So this is Christ Mass
What is Christmas?
What was it for me as a child? I don't think I can deconstruct that; it was a thing in itself. It wasn't about getting stuff, though I cared more about that then than I do now. Having time off from school certainly played a part, but school was much less (and much less consistently) a burden back then, that that surely couldn't have held a majority share in Christmas's magic. And the religious elements; let's be honest, I was not equipped to analyze or care about those in sufficient depth that they could dominate the meaning of the holiday for me, though the symbolism packaged with them certainly played a large part. Rather, it was a holistic aesthetic and emotional coup, a particular arrangement of symbols and thoughts and sensations that I don't believe will ever come together for me again in quite that form. But that's not a tragedy, such things were not made to last, and I must push forward and try to understand things anew rather than clinging to the past.
I am a paradox, limitlessly double-minded. I champion notions of "deconstruction" and "synthesis" (not merely to be opaque, I assure you; I have at great length come to understand what these concepts mean), but at the same time I hold strongly to many aspects of cultural conservatism. I am cynical, though I consider it in my nature to combat cynicism. I strain to rein in my emotional impulses and to maintain objectivity in contentious matters, but at the same time consider myself an aesthete and Romantic. It's little wonder I find it such a struggle to create an identity for myself.
For the past several years, my Christian faith has been tissue-thin (if 3-ply in the best of times). But in my need for meaning, and my repulsion at the idea of Christmas descending into meaninglessness, there is only one place I can think to begin my formulation: Christ Mass.
The Christ Mass, the "season of hope", or the "season of peace", as it is both religiously and (by the most idealistic) secularly touted, is a celebration of and reflection upon the absolute cornerstone of the Christian faith. But it is a hope and peace that often seems to have been so many times photocopied and faxed as to have faded to grey - a vague, amorphous emotional form, perhaps a very pale glow of the undefined wonder Christmas held as a child.
But there is potency in the hope of peace offered by the Christ that cannot be adulterated if we only bother to look into it. The hope I find today is in the inclusiveness of that offer. It was available no less to prostitutes than to scholars, no less to the infantile than the sage... and so it is not a stretch to believe, in this season that beckons that we give belief a chance, that it is available no less to a 21st-century first-world overeducated cynic than to a 1st-century Pharisee.
This is sufficient for me to have a merry Christmas - I will find peace in the hope of peace. For now a vague hope, but a hope that carries with it the hope of a concrete object and which may, perhaps sooner than I think, once again take the form of worship.
What was it for me as a child? I don't think I can deconstruct that; it was a thing in itself. It wasn't about getting stuff, though I cared more about that then than I do now. Having time off from school certainly played a part, but school was much less (and much less consistently) a burden back then, that that surely couldn't have held a majority share in Christmas's magic. And the religious elements; let's be honest, I was not equipped to analyze or care about those in sufficient depth that they could dominate the meaning of the holiday for me, though the symbolism packaged with them certainly played a large part. Rather, it was a holistic aesthetic and emotional coup, a particular arrangement of symbols and thoughts and sensations that I don't believe will ever come together for me again in quite that form. But that's not a tragedy, such things were not made to last, and I must push forward and try to understand things anew rather than clinging to the past.
I am a paradox, limitlessly double-minded. I champion notions of "deconstruction" and "synthesis" (not merely to be opaque, I assure you; I have at great length come to understand what these concepts mean), but at the same time I hold strongly to many aspects of cultural conservatism. I am cynical, though I consider it in my nature to combat cynicism. I strain to rein in my emotional impulses and to maintain objectivity in contentious matters, but at the same time consider myself an aesthete and Romantic. It's little wonder I find it such a struggle to create an identity for myself.
For the past several years, my Christian faith has been tissue-thin (if 3-ply in the best of times). But in my need for meaning, and my repulsion at the idea of Christmas descending into meaninglessness, there is only one place I can think to begin my formulation: Christ Mass.
The Christ Mass, the "season of hope", or the "season of peace", as it is both religiously and (by the most idealistic) secularly touted, is a celebration of and reflection upon the absolute cornerstone of the Christian faith. But it is a hope and peace that often seems to have been so many times photocopied and faxed as to have faded to grey - a vague, amorphous emotional form, perhaps a very pale glow of the undefined wonder Christmas held as a child.
But there is potency in the hope of peace offered by the Christ that cannot be adulterated if we only bother to look into it. The hope I find today is in the inclusiveness of that offer. It was available no less to prostitutes than to scholars, no less to the infantile than the sage... and so it is not a stretch to believe, in this season that beckons that we give belief a chance, that it is available no less to a 21st-century first-world overeducated cynic than to a 1st-century Pharisee.
This is sufficient for me to have a merry Christmas - I will find peace in the hope of peace. For now a vague hope, but a hope that carries with it the hope of a concrete object and which may, perhaps sooner than I think, once again take the form of worship.