The Work of Christmas Begins

The beautiful music and the spell binding words spoken during our Christmas Eve Service are still singing in my imagination.  Howard Thurman’s Life Is Saved by the Singing of Angels rings true; “There must be always remaining in everyone’s life some place for the singing of angels – some place for that which in itself is breathlessly beautiful and by an inherent prerogative, throwing all the rest of life into a new and creative relatedness.” 

Thank you to everyone who contributed: most especially Dan Franklin and Terry Yokota who did the layout and design for our incredibly beautiful order of service; also our choir and director Joel Knapp, along with accompanist Earl Naylor; the readers this year who were excellent, the Hunter family, T.J., Catherine and Daniel at 4:00 and the Grimm-Howell family, George, Betsy, Owen and Meredith at 6:00.  And also the other priestly looking fellow wearing the long dark academic robe, John Knoll as worship assistant, Chair of our Worship Arts Committee.

I love our Christmas Eve service in the way it stands apart from our usual Sunday services, unabashedly immersed in the poetic images of the Christmas story.  When I reflect on the significance of that story and religious language in general, I imagine religion as a magical mirror in which is reflected that which we love most, our own essence, what Paul Tillich described as one’s own sense of ultimate reality 

What Christmas affirms is the divinity of human beings, the sacred character of their values, the perfection of their bodies, the goodness of living - to eat - to hear - to smell - to see.  What happens at Christmas is that in dreams we see real things in the magic splendor of imagination and fantasy, instead of the simple daylight of reality and necessity.  Christmas does not reveal a sacred world from the other side of reality, Christmas is a revelation and transfiguration of what exists on this side. 

Christmas celebrates the Christian mystery of the incarnation of the divine and most surprisingly, the deepest paradoxical secret of Christmas, is atheism.  In the Christmas Eve reading, The Word Became Flesh, Rebecca Parker writes “You have to know your body as the home of God.  And this is the purpose of Christmas . . . This is the key to the mystery, The Word became Flesh.  We are the dwelling place.  Now:  How will you live?”

Christmas is a magic mirror and we shall only be able to recognize ourselves, in the image in the mirror, if we know that, in truth, there is actually no one within it.  We shall only be able to recognize ourselves in our ideas of God if we know there is no such God at all.  That we are each the only absolute and central point around which all meaning constellates.  We are ourselves the dwelling place of the divine imagination.

The meaning of Christmas and the Christian faith is hidden from those believers who persist in naively dreaming in religious illusions, “not woke” they do not understand their dream.  And thus, for them, religion is preserved as a dream. But for those of us who understand, “The Word Became Flesh – We are the dwelling place,” God disappears: heaven becomes earth, what was up there re-appears out there ahead, as the future.  And the images that religion took to be portraits of the most beautiful and most perfect being are instead seen as constituting a horizon of hope on which people spread their desires, the utopia of society in which the present is magically and miraculously metamorphosed by the person who breaks the chains to pluck the flower, not because of pressures from the outside, but in response to the dreams that come from inside.  And behind the myth and rituals, the carols and scripture, we can perceive the contours, tenuous though they be, of those who await a new world, a new body.  And their religious dreams are transformed into utopian pieces of a new world order to be built.

 

                                                  The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins.

to find the lost,

to heal the broken,

to feed the hungry,

to release the prisoner,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among the brothers and sisters,

to make music in the heart.

 Gary

Christmas is the holiday that reminds us of the supreme importance of love between people.  It is a season in which we show our feelings in tangible ways, by exchanging gifts and expressing sentiments of affection.  One of the great truths at the core of Christmas and the symbolic point of all the literature, art and music is that there is a persistent need to love.  We need each other.  We need the love of other people to console us and nourish us, for without it we are nothing.  It is as though humankind were a huge picture puzzle - in which each person is incomplete and unfulfilled until interrelated to others.

I am sometimes prone to a somewhat gloomy and unflattering characterization of the human species.  But against all the reasons that can be given to show how cruel and violent is our species, how destructive we are and how much carnage we wreak; against all that, it is still so that there has always been more of love and affection than of hate.  If this were not so our species would not have survived.  Throughout history there has needed to be mutuality.  We could not have lasted through all the evil and senseless slaughter we have wreaked upon one another except by the harmony to which we are prone.  Simple self interest has shown people the need to work together, to help each other and sacrifice personal gain for the greater good.

Even my hero during my youth, Bertrand Russell, who was mostly a cynic about religion, wrote:

“Nothing can penetrate the loneliness of the human heart except the highest intensity of the sort of love the religious teachers have preached.  Whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful and at best useless . . . the unmystical rationalistic view of life seems to omit all that is most important and most beautiful.”

Christmas reminds us of our mutual bonds.  We learn that the more interrelated a people become the happier the community. As we work, eat, share our grief, sing hymns, pray and meditate and generally strive together in the great cause of our religious faith, we find something good is added to our lives.

The circumstances of Jesus’ birth remind us of the importance of love.  It was the central message of his life.  He worked, taught, lived and died that we might learn more deeply the meaning of that small word love – that means so much.  Love is that doorway through which we pass from solitude to kinship with all humankind.  But the message is found in all religions.  From the sayings of the Buddha:  “Gifts are great, the founding of temples is meritorious, meditations and religious exercises pacify the heart, comprehension of the truth leads to nirvana: but greater than all is loving kindness.  As the light of the moon is sixteen times stronger that the light of all the stars, so is loving kindness sixteen times more efficacious in liberating the heart, the realization of love is more important than all other religious accomplishments taken together.”

At Christmas especially does the summons to love call us.  Let us open ourselves to it so that in part, through our fidelity to love, the world might move steadily forward toward the ancient good of which generation after generation has dreamed.

Merry Christmas – Love,

Gary