12.24.08

The Christmas Eve post 2008

Posted in Religion & Spirituality at 3:15 pm by Administrator

The challenge here is to systematize all that swirls within my skull today.  I shall pour a fresh cup of coffee and marshal my resources.

I think I have zeroed in on both the most significant spiritual insight I’ve had all year and also the most significant sticking point I still come up against.

I think.

I’d say the most significant spiritual insight is the consideration that none of this is ours save for having been given to us as gifts. Not the view outside our window, not the house from which we peer, not our cars, clothes, pets, family members, friends, careers, talents, knowledge we have amassed. Not even our minds or our bodies.

As I am wont to do, I work these things out as dialogues – arguments – in my head, and as I first started articulating this, Argument Participant Number Two said, “But, of course they’re ours.  Certainly our minds and bodies.  Look at what Jefferson said in his thunderous Declaration.  Our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights.”

To which Participant Number One replied, “I remind you of the clause that preceeds that assertion, which is that we are endowed by our Creator with these rights.  They are gifts, which God did not have to bestow on us when he willed us into existence.”

Now, the reassuring thing is that a real gift cannot be taken away.  If someone who loves you hands you something wonderful and says, “Here, this is yours now,” you can be sure that there are no strings attached.  That said, the appropriate attitude for you to take as recipient is gratitude, which involves a resolve to remember that you came into the wonderful thing in question through no effort of your own. You did not earn it in the marketplace.  You did not win it in a competition.  Nonetheless, it’s yours.

So even our rights, our possession of which is as close to individual sovereignty as we come, were not ours until they were given to us.

Wouldn’t it be pretty crummy of us to use these gifts in ways for which they were not designed, much as if we were to operate an appliance or toy we’d found under the tree with no regard for the owner’s manual?  Furthermore, wouldn’t it be really crummy to put out of our minds the manner in which we’d come into possession of them?

So there’s something humbling about returning to a remembrance of how we came to have such basics as our breath and our ability to make choices.

Okay, that’s the insight.

The most significant sticking point against which I bump is the frustration of everybody’s zeal to think my insights mean that I’m in agreement with them.  I use the term “everybody” deliberately; see the post below for the gamut of professors of spiritual truth with whom I come in contact in my life.  It spans the spectrum from New Agers through fundamentalists.

Christmas Eve is for me, as it is, for a wide range of people, an emotional day.  I spend a lot of time with scripture as well as theological and apologetic writings.  I contemplate fervently the historically verifiable facts of the first Christmas, and the entire life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  Usually, I’m moved to offer some thoughts and feelings, as I’m doing right now in this blog post.  The irony is that I bristle if someone responds by saying, “Yes!  Yes!  Now you’re getting close!”

Getting close makes me skittish.  The way folks on the happy-happy side of the spectrum (the New Agers, the left-o, inclusive and diverse and green mainline Protestants, and the bestselling pep-talk pop icons) interpret that is to say I’m zeroing in on how much I’m loved by God, or Source energy or whatever.  The way the fundies and hyper-Calvinists interpret it is to say that I’m coming to see how important a word-by-word digestion of inerrant scripture is.  I think I may have recounted, at some point, my experience a while back when I wrote a newspaper column in which I publicly worked out some of this effort tofeel my way toward a solid and consistent faith.  A couple of days later, I got a note in the snail-mail from a total stranger who said he’d read the column and was glad to see that I was seriously inquiring about such things.  The very next thing he said was that since he’d become a fundamentalist the ultimate truth had opened up for him and changed his life.  He invited me to come to his church and get going on such a path.  I felt like mailing the guy back a photo of my middle finger.  He was talking right past my entire body of thought and shoving his agenda in my face.

So at age 53, at 10:08 AM on December 24, 2008, I still reserve the right – after all, it’s a gift from my Creator, is it not? – to proceed at my own pace, proclaiming truth when I know it to be so, and refraining from drawing conclusions when they don’t really feel like conclusions.  To do any less would be to act out of worry over someone else’s conclusions about salvation and Hell.  Surely a God who really loves me would be in support of such a degree of self-honesty.

I guess the shorthand for all this is that I know what I buy with my gut, and that’s all I can bring to my friendship with God this Christmas Eve. 

I do pray that His guidance will pull me the rest of the way.

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