or, why i can no longer celebrate
For years now, i've struggled with celebrating Christmas
because to my way of thinking, the celebration has become more and more hypocritical,
religion feeding Wall Street, megalomania feeding egos,
amidst hunger and poverty and state created orphans …
this year being caught up in a nightmare of gargantuan proportions
with issues ranging from personal to patriotic,
it's just me now, the pariah, so no others, no children, no grandchildren,
and my sad unaffectedness is defense against the inhumanity i see all around me -
in fact, to embrace the pagan way and do nothing specifically Christmas
will actually be a relief from juggling tradition with blatant hypocrisy.
After all, what is Christmas but a holiday to honour a baby
for who he would become, and for his later faithful who grew honourable
by living and spreading his teaching.
Yet in 2020, this same faith is desecrated by self-proclaimed followers
who preach to others, but no longer live these same basic teachings –
how else to explain the unconscionability of, for instance,
caging thousands of babies and children ripped from their parents’ arms?
Or the tear-gassing worshipers to stage of photo op in front of a church?
Christmas reminds me of the greatest hypocrisy of today's
all too common, disconnected, present day child/adult relationships,
a breakdown which pervades all of time and society,
that begins with the babies who make great accessories,
but then babies become children, and as regular everyday wear,
too many children are tossed aside forgotten -
whether physically and emotionally doesn’t matter, the two are inter-connected,
so that with spirits disjointed, few can become what they dream for themselves …
and then these children grow up and foster upon their children
the baggage of their own psychology … and on it goes …
and this idea, having been gathering momentum for millenia,
today rivals Herod's evil murder of the Holy Innocents.
i cannot celebrate Christmas because i don't know how to stop seeing
just how antithetical Christianity has become to its founder’s original intentions,
and 'Christians' who aren't bothered that Jesus himself
would be unable to recognize his own teachings
as interpreted and mal-practiced in the 21st century.
so this year the Universe has granted me a moratorium -
i’ll probably embrace the pagan thing and do nothing specifically Christmas --
oh and about the 'scourge' of paganism, here's a bit of disconcerting trivia -
as a pre-Vatican II Jesuit cradle Catholic in the ‘50s
raised and educated by nuns, i learned from them that a pagan
was someone whose religion, quite simply, had 'come before' Jesus,
neither good nor bad but leaning toward a question mark and sympathy
in that pagans just hadn't had the opportunity to know jesus which,
admittedly not their fault, offered lots of dogmatic wiggle room -
It didn't take me long for me to realize that by that very definition,
according to Christian writings which refer to the Baptist as the ‘forerunner,’
defined as someone or something that comes before especially as a sign of the coming of another,
John the Baptist himself is a pagan.
. *shrugs and laughs for reasons few would understand*
For that matter, so are the Mandaeans,
a pre-Christian religious group, quasi-absorbed into the Church,
whose prophet was not in fact Jesus, but the Baptist -
the catchpoint wasn't that they disbelieved Jesus was who he was;
but that their belief was rooted in the Baptist's proclamation of Jesus' identity,
and not on the resurrection, which is the true Christian hallmark ...
i’ll spare the discourse on how paganism
significantly influences honoured Christmas traditions,
but if anyone's curious, explore at this History channel link
PEACE be with us all
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related reading: Thanksgiving
Feast of the Epiphany