Christmas Spirit (Part 2)

Part 1: https://metanomalies.com/christmas-spirit/

We who have so much of the material goods and services of life that we swallow the camel of ‘God is dead’ and strain at the gnat of sharing even what we have in great surplus. This is because we have no Christmastime, it is because we have Midwinter Break instead. It is because we have jettisoned as being ‘inconvenient’ any talk or conscionable thought for or of God. Our spiritual lives are bewildered. We have so much material prosperity that we have strangled our better natures with its wastrel excesses. We have so little spirituality; not enough to raise a sleigh or to lay a demon in a corny children’s movie.

Now again ‘spirituality’ is not as many of us think it is – it is not singing hymns and looking down one’s nose at drunks and mothers with scruffy screaming children; or feeling righteous or somehow walking on a cushion of air whatever. ‘Spirituality’ is hard work; it is facing up to truth and bearing as one is able to bear one’s own part in how things are come to be as they are. It’s about solid hard work and constant heavy lifting. It’s not glamorous nor is it clean and glorious – a person who tries to make a spiritual difference is often on a road to facing derision and being walked over and scoffed at and taken-wrongly and just being looked upon as a ‘nutter’. But there’s the pity. There’s the very reason for making such an effort, for trying to do something to release the potential of the people around and about who can only bring to bear these stock and misguided responses to one who is attempting being a worker in the vineyard of life.

Our Christmas break is hailed by apologists for its demise as being a ‘Pagan celebration of the turning of the Winter Solstice’, and they in this way are thinking to substitute an age old tradition in the stead of Christmas; like those who would be Druids and do rituals at various standing stones and so forth, claiming for themselves a pre-Christian spirituality that goes back as far as 1968 when Woolworth’s first began to stock incense and smelly candles.

There’s a whole lot of palaver goes on, sometimes even in the name of the Lord Jesus; but the faith is pretty clear and plain and doesn’t neeed censers and avalanches of ritual and liturgy. It just needs people to try to be better than they are now, and to keep on trying to do better each day of one’s life. The measure of better is – what did I do for my friend, for my neighbour, for the persons I saw to be in need today? There’ s no marks, no scores, no brownie points; it is the reasonable service of a good and faithful servant; nothing more – as if you should get a bonus for doing no more than you expected to, and no more than you were expected to.

As for Christmas Spirit, it’s here all around us everywhere everyday – like a barrel of good wine you only have to tap into it – but unlike a barrel of good wine it never runs dry and there is always enough for those who come. Our world is God’s glitterball, mostly crystalline, a crystal ball. The stars are indentations in the skies of sparks; the material representation of the angelic hordes of Heaven. They pin-cushion the night skies like the bright beads of steel pins. The fields and the trees and hedgerows are the glorious gaudies of God. Men and women, from time to time, and at their best, astound others of us with their sudden flashes of unassailable generous inviolability; when they take a blow full-on – moneywise or maybe in a brutal scuffle – for the sake of and in the stead of another, sometimes even in the stead of an unknown other.

The girl with the rose for the militiaman’s rifle barrel. Gandhi’s pacific protest walking to the sea. The woman who would not give up her bus seat to the white guy. The guys at Sun Records who were beautifully colourblind. The woman on London Bridge who took a death wound for her partner.

Faith Hope Love – all three – but the greatest of these is love.

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