The Migration of Xmas

The Xmas Spell

Xmas isn’t my favourite time of year. It’s come, in fact, to be my least favourite time of year. I once celebrated the most magical aspects of the Santa trope, carrying on my parents’ tradition, arranging my kids’ stuffies while they slept around the fireplace, leaving ashen footprints of Santa having come down the chimney, creating special ‘Santa Cards’ in strange and elaborate handwriting, and taking pleasure in finding special gifts and preparing special food. More recently through the death of dear ones, the fragmentation of family, perpetual financial insecurity, and my own stubborn withdrawal, it has decidedly become the ‘X’ time of year.

I now experience Xmas as a kind of spotlight on a host of insecurities and failures and regrets which I feel helpless before. Of course, I’m not alone in bearing the death of dear ones, or a fragmented family, or financial insecurity, or in feeling alone on Xmas. Thank God that He turned water into wine, and that Xmas ‘cheer’ promotes and condones the liberal use of the world’s most socially acceptable addictive pain killer, alcohol. A most unfaithful and duplicitous companion – but a companion nonetheless – through the longest nights of the year.

So how and why does Xmas feel so miserable for some folks, and is there another way to approach it?

The Xmas Spell: Christ’s Mass, Solstice, Santa, Belonging & Security, and Ad Wizards

It’s no coincidence that the celebration of Christ’s Mass, the birth of Jesus, coincides with – in northern climes, where Christmas has such a cultural hold – the longest night of the year, Solstice: a heady and hearty mix.

I make a deliberate differentiation between ‘Christmas’ and ‘Xmas’. ‘Christmas’ is Christ’s Mass, a mass celebrating the birth of Jesus. ‘Xmas’ replaces Christ with… an X.
X: a relatively rarely used phoneme originating in Phoenicia, the Roman numeral for ‘10’, but more importantly a vivid graphic symbol representing that you got it ‘wrong’ and, interestingly, in mathematics, the symbol for something unknown (I saw far too many of the wrong kind of ‘Xs’ in my math classes, mostly because the ‘X’ remained unknown to me). No wonder ‘X’ isn’t used as a letter that often, it’s already way too busy.

‘Xmas’ is not a religious holiday. ‘Xmas’ is an annual mass spell that contemporary mainstream cultures fall under cast by ad wizards for the benefit of their retail clients. That wizardry stirs Christ’s Mass (religion), Solstice (astronomy/astrology) and Santa Claus (magic) into an already fermenting, all-too-human, brew of Belonging and Insecurity, catalyzing an alchemical reaction which pumps out exceedingly potent memes – jingles, ad campaigns, and irresistible sales promotions – which jump from mind to mind faster than a speeding omicron variant.

A recap of the elements.
Christ’s Mass remains the astonishing and beguiling paradox of God born into the world as a fragile mortal infant with no place to rest his natal head – already shunned at the ‘Inn’ (where the In crowd is) – except in a stable with the animals.
Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year, carries with it the ancient and chilling implication of a long cold winter ahead, and further that maybe, just maybe, the sun won’t actually come back, a spring in the astronomical loops of time will snap, and we’ll all freeze to death in darkness.
Santa Claus is the memic mastermind mind who has, fantastically, migrated from a Christian Saint to a Coke ad to a Disney icon to the only theatrical enactment that most parents will engage in on a yearly basis until their children start deciphering the packaging on ‘Santa’s’ gifts.
‘Belonging and Insecurity’ are two sides of the same deeply human coin, and any ad wizard worth their salt knows that their clients can reap considerable coin by playing Xmas hardball down the signifier line of inclusion and exclusion. Basic messaging: no one wants to spend Xmas in the stable (it’s cold and dark and Jesus, God – total buzzkill – might be there) and you have to have lots of gifts to get into the Inn. Hence, get In there and go forth and spend!

Ahhh Xmas: where God, Solstice, the End of Time, the End Times and Santa and Disney and PlayStation all get a little mixed up.

Xmas, the End Times, the End of Time… and especially Santa

I posit that Xmas is an annual celebration/folly/apocalypse/addiction frenzy arising from an ancient and existential dread of both the End of Time (Winter Solstice: what if, maybe, the sun actually doesn’t return, ever…)
and the ‘End Times’ (God shows up on earth for some serious judgement, demanding immediate payback for a lifetime ((or many lifetimes, or generations and generations, depending on whether you’re Buddhist, Hindu, or into epigenetics)) of moral debt),
while having our heightened desire for Belonging and Security (heightened by our agitation over the End of Time and the End Times) played by meme wizards employed by sales people.

Maybe it’s all over, or it’s payback time, or maybe both: let’s eat too much, drink too much, and go shopping – cha-ching.

In reaction to such a couple of really unpleasant spectres (the End of Time and the End Times), we’ll huddle together, supplant Jesus with Santa (he’s a rather jollier fellow), go on a massive shopping spree (the defacto angst panacea and pacifier of capitalist civilisation), and eat and drink like there’s no tomorrow.  This of course leaves the stragglers – those who don’t belong inside, in the Inn – out in the stables with the spectres of the End of Time and the End Time. It’s easy enough to imagine the homeless and the lonely, the poor (who can’t afford a shopping spree), the hungry and the broken-spirited, a cow, an ass, 3 sheep, 6 chickens and the barn cat (the mice are hiding), all hanging out in the barn on the longest night of the year with Jesus and Chronos (all gussied up as the Grim Reaper) over by the manure pile (it’s warmer there) resignedly toasting their annual reunion.

So, what if:

            – instead of placating our religious conscience with a Hail Mary visit to church to listen to Handel once a year (or even implicating the revolutionary poverello Jesus in this quagmire);
            – getting pissed (more than one meaning to that word) and, in some primordial instinctual way deeply distressed, at how dark it is;
            – marveling and puzzling over how Santa fits into all this (and/or dropping the whole thing on his already overburdened sleigh);
            – and falling into a memic spell the result of which is a new debt to pay off, a bunch of extra pounds to lose (another kind of debt), a crushing hangover (another kind of debt), and our children ensconced in video games and cell phone channels (designed for the brain like sugar is for the gut – more wizardry, and another kind of debt) that actually distance them even more from genuine belonging;

we took a moment to head out to the barn and say hello to the End Times and the End of Time.

How about we start, gently, with a Santa story?
My two boys are very bright and, as children gently becoming cognizant of the limits inherent in the space-time continuum, posed to me one day (at Xmas) that it was physically impossible for Santa Claus, limited by the speed of a team of flying reindeer and the sheer distance from the North Pole, to deliver gifts to children all over the entire world in one night. This was a formidable question… but… being someone who perennially exists on the borderline of the possible and impossible, the real and the fantastical, I quipped that that wasn’t such a big deal.
Santa STOPS TIME.
That’s right.
Santa just stopped time for a while, got all the presents delivered, and then started it again.
Obviously.
(I’ve heard of other parents of equally suspicious children using the explanations that Santa multiplies himself, and/or creates a parallel universe, but these explanations are both disturbing and absurd).

The credibility of this stroke of genius on my part lasted about a year, at which point the boys began a serious and irrevocable questioning of why the elves were working for Mattel, Play Station and Apple, and why all their hard work showed up in Walmart. My imagination found its limits. And theirs began their inevitable venture into the clash of the magical and fantastical with ‘the real’.

In my inspired moment, seeking to keep the magic of Santa alive just a little longer by bequeathing to Santa the power to stop time, I had not thought through the implications. To stop time on earth Santa would have had to stop the revolution of the earth around the sun, and the sun exists in an evolving galaxy, and that galaxy exists in an evolving universe and… Santa would have to bring the entire universe to a screaming halt. That’s a considerable responsibility.

Furthermore, remember that Santa gives gifts to ‘good’ kids. Not only does Santa have the capacity to stop time, Santa has an all-seeing eye for the moral character of all children in the entire world (or, at least those expecting gifts).

You better watch out,
You better not pout
You better not cry,
I’m telling you why,
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He’s making a list,
He’s checking it twice,
He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice,
Santa Claus is coming to town.

He sees you when you’re sleeping,
And he knows when you’re awake,
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake.

Santa: capable of stopping time, and of watching you when your sleeping, and knowing if you’ve been ‘bad or good’… (‘good’ being significantly associated with ‘not crying’… it makes me want to cry just considering the sheer Orwellian magnitude of such a being).
Santa: the lynchpin – the cosmic trickster and shapeshifter, the ‘distracter from distraction by distraction’ – between Jesus and Solstice, and Disneyland and your shopping spree.
[Thanks Bruce Springsteen for terrifying yet another generation of innocent children.]

I’m trying not to be distracted by flying reindeer…
It’s not easy: the End of Time and the End Times…

Death, Terror, Time, God… and Santa

What if time ended, we’re going to die, and/or, God shows up?

And why is this question making me feel a little uncomfortable and that maybe a beverage or a shopping spree is in order?

Santa? Where are you?

This is the thing. Xmas is a distraction, an anxiety soporific, an addiction frenzy, in the face of a period of time primordially associated with mortality, and religiously associated with the coming of God.

As TS Eliot put it, “humankind / Cannot bear very much reality”.

Terror Management Theory, a psychological approach based on Ernest Becker’s renowned book ‘The Denial of Death’, proposes that humans experience an irresolvable and intrinsic psychological conflict because they know they’re going to die. As the weird weak geeks of the animal kingdom we have – along with having our hands fused to our overly large frontal lobes to build tools and technologies with which to subdue everything on earth except ourselves and one another – the capacity to see into possible futures. And every one of them ends up with us dying. We have, in the poetic words of Maria Popova, an “inconsolable longing for permanency amid a universe driven by perpetual change and inevitable loss.” This conflict, according to Terror Management Theory, “produces terror, which is managed through a combination of escapism and cultural beliefs that act to counter biological reality…”.

Hello Xmas… and Santa… and flying reindeer… and drinking… and shopping…

In ‘The Sabbath’ renowned philosopher and scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel claims that contemporary civilisation is besotted with the things of space. “Reality to us is a thinghood… even God is conceived by most of us as a thing.” We expend our time to buy ‘things’… but their power terminates abruptly at the borderline of time. “As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look in its face.” Time is “a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives. Shrinking therefore from facing time we escape to things of space.” “Is the joy of possession”, Heschel writes, “an antidote to the terror of time which grows to the dread of inevitable death?”

I confess that I shrink from separating time from space, and also death. But nailed deep deep deep into language itself is the separation of nouns from verbs, things from actions, space from time. Nouns flail helplessly, alone and isolated with nothing to do or even be, while a verb (‘verb’ is a noun and, interestingly, this entire essay is ‘verbiage’), full of action, has nothing to act on. Along comes the blessed sentence (there’s more than one meaning to that word), bringing the two together. Alfred North Whitehead described all ‘things’ as ‘spatio-temporal unities’ which admirably combines space and time, but ‘a spatio-temporal unity’ is a noun.
‘Things’ (nouns) rule, and have ruled, for a long time.

Here’s a thing.

Heschel expresses a kind of dismay that “even God is perceived as a thing.”
So…
What if God isn’t a ‘thing’?

As it’s said in possibly the most popular and prosaic paradox/Koan ever (note that ‘forever’ and ‘ever’ are not nouns), ‘Change is the only constant’.
No-thing lasts forever, hence God – infinite/eternal – can’t be a thing.

So…
what, or where, is God?

The problem with the questions ‘What or Where is God?’ isn’t so much that it leaves a few billion hapless people running around trying to find him/her/it/them (with a considerable number of them quite determined that they’ve found him/her/it/them: they’re ‘In’ and everyone else is ‘Out’, violence and slavery ensue).
The problem is that it’s the wrong question.
The more useful question – and I relate this specifically to Xmas ‘time’ – is:
‘When is God?’.

‘When is God?

The first teachings of the Buddha are generally understood to be the Four Noble Truths. The second of these is that suffering is caused by the craving for ‘things’ that are transient. No ‘things’ last forever, and our ‘craving’ for them, our attachment to them, is the cause of our suffering. Possibly foremost among the things we’re attached to is ourselves; the concept (concept ‘things’ are exceedingly powerful) that we exist as separate ‘ego identities’ in space and time. “I me mine” as George Harrison so eloquently put it. And, unfortunately, “I me mine” is gonna die.

You can’t possess time.
Not even an instant.
Every ‘thing’ has a lifespan.
Me, my mum, my dad, my boys(!), my city, my country, the skyscrapers, the gothic cathedrals, the USA & China, the forests and the mountains, the planet earth, the sun, the whole cosmos is aflame with change.
No ‘thing’ will last.
Time is, as Abraham Heschel so poignantly and courageously wrote, ‘a furnace incinerating’.
Clinging to ‘things’ results in suffering.

 The spectres of transience and disruptive change elicited during Xmas time – Winter Solstice (the End of Time), Christ’s Mass (the End Times) – make us want to cling on to something, any-thing, that might just get us through the night. These ‘things’, so many of them: the ad wizards hired to make these things seem necessary for Belonging, the billions spent in marketing campaigns selling the things, the desperate people fighting over the things in Walmart on Black Friday, the credit cards maxing out to purchase the things, and the isolation felt by those who can’t buy the things for the people they love on…
Xmas.

When is God?

When is God?

When is God?

In ‘The Sabbath’ Abraham Heschel proposes the concept of the sanctity of time over and above the sanctity of ‘space’ and ‘things’. “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” Heschel writes. “Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architectures of time.”

Wow!
An organised ‘architecture of time’.
A period of time which is sacred, rather than a ‘thing’, an object.

We have this annual period of time, ‘Xmas’;
in cultures addicted to profit a kind of Sabbath gone amok, a feeding frenzy for things, a ‘desanctification’ of time. An addiction frenzy/Terror Management strategy brought on by a period of time primordially and religiously associated with the ‘End of Time’ (mortality) and the ‘End Times’ (moral debt). Let’s face it, mortality and morality, grief and shame, are the dynamic duo of addiction.
And there is nothing in this world more profitable than addiction.

Hello Santa… and marketing campaigns starting the day after Halloween… and drinking… and shopping sprees… and debt (spiralling ‘debt’, in all its forms – financial, physical, emotional – being the inevitable dynamism of addictive behaviour)…

What could it mean to ‘sanctify time’?

TIME: Chronos & Kairos

What is time??

Possibly Groucho Marx summarised Time most succinctly, “Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.” While I question Marx’s belief that bananas can fly, his supposition that “Time flies like an arrow” is, really, how most of us think of ‘time’, and is related to the Greek ‘Chronos’. 

‘Chronos’ is linear time, it has one direction, and is divided into ‘units of time’: millennium, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, seconds, etc. When you ask someone what time it is you’re asking for the chronos (it’s interesting that we called the portable chronometers we no longer wear on our wrists ‘watches’; watches watch chronos time). A chronometer is a highly accurate mechanical timepiece.  We run, in our cultures dedicated to efficiency and productivity, on ‘chronos’ time. We set our phone app to wake us up in the morning, we put in our hours (9 to 5), and are taught to design our wellness exercises (20 mins ‘mindfulness meditation’, 30 mins bicycle/jogging) to make us better able to be productive in the chronos. ‘Chronos’ is also related to ‘chronic’, frequently used in reference to a long-lasting illness, but also a negative habitual behaviour.

Chronos,
your tick-a-tock
chock-a-block
brick on brick
ruler clock
sets the limits
counts the minutes.

 Straight,
perpetuate,
you count the change,
the losses, the gains,
you count the cost,
no coin’s tossed.

Clickety-clack
snicker-snap
mousetrap
you’ve clapped
a regulator
on circumstance.
There’s no chance.

 In your bolts and nuts
no fuss or muss,
no blood or guts
no love no lust
no ashes no dust.

 One, two, three, four,
march straight down your corridor,
eyes right, ears tight,
no one needs to know what for,
close the door,
keep score.

[excerpt from ‘O’ – Nik Beeson]

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KAIROS

This seems a good time, good timing, to bring in the other word that the Greeks used in relation to time, kairos. It’s interesting to consider that ‘chronos’ is a word most folks can get a sense of in contemporary culture, but kairos is completely unknown. Possibly the most productive definition of kairos is, in fact, ‘good timing’. If chronos refers to time as a quantity, kairos refers to time as a quality. The origins of the word are related to archery and weaving. Kairos is the moment in which there is sufficient tension in a bow to generate the force for an arrow to pierce a target, and also the precise path the arrow must fly to reach its target (I’m realising here that Groucho Marx in his “Time flies like an arrow” quip succeeds in combining both chronos and kairos! Genius!). In weaving, kairos refers to the moment the gap opens in the warp of the cloth being woven for the shuttle to pass through. Both meanings, in archery and in weaving, refer to an action related to precision timing. Kairos refers to ‘a window of time’, a period when ‘the time is ripe’, during which an action is most propitious. Kairos is the word for time used in one of the most famous passages in the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 3:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

[Ecclesiastes is one of the more astonishing books in the Old Testament; an almost nihilistic meditation on the apparent lack of justice, and the meaninglessness, of much of human endeavour – quit a read!]

Both images of archery and weaving imply a kind of opening and/or a penetration into or through which something may pass; an arrow piercing an object, the shuttle deftly passing through the warp, an open window.
What could it mean for something to penetrate, or pass through, time?
How can time be ‘open’?

This is another meaning for kairos; kairos opens, penetrates and passes through chronos. Chronos’ inevitable chain of cause-and-effect is broken open by kairos, an alien and irrational breach in time initiating the potential for invention, creativity, sublimity and new meaning. Deleuze described how a skilled film director creates ‘irrational cuts’ which create ‘cracks’ or ‘fissures’ in chronological time, unhinging, and ‘throwing time out of joint’. Kairos, writes Robert Leston in his essay ‘Unhinged: Kairos and the Invention of the Untimely’, “seeps in through this interstice, shocking us out of our habitual way of accepting the flow of time.”

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote considerably on the subject of kairos writing that “Kairos means that the eternal can break into the temporal and that a new beginning can take place”.  Kairos is “an outstanding moment in the temporal process, a moment in which the eternal breaks into the temporal, shaking and transforming it and creating a crisis in the depth of human existence”. 

For Tillich kairos creates a ‘crisis’, but it’s also useful to consider that crises may be particularly propitious timings for the ‘breach’ of kairos. ‘Crisis’ used to refer to a turning point in a disease which decided between recovery or death, and before that it was the word used for a ‘sieve’, or for ‘sifting’ the wheat from the chaff. Crises, disruptions which challenge and potentially ‘dis-habituate’ (Fr. ‘deshabiller’ – to undress) habitual, chronic, patterns of behaviour, create cracks in chronos. As Leonard Cohen put it so beautifully, “There’s a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”  What I’m suggesting is that there are cracks not only in ‘things’, but in time, and that’s where the kairos gets in.

O Chronos,
you’ve made us old,
and now old,
we’ve come to know you far too well.
Yes, we see that you’re blind,
and now we’ve learned to read between your lines,
and decode your mighty spells.
We’ve felt and found the rhythm of your perpetual precision.
We raise your rhythm
and overdrive its simple,
predictable,
thrust.
We delay,
drag your beat back,
weigh your beat down,
mimic your clicks
then slip in glitch.
We’ve learned the cheats that round your brutal beats
into a blessed rhythmic rollicking wild grind.
Your forced march,
grinding forth,
grinding down,
grounding down,
ground down…
arouses us.
We sow seeds of wild chaos across
your rows of ordered symmetry.
We rewrite blind rites
tying them to meaning.
We reroute ruts so they reach streams,
and dig down deep
so the source
bursts forth.
We hang up your habits,
deshabillez-vous,
string up your strung out
and let them sing us their tunes.
We rock and we roll you,
glean the meaning from your force,
through pure contact, pure feel,
we tap, grasp and squeeze your source.

O Chronos,
we send your remorseless tick-tock clickety-clack off track.
We tick your clock off,
bend your springs back,
pull the pins from your tracks,
spread them wide
and dive inside.

[excerpt from ‘O’]

SANCTIFYING TIME (AWAKENING)

So, what’s the relationship between chronos and kairos and the original theme of this… essay/verbiage… Xmas.

Xmas occurs, annually, during Solstice and Christ’s Mass which provoke two primordial and existential concerns: the ‘End of Time’ (Solstice – mortality) and the ‘End Times’ (Christ’s Mass – moral debt).  I’m proposing that deep in the psyches of folks run off their feet trying to keep up with the relentless need for continuous growth and productivity of most contemporary cultures is an intrinsic sense of reckoning with death and judgement. 

Am I going to die?
Am I a good (enough) person?

Solstice and Christ’s Mass are annual (chronic) crises/disruptions in our chronic lives. Xmas – a kind of frenzy of purchasing promoted by a profit driven culture – is a pretty typical addiction response to an unbearable situation. Down, under, beneath Santa – and the desperate flights to Walmart, and Amazon, and Apple – is an existential crisis.

But…
Kairos kind of likes crises, the cracks in time.
So, according to Deleuze and Tillich and our dear Canadian poet/troubadour Leonard Cohen, the rituals of Solstice, and Christ’s Mass, and even Xmas, present an opportunity for the arrow and the shuttle of kairos.

RITUALS

A chronos architecture of time is a bit like a bunker; a chronic, predictable and habitual structure of time, hard to penetrate, hard to see out of.
An architecture of time open to kairos is something more like what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke called “a makeshift hut to receive the music”; a curious, temporal, even nomadic, structure of time, designed to receive the Open, the Outside, Surprise, ‘the music’.

 A ‘ritual’ is an architecture of time. The word ‘ritual’ comes from the Sanskrit Ritu which refers to a fixed or appointed time, especially the proper time for sacrifice. Sacrifice doesn’t sound so good. It’s not a word we’re used to now. It sounds like goats and lambs and blood. It sounds like giving away something precious. However, Rilke defined ‘sacrifice’ in a surprising way: “the boundless resolve, no longer limitable in any direction, to achieve one’s purest, inmost, possibility.” Not so much about goats, and lambs… A relinquishment of the shit (make no mistake, some of it might feel like really good shit) that’s in the way of possibility and freedom. Rilke flips the focus of  ‘sacrifice’ from ‘things you have to give away’, to an attitude (boundless resolve) towards freedom (pure possibility).

In that rituals are usually ‘rote’, regular fixed or appointed times (the sabbath for example), they are related to chronos. In that they are also usually related to connecting with the divine, or meaning, they are also related to kairos. Ritual is the time for the divine. An ‘architecture of time’ in which chronos and kairos, time and meaning, have an opportune moment in which to meet.

PILGRIMS

John Wayne once said, cryptically, and possibly referencing the mystery and potentiality of the immanence of kairos in chronos in the present moment, “What is it now, Pilgrim?”. Jorge Luis Borges, less cryptically, said that “The object of the pilgrimage turned out to be a pilgrim.” The object of most pilgrimages is… God… and so Borges is making it plain that God’s on the move or, that God is a movement.

Typically I don’t really like to use the word ‘God’. Too many possible interpretations, and it’s a noun, a ‘thing’ (or, for plenty of folks, a person, with a gender, usually male).  When I was younger I was something of a record hitchhiker (I racked up over 70,000 miles with my thumb– no guff) and became deeply accustomed to the questions, shortly after catching a ride, “Do you believe in God?’, or “Are you a believer?”, at which point I would understand I was in for a ‘conversion project’ by an evangelical Christian (many of whom, I must say, were exceedingly kind and generous). My response began to become rote: “What do you mean by God?’, ‘What do you mean by believe?’, etc.

For me ‘God’, if I have to use the word, isn’t someone/some-thing ‘out there’ – in the clouds, above the clouds, or in a book, or outer space, or in the trees, or in the future, or in the past, or in particularly ‘spiritual’ people – but a ‘happening’. God happens. A kind of revelation not so much in space, but in time. Not so much a noun, but a verb. A crack in the orderly chronic marching of time, and the chronic bunkers of my own heart and mind, during which glimpses (occasionally stunning) into a vast beauty and love occurs, and which can tether me to an enduring sense of meaning.  God’s an awakening; not an awakening to the existence of something else ‘out there’, but the actual experience of waking up, as if out of a spell. This experience might be best described as an experience of ‘agape’, a word which combines ‘open-mouthed’ surprise and wonder, with love.

[This definition of ‘God’, that it’s an ‘experience of awakening’ is, BTW, why I need frequent naps…]

I once wrote that,
“God’s not a noun.
God’s a ceaseless
leapingness
into loving.”

Mr. Rogers said it somewhat better: “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly as he or she is, right here and now.” “Love isn’t a state” (a static ‘thing’) but ‘an active struggle’ which occurs in time, specifically, “right here and now”. Abraham Herschel furthers this notion of ‘God’s’ presence in time, and specifically, in the present moment. “There is this present moment because God is present. Every instant is an act of creation. A moment is not a terminal but a flash, a signal of Beginning. Time is perpetual innovation, a synonym for continuous creation.” “The higher goal of spiritual living is…”, writes Hershel, “to face sacred moments.”

GOOD RITUALS

A ritual is an architecture of time, and Xmas, in that it’s an annual, chronic, event with a certain set of behavioural expectations, buying a lot of things perhaps being foremost, verges on being a ritual. But a ‘ritual’ combines chronos and kairos. Xmas seems to be missing the kairos. In fact the attributes of kairos, the meaning elements of a ritual which are decidedly present in Solstice rituals (which provoke the meaning making potential of considering mortality) and in Christ’s Mass rituals (which provoke the meaning making potential of considering ‘God-in-the-world’) appear to be shut out of Xmas. The Xmas addiction frenzy may well be something like a cultural bunker, a strategy to evade the existential questions provoked by considering the End of Time and the End Times.
Who wants an existential crisis?
But, remember, kairos likes a good crisis: it creates the gap for the shuttle to get through, a target for the arrow to strike, the crack for the light to get in.

A good ritual – in combining chronos and kairos, time and meaning – actually invites provocative existential questions. It’s an architecture of time designed precisely for that reason. A good ritual is a meaning-making time machine.

In numerous ancient Solstice traditions (Zoroastrian, Germanic, Celtic) it was believed that evil spirits wander the earth on the longest night. The ritual response was (and in some places continues to be) to gather together through the night to feast, read poetry, sing songs and tell stories, because the joy and wisdom of such a gathering banishes the dark forces.

As a musician, I’m particularly attracted to the role of music in such rituals. A good ritual serves in the words of Rilke, as “a makeshift hut to receive the music.” Music is an art form admirably well suited to express time as music occurs, intrinsically, through time. Music isn’t made of atoms, things. Music is a sequence of vibrations that change the shape of air molecules into, sometimes exquisitely and meaningfully, structured sound waves. And so, maybe the relationship of music to atoms is much like the relationship of kairos to chronos; kairos has the capacity to change the shape of chronos. Meaning changing the shape of time.

WHEN THE NIGHT COMES

I started this somewhat outrageous verbiage by calling into question the rote of Xmas, going on to propose that it’s an ‘addiction frenzy’ to escape the existential crises provoked by the two annual events that it overlays: Winter Solstice (arousing the crisis of ‘the End of Time’ and mortality) and Christ’s Mass (arousing the crisis of ‘the End Times’ and judgement/morality). Then, in following the question incited by these existential crises, I ended up, through ‘time’, and chronos and kairos, confessing to a description of ‘God’ as a ‘happening’ and an ‘awakening’. Finally, I landed on the ‘architectures of time’ called ‘rituals’ and how a good ritual combines chronos and kairos, time and meaning.

I’m thinking that a word that somehow summarises the tension at the centre of this is ‘transience’. ‘Transience’, from the Latin transire, to “cross over, go over, pass over, hasten over, pass away” expresses so succinctly the attachment we have to ‘things’, and how time just keeps on taking them away. ‘Transience’ lives in the tension between things and time.

‘Transience’ is a word we use to describe our experience of how things just never stay the same, no matter how much we hope they’ll stay; time takes it all away. And my apostatic description of God as a ‘pilgrim’, a ‘happening’, an ‘awakening’, is a way of trying to keep up, keep pace with, catch the timing of, transience. Without transience, there’d just be a lot of static things, and no room for anything to happen – for example, God.

Nick Cave, master songwriter of the dark underbelly of pleasant worlds, expresses it beautifully in one of his responses to folks who ask him questions in The Red Hand Files:

“This feeling… of alertness to the inner-spirit of things — this humming — comes from a hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of things and, indeed, our own impermanence. This lesson ultimately animates and illuminates our lives. We become witnesses to the thrilling emergency of the present — a series of exquisite and burning moments, each extinguished as the next arises. These magical moments are the bright jewels of loss to which we cling.”

When the Xmas bunker rolls around, I’ll endeavour – it may take years – to design a ritual to celebrate, even joyfully, the coalescence of Solstice and Christ’s Mass and the existential crises they provoke. I don’t really want to drive away the dark spirits that drive the consumerism and anxiety that arise around that time. I’ve met a dark spirit and, thanks to some very good friends who are very kind and who stood by me, I was able to see – after many years of being terrified by it – that it just wanted to be loved and even needed in some useful way, just like everyone and everything else.

There will of course be music. 

Here’s a good start.

Stand By Me

 When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
Well I won’t be afraid
No I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

 If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall
Or the mountain should crumble to the sea,
I won’t cry, I won’t cry,
No I won’t shed a tear,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me,
Stand by me.

Ben E. King
John Lennon
O Rosetta

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A sea of brown fallen leaves
rises up into the trees
bursts into colour
and grows green.

Muted, muzzled horns,
find their tornadoes,
and blow, full-throated, wholely free.

Dead dust,
touched by starlight,
bursts into a Phoenix of flames.

Ashes condense into clay,
writhe and configure
into lithe bones,
which leap into play.

A giggling angel dips her flaming halo
into our mortal pool
and drinks.

[excerpt from ‘O’]