On America

It’s Independence Day in small town USA. The country pride is high.

Outside my window, fireworks crack the sky open. I think of mortars falling, of distant and not-so-distant gunfire. Of countries where there is no such thing as independence. And I think that America is great. I also think that it has grown so great that it no longer remembers why this holiday is so important.

Americans like tout the word freedom as if it is the secret pass-phrase into a superhero hideout. We celebrate ourselves as victorious heroes who overcame great odds, but the truth is that, for a very long time, this country has not known what it is not to be free. It has forgotten what it is to be small, powerless, beleaguered and belittled. It has forgotten the days when those flashes and that rumbling were made by cannon and muskets of enemy forces coming across the fields. More importantly, it has forgotten why those battles were fought in the first place. Those revolutionary battles were not fought to give us a birthright to luxury, but to give people the chance to strive for a better life.

One would think that a better life would make a better kind of people, more gracious, kinder. But separation from hardship has inured this nation to freedom. The desperate huddled masses are forgotten apart from a few media feeding frenzies if they get the proper pathetic photo or have the right political slant for the day.

 Consequently, the days of expansive welcome that inspired the poem “The New Colossus” to be placed on the Statue of Liberty, have been forgotten in proportion. Commiseration and compassion have on many levels been abandoned for nationalism and an ugly, fierce pride in something that begins to look more and more dystopian with every passing year.

Perhaps, America will remain great in terms of size and political power. But is it good? And what, dear friends, will it take to make it better? Don’t look to politicians. Or soldiers. This isn’t truly a matter of immigration policy or gun control or even desegregation. Legislation is never going to fix what is wrong with this country. What is wrong lies inside our hearts, our minds, places sacred and intangible—in our very souls. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And until we are able to look at people, any people, and see that their souls are no different than ours, that their children are no different than our children, then we will continue this downward spiral, desperately grasping at whatever we think we need to keep us afloat, never realizing that all of these things we cling to so greedily are what is weighing us down.

I long for my country to be good, noble and worthy. I want to be able to be proud to live here, not because the country is amazing, but because it is full of people who are truly trying to be great.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

THE NEW COLOSSUS

Emma Lazarus

Stories and Storytellers

In all stories, we are told by our high school and college writing professors, there must be a core element of truth. You can only expect the reader to suspend reality for so long before they lose interest if the story becomes unreliable. This means that although you can have unlikely devices and twisted plot lines and magic and zombies, the characters who use such devices, traverse the plot lines and defeat magic-zombies must always act in a way that is realistic. In other words, in a way that we as people who have been studying the way other people react all of our lives will find believable. So a man who has never in his life forgiven anyone for a slight cannot suddenly forgive some young woman just because it helps a romance along. There must be a catalyst, a force of change, something that is believable because it holds to reality.

To switch tracks a bit, let’s assume you are a person living during the height of the Roman Empire. In this time period, it was not unreasonable to assume that a god or goddess might step down to earth and dally with humans. This is primarily because said gods and goddesses had extremely human traits, quarrels and jealousies. They were, in fact, little more than immortal humans. And they were born of stories created by human minds, following the very important laws of storytelling to make them believable and relatable.

However, if you are talking about God, and not gods—if you were Jewish (which you most likely were if you were a monotheist in those days) the assumption that God would come down and live among men was another proposition entirely. We are talking about God here—the one who laid the stars in place and spread out the oceans, who stores thunder and lightning and fights in pillars of fire. He held all of the supposed power of the Olympians combined and even more.

King Solomon the wisest man who ever lived did not believe that it was possible. He said, “But will God indeed live on earth with man? Even heaven, the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this temple I have built.” (2 Chron. 6:18)

So when we tell the story of God coming down to earth we must see that it is not a story that a human mind, who understood the vast power of God, could imagine telling. It doesn’t hold to reality. It is not expected. It isn’t simply a plot twist, it is a twist of the very fabric of the world—this thought that God could consent to be a companion of men, to put on flesh and blood and time itself—the God who created TIME, submitting himself in so many ways to his own creation. It is fantastic and unearthly.

This is not a story that anyone who believed in the one, true God would dare to create on his own. It’s too impossible.

Truth became infinitely stranger than fiction on the day Jesus was born.

And yet, it isn’t strange at all if you consider that God loves humans. Because love is a catalyst, a game-changer. Love explains deeds that would otherwise appear irrational (and perhaps sometimes they still are). God proved his love by sending his son, and up until that point it was not something that man could comprehend—God’s love. Now it is. He put it into context for us. He told a story that we with our limited human understanding could never create on our own, but one that we could believe.

“…One will come from you to be rule over Israel for Me,

His origin is from antiquity, from eternity.” (Micah 5:2)

Abandoning Christmas

What if we didn't celebrate Christmas at all? What if as an entire Christian community we decided to say, "Okay, World. This holiday is yours. Obviously, as many of you will no doubt point out, it was your idea from the beginning. So here you go. Take it back. We won't interfere with your decorations, your choice of greeting or your frenzied sales. Do whatever you like. We can't control you, and we don't want to."

I don't mean this to sound facetious. I wonder if we could actually do it, and I wonder how the world would change if we did. I think some Christians (and I myself have occasionally though this way) feel that if we abandon a holiday to the secular world, to their strange icons of fat men or giant rabbits, we will have lost foothold and given the enemy another beachhead in this vast war for souls. I would counter by asking what good we have done thus far in clinging to a tattered idea of a sacred day that has been warped to the point that it does not in any way resemble the grace and holiness that it was meant to celebrate. We forget, I think, that Christmas is a man-made celebration, and like everything made by men, it will go awry. God did not mandate that his people keep it sacred. He did not command, "Thou Shalt Remember Christmas and Keep It Holy." No. He did not. 

By the very appearance of Christ in human time and form, God was removing the obstacles and veils that separated the holy from the unholy. By the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, he allows us (the unholy) access to him (the most holy), every single second of every day of the year. There is no reason at all why December 25th ought to be more important than May 23rd or July 2nd. Jesus Christ was indeed born at a fixed point in time, but only so he could then save us all from the darkness and pain of death throughout the rest of eternity.

So what if we gave up Christmas? What if we abandoned it to the spoils of the world and concerned ourselves with other things? Honestly, I don't think the world would notice, except to sigh in relief as the whingeing and controversy dies away. But what if we took all the money and time and effort we spend on worrying and preparing for this one holiday and spent it on someone in our community instead? A homeless man, a heartbroken co-worker, a frazzled mother.

To clarify, I don't think celebrating Christmas is bad or wrong or somehow unChristian. We mean well. Honestly, I think, we do. But we are seeking in a human construction once again a sacredness, a sense of peace and belonging that only God can give.

Time, as I was reminded the other night, is precious. We have it in limited supply. We ought to give a great deal of thought to how and why we do what we do in order to avoid squandering what time we have. And it seems to me we could do a great deal of good if we stopped celebrating Christmas as a single day and started living as if the reason we were celebrating were actually and truly a part of our lives every day of the year.

So from me to you, have a very merry holiday season.