On the Other Hand...Not So Much of the Christmas Spirit...(except the greed part)

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"We Are Christmas" by the Spelman College Glee Club

An Athiest's Christmas Sermon

Last night, a friend of mine posted the YouTube video of "We Are Christmas," by the Spelman College Glee Club (posted above) on his Facebook page.  I recommend the performance highly.  It's worth the time just for the music, but the song, which is original to the singer and the Glee Club director, conveys a lovely and potent message, wholly appropriate to the holiday season.  It put me in mind of a letter I wrote several years ago to my godson, as it conveys a similar message.  As it seems appropriate to the holiday season, I am posting the letter here.

 

* * * * *

 

I was rereading a section of an IM conversation you and I had some time ago about what it meant to live a Christian life and to be a follower of Jesus, and I was struck by something you said:    “When I think about it, that seems like a natural extension (perhaps the entire purpose) of the striving to become like Jesus—to try to improve while remaining cognizant of the road traveled and the distance that remains.”  I got to thinking about that—and about some of the things that Mrs. Biddle has recently been saying about the role of Jesus in Christianity, and I was struck again by the power of the story of Jesus to provide a role model not only for how we ought to try to live in terms of making ourselves into better, by which I mean more moral, people, but also in terms of how we can deal more courageously with the pain and suffering that we encounter in our lives.  (And the power of the story is equally effective even for someone like me who does not accept a literal Jesus as a literal savior and son of God as it is for those who “believe” in Christian terms—this is, in fact, the way in which I, too, can respond to and find succor in religion despite my apparent agnosticism.)  Allow me to elucidate . . . .

 

I am going to quote at some length from another book by Henri Nouwen (he’s the author of The Prodigal Son, which I sent you awhile back).  It’s called Letters to Marc About Jesus, and it is exactly what it says it is:  a collection of letters that Nouwen wrote to his nephew, who was , at the time the letters were written, about your age and uncertain about his own religious beliefs.  Nouwen wrote the letters to try to give his nephew an idea about why Jesus was such an important figure in his (Nouwen’s) own life, as well as in Christianity in general.  By the end of the book, Nouwen waxes too mystical for my tastes, and he pretty much lost me, but much of the book (which is VERY short) I found to be quite interesting, and one of the things he had to say was an entirely new idea to me, and one which seems to me to be a critical part of understanding the value of Jesus either as metaphor or as literal and integral part of the Christian belief in redemption.

 

Nouwen writes[1]:

 

I’ve gradually come to see that these people have learned to know Jesus as the God who suffers with them.  For them, the suffering and dying Jesus is the most convincing sign that God really loves them very much and does not leave them uncared for.  He is their companion in suffering.  If they are poor, they know that Jesus was poor too; if they are afraid, they know that Jesus was also afraid; if they are beaten, they know that Jesus too was beaten; and if they are tortured to death, well then, they know that Jesus suffered the same fate.  For these people, Jesus is the faithful friend who treads with them the lonely road of suffering and brings them consolation.  He is with them in solidarity.  He knows them, understands them, and clasps them to himself in their moments of greatest pain.

 

Suffering—and the idea that there is meaning in suffering—seems to me to be one of the central tenets of the Christian outlook.  In fact, I have done quite a bit of reading over the past year or two about religion in general, and I have learned that one of the fundamental differences, perhaps even the defining difference, between Eastern religions (such as Hinduism and Buddhism) and Western religions is the attitude toward suffering.  In Eastern religions, suffering is viewed as something evil and to be avoided if at all possible, and the role of religion is to provide the promise that suffering will end and we will all return to Nirvana—the end of suffering.  In the west, however, suffering is viewed as unavoidable, and the role of religion is to provide the guidance for how to cope with it.  In Eastern philosophy, then, if we suffer it is because we failed, in a previous incarnation, to live a life good enough to earn our way out of suffering, while in Western philosophy, we earn our way into heaven by demonstrating that we know how to cope with suffering in appropriate ways and that we have repented for the suffering that we have caused.  (That is a gross oversimplification, of course, with regard to both philosophies, but it is not my purpose here to give a detailed exposition on two schools of thought.  I mean only to highlight the significance of the idea of suffering in all the major religions.  For one thing, it seems to me that the preoccupation with suffering as one of the major functions of religious thought demonstrates the fact that suffering is part of the human condition—we need not think ourselves evil or abnormal because we suffer!)

 

Given the relationship between religion and suffering, then, I started to think about what meaning the story of Jesus’ life has for human beings today.  It’s a famous story, of course, and has been re-told in many ways.  I’ve enclosed a copy of the lyrics to one of the songs from Jesus Christ, Superstar.  It’s the song that Jesus sings at Gethsemane, when he knows that Judas will betray him and he is waiting to be taken.  The lyrics from “Gethsemane” reflect Jesus’ essential humanity.  They reflect exactly the fears and uncertainties, the demands for reassurance, and the despair that you or I might feel in similar circumstances.  The song walks us through the argument that rages inside Jesus’ head as he tries to find a way to come to terms with what he knows is coming.  He wants, first of all, to be let off. 

 

I only want to say
If there is a way
Take this cup away from me
For I don't want to taste its poison

He is afraid of the pain and the death, as we all are, and he doesn’t want to go through with it.   His first impulse is to bargain his way out based on his past accomplishments—essentially he says that he’s done enough and ought to be let off because he deserves it; he’s earned his way out of suffering:

 

Listen surely I've exceeded
Expectations
Tried for three years
Seems like thirty
Could you ask as much
From any other man?

When that doesn’t work, he tries to demand verification that at least all this is going to be worth it.  He asks for a series of things: for a reason, for assurance that he’ll be remembered, for a personal reward, and, finally, for verification that his suffering won’t have been wasted: 

 

Can you show me now

That I would not be killed in van?

Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain

Show me there’s a reason/

For your wanting me to die

You’re far too keen on where and how

But not so hot on why . . .

 

There are no answers of course, and so ultimately, faced with silence, Jesus has to make the leap of faith and accept his death without assurance of any kind.  He’s right, of course, when he accuses God of being “hard.”  The universe is hard—it doesn’t supply us with reasons or assurance or verification that what we’re doing is the right thing.  It demands of us blind faith, The Jesus of this song is no hero of the sort who has transcended fear and doubt and who can, therefore, lead us fearlessly on to glory, keeping us all the while safe from danger.  This is someone who is afraid, who doesn’t want to die, who, at the very least, would like to have some concrete reassurance that his death will be meaningful, because that knowledge would make it easier to accept the suffering and the fear of the unknown.  These are feelings and words that speak, I think, very deeply to a universal experience.  This Jesus is the hero who shows us that it is possible to summon from deep inside ourselves the courage and faith that are required. 

 

We suffer; we go through times of terrible change and difficult emotional struggling, and we have no way to know for certain whether the eventual outcome will be worth all that pain.  As Jesus does with this song, we resist the struggle, we try to avoid the pain, and we do, very often, ask that futile question:  “Why?”  And the truth of the matter is, that just like Jesus at Gethsemane, we have to fight our own doubts just at the precise moment at which we are trying to cope with whatever pressures caused us to have the doubts in the first place.  We have ultimately to make up our minds to trust that the outcome IS worth the pain—even when we cannot know for certain that the outcome will be what we hope it will be—or even that it will be good.  That is the very nature of faith.  The remarkable thing about Jesus in this version of the story of his life is that he does ultimately accept his fate without getting any answer from God, because of course that is the only choice he has if he is to do God’s work, and we must make the same choice because there will be no direct answer for us, either.  To refuse to go on, to refuse, as the song puts it, “the cup of poison” is to choose to keep ourselves mired in the darkness of not growing.  To refuse the cup of poison is to refuse to face reality, to refuse to believe that there is, in fact, reason for hope.  To refuse the cup of poison is to die a lesser, and fruitless, death, having failed to realize our potential—having failed to create good.  To refuse the cup is to refuse the path to God.

 

The story of Jesus’ life is, to my mind, the perfect metaphor and model for the story of our own lives.  What matters to me is not so much the mysticism of whether the historical Jesus (if any) was the literal product of the immaculate conception and the literal son of a literal God, but the pragmatic fact that Jesus was—literal or fictional—a human being.  That means that his life is not merely an ideal on which to model our lives, but that his life is our life.  What he went through, we, too, go through.  Viewed this way, the story of his death becomes archetype.  How does it go?  “He suffered, died, and was buried.  On the third day he rose again from the dead and ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father Almighty . …”  Eventually, we, too will die and be buried (or cremated or whatever!), but I think we do not wait until then to live out the pattern that Jesus’ life demonstrates.  He lived in poverty and hunger and suffering, and then, before he could escape them and enter into a happier and more fulfilling life, things had actually to get worse—more painful.  In order to get out of poverty and loneliness and fear, he had to be tortured and crucified—had had, actually, to die.  The deaths that we undergo occur throughout our lives, and they are not literal, but rather they are the multiple transformations that we undergo as we develop from one version of ourselves into the next, more mature, more complex, and, one hopes, more loving, more productive, and happier version. 

 

Living entails growing and changing, and for all of us there are periods in our lives during which we are unhappy and lonely and frightened.  If we are to survive those periods, if we are to transcend them and discover—or create—for ourselves happier periods during which joy and self-respect and self-confidence are possible, we, too, must pass through the torture and the crucifixion.  In the case of our ordinary human experience, the torture and the crucifixion are (generally speaking, anyway!) not literal; rather, they are metaphorical:  the suffering comes from the terrible pressures that arise out of the process of growing.  We all suffer through periods during which that growing and changing becomes particularly intense—either as the result of conditions enforced from the outside (as in the example of the poverty-stricken and tormented Latin American Indians that Nouwen offered) or as the result of internal conditions—as a result of the emotional need to leave behind an old and unsatisfactory and unhappy version of ourselves in the effort to be, in effect, reborn into a better, happier version.  In undergoing such change we are remaking ourselves, remolding all of the emotional structures that comprise our most basic reactions to the world around us.  We are in the metaphorical process of cutting out dead wood and making room for healthier branches to grow; we are in the process of dying and being reborn.  Really it is not surprising that this process entails pain.  We ultimately escape that pain not because we are rescued from outside but because we grow into people who have mechanisms for defeating it. 

 

Jesus Christ, Superstar is written from the perspective that Jesus was a human being with all the flaws and strengths and weaknesses of any human being—a repeated lyric in several of the songs is “…he’s a man; he’s just a man…”—and that is, in fact, what I consider to be the particular brilliance of the work as a whole.  Andrew Lloyd Weber was 19 years old when he collaborated with Tim Rice (about the same age) to write this musical, which I find remarkable, but also heartening:  this is the vision of young people who were grappling in real ways with the philosophical questions about living because they were themselves in the very process of trying to decide who to become, and they conveyed, therefore, a particular perspective that someone much older, someone who came to terms with those questions long before could not provide.  Some people consider the portrayal to be sacrilegious (even more shocking was Nikos Kazantzakis’ book The Last Temptation of Christ, which I have not read, but which, I believe, includes a sexual fantasy that Jesus has about Mary Magdalene while he is dying on the cross) because it “reduces” Jesus to something “less than” God-ly. To me, the insistence on Jesus’ essential humanity is not only reasonable, it is inspired.  Jesus would not be much good to us if he were not “just a man”; if he were, in fact, God and not man, he would not have had to suffer and he could have had no real empathy for the suffering of mankind. 

 

The story of Jesus’ life and death must be able to answer two questions to answer if he is to be of service to us during our lifetimes—either as literal son of a literal God or as an archetypal metaphor for human experience:  First, if we must suffer, if we must—throughout our lifetime—go through periods of pain and loneliness, of the torture of being reshaped and killed to our old selves in order to be reborn as newer selves, then how do we cope with the pain of those times so that the rebirth is possible?  Living entails suffering; our job, then is to figure out a way to face the suffering and survive it.    It’s been described many different ways:  Winston Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”  He understood, as so many others have understood, that heaven is always on the other side of hell, and can’t be got to by going around or over or underneath but only through hell.  Edgar Allen Poe wrote the poem explaining that to get to “El Dorado” the knight, gaily bedight, had to get through the Valley of the Shadow.  Hermione and Leontes had to suffer through 16 years of winter in Shakespeare’s version.  Robert Penn Warren’s image for how not to live was the Great Sleep—Jack had to face up to the pain and the abandonment and the death before he could accept love.   The Golden Phoenix arises out of the ashes of the death of its former self, and in The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne had to swim through that river of shit to come out clean on the other side.  

 

I want two things when I’m in trouble and suffering a lot of pain, fear, and uncertainty:  I want to know that I can make it through to the other side, and I want to be able to believe that I’m doing the right thing by continuing to struggle—I want to believe that future good will come out of the current bad.  I’m not looking for a Jesus who will perform a miracle and simply eliminate with a wave of his magic hand my suffering; I’m not looking, except in moments of weakness which I want to pass without my giving into them, for someone to save me from what I must do.  I am looking for inspiration; I am looking for courage.  I don’t want a Jesus who does my work for me (what pride or self-confidence could I gain from that?); I want a Jesus who can make me believe me that I can and must do the work for myself.  I don’t want escape; I want strength to keep going through hell.  I think that the Jesus of Henri Nouwen and Andrew Lloyd Weber has the power to give me what I want.

 

Nouwen observes that in sending His son to live in poverty and pain, God was demonstrating that He is one with us. That strikes me as being profound.  Certainly it is much easier for us to accept love and compassion and help from someone who truly knows what we suffer, who has suffered himself, than it is from someone who does not know from experience what our life feels like, whose innate power allows him to transcend suffering, and who is, therefore, likely to come across as being in some way inherently superior to and essentially remote from us.  The story of Jesus as “just a man,” however, demonstrates that suffering can be survived.  But—and this is the second question that I want answered if I can understand Jesus’ life as a metaphor for my own struggling—to survive suffering I need courage, and I can only summon courage if I have hope.  If the metaphor of Jesus’ crucifixion and reincarnation is to operate for us in real ways during this lifetime and not just through our own literal death and ascension to heaven, then in what sense are we to accept the idea that hope is reasonable—that each of our temporal rebirths will in fact bring us to sit, metaphorically speaking, at the right-hand of God the Father Almighty?

 

Nouwen also gives us the answer to that question, because he shows us, in his interpretation of the story, that Jesus’ life demonstrates not only the human capacity to endure, but also the need to learn compassion for ourselves and for each other.  We must face the fact that we are sufferers along with those around us, and we must offer to others the sympathy—the compassion—that Jesus offers mankind in the Christian story.   Love is the medium through which we know God—and again, I think that statement is accurate whether you accept, as many people do, God as a sentient being or whether you accept Him, as I do, only as metaphor.  If the Les Miserables lyric is accurate, and I believe it is, and we do, indeed, see the face of God when we learn to love another person, then we are reborn closer to God every time we learn to love another deeply and compassionately.  When we recognize that the suffering of others is necessary and inevitable, that their pain does not make them evil, when we understand, even, that destructive and ugly behavior arises not out of a purely wicked desire to do wrong, but rather out of a desperate attempt to cope with suffering—probably without the aid of someone else’s compassion, then we are capable of love in the way that religion exhorts us to offer it.  We suffer, then, in order to grow toward goodness.  We suffer in part because suffering is the crucible in which we are made new and better as individuals, and we suffer in part because in our own suffering we can find the reason to offer to others real love and compassion.

 

If you are suffering, if you are lonely or unhappy, you must carry your own cross—I cannot carry it for you.  But if I am to be your friend in the sense that Christianity exhorts me to be, then I must reach out to you from my own experience with pain and offer you my compassion—not my sympathetic superiority, but my heartfelt compassion—my willingness to suffer with you because I know what your suffering feels like.   Based on the model that Jesus Christ provided (whether we want to accept it as literal or metaphysical), the thing that we can understand about living and about truly loving relationships is this:  we can’t get rid of suffering, not our own, not each other’s—at least not permanently—but we can help each other to bear it.

 

(One of the famous metaphors for that process is the shedding of the lobster’s shell.  Lobsters grow, but their shells do not.  As the lobster grows, then, it must shed its shell and grow an entirely new one.  The process is not only physically painful, but it also entails a high level of vulnerability and danger:  without its shell, the lobster is easy prey for any aggressor who chooses to go after it, even enemies who ordinarily cannot hope even to begin to do a lobster harm.  Lobsters, then, hide while their shells are re-growing.  They find a dark corner under a rock or some other shadowy place and lay low, hoping that they will stay safe while their defenses regrow.  E.B. White refers, you may remember, to the lobster and its shell in his essay about trying to get rid of the possessions of a lifetime—“Good Bye to Forty-Eighth Street.”  We don’t have to hide—indeed, although we might often like to do so, we generally can’t hide for long from the rest of the world—and so our growing is often done in the sunlight and without the shell of our old defenses; thus, we are generally forced to rely on help from others if we are to survive that transition period.)

 

Nouwen encapsulates the whole idea this way:

 

Finding new life through suffering and death:  that is the core of the good news….To look suffering and death in the face and to go through them oneself in the hope of a new God-given life:  that is the sign of Jesus and of every human being who wants to lead a spiritual life in imitation of him.  It is the sign of the cross:  the sign of suffering and death, but also the hope of total renewal.

 

Forrest Church, in Life Lines:  Holding on and Letting Go, puts it anther, equally potent way:

 

All this is worth it.  Especially the pain.  If we insulate our hearts from suffering, we shall only subdue the very thing that makes life worth living.  We cannot protect ourselves from loss.  We can only protect ourselves from the death of love.  And without love, there is no meaning.  Without love, we are left only with the aching hollow of regret, that haunting emptiness where love might have been.

 

Joan Brown Campbell, in the final sermon of the 2003 season at Chautauqua (the CD of which I am enclosing), put it this way:

 

We are not judged by naming Jesus.  Rather we are judged by claiming to follow the life of Jesus.  Those who wear the bracelet that says, ‘What would Jesus do?’ might be better served if the bracelet read, ‘What would love do?’  This I think is the quest that Jesus would set us on.  The elusive Jesus will be found not in the symbols of faith but in the lives of the faithful.  Not in the symbols of faith but in the lives of the faithful.

 

You put it this way:  “When I think about it, that seems like a natural extension (perhaps the entire purpose) of the striving to become like Jesus—to try to improve while remaining cognizant of the road traveled and the distance that remains.”   The point, in other words, is not to put an end to the journey by getting off the road or by deciding to stay home in the old, familiar place; the point is to see the journey for what it is, to learn from where we have been what we can change and how, to be aware that we will always have further to travel, and to believe that we can and will travel well. 

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[1] In the original letter, I quoted several additional paragraphs.  As I do not have permission from the publisher to include a lengthy passage from the book, I have reduced the quotation here to comply with copyright.  Anyone interested in reading the entire original can find the book here.

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