Christmas

Well, it is time for my annual rant about putting Christ back into Christmas.

Not that I want you to, rather, I want people to stop saying we should.

I mean, really, what part of Christmas and the real world we live in do you really think is bad? Do the people that are worried about the way we celebrate the season dislike the light shows on people’s houses which bring such joy and wonder? Are we all complaining that the music on the radio and in the mall is about giving, and loving, and sleigh rides, and visiting family and all of those dangerous ideals? What about this whole giving gifts to other people and showing our appreciation, surely that is the slippery slope to moral bankruptcy.

Sorry, I let a little sarcasm slip in there. The thing is, there is nothing about the season of Christmas as it has been adopted by our culture that goes against anything I believe in. Although, I should point out that if you really feel you need to buy someone a car for Christmas, or a thousand dollar piece of jewelry then you might have a problem recognizing limits; and for the record I would like an orange Jeep.

But at its heart everything about this time of year is good, and reflects values that we all want, that we all need, and that are in keeping with every single religious point of view; including secular humanism. We are talking about recognizing value, we are talking about giving gifts, we are talking about family time, and we are talking about feasts and parties… all good things.

The other thing we tend to forget is that the ways of the world influence our way of understanding our faith, and that is not a bad thing. Take the curious story of Santa Clause.

Way back in the early church there was a Bishop, Nicolaus, who was the patron saint of the poor and of Sailors. His Saint Day is December 6^th and he was known throughout history as the one who brought presents and filled stockings. But Christmas was no big deal in the church; just another Sunday service with readings about the Virgin Birth.

Then some American Poets got a hold of the idea of Saint Nicholas… then Coca Cola one upped them and invented him as the jolly old elf in red fur who brings presents, particularly a case of Coke… and it caught the public’s attention. Santa Clause became the centre of Christmas and Christmas became a bigger and bigger deal.

I am of course condensing history into a paragraph so you know it is slightly distorted, but consider this, before the poem “The Night Before Christmas” no one thought Santa brought gifts. Before Coca Cola and The New York Times and Norman Rockwell, no one knew what Santa looked like. Santa has evolved from Saint Nicholas because of the corporate, secular, advertising world…. But what they did was make Christmas popular… and the churches needed to get on the bandwagon.

So here is the rub, post 1930, churches started upping the ante, adding things to their celebration of Christmas. The protestant mainline churches never had a Christmas Eve service until the 50’s sometimes not until the 60’s for example…

So because the world started Christmas shopping, the churches started celebrating Christ’s birth.

The thing is, there is this feeling out there, no matter who you are and what you are talking about, that the world is us and them. It never is. Everything is tied together in unexpected ways. EVERYTHING. And when we spend our energy trying to convince people they aare doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, we are fighting a losing battle for no reason.

So put up your silly Holiday trees, wish everyone compliments of the season, whatever you want to do… it doesn’t matter to me because I am with Dickens on this one…

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say… Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round… as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, 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… I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Grief and Depression

I have been thinking about grief lately as a cumulative process.

By this I mean that it adds up. I think we can see this if we think about it. The more things that happen to you, the more stressed you become, or the sadder you feel.

For some reason this simple bit of wisdom does not register when we are thinking about our life, or our day to day living, or what our friends are going through. It is like we get amnesia and can only remember this one moment, this one tragedy, this one death.

Psychologists have long known that there are life stress events. Buy or sell a house, have a child, change jobs, move, get a divorce, have a friend die, start a new relationship, have a death in the family, get a bad medical diagnosis or turn 40 and you are going to have some major feelings about it, and a whole lot of stress. Enough stress in fact, from any one of those that it might cause a period of depression.

Now, in our world, where we all move a lot, where the economy tanks, where relationships are more fragile, and where our friends are all aging as the majority of the population gets older… and the truth is, many of those things happen to us all the time.

And people are more stressed than they ever have been.

If you are at all familiar with Christianity you might remember that story where Jesus found the woman who was going to be stoned to death because she was accused of adultery. The crowd had gathered and Jesus casually knelt down in front of the woman and began drawing in the sand. Then he asked the crowd a question – do you think any of you are free from guilt? Has anyone here never done anything wrong? That person should throw the first rock.

No one did.

And we get that, we really do, all of us are guilty of white lies, or we have at the very least broken a few traffic laws in our day. All of us understand that we are not perfect and that we should not judge what other people do too harshly.

But when it comes to feelings, when it comes to emotion, for some reason we have blinders on. We think that everyone should be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and just carry on. In fact, the British war time meme “Keep Calm and Carry On” has come back into our lives with such a vengeance that it is supposedly our whole mantra for the modern way of life.

I think we should start admitting that we all have mental illness as well. Sure, you might not be ADHD yourself, or suffer from multiple personality disorder, although having dealt with a variety of people in a variety of situations, I bet we are all closer to that one than we think… but we all have depression, and the beginnings of mania. We all have our own delusions.

Who is going to, seriously, cast the first stone when someone has a major bout of depression. Or when the situation builds up to the point where one cannot get out of bed in the morning?

The reason I started thinking about all of this was because of being a clergy person. I deal with more death and loss and change than most people will in their entire life. Some days it is hard to want to continue on in the face of it all.

But then I got thinking about everyone. We do not take grief and emotional pain seriously enough. We do not make room for it. We do not accept that it is part of the way we were made, part of our very nature.  

Buddha once said that all of life is suffering. And although I feel moments of joy, I get his point.

I guess this column is a plea to take our mental health as seriously as we take everything else. There are times when we just need to recover and there are people out there, who you are walking by every day, who are having the worst time of their life.

Be compassionate. That is what being faithful is all about.