Christmas With Christ

I spent Christmas alone this year. It was the first time in my life that it was so. It made it peaceful, for sure, but I can also say, I was not lonely.

My boys called me up at two in the morning, Christmas, after attending midnight Mass with their mom. Santa had been there while they were gone. My oldest got a blanket with USMC in huge letters and was excited to tell me. My youngest got twenty Roger Maris baseball cards. They didn't care if their dad was asleep, they had to share this with me.

All through the night going into Christmas Eve, then into Christmas, I was awoken by other things as well. A story I've been working on. A very emotional one for me since it's outset. It's religiously oriented and over and over again things poked at me as I slept or was ready to. Things I couldn't get down fast enough and after turning on lights to get paper and pen and write them down, as I was instructed, you might say, I finally put a lamp near the bed so that I could at least save myself from getting up.

I didn't know I believed all that stuff I wrote down. Actually, I knew I did, but it had been forming forever, through the years, but more and more lately. Things I had to say, but was too shy or afraid. That was a wonderful Christmas gift. To say it like I did.

Christmas itself I watched the movie Jesus Of Nazereth. It will be the third time I've seen it. It is by far my favorite religious movie. It is taken from the book of John, I believe I heard. Some definitely is. What I like about it, it is very tied to scripture, but done so convicingly, as with a message, a conviction, and not just dreamy eyed stuff. I need meat and it does well.

Hours of peace, of thought and reflection, are not lonely times. Stuck with yourself forever is, but that is not my case. Times to listen to the voice inside that wants to speak. It was one of the best Christmases I've ever had. Listening, instead of telling Christ what you think He wants to hear.

Merry Christmas From Around The World

So, I'm at work and while at my desk I hear people walking to and fro in the hallway and hear them humming to themselves, usually a Christmas Carol. People are so easily happy and it is more than tradition and commercialism that made them so. Somewhere even in the secular customs that have emerged from a sacred symbol, it worked. Like it was supposed to. People are so easily and genuinely happy at Christmas. Except, I'm sure, for ACLU types.

Speaking of ACLU. Every year our town, with tax money, celebrates Christmas in its Central Park. Every year you feel like you stole a right and managed one more before the ACLU chases Santa off. The city gets away with it partly because it displays the more secular, holiday era symbols, Rudolf, Santa, Christmas trees, etc. Has a hayride, hot chocolate, but still, even then, it does have that Christmas tree and calls the whole thing, Christmas in the Park, which is also displayed in big, bright, bold, and probably too happy, lights. So, we still have to worry about the ACLU.

But until then and their intolerance, you meet so many wonderful tolerant people there. Including Moslems, Hindus, Jews, and Agnostics. It's just a happy, happy, joyous time, whose spirit is still directly and indirectly linked to the original manger in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago. Somehow, in spite of religious wars and bigotry, something good came from all of that too, like was meant to be.

When I meet non-Christians at Christmas every year, I also have my memories of being somewhere in my life, in their country. I also loved sharing their customs and major religious celebrations. The ones by the private and secular segments.

I was in Pakistan once and on national television saw, as like an advertisement, film from an annual pilgrimmage to Mecca, a segment where tens of thousands of people marched around the kabba stone. It was incredibly touching and inspiring. In India, I saw their state taxes put to such a tv type ad of religious celebration that was Hindu oriented. Jewish such when I was in Israel.

When I lived in Israel actually, I worked on a kibbutz. They made a bargain with us Americans and Europeans. They would let us take Christmas off and we would do the minimal chores for them on some of their holidays. It sounded good, but they expected the American Jews to work on Christmas also, but the American and European Jews also wanted Christmas off, from their tradition of celebrating it back in their homeland. It wasn't the work, they just loved Christmas, nativity scene and all, as much as Christians in their homeland. It's called appreciation, and tolerance. Respect. Not jihad.

We have a Christian from India that works with us. Two percent of India is Christian. Most rather recent converts, many this generation, many from British Raj days, but in her case, and thousands of others, hers dating all the way back to St. Thomas of the Bible. St. Thomas, legend has it, historians believe to have some truth to it, was beheaded in India. He is like their patron saint. He entered in the north through Kashmere, but in her case, she is from the southern tip.

I asked her yesterday how they celebrate Christmas. They have Christmas trees too. They don't chop theirs down and of course it isn't a pine tree. But they wrap it with crepe type paper and put balloons throughout. They feast on Indian food, they sing carols.

I lived in Switzerland eleven years and a very small percent of the population is practicing Christian anymore. It seemed easily over half the country was even skeptical. But they decorate, the celebrate, they sing, they exchange gifts. It is far more than commercialism and tradition too. It's Christmas spirit, even if the commercialism exists along side of it.

The true Christ spirit is hard to deny in your life no matter how it got through to you. Even if you are an unbeliever and don't trace it's origins.

I love this whole time of year. And I will say, it absolutely gives me hope for mankind.

You did okay Joseph and Mary. And Jesus is there, even if you don't see Him.

John Lennon

I was a typical high school rural Southerner when I first heard of this British teeny band called the Beatles. Give me a break. Still the electricity in the air was exciting, even as I stayed skeptical. Finally summer of '64 I decided to quit humbugging and give them a look as they were ready to make their second American tour. I even missed church to see them on the Ed Sullivan show. I even liked some of the songs I grudingly heard so far going into their return here.

There was all this hoopla over Ringo and Paul. Ringo was the only one I really recognized, though by now I knew all their names in spite of myself. I could not contain the excitement though as I waited for them and got off to the screaming teeny girls in the audience who were more impatient than me.

Finally, they came on and you usually couldn't hear what they were singing, just enough of the guitar intros and parts of the words to figure out what song it was. And it was so much fun. I began to get on to myself, all that I had been missing.

And there was one that caught my eye. Hypnotically almost. It wasn't just that I thought him the best looking, but he had a knock you down charisma, even without talking. And he didn't wiggle his hips as Elvis had done, he just stood up there toe to toe with the audience and bowled you over.

I hated it. I was just as superficial as all the rest, I thought. But I thought Paul was indeed a throb. I was a guy, I didn't care about the silly things that made him cool, I thought it was way beyond that. I could not take my eyes off him, but studied everything that he did, his mannerisms, the way he moved his mouth when he sang, the way he held his guitar, it wasn't cool as much as spiritual. Rock and roll, spiritual, I couldn't believe I was thinking like that. He did have unbelievable charisma, but it wasn't like the girls thought, there was something deeper. But still it shamed me, here I was getting off to the one everybody else liked.

When they were finished Ed Sullivan introduced them one by one, with a different set of fans screaming the loudest for their hero. Somehow, though, Ed Sullivan got things mixed up. He called Paul, John. But that's what he said, John Lennon. Then he called another, a boyish looking one, Paul. By God, it was true, John Lennon was the one that captured my attention. I was smarter than the girls after all.

I had read that John had been the founder of the Beatles and was their leader, and wrote all the music along with Paul. Now it made since. Let the girls scream their silly heads off, me and God knew who was the one with depth.

So, forty-one years later I'm watching the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assasination of John Lennon and getting all choked up again over it. Assasination. A word used in Shakespeare, over kings, Presidents. I had already lived through the assasination of JFK, then Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. What a crazy world I lived in. Vietnam, Watergate, Kent State. Just as things began to settle down, some normalcy to try and digest this turbulent life I had been living in, then John Lennon gets gunned down by one of his biggest fans. And assasination was one of the words they used.

I remembered exactly what I was doing when I heard the news, just like when JFK was shot. Like I heard people talk about when they heard the news about FDR. This guy was a rock and roller, and it was like he was bigger than anything around, like Presidents, like history embodied. And I knew why.

I was so stunned, so hurt, I could not cry. It was late at night, a Monday, I should have been studying, I took my grades so seriously working towards my Masters. But I had been over at my Mentor's house, not studying with her, but talking about God, arrived back to my little shack, turned on the TV to see who won Monday Night Football and heard Frank Gifford talk about more details coming up on the tragic death of John Lennon. It must be a different John Lennon somehow.

The next morning as I was riding my bicycle to class, finally the tears began. And as the details came in, more of the life he had been leading the last five years where he hardly ever stuck his head up socially were brought up.

He had battled his tremendous ego the whole time. Usually unsuccessfully, but he felt the imbalance and saw what it did to his icon, Elvis Presley. He lived now a beautiful and devoted domestic life with his wife and little boy. He walked openly in Central Park, down sidewalks, waving back to adoring fans watching the social god of the times trying to find the beauty of being real.

And you remembered. How he had changed your life and that of people that didn't care who the hell he was.

He helped shape my life and change it. Almost all for the better. Both in his depth, and even in disgust where I thought him a phony in parts, and he was some and said so. I loved that. He tried coming to grips with his faults too. He was so easy to forgive for it, and helped me forgive myself too for lackings.

I'm so glad we still remember. I will never forget.

When Victory Is Complete

From Sun-tzu's The Art Of War.

Thus it is said,
if you know them and know yourself,
your victory will not be imperiled.

If you know Heaven and know Earth,
your victory can be complete.