Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm: Mary's Song of Joy (2 of 5)
This is the first of six blogs offered during the holiday season as reflective pieces for centering. They can help us shift from the holiday patterns that make us crazy. They offer a counterpoint to a holiday that too quickly gets out of balance with events, presents, parties, and other things that are good within balance. These pieces invite us to see a cosmic-sized story that is scandalous and transforming what we need today. It is the story inside which we find the way to go, whether we are Occupiers or the 1%. A new piece will be posted weekly up through Christmas. Light a candle, center, read, and please leave your reflections as comments at the end of each piece.
You can find all these Christmas related posts (from this year and last year) in the Unwrapping Christmas category.
Artists depict the holy family of Christmas on everything from cards to pieces hung in galleries. One pose that has may variations shows Joseph standing with a staff and looking over Mary's shoulder. Both of them are focused on their newborn lying in a manger. The scene is iconic and conveys a holy hush.
Mothers and fathers everywhere are photographed similarly holding their newborn in adoration and quiet amazement at this new life now in their lives. Though these poses also hold a sense of the sacred, only Joseph, Mary, and Jesus are called "the holy family."
Without taking anything away from their young family, calling them THE holy family carries dangers. There's wholeness and dysfunction in every family, their's included. The consciousness that makes only the family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph holy contributes to damaging illusions and false ideals about "being a family." It reduces the shapes 'family" can take.
When Matthew wrote his Gospel, he was not into creating an ideal of family but one that was scandalously transformative. He opens his Gospel intent on presenting the"holy family" of Christmas as an unholy family in which dysfunctions and irregularities become the path to new consciousness for their lives and ours.
As Matthew presents the genealogy of Jesus' family, he includes the shadows in the family tree; a few scandals that an ideal would leave out. We need only read a holiday letter from friends updating us on their year to recognize how quickly we fall into the trap of telling about our lives and family in mostly favorable ways, without the shadow side. All of which begs us to look for clues as to why it was important to Matthew to create the family tree that he did.
First of all, he neatly clustered ancestors into three groups of fourteen generations each. Each new cluster opens a new beginning or genesis in Hebrew history. The first cluster begins with Abraham, who along with Sarah migrated out of the advanced civilization of Sumer and began the story of the Hebrew people in a new land. The second cluster begins with David, the beginning of the Hebrew experiment with empire based in Jerusalem. The third cluster begins with Jechoniah, the beginning of a new story of resistance to empires, in particular the Hellenistic and Roman superpowers. That brings us to Jesus and, well, here Matthew tells us we have come to a new beginning of such immense proportions that it is nothing less than a new generation of the Cosmos itself. That's worth meditating on as the cosmic Solstice happens!
Matthew tells us that he's writing a new kind of Genesis story. His opening words "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ" parallel Genesis 5:1, "This is the book of the generations of Adam" (from the Greek translation that Matthew used). By presenting Jesus to us with the same formula that was used to present Adam, we get a clue to his purposes. He wants us to see Joseph and Mary giving birth to a new prototype of humanity, one that equalled and surpassed God giving birth to Adam and Eve as the grand mythic beginning of humanity expressed in a male and female whole. I hurry to add that my use of the word "mythic." does not mean it is not true. On the contrary, mythology is a literary tool writers and cultures use to convey truth too great for what a historical account alone can carry. Often mythology has historical elements mixed in with it as it presents truth and wisdom that both surround historical events and transcend or undergird them. Matthew uses just such a mix in telling us the story of the birth of Jesus while putting it in a context that is bigger than any historical account of human events alone. His genealogy of Jesus mixes in history en route to achieving his goal of presenting Jesus' story as bigger than history. Good thing, because the histories of the time didn't mention the birth of Jesus.
Just to be sure we do not miss the clues Matthew gives us to his purposes by the way he presents this selective, stylized family tree, I want to state them plainly. Matthew knows he needs the help of mythic, cosmological, universal, and archetypal features. He cannot confine himself to the requirements of writing history.
He intends to use mythic storytelling just as the Torah tellers did in the Genesis stories of origins. Like them, Matthew uses stylized, not precise, genealogy.
He will present the birth of Jesus as a cosmological event. Matthew intends to make a strong case that Jesus adds to the origins of the cosmos, that Jesus reveals more about creation than the stories in the Torah told!
He will present Jesus as a universal archetype of being truly human. Though Jesus was male, his embodiment of Christ or divine consciousness, was both male and female or One. Matthew was not telling only a Jewish story or presenting maleness as the archetype of true humanity. He wanted to resonate with the structures in the all-cultures, all-genders souls of all people, so that all could connect with the transformative mind-set that gripped Jesus and which he conveyed.
Beyond these larger-than-historical intentions, Matthew's genealogy also breaks a traditional Hebrew and cultural rule of that time: Women are not included in genealogies. But Matthew includes four of them, a complete anomaly in Jewish lineages of the 1st century. Having no legal rights in their cultures, women were legally defined as possessions of men. This terribly sad cultural norm was expressed in the morning prayer many Jewish men prayed: "I thank you, Lord, that you have not made me a Gentile, a slave, or a woman." Along with the ethno-centrism and classism of this prayer is its extreme patriarchy. All are key building stones of superpower domination. Matthew boldly fractures the patriarchal building stone by including women in Jesus' pedigree.
Who the women are intensifies the fracturing! Not Sarah, Rebecca, Miriam, and Esther; but Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. None of them is a Jew. All are foreigners. Tamar and Rahab are Canaanites, Ruth a Moabite, and Bathsheba, a Hittite. Because of their gender and non-citizenship, all were economically vulnerable. Through putting them in Jesus' family tree, Matthew prepares his readers for the new consciousness he found in Jesus, a consciousness that takes us beyond superpowers, patriarchy, immigrant-citizen animosities, and economic class. It is a consciousness which today as then is capable of including what borders of ethnicity hold separate. It is a consciousness that could not be held or defined by nation-states, empires, or superpowers; not by patriarchal hierarchies and not by economic class. It is a consciousness as inclusive as the creation that brought forth Earth, the stars, and the entire cosmos. No one religion has a corner on it. It is a sacred offer to all.
In the following weeks of Advent, I will present the biographies of these women with special focus on the scandal in which they, along with the men to whom they related, was involved. The Greek word for scandal, skandalon, is often translated "stumbling block." It names the kind of stumbling block moment in our lives where we trip and fall. But the stumbling block can also be a stepping stone to new consciousness. When our stumbling blocks becomes stepping stones, we step into a greater capacity to act in ways that transcend cultural norms and systemic injustices that hold us captive. We become more truly human.
In Matthew's genealogy, all four women, when they came to a scandalous moment, stepped on that stone of stumbling and walked right on into a new consciousness for themselves; others were forced to take notice. So can we. Because it's not just about these four women. Matthew saw how personal choices in scandalous moments open up an opportunity beyond the people involved. These four women are essential and exemplary to Matthew's purpose of presenting a story big enough to regenerate society and the cosmos.
The unholy family of Christmas is Genesis all over again. As Earth today reacts to the scandalous treatment she's receiving through our economics of domination and division, the new consciousness Matthew presents in Jesus and his unholy family is the best holiday gift we, and all the Earth, can receive.
TagALTERNATIVES, TagBIBLICAL STUDIES, TagCHRISTMAS, TagCHRISTOLOGY, TagCIVILIZATION STORY, TagCONSUMER CULTURE, TagCOSMIC CHRIST, TagEMPIRE ECONOMICS, TagFAITH JOURNEY, TagHISTORICAL JESUS, TagLEE VAN HAM, TagREADING THE BIBLE ECONOMICALLY
Reader Comments (1)
Fabulous, Lee! I was enlightened by many pieces of this essay, including the sentence, "mythology is a literary tool writers and cultures use to convey truth too great for what a historical account alone can carry". I look forward the the next blog posts.
November 21, 2011 | rick z
This is the second of six blogs offered during the holiday season as reflective pieces for centering. They can help us shift from the holiday patterns that make us crazy. They offer a counterpoint to a holiday that too quickly gets out of balance with events, presents, parties, and other things that are good within balance. These pieces invite us to see a cosmic-sized story that is scandalous and transforming what we need today. It is the story inside which we find the way to go, whether we are Occupiers or the 1%. A new piece will be posted weekly up through Christmas. Light a candle, center, read, and please leave your reflections as comments at the end of each piece.
You can find all these Christmas related posts (from this year and last year) in the Unwrapping Christmas category.
Have you ever heard the Christmas story told in a way that included a woman named Tamar? Perhaps no one has. But that's how Matthew tells the story of the birth of Jesus. We have to ask, "Why?"
Well, by 80 or 90 CE, when Matthew was writing his gospel, it was six decades after Jesus' life. Matthew was part of the Jesus movement, his life having been transformed by the divine consciousness Jesus embodied. Furthermore, he saw how the Christ consciousness of Jesus was transforming the world views of all who sought to embrace it. Instead of being shaped by empire-think and control, the more people got into Christ consciousness the more their world views became shaped by caring, cooperation, and interdependence. Thrilling! Completely opposite to the culture of Rome's empire. But how could he, Matthew, write the story of the life and birth of this person with the full energy and force of that transforming power? What words and writing tools could he choose to release that same power in every reader? He had to show how with the birth and life of Jesus, hallowed rules of society and economics were broken in the name of freeing people to become more truly human. He felt weak just thinking about it.
Including Tamar in the birth story was part of his solution. Tamar helped Matthew explode usual ways of thinking. He did not want the strange circumstances in the marriage of Mary and Joseph to make them the first family in Jesus' story to be involved in scandal, so he showed how scandal happened frequently in Jesus' family tree. Furthermore, Matthew wanted to show how in each case, scandal resulted in new consciousness that went beyond where society was. With his genealogy, Matthew could show how conversion of consciousness and society took a quantum leap forward in the story of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. In light of such ambitious purposes, Matthew would consider it a great oversight to omit Tamar from telling the story of Jesus' birth or not including her in Advent preaching.
Tamar's story in Genesis 38 oozes intrigue, family dysfunction, and trickery. It revolves around the levirate law, named for its Latin derivation from levir, which means "brother-in-law." According to this law, if a woman's spouse died, the spouse's brother was by law required to marry his sister-in-law (Deuteronomy 25:5-10). When it operated well in patriarchal cultures, it was better than a modern day life insurance policy. Though today a husband can buy insurance on his life to assure the economic viability of his wife and family in case of his death, continuing relationships with in-laws and community are not assured. Social vulnerability increases. The levirate law provided both economic and social glue for a community. A brother who refused to follow the law opened himself to public shame for putting his own interests above the wellbeing of his relatives and the community as a whole. Furthermore, this economic and social law was given divine sanction, meaning that to disobey it was to disobey God. So when Judah and his sons disobeyed it, Tamar exposed them socially, economically, and spiritually.
Tamar was a Canaanite, not a Jew, so when Judah's oldest son, Er, married her, they formed an inter-ethnic marriage which was a little edgy for the time. Canaanites were among the Indigenous Peoples of the Israel-Lebanon region, going back to the third millennium BCE. But intermarriage with them was spoken against by Abraham who did not want his son to marry one (Gen. 24:3); nor did Isaac want his son, Jacob, to either (Gen. 28:1). Judah, remember, was one of the blessed sons of Jacob, and when the nation of Israel divided in two in 922 BCE, after the death of Solomon, the southern part where Jerusalem and Bethlehem were, bore his name, the Kingdom of Judah. So Judah was highly regarded in Hebrew lore.
We enter Tamar's story at the moment of her widowhood. When her husband, Er, died, Er's brother, Onan, Judah's second son, was to marry Tamar, his sister-in-law. But Onan did not want to marry Tamar because he did not want to bear a child that would be considered his older brother's. Hmmm. Sounds like he didn't like his brother much. When his dad stepped in and told Onan to have sexual relations with Tamar, Onan acted with unabashed patriarchal ego and decided to circumvent his father and the levirate law by spilling his semen on the ground rather than having it enter Tamar. That stand-off in family relationships ended quickly because Onan shortly died.
Tamar then turned to Judah's third son, Shelah. Would he marry her? But Judah stepped in again, only this time he refused to give Tamar his third son. Since giving birth was the major way for a woman to evolve into respected female personhood, Tamar languished childless while the men in the family failed in their duties to her and the community, protected in their disobedience by the powers of patriarchy. But their abuse made Tamar desperate. So she was determined to challenge Judah and the patriarchal status that protected his delaying tactics. Her future as well as her current full membership in the community were at stake.
Dressing herself as a temple prostitute, Tamar went and sat along the road which she had been told Judah would be traveling. She timed it well. Judah, by this time a widower himself, came up the road and approached her. Because her face was covered as part of her daring disguise, Judah did not recognize her. He propositioned her and she consented to have sex, but only if he gave her a couple of personal items that he was wearing. With these in her possession, she planned to use them as evidence against him if he denied having had sex with his daughter-in-law. From their sexual union, twins were born, one of whom, Perez, was an ancestor to Jesus. But these are only the highlights of the story. It is a must read.
Onan, Shelah, and Judah all hid from their levirate duties using the cover of patriarchy. They protected their pocketbooks, their egos, and their privileges. They were willing to sacrifice Tamar, the social and spiritual compact between men and women, and the moral glue of their community. Similarly today, patriarchal businesses and governments continually erode the social compact with women, children, foreigners, and economically vulnerable people while their own luxuries and pensions are assured.
But Tamar refused to overlook how she'd been wronged by the men in her distinguished patriarchal family. By wronging her, the men failed in their responsibilities to society and to God as well. She exposed the male ego for not showing the economic caring required of them. Then, like now, when the powers do not keep the high laws of life and love, we the people have the calling to do so. Tamar did. As the outsider, Indigenous woman, she seduced her prestigious father-in-law, not just into sex, but into compliance with his moral, economic, and spiritual obligations to her and to the community. She challenged patriarchy through the great power of her sexuality and of eros rather than the law. The law was, after all, useless to her, since it gave women no status. Men had the power in patriarchy and would decide whether or not to enforce society's laws, many of which assured their continued control. Tamar used a more primal power, "erotic, feminine energies" to show Judah's vulnerabilities and entice him into behaving rightly. As Judah acknowledged, when he realized he had fathered a child by her, "She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my son Shelah." Tamar's consciousness was more whole than his.
Including Tamar in the Christmas story is both messier and more transformational than talking about a holy family comprised only of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Because of its daring scandal and transforming example, Tamar's story is the kind of historic precedent Matthew used to release the transformative power of the new consciousness that Jesus and his birth family portrayed.
More important than the sex scandal Tamar initiated was the unjust patriarchal power she exposed, even though patriarchy itself continued to be accepted as the norm. She refused to stumble over the failure of men to live up to their obligations to her and to society. Through her daring, she evolved into greater maturity and called Judah to a higher path than he was on. It is the same kind of expose of patriarchal abuse that Jesus challenged throughout his life and an important reason he resonated with the oppressed of his time. Do not many of us have to be seduced into greater consciousness, clinging as we do to what privileges us instead of the most vulnerable or the common good?
The unholy family of Christmas confirms how evolving to a greater consciousness that moves us beyond egoism, greed, privilege, and domination is the conversion into which the birth of Jesus takes us when we tell it Matthew-style.
TagCHRISTMAS, TagCHRISTOLOGY, TagCONSCIOUSNESS, TagECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION, TagLEE VAN HAM, TagPATRIARCHY, TagPERSONAL TRANSFORMATION
Reader Comments (3)
Hey, I didn't know there was a Tamar in the stories. Thanks for sharing this.
November 28, 2011 | Natasha Tygart
There are a couple Tamar characters in the Hebrew Bible, and both are figures at the center of some quite scandalous sexual relations involving intra-familial encounters. (The other is raped by her own brother in 2 Samuel.) But here, the author of Matthew goes for the one where the woman was the clever one who got the upper hand on the males of the story, one of the oft-recurring types of role reversal and inversions that show up in the Bible, each with the power to shock listeners/readers into seeing things in a new way, usually in a way that jars their cultural expectations. Said in Jesus' radical terms, "the last shall be first and the first shall be last."
Thanks for reading!
November 29, 2011 | Webmaster
Thank you for this intriguing story & eye-opening perspective.
December 1, 2011 | rick z
This is the third of six blogs offered during the holiday season as reflective pieces for centering. They can help us shift from the holiday patterns that make us crazy. They offer a counterpoint to a holiday that too quickly gets out of balance with events, presents, parties, and other things that are good within balance. These pieces invite us to see a cosmic-sized story that is scandalous and transforming what we need today. It is the story inside which we find the way to go, whether we are Occupiers or the 1%. A new piece will be posted weekly up through Christmas. Light a candle, center, read, and please leave your reflections as comments at the end of each piece.
You can find all these Christmas related posts (from this year and last year) in the Unwrapping Christmas category.
You needn't be a synagogue or church regular to have heard of Rahab. She has made her way into cultural lore as a kind of archetype of the whore, the seductress, the escort, the "pretty woman." But has she ever been part of the Christmas story as you've heard it or told it?
Matthew, for his money, wants Rahab in the Christmas story. She rescues it from the smooth stone kind of story that fits civilization's etiquette. She lures us into a different kind of story. We stammer a bit when we come to her in this "holy" story as we explain why "Her Unholiness" is there at all. So why did Matthew clearly relish her being in the story as he told it?
First of all, like Tamar, Rahab was a Canaanite, a person of Indigenous ancestry, an outlier to the Hebrew identity and culture of her time (c. 1200 BCE). Secondly, that she worked as a prostitute further fit Matthew's reasons for including her. She gives the story of Christmas an extra dose of scandal. We come to her and we trip. She makes us take the story in a different and messier direction. Rahab disobeyed patriotic expectations. In the eyes of Jericho politics, Rahab played the traitor. She cooperated with "the enemy," and thereby threatened city-state security.
Yet, it was through Rahab's disobedience that she moved into a different paradigm, into a greater consciousness, and into the security offered when we befriend what we fight as "enemy."That's why with her in it, the Christmas story swells to much more than Mary watching Jesus in the manger while Joseph stands by, and we all sing "Away in the Manger."
As the story is told in Joshua, chapter 2, Rahab, Jericho's officials, and all the citizens of this impressive, walled city lived anxiously ever since a large encampment of Hebrews had located just across the Jordan River from them. A parenthesis is necessary here to explain that this description of Jericho was written looking back on it through the eyes of Israel's monarchy, two centuries or more later. The book of Joshua, which includes the "holy wars" mentality, tells the story as a conquering monarch or imperial leader would tell it, exactly the kind of story told to fit with the era of David and Solomon, the two who expanded Israel's land and power through conquest. It is the kind of story told in a civilization-based world view committed to conquest and domination, a view that competes throughout the Bible with the creation-based world view committed to cooperation and interdependence. The archaeological record of this era shows that Jericho was not walled at the time; so the so-called "conquest of Canaan is a story enhanced with the mythology of monarchy. The archaeological record fits better with the description of entering Canaan described in the biblical book of Judges, a book more connected with a creation-based world view. Starting around 1200 BCE, the cities of the low-lands lost much of their influence just as the hill country's population greatly increased. The Exodus Hebrews were re-entering Canaan during that time and that is the context in which Rahab befriended "the enemy."
Now, continuing with the Joshua version, the Hebrew commander, Joshua, sends two spies to the city to gather some intelligence. But word got to the mayor of Jericho that a couple of suspicious looking men were in the city. He put the police on their trail. Thinking much like today's FBI and CIA intelligence gatherers who do not hesitate to work with mafia or prostitutes, they checked with Rahab. Her house rested partly on the wall around the city of Jericho making it a strategic structure for possible entrance or exit from the city. Spies would be able to go over the wall instead of through checkpoints at the gates. Think of how long the U.S. Border Patrol would put up with her house on the wall separating Mexico and the U.S., unless, of course, it served their purposes. Rahab, they knew, would know lots about the comings and goings of male visitors in the city. "Have you seen them?" they asked her, she told the police. But then quickly added, "They have already left the city. So the police made tracks out of the city gates looking for the spies, while Rahab went up to her loft where she had hid them. There she made a deal. "I know that your God is the great God," so when you and your people take this city, please treat me and my family well.
Her lies and crimes of protecting the enemy clearly aimed to assure her own survival and the family she had responsibility for. Though she may have been more shrewd than spiritual, her appreciation for the Hebrew God was a choice for life in a shaky situation. For illegally protecting two undocumented aliens in the name of Yahweh, their deity, this prostitute and traitor was acclaimed to be one of the few female heroines in the great "Hebrew Hall of Fame" dominated by males. (See the New Testament Epistle of Hebrews, chapter 11.)
She perceived the vulnerability of the city-state kind of control exercised by Jericho over the region. Being Indigenous herself with ancestry rooted in the patterns of wilderness, she knew the ingenuity of the people of the wilderness encamped across the Jordan. She knew enough to risk trusting the people of the wilderness over the city civilization she lived in. She cast her lot with the Hebrews rather than with the Jericho police and the city powers they were defending. More than a choice to save her life and her family, it was a choice for a different world view, one expressing a different consciousness by which people of the low-land cities and rural people of the hill country could trust and befriend one another. Rahab embodied the choice for a creation-based world view over the civilization-based world view of domination. As such she comically moves to a greater consciousness in a story otherwise rampant with the mythology of imperial conquest.
Her courage did not blink when two men, spies for Jericho's enemies, asked her to protect them. Her wit fooled the mayor and police of Jericho. (See Joshua 2:1-24; 6:22-25 for her story.) Rahab did what Archbishop Desmond Tutu once suggested to the police of South Africa who were enforcing apartheid. He suggested they join the crowds in support of a new country without apartheid because that way they would go over to the winning side of justice. Rahab functioned with this kind of greater consciousness.
As Hebrew history unfolded, rabbis came to love Rahab and assured her fame in the Hebrew story. Rabbis taught that she was one of the four most beautiful women in the world, and that from her offspring came eight prophets, one of whom was Jeremiah. Though the rabbis likely added mythology to her history in order to speak boldly of her ironic significance in the contrasting paradigms that comprise Hebrew history, Rahab's choices attract such enhancement.
But wait? Was the Rahab Matthew included in his radical genealogy of Jesus even the same woman as the Rahab of Jericho? Some have doubted it because Jericho's Rahab does not fit well into the historical sequence of the genealogy. But remember, Matthew's purposes were bigger than what history could hold. Mimicking the genealogies of Genesis, Matthew was connecting the story of humans with the grand story of the cosmos. He was intent on shifting our consciousness from civilization's ways to a new world view. Inviting his readers to participate in that shift, Matthew could not settle for historical accuracy. He took history and let cosmology explode it. Matthew could only smile at any concern we might have for correctness in his genealogy. He would say, "You don't get what I'm doing.
Rahab of Jericho serves well Matthew's intent to portray the birth of Jesus as Genesis revisited. Like the figures in the stories of Genesis, Matthew's Jesus in his Gospel requires history to share the podium with theology, mythology, and cosmology in order to convey truth too big for rational, historical thought alone. Christmas, I insist, is not an inside story of culture or civilization. It pushes against civilization's borders from beyond. It belongs to a different paradigm and can be co-opted by civilization only through sleight of hand. The story of Christmas generates life much like Creation and Cosmos do, not like shopping malls do. Christmas is more like Rahab than Ms. Cosmopolitan.
In this respect, Matthew and the rabbis are of similar mind. It's not a matter of winking at all the moral scandal and impropriety in Rahab's life, but of having our eyes popped open to see that her greater consciousness allowed her to get beyond the category of "enemy" in her world view. In this she behaved well beyond the consciousness of today's global leaders in businesses, governments, and militaries. Her consciousness could overcome enemies not by defeating them, but by befriending them. Such consciousness dwarfs the small, ego-consciousness exhibited by the controllers of civilization who depend on tear gas and worse as they control dissenters, putting them into prisons, Guantanamo, or gulags.
Converting to Rahab's world view calls on our deeper and better capacities, ones that carry us to a humanity worthy of the divine image we bear. Rahab's consciousness fits with the Christ consciousness of the Jesus Matthew presents as gospel. Rahab definitely belongs in Jesus' family tree as Matthew saw it. And for the same reasons, she belongs in the unholy family of Christmas, a family to which we wisely aspire to belong. But it does mean learning to befriend our enemies.
TagCHRISTMAS, TagCHRISTOLOGY, TagCIVILIZATION STORY, TagCREATION, TagLEE VAN HAM, TagWAR, TagWILDERNESS
Reader Comments (2)
well done. these blog pieces are brilliant. certainly not the images I've grown up with and left behind in adulthood about christmas.
December 2, 2011 | rick z
Lee, I love these new (at least to me) stories of some very profound women of biblical times. I love the paradigm of being most "holy" when we are most naked, exposed and fully in touch with our shadow side; ah, when we are fully human. And, you leave us, as always, more conscious and thus, more empowered to embrace and demand change. Namaste.
December 7, 2011 | Deb H
LEE VAN HAM
This is the fourth of six blogs offered during the holiday season as reflective pieces for centering. They can help us shift from the holiday patterns that make us crazy. They offer a counterpoint to a holiday that too quickly gets out of balance with events, presents, parties, and other things that are good within balance. These pieces invite us to see a cosmic-sized story that is scandalous and transforming what we need today. It is the story inside which we find the way to go, whether we are Occupiers or the 1%. A new piece will be posted weekly up through Christmas. Light a candle, center, read, and please leave your reflections as comments at the end of each piece.
You can find all these Christmas related posts (from this year and last year) in the Unwrapping Christmas category.
Though parents are not likely to name their newborn girl Tamar, Rahab, or Bathsheba, an appealing romance clings to the name Ruth. Given the extensive use of her name, is Ruth then the story of a woman living according to the norms of middle American values? Is she an exception to Matthew's interest in choosing women for Jesus' family tree who break the rules of what is proper? Hardly. Her story fills the four chapters of the little Old Testament book that bears her name. There we can read the tale of a foreign woman who challenges norms and uses erotic powers to assure financial stability for her and her mother-in-law.
The backstory on Ruth is that she entered the Bethlehem area with her Jewish mother-in-law during the Ezra and Nehemiah era, the 5th century BCE, when Jerusalem and the temple were being rebuilt. It was a hard time for foreigners, much like today for people in the U.S. without legal documents or being Muslim in the U.S. during the Iraq and Afghan Wars. The rebuilding project was happening because the empire of Babylon had destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 587 BCE. The events shattered Hebrew assumptions which had come to believe that God would never allow anyone to destroy either the temple or the city. Prior to the destruction, Babylon had ruthlessly force-marched all the ruling class, educated, professionals, owner class, in other words, all those in positions of leadership of any kind to Babylon, exiled from their homeland.
Some decades later (539 BCE), Persia defeated Babylon and took over the region. Emperor Cyrus freed the Jews to return to their homeland. Ezra and Nehemiah were put in charge. But the joy of return was not shared by all because the plans to redevelop the region of Judea used an imperial model that Persia could bless rather than beginning with the people who had been living in the region throughout the Babylon era. The local people weren't at all excited about these citified, ruling class folk from Babylon coming in with their ideas for the region, especially when it meant displacing them. Such displacement was inevitable because Jews migrating back from Babylon to their homeland needed land to live on. The locals had worked hard to make a living in the area without Jerusalem, the temple, and those who ran them. To them, rebuilding Jerusalem as the center of rule and enterprise, and the Temple as the center for religion led by the priesthood and sacrificial system, was more trouble than it was worth.
In all this turmoil it became most important to be able to prove that you were a Jew. Only then were you entitled to receive the land and benefits that went with this Imperial Development Corporation. It was as important to be a Jew in that situation as it has been in the U.S. to prove that you're an American citizen. How else could Ezra and Nehemiah sort out who qualified and who didn't. The inter-ethnic, inter-marriage, and inter-religious nature of the populace of Judea complicated things for their model. So they made birth or genealogy the first criteria to establish Jewishness; loyalty to the Torah and Temple were the second. Nehemiah even tried to make Hebrew the official and only language to be spoken much like efforts in the U.S. to make English the official language, requiring all immigrants to learn it pronto.
It was into this environment of restrictions toward foreigners that Ruth entered the region from her homeland across the Jordan River in Moab. She was one of the many who were scrambling to put life together amid the Ezra-Nehemiah efforts to re-establish Jewish dominance in the region through their imperial model. In contrast to the Ezra-Nehemiah world view, Ruth's story expresses the universal vision described in the later chapters of Isaiah where the consciousness of ethnic and national identity is superseded by a conversion to a universal identity in which Yahweh is the God of all peoples, not just some peoples.
But backtracking for a moment to how Ruth got to Judea, that story begins with a famine that put the economy of Bethlehem into a tailspin. As the economy spiraled downward, the Jewish household of Elimelech and Naomi made the difficult decision to take their two sons and migrate to the region of Moab. There they reinvented their lives in a foreign land; their sons married Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. But the experience in Moab turned tragic when Elimelech and both of his sons died, leaving three widows. The loss of their husbands was amplified because along with them went the economic base for their survival. The extreme marginal status of women at the time made it difficult for a widow to survive financially, even more so than today.
So with the collapse of her life in Moab, Naomi decided that her best option was to return to her homeland. She would seek the support of her extended family in Bethlehem, Judea. But what Naomi had not counted on was that her Moabite daughters-in-law would decide that their future lay with her. They wanted to migrate to Judea as she had done to Moab.
But Naomi pushed back. She argued they would do better in their homeland. Orpah was persuaded, but Ruth insisted on going with her. Her words have become famous. Where you go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God, my God. We hear these words in some weddings even though Ruth was speaking to her mother-in-law, not her prospective spouse.
When they arrived in Bethlehem, Naomi told Ruth that they had a wealthy relative there named Boaz who owned a lot of fields. Ruth replied that she would like to glean in those fields. So, though gleaning was the lowest social status of all farm laborers, Ruth made good on her pledge to Naomi that the two of them were in this together. After all, with the mood of restrictionism being promoted by Ezra, Nehemiah, and the returnee settlers, extra hurdles lay before foreign immigrants like Ruth. She couldn't be picky.
Quickly, Ruth discovered which fields belonged to Boaz. She appreciated his hands-on approach to make sure his workers left extra grain for the gleaners, more than the gleaning laws required. Those laws assured that aliens, widows, and orphans could sustain themselves. But it was still hard work, both slow and physically demanding. In addition, there was the attitude directed toward those in the lowest class (Lev. 23:22, Deut. 24:19).
Boaz noticed Ruth and asked his workers about her. He had already heard of her devotion to Naomi, his relative. Pleased that she was in his fields, Boaz invited her to drink water from the workers, pitchers whenever she wanted. He instructed his workers to pull out even more barley and wheat from the sheaves and leave it behind. Like strangers in the night exchanging glances," Ruth and Boaz became attracted to one another. Boaz had already begun to mentally court this foreign gleaner as he spoke with her, granted gleaning favors, and instructed his workers to protect her from sexual harassment by other male servants and gleaners.
At this point Ruth's story gets really juicy. Naomi and Ruth conspired to give the levirate process some erotic energy. Happily, Boaz was a willing player.
One night when there was a party on Boaz's grain threshing floor, Naomi helped Ruth look her loveliest self and sent her off to the party. Ruth waited for Boaz to eat and drink, getting his fill and becoming contented in mood. In fact, he'd had enough wine that he did not go to his house. He was so content that he went to sleep by a heap of grain on the threshing floor. Once he was asleep, Ruth, who hadn't let him out of her sight all evening, lifted the covers near his feet and curled up next to him. When he awoke during the night, he was delighted to hear Ruth's voice and was just as delighted by her daring, seductive actions. That night their romance moved to a new level. Boaz wanted to marry her.
But there was a problem. Boaz knew of another relative of Naomi who was a closer relative than himself. That relative, not Boaz, had first duty under the levirate law to Elimelech's family. At the public hearing on the matter, the other relative came. Boaz explained that the other relative had first right to Elimilech's property but that Ruth, the foreign widow from Moab, came along with the deal. At that point the man demurred, saying that under those conditions his own inheritance would be damaged. With the way cleared, Boaz announced publicly that he would then happily redeem the land of Elimelech's family and that Ruth, the foreign widow, would become his wife.
Ruth and Boaz had to overcome strong prejudice of Hebrews toward Moabites, prejudice born long ago when the Moabites were hostile to the Hebrews of the exodus, refusing them food and water. As a result Moabites were to be excluded from the assembly of Yahweh for ten generations. In the minds of restrictionist Hebrews, this prejudice carried divine sanction. Yet, Boaz and Ruth disobeyed this sanction, transcended ethnic purity barriers, risked clucking tongues, and created a new social consciousness in step with the vision in Isaiah, using the levirate conventions in support of their own courage. Then as now, disobedience of a prevailing consciousness, even one claiming divine authority, becomes the scandal by which transformation to a more inclusive, healing consciousness often happens.
For her consciousness-shifting courage, Ruth fits well in Matthew's genealogy of Genesis-like new beginnings. Writing as one who was seeking to live the Christ consciousness, Matthew broke with cultural consciousness by breaking through male-only and Jew-only genealogies. He was heading for an inclusive family tree of all peoples, a consciousness that requires advocacy for and inclusiveness of immigrants. A lesser consciousness that makes ethnic borders and national borders the ultimate line for who's in and who's out just doesn't fit with the Jesus Matthew was presenting in his gospel.
In these ways, Ruth is more than a romantic story of a woman overcoming great odds, being a lover and the beloved, and living successfully in a new land. Hers is a tale of how we can move into a higher consciousness in which national borders cannot define either the nature of being human or a country interdependent with all others. Immigrants and their advocates everywhere already have this consciousness and live by it; many leaders of business, finance, religions, and nations do not. Telling the Christmas story truthfully reveals how it carries this greater, border-transcending consciousness of Christ, just as Matthew has told it to us.
TagALTERNATIVES, TagBIBLICAL STUDIES, TagIMMIGRATION, TagLEE VAN HAM, TagPATRIARCHY
LEE VAN HAM
This is the fifth of six blogs offered during the holiday season as reflective pieces for centering. They can help us shift from the holiday patterns that make us crazy. They offer a counterpoint to a holiday that too quickly gets out of balance with events, presents, parties, and other things that are good within balance. These pieces invite us to see a cosmic-sized story that is scandalous and transforming what we need today. It is the story inside which we find the way to go, whether we are Occupiers or the 1%. A new piece will be posted weekly up through Christmas. Light a candle, center, read, and please leave your reflections as comments at the end of each piece.
You can find all these Christmas related posts (from this year and last year) in the Unwrapping Christmas category.
Here's what I mean. In the genealogy of the unholy, holy family by which Matthew leads up to the birth event, we are not surprised to see Jesus' revered ancestor, King David. But when Matthew makes sure to include the most earthy, least flattering, ego-protecting incidents in this Hebrew hero's life, we have to know something exceptional is going on. Matthew does it with just one word: Bathsheba.
Bathsheba was married to a soldier in Israel's army. She and her husband, Uriah, were not Hebrews, but Hittites, one of many subgroups of Canaanite peoples whom David had brought under his monarchy. She exposed how empire works and did it as an insider, being married to David and the mother of Solomon. These two men led Israel into a new self-identification as an empire, dominating the peoples of the region. Many came to see it as Israel's golden age. indeed, it's still taught that way in plenty of congregations. But Jesus rejected their model of leadership, a rejection that Matthew's Gospel portrays. By including Bathsheba in the family tree, Matthew holds up the woman who showed that superpowers can be brought into being only by some ugly, ruthless behavior. It's all part of the tactics of domination.
The story begins late one spring afternoon when King David sauntered restlessly up onto the rooftop of his house. Across the way, he saw a woman bathing and was struck by her great beauty. Hmmm. David did not hesitate. Seeing her, he inquired about her and learned she was a Hittite married to Uriah, a soldier in his army. Since the army was out of town securing territory from Ammonites, he sent for her. Whatever else we imagine that first meeting included, it did include intercourse. Then she returned to her house. Soon after, her simple message was communicated to David. But that was just the beginning of the scandal in the royal palace.
David moved into cover-up mode. He told Joab, his field general, to send Uriah home from battle, thinking that Uriah would be more than ready to have intercourse with his wife while on leave. But Uriah's solidarity with his army buddies and faithfulness to his Hebrew king were so strong that he felt duty bound to sleep at David's gate, not in his own bed. Uriah's loyalty ruined the king's easy cover-up plan.
So the king took it to the next level. He threw a royal party the next night and made sure that Uriah got drunk. But even then Uriah did not go home.
Forced by Uriah's sense of military duty, David determined to shift to an even darker strategy. He ordered Uriah back to the army with secret, written orders which he was to hand deliver to his general. The orders he carried were a military strategy that would assure his own death in battle.
When General Joab received these new orders, he knew they were militarily wrong. He knew some of his men would unnecessarily lose their lives. But he obeyed his commander-in-chief. He ordered the attack on the Ammonites with Uriah in the lead forces. It was a fundamental betrayal of his men and a violation of the military ethics he was committed to follow.
In the attack, many men did lose their lives. Joab immediately sent a messenger to his king with a full report on the battle. It included the news that David awaited, and by which Joab feebly absolved.
Like the other women in the Unholy Family of Christmas, Bathsheba's story drips with drama generated by lies, sex, and power. It is too good not to read for yourself (see II Sam. 11:1-12:35). It includes a strong rebuke of David by a courageous man, Nathan, who, unlike Joab, spoke truth to power.
Skipping parts of the story, David marries Bathsheba following her period of grief. Their child is born, but dies in infancy. Later, Solomon was born to their marriage, the son who succeeded his father as king, and developed a kind of governance that was praised by all those drawn to empires and the luxuries affordable to dominators. But Solomon's political and economic leadership was a disappointment to all wanting to see Jews model a different way of governing, one that was in step with creation and their own anti-imperial history exhibited in the exodus from Egypt. David and Solomon governed much like the Pharaohs from which their ancestors had been liberated. Solomon enslaved workers in the building of his luxuries, including even his celebrated, holy Temple. His economy was laced with domination and extreme class disparity. David and Solomon forgot the warnings to remember Egypt. They forgot what all superpowers forget, namely, the forces greater than empires by which Yahweh delivered the Hebrews from Egypt. They are the forces at work today as the Creator delivers Earth from the strategies of superpowers to dominate her and all species.
Through it all, Bathsheba became the Queen Mother in Israel's empire. When David died and Solomon was enthroned, Bathsheba continued to have access to the throne. Just as she had unmasked David's ways, whether willingly or not is hard to know, she did the same with Solomon.
One of David's sons by a woman other than Bathsheba was Adonijah. Being older than Solomon, he wanted to ascend to the throne, but Solomon was preferred by David. However, the competition did not end when David died. Adonijah sought to increase his power through marriage. He asked Bathsheba to request Emperor Solomon to arrange a marriage for him with Abishag, David's last lover. When Bathsheba approached Solomon to make this request, he had a throne brought in beside him in recognition of her power and influence. But then when she made the request, Solomon immediately saw it as a ploy by Adonijah to increase his own political influence by gaining the allegiance of the segment of the population to which Abishag was connected. Adonijah's proposal for this geopolitical marriage infuriated Solomon. Not that he opposed such marriages as his many wives show; he just opposed them when they threatened him. Solomon immediately ordered Adonijah sought out and executed.
Once again, Bathsheba, the Queen Mother, had exposed the frailty of empire. In her relationship with David and now with Solomon, she showed that the Hebrew form of empire was not an exception to the rule of how other empires functioned. It wasn't that the Hebrews could do empire better. It was that empire itself could not energize humanity to live Yahweh's ways.
By the time Matthew wrote his Gospel, he and others knew how Jesus had explicitly rejected the model of superpower government. Not only did he challenge the powers of Rome which would execute him, but he also rejected the once proud Hebrew empire that peaked under David and Bathsheba's son, Solomon. He knew that it could not be a model for governments in a world view that lived aligned with the ways of creation. The star of David was very different from the star over Bethlehem.
Bathsheba was the woman in the family tree of Jesus who gave Matthew all the reason he needed to show why the way of empire was not Jesus' way. Matthew recognized how Bathsheba was a heroine for all voices in the Hebrew legacy who consistently dissented from empire. Bathsheba exposed empire from the inside, and he gladly included her in his genealogy.
Still, I wonder what was in Bathsheba's heart. Was she flattered when the king invited her to the palace and went eagerly? Or, as a foreigner and a woman with no social, legal, or economic standing, did she feel coerced by his power, seeing no way out except to go along? Did her heart sometimes bleed from being captive to empire herself? Or did she relish the change from soldier wife to foreign-woman-becomes-Queen Mother? Bathsheba's story lends evidence to the view of Jesus that there was, and is, no real way to diminish the control of empire over us other than to live according to an entirely different world view. So he turned from an economy in which most resources were controlled by the few and practiced a sustainable economy that distributed justly to 100% of the people and species.
I'm grateful for what Bathsheba's story underscores, for how the scandals she was involved in urge us to move beyond empire world views. She helps Matthew, and us, know that the messianic consciousness of Jesus, much greater than the consciousness of empire, is essential when we seek healing and peace for Earth and her inhabitants.
TagBIBLICAL STUDIES, TagCHRISTMAS, TagCHRISTOLOGY, TagEMPIRE ECONOMICS, TagLEE VAN HAM
LEE VAN HAM
This is the sixth of six blogs offered during the holiday season as reflective pieces for centering. They can help us shift from the holiday patterns that make us crazy. They offer a counterpoint to a holiday that too quickly gets out of balance with events, presents, parties, and other things that are good within balance. These pieces invite us to see a cosmic-sized story that is scandalous and transforming what we need today. It is the story inside which we find the way to go, whether we are Occupiers or the 1%. A new piece will be posted weekly up through Christmas. Light a candle, center, read, and please leave your reflections as comments at the end of each piece.
You can find all these Christmas related posts (from this year and last year) in the Unwrapping Christmas category.
There are two over-arching, life-shaping stories which have coexisted non-peacefully over recent millennia, and the unholy family of Christmas' has participated fully in this great drama. That family has been involved in how the stories clash, diverge, and sometimes collaborate. But mostly the younger story, which is the story of human civilization, has been a dangerous and ruthless antagonist toward the much older and larger story, which is the story of creation, the continuing evolution of Earth and Cosmos. Today, however, creation is moving into a major and expanding response to her antagonist. Her gracious tolerance of abuse by civilization in past millennia is now proving to have logical consequences for Earth's entire family of life. Our human family needs to move quickly to a new chapter of Genesis, a move modeled in some ways by Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.
As the epic struggle between these two stories runs throughout the Bible, the life-generating creation story is strongly preferred. It is inside the creation story where Matthew presents the birth of Jesus as an exciting, new chapter of Genesis! His intent is clear from verse one because he opens his Gospel with a genealogy of generations patterned after genealogies presented in Genesis. Then, when he includes four women all foreigners and participants in activities that expose the practices and the people living by the civilization story. Matthew leaves no doubt that he's put his faith in the creation story.
Matthew picked up on how each woman met civilization's ways of sidelining her, and how a new consciousness resulted that exposed as false, civilization's claims to make life better for all. With Tamar, Matthew showed the underside of a society using patriarchal structures. With Rahab, he raised us to the greater consciousness of disarming enemies through finding common ground. With Ruth, he exposed the smallness of civilized empires when they require bloodlines or race for deciding who's out instead of creation's rights for all. With Bathsheba, he unmasked the notion that any superpower can be a moral exception to the ways of domination via ruthless, calculating, geopolitical actions. The cumulative impact of all their daring actions crescendoed toward transformation. They helped Matthew prepare the way for what he presents as the next chapter of Genesis: the joining of Mary and Joseph in marriage and the birth of Jesus.
In whatever way Mary and Joseph came together, they were soon immersed in scandal. Matthew artfully conveys the birth as a consciousness altering event for the parents and all around them. Many who have studied birth stories of mythology have pointed out similarities with Jesus' birth story, including divine origins. Noting such similarities need not cast doubt on Matthew's account as long as we do not require truth to come to us only in the form of scientific or historical fact. When we understand that mythology carries truth too big for history and science alone, then we set ourselves to looking for how Matthew was communicating the transforming reality in the story he was telling.
The conception of Jesus is for Matthew a divine surprise and a social scandal. Though his genealogy is remarkable for the inclusion of women, his birth story focuses on Joseph, initially on how Joseph struggled mightily with what right living looked like once Mary surprised him with the news of her pregnancy. Social rules dictated that Joseph should end his relationship with her, protecting himself and patriarchy, but at terrible expense to Mary and women everywhere. If he broke with Mary, he made her economically vulnerable and marked her as unlikely for marriage in the future. It was even possible she would be stoned. Such were the ways of civilization. They included not only social norms of the countryside and cities, but also the religion of torah as interpreted through the temple and synagogues of the time. Joseph, being committed to the Torah, could not conscientiously waver from that righteousness; so he began to plan how to leave the relationship quietly.
But a lucid dream intercepted his plans. In the dream, an angel, an immediate indication that the fear-inspired obedience to civilization's powers was about to be transcended with a more liberating way. It would require his conversion to greater consciousness and obedience to that higher way. And that's what happened! The divine voice of the dream said that Joseph was to go ahead with his plans for marriage. Mary was to be his wife. The dream trumped the righteousness of temple and torah as then taught. Joseph's sense of rightness was rearranged.
As we know, dreams are not a primary source of knowledge and decision-making in the civilization story. Though the value of dreams has come to be understood and appreciated by growing numbers of people, it continues to be common to laugh about our dreams, dismiss them as weird, tell them with curiosity, and refer to nightmares as bad dreams that we want to get away from. But in the world view of the creation story, dreams bring to our ego consciousness what the consciousness of our deeper self and a greater collective unconscious is already working with. The smaller consciousness of ego proudly considers itself quite rational and empirical. But the much larger consciousness of self revels in irrational knowing, symbols, and images as well as the knowledge of perception and reason. Dreams are the language and videos of that greater consciousness, speaking and making pictures to expand the consciousness of ego, sometimes against ego's will and often in ways that stretch ego norms.
Had Joseph not been rooted in the creation story and its ways of knowing, he would have dismissed his dream and continued normal, civilized ways. That inferior consciousness and righteousness would have destroyed Mary. But because he was shaped not only by civilization's ways but also by the creation story, his consciousness was transformed via the dream encounter, and Joseph chose to marry her.
Of course, many continued to think of Joseph and Mary's first child as illegitimate. Yet, by daring to come together, the two of them moved to a new consciousness and lived by new rules of righteousness (right relationships). Like the women in the family tree of Jesus, Mary and Joseph opted daringly for the ethic of creative transformation over the ethic of wooden obedience to custom and social morality. The disobedience that they chose was a choice over obedience to injustices imposed by righteous rules, their teachers, and the consensus enforcement of society. Their continuing relationship and marriage shifted the paradigm to show the interdependence of all life rather than the divisions that prevailed in Nazareth and throughout empires everywhere. Living with such consciousness they redistributed what was possible. Their act shows the way for a new consciousness to evolve in any of us.
Significantly, Joseph's decision regarding Mary is our decision today regarding Earth. When we realize we have no life without her, do we not recognize Earth as our Great Mother? Civilization's ways, dominated by patriarchy, continue to disgrace her abusively. By treating her as a thing to use rather than a being to love, civilized consciousness is unable to accept marrying her. Consequently, civilization is stoning her land, waters, and atmosphere.
Loving Earth, not just using her, is a centerpiece of the consciousness or paradigm of creation. The paradigm is infused by Spirit. Just as the Spirit actively conceived, gestated, and birthed heaven and earth through her presence in the cosmic womb (Genesis 1:2), so also Matthew presents the Spirit involved in the conception, gestation, and birth of Jesus in Mary's womb. In the chapter of Genesis that Matthew wrote, he artistically and imaginatively presented us with Jesus who lived in the creation paradigm from birth to resurrection. Carrying forward Matthew's work, the chapter of Genesis that is ours to write today requires conversion to that same powerful, larger, Christ-consciousness capable of ending empires and bringing into being a new heaven and a new earth.
In summary, the family tree of Jesus gives us not an ideal, holy family but, even better, one that was scandalously transformative. The holy family of Christmas was an unholy family in which dysfunctions and irregularities became the path to new consciousness for their lives and ours. It is through disobedience to the orthodoxy of civilization and its empires that we step to a new consciousness beyond superpowers into the far greater capacities of our Creator's capacities made available as we love creation's ways deeply. The holy family we need now is not just the family of Jesus or even the human family, but the family of all of life.
Acknowledgements
The following sources gave me great pleasure as I read them seeking more historical background for these blogs on Matthew's genealogy, the unholy family of Christmas.
Howard-Brook, Wes. Come Out, My People!: God's Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. Orbis Books, 2010.
Metzger, Bruce and Michael Coogan (eds.). The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Oxford University Press, 1993.
TagADVENT, TagBIBLICAL STUDIES, TagCHRISTMAS, TagCHRISTOLOGY, TagCIVILIZATION STORY,
When unwrapped in a jubilee economic paradigm, Christmas does not have giving at its core, but a redistribution that minimizes the wealth-poverty class injustices which are commonplace in today's economic structures. Changing the wealth-poverty structures is very different from giving and charity. Christmas is a story bigger than charity and giving. It is a story bigger than Caesar or the U.S. economy. "We won't be able to have much of a Christmas this year" are words that could come from millions this December. But it's true only if Christmas equals buying and giving commercial gifts. It's true only if the story of the malls is the true Christmas event.
Neither is true, of course, and this is the first of five pre-Christmas, jubilee messages that will unwrap Christmas in a different economic paradigm from the one heralded by shopping malls. The next four messages will come one per week during the four weeks of Advent that precede Christmas, beginning November 28, this year.
The large chain stores that serve as outlets for the corporations that rule the economy love a theology of Christmas that puts giving at the center. The gifts of the magi brought to the child, or an emphasis on Jesus as a gift to us from God, both serve very well the commercial path of giving. A giving theology of Christmas is exploited by thousands of ads, arousing the sense that we MUST buy something for EVERYONE on "our list." Christmas is huge economic news. Depending on the business, 20% to 60% of annual sales come from Christmas gift-giving!
Economic indicators are followed closely every holiday season on the various business reports of media and magazines. Are consumers buying? Are we buying more than last year? Will merchants show strong earnings? Or do merchants need to entice shoppers into their stores with big discounts because economic times are hard? Indeed, weak demand from shoppers leading up to and during the Christmas of 2008 resulted in many stores, including some big chains, holding going out of business sales.
Many people lament the stress of shopping. Though an element of spirit and romance can be found in it, gift-giving can overwhelm Christmas. Each year people vow to do less of it. Some succeed. Congregations struggle to focus the Christmas story religiously, fighting its takeover by the shopping mall as the primary religious ritual of the season. But many congregations fail to truly take back the Christmas drama from the mall. Instead, many offer beautiful Christmas eve worship to an audience swollen for a family tradition--attending worship on Christmas eve, especially with candlelight. Though the time, work, and money invested in such worship can be great, and though worshippers may be very pleased to have been present, going to church at Christmas is largely a part of the whole calendar of Christmas--along with Santa, shopping, festive parties, family traditions, and the power to create good feelings and goodwill as widely as possible.
To be clear, I do not wish to disconnect Christmas from economics, but to speak of a connection that differs greatly from the one of the shopping mall. When unwrapped in a jubilee economic paradigm, Christmas does not have giving at its core, but a redistribution that minimizes the wealth-poverty class injustices which are commonplace in today's economic structures. Changing the wealth-poverty structures is very different from giving and charity. Christmas is a story bigger than charity and giving. It is a story bigger than Caesar or the U.S. economy. It is a story of the birth of a divine consciousness among humans that shows us a whole new paradigm in which to live abundantly, to do our celebrating festively, and to arrange our economy sustainably.
Here are the following four "unwrappings":
Mary's Song of Joy! It's Not Heard in Mall Christmas Music
The Birth of Jesus Is Wildly Cosmological; Caesar and the U.S. Aren't
Empires Say, "Fear! But We'll Protect You!"; Angels Say, "Fear Not!"
Having Christ Born in Us --It's the Doorway to a Different Paradigm
TagCHRISTMAS, TagCONSUMER CULTURE, TagCOSMOLOGY, TagLEE VAN HAM, TagSPIRITUAL ECONOMICS
Reader Comments (1)
What a wonderful beginning, Lee. I am compelled to read more because of the premise which you have clearly laid out. I have not been celebrating christmas for years. "Christ" and "Mass" leave me cold, but the winter solstice celebrating the return of the light, warms my soul, especially when standing around a fire with my earthen brothers and sisters, releasing the darkest places within and replaces with new light, and singing with one voice our joy of life and the natural beauty and worth of all living things.
February 2, 2011 | Galen
Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm: Mary's Song of Joy (2 of 5)LEE VAN HAM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28
It's widely known how Mary saw the Angel Gabriel and through him learned that she would conceive through the Holy Spirit, bear a son whom she was to name Jesus; that he would be "called the Son of the Most High," given the throne of David, and that there would be no end to his kingdom. Wow! Imagine sitting still for that one!
BUT nearly unknown is the song Mary sang about the child she was nurturing in her womb--how he would change the structures of economic class that separated wealth from poverty. She sang in joy as she imagined her child advocating for a different distribution of God's abundance, a distribution through which all would have enough. This song is not heard in the malls at Christmas. Redistribution of wealth in any direction other than upward violates the commitment and economic model of the corporations running the mall. But even in congregations, the Mary of Christmas is not presented singing about overcoming class inequalities, even though her song is the most direct economic message in the entire Christmas story.
Just listen to it!
God my Savior … has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. (Luke 1:51-53)
Mary's lyrics are so wonderfully, painfully disruptive to many of the warmer sentiments we have for Mary. We love her for her frightening, thrilling, courageous consent to become pregnant with Jesus. But, Mary, an economist? And, one who disagrees with an economic model that distributes resources unevenly? Whoa, reindeer!
Mary's economics are disturbing enough to encourage the possibility that she didn't really sing it at all, but that Luke, writing over 70 years after her pregnancy, put this poem in Mary's mouth. He, in turn, could have picked it up from his faith community who recognized that Jesus, throughout his life, presented an economy that would reduce the class divisions rampant throughout the empire--indeed, today's empires as well.
But think again. Connecting a more just distribution of wealth with Mary is not a stretch. Mothers everywhere, whether operating with a degree in economics or with people-smarts, understand economic class. Some will teach their children to "marry well" while others, like Mary, taught her children how to navigate the economy from the underside. How could she not have imagined that her first child would improve the world by raising up the lowly, filling them with good things, and by not adding unnecessarily to the assets of the wealthy?
Happy as we can be for countless versions of beautiful music entitled The Magnificat, taken from the phrase which begins Mary's song, "my soul magnifies the Lord," we cannot but apologize to her for ignoring what comes later in the poem. We have ignored what gave her the greatest reason for her exult. But, if we will embrace Mary's radical hope, a deep conversion of mind and heart will be underway in us, moving us away from empire-think. In empire-think, wealth and poverty are accepted as an inevitable arrangement, even by those who despise it. Extreme maldistribution is so institutionalized in today's economic structures that any hope for change is repeatedly aborted before it is born--even among the most aspiring or imaginative lower income peoples. Yet, in the womb of Mary, the hope for change did get carried to term and resulted in a birth noticed by the cosmos, if missed by the empire.
Mary's economic wisdom is central in unwrapping the Christmas story in a new paradigm--one not focused in giving, but in committing to an economic model that assures all species sharing in God's abundance. Her economic vision saw caring and sharing as shapers of a more just economy. Her son, Jesus, would teach and live such an economy as a contemporary expression of his scripture's economy, the sabbath and jubilee economy of the Old Testament.
Today, caring and sharing are shown to be excellent shapers of a healthy economy. Riane Eisler's work, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economy, shows how re-inventing economies to include caring and sharing makes good economic sense as well as being right morally. Study after study confirms that such an economy is healthier for people, planet, and profits than an economy focused in competitive advantage and growth. Earlier this fall, the Swiss banking giant, Credit Suisse, came out with a first-ever Global Wealth Report which concludes that the world has more than enough wealth to provide economic security for every person on Earth. Mary got it right. Her economics release in us the deepest capacities we have as humans to live our best spiritual beliefs and inherent sense of justice.
TagCHRISTMAS, TagCONSUMER CULTURE, TagCOSMOLOGY, TagLEE VAN HAM, TagSPIRITUAL ECONOMICS
Reader Comments (3)
"Whoah, reindeer!" Love that phrase, Lee! To think of Mary offering an economic analysis in her song is just so far from our normal thinking and practice at Christmas, in or out of the church. Thanks for your well-thought-out reminder. You've inspired me to go this route in our Christmas Eve service this year. I'm sure we'll have a "Mary time," a serious look at the paradigm shift, and--who knows--maybe even end in hope.
December 7, 2010 | Tony Wolfe
Just unwrapped gift #1. Do Mary and Suze (Orman) have anything in common? I am currently living among some of that 2% wealthiest families in the country. Interestingly, i received fewer gifts than at previous schools this holiday season. i have no idea what that truly means. Maybe the transition from the former teacher is taking much longer. At any rate, I do like this interpretation, and it is feeding a part of me that longs for clarity, justice and a vision for true world peace. Another part of me wants to dismiss anything connected to a book that some people in my life have used to put hexes on me. As a child of the universe, light and love, I can heal myself and rewrite the hexes of darkness into words of fire and sear the truth on my heart.
February 2, 2011 | Galen
Addendum: Your ideas contain wisdom and light which have ignited the spark in my soul.
February 2, 2011 | Galen
For this year's season of Advent-Christmas, Lee Van Ham is presenting other ways to look at this special season, his comments rooted in the cosmological nature of the birth narratives told in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.
A lot of attention has been given to locating the birth of Jesus precisely in history. So, for example, 4 B.C.E. is a commonly seen year of his birth. But the Gospel writers had an opposite concern, namely, how to break their story out of the confines of history. They did it too--by making their story cosmological in scope.
Think about it. History gets told by the dominant powers. So, like the leaders of today, the Roman and Jewish leaders told history. The Gospel writers exploded it. Their story was bigger than history. They did not want the birth of Jesus to be confined to how the Empire or Temple would tell the story, which was not to tell it. They released the story from captivity to empire and history by framing it cosmologically! Ingenious!
In the cosmological version, angels make surprise appearances and stunning announcements. They come out into the heavens as a magnificent chorus and loudly sing charged political lyrics, gloriously laughing at Caesar--and all empires in fact. A star gets the attention of Persian magi and locates the royal child for them with GPS precision. Don't even try to make all of this fit historically. If we do, we are undoing the very purpose of the authors who knew that what they had to tell subverted and converted history. Why try to make angels, dreams, extreme human jubilation, and heavenly phenomena "reasonable," when their wild, cosmic irrationality is exactly what busts open human civilization's efforts to standardize and explain.
Empires and cosmos have different objectives. Empire deal with nations and powers, finding definitions that establish borders and boundaries for each. But cosmos is an expanding, limitless, unfathomable mystery well beyond what any empire has yet defined or managed. Cosmology, a combination of science, mystery, and spirit, is unruly, and that's what makes it paradigm-altering. Empires don't handle that well.
The famed astronomer, Carl Sagan, began his majestic PBS television series, Cosmos, by saying "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." That dwarfs the claims of governments, nation-states, and corporate states. It's exactly why it's important for us to root the Christmas story in Sagan's Cosmos, not the latest historical versions of civilization. Framed in Sagan's Cosmos, the Christmas Story becomes enormous! Unfathomable! Mysterious! Real!
To give an example. That part of the Christmas story where shepherds watch their flocks (Luke 2:8-20) would be of little note were it not for the angels and heavens that energize it. Angels, who are messengers not beholden to empire, appear to the shepherds with blinding light and deliver in words and song a high voltage political and economic message overlooked in conventional tellings of this story. Have you ever really thought about just how politically and economically charged their message was?
"Behold"--In other words, "Open your eyes! See what empire thinking is blinding you to, numbing you into compliance. Shift your eyes from suspicion and fear-mongering. Instead, behold a grand cosmos that is trustworthy and providing."
"I bring you good news of great joy for all people" -- "Good news," euangellion in the Greek, also translated as "gospel," was the word widely used by empires to refer to the victory messages brought to people following a military expedition. The spin of those messages always enhanced the standing of the empire in the eyes of the citizens. But these military messages, though "good news" for the ruling political and economic class, were not "good news" for "all people;" for most people it meant that their repression would continue through the empire's controlling governance. The angelic message of "great joy to all people" was an astonishing contrast. The inclusivity of the angel's message threatened empire's boundaries and control. It still does.
"Glory to God in the highest heaven…" --Here the political and economic charge increases exponentially. The Caesar in Rome at the time had just taken for himself the title "Augustus," or "the Greatest." He and his successors claimed divine authority, even the attribute of deity. But a heaven full of angels sang joyfully of a greater reality. Through performance art they joyfully dismissed the claims of "caesars" to divine authority, directing us, instead, to "God of the highest heaven!" No protest song could be any grander in what is denounced or announced! Can we really imagine what feelings would be released in those moments? Feelings pressed down into the lowest layers of the gut by a lifetime of intimidation by ruling class domination broke out. What a moment of spiritual, economic, and political conversion to hear a great chorus of artists sing glory to the God of the highest heavens instead of national anthems and glory to nation, empire, or emperor!
"… and on earth peace to all of good will." --Quickly these lyrics shrink the vaunted Pax Romana down to size, countering the cherished notion of empires that "peace through strength" is the best policy. The angels turn 180 degrees from imperial policy and sing unequivocally of peace established through good will. Furthermore, peace through good includes foreigners and all on the other side of empire's borders. Political and economic structures in this newly announced peace are generated by the great human capacity for good will. Empire, by contrast, repeatedly pits individuals and groups against one another in competition, fighting for scarce resources and opportunities.
Again this Christmas we can sing the "Glorias" and the angels lyrics of peace. But we must not miss that we are singing a protest song. We are protesting the economic and governing powers that dominate in the world. We are protesting their continued practices of peace through force, strength, economic might, and domination. Instead, we want actions based on human good will--even though it receives only a fraction of the money and energy given to the military-industrial-prison complex.
Whatever the political and economics conversations of the shepherds were before, the angels gave them a lesson in politics and economics that the empire would have squelched if they could have. Likewise today, any telling of the Christmas Story that misses these dramatic words of contrast to empire guts the Story, surrendering it to the empire and its economic and political powers. How we tell the story and sing the songs matters.
TagCOSMOLOGY, TagEMPIRE ECONOMICS, TagLEE VAN HAM, TagSPIRITUAL ECONOMICS
Reader Comments (1)
So, are you telling me that the chorus of angels didn't belong to James Dobson or Pat Robertson or the Pope to use as a money making device and to control the masses??? Things sure got screwed up along the way. Was it the messengers fault? I'm impressed, you spoke of Carl Sagan without using "billions and billions" a single time. Now, that combination of science, mystery, and spirit-That's something I can sink my teeth into! As for that protest song, could it be that the angels were singing "We Shall Overcome"? WOW! I just had a memory of your sermon on "O Little Town of Bethlehem"! That was 20 years ago! "And in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light". Dan Fogelberg wrote, "there's a light in the depth of your darkness...let it shine!" The new Disney movie has a song "I See The Light". It is a vision of stunning beauty and love. "At last I see the light...and it's like the sky is new...and the world has somehow shifted...now that I see you."
February 2, 2011 | Galen
Unwrapping Christmas in a Different Paradigm: Fear or Fear Not? (4 of 5)Joseph was in a fix. He'd been excited about his upcoming marriage to Mary, but she just told him she was pregnant. As Matthew tells the story, Joseph was a man who lived righteously--in a good way. If he made a big deal about how Mary says she got pregnant, he might save face in the community for himself, but Mary would then bear all the social disgrace. She could even be stoned. Even if she was allowed to live, she had no economic viability, being unmarried, pregnant, and a peasant teenager. Joseph couldn't resolve his dilemma, caught in fears of violating either social expectations or his own sense of what was right. What to do?
Then one night an angel came to Joseph while he was in a dream-state and told him not to be afraid. He should go ahead and marry his love, Mary. This message from the cosmos' angel trumped Joseph's fears. So he did it. He joined Mary in daring to believe that, consistent with the cosmos, as delivered by the angel messenger, God was calling them to live a different paradigm from the one that had shaped them as well as the rest of the Galilean countryside.
Joseph and Mary continued in their lives with the interdependence and relationships that are part of cosmology. They broke through the norms of society and showed there was a right, caring, and truthful way to live that transcended the norms many persisted in saying were absolute. They were criticized throughout their lives, and their beloved child would always be considered a bastard-child by some. But their resolve to be a family was rooted in a different consciousness from their critics. In the consciousness of Joseph and Mary, the cosmos' message of "fear not," delivered by God's angel, won out over the consciousness of fear.
What a contrast the angel's words are to the endless messages of fear we hear daily throughout our modern culture. Governments tells us that the world is scary, filled with criminals, enemies, bullies, terrorists, and foreigners. Therefore we need to fund and train strong police and militaries. All the costs--taxes, human life, property damage, destruction of creation, repression of freedom--must be faithfully paid in the name of security. Beyond what is needed for essential security, fear-based justifications for excessively tough law enforcement, bloated military budgets, and excessive force are piled on.
Add in the economic fears currently everywhere. With real unemployment around 20 percent, millions are afraid of hunger and sickness. Many more fear being without work, and therefore continue in low-paying jobs or in work that goes against their values. Walking hand-in-hand with these fears is the fear of losing one's home because payments of rents and mortgages can't be met.
Then there's advertising. In a whole different way, advertising is low-level fear-on-the-prowl. Constantly we read, see, and hear what we aren't doing, but need to do, or what we don't have, but need to have. The messages provoke anxiety, a sense of incompleteness, and for many, the fear of being left out of life's best. None feeds on our fears and insecurities better than banks and big pharmaceutical companies. Banks promise security in their products even as they tell us we are insecure unless we have them. Pharmaceuticals tell us we're right to fear disease, but that their product will knock it out. At Christmas, the non-stop glaze of advertising tells us how we can avoid the fear of not measuring up in relationships by buying gifts. As long as we consent to the advertisers way of thinking, our actions will be based on fear.
How much we need to hear the fear-not, good news words of angels! But we aren't likely to see or hear angels while chained to world-views that must be rational, or which are confined to human civilization and culture. Angels do not speak the language of the powers that dominate history, neither in the Christmas story, nor today. Their language is framed by the powers of the cosmos. Accordingly, the likelihood that we will see and hear them increases when we become skeptical enough of the ways of culture and exclusive rational knowing that we look beyond those horizons. Irrational powers such as awe and wonder swirl in upon us when we become connected with cosmology.
Think again about what cosmology is. Cosmology tells the story of the cosmos, is larger than human history, and is part of our human experience both through scientific observation and through its power to awaken awe even when our rational egos don't understand. It's both scientific and mystical knowing. Mary and the shepherds see the angels through the mystical aspect of cosmology, not the scientific.
So Joseph's and Mary's encounters with angels connected them with the grand wishes of the cosmos even as it undermined the moral consciousness of the society of Nazareth regarding the norms of marriage. What was already conceived in the consciousness of the cosmos was connecting with her womb where conception was both a biological and spiritual mystery.
The cosmology of angels broke through the historical norms of the Jewish world. Joseph found truth in his heart that connected with the cosmos and its Creator, transcending his culture. Mary was saved economically and socially. Their bastard-child showed the illegitimacy of reigning religion, politics, and economics by living according to a consciousness enlightened by the cosmos and the Divine Presence everywhere, there and beyond, whom he called Abba, or Daddy. In all these ways the special family of Christmas shows us what it means to live a "fear-not" consciousness.
Authors Matthew and Luke showed their genius by presenting Joseph and Mary on the stage of cosmology, not just history. We do well to copy them. By rooting ourselves in a different way of thinking, and by living our lives by a different story, namely, the huge story of the cosmos, we become able to stare down empire's and culture's frightening intimidation. Anything less is not the Christmas story.
TagCONSUMER CULTURE, TagCOSMOLOGY, TagEMPIRE ECONOMICS, TagFEAR OR FEAR NOT, TagLEE VAN HAM
Reader Comments (1)
The return of the sun on the solstice tells me what it means to live a "fear-not" consciousness. Well, at least until the sun burns out. I think we're taught to be afraid of fearing not. Fear becomes the familiar and comforting feeling and we cannot feel true freedom and spirit as long as we cling to it. If we see the tightrope of fear we're walking on as an illusion and erase the tightrope, maybe we can free-fall to a grounded sense of liberation. LIGHT allows us to fear not. Just one small light reduces the anxiety of the unknown considerably. A whole bunch of small lights (as in souls) can ground us and make us safe and more creative and spontaneous.
Lee, you have always had a way with words and conveying complex ideas clearly and creatively. What a gift!
February 2, 2011 | Galen
LEE VAN HAM
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, within time, in a particular place; by contrast, Christ was and is from the beginning. As John says, "In the beginning was the Logos." To say, "Christ was born in Bethlehem," is a theological affirmation, not a historical statement. The Christmas songs we sing are filled with theology linking Christ with Jesus. Such connections can be exciting, soul-nourishing, and transformative. My point here is that using Jesus and Christ interchangeably, without awareness of how they have separate lineages and definitions, fuzzes over important distinctions between them. With the loss of those distinctions, the Christ of the cosmos gets reduced to proportions of history--a serious mistake, and never more so than when we are up against the stories of empire and consumer economics.
Throughout the Gospels and Epistles we see the creativity of people 20 centuries ago connecting the Jesus of Bethlehem and the Christ of the eons or cosmos. Their work was important and essential, and informs our own search for the relationship today. Their context, however, differs from ours in that "Christ" was not then assumed to be Jesus' second name as it is so often today. What is especially important for us today is to rediscover how they are separate. Only then can we rediscover a healthy, connecting relationship between them, instead of the co-dependent, dysfunctional linking that fails us when we need a big, cosmic-proportioned story with which to deal with our contemporary economic and cultural reality. Sometimes we hear people make the separation by saying not "Jesus Christ," but "Jesus, the Christ." That helps. But many hearers need further help in pondering the mystery of both the distinction and the relationship. I want to remind us how reluctantly Jesus called himself Christ or Messiah (the Hebrew equivalent). Some scholars, in fact, regard all such references as not spoken by Jesus but by the New Testament writers describing how they had come to think of Jesus some decades later. Jesus preferred other designations, his favorite being "the human one" or "the truly human one," a preferred translation to what may be more familiar, "Son of Man."
Given how wary Jesus was to identify himself with Messianic mythology that had developed in several strands over centuries, we do well to ask why many, soon after his life and ever since, have so readily called Jesus "Christos." For Jesus, lots of the Messiah mythology was filled with expectations that would subvert him from his divine call, rather than fulfill it. This was especially true of the politicized stories of Christos as one who would seek political control. He also feared the outcome of Messianism that projected powers onto the Christ that we humans need to own for ourselves. Jesus' way was for everyone to accept that they could develop the capacity to challenge empire and live a different way, not to leave it to THE Christ, but to also incarnate Christ as he did. It's God's way of living the divine image in us. But the most important factor in how we perceive the relationship between Jesus and Christ and ourselves lies in changing our worldview to one shaped by the emerging cosmological science and mystical spirituality.
Just as the Gospel writers understood "Jesus was born in Bethlehem" as a historical statement, they understood that the origins of Christ were cosmological, from the beginning of time. Whether or not we can relate to Christ as cosmological, as a divine mind, presence, Spirit, or consciousness embodied in human history and in all of creation will depend on whether we are ourselves evolving a cosmic consciousness. A consciousness needing a rationally ordered world and requiring that truth be only historical fact will of necessity reduce Christ to the size of reason or history--something Jesus shunned. The most common way to reduce Christ is to unreflectively equate Christ with Jesus. The impact of such consciousness on the Christmas story is to make it several sizes smaller than the way it has been told by the Gospel writers. It clips the story to the size where it can then fit in malls and within the Christmas traditions that evolve in the absence of the sacred.
The Christ connects not only to Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, but as Jesus taught, to the incarnating of Christos in all humanity and all of creation. But this is not the common way of talking about Christ. The common way connects cosmo-centric knowing, wisdom, and power exclusively with Jesus. This defeats exactly what Jesus sought to do, which was to see Christos in a fuller incarnation throughout creation. The "behold" of the angels was the opening fanfare to a highly energized focus on healing our blindness to the Christos power smeared throughout Creation since the beginning. Jesus continued to emphasize "opening eyes" and "opening ears", both are graphic metaphors for the blindness and deafness of a consciousness unable to perceive the Christos immediately available to all. This evolution in consciousness, an evolution whose time had come (hence the phrase, the time is fulfilled), would change the paradigm of empire consciousness and all the activities of domination that go with it. When Christos consciousness incarnates in us, then we fulfill the intent of divine creation for us.
I hope that however you come to describe and know the relationship between Christ, Jesus, yourself, and all of creation, that it is a relationship too numinous to ever be captured by words at all, let alone a single set of verbal symbols. Connecting Christ, Jesus, us, and all of creation is a transforming adventure. There is no formula or arrangement of words that can ever encapsulate the interrelationships of these. I am well aware that certain arrangements of words have pleased some who proceed to make them orthodox or "the" correct way to talk about what must, if truth is our concern, always remain a mystery beyond verbal arrangements. So, the importance of my words are not that I have said it "right," but that I am testifying to how the interrelationship of Christ, Jesus, me, and creation continues to be transformative, continues to give me chills and goose bumps, continues to reconfigure what I think I "know." The interrelationships I sense continue to take me into conversations and awesome places where my rational mind knows that I can utter no more words. Sometimes I become silent as the conversation continues. My heart takes off its shoes, and whispers, "Holy."
Holy is a good name for Christmas unwrapped in a new paradigm. Holy gives us the capacity to live Mary's song of economic equality with all creation, as well as the cosmos' angels words of living in peace without fear, as we generate good will shared in common.
TagCHRISTOLOGY, TagCOSMIC CHRIST, TagHISTORICAL JESUS, TagLEE VAN HAM
Reader Comments (1)
Excelente reminder hermano! You may be surprised that I hear you, understand you and give thanks for your perseverance to the vision received. There has never been a time that JEM will be more needed than in the coming decade. Feliz Navidad y Un Ano lleno de Sorpresas!!!
December 19, 2010 | Dan
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