. Each believed different things about Christmas yet grasped its universal meaning. I'm a patsy for them all. So are most folks. It's why the war on Christmas crowd picked on retailers rather than authors, composers or actors. Better to battle Wal-Mart than Bing Crosby, George Bailey or the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Some leaders of religions and even some politicians think the task of separating out the sheep from the goats falls to them. I'm no theologian but I remember the endless parables of love and inclusion, wherein prostitutes, lepers, Samaritans and tax collectors were all let in and loved without condition. He never once said judge thy neighbor.

Can there be any greater folly than a war fought over religion? Is it so much easier to fight for our principles than to live by them? According to a wise priest I know, "Jesus didn't ask to be worshipped; He asked to be followed, which is harder." We search for signs of winter and Christmas, and settle for what we find until at last we look within.

Comments

[OutsideLookingIn]

And to make it more acceptable to non-Christians many aspects of the religions it was displacing were absorbed into it, such as the Virgin birth (Mithras). This was also the time many 'Christian' doctrines such as the humility and poverty of the clergy as Jesus's representatives and the directness of the God/individual connection with no need for clerical mediation, were declared heresies by the Church leadership in Rome cynically prostituting Jesus's teaching in exchange for power and influence.

[OutsideLookingIn]

It's hardly true to claim that Christianity conquered the Roman Empire. Constantine, looking for a suitable candidate for a single, empire-wide religion, chose Christianity - still just one of many religions in a tolerant Empire - for its parallel organisation (Pope/Emperor, Bishop/Governor), its non-politicisation ("render unto Caesar what is Caesar's") and it's general 'know-your-place-and-be happy-with-it' pacification, than for any theology and then imposed it by fiat and force.

[tililek]

Us pagans are a generous lot. We believe in live and let live, in being benevolent to ALL, to sharing. I could wish that all those people who believe in the narrow religions that say, "ME, or the HIGHWAY" would not only adopt our goodies, but would adopt our believe that each may believe as they will, and allow others the same freedoms.

[DenverCurmudgeon]

Thanks Bill Curry for an insightful post.

[Dave24]

Scripture is fiction, or exaggerated versions of historical events (at best). Homer's Odyssey, or any of Shakespeare's plays, are no different - so why don't we worship Cicero, for example?

One does not need to subscribe to manmade scripture to empathize with fellow members of our species.

Merry Paganmas, and Happy Revolution Around the Sun.

[Crowhaul]

I'll thank the christianists to not superimpose their 'story of virginal birth' on top of our ancient Julfest traditions (Yule)....

As the author so well stated, I want my wreath back.

[eileenfleming]

100 years before Christ walked the earth

Rabbi Hillel knew that the Hebrew understanding of Hokema;

Holy Wisdom;

The Feminine Divinity

Was the same as the Greek understanding of

The Logos:

The Word.

It was the first Paul and John who understood:

The Word was good and

The Word was

The Logos

The Word is The Christ.

It was John on Rubber Soul who intuitively knew:

"The Word is just The Way and The Word is Love"

IMAGINE:

Before Christ walked the earth a man,

He was already a SHE:

Hokema, Holy Wisdom; the Feminine Divinity

Now, isn't that Good News?

The God Head is One Pure Being;

as much male as female

as much mommy as daddy.

And we are all children of Her Universe;

And **He is the oldest personality because He is the origin of everything;

and everything is born of Him.

He is the supreme controller of the universe,

the maintainer and instructor of humanity.

He is smaller than the smallest.[**Bhagavad-Gita]

He indwells the heart of every atom and

She is beyond the Universe.

Wisdom is calling,

She is rattling your windows and shaking your walls

With some more good news of the

three witnesses,

and three always beats one

and not just that,

I've got a fourth.

Get out your Good Book sisters and brothers and chew on this;

Matthew 12:31-32, Mark 3:28-29, and Luke 12:10

are simpatico with gnostic Thomas saying 44:

'Jesus said: "Whoever blasphemes against the father will be forgiven, whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven either on earth or in heaven."

His ways are not your ways

Her thoughts are not your thoughts

Dominion never meant to rape and plunder,

but to nurture, care and love

And if you have not love, you have nothing at all

WAKE UP Christian!

Hear the wind begin to howl.

e
http://www.wearewideawake.org

[twofish]

Yes indeed. As a Pagan, I'm always glad to share our midwinter holiday with the Christians, until they get all huffy about owning it.

All religions are pastiches, stiched together from bits from the past and a new idea or two. It's how religion -- ahem -- evolves. It's only the fundies who want to freeze it once and for all. Beware any religion that claims to be the Final revelation.

Christianity was built on a base of Judiasm, with bits from the Romans, Egyptians, gnostics and others thrown in.

Far from being the reason for the season, Jesus' birth was placed at the winter solstice to compete with other Roman festivites going on then, including that of the god Mithras, a special favorite of the Roman legions. It inherited the gift-giving, partying and decorating the house with evergreens that were part of the Romans' celebrations.

God 1.0 (himself a composite of Jahweh and El, plural Elohim) was so cruel and arbitrary that he needed to come to earth and be born in the body of one of his creatures and see just how bloody rough it can be. Read Jung's "Answer to Job."

And a happy festival of the unconquered sun to all.

[mommadona]

"Can there be any greater folly than a war fought over religion? Is it so much easier to fight for our principles than to live by them? According to a wise priest I know, "Jesus didn't ask to be worshipped; He asked to be followed, which is harder." We search for signs of winter and Christmas, and settle for what we find until at last we look within."

Thank you, for being.

[OneWoman]

"We have, it seems, everything Dickensian except a Dickens of our own to hold up a mirror that we may see ourselves better."

Yes we do: Her name is Barbara Ehrenreich.

[TRYKER]

Nice post, thanks.

I've since learned that any true spiritual path starts with taking one's own inventory.
Is it so much easier to fight for our principles than to live by them?

Most excellent points.
May we be Restored to Sanity in this new year.

[Sciguy]

Great article, thanks!

We celebrate Solstice, and the next time somebody tries to cram christian doctrine down my throat, I'll remind him / her that it's MY holiday they corrupted, not the other way around.

As for following Jesus rather than worshipping Jesus - not too many people do that nowadays. It's much easier to buy Christmas crap at WalMart than to actually practice the principles Jesus taught. Nice thought, and it's too bad that it's just a nice thought.