’Tis the Season…to Upset Applecarts?
Yes, my friends, it’s that season of the year…
…when hopes rise that maybe this year the promise of happily dancing foodstuffs will create the deep and meaningful joy that we have waited all year to have…
…and loving families will either be uplifted by one single day of excess, or anesthetized by nog…
…and the “right” gifts will have been purchased…
…and that somewhere in there we will have personally touched the experiential hem, as it were, of the high spiritual truths that we think this time of year was created for.
It’s all such a beautiful idea, in its own beautiful and innocent way, but I think that it is inappropriate to what we say the season is about: Jesus. Jesus isn’t remembered because he quietly soothed the masses with hand-wrapped gifts and time off from working in order to celebrate one’s family and close friends.
That sweet and kind stuff isn’t what Jesus came to do! Jesus came to upset every. single. motha-fecking. applecart. there is!
And that’s exactly what he did!
He injected truth into a world of lies. He spoke about spiritual truths and ideas in ways that went bang-zoom against the accepted norms of the day and upset a whole lotta people! He collected the least powerful people as his community and created a stir by being authentic and powerful, loving and unyielding, and creating an upsurge of individual empowerment and care.
So, let’s not talk about historical facts around the December 25th. That’ll be for another article.
Let’s start instead with the Jesus who was so cell-level and consciousness-shiftingly impactful we know about him centuries after his passing, and we will continue to know about him until the world implodes.
Yes, Jesus preached about love and peace and compassion. But he was also not afraid to take on the egotistical bullshit around him, tell truths and even throw money-lenders out of temples!
[I wish they’d had photographers back then…I would have loved to have seen that…]
This was not a guy who conformed and placated and said, “Let’s please just stop arguing, and get along!”
This was not the guy who said, “I think I’ll be a nice Jewish boy and just do what my mom wants me to do — maybe get a cushy job and make a bunch of money, get married and have a bunch of kids.”
No, not this guy! THIS guy says, “Excuse me while I kiss the sky!” and takes off for India — some say, but who really knows? They didn’t have Tik Tok back then — and comes back with a real barn-burner of a message:
“We’ve all got it — that thing that we are made of that has given us the power of free will and the ability to create lives and miracles and things. And hey, lookit me! What I’m doing, you can do it too! Not later — now!”
That message of his continues to be the single most threatening idea on Planet Earth, particularly to those who live to create base fear and then soothe it with their controlling rules, regulations and greed.
So threatening, in fact, was his message that the Council of Nicea, in 452 A.D., decided to take all of his references to reincarnation and anything less than straight-laced out of the Bible and leave a sanitized version.
Yeah, Jesus was a threat.
He brought an absolutely fierce kind of love into a world that was in its own way as screwed up and difficult as ours is now. He said, through his actions, that he would love us no matter what but he would also not let us hide. He said that somehow, through our human bodies, we could create the incredible magic of love and coexistence and that we could stop the bullshit of the ego if we were willing to work at it! He told the truth, and he made us tell the truth so that we would be as fierce as he was!
He questioned authority and he made his own rules, and he made his own community.
He looked calmly into the face of leadership that wanted to control everything, and he said, “No, you are not in control. Each one of us is in control.” And that just fucked. them. UP.
Some think he hung out with a woman who was a prostitute. I think he married a woman named Mary who was one of his disciples, and the world that thought that women are the world’s biggest threat (second only to Jesus’s message )— being mysterious and powerful and the bringers of life itself — turned her into a prostitute by creating the rule that social shame has real-world negative consequences, and then attaching sexual shame solely to bodies with vaginas and not to bodies with penises.
Sadly, we haven’t left this ideology even thousands of years later.
So, the idea of celebrating this holiday as a place of calm is beautiful and lovely. It is most certainly an experience much to be desired and even to be experienced. Count me in, I’m a fan of the idea, but…!
But if we want to celebrate the ideals and the Truth of a Jesus, we are going to have to dig far, FAR deeper.
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You’re gonna love it.
We should absolutely learn to embody the “nice” messages of love and compassion and service — absolutely! — but since we haven’t managed to stinkin’ DO that after all of these years, it seems crystal clear to me that we have to do something more substantial to make those constants in our lives, rather than a nice little pink experience we strive to experience one day a year!
If we want to truly embody the ideals of Christmas, the war we have to fight is against this idea that we should celebrate Jesus’s message as one of emotional disengagement from the struggle of finding love amidst craziness, or — even more noxiously — of the appearance of being caring.
If you are giving money to the poor one day a year and being a violent uncaring douchebag the rest of the year, you’re being an asshole. There’s just no way around that. Keep your effing money.
Look, we know that Christmas Day is never the idyllic day that the 1940’s movies painted it to be. More’s the pity. Believe me, I’d be all over that if it were real. And for those who really can create that kind of ultra-loving and giving day that we all long for, my hat is permanently OFF to you. That is an incredible gift to be able to bring to yourself and to others.
For me personally, Christmas has been a day to spend time with people I love, and let go of the world for a minute, and remind myself that love is real and that as an individual I am not alone in understanding and feeling the reality of its critical and oxygen-bearing importance.
But Christmas is also a day for movies and Chinese food and Christmas is a day off of work — hardly spiritual on its face, but certainly refreshing to the spirit that needs a break after a long year.
And then there are those who are reaching for and touching the spiritual meaning of Christmas that we yearn for: connection, love, compassion and a better world.
But we have no practices on that day that we carry forward as an internal practice and commitment to be more next year than we were the preceding December 25th. Well, we do have the external practice of saving money so that we can prove our love through gifting, but money is the easy way to show love.
What we don’t do, and we so freakin’ much NEED to do, is use this day to tell the truth, to share our hearts, to say things that are difficult to say — like how much we care about each other! — from a place of such deep love and courage.
We need to set our sails so that we pump ourselves up with the meanings of the holiday and then bring up the anchor so that we can navigate the waves of the year with self-supporting, proactive, strengthening and compassion-building practices!
We don’t talk on that day, sorry to say, about how we can grow in our ability to say no to assholiness while not hating the asshole himself. We don’t discuss how to move through a world of hate with an internal thermostat of balance and lovingkindness to ourselves so that we are equipped when others need a cup of the stuff.
We need cups of kindness a lot through the year.
So we need to embrace authenticity — mature authenticity. Not the kind of teenage rebellion that passes for authenticity and which is nothing more than careless and damaging self-indulgence.
We need to throw “the money lenders” out of the temples of our own experience.
We need to come to the capital-T Truths within our own selves so that we can also stand up and say “no” to nonsense, and “yes” to truth and all of the values we say we hold to, and do it without exploding from the contradictions within our own minds!
We need to come to vulnerability and sharing and inclusivity, and we need to do it together and imperfectly and with great commitment to the messages that Christmas says we should pay the most attention to.
Then, we really could keep Christmas all the year ‘round. Or maybe we could just start with a week or two…
Seems to me that the Jesus we read about wanted love to be practiced and to last in us and for others for more than one day a year.
That sounds like an awfully good idea to me — as a woman, as a human, as a spiritual Jew, as a spiritual rebel, as a personal growth junkie.
So Merry Holidays to you, Happy Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy Kwanzaa and all the other 23 holidays that I once read are celebrated during December.
Much love, and I’ll see you at the Chinese restaurant!
Lori Kirstein is a Scriptwriter and Copywriter and artist who lives in Ohio with a cat named Thomas and a business called The Goodbye Good Girl Project. LKCopyArts@gmail.com
