I have no problem saying “Merry Christmas” even though the Christ part of Christmas means absolutely nothing to me. It’s just a way of expressing a hope that whoever hears those words will have a pleasant holiday season if they’re in a part of the world that celebrates Christmas.
Every December I write a Christmas Letter, even though my wife and I title it Holiday Greetings. Here’s a link to this year’s letter.
Last night, Christmas Eve, Laurel and I hosted a small dinner for three friends who live in our neighborhood. It was a partial potluck. We provided muffins, a pie, and a vegetable stew featuring garbanzo beans, potatoes, and squash. My main contribution was cutting the potatoes and squash into bite size pieces and washing most of the dishes after our guests left. Our dog helped out by begging for the cheese part of a cheese and crackers appetizer plate.
For several days high winds had been forecast for western Oregon on Christmas Eve day that could create widespread power outages. This partly was due to the fact that last week Oregon and Washington were hit by an “atmospheric river” originating in the tropics that caused some severe flooding in places. Our rain gauge totaled 6 3/4 inches for the week, almost an inch a day.
Not catastrophic, but a lot. Enough to increase the likelihood of trees toppling because the ground was so soft from all the rain. Fortunately, the track of yesterday’s forecasted wind storm shifted enough to produce almost no wind, rather than the gusts of 50-55 mph that had been predicted.
So it was nice to not have to worry about our electricity going out on Christmas Eve. We have a backup generator, but going without power still isn’t a fun time. Talking with our friends and eating tasty food was. We’re all atheists, but the topic of God or religion never arose in our conversation. Lots of other subjects did, including how much we dislike what Trump is doing to the United States and the world.
Laurel had asked that everybody bring a photo of themselves as a child, preferably taken at Christmas, to share. The other four Christmas Eve’ers had some positive things to say about their photo. How I described my photo was considerably darker. It was the bottom photo of infant me and my father, John Hines, that I’d printed out from a HinesSight blog post, “Regrets about the one hour I spent with my father.”
There I was, I said, being held by my father seemingly at my first Christmas in 1948. I’d been born about 2 1/2 months prior. A few years later my mother divorced my father for a good reason, and I had no memory of him until I was able to see him in a Boston hotel room for a single disappointing hour that left me pleased that I’d never see my father again. Such is life. All through my childhood I felt like I was missing out by not having a father in my life, since divorce was uncommon back then and all my friends had fathers.
Then in my mid-30s I finally have a chance to meet him and end up feeling glad that he hadn’t been part of my life. Life often is difficult and disappointing. Life also often is pleasant and easy — like last night, when our Christmas Eve gathering went smoothly. It’s just impossible to predict whether pleasure or pain will be part of our life. We can make predictions about this, just as weather forecasters were predicting high winds, but often predictions don’t come true, whether we’re talking about meteorological weather or the weather of our lives.
The older I get, the more I appreciate simply being alive. Sure, I much prefer being happy rather than sad. However, I’ve come to realize that even sadness contributes to the richness of my life, which makes me grateful for existence itself. Robert Saltzman speaks of a similar perspective in his book, Depending on no-thing.
I am not looking to escape from ordinary life into an envisioned nirvana. I’m not aiming at feeling better or happier. In a flash of awareness to what is, unobscured by wishes for things to be different, any apparent insufficiency disappears. In a heartbeat, the incredible beauty of this world shines brightly, whether “I” am suffering or not. Philosophically, this is the aim of Stoicism, but I don’t practice that either. Honestly, I don’t practice anything. All of this just is what it is.
I see living as a privilege — a once-upon-a-once opportunity to experience this aliveness — not a prison sentence from which one wants to escape into nirvana (whice literally means “blown out,” the way a candle flame is blown out). This gratitude for being at all is quite opposite to versions of spirituality that claim one would be better off never having been born at all.
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Happy XMas, Brian, to you and yours. And to everybody here.
Referring to himself, Saltzman puts “I” in quotes, yet in the same breath mocks Buddhism for teaching nihilism & extinctionism (which it doesn’t).
Ding! It’s time for walking contradiction meditation.
There is something disingenuous, but quite innocent, or ignorant, in Saltzman’s quote. The creation, this moment is too big to drag our history in and wallpaper over this moment. If so many things are wonderful precisely because they are what they are, then it makes no sense to push any of it away. If pleasure and pain are to be met with the same gratitude for being alive, then I say Merry Christmas mom and dad, Donald and Melania, Saltzman and Pope Leo, Hitler and Maya Angelou.
I don’t claim to be objective, especially when I complain about some of you and complement others that life has chosen in distinction to give life. The life I do love in me, is the same life in you. And it is far more beautiful and awesome without anything I have to make claim to, in my own ignorance. We all live in the same creation, we are all children of life.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Dylan Thomas
Merry belated Christmas, Y’all.
It’s a free country. I have no problem saying anything. I got such a big kick of somebody calling Gurinderji a cowboy that I wrote a song about it.
When they finally do come for Gurinderji and lock him away remember it will be the holy Spirit. This coming year the holy Spirit not the holy Spirit yesterday. Now he looks like a deer caught in the headlights that should have done a little more analytical thinking before just standing there doing nothing.
Brian, as a confirmed Atheist unbeliever in Christ,…….what would you do if you were stuck behind a car that wasn’t moving , when the Red light turned green, and you were getting angry as you were reading the huge Bumper sticker on the car , HONK, IF YOU LOVE JESUS!
😇😂😁
That’s funny but people are just waiting to take a swipe. Just leave my mother out of it . I’m not searching for anything. I have it all and for quite some time !
Brian says he is grateful for existence and Saltzman sees living as a privilege. If we are okay with that, what more would we wish for?
I do tend to wonder, what is it that we are all searching for? The short answer is to escape our fears and insecurities and to disappear into some painful, free existence where all our questions are answered, and all our pains and worries come to an end.
For many, having lost faith in the established religions, there is an exodus towards what the spiritual teacher, the guru, claims to be able to show us. If that is not our bag, then there is always the option of comforting ourselves with the unanswerable mire of consciousness or referring to experience, which in the area of spirituality is always subjective. And some go further, imagining some visitor(s) from outer space will pop along to tell us all that we want to know.
It all seems to be in the same vein, generally wishing or believing that we are not just mammalian primates who will live for a while and die like every other life form with no particular meaning attached to our lives. But that we are not satisfied with just living and believe or hope that somehow all will be revealed and we will be enlightened or lifted up – whatever story one chooses to follow.
Actually, the truth is, apart from living and experiencing the ‘here now’ (or ‘what is’ as Saltzman puts it), we just don’t know. All our grand concepts in these matters are conjectures based on what we have absorbed through ancient books and by those who say they know!
We become adept at avoiding that we just don’t know, closing our eyes to the fact that all we ever are is all that we are right now – beyond that is a mystery. It seems that we habitually evade entertaining our ignorance and fleeting impermanence by resorting to faith or conjuring up creative, though essentially empty, arguments.