...more recent posts
December 25, 2002
Christmas?
So I sit here on Christmas morning, trying to understand what it’s like to have been born, and I listen to Christmas music, because this is its season, and you really can’t listen to it any other time of the year. Many of the Christmas songs are folk songs, such as I’ve talked about recently. This year I keep coming back to the Cherry Tree Carol. It’s based on apocryphal tradition, and certainly doesn’t match any Biblical accounts, but it concerns the Virgin’s pregnancy, and it’s popularly sung as a Christmas carol.It must be the cherries; the blood red fruit.
Or maybe it’s all this talk and song of being born, but I can’t help thinking back to Spring, and that Riddle Song, the one with the cherry without any stone.
And I’m thinking there might be another answer to that riddle.
A Riddle is a little model we make of the Mystery.
Just as Mystery is inexhaustible, a Riddle may have more than one correct answer.
Just as thinking back to Spring is now thinking forward to Spring.
But right now it’s Christmas, and I present you with a Holiday Triad of Riddles:
Who is as a Cherry without any Stone?
Who is Child and Parent at once?
Who is Born with the Reborn Sun?
December 24, 2002
Descended From a Miracle
It happens that Christmas Eve is my birthday. People often assume that’s a problem, that my “special day” gets lost in the seasonal surge. On the contrary, I’ve always enjoyed the association. It seems to me I get more attention, rather than less, owing to the general concentration of celebration.Anyone’s birthday is a special day, at least to them. Mine is caught up in our biggest Holiday, replete with images and evocations of nativity. Christmas is a heady occasion, no doubt, but I’ve come to realize that I can’t really separate it from my own birthday. I suppose that some part of what I understand as the “Holiday Spirit” is actually what other people feel on their birthdays, whenever they occur. Allowing us to identify with divinity is a proper function of Christmas, but for most of the year we are merely born, in the conventional manner.
Such as that may be.
We know our parents, and who their parents were, but beyond that it’s hearsay fading to ignorance. Surely the line had a beginning? There was a time before there were people, and a time before there was life. Perhaps there was a time before there was anything, if you can call that time. Even the most mundane explanation of how it is that we are here now passes for miraculous. Somewhere in our ancestry we require that there be something out of nothing.
Something out of nothing is a Mystery.
Hence Christmas, with it’s unaccountable Birth.
But mine, and yours, are no less miraculous.
And that, too, is the lesson of Christmas.
It’s everybody’s Birthday.