Lo! Unto us a child is born!
As you all know, I have a lover's quarrel with God. I'd like to think She exists, but the history of our world makes me doubt that. Theodicy has always been a sticking point with me, ever since the priests and nuns and lay teachers taught me to reason. (Big mistake.)
But, as mythologies go, the Christmas story is one of the most stunning.
The world's most adhered-to religion is based upon the story of a child being born to a woman who became pregnant out of wedlock. It is a story of a Savior who began life as a poor carpenter's son in the countryside. Jesus was no Gilgamesh. He wasn't a king. He wasn't born into a noble family. He was born into a peasant family, in a country beset by a foreign occupation.
The Jesus story is one of the humble and the downtrodden being the true inheritors of Paradise. The kingdom he claimed wasn't one of the powers and principalities, but one which posited as its central trope the commonality of all of humankind.
All religions teach the same things: Be kind to one another. Treat others as you would wish to be treated. Honor the creation in which we live.
The tragedy of our modern age is that we too often focus on what separates us, what makes us different from each other, because we think that defines our individuality. When, in fact, in this world beset by so many problems, we should focus on what binds us together, what we share in common. That was the central message of the rabbi Yeshua.
I often think about how right wing Christian fundamentalists reconcile the story of the Prince of Peace with the vengeful God they worship. And, of course, they don't. They elide the two. They focus on the bloody God of the early Hebrew scriptures, the God who commanded genocide against the native inhabitants of the Promised Land, and ignore that that God evolves and grows in the telling of the Jewish story, as Jews suffered calamity, and an angry God didn't fit their reality, until he becomes the God of love, whom the Christian authors then took up as their own.
"Religion" comes from the Latin "religare", "to bind". Religion as the loudest and most hateful practice it doesn't bind us together, but sets us at each others' throats. As a civilization, we have to reconnect with what joins us to one another, rather than the petty differences which keep us at odds. True religion has work to do: to restore us together, to bind us in our common humanity. All the conceptions of God which people worship hold peace and love as the highest of goals. Anything we do contrary to that betrays that ancient wisdom.
As we close out this hardest of years, I again wish for this: On earth peace, and good will towards all.
This is your weekend self-care open thread. And, as always: Be brave, be bold, be beautiful. Be at peace, and accept love.