Every year Christians of various stripes try re-claiming the meaning of Christmas. "Put Christ back into Christmas" we say. Sometimes the more scholarly of us try finding new or paradigm-shifting ways of reading the birth narratives in the Bible. Whatever we do, almost all Christians use Advent to complain that Christmas is no longer really Christmas. I wonder if we're using our time wisely.
One of the major targets of complaint, of course, is consumerism. We spend too much time, effort, and money advertising and then buying gifts as if the gifts make Christmas. Certainly that is true. But then we need to talk about families who are not able to afford gifts of any kind and who are, instead, worrying about how to afford heat and electricity through the winter. As a pastor, I have received a number of those calls over the years and it's always heart-breaking. "Please, I want to give my kids a Christmas and I don't know what to do." I could tell those parents that, actually, Christmas is not about giving or receiving gifts. I could do that, but I doubt I'd be very helpful. This year, though, one of my churches has been extremely helpful in providing a Christmas for a handful of families in turmoil and financial stress. We provided a trunk full of mittens, hats, and scarves to families in need; and another trunk full of gifts to three families who otherwise would not have had any. Our giving was in coordination with DCF, and when we dropped off our gifts to the case worker, the case worker cried tears of joy; one of the parents, we learned later, also was overcome with tears of joy and exclaimed how amazed she was that a church would be so generous. It was through our gift-giving on a personal level that showed the case worker and a number of families what Christmas is really about. We cannot be quite so quick to dismiss consumerism. An element of consumerism can and does speak Christmas to those in need.
Now, this essay is not about consumerism and Christmas. Rather, it's perhaps useful to say that our trying to determine the meaning of Christmas for people serves little use. What does it mean, really, when we say we should put Christ back into Christmas? (By the way, as an aside: when people say we should put Christ back into Christmas, I think they are reacting to people's writing or saying, "XMas." Which is funny because the first letter of Christ's name in Greek, the language of our New Testament, is X--spelled 'Chi,' generally pronounced 'kai.' Throughout early and late Christian history, X stood for Christ. 'Xmas' is, in fact, quite appropriate.) Or what does it mean when we dig into the birth narratives using our preferred method of interpretation to figure out the real meaning of Christmas? Next to nothing, I argue.
To make my point I reference a wonderful movie, Anomalisa, if for no other reason than that you should watch it. In the film, the main character, Michael, is a successful but hopeless man searching for meaning in his life while away at a hotel for a conference. Watching the film, you quickly notice that everyone except for Michael has the same voice. Male or female, every character speaks with the same voice. Obviously, then, to Michael, life is dreary and he cannot enjoy any interaction or relationship, not even with his wife or son, because everyone is the same person. Or, put another way, everyone is no one--no person is real except for himself.
Imagine Michael's elation, then, when he hears a different voice from down the hall. He runs to search for the voice, frantically knocking on doors hoping he'll find the real person. Michael finds her, Lisa. She happens to be rooming with a friend, Emily, and both of them are there for the conference because they're big fans of his. Both of them, then, jump at the chance to have a drink with Michael. Emily fawns all over Michael, filling the stereotypical role of a beautiful groupy. But Michael decides not to have easy sex with Emily, who is the same as all other people on the planet, and instead returns to his room with Lisa, who is awkward, not intelligent, and rather erratic. Michael is quite simply entranced with her voice, with her realness, and wants to spend the night listening to her. So Michael tells Lisa to tell a story. While she's talking, Michael initiates a sexual encounter.
There's much more to the movie but this is a good place to take an intermission. Indeed, my wife, Danielle, and I did take an intermission at this point, and Danielle proceeded to share her anger about Michael. "Typical man," she said. I wasn't angry with him and Danielle was surprised. "You, a pastor, are not angry with a guy who just committed adultery?" I want to say that it's a movie and I would be upset and disappointed with anyone who commits adultery, though I'd also pray with that person. The reason I wasn't upset with Michael, though, is worth investigating.
The question is: can you commit adultery if the person you're married to is not a real person? If everyone in the world is fake except for you and your mistress, is that adultery? Think of all the fake people as cardboard cutouts. If I were to slash apart every cardboard cutout in the world, is that murder? Or is it only murder if I also slash apart another real person? If both are murder, then do we commit murder every time we flatten a box to put it into recycling? Is it possible to do harm to a person who isn't even a person, who is more of a something than a someone? Human traffickers often prioritize convincing victims that they are not a person but are ultimately a thing, and that is evil, but that's not what we're talking about here. What if everyone had never been a person to begin with?
These questions remind me of Diogenes the Cynic, who is known for having carried around a lantern in broad daylight. Everyone thought him to be a fool but, in response, Diogenes claimed everyone else was a fool. "I'm in search of an honest man," Diogenes would say. A later story about Aesop is similar, in which Aesop claims he's looking for a real, or honest, man. According to these stories, everyone on earth except for the philosopher himself were, actually, walking around in darkness, despite the sun's being out. The philosopher thus needed a lantern to walk around in such darkness, that only those in the dark perceived as light, and would find an honest, or real, man because the other real man would either also carry a lantern or be stumbling around as if lost, like Michael in the film.
Believe it or not, our holy writ agrees, in principle, with Diogenes. The best example comes from Paul's Letter to the Romans. In that letter, Paul argues that all people, though alive, are actually dead. If we're reading carefully, I think that we'll find Paul means this literally. We are all dead. We may think we are alive but we aren't. The only way we can be truly alive is if we let go of our death and live through the Holy Spirit. Only by the power of God's Spirit can we find life, have life, and live.
One of our philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard, also agrees. All of his writings, his whole life purpose, was dedicated to "that solitary individual," that one other person out there who was stumbling around in the darkness. Kierkegaard's magazine, The Moment, make his argument clear and plain: you all who claim to be Christian have no idea what Christianity and discipleship actually are; you're not real; you're not alive; you're dead, walking around in darkness calling it light. To Kierkegaard, following the dictates of the Church did not a Christian make, and so even if a person 'put Christ back into Christmas' via the Church, that person would still be fake, would still be a cardboard cutout. Christ's Incarnation on Christmas did not occur so that we could say, "I believe in Christ," just like all other cardboard cutouts, and be saved. Rather, Christ's Incarnation on Christmas occurred so that we could find Christ, truly, in our hearts and lives, and be real. What being real in Christ means, though, is that we appear to be a man carrying a lantern in broad daylight.
What Christmas is about is being a real person, being a Michael, a Lisa, a Diogenes. Christ's coming into the world isn't so that we could celebrate the birth of Christ but so that we are not cardboard cutouts. Prior to Christ's coming into this world as a real person, as really human flesh, religion ruled the day. Nietzsche is right on this score.
Oftentimes Nietzsche is labeled as the bane of any religious person's existence. If that were true, then that would mean that Christians are incapable of reflecting on the nature of our faith. Nietzsche's philosophy is critical, I think, in understanding the meaning of Christianity. Not the entire philosophical system but some of it. The most relevant of Nietzsche's ideas is that religion formed around an attempt to codify and perpetuate rules, probably for the sake of creating a system of power. What perhaps began as a true and charismatic religion becomes a system bent on creating new cardboard cutouts, concerned only with what God told us to do and what God promises to do for us, as told through the powerful priests, rather than concentrating on the nature and existence of God and our existential relationship to that God. All religions do it, though Nietzsche focused on Judaism and Christianity. Look at the Buddha and Buddhism. The Buddha tried escaping a rules-based system, the caste tradition of Hinduism, and didn't want to start a religion. Instead, the Buddha attempted to tear down the rules and simply find nirvana. What resulted over time, however, was and is a religion that, though without many rules, still centers around a "how to" rather than a "be/being" system. Luther, Wesley, and other first movers of new denominations in Christianity have had the same experience. In trying to delete rules-based religion and return to a charismatic, faith-based "be/being" way of life, rules-based religions and new denominations come into being.
What Nietzsche well articulates is that spiritual movements meant to revitalize individuals striving toward or finding salvation in real, being ways, meant to aid individuals to find the objective reality of God/Truth/Nirvana in a personal/subjective way, then quickly and inevitably themselves turn into demanding objective realities that eschew the very Spirit behind the revitalization. So what was once about finding God's grace in our life, being slain in or led by the Spirit, finding oneness with nirvana, etc., becomes about being a good member of a religion or denomination. Rather than being real people with our own unique voices as we seek and live with the Spirit of God, we become living cardboard cutouts, living the lives we think we "should" based on what a religion or denomination has told us; our inner monologue is no longer our own or one synergistically worked out with God but instead is a script given to us. In that case we are still living, our hearts are still beating, but our lives are not real.
For our lives to be real, we obviously cannot be a cardboard cutout, and that means putting aside the script given to us by the author of a religion or denomination or nationalism. It is difficult to do so. The script and voice of the author (as opposed to The Author) is often compelling. Almost all men everywhere, pig or not, would have slept with Lisa's friend Emily because she is intelligent, charming, and clearly putting herself in a position for an affair. Lisa, on the other hand, is awkward, not intelligent, and barely seems to understand what's going on in her own life. Choosing Lisa over Emily in that situation may sound like the right choice on paper but when put into that situation hardly anyone would do so. The non-real choices scripted for us by the fake voice and author are always more compelling because we have been scripted/taught to choose them. Yet choose Lisa we must in order to be real. Despite all her deformities, and indeed her face is scarred, her strangeness and awkwardness, Lisa is confident in seeking out grace, hope, and her own identity on her own, for herself and by herself. That is realness, and like Lisa it is one in a million.
In choosing Lisa and realness, however, we must always be on guard against the corruption of charism, the corruption of Spirit. The kicker in the movie is that, when Michael decides to leave his wife and son and go off to live with Lisa because she is real, her voice starts turning into the same voice as everyone else's. Lisa even repeats verbatim a statement made by another character earlier in the film. Michael is left hopeless. He is the only real person in the world and he is alone. Yet we must wonder if, after all, Michael is at fault for the sameness of voice he hears. He is the one who tried controlling Lisa to conform to his plan, his desire, and wanted to correct some of Lisa's idiosyncrasies. Michael says aloud that he thinks Lisa is being "too controlling," but ultimately it would seem that Michael himself is trying to control Lisa. Indeed, Michael himself becomes predictable. What had begun as a unique relationship in which all he wanted was to listen to Lisa speak quickly morphs into a predictable affair. At the beginning, a thoughtful, genuine seeker of Truth, grace, and Spirit could relate and empathize with Michael, as he appears to be seeking for something real. Gradually it becomes clear that, rather, Michael actually desires for something real to be given to him; he wants the script, the author, to give him something real. Thus, when Michael encounters realness, he tries to coopt and corrupt that realness to his understanding of what the script should be not only for himself but now for other people, too. Michael misunderstands his own personal, subjective search for grace as something that should be given him; and he infringes upon others' ability to embark on the same search.
Michael's failure on his journey and hopelessness as he returns home teaches us a couple lessons: while the path to realness may always be open to us, realness itself is not given to us by a script, whether it be our own script or someone else's; and we cannot at any time compel or corrupt realness, in ourselves or others, to conform to our own desires. In other words, we do not have the power to decide for Truth, grace, Spirit, whatever we want to call it, how we will find realness or how we will respond to realness. We only have the power to decide whether we will embark on the journey or not. What we will find on the journey and who we will become on the journey, well, that will be decided by God's Spirit, nirvana, or whatever else interacting with our own spirit.
Reflecting on realness in this way, what I said above about Christmas and how most Christians nowadays approach the holiday should now make complete sense. More than that, it should be said that, indeed, each person is a child of God. Christ was born in real human flesh so that there could be good news for all people, as if God was truly saying to us, "You are now able and free to truly and genuinely seek me out, to make your journey to realness." However else we interpret the Christmas stories, one thing remains static: travel. No one is content in the Christmas story sitting put. It is not enough to hear about the script. Those who want to hear the good news do more than hear it. They seek it out, they journey, they want to be made real and no longer be cardboard cutouts. To be made real requires a journey, a journey that is impossible to script. It is a journey only you, the individual, and God/Spirit/Truth/Grace/Nirvana/etc. can know. It is a journey, though, that Christ's real fleshness opens up to you. Every step you take, the path rearranges to always be open to and for you.
This Christmas, then, perhaps we dedicate ourselves to contemplation and ask, "What am I doing with my life? Am I real or scripted? Is my voice my own, developed between God and me, or is it essentially the same as everyone else's? Have I corrupted my journey to realness, or someone else's journey, through an non-spiritual form of religion or social contract?" Spending time in contemplation and asking these questions is not only the possible beginning of a journey to the realness God intends for us, the realness that Christ's birth was and is meant to encourage, but such contemplation is also foundation of the Christmas tradition.
Catholics are perhaps right to honor Mary as they do. She is the biblical version of Anomalisa's Lisa. Mary does a lot of questioning, pondering and treasuring from conception through the entirety of Jesus's childhood. Though she has heard the very words of an angel, though she has heard the praises of shepherds who repeat the words of the angel, and though she has heard the words of young Jesus himself, Luke 2:50 quite clearly relates Mary's pondering and treasuring to her not knowing what was being said to her. In other words, Mary is not content blindly accepting a script, even if that script is full of good news and given to her first by an angel, then by miraculous intervention, then by the Son of God. Instead, Mary must contemplate, she must ponder, she must process life on her own in her own way and thereby sustain her connection to the Christ and thus, too, her realness. The letter to/of the Hebrews calls Jesus the "pioneer of our faith," and that is true, but perhaps Mary deserves that title, too. We cannot ignore Jesus's own pioneering. In that Luke 2 story of Jesus's childhood, when Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem rather than returning home with his parents, forcing Mary and Joseph to anxiously and angrily look for Jesus after being lost for a couple of days, it is as if Jesus is saying, "Look, I must do what is right for me to be in real relationship with our God, with my God, and I cannot merely follow the script of a son." Jesus and Mary, then, the holy family, prove to us that the contemplative journey to realness must be done in our way, in our heart and mind, a subjective searching for the objective. Communities of faith can be and are crucial to our journey as long as they are not scripted or lead us to follow a script. God, Christ, must be real to us, individually, in order for ourselves to be real.
So however we read the Christmas story, however we understand the Christmas story, now is a time to reflect on our realness and whether Christ is real to us. Have we been made real, on our own unique journey, by The Real?
No comments:
Post a Comment