The True Meaning of Christmas

(Spoiler:  I would never tell, even if I knew it. I like mysteries.)

A few weeks ago I had lunch with three Buddhists.  (Four if one counts the woman who had been a Buddhist but who now had dementia so that she didn't much participate in the conversation, although I wonder if she didn't best exhibit the true Buddha nature.)  It was an interesting lunch in many ways.  They were each students and practitioners of different Buddhist traditions, so much of their talk was about those differences.  They were all pretty advanced in their practices.   I kinda led them along for a while, showing as much innocence as I can muster before admitting to having been a practicing Christian priest. So for a while we shared stories of how many divergent/converging paths there are in the two religions, and of how many of the daily practices could be similar.

The ultimate question of the lunch was directed at me.  (I had been the one asking most of the questions most of the time.):  Did I still 'believe in' Christianity?  Not being sure what each of them might mean by Christianity, I said I would answer that question in terms of whether I thought that the Symbols of the Nicene Creed were true.  And I said, of course I didn't.  I mean, what does it mean, 'light from light'?  And wouldn't things be things become terribly cluttered with 'the resurrection of the dead'?  And I said that, of course I do.  It is a beautifully consistent and elegant way to express the relationship between the parts of the world, the causes and effects, and only claims to be dogma, that is, the best we can do to express the inexpressible.  Then we traded phone numbers and said we would meet again and have coffee--or tea, in the case of those non-believers who only drink tea.

But of course, we haven't, and I had forgotten about that conversation until I tried to watch a video stream of the Advent Lessons and Carols from Washington National Cathedral.  I did pretty well until the Dean of the Cathedral replaced the traditional bidding prayer for Lessons and Carols, which is about our listening to stories and praying for the world, with asking God to tell us the 'true meaning of Christmas'.  At that point I gave up, because I knew what followed would not be the wonderfully complex, multivalent ambiguities of a collection of stories from many places and times combined with songs from many places and times that reflect on those stories but an attempt to make the meaning of Christmas that we should elect Elizabeth Warren president of the United States.  Now, I could live with someone's suggesting that electing such a person president might be congruent with the meaning of Christmas.  But I can't accept that it is possible to  to reduce Christmas to one meaning, to claim that there is true meaning of Christmas and that we err to expand the feast to include pagan practices like yule logs and trees from old non- or ore-Christians sources or non-, post-Christian urban practices like stealing the baby Jesus from the nativity scene in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, or lighting the front of Saks in New York. 

If we really do believe in 'One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible,' then we are  stuck with a lot of things that we find difficult to accept as true, such as Santa Claus being at one time in every department store in the developed world and coming down chimneys in houses with steam heat.  But, hey, if you think you understand quantum physics, then you don't understand it.

So, I would suggest that when someone tells you 'the true meaning of Christmas', smile, because that would perhaps 'rejoice [the Christ Child's] heart', and then put that meaning in a bag of gifts to ponder.  Be careful when you smile, though.  Someone might think you are the Buddha on the road and kill you.  But even if that happens, you can still look for the resurrection of the dead.