Christmas: the rhythm's the thing

TIME, even to science is still a bit of a mystery.

But Earth-time’s leading edge, as it scours its circuits of this turning planet, seems to sweep up the energies of the day, of the night — the joys and torments, creations and annihilations — and radiate them to the infinities.

Each day, it’s all just a little bit different. We are different. And — if we put aside whatever fears unsettled us yesterday — we can breakfast on new insights, opportunities and hopes.

But, here in the north, winter has come.

The nectar’s gone. The fruit have fallen.

The frosts have bitten: bees huddle in their catacombs. Squirrels, finger-lickin’ fat, snuggle in their nests.

The life-sapped stillness of bare trees and greyed grass tell us it’s over, dead, done, ended.

And isn’t the World a mess, all things considered? Walking the dog, I find the weakened grass revealing more of the roadside trash. It makes me wonder what General Petraeus is buying his wife for Christmas.

Christmas… the birthday party for… no, not for Santa, for Yeshua — for “Jesus”, whose ministry became the foundation stone of Christianity… or, ah, alternatively, it’s just the “season”.

The date was not arbitrarily chosen. It coincides with the northern winter solstice.

So Christianity celebrates not just a person, but all that person stood for …and everything he came to stand for: new hope, new life, new joy… the possibility of redemption.

The solstice is easily explained: have an obedient child hold a basketball. It’s the sun. Take a wee green pea carefully between thumb and forefinger: it’s about the Earth’s relative size. Hold the pea on a 23.5 degrees angle. Which end is nearer the basketball? The top? The bottom? Now, walk a big circle, counterclockwise, keeping about 90 feet away from the child (if he’s still there), with your attention fixed on the pea. Watch what happens to its “top” and “bottom”. If you suddenly find yourself in heavy traffic or a neighbor’s kitchen, move the child and start again.

Once around the circle represents a year. Half way around is six months. Take your time. This is important. Stop when you get to June and consider the pea: which end is closer now? The rest is self-evident.

Exactly!

Actually, we don’t need the seasons explained.

What matters is the rhythm.

But let’s not rush ahead to the “first century”: it’s a long story.

Since Neolithic times, the shortest day of the year has been marked as a turning point: after it, the lengthening days will lead into spring and usher in all the beauty and abundance of another summer.

Nature had not trashed life, after all. Joy and plenty with goodness would return: refreshed and revitalized. Cultures all over the planet drew hope and vitality from the solstice.

The ancient Babylonians celebrated Zagmuk; for Persians it was Deygan; old Anglo-Saxons held a “mother’s night”: Modraniht. At the same time, across the Atlantic, the Incas were into Inti Raymi.

In 1995, in Brighton, England, a group of New Age Brits launched a Burning the Clocks festival as a counter-attack on the debauch of commercialized Christmas. Oddly, at least from a Canadian perspective, it was called off in 2009 because snow and icy weather were forecast.

In the Northern Hemisphere, this year’s winter solstice falls on 21 December. In the Southern Hemisphere it fell on June 20. There, despite the milder climate, Maori people observe Matariki (the rising of the Pleiades constellation).

Which brings us, at last, back to Christmas… and, whether you or I are Christians, or not, it’s what the longer days MEAN that matter.

Think about those longer days.

Remember them?

The wildflowers?… the bees?

Remember witnessing their constant relationship. It has been going on, just as you saw it last summer, for 100 million years or more.

And, remember, in sustaining itself, the bee, fly, wasp or butterfly (whatever pollinator you have in mind) also sustains the plant. In fact, through its ancestors, it helped that plant to evolve, and made possible today’s diversities of all we see, smell and taste among flowering plants, their fruit and in byproducts like beeswax and honey. Few of the fruit or vegetables we eat would have formed without a pollinator.

Moreover, all of these good things have long served humans as sources of inspiration. Inspiration is as essential as food and water.

Sure, it can all be explained. But, when we look for “meaning”, instead of walking around in circles, we see that “the whole” is far greater than the sum of its parts. Everything has been benefitting.

Pollinators are creatures for which we seldom spare a thought, far less esteem as our evolutionary elders or teachers. Yet, in sustaining themselves, they benefit us all — even in mid-winter — honey and lemon is a great treatment for winter colds — and, apart from the odd sting, they do us no harm.

We seem to have fallen into a dangerous place where, in sustaining ourselves, we damage our planet (including the flowers and their pollinators). We impoverish, dupe and damage each other and each others’ cultures; we surround ourselves with “collateral damage” … perhaps we’d do well to heed more humbly the teachings of the beauty and abundance that embrace us?

And, doing that, we can feast on the hope and joy the “holiday season” offers: the hopes that Christmas offers. Forget the economist who tells you that deepening your consumer debt for Christmas puts a great, passing spark into “The Economy”.

There are far more important things get going with: new hope, new life, new joy. Even the possibility of redemption. Enjoy!

The "god" vexation

It seems to have been "forever": a deep human need to find a reassuring appreciation of the mystery of existence.

“Reassurance” is relative. Some cultures have populated the infinite with personifications of oppressive brutality, many have come to notions of more or less delicately balanced forces and a few to concepts of all-sustaining total goodness. Enter: "GOD". Or "the gods". 

In each case, appropriate human responses have been prescribed by religions or wisdom teachers: unwavering obedience, public or private sacrifice, formulaic worship and adoration, denial or annihilation of “self”,  obedience to codes of socially practiced goodness, obedience to codes of purity and “cleanliness”, the practice of ecstatic social ritual or private reflection and meditation.

Across the board, you can find all sorts of similarities… and all sorts of differences. Many of the differences can be traced to cultural insights, biases and practices (the tastes of the “gods” happily coinciding with the culture’s set of sanctions). Many of the similarities can be linked to widespread or universal human capacities (we share finite abilities), or to the daily needs of social animals: genes or survival.

But, no matter how the impulse is expressed or where you find the shapes of its expression, the existential mysteries still vex human consciousness: “god” does not go away.

This is where atheism fails, not because of its apparently watertight arguments but because "god" will not go away. And whether or not “god” or the “gods” take form in the human mind or at the furthest ends of the universe, or exist all-pervasively, is similarly irrelevant — in that case, we are just conjecturing about the gods’ location, not their existence. Either way, they are just as “present”.

There is one way to get away from the issue. That is to build a brick wall  around all we think we know and call the wall “the ends of the universe”… enter the “modern”, rational, “practical” man of action, the pragmatist who gets things done. As a cultural style, it produces the literalist, the materialist, the rule of law, the clinician, the accountant, dualism and fundamentalism thrive: you can only be “right” or “wrong”. Minds close. All becomes vanity.

The trap here is that there’s no “higher court” of appeal: there is no effective recourse for aesthetic, intuitive or “spiritual” values and “emotionalism” is a weakness. Nothing is sacred.

We have moved a long way from the Middle Ages, when magic pulled the strings, to the rising reign of the rational …and the danger is that human beings have always tended to swing between extremes.

We need “religion”, “spirituality” and “faith” in order to be fully human.

THIS is the “bedrock” of any faith… not what is “believed” but where we plant its foundations. It's the context, not the content that's decisive. And the context is the absolute mystery of existence.Where, in our being, is the seed of faith? How have we found it?

I don’t think the churches, collectively, know. I don’t think they even think very deeply about it, nor our culture and the directions in which we are pulled — at the deepest levels — by it.

But we are healthiest and happiest when we are most fully human; not necessarily when we are rich and clever.

We find “god” when we seek the wholeness of our own humanity.

Where are we going?

HOW do we go about that search?

Here are my thoughts:

CURIOSITY… as an youthful atheist I felt the purpose of life was to experience it all as fully as possible: in New Zealand in those days, that meant going up mountains, down caves, into the wilderness and, as often as possible, to the ocean: sailing, diving, surfing or just swimming. It meant partying and mixing it with different (mostly Polynesian) cultures. This led me to an awareness of an overriding unity that makes life “real” as opposed to something that passes by. 
I found that incidents began coalescing into narratives — there was some kind of unintelligible “meaning” to it all. I experienced this as the biggest “why?” of them all. So I tried doing stuff I didn’t think I wanted to do, just to push the boundaries and this led me into religion and on into Christianity (of a sort). I’ve sought meaning intellectually but, much more importantly, experientially.

OPEN-NESS… to life, people, places… accepting the unexpected, the “strange” and the “stranger”. It’s an amazingly diverse little World. Without open-ness I think my curiosity might have dried up. I feel I’ve come to faith by trying to be the least interesting person I know. At the same time, it is the stimulus — a vivid face of love — I’ve found among very different people that’s given me confidence to seek my “self”-hood.

But self-hood has no meaning to me without its connectedness to the “meaning” I began to discern as an atheist. While open-ness adds to the narrative (meaning) and self-hood — which inevitably becomes defined in the context of some sort of community — it does nothing to diminish the mystery: the mystery keeps expanding. Self-hood helps me enjoy the ride and, thereby, learn from it.

LOVE… love rises when I let myself be passionate about entering into experience. And love then energises and heightens the experience. I find it difficult not to feel love rise among most the people and in most of the places to which I’ve let myself be led. I’ve seen love expressed widely enough to conclude that “love” is a human being’s natural state. 

The distance any of us moves from that natural state is a measure of how screwed up things are. 

But I easily get immersed in and distracted by all sorts of beauty — beauty is, in my conception, god's language of love — and incessant drama, often as commonplace as a spider making a web, a fish in the river, a cloud unfurling in a high wind, the way a creature moves… and by watching people interact: you can learn more about people by watching their movements, gestures and expressions as they interact with each other than you could from a transcript of their conversation. And it all adds to the grand narrative of existence.

BUT there are obstacles.

• “Wants” and “needs”: To serve a need or a want is to narrow your frames of experience — it becomes necessary to exclude the “distractions”, to “focus”. The false premise behind pursuing “wants” is that fulfillment and happiness are “out there”. I can’t remember ever having seen  the satisfaction of that sort of “want” bring enduring pleasure or joy. On the contrary, it usually seems to spark awareness of some new “want”. I’ve known people who have been made made less happy than they expected by relief from desperate material need. The hope that sustained them through their direst times and gave them the resilience to last the distance… that was the basis of their joy — even after the need was satisfied. 

Most of us though, in the global middle class of “Western” societies generate wants and needs, it seems, for their own sake. So, blinkered by fanciful “needs”, we consume vast amounts of “entertainment” because we are blind to the torrents of stimulus that wash over us ever moment, everywhere we are. (According to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s annual Communications Monitoring Report released on 4 September, the “average” Canadian watched 28.5 hours of television a week in 2011, up from 28 hours a week in 2010.) And entertainment annihilates awe.

• ANXIETY… is another enemy of faith. Anxiety is a culturally induced frame of mind that draws boundaries close and dampens interest in anything beyond one's immediate self.. Our own, very often groundless, little fears and worries about trivialities nag us away from curiosity and the risk-taking that open-ness to life requires. We are made to fret about our comfort zones and our fretting too often grows into fear. And fear is paralyzing. If anything can damn us, it's fear and anxiety.

As I said above: we are healthiest and happiest when we are most fully human; not necessarily when we are rich and clever. And, when we seek the wholeness of our own humanity, we find “god”.

It really is a wonder...

WONDER’s a word that’s long carried with it strong implications of openness to joy. It’s a word that has been traced back to the origins of our English language. It isn’t a new emotion. And it’s typically our first response to the giddy depths of mystery.

Wonder has been credited with energising human curiosity, inspiring art and the origins of both religion and science. It penetrates deeply, extending the senses and animating the intellect.

Mystery energises us. Mystery gives us the appetite to strive to understand, first of all ourselves, and then in order to become what we should. Mystery makes it clear that we’re all humanity together, and that we inhabit a shared predicament. It’s one that makes us burn with awe and curiosity, so it’s good for us to talk with each other. But is also teaches us that cleverness is an illusion: it has too few dimensions to approach truth.

Mystery is neither good nor evil; it is enfolded into one human life no more or less than any other. Human lives can in turn only enfold themselves into the mystery, one at a time. The mystery is far more to be trusted than our deepest insight or anxiety. After all, as most other species seem to be aware, it’s where we are and how we all got to be here. So who are we to be picky?

The greatest gift mystery gives us is wonder… wonder’s essential to being human.

BUT, a little while ago, when I searched the word “mystery” in the “books” category at amazon.ca, the title that popped up at the top of the list was a work called: The Mystery Method: The Foolproof Way to Get Any Woman You Want Into Bed. So, expecting an tale of rejection and disappointment, I read the first “reader review”… but, no. It was glowing. And I soon had to look up “PUA” in Wikipedia. I discovered it means “pick up artist” and that there’s a “PUA” genre of “literature”.

Putting to one side the images this suggested of sullen, drooling men with low foreheads, their long, over-sized libidos slithering along behind them, I returned to amazon.ca where I discovered that, for $18.96, I could buy another favourably reviewed book called God is a Woman: Dating Disasters. Here, in a single non sequitur, was a title that simultaneously trivialised concepts of “god”, “woman”, “dating” and “disaster”. Breathing deeply, the moron images came right back.

It really gets wearisome, beating a path through the morass of mindlessness that the “rise of civilisation” has managed to generate.

We of the West claim to have spent thousands of years in the pursuit of knowledge, human dignity, truth and the “just” society… we have aimed for the stars, walked on the Moon and, inexplicably, wallow around in neurosis, vacuity, trashy dependencies, violence, despond, timidity and credulity, and the inane trivia that endlessly belches from the bowels of a global entertainment industry.

A human consciousness needs real food to flourish. It starves on trivialities and simulations. A healthy human consciousness sings with birds and breezes, weeps with a suffering friend, is grateful for goodness, needs and gives love, is distracted by beauty, seeks and values friendship, enjoys laughter, esteems intellect, is endlessly curious; it loves more readily than it hates, opposes injustice and is from time to time fired with inexplicable joy.  But it has to be fed. It can’t thrive in stasis or find peace in one place: it has to journey.

A starting point is immediately at hand: beauty.

Although “beauty”, too, is a word that’s been savagely trivialised, beauty itself is inviolate. Beauty is an experience of the BE-ing of goodness. It attracts. It inspires. And it redeems words like “mystery” and “wonder” because beauty lies at their core.

Beauty, it is commonly said, lies in the eye of the beholder. That isn’t true. Beauty is primal. But beauty undoubtedly exists, long before it is beheld.

Among the varieties of stone most favored by sculptors in marble for more than two and a half millennia — since the time of the Athenian cultural efflorescence — has been the luminously white marble of Naxos, a small island in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea.

Its fine grain and capacity to take a lustrous, polished finish made it a prized material for temples and statues of gods. Naxian marble has a capacity to glow as though it is on the point of being animated by an inner energy. Glistening in the brilliant Mediterranean sunshine of 2600 years ago, the freshly erected, 25-foot high statue in Naxian marble of Apollo in Delos must have been every bit as breath-taking as its creators intended.

It all begins with the sea: like time, its long, regular oceanic risings and valleyings, its sharper, breaking pitching and heaving, its rush to shores and hissing retreats, and beneath the sinewy flow of currents, a dark, seeming stillness. And beneath even that, there continue the achingly slow journeyings of the earth’s mantle itself… sliding and folding under to soften and grow molten or, prised upwards, rising and hardening so that the seas toss their wrack against new shores whilst patiently gnawing away at the old.

It all begins with the sea, like the surface-parting exhalations of whales that loom for air from their ringing depths, the majestic passage of sharks, the otherworldliness of depths where colour is washed away and countless creatures live lives that shake off everything we know from our circumscribed lives on earth to inhabit a three-dimensional freedom that surpasses even that of the globe-circling albatross; the heaving, changing otherness of it, the smell of it, the taste of it, the ever-presence of it, the plunge and crackle of surf, and the lurch of a surfboard catching the wave; the yawing roll of the deep ocean swell, lucent-black under a keel, and the trailing wake that slowly vanishes; oyster-clad rocks and spray-drenched mussel beds, tresses of kelp on the rocks, the thud and thrust of a filling sail and a ship’s churning wallow through the waves, that ship-smell of tar and cordage and iodine, the glowing trails of fish through phosphorescent subtropical seas at night while overhead the stars reflect on the open water where swells rise and fall as they did for millions of human lifetimes before the first human appeared, eons of motion, never the same, never different.

The loneliness of the sea’s constant, animated companionship, its power to console or destroy… this it where it all begins. Even the marble began here because, for at least 500 million years, small one-celled creatures called Foraminifera have teemed in the seas. We need microscopes to see them, but they take up calcium salts and carbon dioxide from the water and transform them into tiny shells for themselves. Their shapes are countless and striking in their life-formed beauty.

Over the millennia, these tiny creatures have lived and died, and their tiny shells rained slowly to the ocean floor to form deep beds of nearly pure sediment. The gathering weight compressed the small shells into limestone.

In some parts of the world, beds of limestone rock were lifted upwards by the planet’s slow re-adjustments. Water, slightly acidic from decaying plants and deepening soil, seeped into crevices and very gradually mined out dripping tunnels of underground watercourses and, as each small droplet of minerals-laden water evaporated, it left a trace of calcium carbonate behind. The residues turned underground caverns into pillared, chandeliered, glittering wonderlands that can be seen by human eyes only when people make their way into these unlikeliest of places — squeezing through tiny passages, scaling sheer, underground rock faces, swimming through dark pools and crawling through fine, clinging mud — then light lights and look about… and wonder. It is still possible to be the first person ever to stand in such a place and to reel with the revelation of it all.

In other parts of the world, the deep sheets of limestone were carried far into the Earth’s mantle: to depths where the core’s intense heat melts rock. Molten, the limestone was lifted again, and as it cooled, crystals formed. In a few places, where the limestone was sufficiently pure and the crystals that formed in the cooling were small, the rising layers contained lodes of fine-grained, white marble.

Marble quarry on the Aegean island of Naxos

The neighbouring islands of Naxos and Paros rose from the sea endowed with such a stone. And, eventually, human beings stumbled upon this remarkable rock and, in their desire to honour the gods they’d moulded from the mystery, found a purpose for it that was appropriate to its worth. It is another wonder, an afterthought of nature, that placed beside the shimmering white marble are black seams of emery: the abrasive rock that is perfect substance with which to work the sculpted surface of marble to that heart-stopping polish.

A seam of black emery in Naxian marble.

My point in all of this is that beauty cannot be confined to this place or that. It permeates our world and is discernible everywhere and its discernment is a conscious act that ignites feelings of hope and “rightness”, meaning and gratitude: a “fit” with goodness.

There’s something elemental and universal in its character. The beauty of a musical note has been a part of the Earth’s acoustic capacity since the Earth was formed. The beauty we experience in various configurations of light, of sound, or form may be more of less apparent in different ways to each of us but it is there for us all. Nor does beauty ever seem to be a sufficient end in itself: it propels consciousness forward. It nags at its every beholder to take the next step, to continue the journey.

When and where did our sense of beauty get marginalised? Why? How did the idea of “beauty” get reduced to a broad-spectrum, unnecessary buzz-word? What makes us so often the arbiters and trivialisers of beauty rather than its discoverers and celebrators?

Real beauty is everywhere. Every insect I’ve ever seen, every creature I’ve seen, has been a masterpiece of dynamic design, a fusion of form and function that fascinates the mind as well as inspiring the spirit … an aesthetic marvel. Scientists estimate there are close to 10 million different species of insect. They pollinate our fruit trees and flowers, they give us silk, they give us honey, they are food for many people … and most are benign: unsung contributors to our wellbeing. And, moreover, creatures like this have been around for 400 million years, compared with our 750,000 or so.

We have a few blueberry bushes that produce delicious, health-promoting fruit. Blueberries are the sort of thing we tend to talk about “by the pound” — and there's nothing like commodification to rip the meaning from things.

But look at the complexity of one single blueberry: the seed-bearing pale flesh that tastes so different from the astringent skin. But two flavours complement each other beautifully and uniquely. And they’re not really very “blue” at all. Each berry is a gifted thing to pop into your mouth, but it’s also beautiful in its form.

So what gives us the capacity to be transported by beautiful flavours?

And sounds …

And colours …

And smells…

And textures …

And sensations …

And what does it mean? We seem to have evolved with a capacity to apprehend an infinite array of beauty, and to grow our wisdom in its “soil”.

And, primed with beauty, consciousness itself can hope to become beautiful.