BloodWaterGodMagic vs. Charlie Brown

Thanks in no small part to Charlie Brown's Christmas Special, we (Christians, non-Christians, and Anti-Christians alike) have been duly guilted into struggling against the insidious and confounding spirit of "commercialism" at Christmas.

Television advertisements extoll the "magic of Christmas" and suggest that that deep and meaningful magic is contained in a Lexus. If you want the magic, you ought to buy one.

I think the ads may be right.

You've got to remember that I come from a magical land of barbed wire and hog manure citadels. The rocks where I make my bed are ensorcelled, and my cave buzzes with the childlike whispers of the faerie-dazzled.

So I don't have the knee-jerk rejection of claims of magic that most humans do. Even if they come from a car dealership.

The fact is this: Christmas is magical. You know this to be true.

The question is, what is the source of the magic?

Some will say that it is a cultural magic: society has determined the Christmas season to be one of familial homecomings and bonding, a time to party with friends and receive presents.

Others will note that there is an inherent magic in the acts of Christmas: that, at some level, Father Christmas is a real spirit, and that gifts are his icons, imbued with some fragment of that unidentifiable joy.

Another possible source is a social-personal one: that there is, as part of the so-called "collective unconscious" a natural "need" for Christmas magic, a sort of primordial, protean phenomenon structured to salve a person's spirit whilst drawing him into the Unknown Greater.

These all have their merits, but none of these notions have the ability to completely describe the source of Christmas magic. After all, gifts can disappoint, depression afflicts, acutely, the lonely at the holidays, and Christmas or its pagan alternatives are celebrated widely, but not universally.

Besides, anyone who knows magic knows that its true source is more, well...sacrificial than that. Whether eye of newt or iocane powder, real magic has components that are rare and hard fought, almost exclusively bought at the risk, and often loss, of blood or life.

Some time ago, near a gnawed-on feed trough, a god burst forth through the blood and water of his mother, in the helpless person of an infant named Yeshua. Certainly, there were miraculous spirits in the world, and strange tidings and joy, but those were ripples from the source of the magic of that hour: a wriggling, swaddled and bloody baby born amidst dung and wheat mash. Those ripples continued out, and later drew rich and educated men to bring extravagant gifts to the toddler to celebrate his reign.

They may as well have left him a Lexus.

That's why I don't have a huge problem with the so-called "commercialization" of Christmas. All of it, the presents and food and excess and laughter, can be taken to points of abuse or exhaustion, but they don't have to be, and, often, more than often, they are not. And these things only exist as radiating ripples of the Magic of Christmas, which has its source in Our Savior, born a man, all those years ago.

The so-called "True Meaning" of Christmas is not "Stop Being Materialistic." It is "Start Living Abundantly in the One Who Loves Abundantly."

And sometimes, just sometimes, an abundant life may be found in the driver's seat of dazzling new Lexus.

Cheerless Links for Joyless Folks

If Scrooge ate a Grinch and chased it down with a big bottle of rat poison for his ensuing dispepsia, he'd look like a friendlier version of myself.

Elvis Costello nailed a great tune with The Other Side of Summer and, in that spirit, I give you

The Other Side of Christmas:

The Lost Genre Guild: Lesson Learned

Christmas in Jail

God Still Loves Us - Biohazard Version*

*(This is a fascinating viral marketing piece from the folks behind the I Am Legend film. I would have thought it would be gimmicky, but it, so far, has been one of the most civil meetpoints for atheists, Christians and others that I've seen on the net. What's strange is that I've been thinking about the God Virus for about six months, and even posted about it a few days ago.)

From a poor little schoolboy who doesn't need no lessons.

Today, my name is Jezebel.

Caught the "other" Peanuts Christmas special last night for the second time this season. This is not the famous "pathetic tree - Linus as St. Luke" one (i.e. A Charlie Brown Christmas), but the one that came decades later, which consists of little vignettes taken from orginal Christmas-themed comic strips.

My favorite one is about the little girl who changes her name every day, confounding Linus.

"Today," she says, "My name is Jezebel."

Linus explains to her that Jezebel was the evil wife of King Ahab in 2nd Kings in the Old Testament, and that her servants threw her from a window and she landed on her head. (He doesn't mentioned that dogs ate her up, though. I think his point had been driven home before he had to continue.)

The girl replies, "Today, my name is Susan."

As soon as she sees that she has identified herself with an unseemly person, she "converts" without thought.

I think it is important to identify with all people in the bible. We're quick to see characters in black and white terms - Solomon, good, Nebuchadnezzer, bad. Noah, good, Goliath, bad. If we identify with any character, it is usually the idealized "good" one, not the fully realized "semi-good" one and never the stereotypical "bad" ones.

But we miss our own sins that way. If we only identify with Job when we are suffering, we miss both the hazards of his slow-burning impatience with God's justice AND the riches of his redemption. If we don't stand in the shoes of Balaam, we miss how God's Word thwarts attempts to twist itself.

Our eyes can be clouded from any righteousness which may be credited to us if we only identify with sanitized models of real people.

I am Goliath of Gath. I am Jeroboam. I am Jonah. I am Pharoah. I am Saul.

And today, my name is Jezebel.