In his poem, “The Mystic’s Christmas,” John Greenleaf Whittier describes a group of monks who are taken aback by the refusal of one of their brothers to join them in their Christmas revels. He sits apart, quietly, with a look of sweet peace upon his face.
"Why sitt'st thou thus?"
his brethren cried,
"It is the blessed
Christmas-tide;
The Christmas lights are all aglow,
The sacred lilies bud and blow.
. . .
"Rejoice with us; no more
rebuke
Our gladness with thy quiet
look."
The gray monk answered, "Keep,
I pray,
Even as ye list, the Lord's
birthday.
The gray monk in no way wishes to
undermine the joy of his dancing brothers, nor diminish the importance of their
sacred celebration. There was a time
when he too, found deep meaning in the observance of Christmas as a special day
and enjoins them to keep the feast. Yet,
he says, through God’s exceeding grace we can transcend the mere forms of
religion to attain a deeper truth and joy.
"The outward symbols disappear
From him whose inward sight is
clear;
And small must be the choice of days
To him who fills them all with
praise!
"Keep while you need it,
brothers mine,
With honest seal your Christmas
sign,
But judge not him who every morn
Feels in his heart the Lord Christ
born!"
The grey monk of Whittier’s poem
echoes the teaching of the mystic, St. John of the Cross, who said, “The soul
of one who loves God always swims in joy, always keeps holiday, and is always
in the mood for singing.”[1] This is quite a statement from this Spanish
mystic best known for his teaching about the dark night of the soul! St. John of the Cross is no Pollyanna, yet it
was his experience that a deep and abiding joy is the fruit of spiritual
awakening: every day is Christmas for
those in whom Christ is born.
Our Christmas celebration is
meaningless if it does not serve to awaken us to the birth of Christ in our own
souls, to the fullness of life and love for which we have been created. This is God’s desire for us, and it is our
deepest desire as well. Christmas is
not only about the birth of Jesus back then and there. It is also about the realization of our true
selves, Christ in us, here and now. Christmas reminds us of who we are, of all we
can become. It is easy to forget.
To borrow an analogy from Rabbi
Sharon Brous, consider the importance of wedding anniversaries. As a priest, it is a great privilege for me
to help a couple celebrate the holy love they share and to declare it blessed. Holy Matrimony is a wonderful
celebration. It is an intense,
sacramental experience.
Consider, however, from your own
experience, or try to imagine with me, the difference between the intensity of
the experience of the wedding day and say, the sixth or seventh
anniversary. By the 16th or
17th anniversary, God willing you should make it that long, you are
lucky to remember what day it is when you wake up that morning, and scramble to
make a restaurant reservation or hope you can get a card before your beloved
springs one on you (or, better yet, hope you aren’t the only one who
forgot). I wasn’t so lucky. I forgot our 7th anniversary, and
my husband has never let me forget that I forgot!
As Rabbi Brous explains it,
“religious ritual and rites were essentially designed to serve the function of
the anniversary, to be a container in which we would hold on to the remnants of
that sacred, revelatory encounter that birthed the religion in the first place.
The problem is that after a few centuries, the date remains on the calendar,
but the love affair is long dead. That's when we find ourselves in endless,
mindless repetitions of words that don't mean anything to us, rising and being
seated because someone has asked us to, holding onto jealously guarded doctrine
that's completely and wildly out of step with our contemporary reality,
engaging in perfunctory practice simply because that's the way things have
always been done.”[2]
Christmas, like a wedding
anniversary, is a reminder to keep love alive, not just on Christmas day, not
just on the anniversary, but every day:
it is a reminder of who we are and of the commitment that love demands
of us. It is an invitation to live in
the joy that we can only experience through the sometimes painful, but
ultimately life-giving, commitment to love:
not just love of our spouse or of a friend but of God, and of all things in God.
A religion, like a marriage,
becomes stale when the celebration of its anniversary becomes an exercise in
nostalgia, reducing love to mere sentimentality. It becomes routine, lifeless, and, yes,
boring; completely disconnected from present reality and the risks and
vulnerability of real love. That is one
of the ways that religion goes wrong.
Another way religion goes wrong is
when it becomes extremist, all about domination and control, a form of domestic
and even civic violence. It is used to
justify regressive and exploitative politics and policies, using sacred texts
to legitimate hatred and violence in God’s name. Such religion is an exercise in cultivating
fear rather than love. As Rabbi Brous
notes, “Religion today has failed to capture the imagination of millions who
are repelled by the viciousness of extremism and disenchanted by the dullness
of routine-ism. They refuse to choose
between religion that’s deadly and religion that is dead.”[3]
The purpose of religion is not
to numb us into complacency or force us into compliance. It is misused whenever it serves as a form of
escapism – “thoughts and prayers religion” – as in “our thoughts and prayers
are with the victims of the mass shooting” but we aren’t going to do anything
about the fetishizing of guns in America; or “our thoughts and prayers are with
the victims of the hurricanes” but we refuse to acknowledge the reality of
global climate change much less enact policies to mitigate its effects. Religion is equally misused when it serves as
a form of social control, serving as chaplain to the empire and its idolatry of
blood and soil.
Authentic religion is always an invitation to wake-up and a
threat to empire. Christmas is
not a bucolic, sentimental story about sweet baby Jesus, meek and mild. It is a subversive claim that God is found,
not at the center of empire, but in the resistance. It is a subversive claim that divine power is
not exercised through violent domination, but through revolutionary love. It is a subversive claim that salvation does
not come down from above, in the form of noblesse
oblige, but wells up from below, in the form of a community of nobodies
from nowhere who turn the world upside-down.
The story of the birth of Jesus delegitimizes the official story, and
offers an alternative version of religion as the practice of becoming human,
fully alive and breathtakingly free.
In a healthy marriage, anniversaries
are celebrated as a joyous recognition of the way love challenges us to change
and grow, and discover that the meaning of our life is found in community and
in service to others. Through it, we
come to accept our vulnerability as a gift, a means of connection, and honor
the vulnerability of our beloved. We
learn to let go of our ego, die to our self-image, so that we can see more
clearly and love more deeply, selflessly, and unconditionally, so that we can
become mutual agents of our beloved’s healing.
We accept pain in the service of growth, rather than trying to avoid or
control reality. We give ourselves away,
and thereby receive all things in return.
Well, Christmas is the anniversary
of our love affair with God, who comes to us in the form of a child and says to
us, in the words of another mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, “I, God, am your
playmate! I will lead the child in you
in wonderful ways for I have chosen you.”[4] The world is our playground, and God invites
us to enjoy it. Yes, you can get hurt on
the playground. It can be a little
dangerous. But the risk of love is worth
the joy of playing together. When we
realize this deep in our soul, beyond our illusions and our fears and our false
ideas about religion, then we can say with St. John of the Cross, “The soul of one who loves God
always swims in joy, always keeps holiday, and is always in the mood for
singing.” When Christ is born in us,
then every day is Christmas. Amen.
[1]
Quoted in The Living Pulpit
(October-December, 1996), p. 30.
[2]
Rabbi Sharon Brous, “It’s time to reclaim religion,” TED conference talk at https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_brous_it_s_time_to_reclaim_and_reinvent_religion.
[3]
Rabbi Sharon Brous, “I need you to breath,” keynote address at PICO Prophetic
Resistance Summit, October 23, 2017 at http://ikar-la.org/wp-content/uploads/PICO-Prophetic-Resistance-Keynote.pdf.
[4]
Quoted in The Living Pulpit
(October-December, 1996), p. 30.
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