Christmas Confessions

OK, it's confession time. For a long time I dreaded the entire Christmas season, with it's cheesy tunes being piped through retail store speakers, all that horrible fruitcake (does anyone actually like that stuff?) and artificially flavored eggnog, the dreadful holiday sweaters, useless gifts people will pretend to like then re-gift, tacky plastic decorations which end up in countless landfills, all those less-than-sincere "merry Christmases" wished. The only upside for this grinch was that mercifully here in the US the brainwashing starts closer to Thanksgiving, unlike Canadian retailers who launch their attack-campaign just as the Halloween jackolanterns are being tossed on the compost heap.

Looking back, I see that period of disillusionment as my growth out of my childhood Christmases into something bigger. Like all real growth, there was some discomfort from the transition out of a shell that is familiar yet too small, into something roomier. It's the in between period that left me feeling a little disillusioned and vulnerable, having left behind the Christmas of childhood and not yet having found something deeper and more satisfying.

On the first, rainy Sunday of Advent this year, I decided to subject myself to the newly released apocalyptic movie The Road. The film begins with some unspecified disaster which brings the world to an end. All plants, animals and humans are wiped out except for a few human survivors. The color palette is gray and brown, with a constant drizzle which falls out of a permanent blanket of cloud cover, which might as well be liquid depression. There is a sense of hopelessness in the first half of the film that is deeply disturbing. Houses abandoned, dead trees falling over, many survivors banding together and reduced to cannibalism.

An unnamed father and son become the center of this strange, unlikely film which turns into a plot of hope. Throughout the film, the father reminds the son that they're the "good guys", who would never stoop to cannibalism. Father reminds son that they carry the "fire", as they struggle on foot, with little nourishment southward and coastward. At no point does the environment look anything less than completely devastated, and one is left to assume that it's only a matter of time before the survivors will succumb to the inevitable. And yet father and son continue to speak of the fire, not giving up, continuing southward, not stooping to the lowest common denominator. I wanted to believe that they were right to hope, that they had good reason to continue carrying the fire, and yet it seemed almost dishonest to keep hoping when the seemingly obvious trajectory was towards complete extinction. And yet, the film ends with just a little hope that real humanity can survive even in a world where the survival instinct of humans could easily reduce them to vulture-like savageness.

Strangely, I found myself inspired and full of hope as I walked out of the theatre. At times I feel that the hope of Christmas can seem almost as delusional to someone who doesn't carry the fire. Jesus' fire was all about this Kingdom of God, which was and is right here, right now. Perhaps you could call it the Big Picture vision...and Jesus wanted us to catch it, to see reality with it. Without Big Picture vision, without the fire, we all operate at the lowest common denominator: self-interest. With Kingdom of God Big Picture vision, we see hope where there is hopelessness, good where we are told there is just evil, a third way where there is just two, and life where our hopeless eyes see death.

(Author's note: I do once again enjoy Christmas carols, Christmas trees and eggnog with real rum. I do however still avoid tacky decor and useless gifts.)

On Faith and Hell

Recently, I had a conversation with someone struggling with the challenge that the idea of a non-literal hell presented to her long held worldview. (Literal hell as in a pit with burning sulfur, conscious eternal torment…light-hearted stuff like that.) When I asked her why she needed to believe in that kind of a hell I was impressed with her unflinching honesty: “Because I need to know that people who have hurt me and my family aren’t going to be in heaven.”

I believe that most people who need to believe in a literal hell, believe it precisely because they need to know that there are real (i.e. eternal) consequences for hurting me, disagreeing with the Truth as I understand it, hurting people in my family or my country, church and so on. Many people, including myself, begin in our spiritual journeys with such a clear, neatly divided view of God’s judgment. In fact, it may even be helpful at a certain point in our journey to have such clear absolutes…think of them as training wheels that we eventually realize we don’t need once we learn how to simply have faith in God. Ah, but faith doesn’t offer us certainty by virtue of the fact that it requires trust…and it’s hard to fully trust Anyone you don’t believe to be completely good.

I’m not saying, let’s sweep human evil under the carpet. It’s impossible to go through a single day without noticing the consequences of our failure to live in God’s love. Jesus did just that: he used the present reality of Jerusalem’s town dump (gehenna) as a very effective metaphor for what happens when we choose not to walk in the way of love.

Instead, let’s take a look at ourselves. It’s been said, that when we are not changed by God, we pull God down to our level. In fact, any change of mind is preceded by a change of heart…and our hearts can be very egocentric. I wonder how much of the need to believe in a clear “in” and “out”, is simply a function of the ego’s need for security? It’s not hard to understand really…we’ve always had to identify the enemy if we were going to avoid being killed, robbed or otherwise violated. In sports we have to be able to clearly identify who’s on our team and who’s not if we’re going to win the game. We learn this lesson early on: there are winners and there are losers, and you don’t want to be a loser.

It shouldn’t be a great surprise that if our hearts are not transformed by this mysterious God who sends rain on both the just and the unjust, that it becomes too difficult to live in that tension, and we resolve that tension by making God more like us. Once we're honest about our own dark side (which we often use religion to cover), and the fact that God loves us and accepts us despite it…it makes the whole question of hell much less interesting. Perhaps we could simply say this: our need to be certain about eternal consequences is a reflection of our need for control, and our inability to fully trust in the goodness of God.