Dear old and new friends,

     Wishes for a "Happy New Year" are exchanged these days with neighbors, strangers on the streets, clerks in stores and echoed from out of television sets. A happy, blissful, joyful, cheerful and delightful 2016 is for many people however unattainable if not impossible. For most the only difference of this coming New Year will be its number; otherwise it will smell like, look like and most of all “feel” like old 2015.

     Every 13 minutes in our country someone feeling life is too painfully sad will take their own life! While homicides have fallen by half since 1991, suicide is now the second leading killer for those ages 15-34. To ask why this is the case is politically impolite or incorrect for taxes must be cut, not increased. “Cut back on spending” is the righteous battle cry of the conservative right…and the reason we have closed or curtailed local treatment for the mentally ill. Depressed people, instead of finding treatment in a local mental facility, find themselves in homeless shelters, jails or pondering suicide.

     The fellow citizens suffering depression we walk pass on the street, shop among or work with don’t wear signs signaling their unhappy dejected condition. They are prisoners of a most horrifying penitentiary—one with no exits! A human being can survive almost anything as long as she or he can see the end of it in sight, and insidiously depression makes its victims feel there is no escape, except death. The author Eugene O’Neill spoke for a large majority of us when asked to write about happiness replied, “I will write about it if I ever happen to meet up with that luxury.” To wish “Happy New Year” is wishing an unattainable luxury to those seriously depressed, angry with another, aching with a broken heart, in a bitter divorce or unemployed.

     “Happy New Year” is like “Thank you for your service” spoken to soldiers in uniform in public gatherings or airports. Military personnel report when they hear that it sounds like a platitude, a hollow expression. The active military, who are only 0.5% of the population, report they feel civilians regard them as guard dogs, a necessary evil. They also feel whenever civilians thank them for their service that unspoken is “I’m glad you serve, so I don’t have to…or my kids won’t have to.”

     Expressions of gratitude or wishes for a happy new year must flow from your heart and not just your lips. As children we learned from fairy tales that wishes are very powerful, so look before you wish. Look to see beneath as best you can whoever is standing before you, or use your imagination for each person has a story. It may be one of heart wrenching sadness, of fear, loneliness or exclusion because of their sexuality or physical appearance. It may be one of family discord, broken relationships or a seemingly unattainable bright future. Then inhale, filling your greeting with soul and love, and whatever you intuit will bring happiness to that person.

     Think un-American, since an old fashioned USA dogma is happiness and contentment come to those who work hard, have the right attitude and strive for self-improvement. This conviction undergirded a recent Republican politician’s solution to poverty which wasn’t new jobs with equality of wages. His proposal was sending poor people to happiness courses to improve their attitudes!

                                 Three questions for your meditation

     1. Do you think you need to attend a happiness course to improve your attitude?

     2. Can anyone wish another what they themselves do not possess?

     3. Does expressing a wish fulfilling “Happy New Year” have more potency when you are a happy and contented person in solidarity with the employed, the less fortunate, and depressed?

Dear old and new friends,
 
     Christmas celebrates the birth of one with many titles: Prince of Peace, God-Hero, Wonder-Counselor, Father-Forever, Son of God…and the most meaningful, “Jesus, the Erotic Lover.” The old religious hierarchy was flabbergasted when God decided to exit heaven and take on human flesh in Jesus of Nazareth and all earthy things. Christmas was so scandalous—God with sexuality and human needs and hungers—that religion attempted to deny the reality by burying it under piles of laws, complicated theologies and a public worship that actually proclaimed the exact opposite. It wasn’t until the fourth century that the Christian Church celebrated the Feast of the Nativity—Christ’s birth, Christmas—and then only with opposition.

     What made an unwrapped Christmas so shocking was that it was a feast of God in the human flesh of an illiterate Jewish village craftsman who wasn’t some new prophet, but rather the living, breathing All Holy One, the Supreme Spiritual Being dwelling in a human body’s fragile flesh. Was this amazing feat the result of God being convinced of the old saying, “Humans can’t love what they cannot put their arms around”? If so, the Almighty One became huggable!

     To understand the title of “Jesus, the Erotic Lover” recall that “God is love” and that Jesus was the en-fleshment of that Divine Mystery. He didn’t become some disembodied ethereal love, but rather an earthy and deeply sensual person with all the needs, desires, feelings, conflicts and cravings we experience. Theologian Teilhard de Chardin used fire to illustrate love; that intensely scorching blaze that enflames sexual intimacy with such attraction, as well as bliss. Along with other recent scholars, Teilhard believes sexuality is the creative core of a spirituality and theology for a God of Divine Eros, and not the old detached, aloof Deity.
    
     This unwrapping of Christmas invites us to look at our bodies with different eyes and to see them as one with the Body of Christ, both an earthly and cosmic body cherished by God. The Irish theologian Diarmuid O’Murchu says, “God loves bodies.” He also insightfully says “God likes you” (pause to let that last statement soak into your soul) since for we as Christians it is possible to love people whom we don’t like.

     This Christmas Celebration calls us to embrace eroticism which once we rejected as a deadly sinful temptation, but that now with our understanding of the incarnation we should incorporate into our spiritual-inner lives. The anti-sexuality of Christianity of the last several hundred years has led to a repression of sensual creative energies that we now need to abandon as theologically antique and unhealthy.

     So, don’t be afraid to unwrap Christmas--to like yourself and your body—as does God.

     This charming note to Santa must be from some poor blind child who has heard the endearing Christmas carols and the songs of Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer and a White Christmas. These songs have aroused a deep longing to actually see Christmas in its glorious splendor; to behold reported homes and stores hung with endless strings of colored lights, the invasion of thousands of dazzlingly illuminated decorated Christmas trees in stores and even inside houses.

     This note to Santa isn’t from a blind person, and yet it also is since each one of us could have written it! While you and I can see all the external lavish decorations of Christmas, are we able to see Christmas? If you and I could, then all that spellbinding awesome wonder of Christmas we felt as small children we can once again experience.

     If we were gifted with a pair of mystical red-framed Christmas eyeglasses we could see the feast of Christmas, the Incarnation of God taking on human flesh in Jesus’ birth, and so much more. We would see God ceasing to be an aloof heavenly dwelling Deity…and now embracing and entering into all that it means to be human, mingling fully in the messiness of human life, and filling all of the world and the cosmos. We would see how out of great love the Divine Mystery has made what we saw once as worldly or secular into the luminously beautiful holy and consecrated. With these Christmas glasses we would see our vocation isn’t to flee or turn our backs on the worldly and secular but rather to behold and respond to the Divine at its depths.

     Wearing these glasses, we can see beyond the dirt and grime of poverty, shame or sickness to behold the face of God. And what if you don’t have such Christmas glasses?
 
Then become addicted, obsessed to performing concrete acts of love, since only a heart in love with humanity and earthy matter can see a God-filled Christmas world.

Dear old and new friends,

     These are the times of belief and disbelief, of skepticism and denial, that we have all lived through before. On the playground in my early grade school days I met my first atheists, or deniers. During the days just before Christmas they challenged my belief in that jolly, red-suited gift giver, while I proclaimed loudly the evidence of his existence in the sightings of him all over the town. I did agree with them that logically the law of gravity made his flying reindeer impossible, but in Santa and his elves my faith remained firm since I had proof of their existence…peanuts!

     As a child, if my two younger brothers and I took our afternoon naps we were told the elves would come and leave for us shelled peanuts in a Santa dish on the ledge of the stairwell, and amazingly they never failed to do so. I don’t know precisely my age when I stopped believing in my once deeply held belief of Santa. But how do we explain a Gallup poll that found one in four high school students, college students and adults believe in Saint Nick? Since a child fears becoming a Santa atheist could logically mean no Christmas gifts, so too the faith convictions of both children and adults have heavy emotional consequences.

     The recent United Nations “Climate Change Conference” in Paris has made front page news. When asked their opinion about it, many claim they can’t make one since they aren’t scientists; while others remain skeptical of the scientific facts. Surprisingly, a Gallup poll recently found that regardless of credible scientific evidence, one in four Americans still disbelieves in climate change! Also, among political conservatives and religious fundamentalists 50 to 60 percent of them deny evolution! (Political candidates wisely do not publicly acknowledge their views.) As in childhood we feared the consequences of a denial of Santa, so then for religious fundamentalists is climate change and evolution “the camel’s nose in the tent” …a prelude to the drastic unraveling of their faith?

      Five-thousand years ago the Athenian orator Demosthenes said, “Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what a man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” Is that the case with today’s climate change deniers, where what they believe is what they wish was true? It certainly was true for Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II (1844-1913). Upon learning of the new electric chair, he ordered one in the hope of deterring crime, though unaware Ethiopia lacked the sufficient electrical power to operate it. So he creatively had the massive chair converted into his throne.

     Emperor Menelick held the unique belief that when he was not well, simply eating some pages of the bible he would make him feel better. His faith in this act may be from the book of Ezekiel where the prophet in a vision saw a hand holding out to him a scripture scroll and heard a voice say, “Eat this.” He did, and found it sweet. In December, 1913, Menelick had a stroke and later felt extremely ill, but instead of calling a doctor he ordered the complete Book of Kings be cut out of the bible and fed page by page to him (in a bible today that would be about 57 pages). He died while chewing the pages…but before he had consumed the entire Book of Kings.

     This December is the 102nd anniversary of Emperor Menelik II’s death, and so an ideal time to examine honestly your beliefs. Not about Santa Claus or his magical elves, but something you both believe and you like to believe, since this true Ethiopian story warns us that our beliefs contrary to evidence have serious consequences.

Dear old and new friends,

     “Eat, drink and be merry” would be a great motto for these December days. December 7th begins Hanukah’s eight-day festival, followed by the celebration of Christmas, and then New Year’s. The coming days call for good food and good wine…speaking of which reminds me of a true story.

     Bishop Johann Fugger set off in the year 1110 from Germany to participate in Emperor Henry V’s coronation in Rome. He sent his majordomo ahead to sample the wines served in taverns along the road leading to Rome, instructing him to write “Est” (It is) over the doors of taverns serving good wine. About a hundred miles north of Rome in the small Italian town of Montefiascone he wrote over the door of the inn, “Est! Est! Est!” Bishop Fugger agreed and drank only the Montefiascone vintage for the rest of his life. He even was buried in that Italian town, and his will directed on the yearly anniversary of his death that a barrel of Montefiascone was poured over his grave! Now there’s a great wine.

     The Teacher of Galilee’s words not to put new wine into old wine skins, as the old skins would break and you would lose both the skins and the new wine, seems like just folk wisdom. Yet the Gospel writer Luke tells us it is a parable! Its lesson seems to warn of not putting new radical ideas into old weary structures, which sadly happened with his teachings when the Church embraced the Gospel. In his life, Galilee’s wandering teacher went about offering the new, very potent wine of love and freedom. Any who dared to drink this new wine quickly developed bizarre behaviors, acting as if the world had been turned upside down. They drunkenly loved their enemies along with everyone else; feeling liberated they ignored those who tried to hold power over them. The inebriated followers also were guilty of WWI: Worshiping While under the Influence by not observing official prayer or temple worship.

     Secular and religious authorities denounced this dangerous new wine, so the teacher wisely instructed his disciples to imitate him and be bootleggers, and like him to carry hidden this new wine in skins in his high boots. They were to offer it only to those tired of the drabness of being sober and wanted to get merrily drunk. If you desire to drink this wondrous new wine, don’t look to the Church to provide it; her wine cellar holds only the old vintage, some so old it has turned to sour vinegar. So you must become a bootlegger and create your “new” wine in your own bathtub winery.
 
     Such new, tasty intoxicating spirits are especially needed since the over-civilized mechanization of life has caused us to lose our human capacity to both deeply love and to be alluringly lovely. Here’s a “new” wine recipe: Absorb as much as possible of the vital life energy of love by loving those in the center of your life more deeply and more passionately each day than you did the day before. But be cautious…don’t love only with your head (cerebral=non-alcoholic wine) but passionately with all your body, and extend your love boundaries by physically embracing more, including unlovable persons.
 
     Finally, be a bootlegger. As the Teacher taught, keep your forbidden booze hidden until you offer some to some sober sad soul who asks how you can be so cheerful and happy in such terrible times? By making your own Galilean new wine and sharing it with the truly thirsty, you’ll find these holidays days to be “Est! Est! Est!” merry.