A heathen’s Christmas Greeting

Dusk on the Charles, 2016, photo: John Barrett

Merry Christmas Eve, all!

While I’m not a Christian, the holiday has a resonance for what it’s supposed to be. There’s a complicated mythos and cultural appropriation and exploitation in Christianity’s evolution. And to be fair, Christianity isn’t monolithic nor is there only one type of Christian. I am struck by Christ’s core teachings, though, however hobbled, mangled, and twisted they’ve become by some of His followers.

“Love one another” seems like a good place to act from. It’s simple, straightforward, and a high bar to shoot for, but worthwhile enough to make the attempt.

Nor is it a simpleminded or simplistic directive. From what I can recall, many of those parables are instruction manuals on how to implement it.

We live in a no less divided and divisive period or place than JC did 2000 years ago. (I’m ignoring historicity for a reason, by the way, but that’s for another place.) Yet, what if we use our imagination and opened our hearts, even to or especially, to our “enemies”, to those who would harm us? Because a prerequisite for love is fearlessness.

Can we cease to fear the Other and embrace them? I genuinely don’t know. 

Here’s something: I write a lot of salty stuff about the Right, about MAGA and the dismantling of the country the movement has brought about. I’ve railed and will likely continue to, against the ignorance and hatred issuing from the halls of power.

But I find myself checking myself; I cannot give into hating the people who are party to this destruction. I can’t. Not from some sense that an outside force or deity is going to send me to a non-existent hell, but simply because I can’t. It’s almost physiological. I genuinely can’t see another human being as an object of hatred, the most corrosive of emotions in our make-up.

Anger? Sure! I get pissed off and moved to a sometimes intense degree of anger, but it doesn’t last and even though I’ll take a political figure to task (looking at Greg Abbott next in my list), and even though they’ve authored hateful policies and perpetrated hateful acts and conditions, I cannot find a similar, let alone hatred in my heart. I can’t.

Hatred is a zero-sum, scorched earth extreme that has, in many regards brought us where we are today.

Now, is the absence of hatred love?

Not necessarily. Love requires active and actionable motivation. It’s far more difficult to generate anger and anger’s metastasis into hatred. Love requires awareness, openness, and an all-encompassing empathy and sympathy for the Other. Live cannot be abstract; that’s just “nice sentiment” or self-delusion. A real aspiration to love requires action and frankly, I don’t know about you, but that’s where I fall short. 

Nevertheless, there’s merit in the attempt, despite Master Yoda’s “do or do not, there is no try” admonition. Besides, the attempt begins with the aspiration. Thus, aspiring to “love one another” seems like a good place to start. 

It’s been my experience that when I get my   projections out of the way, my constructed “self”, if you will, and just let that deep quiet in the center of my being (which is yours, too) do its thing, remarkable stuff happens. Not something earth-shattering or history changing, but there’s a shift within and those cracks where the light gets in that Cohen wrote of grow wider.

So if I’m saying “Merry Christmas”, understand that the foregoing is what’s implied. Whether Christian or not, I find Christmas to be a state of mind or the innate sense of goodness and goodwill we should harbor toward one another and all beings, really.

Merry Christmas, it is, then.