This essay,
Christmas Greetings,
is the complete text of my 2007
holiday.
wishes sent to one thousand one hundred and sixty five family and
friends around the world.
As you celebrate with your families and friends, may you have an
awesome festive season. And especially if you're fortunate enough to
have around you young children leading the charge to excitement and
wonder, may you revel with them and relish the joy of Life on
Earth
and everything Christmas promises and stands for.
As I step back and notice what I've just said, I see my words are
genuine. They're real, and yet they don't really examine the spirit of
this occasion celebrated around the world. My words are tinsel and
glitter but not examined. Socrates was right: "The unexamined life is
not worth living.".
So I look deeper at the significance of Christmas and
the holiday season.
And not too deep below the surface, I notice issues and questions.
For many, many people, Jews and Muslims alike for example, Christmas
has no real significance. Foisting Christmas on the world as a
universal celebration is not only inaccurate: it's
inconsiderate. Ironically, it's contrary to the spirit of Christmas
itself. Yet it's rampant.
While I'm totally clear on the crux of what Christmas celebrates,
that's not what mostly shows up in the world at this time of year.
Mostly what shows up in the world as Christmas is a marketing push like
no other at any other time of the year. We're duped and conned - again.
Material gifts can't ever come close to what we really, deep in our
hearts, want to give to each other and what we want from each other:
ourSelves. Really! After the gifts are opened on Christmas morning, do
we really behave any differently toward the people in our lives whom we
love and who love us? Are we altered forever from that moment on in the
way we regard, behave toward, and treasure all human beings?
If we spent half of what we normally spend on gifts, and spent the
other half on those less
privileged
than us, wouldn't that be more in tune with the spirit of Christmas
than going to the local Wal~Mart to buy the latest marked
down video game which will end up in a garage sale a few weeks from
now?
And the biggest issue for me, the one which just won't go away, is this
one: what's the deal with waiting for one day out of three hundred and
sixty five days in a year to celebrate love, to celebrate family, even
to celebrate
Jesus Christ?
Aren't they all worth celebrating 24 / 7 / 365?
I don't have the answers. I don't know what's the right way to be about
Christmas. I hardly know what's the right way to be about
Laurence, the life I seem to be responsible for in the world
which I'm imbued with to live and which came with no instruction
manual so I have to ongoingly work out what's worthwhile to do with it
and discard what's not. I don't know what's right for Life. I hardly
know what's the right way to be in my own life. I seem to
be an opening in which the truth can show up and more powerfully go to
work. I've discovered mySelf as space, and the questions just
flood me asking what's the best way, what's the most appropriate way to
utilize this space, this gift, this miracle of life? What will my
legacy be, given the raw material
God
has given me to work with?
This inquiry has brought me
full circle,
back to the spirit and meaning of Christmas: the birth of the
possibility of a life well used and
authentically
lived. This, I get, is the message of Christmas. This is what
Jesus Christ
has taught me.
With all that in mind, I wish you everything I wished you in my opening
paragraph ... but now unveiled, now fully experienced, now newly
examined and totally alive. I wish you all a wonderful Christmas and
Happy Holiday.
