The Truth Behind The Myth
As I sit here in my local coffee shop staring out at the shoppers passing by with their heavy bags of ‘stuff’ for the celebration of Christmas, I really do wonder what the Nazarene would make of it all. Struggling shopkeepers trying to make a living in the midst of deep recession, try to tempt us into the commercial Yuletide spirit, with copious amounts of fake snow and semi glittering tinsel, all undoubtedly birthed in the great Chinese manufacturing drive for world domination.
Many dread the big day with its pseudo celebratory take on the birth of Yeshua, a working class Jew who, if many of us were totally honest, would have no place around our festive Christmas table. Family smiles often disguise deep hurts and wounds from years gone by. Presents are given to hide the hidden agendas of our rivaling relationships. Food and drink together conspire to drug us into the illusion that all is well with the world whilst the poor continue to be just that….poor. Cable TV transmits its fake take on the Season, as James Stewart, once more decides not to jump! B and C list personalities smile with broader smiles than usual, whipping up our manufactured feel good factor for the big day.
Yes, in the darkest days of Winter we humans love a good party, something to give our psyche a leg up in the sun starved days of cold December. Once upon a time it was Paganism, closely followed by Christianity who authenticated our annual knees up but now its Amazon and Apple who lend their commercial clout to our mythical merriment.
Am I a bit of a Scrooge or a sour faced, joyless Northern Irish Puritan? Well, no. I’m just a recovering religious junkie who yearns for authenticity and peace in the midst of our lemming like rush to the stores. May I be frank? Is there actually anything to celebrate under the orgasmic, multi-layered religio-commercialism that worships at the glitzy altar of trans- global Capitalism?
Thankfully, I believe so.
No matter where and when he was born, it appears that Yeshua, the Nazarene, really did emerge onto the world stage in first century Palestine. Forget the mythical donkey and the myrrh bearing magi. Such sweet icing on the metanarrative religious cake doesn’t actually matter. What matters is whether Yeshua really lived and what his teaching revealed about the mystery of Divine Source, the birth point of the Cosmos, and, more importantly, our purpose within it.
Many have tried to deconstruct the Nazarene from the pages of human history. They’ve almost managed it but good old Josephus, a first century Jewish historian, in the pay of the Romans, just won’t let them get away with it. No friend of the early Yeshua movement, the literary historian fleetingly refers to the ‘Christ’ in two separate references. No it would appear that Yeshua was a real fresh and blood guy, albeit one with a radical take on the nature of Divinity that set him against the status quo religion of his day.
So what is there to celebrate?
Simply put, two things!
1) Yeshua lived.
Think of a world without the Nazarene’s character, compassion and teaching. A much poorer place leaving the spirituality of man in the prophetic hands of the Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tze and other enlightened souls.
2) God is not obsessed with ‘sin’ or human dysfunction.
Yeshua’s view of a welcoming Divinity who doesn’t listen to the ‘sinners prayer’ before authenticating us is surely something worth celebrating. If this sounds too good to be true do have a wee reread of the parable of ‘The Prodigal’ – the returning son couldn’t get his rehearsed ‘repentance’ out before being smothered in Divine generosity and acceptance.
So, in this season of silliness and over indulgence, may I wish you all a blessed moment of Divine revelation. When we’ve had enough to eat, tire of our family and friends and are fed up with the saccharine TV fare let’s go into the solitude of our sacred space and wait for Divine Presence; an authentic Breath that longs to touch our saturated psyche in the bleak Mid-Winter.
Dylan’s Author page ~ https://www.amazon.com/author/dylanmorrison
Writer Dylan Morrison 
Awesome Dylan, along time ago Papa spoke to me and welcomed me back via that story of the prodigal. That is indeed worth celebrating everyday the real “christmas” we need all year. Thanks for sharing this!
Russ
Thanks for dropping by Russ. Yes, Yeshua’s wee tale of the Prodigal sums up his teaching for me. Subsequent theology has covered its simple truth with mind games that question the generosity of Divine Love.
This is so refreshing to read and contemplate on.
Thanks so much for what you’re doing. I am thankful to have “met” you out here in cyberspace. You’re one of a kind and appreciated for being so!
-Connie
Connie, thanks for your kind and encouraging words. They mean a lot to me and will hopefully further fuel the flow of inspiration from within. Have a great wee Christmas and 2013. x Dylan
Bravo Dylan, and a happy and blessed Christmas to you.
George
Thanks George. Hopefully more to come in 2013 if the Mayans are proved wrong! Have a great Christmas over there in Tokyo.
The rape of the sacred, that’s what has happened to Christmas. What would the Nazarene make of our hoopla, our spending frenzies, our debt to keep retailers in business? The perversion of what is simple and pure, that’s what the season has become. I wish I had a better attitude, wish I could get in the ‘spirit’, but I can’t, not the way this world portrays the holy season. Ennui at its best, I guess.
Agreed Debra. Maybe Oliver Cromwell was right to ban Christmas in his Puritan zeal. He’d turn in his grave if he saw what we’ve done to it in the 21st century!
Thanks for dropping in and for your encouragement in 2012!
x Dylan
A thoughtful post as ever Dylan, and points to good cheer in the sense the Nazarene did; seek the good but be realistic about the awful.
Christ mass blessings,
Michael
Thanks Michael. Lovely to hear from you! Yes indeed, Yeshua was a visionary, but also the greatest realist that ever walked on Planet Earth.
Have a great wee Christmas!
Dylan
You have a beautiful Kingdom-view… along with an amazingly loving sense of humor that helps break the sadness over what is missed, Dylan… or better said, what is left out of true Celebration. Even while He was here with us on Earth, most of the crowd celebrated a person and teaching viewed only through the filter of unchoice… one that kept (intentionally) and/or left (tragically, unknowingly) the deeply-thirsting heart-parts within undisturbed and unmoved in and through the complexities of the fear-immersed hiding process… a machine we all have within us whose filter-system, intricate in its ‘protection’-buffers and baffles to such a degree that the beautiful healing Light actually becomes “bent” (for lack of humanly descriptive words)…. and what is meant to be stirred and deeply moved by and into Love’s healing process is left ‘comfortably undisturbed’… and therefore unchallenged.
Ahh… the magnificent quagmire of distraction that is the acceptable Christmas celebration of the ‘norm’…. yet deep pain and sadness again as the true Person and His Beautiful Message goes yet again unseen and unfelt by people who all have the God-given capacity to become truly beautiful partakers in Life by doing the almost unspeakable… to actually feel safe enough to hold oneself open long enough to allow the Christ-given Message of Light and Life to directly bathe that in us which has been previously disconnected… broken… hidden.
May there be a chance this Christmas that all here on Earth would have even a glimpse of what is Real… to be free from the Life-choking constraints of condemnation and the current message-teachings of the mainstream… even if only for a moment, in order to see the Hope and the View enough to begin entering into choice…
the beautiful Celebration of choosing to allow the Christ-Love to have Its intended Way with us.
I love these lyrics posted below… they say it all. The “they” and “them” mentioned here is not necessarily any person or people per se… it is simply the the spirit-quench of the beast’s death message so deceptfully masked as Life… only exposed for what it truly is when we finally have the chance to “See”, and then choose to let the Christ-shown Love in.
I see this as a near-perfect Message to every one of us.~
“There’s so much more about you that you never let them see
You turn away
But not to me
And I know how they tried to take you
Held you up and meant to break you down
But you can’t be
For so long I tried to reach you
I know I’m almost there
I’m close enough for you to see
You’ve been hiding in the shadows
Have you forgotten how we used to dream?
Let me remind you
The Light doesn’t blind you at all
It just helps you see
Can you see?
Yeah you have become
Yeah, you have become… Beautiful.”
May we all have that chance for our spirits to breathe again.
Oh… and a beautiful Merry Christmas Celebration to all 🙂
❤
Indeed Paul! The fear of Love, the human predicament.
Sadly so, my friend… and I am the chief of the ‘hiders’. I still have a pulse though, and therefore opportunity without measure while here in the land of the living to once again turn towards and re-choose to let that Love in.
I love knowing that.
~Paul
Some years ago I became estranged from family and have spent the Christmas holidays alone, a continent away from them. To be honest, I’m perfectly happy with the thought “thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” What could be better than that?
Nothing I reckon Amy. Have a lovely day over there in Rio! Peace within and without ` Dylan
Thanks, Dylan…you, too!