We are about to begin another Advent and Christmas season.  There is something peculiar about this season.  In normal secular society it simply doesn’t exist—there is only the “Christmas shopping season,” where cardboard angels in supermarkets announce the good news of lower prices.  But even in Christian circles there is something odd about how Advent and Christmas become this conflation of an eschatological  message–“Christ’s Second Coming at the end of the world”– and a memorial or celebration of the historical moment in the past of the nativity of Jesus.

And the latter dynamic itself is so often done in such a sentimental fashion as to eviscerate any sense of the great mystery behind it and in it.  We are left with the “Baby Jesus” and the creche/nativity scene and some nice carols.  I hate to put it this way, but some of us do not relate well to this stuff; and actually a whole large segment of Christianity never made a big deal out of the nativity itself.  In the Christian East, Christmas is not the big liturgical day that it is in the West—what is more significant is Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord, in other words the manifestation and the recognition of the reality of who Jesus is and the implications of all that.  Be that as it may, in the Medieval West and with some remarkable saints begins the dubious process that ends up in a kind of pure sentimentality and  feeling and emotion by the nineteenth century in most of Europe.  Also all kinds of traditions become attached to this feast, and so the celebration of Christmas is done with a lot of gusto in most of Europe.  Incidentally, the feast was celebrated with flourish quite well even as the Europeans were butchering each other–afterall they sang Christmas carols in the trenches of WWI, and in Germany during the Nazi reign Germans made a big deal of Christmas celebrations.  When these traditions arrived in the U.S., they became quickly transformed into agents of capitalist consumerism, covered over with a veneer of the old sentimentality of “Baby Jesus” and with a dash of a “I Dream of a White Christmas,”  and a sip of egg nog,  etc.  The average Joe Believer/Mary Church-Goer has no chance of being liberated into something deeper, more profound, more challenging because the average priest/minister simply recycles his old homilies and the same sentimental messages each year—though of course couched in proper religious language.  But make no mistake about it—the real revolutionary, shattering reality is left untouched, unnoticed….  Interestingly enough Dickens, in 19th Century England, tried to penetrate the “façade” of this kind of Christmas in his story A Christmas Carol, where he depicts the radical transformation on Christmas night  of the greedy, despairing Ebeneezer Scrooge, icon of unfettered 19^th century capitalism.  What is especially interesting is that Dickens has no recourse to the “Baby Jesus”–instead he has Scrooge see his own life from several different perspectives, including Death.  Now Dickens is not really very successful in what he is trying to do because he is still too enmeshed in the 19^th century sensibility of sentimentality, but the try is worthy of praise.  Another commendable example can be found in Thomas Merton, in his little-known book entitled “Raids on the Unspeakable,” in which there is a short meditation simply on one scriptural line: “There was no room for them in the inn.”  The title of the essay is “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room.”  This is as good as you can go with the traditional language, but go further we must.

But now we have gotten way ahead of ourselves.  Let us return to our consideration of Advent itself.  Its eschatological message presents its own problems.  Each year we hear the same message:  Christ will come again, a Second Coming, an End of the World, etc.  Lots and lots of theological issues underlying all this.  Fundamentalists and literalists become fixated by this kind of language as if that were the essence of their faith.  Most others however simply become kind of numb to this language as it gets repeated over and over, year after year….  Already among medieval spiritual writers there is an attempt to put this language into a larger spiritual context, so they put it all together in this one phrase:  The Christ Who Comes or The God Who Comes.  First, Christ came into history through the Incarnation and the Nativity celebrated at Christmas; then Christ comes daily into our hearts and into the Real Presence of the Eucharist(mostly Catholic belief); then there is the Christ who will come in the future to bring it all to fulfillment and conclusion.  As I said above, lots of theological issues here to be sure.  Not the least of which is the status of what we call the Old Testament; nor the meaning of that little term, “comes.”  Exactly what does THAT mean?  A few mystics have balked at this language.  This kind of language is so characteristic of the West in its tendency to “externalize” God as a reality “somewhere” out there and so then He “comes” “here”–whatever that means.  This does not resonate well to those who have imbibed deeply of the Asian mystical traditions or even of certain strains of Christian mysticism.

At this point let me quote from Abhishiktananda:

To a monk friend of his in France he wrote in 1960:  “We are now in the middle of advent, that time which is so dear to you.  I admit to being a little weary of these liturgical years coming again and again, which promise so much and leave you apparently where you were before.  So the Jewish prophets, who always foretold wrath for tomorrow, used to paint the day following in shades of eschatological triumph.  As age increases, I get tired of waiting for that to come.  The John of the Gospel is no longer the John of Patmos (i.e. of the Book of Revelation): everything happens within (John 14), and as our sages here say:  It is already here, just realize it.”

And to a friend who was a Carmelite nun in India and who was dreading another Christmas with her fellow nuns, he wrote in 1970:  “Your Christmas will be an interior exile.  How well I understand you!  That is why as a rule I try to spend Christmas and Easter in silence and solitude.  With you this is not a lack of ‘incarnation,’ but simply a difference of approach and calling.  Quite simply accept that you are different, or rather that your sisters should be different; prepare the creches in all simplicity.  It can’t be helped; contact with the depth and the atmosphere of ‘depth’ in which contact with Vedanta makes us live, inevitably uproots us.  Advent, for example, in which I took such delight twenty or thirty years ago, now says so little to me, even though its poetry contains infinite echoes, far beyond the disappointing words.  Who is coming?  And from where?  In order to experience Advent as in time past, I should have to be able to remove myself from the blazing Presence, and dream that it was still ‘coming.’  NOT A ‘WAITING,’ BUT AN AWAKENING SHOULD CONSTITUTE A CHRISTIAN LITURGY(blogger’s emphasis, not the author’s!)….  Add to that the fact that the poetry of the liturgy anesthetizes  Christians who are too often happy to repeat each year, ‘He will come and will not delay,’ while the poor look in vain for bread, shelter and respect.  Advent is the cry of the poor, humiliated and frustrated,…who are WAITING for me, the Christian, to come to their help….”

And finally just a year before he died he writes to his sister:  “A good and holy Christmas—but Christmas is every day, when you have discovered the non-time of your own origin!  Each moment is the dawn of eternity in the explosion of the joy of Being.”

There is an awful lot packed in these words.  Just a few of the many points:

A. Without directly saying so, Abhishiktananda calls into question our reading of certain scriptural language—all that eschatological language of “waiting” and “coming,” both in the Old Testament and in the Gospels and in the Letters and in Revelation (by the way, has anyone really read the macabre goriness of the language in that book?).  He is quite right to challenge it because there are certain strains of Christian theology and spirituality that have made this a “big deal.”  We are termed the “Advent People” who are always waiting for God.  But what if all that language is mythic in the deepest sense of the term?  Referring to something quite else?  Anyone who has even glimpsed their intimacy with the Mystery of God will find the language of “waiting” and “coming” too lame to sustain their experience in the world of language.

B.  Following that up, anyone who has encountered India’s call to interiority; anyone who has been touched by the nondualism of advaita even in Christian mysticism, such a one will not be satisfied with the language of “waiting”or “coming.”  Rather, the key word for them–and really for all of us–is “awakening.”

C.  Many Christian theologians and spiritual writers will be critical of this approach.  They will say that through this “Hindu optic” you lose sight of the historical element and historical character of Christianity.  It is rooted in particular moments in time and in particular places in space.  Thus, we have Jesus of Nazareth, born under Caesar Augustus, crucified in Jerusalem under the Procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, etc., etc.  But what these “facts” mean and their significance needs much deeper pondering, exploration, and debate quite frankly. Because if Christianity grounds itself in “historical facticity” and brushes aside the great world religions(Hinduism, Buddhism and even Sufism in Islam)as their approach to such “facts” varies quite a bit; or if Christianitytakes on  an air of superiority to such  “ahistorical” religions, then paradoxically Christianity is poised to MISS the “coming of the Lord” as He COMES to it in this historical moment through these religions.

D. Finally, there is the poignant “coming” that Abhishiktananda himself points to.  It is the coming of Christ that the poor and wretched of the earth are waiting for—IT IS CHRIST IN US WHO IS TO COME TO THEM!  To feed the hungry, to liberate the oppressed, to wipe away every tear….  This is the real Parousia, and it is only we who are holding it back.  Amen.

One of the characteristics of the modern era is the presence of individuals who have a keen religious sensibility but who no longer can walk the path of the traditional religions.  They have been often disparaged by the “traditionalists” as “doing their own thing,” engaging in a “do-it-yourself” religion, succumbing to an illusory individualism characteristic of modernism, “New Agers” with weird amalgams from various religions, self-centered, self-absorbed, and so on, and so on.  A lot of this criticism is not far off and probably well-earned!  But not in all cases.  There are those persons which the traditional bodies cannot hold–for whatever reason their religious sensibility takes them into uncharted territory.  In fact, those who easily fit in with the traditional bodies, without any friction, without any pain or disagreement, these may have the more serious problem because ALL the traditional bodies have shown a very real dysfunctionality and to be in harmony with THAT is not exactly a recommendation!  To borrow an image: to a crowd that is running away from the Center, the one person who is heading in the opposite direction will seem like the one who is heading in the wrong direction and running away–often the complaint about someone who is “dropping out” and becoming a monk.  Be that as it may, two people who exemplify what we are describing are John Muir and Gary Snyder.

John Muir

Muir is not generally recognized as a religious figure.  He is almost always seen as one of the fathers of the environmental movement in the U.S., as a founder of the Sierra Club(which today he probably would not support at all!), as a lover of the wilderness.  Born in 1838 in Scotland, he was raised in a very strict Protestant home.  His father did not think that the Church of Scotland was strict enough and when the family had moved to the U.S., to Wisconsin, he joined or formed a very strict Christian sect.  By 11 the young Muir had memorized all of the New Testament and a good part of the Old Testament.  But he rebelled against this Christianity and walked away from it all, literally and figuratively.  As a young man he walked all over the developing U.S. and even into Canada in the 1860s–avoiding the Civil War. He knew he could not live without daily intimacy with wild nature and mulled over ways he could live outdoors, “not as a mere sport or plaything excursion, but to find the Law that governs the relations subsisting between human beings and Nature.”   He came to California in 1868, and when he saw the Sierras, that part that is now called Yosemite, he said: “No temple made with hands can compare with this.”  In fact he never stepped into another church ever again, preferring the wilderness.  He wrote: “I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization; they went away of their own accord, melting and evaporating noiselessly without any effort and without leaving any consciousness of loss.”

He travelled always alone.  And it is amusing to note what he carried with him, compared to today’s hikers with all their great equipment:  a tin cup, an army jacket, tea, dry bread, a copy of Emerson, reading Emerson by campfire under the stars.  So, no tent, no sleeping bag, etc.  He delighted in experiencing the wilderness “close to his skin” as it were.  One time, in order to experience an oncoming mountain storm, he somehow climbed a tree and lashed himself to it and stayed there while tremendous mountain winds blew and rain fell and the tree swayed violently(storm gusts in the Sierras can get up to 100mph).

Emerson was the only “idea person” or religious figure of any kind that he liked(in this he was close also to that other giant of the environmental movement, Thoreau).  Emerson came out West one time, met Muir, was deeply impressed by him, and offered him a professorship at Harvard.  Muir declined:  “I never for a moment thought of giving up God’s big show for a mere professorship.”

What many in the environmental movement do not realize is that the foundation of Muir’s relatedness to wilderness and nature was a sense of God’s presence.  Much more so than in any organized religion.  He thought much of Christianity’s doctrines were bogus, but he had this very deep and abiding realization of God’s presence in the sacrament of the wilderness.  And he went to it like someone going to a church, a holy place, etc.

This had many important implications for what Muir proposed pertaining to the role of wilderness in the national outlook.  There were a number of people that were sympathetic to Muir’s appreciation of nature, but their outlook was more what is called today “wise use.”  Meaning, the wilderness should be protected up to a point for recreational use, but also used for economic development.  Muir vigorously disagreed.  For him that would be like using a church as a shopping mall on Monday through Friday and then for worship on Sat and Sunday.  Or something like that.  The wilderness was a sacrament of something much deeper than any mere economic or recreational exploitation could ever access.  “Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal, or heaven cannot heal, for the earth as seen in the clean wilds of the mountains is about as divine as anything the heart of man can conceive.”

Muir felt a closeness and intimacy with the wild that few moderns ever experience:  “The sun shines not on us but in us, as if truly part and parent of us.  The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing….”  “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wilderness is a necessity.”  Ah, if only that were true and not just a wishful thought on Muir’s part.

As old age crept up on him, he would spend more time in the Bay Area in California, going out to his beloved Yosemite only for a few months at a time.  When he finally died, he was buried in Martinez–with his bodily remains near shipping lanes, oil refineries, congested highways, and the noise of civilization, but the real Muir is somewhere else–Home, of which the wilderness was always a sacrament for him.

1. Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder, a well-known American poet, is also very much a part of the picture of the American environmental movement and one who also has spent a considerable time in the mountains of the American West.  He shares much with Muir in terms of their common love and appreciation for the wild.  With regard to religion, however, he is decidely different from Muir.  Snyder, although born before World War II, grew up and was educated in post-war America, in the Northwest and in California.  In fact, in his old age he is teaching now at UC Davis and living in his own cabin in the foothills of the Sierras.  Snyder is also much more educated than Muir ever was–he has a master’s degree in Asian languages from UC Berkeley and is fluent in Chinese and Japanese.  It is this which enabled him to have a very intimate knowledge of Buddhism.  He spent a considerable time at a Japanese Zen monastery in Kyoto undergoing the traditional life in the Rinzai lineage.  He speaks of it with great affection, but he is also aware of the problems Buddhism has had historically, and he is not afraid to speak of those also.  This goes double for all the other great world religions–Snyder considers them all just a watered-down version, an obfuscated version of something more primitive, deeper and more archaic–this he hesitates to even call “religion.”  It is a religious consciousness but it doesn’t refer to any “ecclesial God” but to the interconnectedness of all reality–thus his preference for Buddhism–and it expresses itself in mythopoetic terms that can be found in all the great religions in one way or another.

Snyder definitely has a preference for the archaic and the primitive as opposed to the modern civilized–especially in regard to religion:  “We all know what primitive cultures don’t have.  What they do have is this knowledge of connection and responsibility that amounts to a spiritual ascesis for the whole community.  Monks of Christianity or Buddhism, ‘leaving the world'(which means the games of society), are trying, in a decadent way, to achieve what whole primitive communities–men, women, and children–live by daily; and with more wholeness…. Class-structured civilized society is a kind of mass ego.  To transcend the ego is to go beyond society as well.  ‘Beyond’ there lies, inwardly, the unconscious.  Outwardly, the equivalent of the unconscious is the wilderness: both of these terms meet, as one steps even farther on, as one.”

As one can intuit from this, Snyder’s religious consciousness is more complex and nuanced than Muir’s. His thought wrestles with the interface of society, language and ecology.  He accepts the “inevitability” of society, but he is seeking to reduce the destructive aspects of society, especially Western Civilization–which is most alienated from the primitive and archaic.    Snyder’s hero and role-model is the poet-shaman rather than the monk–and certainly not the priest or the urban religious figure of power and office.  In fact one of Snyder’s most successful works is a translation of the Cold Mountain Poems by Han-Shan, a Tang Dynasty(about 600 AD) Zen/Taoist hermit and “fool” who was also a poet and is highly regarded in China.  Cold Mountain is the name of the place where he lived for decades, and it also stands for a certain state of mind.  A sample:

The path to Han-shan’s place is laughable,

A path, but no sign of cart or horse.

Converging gorges–hard to trace their twists

Jumbled cliffs–unbelievably rugged.

A thousand grasses bend with dew,

A hill of pines hums in the wind.

And now I’ve lost the shortcut home,

Body asking shadow, how do you keep up?

*******************************************

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place–

Bird-paths, but no trails for men.

What’s beyond the yard?

White clouds clinging to vague rocks.

Now I’ve lived here–how many years–

Again and again, spring and winter pass.

Go tell families with silverware and cars

“What’s the use of all that noise and money?“

Snyder again:  “Of all the streams of civilized tradition with roots in the paleolithic, poetry is one of the few that can realistically claim an unchanged function and a relevance which will outlast most of the activities that surround us today.  Poets, as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world in its nakedness, that is fundamental for all of us–birth, love, death, the sheer fact of being alive.   Music, dance, religion, and philosophy of course have archaic roots–a shared origin with poetry.  Religion has tended to become the social justifier, a lackey to power, instead of the vehicle of hair-raising liberating and healing realizations.  Dance has mostly lost its connection with ritual drama, the miming of animals, or tracing the maze of the spiritual journey.  Most music takes too many tools.  The poet can make it on his own voice and mother tongue while steering a course between crystal clouds of utterly incommunicable nonverbal states….”

Snyder has an interesting take on the archaic roots of spiritual practices:  “I understand even more clearly now…that our earlier ways of self-support, our earlier traditions of life prior to agriculture, required literally thousands of years of great attention and awareness, and long hours of stillness.  An anthropologist, William Laughlin, has written a useful article on hunting as education for children.  His first point is to ask why primitive hunters didn’t have better tools than they did.  The bow of the American Indian didn’t draw more than forty pounds; it looked like a toy.  The technology was very simple.  They did lots of other things extremely well, like building houses forty feet in diameter, raising big totem poles, making very fine boats, etc.  Why, then, does there seem to be a weakness in their hunting technology?  The answer is simple: they didn’t hunt with their tools, they hunted with their minds.  They did things–learning an animal’s behavior–that rendered elaborate tools unnecessary.  You learn animal behavior by becoming an acute observer….  Even more interesting: in a hunting and gathering society you learn the landscape as a field, multidimensionally, rather than as a straight line.  We Americans go everywhere on a road; we have points A and B to get from here to there.  Whenever we want something, we define it being at the end of this  or that line….  Certain kinds of hunting are an entering into the movement -consciousness-mind-presence of animals.  As the Indians say: ‘Hunt for the animal that comes to you.’  When I was a boy I saw old Wishram Indians spearing salmon on the Columbia, standing on a little plank out over a rushing waterfall.  They could stand motionless for thirty minutes with a spear in their hands and suddenly–they ‘d have a salmon.….  I am speculating simply on what are the biophysical, evolutionary roots of meditation and spiritual practice….  We know that the practices of fasting and going off into solitude–stillness–as part of the shaman’s training are universal.  All of these possibilities undoubtedly have been exploited for tens of thousands of years–have been a part of the way people learned what they are doing.”

Snyder again:  “…upper Paleolithic people worked about 15 hours a week and devoted the rest of their time to cultural activities.  That period and shortly thereafter coincides with the emergence of the great cave art–for example in the Pyrenees in southern France.  We can only speculate about who those people were; however, we do know that they were fully intelligent, that their physical appearance was no different from people you see today….  Not only are there thousands of caves and thousands of paintings in the caves, but paintings occur in caves two miles deep where you  have to crawl through pools of cold water and traverse narrow passages in the dark, which open up on chambers that have great paintings in them.  This is one of our primary koans:  What have human beings been up to?  The cave tradition of painting, which runs from 35000 to 10000 years ago is the world’s longest single art tradition.  It completely overwhelms anything else.  In that perspective, civilization is like a tiny thing that occurs very late….  The point that many contemporary anthropologists…are making is that our human experience and all our cultures have not been formed within a context of civilization in cities or large numbers of people.  Our self–biophysically, biopsychically, as an animal of great complexity–was already well-formed and shaped by the experience of bands of people living in relatively small populations in a world in which there was lots of company : other life forms such as whales, birds, animals.  We can judge from the paintings, from the beauty and accuracy of the drawings, the existence of a tremendous interest, exchange and sympathy between people and animals….  To come a step farther: in certain areas of the world, the Neolithic period was long a stable part of human experience.  It represented 8000 to 10000 years of relative affluence, stability, and a high degree of democracy, equality between men and women–a period during which all of our vegetables and animals were domesticated and weaving and ceramics came into being.  Most of the arts that civilization is founded on, the crafts and skills, are the legacy of the Neolithic.  You might say that the groundwork for all contemporary spiritual disciplines was well done by then….  So, in that perspective, civilization is new….libraries and academies are very recent developments….and world religions–Buddhism among them–are quite new.  Behind them are millenia of human beings sharpening, developing, and getting to know themselves.”

Looking on the modern scene, Snyder is not very optimistic:  “I’ll say this real clearly, because it seems that it has to be said over and over again:  There is no place to flee to in the U.S..  There is no “country” that you can go and lay back in.  There is no quiet place in the woods where you can take it easy and be a stoned-out hippie.  The surveyors are there with their orange plastic tape, the bulldozers are down the road warming up their engines, the real estate developers have got it all on the wall with pins on it, the county supervisors are in the back room drinking coffee with the real estate developers, the sheriff’s department is figuring to get a new deputy for your area soon, and the forest service is just about to let out a big logging contract to some company.  That’s the way it is everywhere, right up to the north slope of Alaska, all through Canada, too.  It’s the final gold rush mentality.  The rush right now is on for the last of the resources that are left standing.  And that means that the impact is hitting the so-called country and wilderness.  In that sense we are on the front lines.”

Let us conclude by returning to Snyder’s (and my) favorite, Han-shan:

In my first thirty years of life

I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles.

Walked by rivers through deep green grass

Entered cities of boiling red dust.

Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal;

Read books and wrote poems on history.

Today I am back at Cold Mountain:

I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears.

************

When men see Han-shan

They all say he’s crazy

And not much to look at

Dressed in rags and hides.

They don’t get what I say

I don’t talk their language.

All I can say to those I meet:

“Try and make it to Cold Mountain.”

One of the most famous Christmastime stories is by Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Several different movie versions of the story were produced over the years, and now it is a standard and still  a favorite at this time of year.  Set in Victorian England, “a long, long time ago,” it seems almost like a fairy tale, and its happy ending makes people feel good and “somehow” it feels right for Christmas. For some it simply is part of the “sap crap” surrounding Christmastime.  However, there are disturbing elements in the story–disturbing in a good way–things that should awaken us, not lull us into a sentimental slumber.

Dickens calls his story, A Christmas Carol, and this signals to us that the story is a mythopoetic presentation; it is a kind of “carol,” announcing, celebrating, rejoicing–but what?  The story is not really about Christmas; it is “located” within the context of Christmas.  What it really is about is the transformation of a man’s heart, and Dickens wants us to connect it with the meaning and message of Christmas.

The story begins by presenting us with the figure of Ebenezer Scrooge, and it is Christmas Eve in London.  Scrooge is a person who has spiritually and humanly lost his way–he is more a child of the new Industrial Revolution and the unfettered capitalism of his day, rather than a child of God.   He lives only to make money; only that “which fattens the purse” will he entertain.  This is the social milieu Dickens was living in,  and a lot of his art aimed to bring to light “man’s inhumanity to man” which the prevailing social system enhanced.  The underlying philosophy of the economy was that self-interest is beneficial for all of society, or in the memorable words of Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street, “Greed is good.”  One does not just sell a product or a service but sells it at the highest price possible because the accumulation of wealth has become an end in itself and intrinsic to self-identity.  Why stop at being a millionaire when you can be a billionaire.  You are what you own.  Homo Consumerus has arrived.   The New Testament, among various texts, tells us that the accumulation of wealth can be a real problem in our relationship to God, but what Dickens is emphasizing is that this leads to a distortion and concealment of our true relationship to “our neighbor.”  It leads to an atomized view of society where you just have this collection of isolated individuals each acting for their self-interest irregardless of how that affects others(or today we would say the environment also).

Dickens presents Scrooge as very unhappy, a real grouch, and his unhappiness runs very deep. Dickens describes his condition:  “But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone…squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching…. Hard and sharp as flint…secret and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.  The cold within him froze his old features….” Scrooge’s isolation and lack of fellow-feeling is most obvious by its contrast with what is present in other characters that Dickens brings on the stage right at the outset of the story.  There is his nephew who comes to visit him at his office and wish him a Merry Christmas.  Scrooge is totally dismissive. He sarcastically asks what profit is there in “keeping Christmas,” and the nephew answers that Christmas is “the only time I know of….when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”  Incidentally, what the nephew is referring to is much more deeply presented in Russian spirituality,  and they have a word for it: umilenie, which translates literally as a “melting of the heart” or “tender compassion,” but which means a oneness of heart.

Then there is his bookkeeper, Bob Cratchit, to whom Scrooge is barely able to give Christmas day off and whom he generally mistreats as a throw-away worker.  Then there are the two gentlemen who come to the office–they are collecting alms for the poor and destitute.  Scrooge dismisses them sarcastically and without hesitation.  He comes home late after work, and there begins the real story of his transformation.  First he is visited by the ghost of his old partner Marley.  Marley appears all bound in chains:  “You are fettered,” said Scrooge trembling…..  “I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost.  “I made it link by link….”  And then the ghost tells Scrooge that Scrooge himself is “bound in chains that he has made of his own free will.”  Scrooge is frightened but also puzzled–what is this all about, you were a good business man, Marley!   “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again.  “Mankind was my business.  The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all my business.  The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.”

Then Scrooge is visited by three ghosts or spirits.  First comes the Ghost of Christmas Past, which takes him into his own past to relive both the joys and pains of his past, to open up his heart, to see where things went wrong.  This is the only way to true repentance.  The past is the key to making progress into the future.  Then came the Ghost of Christmas Present, and here Scrooge is taken to see what is going on right under his nose as it were.  He sees the life of his poor worker, Bob Crachit, and his poor family and their crippled little boy Tim, and he sees the lives of those who are poor in London that Christmas Eve.  His heart has already been opened up and now he is more vulnerable to recovering his “connectedness” to his fellow human beings.  Finally comes the Ghost of Christmas Future, and here Dickens is a master spiritual teacher–the reality of death pervades this whole episode, and one might ask how does this belong in a Christmas setting, which is all about birth and new beginnings.  Actually Dickens is in harmony with all the great spiritual traditions in that facing the reality of one’s death in a very concrete way is the great motivator and provider of the energy needed for a transformation of heart.  From this point on Scrooge will live his life with a sense of care for all people but especially those who are already present in his life.  He is no longer motivated by self-interest, but the dynamic of his life will now be an outpouring of self for the benefit of all. This means the using of his resources for the benefit of all and not exploitation. This transformation is both the true celebration of Christmas and the true meaning of Christmas, and from a Christian standpoint it is the Mystery of the Incarnation which opens the door to this transformation.

In the Christian calendar this time of year is commonly called “Advent,” and the scripture readings in most of the major churches pertain to the so-called “Second Coming.”  In a peculiar way the Church prepares for the celebration of the Mystery of the Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh(sarx in Greek–important as we shall see later), by meditating on a mysterious promised second coming at something called “the end of time.”  In our secular society, of course, this time of year is only a shopping season for Christmas–and here Christmas is mostly a “feel-good” time marked out by a bizarre collection of symbols that no longer are hinged to anything religious: snowflakes, candles, wreaths, eggnog, Santa Claus, reindeer, even secular angels announcing the good news of lower prices(can angels lie?), etc.  This time of year is very important to the business world, and so these symbols can be found everywhere.

 

If you are a Christian, please do not say, “Oh yeah, I understand: God comes to us in Jesus, and then there is the Second Coming at the end of the world.”  Trust me, you do not understand.  No one does.  These are great mysteries, and they should not be treated as if understood–but because of the repetition of the feast and its secularization and commercialization the whole Christmas season is a kind of pseudo-religious cultural cliché.

 

Here we will focus on the so-called Second Coming and what Christian theology calls “eschatology.”  The scripture readings point to an endtime scenario of cosmic proportions.  Read literally, as the fundamentalists do, this leads to some unfortunate conclusions–among which the mass of humanity is condemned to an eternity in hell for various reasons, and only an elite few are saved(in some readings 144,000).  Here we can use two science fiction movies as illustrations.  The first one is Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  For too many Christians the Second Coming of Christ is like a Super Alien coming to an elite, select few.  It signals its coming in various ways; then it comes and  takes the select few with it; and the others, well……  Of course this caricature is preceded by another caricature that has to do with the first coming or the Mystery of the Incarnation where, in the terms of Christian theology, God is fully and uniquely present in Jesus Christ.  That caricature we may draw from another movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  For too many Christians the Mystery of the Incarnation is reduced to a kind of body-snatching on the part of God.  You know that there is this Jew, Jesus, who looks like us, seems like us, but if you look closely at his eyes, you will see something different, something strange–ah, he is not one of us afterall. It is body-snatcher christology.  The similarity between these two caricatures is that it reduces God to the Ultimate Outsider, the Super Alien.

 

Now there are different valid theological interpretations of the so-called second coming.  We won’t get into that, but let us explore one important aspect of the meaning of these scriptures that refer to the Second Coming.  Here we will draw on Shakespeare for some help.  Recall his play Macbeth and the soliloquy by the main character, Macbeth:

 

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

………………………Out, out brief candle

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more.  It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

 

Someone once said that Macbeth is the first atheist existentialist.  Not sure about that, but he does articulate a view that is more common than one might realize: the ultimate meaninglessness of life.  Strip away the veneer of a facile optimism, the veneer of a surface social life where one runs around consuming and “having fun” in a prolonged sequence of moments; strip away the veneer of those “little projects” and goals in life, and one big question lurks underneath:  what’s the point of it all?  what is the meaning of all my activity? what is the meaning of life?  As long ago as Pascal and even long before that, many wise voices have pointed out that so much of human activity, especially modern frenetic activity(Thoreau’s “most men live lives of quiet desperation”–not so quiet anymore) is actually a diversion from facing head on the question of the meaning of our life.  Even religion can become merely a prop to ward off the sense of meaninglessness.  As one British author caricatured the naturalistic novel as ODTAA–one damned thing after another–so is the flow of history.   History, both personal and our collective human history, seems no more than a surface procession of events and happenings with no point to it.  Now different religious traditions have different ways of dealing with this question, but here we are concerned primarily with the Christian tradition, and here there is an “appeal to God” to render life meaningful.  Very often this is a superficial maneuver when God is brought in as an explanation when one has run out of one’s own resources to deal with the situation.  God becomes a kind of conventional answer with certain emotional reassurances.  But a “cheap appeal to God” will not endure the next challenge.

 

So there is another “threat of meaninglessness” that challenges any and every easy “appeal to God.”  Here let us bring in Dostoevsky and his novel Brothers Karamazov.  Dostoevsky has one of his characters, Ivan, relate a story of how an innocent child was torn to shreds by dogs that a rich baron set upon the  child for a trivial reason.  Ivan throws out a challenge to his monk brother, Alyosha:  how can this happen in a world created by God?  what is the possible meaning of claiming there is a good and loving God?  Ivan doesn’t even contest or argue with Alyosha about his faith–he simply “turns in his ticket to this universe.”  He calls this universe ultimately absurd and meaningless if such things are possible, and so he implicates the God that Alyosha believes in, the God who has created this universe.  In a sense Dostoevsky has anticipated the questions raised by the events of the Holocaust and all the genocides through the centuries.  The postmodern thought world, where everything, even religion, has become a commodity to make you feel good, and we are all happy consumers, the postmodern verdict on all this suffering would be: “In the grand scheme of the universe  your suffering is utterly meaningless–life and all that comes with it has no transcendent meaning or value.”  Of course it is never put so directly or so openly–more like it would be: “Shit happens”; “Bummer.”

 

It is interesting and important that Alyosha does not answer Ivan or argue with him.  We cannot answer the hard questions that someone who is a bearer of such suffering presents to us.  Certainly not by a cheap appeal to God, as if we had a grasp of what we are really claiming to know.  Again, the different religious traditions have different ways of dealing with this situation, but suffice it to say that we can DO the following 3 things:

1. We can try to prevent victimization as much as it is possible within our power even at great cost to ourselves and our own security.
2. We can stand WITH the victim in his/her suffering–not as some outsider who brings in the notion of God more to reassure ourselves that everything is really ok.
3. We can abide in faith.

 

This last thing needs some explanation, and here we return to our reflection on Advent and Christian Eschatology.  This is the point of all those varied “end of time” scripture readings.  They are meant to empower us in a symbolic way to abide in faith in the most “un-faith-filled” situations in the course of history.  Now let us consider this line of poetry:

 

for thirty pieces of silver he sold him

 

This is actually not the full line–we left off the last syllable–here is the full line:

 

for thirty pieces of silver he sold himself.

 

In the first quote we had left off the last syllable, “self.”  With the addition of that last syllable the whole sentence is transformed from a brute fact of history into a revelation of an inner meaning of that fact.  But it is only when you get to that last syllable that you understand. This is an interesting illustration of the situation. So history is experienced as this flow of  “one syllable” after another, offering us one naked fact after another, but what Christian eschatology claims is that 1.) there is a “last syllable” that transforms the meaning of it all; and 2.) that this “last syllable” is both “at the end of time” and within our hearts already.  This is due to the fact that when the Divine Logos became flesh, in the traditional translation, it entered history, that which human beings create–and the second coming will be a kind of completion and fulfillment of what began in the Incarnation. The Greek word is sarx–the Word became sarx–that is the flux and flow of human existence, the transience and impermanence of the human reality, in Buddhist terms, samsara.  The “last syllable” of history is now both within history already and “at the end” of history.  The scripture readings, then, point in two directions:  first, that there is a great(indeed, a cosmic) significance to history–history is not just “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”– and the collective history of the human family is significant and not just our own personal holiness or realization and that we as community and as human family share in the unfolding of this meaning, and so the suffering of every man, woman and child, no matter how obscure, is now not lost in the sequence of events but connected to that “last syllable” and therefore part of that which will render history meaningful; and secondly that there is a great significance even to the smallest human activity within history–nothing is “not meaningful”–even offering a drink to a thirsty stranger is now of great significance and meaning because “you did it to Me.”  These eschatological scripture readings, then, empower us, in a symbolic way,  to abide in faith.  Even in the darkest situation, even in the most incomprehensible events, even when all resources for meaning are helpless, we abide in the mystery of faith, not with cheap solutions, but within the silence of our hearts where we sense the presence of that “last syllable,” and beyond the horizon of our history where we look for the manifestation of that “last syllable.”  We abide in the faith that leads to boundless love and transcendent meaning.