Christmas Ruminations

In the run up to Christmas I attended two funeral services for close relatives of close friends. The first was a Russian Orthodox service with an occasional word or two in English. Here the service was entirely about the glory of God, and the human involved was pretty much incidental. The second was a Methodist service. Here the human was a little more in evidence. In fact the thrust of the service was the eternal life that followed an embrace of the Christian way.

In addition to mourning the loss of deeply loved ones of my dear friends, I found myself experiencing a cascade of emotions around the God parts of these events.

While there are very real ways in which I can be and consider myself an atheist, it isn’t in the angry argument with my childhood God sort of way that is so common among those who embrace that word. Rather I just don’t see the hand of a human-like creator in the beauty of the world, nor do I feel a need to blame a human-like creator for the sorrow of the world. For me what is just is, a grand and mysterious play of relationship in constant motion out of which we arise and to which we return.

And as far as that “we” which rises and returns, as I look at our human existence, completely a part of this passing world, I can’t believe there is any part of me or anyone else that will live on in any coherent way when the body falls apart. All the parts that come together will eventually fall apart. In this sense at least there is nothing that is more precious than any other, nor is there anything that occupies the body but is not a part of it. The many parts are ultimately part of that one glorious dancing cosmos.

That ground set, as I contemplate the big thing, the whole glorious mess of it, I find the classic western language of God often works for me, if not precisely in the way it was originally used, nor in the way it is usually meant by my more “orthodox” friends.

With all this that Russian Orthodox thing actually worked for me, although with my multiple herniations, the hour of standing wasn’t the most fun thing I’ve done recently. But the Methodist thing with its celebration of human immortality really didn’t work very well. Although I did appreciate that there was some attention to the passing human involved, which if not permanent, certainly is beloved. And within that aspect of our oneness where we see our differences, there are choices, there is ethics, there is a call of service to one another felt somewhere deep within.

And now it’s Christmas. Which I find a celebration of how the great mess is discovered in a particular way. What a wonderful story, the great whole expressing itself in the birth of a baby. It is here, I suspect, in contemplating that story, we can find some, maybe even all the ways we can live that are healthy and perhaps even, to use another word from our western spiritual traditions, holy.

We were struggling with what to do for a family dinner that includes mostly carnivores but also has right at the center of the clan two ardent vegans. I would like to claim credit for the small spark of creativity that led us to put something together – that’s so rare an event I need to draw attention… We decided upon a Middle Eastern feast (in honor, of course, of the baby Jesus and his family). It’s mostly vegan, although there is one yogurt based dip and there are kabobs some of which will be all vegetable and some will have lamb.

Here we are in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, surrounded by easy listening versions of Christmas music. Some of it the hymns of my childhood.

And I think of the atavistic experience of a deep and abiding love. This, I suspect, is the place where we, you and I, that mutabile and temporary, but oh so precious individuals and the great mess that is discover our unity. The ancient gnostics called this the Pleroma. Which, if we strip the implicit dualism of most gnosticism and take it monistic, if you will, as a story or expression of our essential oneness within our very multiplicity – there it might prove a useful term.

Of course all this is just a way of trying to express the feeling that flows through the background of those hymns so ubiquitous today.

What I’m writing about here is love.

Is it at the center of the cosmos, or at the center of our human hearts?

Does it matter?

I suspect not.

And now the doorbell has rung, and the relatives are arriving…

So, love becomes a dance.

And in that dance something which I can call God appears, a birthing into the world of the whole great mess.

Merry Christmas!